The Feminist Script for Punishment

Abstract

In her new book, The Feminist War on Crime, Professor Aya Gruber provides a critique of feminists, who have sought political vindication through a governance of punishment. Professor Elizabeth Bernstein coined the term “carceral feminism” to describe the feminist commitment to “a law and order agenda and . . . a drift from the welfare state to the carceral state as the enforcement apparatus for feminist goals.” While feminist movements have expanded the opportunities available to women and girls, too often their means for achieving these accomplishments have been paved on a path of the privileges of feminist elites. These privileges are immune from the pressures of multiple forms of subordination that form the interstitial web of inequality that many other women encounter. These other women are also Other women, in that they are often outsiders in American society, not just because they are women, but also because they are women of color, poor, immigrant, less educated, disabled, and/or queer. The positionality of these Other women is important because they often have personal experiences that make engagement with the state apparatus for punishment undesirable. Black feminists advanced the concerns of the Other women through their activism for state responses that address the systemic, material conditions that make women vulnerable to violence, rather than through engagement with the technologies of punishment. Other women have experienced state violence, either through the inherited trauma that runs in their blood from the violence against their ancestors, or through their daily experiences of everyday subordination within their communities. White, elite feminists have often missed their perspectives. Or, at times, they have outright demeaned their perspectives. Either way, the path to gender equality has had an unsettling entanglement with carcerality. And the logics of punishment and imprisonment have informed feminist demands for reforms. This feminist fascination with the carceral is the subject of Gruber’s book.

Gruber’s historical analysis of the entanglement between feminism and incarceration illustrates that the feminist rage against the patriarchy has at times transformed into retributivist impulses to punish, which contradict feminist values and exacerbate social injustice. Gruber recounts several examples of feminist campaigns that advanced a feminist script for punishment. Many of these campaigns were motivated by the laudable aim of eradicating violence against women and improving women’s ability to lead safe and healthy lives. The various feminist campaigns for more punishment occurred in different decades and had various leaders. But they all share a common script about punishment. They developed similar story lines about women. They painted victims and villains that look remarkably similar through the decades. They subscribe to the same dominant story about the role of the criminal law as a sword against perpetrators. While the individual characters in the script vary and are not always identical, many of the elements that advance their pleas for additional punishment are remarkably similar. These stories follow the same script: a feminist script for punishment.

Keywords: criminal law, criminalization, feminist, feminism, mass incarceration, policing, sex work, carceral feminism, retributivism

JEL Classification: K14, K36, K00