sexual violence

Abolitionist Feminisms – A Call for Submissions

A Call for Proposals for Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics –
Edited by Alisa Bierria, Jakeya Caruthers, and Brooke Lober

Nearly 20 years ago, prison abolitionist organizations, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and Critical Resistance produced the pivotal “Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex.” This was a broad call for movements that creatively and effectively respond to the mutually constitutive relationships between the carceral state and the constancy of domestic and sexual violence, as well as movements that catalyze a vision of worldmaking “based on radical freedom, mutual accountability, and passionate reciprocity.”

Carceral systems structure and secure a racist and sexist world; legacies of abolition feminisms have created insurgent possibilities that dismantle those systems and invent new forms of relationality. This CfP for Abolitionist Feminisms, a special issue of Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics, aims to explore and extend abolitionist feminist thought and action. Our focus on Abolitionist Feminisms arises from our commitments to feminist approaches to racial justice, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, and other political philosophies and formations that constitute a genealogy of anti-carceral feminist epistemologies, strategies, and rebellion.

Crafting the Perfect Woman: How Gynecology, Obstetrics and American Prisons Operate to Construct and Control Women

by Anastazia Schmid (artist/activist/scholar, currently incarcerated at the Indiana Women’s Prison)

Captive women were the prime candidates for experimental gynecological surgeries due to their invisibility, and due to the voicelessness of their social position. …
The violence, sexual abuse, medical experimentation, sterilization and death of a few hundred captive women in the 19th century laid the foundation for the field of gynecology to expand into evolving eugenics practices (albeit in more clandestine forms) across time. Our nation’s first women’s prison housed only 17 women when it opened in 1873, today there are over 115,000 women incarcerated nationwide. One out of every three women incarcerated in the world is incarcerated in the U.S. Numbers fail to illustrate the sobering reality of incarcerated women’s lived experience and loss of humanity.

Lively Up the Dead Zone: Remembering democracy’s racist state crimes (Ashe)

– by Janine Jones –
A critique of political thinking in Africana thought brings us to a crossroads. At this intersection, passing trajectories meet. Moving in opposite directions, they send contradictory messages concerning democracy, racism, and political violence. One trajectory pursues the accomplishments of Africana intellectual, artistic, economic, and political elites… The other trajectory tracks the misery of local and global black masses. It also traces minority group repression by global capitalism, as well as the potential and real possibilities of racial democracies through state violence and neglect. The intersection of these two diverging lines produces a conceptual dead zone, one that is marked by the absence of analysis engaging antiblack racism and genocide in Western democracies and the resilience of elite thinkers to disavow such analyses.

Donald J. Trump: Racist, Alleged Child Rapist, and President-Elect

– by Ahmad Greene-Hayes –
Even as white liberals cry and lament Trump with more fervor than they would ever mourn Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Sandra Bland; or cry with and for our indigenous co-laborers in North Dakota; or even our Latinx kin who have been deported under Obama’s regime, what is undoubtedly apparent to those of us who have been living under white nationalism is that white tears will not save us, nor will white Jesus, nor will white liberals, nor will white Evangelicals. What will save us, though, is a doing away with whiteness writ-large.

The Pitfalls of Being the Best Black Surrogate a White Woman Could Hope For

– by Janine Jones –
Michelle Obama is being hailed as Hillary Clinton’s best surrogate. Arguably, this is as it should be. However, black women, at the very least, should be concerned with such praise, especially when historically they have been white women’s–white families’–best surrogates, and, more recently, have become the best gestational mothers a white woman could buy.