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Paper short abstract

This paper presents a feminist abolitionist ethnography of gender carcerality in female prisons in Portugal, analysing continuities and variations in gender configurations in carceral regimes from 1954 to the present.

Paper long abstract

This paper presents a feminist abolitionist ethnography of gender configurations in prison regimes comparatively analysed from 1954 to the present day in the Tires Female Prison, founded in 1954, and in the Santa Cruz do Bispo Female Prison, founded in 2005.

The research involved an experimental feminist ethnography in action, in which I performed multiple roles as researcher, volunteer and activist.This feminist ethnographic drift moved across different temporalities and spaces, from inside the prison to its margins, engaging with diverse intersubjectivities, institutions and organisations entangled in the carceral system. From this process emerged the concept of gender carcerality, which structured the long-term and inter-institutional analysis of the permanencies, continuities and variations of gender configurations in the prison regimes of Tires and Santa Cruz.

A feminist genealogy of the prison historically situates gender configurations in prison regimes and the prison assistential complex, identifying continuums of gender carcerality embedded in a heteropatriarchal, colonial and racist status quo present in contemporary Portuguese society. Analysing gender configurations through the perceptions of prison professionals enabled the identification of permanencies, continuities and variations that reveal the gendered prison apparatus operating through informal practices within prison regimes. The women and transgender individuals entangled in gender carceral continuums, through their speech and writings, not only illuminate gender carcerality and the reproduction of carcerality, but also teach us about resistance and struggle.

This feminist abolitionist anthropological research highlights the role of gender carcerality in the reproduction of carcerality and in sustaining a white imperialist heteropatriarchal governmentality of life.