Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare: Feminist Political Economy, Primitive Accumulation and the LawA.Roberts. Abingdon: Routledge (2017) 204pp. £92.00hb ISBN 978‐1‐138‐67842‐1

Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare highlights exploitative gendered relations, within both the private and public spheres, on which capitalist production depends, historically and within the ongoing neoliberal project. Using a case-study approach, the book highlights the historic development of the neoliberal project in three cognate countries – the UK, the US, and Canada – highlighting important similarities in each state's pursuit of economic liberalisation and perpetual growth, and the use of punitive and disciplinary mechanisms to manage and incapacitate those surplus to the market's needs. While mass incarceration on a US scale might be exceptional, the ‘draconian forms of policing and punishment’ that underpin this phenomenon are, nonetheless, widespread, particularly in the UK and, more surprisingly, in Canada, a country more often held up as the antithesis to the US (p.2). The book sits in the field of political economy, but it contributes much more broadly across the social sciences. It is particularly relevant to postgraduate students and researchers within criminology, sociology, women's studies and those interested in the development of the New Punitiveness and the retrenchment of social welfare provision. It revisits important subject areas raised in seminal works such as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Foucault 1977), The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Garland 2001) and Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Wacquant 2009). It employs a feminist lens to highlight the gendered character of social control and disciplinary power and foregrounds gendered social relations as the key constituent of the neoliberal project. This book is written from a feminist Marxist perspective, and is highly critical of the political systems it considers. The author is keen to foreground gender in her critique of the neoliberal project. Gender is the elephant in the room: the subordination of women has been a key building block of primitive accumulation, capitalism and neoliberalism, yet has received scant attention, or has been treated as something outside the purview of historical materialist accounts. The book thus highlights the continued omission of gender relations in mainstream theorisations of the ongoing punitive management and incapacitation of the working classes. A key contribution is the nuancing of Garland's theoretical framework of penal welfarism which is adapted to reflect the highly-gendered nature of these processes. A more accurate conceptual tool is thus presented: ‘penal-welfare paternalism’ (p.98, italics added). The gender politics underpinning the dramatic rise in the number of women imprisoned over the last 30 years has, to date, been overlooked. The author sets out to address this and highlights the racial and class dimensions within this development. Importantly, the book contends that what we see currently in global production chains is not new, but more a blast from the past; capitalist production has always relied on exploitative relations along class, gender, and racial lines. The book highlights how the law is used not only as a repressive tool by the dominant classes, but also how it is constitutive of capitalism itself. In fact, the law and capitalism are regarded as mutually constitutive, both producing and reproducing social relations between private property and wage labour, and between genders. The author presents insights into the hierarchies of social injustice with reference to black women in the US and indigenous women in Canada. This could be further developed in line with intersectional feminist approaches to encompass micro-level perspectives of other hyper-marginalised groups such as immigrant/stateless women, those who do not conform to heteronormative binary gender roles, and especially those multiply excluded at intersections of discrimination, such as trans women of colour. Overall, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare offers a powerful contribution to analyses of the penal-welfare nexus and the pervasiveness of gendered oppression within capitalism, both historically and within contemporary practice.

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