Moving Towards Abolitionist Futures of Kinship and Care in Domestic Violence Services

• In Event: To Heal and Care Amidst State Violence: Theorizing Kinship from Alternate Spaces

Abstract

The figure of the criminalized immigrant/undocumented mother domestic violence survivor will be the entry point from which to interrogate how survivors are interpellated by the U.S. imperial state via the prison industrial complex, the criminal legal system, immigration detention centers, institutions such as Child Protective Services, and the nonprofit domestic violence shelter system. If we seriously consider this criminalized survivor figure as a critical epistemological site, what can the survivor figure teach us about the state and about what alternative futures abolition can lead us to? What new modes of relationship and kinship and care become possible when abolition is a guiding praxis and is the center of domestic violence work? This paper will draw from previous scholarship on abolition, such as Abolition Feminisms Vol. 2: Feminist Ruptures against the Carceral State and the ongoing work of the coalition Survived and Punished, to explore the following questions: How can abolition as praxis facilitate new sites of relationship? What networks of kinship, care, and even love are possible and yet to be imagined amidst the constant crises of gender based violence, mass incarceration, deportation, and family policing. In addition, this paper will aim to explore how survivors form their own (informal) networks of care, kinship, survival, mutual aid, etc. within and outside of the eyes of the state. It is becoming ever more urgent to think collectively and deeply about how abolition praxis can provide alternative sites and modes of relationship that do not rely on the disposability logics of the carceral state and that do not reproduce the violences we seek to uproot.

Author

• Linda Zhang, University of California-Los Angeles