The present study investigates how prison comes across as a culturally constructed imaginary. Drawing on narratological methodologies, the study discusses prison as simultaneously real and imagined in society's ongoing communication with and about itself. Through an investigation of how prison is presented in autobiographical prison literature, the study shows how culturally held fears of imprisonment surface in terms of abjection and uncanniness. Previous prison studies have discussed this in terms of civil death and subsequent resurrection. Unlike previous studies, the present study employs the monstrousfeminine motif as a critical device in order to redefine the understanding of prison as abject and uncanny in patriarchal societies. An implementation of the monstrous-feminine motif enables a reading of the prison's particular form of punishment as one that entails incorporation and assimilation; rather than operating on a patriarchal principle of exclusion.

Although desistance is increasingly recognized as a series of complex processes by which individuals transform from offenders into nonoffenders, few desistance scholars have studied this process in depth. In recent years, however, some have begun to explore how desistance is a process rife with setbacks and struggles. Through an analysis of repeated in‐depth interviews with ten desisting women, in this study, we have found such struggles to be unsettling and outright frightening. Examples of this were prevalent throughout the women's narratives. The results of our analysis show how frightening aspects of desistance processes stem from making an unfamiliar, normative lifestyle familiar, while unfamiliarizing oneself with a familiar, deviant lifestyle. As such, desistance processes can be conceptualized as uncanny, that is, as pertaining to the frightening and uncertain. Although uncanniness is not a theoretical framework one tends to find in desistance research, it has the potential to develop the understanding of the struggles, fears, and anxieties of desistance processes. Through our analysis, we engage with how uncanniness can nuance established concepts in desistance research. Implications for theory as well as for criminal justice practice are discussed.

Culturally constructed ideals and stereotypes are part of collective sense-making processes. One such stereotype is Nils Christie's ideal victim. The present study discusses how the ideal victim shares key features with another cultural stereotype: the damsel in distress. Moreover, the study addresses attempts at subverting such stereotypes, which can be found in the women avengers of rape-revenge narratives. Studies of rape-revenge narratives have elucidated how such stories (re)imagine rape victimhood and survival in Western and Nordic culture, in ways that question the ideal victim qua damsel and her underlying patriarchal ideologies from a feminist perspective. However, such critique has led to the creation of other stereotypes and ideologically complex and even problematic portrayals of rape and victimization. Through a semiotic analysis of portrayals of a popular rape-revenge protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, the present study discusses how different ideologies surface, converse, and collide in fictional narratives of rape, survival, victimhood, revenge, and retribution. The study finds that while embodying resistance to the damsel, Lisbeth Salander also embodies aspects of the patriarchal ideologies that keep the damsel in place, thus creating an ideologically complex image. This creates a space for questioning the cultural understanding of rape, victimhood, and resistance.

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