The New Lavender Scare: Urban Policing, Mass Incarceration, and LGBTQ Youth Homelessness

• In Event: 2465 - Exploring the Carceral Continuum

Abstract

In this chapter, I draw on 18-months of ethnographic fieldwork on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth homelessness in central Texas to show how gender and sexuality, along with race and class, shape processes of criminalization and urban policing in this era of mass incarceration. Building on Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, I posit that U.S. society is also in an era of the new Lavender Scare. This new Lavender Scare continues the policing, criminalizing, and erasing of LGBTQ people in U.S. society. As I document, police often profile and arrest LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness. Acts such as trans-profiling, or “walking while trans,” attempt to marginalize and erase gender expansive and transgender people from the public sphere. And black and brown and/or poor LGBTQ youth bear the brunt of this policing, as they often do not have economic, cultural, and racial capital to protect themselves. Mass incarceration and urban policing then are about controlling and punishing LGBTQ people and producing heteronormativity and the gender binary as the dominant modes of relation in society. This new Lavender Scare contributes to the over-representation of LGBTQ people in jails and prisons, while continuing a history of punishing and criminalizing non-heterosexuality and expansive expressions of gender.

Author

• Brandon Andrew Robinson, University of California-Riverside