Deconstruction as Reclamation

2015

Queer geographers have recently begun to examine the lives of transgender persons, a heretofore gap in the literature. This article examines the experiences of incarcerated trans persons in the United States, thus extending this nascent trans geography work by considering a new population in a new space. As some scholarly and activist research has shown over the last decade or so, U.S. trans persons are incarcerated at a disproportionately high rate and face harsh conditions while imprisoned. First-hand accounts of trans prisoners’ experiences are however limited due to the difficulty of accessing this population for research purposes. Working in cooperation with a Montreal-based organization that facilitates pen-pal communications between queer persons inside and outside penitentiaries in the U.S., we conducted qualitative research with twenty-three trans feminine individuals confined in facilities in several states. Our findings unfortunately corroborate the findings laid out in the small existing literature on trans prisoner issues, demonstrating that they endure harsh conditions of confinement. We detail these conditions here, while also pointing to informant responses that offer insight into the ways in which trans incarcerated persons cope with the hypermasculine and heteronormative environment of the U.S. prison. These results are offered in the spirit of advancing a queer abolitionist politics that centers the knowledge and experiences of trans incarcerated persons.

Laws

The criminal punishment system plays a critical role in the production of race, gender, and sexuality in the United States. The regulation of marginalized women’s bodies—transwomen, butches, and lesbians—in confinement reproduces cis-heteronormativity. Echoing the paternalistic claims of protection that have inspired “bathroom bills,” gender-segregated prison facilities have notoriously condemned transwomen prisoners to men’s prisons for the “safety” of women’s prisons, constructing cisgender women as “at risk” of sexual assault and transgender women as “risky”, overlooking the reality of transwomen as the most at risk of experiencing sexual violence in prisons. Prisons use legal and medical constructions of gender that pathologize transgender identity in order to legitimize health concerns; for example, the mutilation of the body in an effort to remove unwanted genitalia as evidence to warrant a diagnosis of gender identity disorder, or later gender dysphoria. This construction of ...

Third Text, 2021

National Review of Black Politics, 2020

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2022

This autoethnographic piece, cowritten through letters exchanged between Kitty Rotolo, currently incarcerated in New York State, and Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot, an abolitionist organizer and graduate student in New York City, explores elaborations of trans identity, affinity, and community across prison walls. Reflecting on the authors’ friendship and the possibilities for mutual recognition that queer kinship has afforded them—even across the distance and disposability produced by incarceration—these letters reveal transness as a practice of seeing. Through letter writing and storytelling, the authors explore how Rotolo has negotiated incarceration in men's prisons, including the transphobic violence of prison, in order to articulate and live transness—as individual identity, as resistance, as affinity, as collectivity, and as practice—inside.

QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking

All rights reserved. The COVID-19 pandemic and international protests of the violences of the prison industrial complex (PIC) have put matters of health, safety, and healing at the forefront of social justice struggles. Prison abolitionists around the world are asking: How do we dismantle systems of oppression foundational to carceral institutions within which and from which we find ourselves needing to heal? Or as Adaku Utah, Nigerian healer and liberation educator, prompts: how do we "create systems and structures that build wellness, safety, care, and power and depend less on the state and systems of violence? What do we need to transform in ourselves and in our organizations to build this kind of world?" 1 (emphasis added) These questions-arguably more urgent than ever in the face of multiple pandemics, unmitigated police violence, and climate catastrophe-animate the articles, essays, poems, and speculative fiction that make up this special issue on queer healing and Transformative Justice. 2 Our contributors, writing from a range of origins, locations, abilities, identities, and subject positions, demonstrate that the work of queer(ing) healing and reimagining how we prevent, disrupt, and intervene in harm is foundational to building abolitionist worlds, in the here and now.

2016

As one of the fastest growing populations in the prison system, transwomen have a unique relationship with the prison system and the Prison Industrial Complex. These systems work to further the marginalization of transwomen by subjecting them to psychological and sexual violence. Transwomen’s bodies are criminalized in ways that naturalizes the violence they experience both in the prisons and in the court systems. This paper aims to provide an overview of the ways in which transwomen are dehumanized in their encounters with the criminal justice system (i.e. mis-gendering, the physical and sexual abuse they experience) by contextualizing their experiences. Through contextualization, I aim to illustrate the interlocking systems of oppression that construct transwomen as socially deviant bodies, that leads to their encounters with the Prison Industrial Complex. Additionally, I explore how these interlocking systems of oppression continue to function within the context of the Prison Ind...

GLQ, 2022

Art represents an understudied yet full archive of Black trans resistance. Though political speeches, organizational documents, and other ephemera hold visions of Black trans futures, visual media contain important insights into how Black trans people envision worlds of safety, care, and community beyond the carceral system. This essay focuses on literature, film, and music because these art forms remain undertheorized as vehicles for abolitionist world building. In contrast to hate crime legislation and other anti-violence ventures that paint Black transness as primarily rooted in victimhood (Snorton and Haritaworn 2013: 67), this work seeks to complicate those portrayals by analyzing visual media for traces of Black trans abolitionist freedom dreams that embrace the complexity of Black trans life and our theories of social change. 1 "(Trans)gendering Abolition" engages the paradox of Black trans visibility: visual media make Black transness legible, and yet visibility-based activism is a road that leads to flattened understandings of Black trans life. Visibility, at least in the traditional sense, is a fraught project for trans people, whose moment of coming into visibility is often the moment of violence. As abolitionist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (2019) asserts, "I don't really understand why we need a day of visibility, when for most of us, especially us Black girls, we are as visible as we need to be. Our visibility is getting us killed." Griffin-Gracy's statement on Trans Day of Visibility contradicts moves being made to diversify popular culture and media through the inclusion of transgender people and our stories. With the 2014 Time Magazine article "The Transgender Tipping Point" (Steinmetz 2014) as well as shows like Orange Is the New Black and Pose, Black and Brown trans people are as visible as they have ever been in popular media. 2 But as Griffin-Gracy elucidates, this visibility often comes at a cost for Black trans women, whose proximity to the criminal (in)justice system places them in the crosshairs of the state's crimi

Cadernos Pagu, 2019

This article proposes a dialogue between two researchers who deal with related topics: the experiences of travestis 1 and transsexuals in the deprivation of freedom. Starting from the formulations of Donna Haraway (1995), we intend to discuss the particularity and embodiment of ethnographic vision through an axis of central differentiation of our distinct experiences in the field: gender identity. While Céu Cavalcanti discusses ethnographic encounters and the development of their research as a trans person, Vanessa Sander does the same in debating the ways she undertakes her research as a cisgender person, i.e. non-trans. Thus, crossed by the notion of experience, as discussed by Joan Scott (1995), we understand this proposition as fundamental to critically analyze our positions as researchers in the insertion of our respective fields. The dialogues and resonances between the two voices that are here allow a flow of connections, where the intersectional plots surrounding our visions are initial objects of reflection. The proposal of a theoretical-methodological analysis of the research makes a meeting point possible with our perspectives, which encourages us to discuss the central element of this text: the implications and tensions of the identifications of cisgender experience/perspective and transgender experience/perspective in the ethnographic and textual production of researchers who propose to produce knowledge from the plurality of trans experiences.

Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, 2021

Given the disproportionate violence trans people in prison experience, flooding the legal system with litigation to create change for individual plaintiffs is only a stopgap measure. A better remedy to uproot the harm is to keep trans people out of prison entirely. The first claim of this Note is that prisons are inherently more violent for trans people than for the general prison population. The second claim is a remedy to the first: alternatives to incarceration should be offered to trans people who are convicted. Such alternatives should be considered for all people in U.S. prisons because the conditions are so unsustainable and damaging. This Note focuses on trans people as a case study for the types of gendered harm prisons create. Viewing the disproportionate violence trans people experience in prison within the broader legal context of trans rights, this Note argues that the criminal legal system is systemically transphobic to an irreparable extent, which should compel policymakers, legal scholars, and litigators to explore and seriously consider alternatives to carceral punishment. This Note proceeds in four parts. First, it summarizes recent litigation efforts to protect LGBTQ people broadly and trans people in prison specifically. Second, the Note makes an empirical claim that prison is particularly violent for trans people, relying on Supreme Court and congressional findings as well as scholarly analysis. Third, using the retributive theory of punishment, the Note makes the normative claim that the subjective experience of trans people in prison is so egregiously violent that it deserves a special remedy. Finally, applying prison abolition as a lodestar, the Note categorizes some potential interventions as carceral, non-carceral, de-carceral, and transformative.