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

The Only Freedom I Can SeeMiddle-class gay white men argued that “gay rights” should remain a legislativeissue and that “legally sanctioned gay marriage should be a primaryconcern for all of us.” 37 Kunzel charts the ways that the forced forgettingof queer and trans prisoners was central to the coalescing of “new gaynorms,” “gay respectability,” and homonormativity. This disciplining ofthe queer left was a racialized project that coalesced around shoring up theprivileges afforded by whiteness, gender normativity, and capital. It wasa movement to proliferate the life-enhancing norms of white supremacyand neoliberalism at the expense of so many lives, in addition to a movementand politics bent on the liberation of all.The purging of imprisoned queer and trans people from “the community”has, in part, acted as the condition of possibility for the privilegesand power afforded to those not ensnared in the nexus of power producedby neoliberalism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and regimesof incarceration. The forgotten, the expunged, and the eradicated are intimatelyconstitutive of what we remember, how we know, and where weare. As some seek safety and security under racially gendered state andcorporate power, what quotidian deaths will make such shelter possible?What norms will proliferate? What bodies and lives will be constructedas disposable or even unimaginable by a movement for inclusion? Whosedoors will continue to be kicked down? Who will continue to be taken atnight, or under the light of day?Imagining the ImpossibleIn his description of the differences between death row and administrativesegregation (the hole), C captures the possibilities that lie within the immobilizingcontradictions of states of captivity:Did I feel differently being on death row? Honestly, to me the onlydifference between death row and Ad.-Seg. [is] that in Ad.-Seg oneday when you do all your sentence you will go home and in death rowyou don’t go home, you get killed…but in death row at least you havea small window in your cell and here in Ad.-Seg [there is] not even awindow to at least see [the] outside, the blue sky, or the night stars. 38In her poetry, R articulates a similar theorization of possibilitywithin the immobilization and incomprehensibility of captivity whenshe writes, “The only freedom I can see/Is death in a prison cell.” 39 Thiscontradictory logic—that freedom comes with death inside one’s cell (and181