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list price: $17.99
edition:eBook
category: Social Science
published: Oct 2015
ISBN:9781772580174
publisher: Demeter Press

Looking for Ashley

e-reading What the Smith Case Reveals about the Governance of Girls, Mothers and Families in Canada

by Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich

tagged: women's studies
Description

The 2007 death by self-induced strangulation in prison of nineteen year old inmate Ashley Smith drew a great deal of public attention. The case gave rise to a shocking verdict of homicide in the 2013 inquest into the cause of her death. In this book, I inquire into questions about of what social problem or phenomenon Ashley Smith is a “case,” and what governmental work is done by prevalent constructions of her as an exemplar. This book performs a critical discourse analysis of figures of Ashley Smith that emerge in her case, looking at those representations as technologies of governance. It argues that the Smith case is read most accurately not as an isolated system failure but an extreme result of routine, everyday brutality, of a society and bureaucracies’ gradual necropolitical successes. It critically analyzes how representations of Ashley in the case leave intact, and even reinforce, logics and systems governing gender, motherhood, security, risk, race thinking and exclusion, in power and knowledge that make it predictable for similar deaths in prison to recur. It argues that, in the logics underlying constructions through which Ashley Smith was celebritized and sacralized, mothers’, girls’ and women’s subjectivities and agencies are made unknowable and even unthinkable while the racialized social boundaries of a white settler society are maintained. This book attempts to intervene in those logics to help make alternative outcomes possible and to take steps towards questioning the raced, classed and heteronormative boundaries of commonly assumed figures of the “noble victim”, “good girl” and “good mother” while supporting the agencies of adolescent girls in actively playing a part in the authoring of their lives.

About the Author
Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich is a Part-Time Professor at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law and Ph.D. Candidate at Carleton University. A lawyer in private practice for seven years before returning to the academic world, she has been a member of the Bar of Ontario since 2003 and has an Ll.M. and Ll.B. from from Queen’s University. Rebecca also has a graduate certificate from the University of Cincinnati, where she taught as an adjunct professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has also been an adjunct at the University of Western Ontario Faculty of Law. Rebecca balances her professional work and scholarship with her role as mother to four amazing children.

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