"We were all partners". Organizational experiences in women's prisons in Argentina

Abstract

In this article we analyze the experiences of three women who went through punitive confinement, seeking to reconstruct how the meanings of politics were configured during and from their prison experiences. We retrieve their testimonies, emphasizing the various strategies and practices of organization within prisons. Some of the central dynamics of discipline typical of the prison institution are replaced, paying attention to the narratives around the subjective impact of their detention. At the same time, we point out those experiences that, in a creative way, produce other ways of inhabiting the confinement. Thus, when reflecting on the ways in which they were repositioned in the prison plot, the political appears linked to motherhood, to spaces of relative power such as student centers, to experiences of solidarity with other detainees, such as literacy teaching; and to collective protests around the conditions of detention, practices that, as we will see, can be read as forms of agency that unfold in everyday life as the central stage.