Girlhood Arrested

How Girlhood is Shaped by the Carceral Landscape in Louisiana

2025

Initially what began as just a zine and self-publishing workshop with formerly incarcerated women (and one transmasculine narrator) with the Visiting Room Project – a non-profit digital archive of people facing life-without-parole in Louisiana prisons – during summer 2025 turned into a 254 page book. This book reflects on the workshop, dualities of carcerality/punishment and play/resistance, the possibilities of girlhood as an organizing construct of self outside of incarceration, and is a transhistorical engagement with the archival gaps of women's lives and stories.

I collaborated with Kennedi Johnson, the program manager at TVRP, to plan and conduct a zine workshop on girlhood with narrators from TVRP. Kennedi and I enthusiastically continued to work together beyond our initial plan because we wanted the subsequent documentation of the workshop and ideas it contained to reflect the richness of the day itself. We felt that adding in interviews, analysis of women's incarceration, and historical documents from the Louisiana State Archives in addition to the zines and shirts the participants made would better reflect this richness. We hope that Girlhood Arrested and the memories embedded within it serve as an example of the importance of girlhood as a site of analysis in memory work and in our collective struggles against incarceration, gender-based violence, and racial capitalism.

This project would not be possible without the support of the RISD Maharam Fellowship and the Visiting Room Project.