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

Captive GendersQueering Abolition, Undoing HomonormativityWhen I asked R what she needed from me as a scholar, activist, and friend,she responded,The last thing I would want is for someone to feel sorry for me. Forwhat I need most help in is to overcome all the negative in my lifeand become a more positive person, but not just for myself but formy people within the gay community and in the free-world, and herebehind these prison bars…. But Steve, what hurts me the most isthis! The lack of knowledge within the gay community in the freeworldconcerning LGBT people behind bars. It makes me feel like mybrothers and sisters in the free-world could care less about us that arebehind prison bars, or we must be the forgotten ones. And this I don’tunderstand [my emphasis]. 33What has this forgetting made possible? What subjects arise out ofthis loss? In Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of ModernAmerican Sexuality, Regina Kunzel charts the forced forgetting of imprisonedLGBTQ people by free-world queer activist communities. By lookingat mainstream gay and queer left publications, Kunzel notes a transitionfrom a politics of solidarity with imprisoned LGBTQ people in the1970s (“We are all prisoners,” “We are all fugitives,” and “Free our sisters!Free ourselves!”) to a position of distance and disidentification beginningin the 1980s. 34 Kunzel notes the ways that in the 1970s queer activistsconnected their experiences of personal and institutionalized racism andhomophobia with the struggles of all prisoners: “Because we understandthat the system that has created and maintained prisons as method ofsocial control is the same system that oppresses [those of] us on the outside.”35 This liberatory queer politic was not concerned with giving queerprisoners a “helping hand,” but rather sought to build “a new kind ofcommunity” that could simultaneously challenge the racialized politicsof criminality, social control, bodily regulation, and the management ofqueer desire.In the 1980s, Kunzel marks a decline in prison pen-pal projects and ashift from a revolutionary politics to a liberal politics bent on social inclusion,rights, and gay marriage. Many queer activists’ concerns shifted to“winnable battles,” in which queer prisoners were constructed as a “negativeelement” in the overall debate concerning “gay rights”; gay activistssought to build a movement with “as little fragmentation as possible.” 36180