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

How to Make Prisons Disappearto expand the category of the bourgeois heteronormative subject to includewomen like Tan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cTojNqjnP4.2. Gay and lesbian activists for UAFA are pushing for the law on the grounds thatit would grant same-sex couples the same rights as married straight couples,claiming that the legislation is especially needed since they cannot marry underfederal law.3. Mercado’s appearance as a butch woman would be a significant, even if unacknowledged,factor in the press coverage and the pair’s attempts to drum upsympathy for their cause (visibly aided by Immigration Equality).4. http://www.dreamactivist.org/rigoberto-padilla-fights-deportation-open-letter/.5. A private bill is often inserted as a section of a larger piece of legislation and usedto further the case of an individual. These rarely pass.6. In the case of Tan and Mercado, the latter’s job placed her in a field that is alreadydematerialized to the extent that the IT industry still functions as a virtualjob sphere, despite the fact that it increasingly requires millions of overworkedand underpaid temp workers to sustain it.7. A further complication in the Tan-Mercado case, which cannot be ignored, isthat they were from the Philippines. The United States’ relationship with thePhilippines has always been one between colonizer and colonized and, as istypical of such relationships, has been a gendered one. The Philippines havehistorically been cast as a feminine Other in relation to the United States, as thesexual and sensual willing handmaiden to the strong, masculine imperial forceof the US The fact that the Philippines’ biggest export is its labor in the form ofdomestic workers and nurses, whose remittances form an important part of thecountry’s economy, estimated at nearly 17 billion in 2009, further lends to thishistorical feminization. The gendering of the Tan-Mercado relationship, of anoutwardly butch and femme lesbian couple, played into this gendering.In contrast, Mexico, in the imagination and political reality of the UnitedStates, has always been marked as nothing more than a cheap source of expendablemigrant labor. Metaphorically, Mexico has been cast as the houseboy of theUnited States, while the Philippines are cast as its eternal concubine. In morerecent iterations of her statement, Tan has begun to state that ICE agents gainedentry into her home by pretending to be looking for a “Mexican girl.” Thisdetail was absent from her earlier versions of her story, including the videotapedtestimony in front of US senators and has only recently begun to surface. It doesappear in a written form of her testimony on the Web site of the United StatesSenate Committee on the Judiciary—but even this is, as far as I can tell, a relativelyrecent addition; the statement was not on the Web site for much of 2009.In the context of the family’s increasing efforts to appear as “good,” this new137