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Stephen Dillon

University of Wyoming, School of Culture, Gender, and Social Justice, Faculty Member

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I am Director of the School of Culture, Gender, and Social Justice at the University of Wyoming. My research on race, sexuality, feminism, and incarceration has appeared in Radical History Review, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, and the edited collections Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex and Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition.

My book, Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State, is forthcoming from Duke University Press (June, 2018). https://www.dukeupress.edu/fugitive-life/?viewby=title

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Books by Stephen Dillon

Introduction to Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State

https://www.dukeupress.edu/fugitive-life/?viewby=title

Papers by Stephen Dillon

The Temporality of Breath Under Racial Capitalism

Feminist Formations, 2023

In this essay, the author reflects on how a near death case of COVID in the first weeks of the pa... more In this essay, the author reflects on how a near death case of COVID in the first weeks of the pandemic informs a larger theory of the relationship between race, temporality, and racial capitalism. By examining the links between race, time, and breathe across time and space-from the plantation to the uprisings of the Black Lives Matter movement-the author argues that the pandemic in not an exception to the normal but as a dispersed amplification of it.

"Nothing Stirred in the Air:" Affect, Sexuality, and the Architectural Terror of the Racial State."

Paths to the Prison: On the Architechures of Carcrality, 2020

Blackness and the Aesthetics of Freedom

American Quarterly, 2022

“I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies”: Black Feminism, Vengeance, and the Futures of Abolition

GLQ, 2022

Affective Terror, Affective Insurgency: Audre Lorde, Anti-Blackness, and the Empire of Police Violence

Theory and Event, 2021

In this essay, I examine the affective contours of Audre Lorde’s poetic meditations on police vio... more In this essay, I examine the affective contours of Audre Lorde’s poetic meditations on police violence. Lorde wrote poems about the police murder of a young Black boy, Clifford Glover, over a five-year period. Her poems offer us a theory of affect that comes from the Black radical tradition and Black lesbian feminism more specifically. She deftly maneuvers between terror and insurgency and highlights how to navigate the unspeakable and unthinkable within an anti-Black state. I argue that Lorde’s poetry offers us an affective politics central to any struggle that seeks to end our intolerable present.

Black Agenda Report Interview About Fugitive Life

https://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php/bar-book-forum-stephen-dillons-fugitive-life

Possessed by Death: The Neoliberal-Carceral State, Black Feminism, and the Afterlife of Slavery

This article offers a critical genealogy of the neoliberal-carceral state by engaging the writing... more This article offers a critical genealogy of the neoliberal-carceral state by engaging the writing of Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur. Shakur's work is read as a black feminist theorization of neoliberalism at the very moment of its emergence. By engaging Shakur's discussion of race, gender, time, and the market, the article pursues a connection between chattel slavery and the present that has yet to garner attention among scholars: slavery's haunting possession of neoliberalism. Although slavery's antiblack technologies inhabit and structure the prison, they also live on in the operations of the market. In particular, this article examines the relationship between the carceral, the market, the body, and population to consider how the necropolitics of slavery possess and drive the biopolitics of neoliberalism. The author argues that under neoliberalism, the market not only colludes with the prison, but also mimics it.

The Prisoner’s Dream: Queer Visions from Solitary Confinement

“It’s here, It’s That Time:” Race, Queer Futurity, and the Temporality of Violence in Born in Flames."

This paper uses the film Born in Flames to engage questions around hope and the future that have ... more This paper uses the film Born in Flames to engage questions around hope and the future that have been central to queer studies in the last decade. As the author understands it, the film's critique of the time of reform and progress holds profound implications for how we think about the future. By demonstrating the repetitions of racialized and gendered violence over time, the film produces a theory of the future where the continuation of the present as it is means the future will not come. If the state organizes populations, institutions, and forms of knowledge through a regulatory imagination and disciplined vision, it also determines the future in the same manner. The state ensures that the future can be extrapolated from the present by managing, contorting, and eradicating the future before it arrives. It uses preemptive action (war, assassination, incarceration, policing, administrative violence, and surveillance) to make its “imagined future come to pass.” The author argues that by showing the continuity between the racialized and gendered violence of the past, present, and future, the film constructs an anticipatory queer politics of urgency and presentism.

The Haunting of Evidence

by Allison Page and Stephen Dillon

Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, special issue on Trayvon Martin

In this essay, we situate the murder of Trayvon Martin within the history of the relationship bet... more In this essay, we situate the murder of Trayvon Martin within the history of the relationship between evidence and antiblackness, suggesting that evidence and facts are rendered irrelevant when it comes to racialized violence and terror. Through an examination of the circulated "media narrative" images of Martin and Zimmerman, we argue that the failure of evidence is bound up with a racialized optics rooted in U.S. chattel slavery that overdetermines blackness as a political ontology of criminality. One cannot prove blackness innocent because guilt is a foregone conclusion.

The Only Freedom I Can See: Imprisoned Queer Writing and the Politics of the Unimaginable.

The Silence of Law and Order (Online and PDF)

Book Review: State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States (Online and PDF).

Book Reviews by Stephen Dillon

Feeling the forever war

Cultural Studies, 2020

Review of "Insurgent aesthetics: security and the queer life of the forever war" by Ronak K. Kapadia

Introduction to Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State

https://www.dukeupress.edu/fugitive-life/?viewby=title

The Temporality of Breath Under Racial Capitalism

Feminist Formations, 2023

In this essay, the author reflects on how a near death case of COVID in the first weeks of the pa... more In this essay, the author reflects on how a near death case of COVID in the first weeks of the pandemic informs a larger theory of the relationship between race, temporality, and racial capitalism. By examining the links between race, time, and breathe across time and space-from the plantation to the uprisings of the Black Lives Matter movement-the author argues that the pandemic in not an exception to the normal but as a dispersed amplification of it.

"Nothing Stirred in the Air:" Affect, Sexuality, and the Architectural Terror of the Racial State."

Paths to the Prison: On the Architechures of Carcrality, 2020

Blackness and the Aesthetics of Freedom

American Quarterly, 2022

“I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies”: Black Feminism, Vengeance, and the Futures of Abolition

GLQ, 2022

Affective Terror, Affective Insurgency: Audre Lorde, Anti-Blackness, and the Empire of Police Violence

Theory and Event, 2021

In this essay, I examine the affective contours of Audre Lorde’s poetic meditations on police vio... more In this essay, I examine the affective contours of Audre Lorde’s poetic meditations on police violence. Lorde wrote poems about the police murder of a young Black boy, Clifford Glover, over a five-year period. Her poems offer us a theory of affect that comes from the Black radical tradition and Black lesbian feminism more specifically. She deftly maneuvers between terror and insurgency and highlights how to navigate the unspeakable and unthinkable within an anti-Black state. I argue that Lorde’s poetry offers us an affective politics central to any struggle that seeks to end our intolerable present.

Black Agenda Report Interview About Fugitive Life

https://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php/bar-book-forum-stephen-dillons-fugitive-life

Possessed by Death: The Neoliberal-Carceral State, Black Feminism, and the Afterlife of Slavery

This article offers a critical genealogy of the neoliberal-carceral state by engaging the writing... more This article offers a critical genealogy of the neoliberal-carceral state by engaging the writing of Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur. Shakur's work is read as a black feminist theorization of neoliberalism at the very moment of its emergence. By engaging Shakur's discussion of race, gender, time, and the market, the article pursues a connection between chattel slavery and the present that has yet to garner attention among scholars: slavery's haunting possession of neoliberalism. Although slavery's antiblack technologies inhabit and structure the prison, they also live on in the operations of the market. In particular, this article examines the relationship between the carceral, the market, the body, and population to consider how the necropolitics of slavery possess and drive the biopolitics of neoliberalism. The author argues that under neoliberalism, the market not only colludes with the prison, but also mimics it.

The Prisoner’s Dream: Queer Visions from Solitary Confinement

“It’s here, It’s That Time:” Race, Queer Futurity, and the Temporality of Violence in Born in Flames."

This paper uses the film Born in Flames to engage questions around hope and the future that have ... more This paper uses the film Born in Flames to engage questions around hope and the future that have been central to queer studies in the last decade. As the author understands it, the film's critique of the time of reform and progress holds profound implications for how we think about the future. By demonstrating the repetitions of racialized and gendered violence over time, the film produces a theory of the future where the continuation of the present as it is means the future will not come. If the state organizes populations, institutions, and forms of knowledge through a regulatory imagination and disciplined vision, it also determines the future in the same manner. The state ensures that the future can be extrapolated from the present by managing, contorting, and eradicating the future before it arrives. It uses preemptive action (war, assassination, incarceration, policing, administrative violence, and surveillance) to make its “imagined future come to pass.” The author argues that by showing the continuity between the racialized and gendered violence of the past, present, and future, the film constructs an anticipatory queer politics of urgency and presentism.

The Haunting of Evidence

by Allison Page and Stephen Dillon

Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, special issue on Trayvon Martin

In this essay, we situate the murder of Trayvon Martin within the history of the relationship bet... more In this essay, we situate the murder of Trayvon Martin within the history of the relationship between evidence and antiblackness, suggesting that evidence and facts are rendered irrelevant when it comes to racialized violence and terror. Through an examination of the circulated "media narrative" images of Martin and Zimmerman, we argue that the failure of evidence is bound up with a racialized optics rooted in U.S. chattel slavery that overdetermines blackness as a political ontology of criminality. One cannot prove blackness innocent because guilt is a foregone conclusion.

The Only Freedom I Can See: Imprisoned Queer Writing and the Politics of the Unimaginable.

The Silence of Law and Order (Online and PDF)

Book Review: State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States (Online and PDF).

Feeling the forever war

Cultural Studies, 2020

Review of "Insurgent aesthetics: security and the queer life of the forever war" by Ronak K. Kapadia