Queering Prison Abolition, Now?

2021

Returning to the Radical Roots of Queer Liberation through Prison Abolition As a phenomenological inquiry, this project is first and foremost concerned with human experiences of incarceration, queerness, and the lifeworlds that grow up in the overlay. I extend Kendall Thomas' contention that antisodomy laws legitimize homophobic violence to say that even after their renunciation, antiqueer laws have a resonant effect and continue to legitimize antiqueer violence. Through the narrative of Jason Lydon, Black and Pink's founder, this dissertation seeks to understand the worldmaking project of Black and Pink. Black and Pink produces an interstitial politics, growing up through the cracks between the criminal justice movement, which fails to engage queers in their fight for carceral justice, and the mainstream LGBTQ movement, which neglects queer prisoners in their fight for queer liberation. Through letter correspondence and a newspaper publication, Black and Pink members inside and outside of prison connect with each other, forging survival relationships and survival community, to respond to threats to queer survival. In a society that assumes state punitive mechanisms as necessary, Black and Pink offers a different path toward survival. Through joining concepts of Dean Spade's mutual aid and adrienne maree brown's emergent strategy, and employing them as social movement theory, I demonstrate how the intimate bonds between Black and Pink members cultivate connective action. Black and Pink is a complex organization working to confront carceral v antiqueer violence on the micro, mezzo, and macro levels. Black and Pink produces a "fugitive" knowledge that serves as empirical evidence implicating the state as a major thread to queer survival. The stories authored by queer prisoners reveal that systems-based approaches for mitigating harm and violence not only fail to do so, but are exploited and produce altogether new antiqueer violence. When we name the violence of prisons as statesanctioned homophobia and transphobia, it becomes imperative for queer movements to recognize that it does not make sense to seek remedy from these institutions that are themselves foundries of queer violence. Ultimately, I understand Black and Pink as a project of survival which arrives at abolition through an embodied course.

QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking

(in Geoffrey Adelsberg, Lisa Guenther, and Scott Zeman, eds. Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration. Fordham U. Press, 2015) One of the most notable accomplishments of queer studies has been in showing how various regimes of normativity are interconnected and mutually constitutive—how reproductive futurity and heteronormativity are articulated in relation to racialization, (dis)ability, and other socially structuring and institutionally enforced axes of difference—in such a way that much work done under the rubric of queer studies today takes for granted that queerness can be defined as against (and as other to) normativity writ large. Perhaps as a consequence of such success, the relationship between queerness and antinormativity can become vaguely tautological—what is queer is antinormative; what is antinormative is queer—and so elastic that useful distinctions between how different normativities get enforced in practice can begin to fade. Conversely, what is now being called critical prison studies, as a field, has had relatively little to say about trans/queer people, or how queer theory and/or politics might differently mitigate its optics. Here then, we have gathered to think about the uses and limits of both queer theory and abolitionist analysis in our work toward collective liberation.

Socialism and Democracy

scholars and activists have failed to seriously engage with alternatives to prisons. This is a fundamental issue. If we are committed to the abolition of prisons, then we must engage rigorously with how to reach that goal. Indeed, without a serious account of what could come after prisons, we limit the possibilities of a community-led, activist, scholarly and political movement. The state of abolitionist thought Prison, penal, carceral abolition Although many Christian abolitionists trace their understandings of abolitionism to the teachings of Christ, 2 in the modern era the term "prison abolition" gained currency with the publication of Thomas Mathiesen's The Politics of Abolition in 1974. 3 Early definitions of prison abolition involved a moral, political, and pragmatic commitment to ending or significantly reducing the use of imprisonment as a response to social harm. 4 In context of the United States, prison abolition is often interpreted as a commitment not only to ending imprisonment, but also to ending the conditions that make prisons possible. 5 For abolitionists such as Angela Davis, this means that prison abolition is also a feminist, anti-racist, 2. Fay Honey Knopp et al.

Counterfutures, 2020

Warwick Tie interviews Emilie Rākete, Ti Lamusse and Sophie Morgan, members of the queer and transgender activist collective No Pride In Prisons, to learn how penal politics has become, for them, a site of radical activism.

Behemoth: A Journal on Civilisation , 2021

Incarcerated radical intellectuals elucidate the nature of political struggle and its various arenas. Alongside these writers are solidarity groups that propagate their writings and intellectual products. Through a close reading of Black Communist trans prisoner Alyssa V. Hope's legal efforts and writings, this article unearths how a pen-pal relationship transformed into a comprehensive abolitionist community. This case study provides an example of how abolitionists are grappling with the need to support the material needs of marginalised communities while still building otherwise possible worlds separate from a failing welfare state. Mutual aid projects, like the one formed by Hope's supporters, showcase that otherwise possible worlds are not only possible, but they are being created right now before us.

Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, 2021

Given the disproportionate violence trans people in prison experience, flooding the legal system with litigation to create change for individual plaintiffs is only a stopgap measure. A better remedy to uproot the harm is to keep trans people out of prison entirely. The first claim of this Note is that prisons are inherently more violent for trans people than for the general prison population. The second claim is a remedy to the first: alternatives to incarceration should be offered to trans people who are convicted. Such alternatives should be considered for all people in U.S. prisons because the conditions are so unsustainable and damaging. This Note focuses on trans people as a case study for the types of gendered harm prisons create. Viewing the disproportionate violence trans people experience in prison within the broader legal context of trans rights, this Note argues that the criminal legal system is systemically transphobic to an irreparable extent, which should compel policymakers, legal scholars, and litigators to explore and seriously consider alternatives to carceral punishment. This Note proceeds in four parts. First, it summarizes recent litigation efforts to protect LGBTQ people broadly and trans people in prison specifically. Second, the Note makes an empirical claim that prison is particularly violent for trans people, relying on Supreme Court and congressional findings as well as scholarly analysis. Third, using the retributive theory of punishment, the Note makes the normative claim that the subjective experience of trans people in prison is so egregiously violent that it deserves a special remedy. Finally, applying prison abolition as a lodestar, the Note categorizes some potential interventions as carceral, non-carceral, de-carceral, and transformative.

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

Human Geography, 2009

Anyone who is committed to radical social transformation is, in effect, involved in an abolitionist struggle. Whether we are organizing against the destructive effects of wage slavery, patriarchy, borders, capitalistic social relations, war, or the state, our activist efforts seek to abolish oppressive institutions in the hope that a more livable set of social relations will develop. For the last ten years, Critical Resistance (CR) has been at the forefront of organizing against a particularly pernicious social and political institution, the prison industrial complex (PIC). The PIC is a set of social relations involving a confluence of state and local political actors and capitalist interests, including the media. It involves issues of race, gender and ethnicity, overlain upon a history of American colonial expansion and economic exploitation. CR's latest contribution, Abolition Now!, attempts, through a variety of voices, to speak to all these aspects of the PIC in a collection of short contributions from activists, academics, prisoners and their loved ones.