Crime Policy
Victimology
Prison Studies
Academic Writing for Undergrads

Cultural Criminology, The Prison as a Gothic Institution

My research centers on pervasive ideas about and feelings towards the prison as a social institution. In short, I study the ways in which society speaks to and about itself through prison imagery in cultural and literary text. My research is concerned with how the prison comes across in collective means of communication such as books, movies or video games. As such, I study text as a presentation of ideas, myths, and stereotypes, rather than as a representation of anything existing outside of the text. Utilizing theoretical frameworks traditionally found in studies of the Gothic, such as abjection and uncanniness, my research project aims to further criminological understanding of how the prison functions as a social institution.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Abject (M)Othering

  2018. Tea Fredriksson. Critical Criminology

  Article

  The present study investigates how prison comes across as a culturally constructed imaginary. Drawing on narratological methodologies, the study discusses prison as simultaneously real and imagined in society’s ongoing communication with and about itself. Through an investigation of how prison is presented in autobiographical prison literature, the study shows how culturally held fears of imprisonment surface in terms of abjection and uncanniness. Previous prison studies have discussed this in terms of civil death and subsequent resurrection. Unlike previous studies, the present study employs the monstrous-feminine motif as a critical device in order to redefine the understanding of prison as abject and uncanny in patriarchal societies. An implementation of the monstrous-feminine motif enables a reading of the prison’s particular form of punishment as one that entails incorporation and assimilation; rather than operating on a patriarchal principle of exclusion.

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Show all publications by Tea Fredriksson at Stockholm University