[local news warning]
Not my normal cup of tea, but this sounds like it will be amazing:
Sheffield Institute for Studies on Ageing
LECTURE SERIES 2005Dr Azrini Wahidin
Lecturer in Criminology, University of Kent at CanterburyNot Old and Quiet: Older Women in Prison
The central focus of this paper is to demonstrate how female elders who are in prison negotiate and resist the omnipresent power of the disciplinary gaze. It is through a discussion of the body and the role of time-discipline that we can come to understand how the ‘old body’ is performed in prison. The work of Foucault is crucial in understanding the nature of power in prisons and how it affects the identities of elders in prison. The spaces occupied by older women in prison demonstrate how time, space and techniques of punishment in the ordering of prison life are disrupted, de-stabilised and transformed. The elders in the study demonstrate how the use of power and how the capillaries of punishment in prison are directed in a specific way at the female body. It is by inserting the words of older women in prison into debates on time and agency that we learn how older women in prison choreograph their own bodies by transgressing or reinforcing typifications of age and femininity. It is the ability to resist and reclaim aspects of their outside self which enables elders to survive prison life.
June 29th, 5.30pm Start, Lecture Theatre 5, Arts Tower, University of Sheffield