ABSTRACT
This chapter returns to the paradox of women’s agency in prison discussed in Chapter 3, namely, how politically affiliated women in prison developed sustained, collective agency in a system which customarily relies on individual discipline. The question invokes the predicament of gendered penal subjectivity whereby women in prison are not understood to exercise effective, long-term collaborative agency, or where women’s resistance is viewed to be most successful at the level of personal subversion (Bosworth 1999: 130-1), but rarely impedes the larger punitive functioning of prison establishments. Equally, the collective agency of female political prisoners defies the androcentric precepts of ‘inmate subcultural’ theories. These have either failed to register the peculiar constraints which shape relations in women’s prisons, and thus conclude that resistance is either absent from their social arrangements, or advance essentialist explanations for the apparent fragility of female communities in prison. Similarly, the scholarship on political imprisonment in Northern Ireland, whilst acknowledging the Republican structures in Armagh and Maghaberry prisons, represents the question of gender (as well as applying ‘gender’ to women’s penality only) as an unresolved problem in the study of political imprisonment (McEvoy 2001: 8; McKeown 2001: 236-7).
