Status Updates From No Mercy Here: Gender, Puni...

⚠️Ch.1”For black women, the construction of their bodies as monstrous meant not only that their political and economic power would be limited, but also that they would be subject to disproportionate arrest and imprisonment.”

⚠️Ch.1”While the Civil War might have produced an opportunity for new definitions of gender and gender roles, the narrative of exceptional white feminine vulnerability became critical to the maintenance of white supremacy through the dissemination of discourses of virtue and domestic order.”

Ch.1”The transition from slavery to a ‘free’ southern economy based upon coerced wage or contract labor was a historical process in which the hierarchy of bodies had to be reconstituted, reconsolidated, and reasserted, and the threat of black political or economic advancement needed to be thwarted.”

⚠️Ch.1”The South's economy was built upon the cultural project of racial differentiation, and Cobb's representation provided the material otherness upon which the iconography of white supremacy and white womanhood rested.”

Ch.1”Eliza Cobb's story is representative of the experience of black women in general, whose sentences to convict labor included gendered forms of racial terror including rape and the attendant violence of compulsory childbirth and familial
estrangement.”

⚠️Ch.1”Eliza Cobb's story is representative of the experience of black women in general, whose sentences to convict labor included gendered forms of racial terror including rape and the attendant violence of compulsory childbirth and familial
estrangement.”

Ch.1”Yet because of these traumas and the prevalence of rape by prison guards whose technologies of force included the lash, the pressure to be an inconspicuous model prisoner in order to receive a pardon, and the gun, it is more likely that she was raped.”

Ch.1”…medical ledgers indicate that she was hospitalized for ‘labor/giving birth’…eleven months after she was convicted of infanticide. It is possible that Eliza Cobb ‘consented’ to have sex with another prisoner only two months after arriving at a predominantly male convict camp, barely a year after being raped and forced to hide her stillborn child from her mother.“

Ch.1”In popular press accounts black women were often referred to as negresses, female but altogether distinct and anathema to the construction of normative womanhood. The terms ‘negro woman’ and ‘negress’ were often used in the same article, sometimes in the same paragraph, and reflect an uneasy, antagonistic relationship between blackness and femininity in the white popular imagination.”

Ch.1”The black female subject occupied a paradoxical, embattled, and fraught position, a productive negation that produced normativity. She was an invention of a white supremacist imaginary defined in part by subjection to extreme violence and terror.”

Ch.1”…Cobb's image illustrates the limits of human legibility for black female subjects, who could be both literally and figuratively captured because they were perceived to so profoundly deviate from the norms of white femininity. In the white imaginary ‘black woman’ was an oxymoronic formulation because the modifier ‘black’ rejected everything associated with the universal ‘woman.’“

Ch.1”Her sex was invoked but in the carceral narrative she bore no resemblance to woman, ‘True’ or not. …Cobb's freedom depended on an appeal to white supremacy that reinforced her position as ‘other,’ specifically, other-than-woman. Her experience provides evidence that juridical power actually produces what it seems to represent.”

Ch.1”Degrading discourses about Cobb's alleged lack of intelligence and homeliness were key to her clemency case, inflicting grave injury as part of the process of her ‘freeing.’ White lawyers and prison officials crafted her application for pardon based upon the attributes that, to them, made Eliza Cobb intelligible as a racialized subject—disfigurement and idiocy.“

Intro:”While this chapter reveals that imprisoned black women sometimes escaped,
waged work slowdowns, and other forms of defiance, their contestation of the meaning of modernity was, perhaps, their most significant sabotage practice.”

Intro:”Their critiques of the legal system were incredibly complex precursors to critical race feminism that would emerge more than forty years later. Black women's punishment-themed blues contested dominant southern narratives about the nature of modernity and the nature of punishment.”

Intro: “The women in this chapter reimagined modern society, positioning punishment not as a natural or necessary prerequisite for its development, but as an obstacle to their independence, sexual, and economic freedom.”

Intro: “However in recent years historians have produced exciting new work on economic development, urbanization, and the criminalization of African American women, constituting a critical field of black feminist carceral history.”

Intro: “The criminalization of black women and their use as labor resources for the development of the infrastructure of the modern Jim Crow state built by convict labor has received little scholarly attention.“

Intro: “Convict labor provided the resources for southern modernization, the development of its public and private infrastructure. After 1908 the chain gang literally paved the way (through massive county road construction) for perhaps the most significant icon of American modernity: the automobile.”

Introduction: Lula Walker says after the sentencing of her niece in 1901 that white people hate black people because they are free. This hatred manifests in the treatment of black people on trial. “‘…all Jury’s ain’t perfect.’”

Reading this for HI 484 American women in the 20th century

This shit is DENSE