ABSTRACT
Women ‘terrorists’ or political offenders are inescapably represented through discourses of deviance, transgression and dangerousness. They are conceived of as uniquely dangerous individuals, or what Elshtain (1995: 163) has called ‘the ferocious few’, and as exceptions to normative womanhood – ‘the non-combatant many’. This chapter examines the anomalous figure of the female political prisoner. It argues that they pose an epistemological ‘problem’ in three analytical fields. These are, first, in accounts of the role of women in the commission of political crime; secondly, in analyses of resistance in prison; and, thirdly, in contemporary accounts of women’s lawbreaking and imprisonment. In bringing these domains together, one is presented with the critical problem whereby existing analyses of political crime and punishment rarely intersect with the body of academic research on women and imprisonment. Not only have women been obscured in analyses of
political crime and punishment but the confinement of women for crimes against the State is rarely considered in debates about women in prison. The question of their marginality, in either case, is not just their minoritarian position within the women’s and political prisoner populations, although this contributes to the relative scarcity of criminological literature on female political prisoners (Zwerman 1988; di Giovanni 1990; Churchill and Vander Wall 1992). Rather, the problem of women political prisoners is that their difference within ‘political imprisonment’ and ‘women in prison’ interrogates and reshapes both these categories. The chapter, therefore, makes three arguments.
