Andrew Dilts
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823262410
- eISBN:
- 9780823268986
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823262410.003.0002
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
This chapter offers an account of how “figures” are discursively produced and socially fabricated through practices that sit between distinct but overlapping domains of power/knowledge. Through an ...
More
This chapter offers an account of how “figures” are discursively produced and socially fabricated through practices that sit between distinct but overlapping domains of power/knowledge. Through an extended reading of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and his 1975 lecture course, Abnormal, this chapter takes up the figures of the “delinquent” and the “convicted offender”–paradigmatic figures of the rehabilitative ideal in penology–demonstrating how they are fabricated to manage the tensions and contradictions between discursive spheres of justice and the penitentiary apparatus. This reading is extended to consider the figure of the felon, who, though the practice of disenfranchisement, should be understood as a similar fabrication, managing the tensions that emerge in the unacknowledged overlap between discourses of punishment and citizenship.Less
This chapter offers an account of how “figures” are discursively produced and socially fabricated through practices that sit between distinct but overlapping domains of power/knowledge. Through an extended reading of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and his 1975 lecture course, Abnormal, this chapter takes up the figures of the “delinquent” and the “convicted offender”–paradigmatic figures of the rehabilitative ideal in penology–demonstrating how they are fabricated to manage the tensions and contradictions between discursive spheres of justice and the penitentiary apparatus. This reading is extended to consider the figure of the felon, who, though the practice of disenfranchisement, should be understood as a similar fabrication, managing the tensions that emerge in the unacknowledged overlap between discourses of punishment and citizenship.
Andrew Dilts
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823262410
- eISBN:
- 9780823268986
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823262410.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership, and the Limits of American Liberalism, gives a theoretical and historical account of the pernicious practice of felon disenfranchisement, drawing widely on ...
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Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership, and the Limits of American Liberalism, gives a theoretical and historical account of the pernicious practice of felon disenfranchisement, drawing widely on early modern political philosophy, continental and post-colonial political thought, critical race theory, feminist philosophy, disability theory, critical legal studies, and archival research into 19th and 20th state constitutional conventions. It demonstrates that the history of felon disenfranchisement, rooted in post-slavery restrictions on suffrage and the contemporaneous emergence of the modern “American” penal system, shows the deep connections between two political institutions often thought to be separate: punishment and citizenship. It reveals the work of membership done by the criminal punishment system, and at the same time, the work of punishment done by the electoral franchise. Felon disenfranchisement is shown to be a symptomatic marker of the deep tension and interdependence that persists in democratic politics between who is considered a member of the polity and how that polity punishes persons who violate its laws. While these connections are seldom deployed openly in current debates about suffrage or criminal justice, the book shows how white supremacy, a perniciously quiet yet deeply violent political system, continues to operate through contemporary regimes of punishment and governance.Less
Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership, and the Limits of American Liberalism, gives a theoretical and historical account of the pernicious practice of felon disenfranchisement, drawing widely on early modern political philosophy, continental and post-colonial political thought, critical race theory, feminist philosophy, disability theory, critical legal studies, and archival research into 19th and 20th state constitutional conventions. It demonstrates that the history of felon disenfranchisement, rooted in post-slavery restrictions on suffrage and the contemporaneous emergence of the modern “American” penal system, shows the deep connections between two political institutions often thought to be separate: punishment and citizenship. It reveals the work of membership done by the criminal punishment system, and at the same time, the work of punishment done by the electoral franchise. Felon disenfranchisement is shown to be a symptomatic marker of the deep tension and interdependence that persists in democratic politics between who is considered a member of the polity and how that polity punishes persons who violate its laws. While these connections are seldom deployed openly in current debates about suffrage or criminal justice, the book shows how white supremacy, a perniciously quiet yet deeply violent political system, continues to operate through contemporary regimes of punishment and governance.
Andrew Dilts
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823262410
- eISBN:
- 9780823268986
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823262410.003.0008
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
The final chapter calls a refiguring of justice that moves toward communicative and deliberative theories of democracy and democratic practice that begin by theorizing injustice, difference, and ...
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The final chapter calls a refiguring of justice that moves toward communicative and deliberative theories of democracy and democratic practice that begin by theorizing injustice, difference, and subjectivity. Drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young, Michel Foucault, and Simon de Beauvoir, the normative evaluation of felon disenfranchisement must begin by recognizing what it as a productive failure that manages paradoxes of liberal punishment and membership. This calls for a provisional acceptance of the relationship between punishment and the boundaries of political membership and a deeper rethinking and refiguring of practical and institutional practices of exclusion, inclusion, and punishment. Recognizing the relation between persons who have and have not been subjected to the criminal punishment system in the US as one of seriality, this chapter calls for a critical, self-reflective, and radical democratic practice. To end the legacy of racialized social and political hierarchization requires removing disenfranchisement provisions, but also demands moving beyond the logic of inclusion, divesting the vote as a location that finalizes, essentializes, and fixes the boundaries of the polity.Less
The final chapter calls a refiguring of justice that moves toward communicative and deliberative theories of democracy and democratic practice that begin by theorizing injustice, difference, and subjectivity. Drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young, Michel Foucault, and Simon de Beauvoir, the normative evaluation of felon disenfranchisement must begin by recognizing what it as a productive failure that manages paradoxes of liberal punishment and membership. This calls for a provisional acceptance of the relationship between punishment and the boundaries of political membership and a deeper rethinking and refiguring of practical and institutional practices of exclusion, inclusion, and punishment. Recognizing the relation between persons who have and have not been subjected to the criminal punishment system in the US as one of seriality, this chapter calls for a critical, self-reflective, and radical democratic practice. To end the legacy of racialized social and political hierarchization requires removing disenfranchisement provisions, but also demands moving beyond the logic of inclusion, divesting the vote as a location that finalizes, essentializes, and fixes the boundaries of the polity.
