Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex Edited by Eric A
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$21.95 | £18 GENDER & SEXUALITY / PRISONS & POLICING SMITH & STANLEY “[N]ew frameworks and new vocabularies that surely will have a transformative impact on the theories and practices of twenty-first century abolition.”—Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz CAPTIVE “A scathing and necessary analysis of the prison industrial complex and a history of queer resistance to state tyranny.”—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, editor of Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity CAPTIVE “[A] brilliant shattering of the assumption that the antidote to danger is human sacrifice.”—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, GENDERS and Opposition in Globalizing California GENDERS trans embodiment and the Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender-non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the enormity of the prison industrial prison industrial complex complex. The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determina- tion, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing TRANS EMBODIMENT AND THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX hate crimes legislation, to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle. Eric A. Stanley works at the intersections of radical trans/queer politics, theories of state violence, and visual culture. Eric is currently finishing a PhD in the History of Con- sciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and organizes with Gay Shame in San Francisco. Along with Chris Vargas, Eric co-directed the films Homo- topia and Criminal Queers. Nat Smith is a light-skinned Black, queer, gender variant nerd who loves camping, com- ics, animals, sci-fi, mathematical equations, and is proof that none of these things is anti- thetical to being from the ’hood. Nat is known to associate with such dangerous organi- zations as Critical Resistance and the Trans/Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project. With Ralowe T. Ampu, Morgan Bassichis, Bo Brown, Cholo, Stephen Dillon, Jayden Donahue, Lori Girshick, Clifton Goring/Candi Raine Sweet, Che Gossett, Reina Gos- sett, Nadia Guidotto, Vanessa Huang, S. Lambel, Alexander Lee, Miss Major, Tommi Avicolli Mecca, Erica R. Meiners, Yasmin Nair, blake nemec, Michelle Potts, Dylan Ro- driguez, Lori Saffin, Kristopher Shelley “Krystal,” Dean Spade, Julia Sudbury AKA Julia C. Oparah, Wesley Ware, Paula Rae Witherspoon, and Jennifer Worley. WWW.AKPRESS.ORG WWW.AKUK.COM PRINTED IN CANADA eric a. stanley & nat smith, editors CG_cover_working5.indd 1 1/27/12 10:43 AM ADVANCE PRAISE FOR CAPTIVE GENDERS _________________________________________ “Captive Genders is an exciting assemblage of writings—analyses, mani- festos, stories, interviews—that traverse the complicated entanglements of surveillance, policing, imprisonment, and the production of gender normativity. Focusing discerningly on the encounter of transpersons with the apparatuses that constitute the prison industrial complex, the con- tributors to this volume create new frameworks and new vocabularies that surely will have a transformative impact on the theories and practices of twenty-first century abolition.” —Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz “The purpose of prison abolition is to discover and promote the countless ways freedom and difference are mutually dependent. The contributors to Captive Genders brilliantly shatter the assumption that the antidote to danger is human sacrifice. In other words, for these thinkers: where life is precious life is precious.” —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Sur- plus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California “Captive Genders is at once a scathing and necessary analysis of the prison industrial complex and a history of queer resistance to state tyranny. By analyzing the root causes of anti-queer and anti-trans violence, this book exposes the brutality of state control over queer/trans bodies inside and outside prison walls, and proposes an analytical framework for undoing not just the prison system, but its mechanisms of surveillance, dehuman- ization, and containment. By queering a prison abolition analysis, Captive Genders moves us to imagine the impossible dream of liberation.” —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly and editor of Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gen- der and Conformity CAPTIVE GENDERS Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex EDITED BY ERIC A . STANLEY AND NAT SMITH Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex Edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith All essays © 2011 by their respective authors This edition © 2011 AK Press (Edinburgh, Oakland, Baltimore) ISBN-13: 978-1-84935-070-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2011920478 AK Press AK Press UK 674-A 23rd Street PO Box 12766 Oakland, CA 94612 Edinburgh EH8 9YE USA Scotland www.akpress.org www.akuk.com [email protected] [email protected] The above addresses would be delighted to provide you with the latest AK Press distribution catalog, which features several thousand books, pamphlets, zines, audio and video recordings, and gear, all published or distributed by AK Press. Alternately, visit our websites to browse the catalog and find out the latest news from the world of anarchist publishing: www.akpress.org | www.akuk.com revolutionbythebook.akpress.org Printed in Canada on 100% recycled, acid-free paper with union labor. Cover image: Marie Ueda, photo from the White Night riots, San Francisco, CA 1979 Courtesy of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society. Cover by Kate Khatib | www.manifestor.org/design Interior by Michelle Fleming with Kate Khatib CONTENTS Acknowledgements................................................................................ix Introduction: Fugitive Flesh: Gender Self-Determination, Queer Abolition, and Trans Resistance.....................................................1 Eric A. Stanley OUT OF TIME: FROM GAY LIBERATION TO PRISON ABOLITION Building an Abolitionist Trans & Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got..........................................................................15 Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, Dean Spade “Street Power” and the Claiming of Public Space: San Francisco’s “Vanguard” and Pre-Stonewall Queer Radicalism.................................41 Jennifer Worley Brushes with Lily Law..........................................................................57 Tommi Avicolli Mecca Looking Back: The Bathhouse Raids in Toronto, 1981.........................63 Nadia Guidotto PRISON BEYOND THE PRISON: CRIMINALIZATION OF THE EVERYDAY “Rounding Up the Homosexuals”: The Impact of Juvenile Court on Queer and Trans/Gender-Non-Conforming Youth...............................77 Wesley Ware Hotel Hell: With Continual References to the Insurrection..................85 Ralowe T. Ampu Regulatory Sites: Management, Confinement, and HIV/AIDS....................................................................................99 Michelle C. Potts Awful Acts and the Trouble with Normal: A Personal Treatise on Sex Offenders..................................................113 Erica R. Meiners How to Make Prisons Disappear: Queer Immigrants, the Shackles of Love, and the Invisibility of the Prison Industrial Complex................123 Yasmin Nair Identities Under Siege: Violence Against Transpersons of Color...............................................141 Lori A. Saffin WALLED LIVES: CONSOLIDATING DIFFERENCE, DISAPPEARING POSSIBILITIES Krystal Is Kristopher and Vice Versa...................................................165 Kristopher Shelley “Krystal” “The Only Freedom I Can See:” Imprisoned Queer Writing and the Politics of the Unimaginable...............................................................169 Stephen Dillon Being an Incarcerated Transperson: Shouldn’t People Care?...............185 Clifton Goring/Candi Raine Sweet Out of Compliance: Masculine-Identified People in Women’s Prisons..................................................................189 Lori Girshick My Story............................................................................................209 Paula Rae Witherspoon Exposure............................................................................................215 Cholo No One Enters Like Them: Health, Gender Variance, and the PIC...217 blake nemec BUSTIN’ OUT: ORGANIZING RESISTANCE AND BUILDING ALTERNATIVES Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex Using a Queer/Trans Analysis.............................235 S. Lambel Making It Happen, Mama: A Conversation with Miss Major.............267 Jayden Donahue gender wars: state changing shape, passing to play, & body of our movements........................................................................................281 Vanessa Huang Maroon Abolitionists: Black Gender-oppressed Activists in the Anti- Prison Movement in the US and Canada...........................................293 Julia Sudbury AKA Julia C. Oparah Abolitionist Imaginings: A Conversation with Bo Brown, Reina Gossett,