Fiona Beals

Playing with the Discursive: a Feminist Post-structural Exploration of the Words 'criminal Woman' Fiona Beals

In this book, Dr Beals examines the discursive subject of 'criminal woman' to uncover possible gaps and silences that are buried within such gendered constructions. Theories of punishment and criminality are explored and then are combined with feminist Foucauldian post-structural theory to explore and analyse the lives of two women, Rene and Sophia, and their experiences of imprisonment in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Rene and Sophia both shared a similar experience of imprisonment in which regimes and practices attempted to degender and sexualise them - an experience which attempted to question their very 'selves'. These women resisted this positioning by reasserting their femininity in very different ways. Dr Beals argues that there is a need to question the academic foundations of traditional theories of deviance to provide space for a re-interpretation of criminality and an acknowledgement of the practices of resistance that happen within the discursive space of the words 'criminal woman'.