Paper short abstract

How does the experience of confinement become inscribed on the body and the senses? Mediated by social relations, this experience is highly contextual and varies not only according to prison-specific circumstances, but also with social-specific circumstances

Paper long abstract

Despite their variable 'normalization' in several aspects, prisons remain anomalous sites in that, by definition, they hinder movement and constrain bodies. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in a Portuguese women's prison in two different decades, I will examine how the experience of penal confinement inscribes itself on the body and the senses, and how this experience is mediated by social relations. More specifically, I will describe how a coherence between the social and the sensorial orders emerged in both periods. Given that hyperincarceration produced a major sociological change between these periods, this coherence means that the bodily experience of confinement - or the way prisoners "embody" prison and make sense of it - is highly contextual and may vary not only according to prison-specific circumstances, but also with social-specific circumstances. Contrasting ideas of contagion, changing experiences of sounds and smells, and individual and para-collective expressions of distress, will be some of the aspects approached.