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

Captive GendersLiving Neoliberal TerrorIn forty meticulously handwritten pages of poetry, prose, and memoirthat have taken her nearly two years to write and send to me from acell in rural Texas, R has told me about freedom, oppression, terror, joy,boredom, fear, loneliness, and captivity. R is a 48-year-old white nonnormativelygendered person (“gay,” “nelly,” “drag queen,” “sister”) whohas spent close to the last thirty years of her life in prison. Twelve of thoseyears were in administrative segregation (“the hole”), a roughly 45 squarefoot cell where one is forced to remain alone for twenty-three hours aday. She is HIV and HCV positive, has no family and no friends (she has“acquaintances” in prison). Her soonest release date is in 2011; her furthestis in 2018. The only other person she communicates with is a nun whowrites to her once a year.In her first letters, she wrote about her life in non-linear, fragmentedpieces threaded together by the fuzziness of memory, prefaced by a disclaimer,“Note: Not everything that happened to me, or did not happen tome is covered. But in the following, what is covered is the truth” [my emphasis].17 R’s qualification recognizes the contingency of the knowledgethat she will relay through her letters—that the truth of her life is hauntedby (and riddled with) absences, gaps, and silences that are rendered allthe more glaring by positivistic demands on knowledge and the ways thatwhite supremacy, queerphobia, capitalism, and the law collude to renderprisoners pathological liars, manipulators, biologically and socially sick,unreliable, and disposable. How do we understand her narrative that restsbetween the happened and the did not happen? Where is the line betweenthe fictive and the factual and the imaginary and the real? For R, truthresides somewhere in the space between the happened and the did not happen,or as Kamala Visweswaran writes, “Memory, as we know, is not tobe relied upon; memory always indexes a loss,” and truth, as R highlights,resides somewhere within this loss, in the space between the happened andthe did not happen. 18 Her poetry is engulfed in loss, not only the physicaland psychic loss she has experienced, but also the loss necessary in theattempt to describe that which is so often unspeakable and unnamable.R’s theorization of truth describes an epistemology that is attuned to thatwhich is present in its conspicuous absence, or in Avery Gordon’s words,R describes “a method attentive to what is elusive, fantastic, contingent,and often barely there.” 19R tells of her life up to her incarceration in a poem titled, “And LifeGoes On.” She begins by asking,174