On Friday afternoon I checked the Huffington Post and read a headline with some eye-catching news: “Hillary Clinton Says She’ll End Private Prisons, Stop Accepting Their Money”. While Hillary’s campaign has been making statements condemning privatized prisons since at least the spring she doesn’t have a consistent track record on the issue, and she’s not the only Democratic hopeful to make statements against the the use of for-profit prisons, I found her goal of ending the practice entirely coupled with her refusal to accept their money to be of particular interest. It was surprising to me that a potential Presidential candidate would even address the issue of prison reform in a meaningful way, especially as a female because it seems like career suicide. Most importantly, I wondered about Hillary and how gender has affected our perceptions of her candidacy, policy and positions on issues. But, the article revolves around the removal of private prisons in favor of solely government run penal institutions and the announcement has nothing to do with prison abolition or even about prisoners themselves, but with money. I was struck by how this news item takes place within the context of the ideas of performance, power and de/construction outlined by Judith Butler.
In order for Hillary Clinton to even be taken seriously as a contender for the Democratic nomination, she had to redefine her own relations to femininity in an effort to better reflect what Americans want from their elected leaders. As Judith Butler states in her introduction, on page 10 of Bodies That Matter, “Construction not only takes place in time, but is itself a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms; sex is both produced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration.” Since the impeachment of her husband, Hillary Clinton has been forced to re-construct acceptable forms of femininity to better meet the expectations of American voters, while also (for good or bad) reconstructing American voters conception of a female leader. Another concept that looms large in Butler’s texts is the idea of the gendered performance. Even while Hillary Clinton has reconstructed the role of a female lawmaker, she still must perform her gender.
Butler expresses the uncontrollable aspects of performance in her introduction, on page 12, where she notes “The forming, crafting, bearing, circulation, signification of that sexed body will not be a set of actions performed in compliance with the law; they will be a set of actions mobilized by the law…” The political necessity of both noncompliance and mobilization forced Hillary Clinton to re-position her policy away from her gender. Unlike other candidates, Hillary Clinton cannot rest on her “personality” to win her votes because she is a womyn. In her reconstruction of what a female Presidential hopeful looks like, there is no room for the “female”. The deconstruction of her femaleness means that she has actually reconstructed another type of femaleness applicable to leadership that is devoid of principles or opinion in favor of policy and money as a necessity. Bernie Sanders can get on the boat of ending prison privatization because he’s a bleeding heart Leftist who can even call himself a Socialist. Hillary, as a womyn, cannot let opinion or ideology into the realm of her policy decisions because she risks getting branded as “emotional”. Even if Hillary Clinton did have a personal interest into the rights of the incarcerated or sympathy for those in prisons, recognizing that those inmates are socially viewed as not that much different from her own female body, she couldn’t express that.
Reflecting on the highly constructed body that Hillary Clinton must inhabit if she seeks to win the Presidency and its relation to incarcerated populations, I think about Judith Butler’s assertion on page 16 of Bodies That Matter, that “…it will be as important to think about how and to what end bodies are constructed as it will be to think about how and to what end bodies are not constructed…” The incarcerated body is a body that doesn’t matter and is not constructed. It’s socially imposed lack of meaning or value places the prisoner in a similar status of the assumed position of womyn. While womyn internalize the terms of the construction, the inmate’s construction is externalized and replaced by the conditions of the penal system. Hillary Clinton can only view incarcerated populations through the lens of a politician, not a person. She sees those in privatized prisons as being deprived of their basic rights…to be in a federal prison. What she fails to see is how the prison system as a whole is the problem and not just privatized prisons. She failed to, as described by Butler on page 22, redirect “…the citational chain toward a more possible future to expand the very meaning of what counts as a valued and valuable body in the world.” While I applaud Hillary’s commitment to not accepting funds from private prisons and her pledge to remove them, I can’t help but be frustrated that she just doesn’t get it. But, maybe being I’m being hard on her. She is just a presidential candidate and I’ve never expected anything of worth from them anyway, why should she be any different?
