Extended Carceral Experiences: Informal Confinement of LGBTQIA+ Identities Across Non-Corrective Institutions

• In Event: 30465 - Queer Criminology in Precarious Sociolegal Climates

Abstract

The carceral state extends beyond prisons, shaping the lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ individuals through regulatory mechanisms embedded in non-corrective institutions. This paper examines how multiple systems—such as immigration enforcement, healthcare, social welfare, and education—act as sites of informal confinement, restricting autonomy and reinforcing precarious sociolegal conditions for LGBTQIA+ populations.

Drawing on Foucauldian and Wacquantian theories of carcerality, this study conceptualizes how institutional surveillance, exclusionary policies, and punitive bureaucratic processes create overlapping forms of constraint that mimic formal incarceration. LGBTQIA+ individuals often experience heightened scrutiny and regulation in these institutional settings, where identity-based marginalization operates as a mechanism of control. For example, restrictive asylum policies, medical gatekeeping in gender-affirming care, and housing discrimination collectively produce conditions of containment that disproportionately impact queer and trans individuals.

Through a qualitative synthesis of institutional policies, legal frameworks, and firsthand narratives, this paper argues for a broader conceptualization of carcerality that extends beyond the prison-industrial complex. By centering LGBTQIA+ experiences, it critiques the ways in which the state, alongside non-state actors, disciplines and regulates queer bodies across multiple domains.

This research contributes to the field of queer criminology by expanding understandings of punishment and surveillance, offering a framework for analyzing how informal confinement operates within institutions not traditionally recognized as carceral. In doing so, it highlights the urgent need to interrogate the intersection of queerness, institutional regulation, and sociolegal precarity in contemporary criminological scholarship.

Author

• Veronica Valencia Gonzalez, University of South Carolina-Columbia