UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title In the System: Art, Prison, and the Performance of Social Welfare Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0rq886vg Author Prieur, Nina Billone Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California In the System: Art, Prison, and the Performance of Social Welfare By Nina Billone Prieur A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Shannon Jackson, Chair Professor Angela Y. Davis Professor Shannon Steen Professor Rebecca McLennan Fall 2010 In the System: Art, Prison, and the Performance of Social Welfare © 2010 by Nina Billone Prieur Abstract In the System: Art, Prison, and the Performance of Social Welfare by Nina Billone Prieur Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality University of California, Berkeley Professor Shannon Jackson, Chair Over the past three decades, the state of California has launched the largest prison construction project in history. The United States has followed California’s lead by massively expanding its penal system and radically dismantling its welfare system. The country currently incarcerates not only more people, but also a greater percentage of its population than any other nation in the world. During this same period, increasing numbers of artists have intervened in the spaces between the U.S. prison and welfare systems. San Francisco has served as a crucible for these endeavors, which constitute a defining feature of the emerging field of community-based performance. This dissertation responds to this political and cultural conjunction by considering how and to what effect artists in San Francisco and across California have engaged the shifting penal-welfare nexus throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From between the fields of theater and performance studies and critical prison studies, I develop the concept of penal-welfare performance. The penal-welfare lens reveals how the prison and welfare systems constitute interconnecting forces within the bureaucratic field. These mechanisms lock large sections of the population out of stabilizing social institutions, a dynamic that geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore aptly describes as mass infrastructural abandonment. This fracturing of communities both effects and is effected by racialized, classed, gendered, and sexualized operations of dehumanization, operations that threaten survival on symbolic and material registers. I demonstrate how penal-welfare performance—as an object of study and a conceptual framework—may redirect the discourses and bureaucratic structures buttressing the prison industrial complex. Moving from community-based theaters that aim to rehabilitate the incarcerated to activist performances that aim to mobilize the public, I examine the limitations and the possibilities of performance’s transformative promise. I argue that by staging their negotiations within networks of power, artists in and around the penal system advance an ethic and aesthetic of interdependency that unsettles the boundaries between prison and society, aesthetics and politics, subject and world. From different locations within and around the prison system, the arts practices in this dissertation highlight how power saturates every aspect of the social world. From the Arts-in-Corrections program (which is fully institutionalized within the California Department of Corrections), to the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women (which 1 occupies a liminal space both within and beyond the county jail system), to the Prison Project at Intersection for the Arts (which operates outside of criminal justice bureaucracies), each of the arts practices I study imagines and re-imagines creative ways of speaking to, against, and through power. 2 For Dwight In loving memory i Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii 1. Institutional Turns 1 2. Performing Reform: Refiguring Rehabilitation at San Quentin Prison 21 3. Animating Bureaucracy: Arts-in-Corrections in Globalizing California 53 4. “Easy Intimacy”: The Medea Project and Theater for Incarcerated Women 80 5. Toward an Abolitionist Aesthetic: The Prison Project at Intersection for the Arts 101 Epilogue: Radical Interdependency 127 Bibliography 131 Appendix A: Images 155 Appendix B: Resource List of Contemporary U.S. Prison Arts Programs 163 ii Acknowledgements This project started to take shape ten years ago when Tsehaye Hébert and Lydia Diamond invited to me to assist them with the Women Writers Workshop at Cook County Jail. I am deeply indebted to them as well as to the women who participated in our weekly workshops. I began to research the politics of prison performance under the guidance of Dwight Conquergood who modeled for me the ethical responsibility and scholarly rigor integral to committed ethnographic research and who taught me the importance of integrating theory and practice, art and activism. While writing is invariably a solitary act, I have been fortunate to develop this dissertation in collaboration with a diverse group of artists, activists, and scholars both inside and outside prison walls. I hope this manuscript can broaden and extend the conversations I have had with artists in San Francisco and across the state of California, artists who have come to serve as an ever-expanding team of experts for this project. In these brief acknowledgements sections, we tend to group contributors into such categories as “mentors,” “colleagues,” “friends,” and “family.” I find, however, that the members of the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women defy such categorization as they have come both to fulfill and to transcend each of these roles in my life. I am especially grateful to Rhodessa Jones, Angela Wilson, Felicia Scaggs, Gina Dawson, and Fe Bongolan for opening their hearts and homes to me—and also for teaching me the power of a high-heeled shoe. The participants in the California Arts-in-Corrections program and the Prison Project at Intersection for the Arts also received me with considerable generosity. Bill Cleveland dedicated every Friday morning for three months to talking with me about his work and Judith Tannenbaum gave me an open invitation to her home for meals, conversations, and archival digging. In addition, Susan Hill, Ellen Davidson, Steve Emrick, Jim Carlson, Larry Brewster, Laurie Brooks, and the AIC artists serving time at New Folsom Prison graciously made the time to talk with me about their work and to think with me about this project’s central questions and concerns. For the past several years, Deborah Cullinan, Rebeka Rodriguez, Sean San Jose, Kevin Chen, and Erika Chong Shuch at Intersection for the Arts have welcomed me into their processes not only as a researcher, but also as a colleague and peer. They have helped me to see the culmination of this dissertation as a beginning, and I look forward to future conversations and collaborations. My advisor, Shannon Jackson, has shown a sustained commitment to the stakes of this project even and especially during those times when I found myself losing the proverbial forest for all of those very many trees. She generously read my earliest most amorphous prose, helping me both to hone in on my overarching questions and arguments and to shape my writing to reflect them. Her relentless examination of what constitutes “a public good” has inspired me as a scholar, teacher, activist, and artist. My readers have also enhanced this project in innumerable ways. I am particularly grateful to Angela Davis for guiding me to work at the crossroads of scholarship and activism and for encouraging me to think seriously about performance’s transformative potential. Shannon Steen challenged me by insisting that I never romanticize this potential, and Rebecca McLennan assisted me in speaking to diverse audiences across multiple disciplines. The communities in around the department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and the program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at UC Berkeley have been instrumental in this project’s development. Colleagues and friends Todd Barnes, Mona Bower, Krista Brune, iii Carrie Gaiser Casey, Emine Fisek, Beth Hoffman, Jennifer Johung, Khai Nguyen, Kelly Rafferty, April Sizemore-Barber, Monica Stufft, and Brandon Woolf have waded through the trenches with me. Juana Rodriguez and the participants in the DEWGS dissertation seminar carefully read drafts of my dissertation and pushed me to enhance and complicate my arguments and methodologies. David Kessler at the Bancroft Library has been a great help to me as I learned the ins and outs of archival research, and Beth Berry and David Henkin in the History Department came to my aid in the final hour. In addition, the Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study, the Jacob Javits Fellowship, and the Mellon Discovery Fellowship provided me with the resources to pursue long-term and in-depth field research. Multiple communities beyond UC Berkeley have also guided me throughout this process. Sonja Kuftinec, Laura Edmondson, and John Fletcher have served as interlocutors both during and in the months between annual conferences. Maya Roth, Derek Goldman, Natsu Onoda Power and my other colleagues in the Theater and Performance Studies