Voices from the Borderlands Women Writing from Prison in Germany and Beyond

Prisons tend to be invisible, on the margins of the community and, if not entirely out of sight, largely out of mind. Prisons are border zones in the sense that they are liminal spaces between the community and, in some times and places, banishment or death. When immigrants or asylum seekers are expelled then those whom the community has rejected are literally shifted across borders. Where capital punishment is legal, prison can be the border between life and death. I am not the first to suggest that women in prison can be read as doubly marginalized. Angela Davies wrote of the “hyperinvisibility” of women prisoners, who disappear, as Diana Medlicott explains, even inside the invisible system: “Concealed within the hidden institution of the prison is the women’s prison population, an even more shadowy phenomenon that has generally been […] subsumed, in terms of policy needs, into the male prison population.” Yet criminal women, particularly the small minority who commit violent crimes, seem doubly visible in the cultural imagination. The contemporary media still reproduce Lombroso’s and Ferrero’s notion that criminal women are monstrous; in Ann Lloyd’s words, they are “doubly deviant” and “doubly damned.” In this essay I will engage with the study of women prisoners as overlooked objects, to set that research alongside the cultural fetishization of female criminality (rarely mentioned in reports that focus on hard data), and finally to address the subjective responses of women prisoners to their situation in “the marginal texts too often lost in the marginal literature of the prison.” Like some others I will suggest that women’s experience of prison and of themselves as prisoners needs to be understood as an experience simultaneously of the real (the conditions of their imprisonment) and the ideal (sociocultural constructions of womanhood, motherhood, violence, and crime); but I am also asking: how do women in prison negotiate their experience of marginalization and stigma, as writers? In the ten years between 1992 and 2002 the male prison population in the UK increased by 50% while the female prison population increased by 173%. In Cyprus the population of women prisoners increased by 410% over the same period. Nonetheless, a report for the European Parliament in 2008 noted that women in Europe still constitute an average of only 4.5% to 5.0% of the total prison population (from 2.9% in Poland to 7.8% in Spain), and find themselves “confined in a system essentially designed, built and run by men for men.” Prisons are micro-communities that reflect and intensify the structures and practices of the societies they border on, and women in prison, like women almost everywhere, are measured against a masculine norm. Female prisoners are held to be a lower security risk and less aggressive than their male counterparts, although given the high levels of self-harming among women prisoners we should perhaps not be denying the existence of aggression so much as asking questions about where aggression is being directed. Women are also overrepresented as drug users in the prison population, where drug use in prisons is already significantly higher than in the population at large. Menstruation is still perceived as an oddity for which “special” hygiene arrangements must be put in place; but the clearest indication that prison is conceived and designed as a space to contain men is the system’s helplessness in the face of pregnancy, birth, and childcare. The average age of imprisoned women in Europe is between 20 and 40 and in 2008 a half of all women in European prisons were mothers, many of whom had sole responsibility for their children as lone parents prior to their …