reproductive landscape

In her book Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore discusses in depth the politicization of women in anti-prison campaigns, a phenomenon that convolutes the gendered social constructions of the "male, or public, sphere" (194) and the female, or private. Both Gilmore and Julie Sze specifically highlight the organization of mothers seeking justice, creating discourses of the domestic and the political; we are all familiar with the feminist slogan: "The personal is political." In these cases the personal is the familial, the relationship between mothers and their children, who are unequally exposed to environmental pollution (as Sze writes about) or strict policing (Gilmore).

Writing specifically about the group Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (ROC), Gilmore brings attention to the ways in which the language of families and motherhood serves as a unifying force to mobilize women with similar and dissimilar experiences towards a single cause. Gilmore quotes Barbara Meredith, the mother of a black youth shot down by LAPD police and eventual co-founder of Mothers ROC: "Our mothers had taught us everything. And our grandmothers, and our aunts, and the ladies next door. They all taught us so we could have a better life." (198) Later, Gilmore writes, discussing the increasing Latina membership of ROC, "Mothers...Wives...Grandmothers...Indeed, the Black and Brown cadres of abuelas began to hold occasisional caucuses." (226) Here we see a specific kind of formulation, a conflation of gender and race: not only are these people women, they are women of color, and mostly working class or poor; though their experiences differ, their triple disenfranchisement unifies them in very particular ways, so that they draw upon the similarities of their roles as mothers and as racialized people and as economically disadvantaged people.

Furthermore, the centrality of children, not just mothers, becomes rhetorically and politically significant. In a 1995 flyer, Mothers ROC write: "Mothers suffer a special pain when their children are incarcerated (lost to them)." (quoted in Gilmore, 196, emphasis added) The use of semantics—the fact that the objective definition of "incarceration" has little to do with the loss of one's children—reimagines the politics of imprisonment, shifting the focus on the relationship between criminality and society to the relationship between mother and child. Thus the public politics of imprisonment becomes domesticized, which allows the Mothers ROC agenda to become relatable: this is not a battle to save some impersonal and faraway idea of "criminals," but rather to save children, and to reunite families. The very name "Mothers Reclaiming Our Children" is significant on multiple levels: it brings this mother-child dynamic to the forefront; it places women in a politically active role; and it asserts that they are reclaiming, a term that is historically loaded with the politics of race, gender, and sexuality, e.g. the reclamation of language, in which non-normative groups of people take and use pejorative words to disempower them of hatred and reempower them with affirmation.

The film Prison Town, USA similarly shifts focus to the family, although mostly highlighting the relationships between men, who have either been incarcerated or employed by a prison, and their wives and children. Although the film does offer a humanized view of those affected by the prison system, I took issue with the invisibility of minorities (although there were black guards in the training camp, all four central families/individuals were white; of course, this is not to say their struggles are illegitimate, and the film does problematize issues of class and wealth, but as [I believe, but can't remember right now] Cheryl Harris points out, working class whites are more likely to ignore the similar experience of working class minorities, focusing instead on the differences of race rather than the similarities of class) and, in retrospect, after having read Gilmore, I noticed that the film also plays into dominant gender roles. While there were female guards present, the film focuses on four men who have been directly affected by the prisons, propelling them to the "public sphere," while their wives are present only in the domestic; we see how the women have been affected too, but not how they fight against the system, or whether they are even able to do so. The only public female figure was the woman at Crossroads, whose job centered around the domestic (helping families of convicts to find shelter and housing).