No abstract

Prior sociological research has demonstrated that religious selves are gendered. Using the case of female inmates—some of the most disadvantaged Americans—this article shows that dominant messages constructing the religious self are not only gendered, but also deeply intertwined with race and class. Data from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork on religion inside a U.S. state women’s prison reveal that religious volunteers—predominately middle-class African American women—preached feminine submissiveness and finding a “man of God” to marry to embody religious ideals. However, these messages were largely out of sync with the realities of working class and poor incarcerated women, especially given their temporary isolation from the marriage market and the marital prospects in the socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods to which many would return. These findings suggest that scholars must pay attention to how race, class, and gender define dominant discourses around the religious self and consider the implications for stratification for those who fail to fulfill this dominant ideology.

Numerous articles and textbooks advise qualitative researchers on accessing “hard-to-reach” or “hidden” populations. In this article, I compare two studies that I conducted with justice-involved women in the United States: a yearlong ethnography inside a state women’s prison and an interview study with formerly incarcerated women. Although these two populations are interconnected—and both are widely deemed hard-to-reach—the barriers to access differed. In the prison study, hard-to-reach reflected an issue of institutional legitimacy, in which researchers must demonstrate themselves and their proposed study as legible, appropriate, and worthy to organizational gatekeepers. In the reentry study, hard-to-reach reflected an issue of structural precarity, in which researchers must navigate the everyday vulnerabilities of research participants’ social position to ensure the study is inclusive and feasible. Juxtaposing these two experiences, I propose greater nuance to the term hard-to-reach such that researchers may proactively address institutional and structural barriers to access.

How do converts manage their disagreements with religious teachings? Previous literature on religious dissent has largely focused on church members advocating change or apostatizing, solutions largely unavailable to initiates. Based on six months of ethnographic observations in a Catholic conversion class and 21 in‐depth interviews with converts, sponsors, and teachers, I demonstrate how microinteractional norms encourage an atmosphere of silence around disagreement. I then show how initiates explain this conflict avoidant response by justifying their doubt, engaging in a process of hierarchical deference, in which initiates call upon the top‐down structure of the Catholic Church to defer control upward, and faulting human imperfection rather than the institution itself. While “culture wars” debates of the past two decades have investigated a purported moral polarization of the American public, this study contributes to a growing literature on how the moderate majority negotiates disagreements between their beliefs and religious teachings.

Criminologists are increasingly interested in how a variety of justice‐adjacent institutions scaffold surveillance and punishment in the U.S. criminal justice system. A relevant but understudied institution within the carceral state is that of religion. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork inside a U.S. state women's prison, I interrogate how religion—predominately conservative and evangelical Protestantism—served dual purposes in light of carceral control. Religion offered redemptive narratives to counter punitive carceral narratives promulgated by the state. At the same time, this narrative shift from “flawed” to “faithful” prescribed particular forms of embodiment: avoiding fights and rejecting sexual relationships with women. These forms of Protestant embodiment aligned with carceral purposes, such that women who reprimanded others for breaching religious norms were simultaneously enforcing prison rules. Although rhetorically challenging official prison narratives on the meaning of incarceration, Protestant narratives in practice regulated women's emotional and sexual behaviors and fostered a system of informal surveillance among incarcerated women. These findings illuminate how organizational narratives are linked to individual action. More broadly, they suggest how an institution such as religion can undergird state authority within an intractable context of carceral control.