The Subjectivities of the Female Lawbreaker in Visual Culture: Cinematic Trajectories of Representation in the Exploitation, Hollywood, and Independent Film in Depictions of the Carceral World

In a consumerist driven culture, crime interweaves within the everyday fabric of leisurely consumption of the filmic artefact, as a culturally constructed entertainment commodity that contours our understandings of the female penal subject and the closed world of the prison – performatively enacted on the visual screen. It is important to investigate popular cultural mediums such as film, because the epistemology created from mediated representations reaches a far greater audience than that generated from academic criminological research endeavours. The dissertation is a critical, analytical, deconstructive inquiry into the cinematic constructions of the lawbreaker/prisoner, across three diverse and interlocking film-making forms: exploitation, Hollywood, and contemporary independent. A feminist-grounded theory methodology was employed to examine a historized database of 22 titles within a complexly integrative framework that unveiled a profusion of prisoners’ subjectivities (categorical constructions); emergent within varied manifestations of the prison and themes (criminological and otherwise), and affirmed in enveloping discourses and theoretical constructs. A multi-analytical, interrogative focus of single filmic texts emphasized particular areas, including the micro-aspects of textual aesthetic expressions (visual, dialogical, narratological, performative and thematic), the meso-milieu of ethnographic ‘voices’ of film industry personnel and the broader macro-level domains (historical, socio-political, cultural and criminological) that envelope and contour the film-making process. Cyberspace supplementary textual sources included 1,161 film reviews. The dissertation findings reveal that prisoners are multiply-constituted subjects; intersectionally located, contextually specific and situated in unequal relations of power. Across the mediascape of women-in-prison titles, the delineated film-making forms create varied and recycled subjectivities; from the fantastical, clichéd ‘othered’ archetypes in exploitation cinema, to the fictitiously personified, ‘normative’ womanhood in Hollywoodized tales. Conversely, the independent film symbolizes a critical image practice of resistance that creates alternatively distinctive, empowering embodiments of prisoners which not only reflect contextualized moments of authenticity in prisoners’ marginalized, experiential lives, but which serve also to demystify the corrosive, oppressive and seemingly denaturalized subjectivities found in the former filmic forms. The praxological research outcomes aim to encourage the filmic viewer to consume representations with a more critical cinephilic eye that challenges problematic representations which appear to reflect an existing unquestioned, taken-for-granted reality regarding the penal subject.