Self-Exclusion for the Already Excluded? Ex-Cons and Antisocial Queer Theory

• In Event: Convict Criminology 1: Feminist Perspectives: Women of Convict Criminology

Abstract

esistance that Judith (Jack) Halberstam writes “promises…to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly,
impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock and annihilate….”
This kind of resistance seeks to disrupt politics of dissemblance and respectability, diversity and inclusion. It asks the
queer subject to refuse to conform to the normative social order, and in its most radical iteration avows criminality –
attempted assassination in the case of Valerie Solanas – as a means of undertaking this refusal. The ex-con faces not
only potential marginalization for such “bad behavior,” as the sexual or racial other might, but the threat of juridical
punishment and legal exclusion from institutional spaces. Working at the intersections of anarchist criminology and
antisocial queer theory in the human sciences, this paper explores the movement from diversity/inclusion to
deviancy/agency. Putting the ex-con at the center of this movement, it asks to what extent the first terms must be met
in order to the second terms to become viable modes of resistance.

Author

• Deena Varner, Purdue University