Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State

 BOOK RE VIE W These are fertile times for “critical prison studies” with multiple texts in circulation, and particularly generative are those that offer fresh takes on histories of resistance, like Emily Thuma’s archives of anti-carceral feminism in All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence and Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier’s project on twentieth-century prisoner-led organizing, Rethinking the American Prison Movement.1 This expanding body of work offers powerful tools for those working to dismantle our nation’s racialized investments in the prison industrial complex (PIC), and reminders of the strength and necessity of inside–outside organizing. Yet the joy of resurfacing legacies of resistance is also coupled with grief over their burial—submerged by decades of movement cooptation and repression. As two feminist queers embedded in transformative justice and abolitionist practices, we dove into Dillon’s project, a counterhistory that maps the Black, feminist, queer, and anti-imperialist foundations of contemporary abolition movements. Fugitive Life is a reminder of the strategic and analytic brilliance of earlier mobilizations, as well as the contemporary left erasure of this powerful trajectory of queer and/or women of color organizing. From Bo Brown to June Jordan, from the George Jackson Brigade to the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries—far from a romantic entanglement with fugitivities, these individuals and collectives fused radical analysis with practice and demanded new worlds that marked no one as disposable. Intersectional before Kimberlé Crenshaw, avowedly international, and queerly nonnormative and boundarycrossing, the genealogies amplified by Fugitive Life reminds us that direct action is a necessary tool for worldmaking. And the costs are high. Dillon’s Introduction, “Escape-Bound Captives: Race, Neoliberalism, and the Force of Queerness,” sets the theoretical frame for the book and paints fugitivity broadly as a way of being/knowing. The underground, Dillon argues, is a “parallel universe” that negates normative space/time (40), an “epistemology 207 Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/msup/qed/article-pdf/7/3/207/942609/qed.7.3.0207.pdf by guest on 06 February 2022 Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State. By Stephen Dillon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018; pp. x + 200, $94.95 cloth, $24.95 paper, $24.98 ebook. 208 ( Book Review Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/msup/qed/article-pdf/7/3/207/942609/qed.7.3.0207.pdf by guest on 06 February 2022 that opens up other ways of thinking about power” (43), and a “fictional space” (75) of making oneself illegible and invisible to state time and space and surveillance. Dillon’s framing implicitly raises the question for us as readers of who counts as a fugitive today, and how we can understand a contemporary geography of the “underground” when space is ever more colonized by high-tech surveillance and carceral control. Chapter 1, “We Are Not Hiding but We Are Invisible: Law and Order, the Temporality of Violence and the Queer Fugitive,” pairs an analysis of the build-up of the racialized neoliberal regime of carcerality in the 1960s and 1970s with the critique and actions of lesbian feminists, in particular those within the Weather Underground. Dillon’s argues that 1970s era organizers, far from viewing the market and the prison as disparate spheres, recognized their intimacy. The women’s brigade of the Weather Underground, as one example, bombed the Department of Education and Welfare in San Francisco in the name of women “locked up in prisons and mental institutions” and those who “live in projects” or “wait in lines for food stamps” (48). A key through line in Fugitive Life is the lens generated by scholars of racial capitalism, that economic systems are never race neutral, and as Dillon writes, “neoliberalism is a carceral project” (38). Chapter 2, “Life Escapes: Neoliberal Economics, the Underground, and Fugitive Freedoms,” juxtaposes what Dillon terms “neoliberal freedom” (or how capital and the “free market” continued to define the contours of freedom by naturalizing policing and surveillance) with “fugitive freedom”—those working to define subjectivity and life outside of this logic. The free market and other fictions central to the ascendency of neoliberalism, he argues, are “made possible by what it forgets . . . white supremacy, settler colonialism, and heteropatriachy” (59). Dillon also queries how the “freedoms” implied by neoliberalism are haunted by carcerality: capitalism haunted by slavery and the “consent” of the wage labor contract haunted by coercion (with the ultimate threat of prison), producing palimpsests of contradiction. Dillon takes Marxists to task for failing to consider the continuities between slavery and the neoliberal market, how “the present is ossified in the past” (99). Chapter 3, “Possessed by Death: Black Feminism, Queer Temporality, and the Afterlife of Slavery,” builds from the work of 1970s imprisoned and exiled Black feminist intellectuals Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Safiya Bukhari. Dillon illustrates how this body of thinking tethered the ascendant carceral regime to the era of chattel slavery, long before Michelle Alexander made this analysis fashionable. In doing so, this insurgent theorizing altered time: “Technologies of antiblack, hetereopatrichal violence queer time by making the separation between past and present look and feel indecipherable” (85). Haunting and Book Review ) 209 Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/msup/qed/article-pdf/7/3/207/942609/qed.7.3.0207.pdf by guest on 06 February 2022 possession surface in these women’s work as not only the tools of survival, but of world making under and against White supremacy. Chapter 4, “‘Only the Sun Will Bleach His Bones Quicker’: Desire, Police Terror, and the Affect of Queer Feminist Futures,” works with Audre Lorde and June Jordan’s poetry, in particular Jordan’s 1980 poem “A Letter to Local Police.” The poem’s strength is in its simplicity, a letter by an overeager citizen reporting back on his unsolicited local policing efforts. Dillon organizes this chapter—perhaps the strongest in the collection—around the poem’s vivid illustration of how policing has been diffused into citizen subjectivity, panopticonstyle, and how subjects come to desire policing. He introduces poststructuralist theorizing from Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari on the desire for fascism as a desire for one’s own subjection, and applies this to the desire for policing, drawing parallels between mid-century European fascism and the US carceral order. The exploration of these vexing desires for subjection, like Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” and Wendy Brown’s “wounded attachments,” is useful for thinking through social pathologies like carceral feminism and queer punitivity. “‘Being Captured is Beside the Point’: A World Beyond the World” closes the project by returning to the page, turning to several edited collections as sites where memories have gathered and solidified: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color ; Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology; and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies.2 Dillon chooses to highlight one lesser known anthology lost to political forgetting, Top Ranking: A Collection of Articles on Racism and Classism in the Lesbian Community edited by Joan Gibbs and Sara Bennett.3 Beautifully written, Fugitive Life is a key text for readers in American studies, criminology, queer studies, Black studies, and—keenly—for those of us who count ourselves as ongoing scholars of, and participants in, radical social and political movements. Yet we are left with a lingering question that is more to ourselves and to “our field”—perhaps a tension built into the project of “critical prison studies” itself—thanks to Dillon: what is our goal through the publication of brilliant texts? This is not a turn to anti-intellectualism or against critique, but for us there is an peculiar emptiness to a field or to scholarship that is not in some form accountable to the ongoing movements and mobilizations which demand not just the redistribution of life-affirming resources but a new way of living, as Queer Politics of Fugitive Life so brilliantly chronicles. Many of us turn to the acknowledgements, the queer pages in books published by scholarly presses, because as this text often functions as a palimpsest, master key, or political signifier—for example, where a lover/editor/patron is acknowledged, the collective genealogies and people that nurtured a project are 210 ( Book Review Not e s 1. Emily Thuma, All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019); Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier, Rethinking the American Prison Movement (New York: Routledge, 2018). 2. Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, Toni Cade Bambara (Eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, Mass: Persephone Press, 1981); Barbara Smith (Ed.), Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983); Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Eds.), All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1982). 3. Joan Gibbs, Sara Bennett (Eds.), Top Ranking: A Collection of Articles on Racism and Classism in the Lesbian Community (New York, Come! Unity Press, 1980). Melanie Brazzell University of California, Santa Barbara USA Erica R. Meiners Northeastern Illinois University USA Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/msup/qed/article-pdf/7/3/207/942609/qed.7.3.0207.pdf by guest on 06 February 2022 named, or we gain some sliver of insight into the money that potentially bought the time to read, study, and write. But, as important to us, often this is where the political or social organizations and collectives that the author holds themselves accountable to find a life denied visibility on the pages of a scholarly project. Fugitive Life, a remarkable text that amplifies the brilliance of networks like the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, circulates in another haunted political moment—where, again, White supremacists march openly. Perhaps, to pull a different read on Lorde’s admonition in her poem on the White violence of policing, “Power” (powerfully reprinted on pages 137–38), as a field we too must grapple with the difference between poetry and rhetoric.