Application

Lynne Haney

Associate Director/Professor, Sociology Department

New York University, United States

Research: Transnational States of Punishment: Gender and Incarceration in the East and West

Lynne Haney is Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She has conducted ethnographic research on gender and the welfare state both in the United States and in Hungary. Her previous research analyzed the development of welfare policies and institutions in Hungary from the inception of state socialism to the mid-1990s. Her first book, Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary, was based on this research. She has also published extensively on the gender politics of contemporary welfare reform in the U.S., including articles on low-income women's responses to welfare and the paternal politics of reform. She is currently writing a book, Offending Women: Gender, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire that compares the gender practices of two U.S. penal institutions at two moments in time. Based on ethnographic research in a group home for incarcerated teen mothers and a prison for women and their children, the book examines shifts in the gendered meanings of incarceration and the linkages between state systems of welfare and punishment.

Professor Haney received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997. She has been the recipient of numerous research grants, including fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Remarque Institute at New York University, and the International Research and Exchanges Board. She has also received several awards for her work, including the 2003 American Sociological Association's Distinguished Book Award in Sex and Gender for Inventing the Needy.

Selected Publications:

Families of a New World: Gender, Politics, and State Development in a Global Context. Edited with Lisa Pollard (Routledge, 2003).

"Married Fathers and Caring Daddies: Welfare Reform and the Discursive Politics
Paternity" (with Miranda March). Social Problems, 2003, 50: 4.
Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary. (University of California Press, 2002).

Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World.
Michael Burawoy et al (University of California Press, 2001).

"Feminist State Theory: Applications to Jurisprudence, Criminology, and the Welfare State." Annual Review of Sociology, 2000: 26.

Back to Top

Transnational States of Punishment: Gender and Incarceration in the East and West

My NCS project will examine contemporary shifts in state systems of punishment in the United States and Hungary and their implications for women's lives. The research will operate on three levels. Most generally, it will compare policy trends and developments in these penal systems, documenting who penal policies target and the socioeconomic forces underlying this targeting. The research will also analyze the gendered form and content of penal practices, uncovering how U.S. and Hungarian penal institutions transmit messages about appropriate gender roles in an attempt to turn inmates into "better women." Finally, the research will investigate how female inmates in these systems interpret and respond to the messages relayed to them.

The analysis of the U.S. penal system was carried out through ethnographic work I conducted in a California prison for women and their children. While a New Century Scholar, I will complete the Hungarian part of the analysis by conducting a four-month ethnographic study in a Budapest women's prison. To understand the form and content of its penal practices, I will immerse myself in the everyday life of the prison, observing everything from group meetings to parenting classes to family counseling. I will also hold creative writing classes for the female inmates as a way to form unmediated relationships with them and to provide them the space to reflect on their experiences.

While the specific focus of my NCS project is the penal system, my goal is to link state punishment to other areas of women's lives and forms of marginalization that extend across national borders and institutions. In this way, I will use the penal system as a site from which to theorize the gendered effects of an array of state policies, including welfare provisions, family policies, reproductive laws, and economic programs. Through a transnational analysis of the gendered organization of punishment, my research will address broad questions relating to women's differential access to political, social, economic, and civil rights.

Back to Top