Crime and Contradiction: Carceral Feminism and FOSTA

• In Event: Gendered Dimensions of Substance Use, Trauma, and Criminal Justice Policy

Abstract

Increasingly, governments, NGOs, and activists are collapsing distinctions between consensual sex work and forced sex trafficking. The Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) conflated consensual prostitution and forced sex trafficking online and led to a purge of all “sexual” content from social networking sites. This censorship has disproportionately harmed racial, gender, and sexual minorities whose very existence on a platform is often deemed sexually suggestive. Ironically, FOSTA and other laws like it are rooted in carceral feminist criminologies, which have, whether advertently or inadvertently, reproduced and even expanded the carceral state, providing justification for the imprisonment of disproportionately poor people of color and increasing numbers of poor women, women of color, and queer women, and gender non-conforming people. This carceral feminist logic has expanded into cyberspace, locking the very marginalized groups that feminism aims to defend into the equivalent of cyberprisons (e.g., “Facebook jail”) that prevent their participation in critically important online discourses regarding their own lives. Preventing such harm requires feminist criminologists to reject binaries such as victim and perpetrator, which perpetuate single-axis logics, in favor of matrix logics that take into account power relations at the micro-, meso-, and macro-level.

Author

• Rachel E. Davis, Middle Tennessee State University