Re-politicize the Prison from a Gender Perspective. An Approach to its “Deviations” and Sexual Horizons of Possibility

Abstract

This article analyzes the prison as a porous and performative setting from three articulated experiences: 1) love/friendship bonds between female prisoners, 2) “tumberas families” and 3) alternative masculinities. For this, a qualitative and participatory research methodology was deployed, which combined semi-structured interviews and the development of a space for cinema-debate in the Women’s Penitentiary Unit No 8 in La Plata, Argentina. The results expose the productive dimension of the prison regime over sexuality, and the multiple ways in which it challenges the body, among them promoting explorations, disorders, and critical possibilities in the face of the hetero norm. However, they also reveal the exercise of sexual- ity and the construction of “affectivities” as ways of going through the confinement. This article constitutes a contribution to prison studies by delving into a little explored variable of power relations within prisons, and to feminist studies since it allows to recognize the drifts of gender and other tensions (concerning the outside) that they retrace themselves in a space where the sexual norm-dissent relationship assumes a new dialectic, meanings, and scope.