Luísa Saavedra, PhD

VIOLENCE, TRANSGRESSION, AND WOMEN OFFENDERS: QUESTIONING SOCIETY AND LAW
OVERVIEW
This line of research takes women's experiences and its intersection with social class, race and sex orientation, as the first target for analysis. The male figure is not, however, excluded from our research, allowing us to confront gender privileged positions with submission positions when tied to  other social categories.Therefore we believe, following Foucault’s prospect, that although there are no unchangeable or  established positions of privilege and domination, in general women are, as a group, most often located in a socially disadvantaged one. Within this line of research, and more recently, our target is women who, in a state of confinement or not, have been legally or socially criminalized and punished. It is the case of women who kill their own children (infanticide and filicide). In this context, we have studied the legislation on infanticide and motherhood genealogy trying to understand the knowledge involved in these constructions. In parallel, we have devoted our attention to public opinion about women who commit this kind of murder: should they be punished as men? What are the losses of pathologizing this crime to the image of overall women in society?
Still in the field of maternity we considered of relevance to analyze how women experience motherhood in prison , which are the conflicts brought by  the decision to stay or not with their children and how they experience their absence. What diversity of experiences is crossed by dichotomist concepts of good and bad mother? What are their conceptions of motherhood? Despite all of these questions, we also care about paternity in prison. Will incarceration have an impact in the way men experience paternity? By preventing parents from having their children with them in confinement, are we not reinforcing the discourse that only mothers are good caretakers?
In conclusion we want to highlight how society maintains standards that build damage both to men and women, questioning the established order in an area where there is still so little international and national research.