Stanley-Eric-Captive-Genders-Trans-Embodiment-and-Prison-Industrial-Complex

Awful Acts and the Trouble with NormalAs cumbersome, private documents internal to police forces, thesepractices diminished as the century progressed. Police harassment was lessnecessary if formal civil penalties, employment, and housing all regulatedgender and sexual practices, and by 1953, Eisenhower had barred all gaysand lesbians from holding federal employment. 8 Canaday writes that thisstate regulation was gendered (and racialized), as tracking female bodies(except for those perceived to be engaged in sex work) held less interest forthe state: “Male perverts mattered so much more to the state because malecitizens did” and apartheid already regulated non-white bodies throughprohibitions on citizenship, mobility, employment, and education. 9Yet state regulation and harassment by punitive agencies fosteredresistances. In tandem with civil rights and gay and lesbian liberationmovements, as the homosexual began a tentative move away from “sexoffender.” By the 1980s, the category of sexual offender and the correspondingstructures of surveillance and documentation identified a newtarget in child predators. Judith Levine 10 and Phillip Jenkins 11 suggest thatthe phenomenal expansion of sex offender registries (SOR) in the UnitedStates to track those convicted of child-related sex offenses was due tomultiple factors: the explosion and fetishization of “stranger danger” andchild abductions in mass media, escalating and racialized fears of publicurban spaces, and the growing anxieties of adults about that achinglyempty signifier, “the child.”In the mid-’90s, weighed down with the precious ennui afforded only byuniversities and cheap marijuana, I lived, worked, and hung out in barsnear the “low track” on the downtown East Side of Vancouver.Like the spring snow melt, female sex workers disappeared.These women never made the evening news or the front page of thepaper, but their photos, usually from high school, were stapled to telephonepoles around the downtown East Side.Sixty-three had disappeared by 2004. Many were indigenous, notfrom the city, and poor.Tanya Holyk, 23, last seen October 1996Olivia Williams, 22, last seen December 1996Stephanie Lane, 20, last seen March 1997Despite candle vigils and marches, the police’s tepid non-response throughoutthe 1990s indicated that these were disposable women who did not115