ABSTRACT
The quotation above is taken from my book, Medical Power in Prisons. The book was concerned with the history of prison medicine in England and Wales and took issue with the liberal orientated, pluralist paradigm of progress underpinning the few historical narratives that had been published up to 1990. In particular, it challenged the politically disembodied, value-free views of science that legitimated these narratives. Instead, it pointed to the potent exercise of medical power utilised by medical experts over and against prisoners and the dialectical relationship between these experts and the state’s apparatus of punishment behind the prison’s walls. Central to the book’s critical argument was an analysis of the gendered nature of medical and psychiatric power. Chapter Five – ‘At the centre of the professional gaze: women, medicine and confinement’ – built on the work of feminist and other radical scholars who were critical of the lack of a gendered analysis not only within liberal histories but also within the self-styled revisionist histories of the prison that had appeared since the mid-1970s. The differential and distinct experience of confined women with respect to the ‘iron therapy’ of medical power was thus central to the book’s argument.
