Session 3: Abolition as Intersectional
Key Questions
What does intersectionality mean?
Why is intersectionality important for understanding imprisonment and migration controls?
Why is intersectionality important for building abolitionist movements?
How do heteronormativity and binary gender norms contribute to the prison industrial complex?
How does the prison create and uphold structures of gender and sexuality?
What does it mean to be queer?
How does the Combahee River Collective Statement define “identity politics”?
Required Readings
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete, “How Gender Structures the Prison System” (AUDIO)
Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, “This Battlefield Called Life: Black Feminist Dreams”
Supplemental Materials
Book: Victoria Law, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, “Overview”
Book: Victoria Law, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, “Sexual Abuse”
Article: Sarah Lamble, Captive Genders, “Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex Through Queer/Trans Analysis and Action”
Poem: Nikki Giovanni, “Revolutionary Dreams” (PDF)
Recommended Materials
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free”
Martha Escobar, “No One Is Criminal” in Abolition NOW!
Victoria Law, “Against Carceral Feminism”
Talila A. Lewis and Dustin Gibson, “The Prison Strike Challenges Ableism and Defends Disability Rights”
Namrata Verghese, “Queer Liberation Is an Abolitionist Affair”
Qwo-Li Driskill, “Shaking Our Shells: Cherokee Two-Spirits Rebalancing the World”
Liat Ben-Moshe, “Deinstitutionalization: A Case Study in Carceral Abolition,” Scapegoat 7
Fannie Lou Hamer, Testimony before Credentials Committee, Democratic National Convention (1964)
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, “ ‘It's Really Up To Us’ Barbara Smith on Combahee, Coalitions and Dismantling White Supremacy”
Exercise
How would you depict how different systems of oppression work together? Draw a diagram, picture, or image that conveys how different systems of oppression work together to shape US society. For an example, you could focus on systems of oppression that shape prisons, or access to food, or housing, or jobs and incomes, etc.
Reading guide
The Combahee River Collective theorized that “major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.” What systems of oppression did they identify and what vision of Black feminist politics grew from that insight? Following Robin Kelley, what was the political and historical context of their formation, and what is the significance of paying attention to gender and sexuality as part of Black radical visions of freedom?
Why does Angela Davis distinguish between a focus on gender and a focus on women? According to Davis, how do gendered and sexualized power relations inform imprisonment? Why is it important to pay attention to how interlocking relations of power shape different people’s experiences of policing and imprisonment? (You could draw in Ritchie & Law here also)
Explain Davis’s critique of “separate but equal” or “gender parity” prison reforms (p. 74).
All of these readings draw attention to the roles that racial-gendered stereotypes (or controlling images, stock figures) play in upholding systems of oppression. What are some of these stereotypes and how have they been used to devalue women and block interracial solidarities?
S. Lamble calls for a “queer/trans politics of prison abolition.” By using this term, they explain they are “referring less to ‘queer’ and ‘trans’ as umbrella identity terms and more to a political approach that questions, disrupts, and transforms dominant ideas about what is normal. Questioning the normalcy of the prison, a queer/trans politics not only helps identify the role of imprisonment in perpetuating gender, racial, and sexual violence, but also provides tools for developing alternative community responses that better address problems of harm” (237). What does it mean to question the “normalcy of the prison”? What other categories or taken-for-granted practices would also be questioned following a queer/trans politics of abolition?