Confined, Not Crucified: Toward a Womanist Carceral Theology

This paper argues that carcerality is a more adequate and generative theological metaphor than crucifixion for naming Black women's survival in America. Ignacio Ellacuría's "crucified people" and James Cone's theology of the cross are event-based, male-coded, and easily spiritualized into redemptive suffering. Drawing on Sarah Jobe's carceral hermeneutics, Hortense Spillers' analysis of the captive body, Kelly Brown Douglas's account of criminalized Black womanhood, and Sylvia Wynter's decolonial critique of the genre of the human, this paper contends that carcerality names what crucifixion cannot: a system of ongoing bodily confinement, intimate and gendered violence, and colonial construction that extends from the Middle Passage to the present. Working constructively within womanist theology, and grounded in Delores Williams's survival ethics and Katie Cannon's moral wisdom, the paper proposes a womanist carceral theology adequate to the task of dismantling, not merely enduring, the structures that confine.