University of Miami Law School University of Miami School of Law Institutional Repository Articles Faculty and Deans 2014 How to Feel Like a Woman, or Why Punishment Is a Drag Mary Anne Franks University of Miami School of Law,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.miami.edu/fac_articles Part of the Law and Gender Commons, Law and Society Commons, and the Sexuality and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Mary Anne Franks, How to Feel Like a Woman, or Why Punishment Is a Drag, 61 UCLA L. Rev. 566 (2014). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty and Deans at University of Miami School of Law Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of University of Miami School of Law Institutional Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. How to Feel Like a Woman, or Why Punishment Is a Drag Mary Anne Franks ABSTRACT If a man in prison says that he was made -to feel like a woman," this is commonly understood to mean that he was degraded, dehumanized, and sexualized. This association of femininity with punishment has significant implications for the way our society understands not only the sexual abuse of men in prison but also sexual abuse generally These important implications are usually overlooked, however, because law and society typically regard prison feminization as a problem of gender transposition: that is, as a problem of men being treated like women. In contrast, this Article argues that feminization is punitive for both men and women.