The Horror-Storied Prison : A Narrative Study of Prison as an Abject and Uncanny Institution

Sammanfattning: In terms of time as well as in terms of depth, prison is a storied institution. Many-layered tales have been told about it since its inception. A prominent theme of these stories is how they configure belonging and otherness through horror-iconography. This study pursues how prison is made sense of in stories that present it as both fact and fiction. To study this, it explores how prison is narrativized in 10 commercially published prison autobiographies. The analysis explores how the narrativization of prison space speaks to social fears and anxieties about deviance and punishment, and how these narratives fit into social, subject-formative processes where prison is an abject as well as uncanny institution.The study employs haunting and the monstrous-feminine as critical devices. The implementation of the monstrous-feminine motif enables a reading of the prison’s particular form of punishment as one that threatens to devour, incorporate, and assimilate subjects into the other; rather than exclude and remove (undesirable) subjects from society. It also elucidates how, as an abject other, it cannot spawn clean and proper, rehabilitated bodies. Moreover, viewing prison as haunting unveils several processes that unfamiliarize the familiar in both conceptual and spatiotemporal ways. It shows how prison unsettles definitions and meanings of things like past, present, and future; punisher and punishee; and even life and death. Additionally, focusing on haunting as social, spatial, and temporal ambiguity enables an analysis of how prison functions as a repository of repressed violence. This is particularly evident when texts reveal how prison is haunted at the same time as it also haunts places and people both in and around it. Uncanny doubles exemplify this, where eerily similar bodies and places destabilize notions of safety and danger. Through its analysis of prison novels, the present study unveils how prison is narrativized as a viscous timespace that devours, disorients, and dissolves. It threatens to incorporate both subjects and other spaces into its lingering abjectivity, and haunt them if they ever leave. The study analyses how prison inscribes social fears on flesh, as well as what ghosts this flesh-making conjures. The resulting view is one of a sticky, subject-dissolving prison that seeps into and disrupts the fabric of ordinary life, while also threatening to keep growing and devouring with indiscriminate insatiability.