Re-imagining a Feminist Criminology

Abstract

Women are the fastest-growing prisoner population in Canada. This can be attributed, in part, to the neo-liberal criminalization of poverty through its war on drugs, creation of welfare fraud, and cutbacks to social services, all of which have directly and uniquely affected women. But what of feminist criminology amidst this incarceration spiral? In this article I examine the drift of critical feminist criminology toward a Foucauldian construction of power that, in decentring the state, has theorized women's docile bodies as governed at a distance through various technologies and rationalities of discipline and risk. I argue that it is time to re-imagine a feminist criminology that questions this shift and asks, in theoretical and political terms, “What is to be done?”