Trying to be Something You Are Not: Masculine Performances within a Prison Setting

Prisons are social communities where people commonly conform to normative institutional and cultural values and ideologies. Conforming as a man in prison may involve performing or projecting prison masculinities to ensure emotional, psychological, and social survival, employing strategies to mask self-perceived weaknesses or vulnerability and to attain status and legitimacy. While few men are likely to subscribe to archetypal masculine roles or stereotypes, ethnographic research with adult male prisoners revealed that individuals endeavored to fit in and become socially accepted into the prison community, commonly aligning themselves with normative values, attitudes, and behaviors of prison life, and striving for social legitimacy. “Front management” strategies were employed by individuals to convey “masculine” personas consistent with the prison code, a system of values based on aggression, violence, control, and exploitation—or “dog eat dog” and “divide and rule”—where individuals would become situated within the hegemonic social hierarchy. Participants equated emotional, psychological, and social survival with health and well-being, which was in turn dependent in part on their social status and legitimacy. Paradoxically, this disempowering and divisive hegemony could lay vulnerable individuals open to exploitation and harm, while also undermining prisoners' personal efforts to improve themselves, physically, emotionally, intellectually, and vocationally. Prisoners' efforts to fit into an excessively performance-orientated masculine culture are therefore likely to work against criminal justice goals to reintegrate offenders back into society.