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

Captive GendersDR: To begin, I would largely defer on this question to people who aremuch more deeply enmeshed in the political and intellectual work aroundthe specificity of these conditions of imprisonment. I think I still have a lotto learn from the experiences and analyses being generated by people whoare closely and rigorously engaging this form of state violence, and perhapsthis is the best way to respond to the question you’ve posed. I don’t knowthat the thing we’re naming as the abolitionist movement has calcified tothe point that it has developed a truly parochial, common set of politicalparadigms and protocols—at least, not in its current rendition as a late–twentieth- and early–twenty-first-century radicalism (one could say therewere at least two predominant, contradictory understandings of “abolition”during the middle-to-late part of the nineteenth century, as it was taken upby white abolitionists and enslaved and non-enslaved black abolitionists).I’m not saying that there aren’t some persistent assumptions guidingthis emerging movement that reproduce oppressive racial, gender, sexual,and class logics; rather, what I’m getting at is that the field of abolitionistpolitics and discourses is contingent, fragile, and flexible enough at thismoment that it may not be a question of whether it needs to “changeand adapt” to accommodate the material and historical truths of imprisoned/detainedtrans and gender-non-conforming people. Instead, the issuemay be one of whether and how multiple abolitionisms can articulatewith each other in a way that poses a legitimate threat to transform thecurrent condition. What we’d be talking about is a conception of politicalstruggle that visualizes the abolition/transformation of various, specific,perhaps non-comparable forms of imprisonment that are sometimeslumped together within the same institutional designation: “prison.” Itmay be the case that we can’t and shouldn’t attempt to compare (or conflate)the sometimes drastically different forms of policing and imprisonmenttargeting different bodies and populations, and instead engage themas relatively specific, but structurally connected forms of state violence.This, I think, might give the work of abolition a rich set of political toolsas well as organizing strategies. With all respect to my colleagues who’vespent much time and energy constructing them, I don’t think there canbe such a thing as a singular or definitive “abolitionist mission statement.”We need many of them, and each needs to rigorously understand what itsmission is attempting to engage.BB: One thing that I think the prison movement doesn’t have is a lotof information about this group. People need to make the information336