An Abolitionist Feminist Analysis of the Racialized Gendering of Carcerality for Realizing Liberatory Futures

• In Event: World-making in the Carceral Classroom: Centering Abolition Feminism as an Analytic Lens

Abstract

Objectives: Accessing the lens of “abolition feminism” (Davis, Dent & Meiners, 2022), I engage my invited entry as an educator into a prison in the U.S. South. I consider how my time teaching in the prison pushed me to further reflect upon how we should be organizing for liberatory futures when we consider gendering as a process of racialization developed by a cisheteropatriarchal bourgeoisie (Quan, 2024).

Methodology & Data: Following an abolitionist feminist approach to gathering, interpreting, and sharing knowledge (i.e., autoethnography; Davis, 2022), I critically and reflexively share my wonderings as I processed teaching for 20 months within a “men’s” prison in the U.S. South.

Theoretical Framework: Following the abolition feminist complications that H.L.T. Quan (2024) brought to the work of Cedric Robinson (2000), and in conversation with Wynter (2003), TallBear (2018) and Kingston-Mann (2018), I seek to further analysis that has considered how gendering can perhaps be seen as a process of racialization. When we think about gender as a coterminous process of racialization, which has been systemically subjugated by cisheteropatriarchy since the onset of what has now been referred to as “racial capitalism,” gendered violence ceases to be subordinated and instead centered. When the racialized act of “enclosure” is seen as a historical development of gendered violence that initiated the colonial process of racial capitalism, evidenced by the interlocking consolidation of cisheteropatriarchy through “couverture,” we can reconceptualize collective futures for liberatory living (Quan, 2024).

Substantiated Conclusions and Scholarly Significance: Based upon autoethnographic reflections of my time teaching within a prison with folks gendered as men, as a person gendered as a man, I consider how the “sociogenic principle” (i.e., the socialized statements of life and death created by human societies) of the current dominant ontology of humans (i.e., Man2, homo oeconomicus; Wynter, 2003) played out from my body to the carceral landscape (Quan, 2024). I reflect upon how prescriptions of abolition are indelibly compromised by continued hierarchical modes of assessing personhood that benefit the carceral organization of workers and peasants “outside” of the prison, as well as the lumpen-proletariat who are carcerally disposed of within institutions we now know as prisons (Robinson, 2000). I assess how the absence of bodies gendered as women exposed anatomies of carcerality. Recognizing a biopolitics of reproductive injustice, we can think about how prisons preclude incarcerated folks from reproducing–just as there are also initiated, generative human kinship relations that challenge European-descended settler ontologies of family and being; especially the very dichotomy of man/woman itself (TallBear, 2018). The anti-life/after-life of carcerality destroys possibilities of the birth of a class most likely to revolt, in alignment with carceral geographies developed during enslavement (Davis, 1974), but at the same time enables imperfect reinscriptions of personhood that open abolitionist feminist futures (Quan, 2024; Wynter, 2003). The undoing of “men” becomes possible as “men” undo their prescriptions of their gendered containment, which in turn, makes possible the abolition of the monohumanist, racialized world of Man2 (Quan, 2024; Wynter, 2003).

Author

• Casey Philip Wong, Georgia State University