Abstract
The genre of women in prison literature
sheds light on a rich storehouse of an unexplored segment of society. As such,
it needs to receive more attention from scholars and educators to promote its
readability to a wider audience. The purpose of this often-neglected genre is
to show how women prisoners are perceived by a wide majority of the supposedly
good citizens as constituting a sub-human level that does not deserve to be
heard. On top of that, the stories of women prisoners are often exceptionally
rich in information about the various elements of their human experience, the
societies they were shaped by, their value systems and the highly asymmetrical
systems of domination and subordination. and can offer a valuable understanding
of ways to reform such societies. A lot of the attention is given to exemplary
women who are either active feminists or silent subjugated objects, and between
those two ends of the spectrum, a wide range of stories are lost and voices are
turned silent. More importantly, looking at women’s stories in prison and their
complex subjectivities becomes more illuminating when those stories are
compared and contrasted in different societies. In order to make that
comparison, Greimas’s semiotic square comprises an effective tool in creating a
visual structure to the contraries and contradictions manifested in the text.
For the analysis, I chose to focus on The
Golden Chariot by the Egyptian writer Salwa Bakr’s and the American best
seller which became a Netflix series Orange
is the New Black written by Piper Kerman. The two texts challenge the
abstract image of a ‘typical female inmate.’ The two texts communicate who
those women are, their subjectivity and their sense of self, and their own
understanding of and feelings about that time in their lives. The two texts
share the common purpose of reintroducing the desire and dream for a communal
mode of existence that is less oppressive and manipulative to all its members.
The two texts also explore the layers beyond the self to depict how women
re-structure power, race, and kin relations in prison, while examining the intricate connection between the personal and the
social scene. I
argue that the social, economic, and individual squares are the same in both
societies, “The conjunctions of those relations form a fundamental network that
governs human social behavior and practice.”
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IJAHSS by IPRPD is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.