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

Captive Gendersand help nurture and develop each other. It demonstrates not only theimmediate urgency of abolition and trans liberation but also the relevanceof histories of community resistance and resilience to our present struggle.Che Gosset: How were you politicized around prison abolitionism?Dylan Rodríguez: First, let me say how important it is that we situateour biographies of politicization within our specific political-historicalcontexts rather than as universalizing stories of “radicalization.” There isoften a temptation to inhabit and perform radical political positions asif they were the inevitable result of traumatic and/or spectacular individualexperiences with violence, oppression, and so forth. The fact is,we usually become radical political workers not simply because we havepersonal grievances with corrupt and unjust social systems, but rather becausewe encounter the mundane, insistent, nourishing, and contentiousinfluences of some community of activists, teachers, survivors, and intellectuals(by which I mean people who think a lot, not just people whoget paid to think and write). In this sense, I see my politicization towardprison, police, and penal abolition as a logical outcome of the people andpolitical-intellectual traditions that I’ve been close to during the last twodecades. There were two overlapping—really inseparable—dimensions tothe process of both clarifying and (more importantly) identifying withan abolitionist analysis and political-intellectual position: participatingin the formation of Critical Resistance as a (truly novice) activist andorganizer produced an intimacy with a deep, historically specific senseof futility, urgency, and frequent desperation that I eventually realizedis organic to the work of engaging liberationist and anti-racist work in atime of heightened—but no less normalized—warfare and institutionalizeddehumanization. This is why I’ve spent most of my adult life tryingto figure out how to conceptualize the prison and policing regimes, intheir comprehensive social-institutional totality, as genocidal (or at leastproto-genocidal) systems.Let me put it this way: If our examination of the prison regimeconstantly leads us to the conclusion that particular populations, bodies,places, and communities are not meant to thrive or survive existinginstitutional arrangements, then what political practices can we conceivethat directly deal with this condition as a state of emergency? This leads tothe second major aspect of my politicization toward abolition, and that’sthe sometimes undervalued activist work of focused study, research, and324