“A Resource for Metaphor”: A Genealogy of the Flesh in Contemporary Prison Literature (1960-2018)

Abstract

Scholarship on twentieth and twenty-first-century prison literature has often argued that the genre bears a genealogical relationship to the institution of plantation slavery. This scholarship has often commended the genre’s ability to notice isomorphic similarities between mass incarceration and slavery—while disparaging the genre’s tendency to essentialize patriarchal family formations. The accusation that prison is a form of undoing binary gender and sexed identities underwrote the genre’s critique of prison as slavery. Prison literature often imagined the violence of slavery as an interruption of patriarchal family formations and freedom from slavery’s carceral aftermath as this formation’s restoration. This dissertation adds to this discussion by arguing that Prison Literature might have contained forms of resistance to incarceration which operated outside of these patriarchal formations. Chapter 1 considers how Assata Shakur in her eponymous autobiography (1987) reframes Black Nationalism through divergence from binary gender and sex. Chapter 2 examines the how certain works of white gay prison literature have promulgated the cultural trope of “reverse racism” against white men in prison. In T.J. Parsell’s Fish (2003), the text both reproduces this cultural trope but also engages in a practice of queer repair. Chapter 3 close reads a work of Prison Literature – Donna Hylton’s A Little Piece of Light (2018) – produced in a feminist creative writing workshop at Bedford Hills Correctional Center by Eve Ensler, the author of The Vagina Monologues (1996). The writing group frames confessional narrative as humanizing the participants through mutual recognition of a binary, universalized womanhood; and yet, there are moments where unresolved trauma resolves instead into redress divergent from gender and sexed binaries.