2 - Gendered Portions and Racialized Rations

Summary

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates over prison dietaries in Britain and in its overseas colonies are the subject of Chapter 2. Although uniformity could easily have been imposed through the issue of a single dietary mandated across the nation, and then converted into local ingredients for use in all the colonies, differences of sex, race, and ethnicity were central considerations in the preparation of prison diet scales. This chapter explores gendered understandings of bodily labor within the British prison system and the impact of these ideologies on the dieting of different incarcerated populations. It then investigates how the racial and ethnic taxonomies deployed within a range of colonial prisons shaped the feeding of prisoners and in turn shored up broader imperial ideologies. It argues that prison authorities were animated by, and in the process reinforced, a variety of bodily imaginaries that distinguished British subjects from each other and thus had effects well beyond the walls of the prison. While in theory all might be equal before the law, after the law had passed its judgment, the bodies of criminals played an active role in performing, inhabiting, and thus reinforcing the categories of difference that structured British society.