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Recovering Identity examines a critical tension in criminalized women's identity work. Through in-depth qualitative and photo-elicitation interviews, Cesraéa Rumpf shows how formerly incarcerated women engaged recovery and faith-based discourses to craft rehabilitated identities, defined in opposition to past identities as "criminal-addicts." While these discourses made it possible for women to carve out spaces of personal protection, growth, and joy, they also promoted individualistic understandings of criminalization and the violence and dehumanization that followed. Honoring criminalized women's stories of personal transformation, Rumpf nevertheless strongly critiques institutions' promotion of narratives that impose lifelong moral judgment while detracting attention from the structural forces of racism, sexism, and poverty that contribute to women's vulnerability to violence.
 

Cesraéa Rumpf is Associate Director of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago.
 

"Cesraéa Rumpf has delivered a deeply moving account of the indignity that women who are criminalized experience as they fight for their freedom. The text comes alive through women's stories of resistance and the photos they have taken and, when combined with sharp analysis and critique, readers are left with the unmistaken sense that, not only do we have to challenge carceral policies and practices, we also have to deepen our commitment to justice for criminalized women more broadly. Indeed, Rumpf demands that we see the violence of incarceration and, as the book's title suggests, that we join in the fight for dignity and freedom."—Beth E. Richie, coauthor of Abolition. Feminism. Now.

"Recovering Identity is a masterful examination of the lived experiences of women who have been impacted by the criminal legal system. Using participant-generated images to center women's voices in order to study identity and agency, Rumpf makes a major contribution to the study of gender, race, and culture in the era of mass incarceration. Her comprehensive analysis of how women counter the negative effects of the criminal legal system is timely, thoroughly researched, and persuasive."—Keesha M. Middlemass, author of Convicted and Condemned: The Politics and Policies of Prisoner Reentry

"Recovering Identity mounts a powerful feminist and intersectional critique of the criminal legal system's overreliance on 12-step recovery models. Rumpf persuasively demonstrates how the 12-step ideology obscures the structural forces driving mass incarceration by emphasizing individualized systems of blame and responsibility. A sensitive, rigorous, and compelling contribution."—Melissa Thompson, coauthor of Motherhood after Incarceration: Community Reintegration for Mothers in the Criminal Legal System