Oppression and the Body by Christine Caldwell & Lucia Bennett Leighton

Author:Christine Caldwell & Lucia Bennett Leighton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623172022
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2018-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

The Performative Body

An aspect of carceral life that is essential for survival is the necessity to establish and build a “public edifice”12 that includes “front management tactics” as a way to “fit into the prison community and avoid exploitation” or, correspondingly, as “one-upmanship or assertion of legitimacy, status, and superiority.”13 Managing one’s front or public persona generally involved attention to how inmates carried themselves in their bodies, nonverbal gestures, quality of eye contact, and facial expressions. Even though he is six feet five inches tall and weighs two hundred pounds, Velika admitted that he did not “feel like a tall person” and normally describes himself as a “shy and timid” person who typically held his pre-prison body in a slouched position to maximize an air of “invisibility.” In prison, though, he quickly learned, as did all the participants who were interviewed for this study, the necessity of developing an embodiment of confidence and strength. Typically, this practice entailed observing and noticing other inmates’ confidence displays and, to some extent, mimicking them. Velika described an inmate who was striking in that one “didn’t ever catch him out of his persona. He was like a strong stoic machine.” Facial expressions were expected to be constrained, and eye contact had to express a quality of fearlessness. Danny Darko acknowledged, “I smiled a lot less. I was a lot quieter of a person. I kind of developed that thousand-yard stare to just look through people. Show nothing and look for everything.”

“Chow-hall face” was nomenclature that Muff Dog and his friends ascribed to a particular facial expression that one donned both in the cafeteria (a venue fraught with potential volatility and violence) and in other parts of the prison. During her interview, Brittany pointed to a permanent crease on her forehead left from her time wearing a self-protective “shitty face” in the dining area. “Prison is like an extrovert’s world,” Velika explained, and, therefore, an extrovert’s body was vital: “It looked like having a straight back, shoulders back, chin up, chest out a little bit, speaking louder—more firmly, poker face.” Hand gestures were generally discouraged because they could be taken as a sign of aggression. According to Velika:

It’s all about not appearing froggy. You don’t want people to think that you’re about to jump up and start fighting. I remember the first time it was made clear to me that my hand gestures needed to calm down. I was afraid of them, but I couldn’t show my fear. They were like, put your hands by your side when you’re talking to me.

Muff Dog, who spent nine years in a maximum-security prison, had a different take on the prison persona:

It doesn’t mean you walk around acting like a tough guy all the time. Some people do and I personally think that’s stupid. You don’t let anybody bully you. You don’t let anybody take your stuff. You don’t let anybody push you around. You handle your own. You’re a man. So that’s what being a convict is. You put on the persona that you think you need to have.

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