Frictions, cracks and micro-resistances: physical activity and sport as strategies to dignify imprisoned women

Abstract

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The folding of sport space into carceral space: On the making of prisoners’ experiences and lives

“…This section has explored the ways in which men and women prisoners produce sport and recreation spaces as they navigate the constraints of their institutional environment. As suggested in other research (e.g., Norman ; Martinez‐Merino ), prisoners’ engagement with sport and recreation spaces may be understood to produce, in some instances, “free spaces” in which they can resist the administrative control that characterizes most of their lives. However, such a reading must also recognize that acts of resistance can only be defined as such relative to “specific forms of power” (Ugelvik , 42) and that the production of violent men's or exclusionary women's sport spaces may, therefore, not be resistant per se .…”

“…There is limited research on the broader social significance of sport and recreational exercise in prisons, and even less that explicitly grapples with how space relates to this significance. Nonetheless, certain research has highlighted important connections between exercise and space in prisons (e.g., Andrews and Andrews ; Martos‐García et al ; Norman ; Martinez‐Merino et al ), and hence deserves deeper unpacking. One prominent debate in the literature, which implicitly invokes the potential spatial significance of prison physical activity, concerns the extent to which prisoners’ participation in sport activities reduces or increases the risk of violence in the institution.…”

“…In a separate study, Norman () interpreted Canadian prisoners’ tactical, and occasionally violent, engagement with recreation spaces as a temporary challenge to the social control experienced in their daily lives. Finally, Martinez‐Merino et al (, 219) revealed how women in Spanish prisons use physical activity to develop “strategies of resistance to create free spaces that enable them to escape from the tedious prison routine.”…”

Sport and Incarceration: Theoretical Considerations for Sport for Development Research

“…Whereas SfD is a burgeoning realm of research (Schulenkorf et al, 2016), socio-cultural research on sport in prisons remains relatively limited. Among the major sociological themes in the existing literature are the contributions of sport to: constructions of hegemonic masculinity in male prisons (Andrews & Andrews, 2003;Sabo, 2001), the control and management of prison populations (Martos-García et al, 2009;Norman, 2017) and prisoners' micro-resistances to these regimes of social control (Martinez-Merino, Martos-García, Lozano-Sufrategui, Martín-González, & Usabiaga, 2019;Norman, 2017;Norman & Andrews, 2019), and the likelihood of prisoners desisting from crime after being released into the community (Meek, 2014;Meek & Lewis, 2014). A new vein of recent research (Gacek, 2017;Norman, 2019;Norman & Andrews, 2019), which this article builds upon, explicitly engages with theoretical developments in carceral geography to consider the spatial significance of sport in prisons.…”

“…In such a context, specific uses of sport may represent resistance, however small, against regimes of control. For example, prisoners may participate in weightlifting or bodybuilding to develop muscular physiques that visibly represent the threat of violence (Norman, 2017), play sport to demonstrate agency in the face of inherently disempowering experiences of incarceration (Martinez-Merino et al, 2019), repurpose recreation spaces or equipment for illicit means (Norman, 2017), or simply shape the experience of carceral time and space in more pleasurable ways (Gacek, 2017;Norman & Andrews, 2019).…”