Re: Reading Ashley Smith: Critically Unpacking Government by Discursive Figures of Ashley as Girl Produced in the Smith Case

In this dissertation, I explore how Ashley Smith has become socially understood as a “case.” I perform a critical discourse analysis of figures of Ashley Smith as technologies of governance. I argue that the Smith case ought not to be read as a case of anomalous system failure but as an extreme, but foreseeable, result of the routine and everyday brutality of a society and bureaucracies’ necropolitical security apparatus. I map a chronological trajectory in which the “official story” of Inmate Smith gives way through the process of celebritization and sacralization of “Child Ashley” to a widely accepted understanding of Ashley Smith as a mislocated mental health subject: “Patient Smith.” This analysis reveals that seeming progressive turn to understanding her as a victim of a failed system of mental health leaves intact, and even reinforces, logics and systems of gender, security, risk, race thinking and exclusion that make her death and the death of other prisoners predictable. I demonstrate how the logics of risk, mental health and legal discourses in the juridical field intersected with discourses of the girl in ways that made alternative readings and Ashley Smith’s own narration of her story illegible and unwritable. Further, I argue that certain operating logics predetermine the labeling of properly constituted adolescent girls’ noncompliance as madness and adolescent boys’ noncompliance as criminality. This analysis further calls into question the foundations of the statistical discrepancy between criminal charge rates for adolescent boys and girls. This dissertation seeks to intervene in these intersecting governmental logics that write “girls in trouble with the law” in particularly damaging ways.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Legal Studies

Grantor dc:publisher

Carleton University

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Bromwich, Rebecca Jaremko

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright © 2015 the author(s). Theses may be used for non-commercial research, educational, or related academic purposes only. Such uses include personal study, research, scholarship, and teaching. Theses may only be shared by linking to Carleton University Institutional Repository and no part may be used without proper attribution to the author. No part may be used for commercial purposes directly or indirectly via a for-profit platform; no adaptation or derivative works are permitted without consent from the copyright owner.

Language dc:language.iso

en

DOI

10.22215/etd/2015-11050

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:carleton.scholaris.ca:20.500.14718/39220