Gender, Violence, and Vulnerability: Beyond the prison

This chapter centres the prison as a key site for interrogating the gender/violence nexus. Public records are used to highlight the deeply embedded (gendered, raced, classed) hierarchies that transcend the prison, constituting the pervasive violences of the ‘ordinary’ and everyday. Rather than focusing on prison masculinity/ies as exceptional or distinct, this chapter pays attention to the resilient and remarkably complex interrelationships between violence, diverse masculinities, and hierarchies of identity and difference. Recognising the contingency and contestability of masculinities, it is argued, is a critical prerequisite for disrupting both the natural(ised) association of men, masculinities and violence, and the conceptualisation of violence as, merely, the actions of individuals (criminals, prisoners, officers) or the product of particular environments (such as prisons).