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

Captive GendersIn order to create real change, we have to center the violence at theheart of these experiences, to speak and write of them as experiences withthe brutal power of the state, not as narratives about good versus bad immigrants.If we are to undo the prison industrial complex and interrogateits relationship to racialized immigration, gender, and sexuality, we needto first make manifest the violence that marks immigration from the start:the violence at the border, the sexualized brutality, the psychic and epistemologicalviolence at the heart of the family that compels children andwomen in particular to remain silent, the violence of gender normativity,and the crushing force that dehumanizes and kills immigrant detainees.We need to recover the discourse on violence instead of relying on thenotion of love in order to rematerialize the specter of the prison. Paradoxically,this is what it will take to make it vanish forever.The current discourse on queer immigration presents an idealizedand bourgeois version of transgender and queer immigrants, a discoursethat makes the reality of the prison industrial complex completely invisible.If we are to seek an end to the nightmare of the PIC and the disasterthat is “immigration reform” in this country, we need to reintegrate ananalysis of the violence of the PIC back into the discourse on immigrationand queers. We need to abolish the walls of prison and the discourse ofnormative attachment, a discourse that only succeeds in making prisondisappear under the fog of love.NOTES1. At the same time, the mainstream gay and lesbian community only pays attentionto queer immigrants in terms of their relationships (as in its concern forUAFA) in the midst of the push for gay marriage, or in terms that can pathologizethem, as in the issue of asylum on the grounds of sexual orientation. Gayorganizations like Immigration Equality are quick to support UAFA but havenothing to say about, for instance, the issue of no-match letters, except whennecessary to gain entry into immigration rights circles.The marriage issue brings with it narratives about legitimacy and illegitimacy.The gay and lesbian mainstream wants a bourgeois identity, to marchonward in its attempts to gain respectability. Within this relentless search, theonly clarity comes within the demarcation of the good and bad immigrant, thedocumented and the undocumented. Mainstream gay activists seek to legitimizethe bourgeois gay subject as one that will not contest the state or unsettleits hierarchies. This is a deeply conservative and neoliberal agenda that neitherchanges the structure nor makes it more equitable. Instead, it simply wants136