This article builds on existing criticism of the interaction of militant republicanism and feminism during the Troubles by focusing in particular on the prisoners' own writing, analyzing the ways in which they choose to self-represent, but also the ways in which they are represented. The discussion is supported both by recent criticism by Sara Ahmed on the designation of who or what is willful, and how that willfulness is restrained, managed, and presented by various power groups, and by the theoretical writing of Jacques Rancière. The co-dependency of politics and aesthetics in these texts is explored, with a view to showing how they present a radical re-articulation of feminism in the carceral context.