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Marilyn Buck
Prisoner; Three Women; Air Nike Slam Dunk; Yvette, Prison Poet Goes Home; Night Showers; Dear Liz; Not a Life Sentence (Poetry)

Ann Folwell Stanford
More Than Just Words: Women's Poetry and Resistance at Cook County Jail

Bernardine Dohrn
All Ellas: Girls Locked Up

Maria St. John
Making Home/Making "Stranger": An Interview with Cheryl Dunye

Ronnie Halperin and Jennifer L. Harris
Parental Rights of Incarcerated Mothers with Children in Foster Care: A Policy Vacuum

Rachel Roth
Do Prisoners Have Abortion Rights?

Salome Chasnoff
Voices in Time

Sarah Potter
'Undesirable Relations': Same-Sex Relationships and the Meaning of Sexual Desire at a Women's Reformatory during the Progressive Era

Deborah Labelle and Sheryl Pimlott Kubiak
Balancing Gender Equity for Women Prisoners

Rebecca B. Rank
Some Time in Crime

Beth E. Richie
Feminist Ethnographies of Women in Prison

Marilyn Buck
Women in Prison and Work

Megan Sweeney
Prison Narratives, Narrative Prisons: Incarcerated Women Reading Gayl Jones's "Eva's Man"

Sara L. Warner
The Medea Project: Mythic Theater for Incarcerated Women

Barbara Saunders
Counting Down the Days

Jasbir K. Puar
Abu Ghraib: Arguing against Exceptionalism

News and Views

Cover Art

Jane Evelyn Atwood. "Cell: Northern California Women's Facility, Stockton, Calif., 1995." From her book, Too Much Time (Phaidon: London, 2000).
© Jane Evelyn Atwood

As we prepare this special issue of Feminist Studies on women and prisons for publication, the abuse of Iraqis detained at Abu Ghraib prison has come to light. Stories and images witnessing the sexual humiliation and other types of abuse visited upon Iraqis by U.S. and British military personnel have been roundly criticized by those who recognize the legitimacy of the Geneva Conventions even in the midst of an illegitimate war. Most of what has been reported has involved male detainees whose nakedness has been seared into our memories as their basic humanity has been violated in the name of the War on Terrorism. Less visible, however, have been the women held in Abu Ghraib who, according to Luke Harding writing in the (London) Guardian (12 May 2004) and Seymour Hersh writing in the New Yorker (17 May 2004), have also reportedly been sexually abused, raped, humiliated, photographed naked, intimidated, even “"disappeared." Jasbir K. Puar's essay, “"Abu Ghraib: Arguing against Exceptionalism,” and two protest letters by the International Women Count Network and the U.K. groups Black Women's Rape Action Project and Women against Rape," reproduced in our News and Views section, articulate strong feminist responses to the situation at Abu Ghraib.

Despite the evidence of the abuse of both female and male detainees, the media continues to focus primarily on the abuse meted out to the men. Women are included, if at all, almost as afterthoughts. Although the majority of those both detained and abused are men, the numbers cannot be the only reason women have been less visible as victims of these human rights abuses. The stories and images of men as victims of sexual abuse, humiliation, and intimidation may seem particularly egregious because such treatment challenges their gender identity, making their feminization a central part of the military's tactics in breaking down the Iraqis and bringing them under control. If this is the case, then the abuse of female detainees is all too ordinary. There is little to distinguish the women inside and outside Abu Ghraib prison other than the prison walls and the windowless 2.5 meter by 1.5 meter cells in which they are held.

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