Abstract

ROMERO GARCIA, Velvet. Becoming Good Women: Treatments to “Refeminize” Female Inmates in Chiconautla prison. Rev. interdiscip. estud. género Col. Méx. [online]. 2022, vol.8, e831.  Epub Aug 15, 2022. ISSN 2395-9185.  https://doi.org/10.24201/reg.v8i1.831.

This text reflects on treatments that essentially seek to “refeminize” and infantilize prisoners, in other words a series of practices that tend to model “good women” within stereotypical gender and class parameters by symbolically converting them into girls tutored by prison officers. This moralizing treatment includes a tripartite intervention, acting on the body, the emotion, and sexuality. Based on women inmates’ testimonies, ethnographic observations, and analysis of psychologists’ clinical diagnoses, this study focuses on prison officers’ various strategies to regulate gender appropriate behaviors. This approach revealed that the social rehabilitation treatment for women inmates is not designed to improve their emotional and social well-being but to correct deviations from the prototypically “good woman”.

Keywords : gender studies; prisoner women; female body; emotions.

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