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Prisoners of Conscience in the United States, 1980-2013

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Prisoners of Conscience in the United States, 1980-2013 Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE 1-1-2015 Privileged Resistance: Prisoners of Conscience in the United States, 1980-2013 Anya Stanger Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/etd Part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Stanger, Anya, "Privileged Resistance: Prisoners of Conscience in the United States, 1980-2013" (2015). Dissertations - ALL. 310. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/310 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ABSTRACT This dissertation tells the story of modern anti-war prisoners of conscience in the United States—people who are incarcerated for six months or more as a result of nonviolent resistance. It explores how they intentionally use and learn about their own privilege in solidarity actions that land them in the belly of the imperial beast; the prison. It traces the lives of forty three such prisoners of conscience, from discernment of action through release, to show how “who they are” (in terms of their visible identities and private senses of self) impacts their experiences, the ways they are understood, and their own interpretations of their actions. The story that emerges is about what it feels like to resist the state with your body, how “whose body” matters in the shaping, interpretation, and efficacy of resistance, and what white, financially stable, well educated, Christian U.S. citizens learn about their own positionality through living for months and years in America’s jails and prisons. What they learn and how they are changed by their experiences is significantly impacted by their racialized gender identities, and the focused story of these individuals works to tell a larger story about patriarchy, neoliberalism, foreign policy, and the contemporary prison industrial complex. The study also provides a model of solidarity activism that takes account of political location, privilege, and “speaking for.” It challenges nonviolence theory and practice to better understand and articulate its strategy of prison witness, and is also an important intervention into the politics and actual “doings” of border crossing solidarity activism that is attentive to personal and global relations of power. PRIVILEGED RESISTANCE: PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE IN THE UNITED STATES, 1980-2013 by Anya Stanger B.A., Peace and Conflict Studies, UC Berkeley, 2002 M.Sc., Gender, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2004 Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Social Science Syracuse University August 2015 Copyright © Anya Stanger 2015 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For providing the best “data” a scholar could ask for, I thank my 43 participants. It is their courageous, loving, smart, political, public, and intentionally-lived lives that I tell, and I am deeply grateful for their sharing of stories and for their work that makes the stories possible. Specifically, I thank my participants providing 43 powerful reasons for hope in the future. Aligning myself with justice action prisoners, even by proximity, has been an honor that I cherish. Thank you. For my beloved advisor, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, thank you. Your tremendous intellect has informed all that is good in this dissertation. Your keen analysis, delivered during regular and timely meetings, quickly sifted the shaft from the grain in my thinking and writing. Your support has been critical to my personal life as well; working for you has provided continual new learning that I adore having access to, participation in Democratizing Knowledge and Future of Minority Studies events have swelled my heart as they’ve stretched my brain, and your employ has provided the stability of a long-term stipend and health benefits for my family. For all this and more, thank you. Chandra’s tremendous leadership has been supported at every step by a hugely committed advisory team. Dr. John Burdick has been by my side from the beginning of my graduate studies, alternately challenging and cheerleading. Dr. Angela Davis promoted thinking with research content and with how such research is done— methodologically and practically. Dr. Sharon Erickson Nepstad’s knowledge of nonviolent action and the Plowshares movement has been essential for this dissertation’s accuracy and relevance. Dr. Gretchen Purser said “yes” to being on this committee—even though I asked her to do so on the day that her sweet baby was due! Lastly, the late Dr. iv Sari Biklen has been an integral part of this work. Her guidance and commitments are present in this dissertation’s best moments, and I will always be grateful for how her teaching has shaped how I think and do my own work. She is missed. In addition to a wonderful committee, this thesis has been critically bettered by Felice and Jack Cohen-Joppa, editors of The Nuclear Resister. My intellectual home at Syracuse University has always been warm, and for making the journey of graduate studies enriching and sustainable I thank Dr. Vernon Greene, Mary Olzweski, and Tammy Salisbury in Social Science. The Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Cooperation (PARCC) was for four years my home-away from home, and I thank Dr. Catherine Gerard, Dr. Tina Nabatchi, Dr. Ines Mergel, Dr. Rosemary O’Leary, Dr. Elizabeth Mignacca, and the incredible Debbie Toole for making it such a happy and good one. The team at Women’s and Gender Studies has also been ever-ready to lend a helpful hand—many thanks to Alice Loomis and Susann DeMocker-Shedd. Of tremendous significance to my academic journey has been the gift of good friends. In particular, my heart is full with Rob Alexander, Hannah Allerdice, Carolina Arango-Vargas, Shannon Buckley and Stefan Leupold, Changyong Choi, Jax and Avital Cuevas and Jen Margulies, Joan Farrenkopf and Al Winters, Will Helenbrook, Dr. Dana Hill, Georoid Millar, Jesse Nissim and Gretchen Purser, Heather Pincock, Lauren and Bill Richie, Diane and Peter Swords, Terry Reeder, the Reckess family, and Dianna Winslow. I am also grateful to the Syracuse Community Choir, for providing the most fabulous, inclusive, loving, and ready-made community that we could ever ask to be a part of. You made our lives in Syracuse feel meaningful from the start. In particular, my v thanks to Karen Mihalyi, Dik Cool, and Nancy Gwin… the trouble maker responsible for this dissertation’s genesis. Lastly, I thank my family. Your pride in what I am capable of, mama, gives me courage. And dad, for instilling me with the gift of a radical mindset from childhood, thank you. Heather and Luke have made moving home to the mountains of California, while maintaining an identity as a scholar, possible. Clare and Patrick have steadily and gently reminded me to continue moving forward, while being open to the diversity of “right answers” for what comes next. Bo doesn’t need details, he just says “good job.” I rely upon all of you. And to my family by marriage: my mother-in-law Rachel moved into our home in Syracuse, and then across the country to stay nearby. Sue, Doris, Carol, Fred and their families have been ever-supportive, even seven years on when they have right to worry about whether I’ll ever finish school. But mostly, I thank Dave, and our children—the bookends to this project, Isa and Leo. In critical ways, Isa shaped this thesis; as a new baby she informed how participants talked to me as well as how I thought about what I heard. She limited drive times between interviews and thus determined the course of interviews—in so many ways, you are in here, my beloved child. And Leo, just seven weeks old, you are this dissertation’s capstone. You will not remember these days, but your life will be shaped by them. And Dave: the more I have learned about justice action, radical politics, peace and justice, and being a good person on the planet, the more I love and appreciate you. You get so much right, without all of these words. Thank you for being my partner in this life, Dave. I love you. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction 1 The Project 1 Nonviolent Resistance 12 Principled versus Pragmatic Nonviolence 15 We Are Not Prisoners of Conscience and We Are Not Disobedient: Naming 19 Imperialism and the Nuclear State: The Issues 25 The Movements: Plowshares and the School of the Americas Watch 29 The Legal Defense: On Trial for “Governmental Insanity” 43 Dissertation Map 49 Chapter Two: Theoretical Frameworks 54 Transnational Feminism 58 Identity 67 Social Movement Theories of Identity 67 Post Positivist Realist Theory of Identity 71 Solidarity 75 People Power 82 Privilege Power and the Body 87 Critiques of Nonviolence and the Potentials of a Feminist Lens 93 Chapter Three: Methods and Procedures 99 Feminist Methods and Power 99 Locating Myself 106 vii Who 109 How 114 Interviews 114 Participant Observation 116 Data Analysis 118 Conclusion to the Chapter 120 Chapter Four: “Like a Chiropractic Adjustment”: Aligning Actions and Beliefs through Identity-Work 122 Identity- Work 123 What Justice Action Prisoners Know 124 Nonviolence is “Tough Love:” The Radical Gospel of Justice Action Prisoners 124 Counter-Hegemonic Knowledge 129 Analysis: Gender 132 Public Identity: The Self in Structure 138 Privileged Citizens 138 Responsible 139 Who I Am: The Self Identifications of Justice Action Prisoners 140
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