No Mercy Here

Abstract

No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity provides an analysis of the role of gender ideology in the development of southern punishment after the Civil War, arguing that the carceral state circulated and entrenched ideas about gender that were critical to the making of Jim Crow. This book reveals how the criminal legal system crafted, reinforced, and required black female deviance as part of the broader constitution of Jim Crow modernity premised upon the devaluation of black life broadly. A study of imprisoned black women’s historical lives, experiences of violence and labor exploitation, practices of refusal and resistance, and visions of freedom and abolition, this book makes the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class central to the history of convict labor and Jim Crow modernity. No Mercy Here incorporates speculative historical narrative to highlight questions about black women’s interior lives and draws upon a wide array of archival documents to uncover black women’s experiences in local and state carceral institutions including mixed gender and all-women’s convict lease camps, chain gangs, and state prison farms. This study encompasses an analysis of a broad range of carceral technologies including criminalizing discourses, surveillance, arrest and prosecution, visual culture, reform legislation, and gendered racial terror. No Mercy Here examines black women’s organizational protest against convict leasing and examines the blues as a black feminist expressive culture within a black radical tradition, prefiguring the insights of critical race theory and asserting a black feminist abolition democracy through vivid and elaborate theorizations of racial, gendered, sexual, and economic justice and a world beyond prisons.

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