“What Kind of Woman are you?”

The female, criminal body occupies a powerful place in the public imagination, in part because of the ways that discourses of womanhood, femininity, and motherhood overlap and collide with those of race, sexuality, and crime (Sudbury, 2002; Zazitow, 2004). For over five years I taught at a large northeastern jail as a member of an organization that provided academic classes to adult incarcerated women. During this time I also conducted a qualitative, ethnographic inquiry in which I investigated the experiences of incarcerated women and the ways they were positioned as women, inmates, and learners.