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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.
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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.
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Associate
Director/Professor, Sociology Department
