Dismembering the PowerMonger: A BlaQueer Feminist Approach to Abolition

• In Event: Abolition and Queer Justice: Queer Criminalization and Criminology’s Investments in the Police

Abstract

Captivity in the United States has deeply visceral and enduring anti-Black roots. Therefore, the very act of arrest, trial, and imprisonment, as masculinist and heteropatriarchal sites of racial captivity perpetuate and embody misogynoir like no other institutions could, today. This necessitates a total dismantling of these institutions if Black women - across all gender and sexuality spectrums - who live and die at the intersections of misogyny, racism, and heterocentrism are to be free. The criminal legal system is in place to facilitate the civil, mental, geospatial, and physical death of those considered to be society’s undesirables. A system predicated on the destruction of life cannot be trusted to protect life. Calling upon Black Feminist Hauntology (Saleh-Hanna, 2015), I present the criminal ‘justice’ system as the body of an abusive, necropolitical Powermonger that must cease to exist through complete dismemberment for Black women and femmes, and therefore all of humanity, to gain freedom from the carceral state.

Author

• Toniqua C. Mikell, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth