Abolition Feminisms Vol. 2: Feminist Ruptures against the Carceral State

by Alisa Bierria (Editor), Brooke Lober (Editor), Jakeya Caruthers (Editor)

Overview

In this expansive companion to Abolition Feminisms Vol. I, contributors confront multiple paradigms of punitivity—the foundational logics of family, borders, heterosexuality, colonial violence, and more—to disengage us from root systems of carcerality.

The book transcends various modes and forms: through grassroots praxis, critical research, storytelling, diagrams, poetry, and visual art, these pieces build on the legacies of feminist thinkers who formulated abolitionist critiques of policing, surveillance, and control. The resulting framework provides readers with the resources to cultivate and inhabit a post-carceral world of radical freedom and possibility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642598896
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	01/24/2023
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Alisa Bierria is a Black feminist philosopher and an assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA. Her writing can be found in numerous scholarly journals and public anthologies, including her co-edited volume, Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence, a special issue of Social Justice. She has been an advocate within the feminist anti-violence movement for over 25 years, including co-founding Survived & Punished, a national abolitionist organization that advocates for the decriminalization of survivors of domestic and sexual violence.

Jakeya Caruthers is Assistant Professor of English & Africana Studies at Drexel University. Her research attends to black political aesthetics within 20th and 21st century cultural production as well as race, gender, sexuality, and state discipline. Jakeya is a principal investigator of an inside-outside research initiative with Survived & Punished California that maps pathways between surviving gender violence, incarceration, and radical possibilities for survivor release. She is also collaborating on a digital archive of feminist decriminalization campaigns waged over the last 50 years.

Brooke Lober is a teacher, writer, and social movement scholar who is currently researching legacies of antiracist and anti-Zionist feminisms in the Bay Area. Brooke’s writing is published in the scholarly journals Feminist Formations, Women’s Studies, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, and on numerous websites of radical culture.

Table of Contents

Foreword Andrea J. Ritchie vii

Introduction: Making a Clearing Alisa Bierria Jakeya Caruthers Brooke Loher 1

Part 1 Dismantling Carceral Intimacies

ACAB Means Abolishing the Cop in Our Heads, Hearts, and Homes: An Intergenerational Demand for Family Abolition Tamara Lea Spira Dayjha McMillan Madi Stapleton Verónica N. Vélez 13

"Purgatorio" Shellyne Rodriguez 44

State-Sanctioned Suicides and Life-Making Resistance in Carceral Contexts Colby Lenz 45

Beyond #StopAsianHate: Criminalization, Gender, and Asian Abolition Feminism Edited and introduced Hyejin Skim 73

"Protect Celeste Guap" Ines Ixierda 85

"All Canned Foods Are Expired but Still Edible": A Critique of Anti-Violence Advocacy and the Perpetuation of Antiblackness Romina Garcia 86

"Aunt Hester's Scream" Kai lumumba barrow 106

Stay Connected at All Costs Alisha Walker in conversation Red Schulte 107

When he dies Jasmine Tabor 112

Part 2 Refusing Reform, Resisting Captivity

"The Precarity of Crossing" Shana M. griffin 114

Domestic Terror: Women's Prisons and Assata Shakur's Abolitionist Refusal Jess Issacharoff 115

From a knife Yola Gómez 148

Bad Apples, Rotted Roots, and the Three Rs of Reformist Reforms Ren-yo Hwang 151

Refusing the Value of Immigrant Fear: An Abolitionist Feminist Critique of Sanctuary by Police Lee Ann S. Wang 186

"Controlled Burns" Molly Costello 207

Social Work and the Partner Assault Response Program: A Critical Pathology Report Rosalie Donaldson-Kronenbuerger Mark Mullkoff 208

Prison Is Not Feminist, Service Is Not Liberation: Punishment, Service, and a Web of Detainment Kayla Marie Martensen 218

Part 3 Making a Clearing

"No Cops on Stolen Land" Summer-Harmony Twenish 228

A Letter for Darnella Frazier: A Black Feminist Abolition Map of the Forgotten Whitney Richards-Calathes 229

Radical Mothering for the Purposes of Abolition Nadine Naber Johnaé Strong Souzan Naser 247

"All Incarceration Is Family Separation" Mon M 274

Teaching Abolitionist Praxis in the Everyday Qui Alexander 275

Tools for Building Dream Worlds That Serve Us: A Review of Fumbling Towards Repair by Mariame Kaha and Shira Hassan Xhercis Méndez 292

"Seachange" Tabitha Arnold 298

Contributors 299

Index 307

Editorial Reviews

As inspiring as it is edifying, this phenomenal collection, Abolition Feminisms, Volume 2: Feminist Ruptures Against the Carceral State, offers us a broad range of ideas, images, provocations, and organizing approaches enabled by developing theories and practices associated with abolition feminisms. Thanks to the thoroughgoing familiarity of the editors with the grassroots efforts that constitute the groundwork of abolition feminism, we are offered important tools that help us to recognize punitive logics within and beyond conventional carceral contexts and to support us as we struggle for a world of mutual care, transformative justice, and freedom.” 
—Angela Y. Davis, author of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle


“This essential two-volume collection maps the shared roots between abolitionist life-making and feminist resistance, showing us how rebellious organizing and radical care are always at the heart of real change. Brimming with dispatches across borders and prison walls, archives of movement building, and striking creative work, Abolition Feminisms describes a breathtaking body of freedom practices, galvanizing us to do everything we can to help forge the liberatory future that we urgently need. Anyone who engages this collection is guaranteed to learn some-thing new.”
—Mariame Kaba, author of We Do This ’Til We Free Us


“This beautiful two-volume collection of essays, poems, and artwork brings a refreshing vibrancy to the radical work of abolition feminism. Inspiring, accessible, and far-reaching, the books are precisely what is needed right now: clear demands for radical change, reflections on the power of radical organizing, and radical statements of hope. Readers will be lifted up as they turn the pages, where each entry is a reminder of how abolition feminism is critical to freedom struggles, and our movement will therefore be challenged and changed.” 
—Beth E. Richie, coauthor of Abolition. Feminism. Now.


“Contrary to popular belief, revolutions don’t come with handbooks or blueprints. They do carry histories, memories, manifestos, maps, moments of clarity and deep contradictions, dreams, principles, and real people who endure the oppressions they are seeking to overturn. This extraordinary collective of activists, artists, and scholars understand that this is what revolutions are made of, and that through study and struggle we see abolition feminism not as a variant or a tendency within some larger liberatory movement but the revolution we need to genuinely overturn things.” 
—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination


“Abolition Feminisms: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice upends feminism’s relegation to an afterthought or appendage of abolition and urges us toward social arrangements defined by caring collectively. One of the most exquisite volumes on abolition feminism to date, this gather-ing of essays, dispatches, art, and poetry features a constellation of vibrant theorists, including those who have been criminalized and imprisoned. Abolition Feminisms offers original insights into the everyday terror and annihilating deprivation facing people inside women’s prisons, the work of imprisoned people to challenge gender and sexual oppression, the structuring role of gender violence to the logic and technologies of the carceral state, the nexus of imperial and domestic modes of repression, the carceral production of gender and sexual normativity, settler-colonial and anti-Black carceral violence, and more. Bierria, Caruthers, and Lober effectively establish abolition’s feminist provenance in an utterly brilliant account of abolition feminism’s decolonial heart, intimate practice, and radical momentum. This collection will be an instant classic in feminist and queer of color critique.”
—Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity


“The creative, political, intellectual interventions in this book, with their deeply intersectional locations of study and methods of analysis, fuel our ongoing work to understand what we are taking apart and to tear it down fully, once and for all. These articles, poems, and images also provide the warm, inviting entry points we need to imagine how bold, risky, ordinary work done by brave, ordinary people is the only path for building a world in which it is impossible for anyone to put anyone in a cage."
—Dean Spade, from the foreword to Volume 1

From the Publisher