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

Abolitionist Imaginingscolor fighting campaigns for economic justice in both the neoliberal cityand rural areas?DR: This is crucial and difficult work because it has to address an intenseconfluence of unions’ internal political hegemonies, late-neoliberalcapital’s repression and disposal of entire categories of workers, and theparticular forms of criminalization reserved for laborers who are alreadypresumed to be destined for some form of early death or imprisonment:Here I’m thinking of prison labor, undocumented workers, sex workers,and young (urban and rural) black and brown people whose only accessto a real income is through the underground economy. So, there hasto be an alternative to mainstream union politics, since the structuralconditions confronting these kinds of “workers” are quite literally notlegible to a conventional union membership or agenda. In other words,when you’re focusing on workers who are not only fighting for basiceconomic survival (what we often call “economic justice”), but are simultaneouslyengaging the systemic violence of criminalization and policing,as well as the spectrum of institutionalized violence formed around thedisciplining and enforcement of normative genders and sexualities, youare transcending and really obliterating the parameters of a “union politics.”So I have no programmatic thoughts for how abolitionist strugglesmight adequately address this state of crisis, but I do think that an immediatestep would be to develop a more multilayered, dynamic, andcomplex understanding of what “criminalization” is, how it works, whenand where it’s mobilized, why its technologies change and don’t change,and so forth. To adequately comprehend the sites of struggle your questionlays out is to build an understanding of how the technologies ofcriminalization not only lead to people being policed and locked up, butalso lead to the most hyper-vulnerable workers being excluded or marginalizedfrom entire categories of political advocacy. Criminalization isa violence of the social imagination that constantly creates the prison andpolicing regime, and works to eliminate certain people from the realm of“legitimate” politics. Abolitionism is uniquely positioned to illuminateand expound on this.BB: You have to do the work, you have to put the information out there,you have to form a group that builds respect in the movement by beingthere, and then you have to demand a voice. We’re queers, we know, wehave to take a space for ourselves, that’s the only way we’ll ever get any339