Carcerality

Few concepts animate more discussion by interdisciplinary, activist-oriented feminist scholars than the concept of carcerality. The broad context for these discussions is the emerging scholarship exploring the profound impact that mass criminalization has had on the fabric of our society, the shifts in public awareness and opinion about questions of crime and justice, policy reforms at the institutional level, high-profile campaigns on behalf of those wrongfully accused, a surge in on-the-ground activism around questions of systemic violence, excessive punishment, and how state power is implicated in the buildup of a prison nation within the borders of the United States (Chettiar and Raghavan 2019; Gould and Leo 2010; Sered 2019). At the level of the university, these discussions are multidisciplinary: philosophers ask questions about the meaning of justice; scholars of race look at profound disproportionate confinement; historians make conceptual links between chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and current punishment regimes; sociologists look at how crime is socially constructed; critical legal scholars explore the rhetoric and microlevel processes in the criminal legal system; and critical criminologists explore how the national preoccupation with punishment has fundamentally shifted the social order in this country in the last twenty-five years (Hernández, Muhammad, and Thompson 2015; Lerman and Weaver 2014; M. Nagel 2018; Schenwar and Law 2020). Importantly, feminist scholars in these disciplines frame intellectual questions around gender, sexuality, and heteropatriarchy, interrogating how carcerality is theoretically bound up with issues of power, exploitation, and domination (Carrington 2015; Gruber 2020).