Neoliberal Care as Punishment: Abolition Feminist Interrogations of the “Benevolent” Carceral State

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel is based on a forthcoming special issue titled, Neoliberal Care as Punishment: Abolition Feminist Interrogations of the “Benevolent” Carceral State. This collection of papers explores the question of community and state funded care within a carceral state. During a time of mass criminal legal system reform, innovative frames to examine punishment are necessary to uncover how reforms continue the cycle of disposing people. This panel brings together scholarship that examines emerging interventions in carceral systems that rely on partnerships between carceral institutions and other benevolent “caring” formations. It will expand upon what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “police humanitarianism,” and what Ren-Yo Hwang calls “carceral care” in reference to reforms, programs, interventions, placements, and other forms of state funded so-called care that ultimately discipline and manage marginalized communities, under the guise of care. Sites that this panel will critically engage include juvenile justice reforms, foster care, after school programs, group homes, and therapeutic alternatives to punishment. Across these diverse topics and contexts, authors will explore how community-based and/or state mandated efforts to “help” systems-impacted people, often result in an expanding system of punishment, surveillance, control, and policing. In doing so, each of the included papers also offer a reflection on the theoretical and empirical affordances of carceral care as a lens through which we can study punishment. This special issue and panel will bring to task the carceral answers the state offers to the ongoing crises of racial and gendered capitalism by asking: what are the boundaries between helping and harming? What distinguishes care from control? How is “care” co-opted by the state to expand carceral practices that target vulnerable communities?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• The Criminalization of Trauma: Trauma-Informed Juvenile Justice Reforms as a project of Carceral Expansion - Kayla Martensen

• A Space of Our Own: Refusal, Surveillance, and a Black Girl Sense of Place - Amoni Miriam Thompson, University of California-Santa Barbara

• “Caring” Institutions Enacting Colonial and Gendered Violence toward Young Women of Color - Joana Chavez

• Carcerality and Care: Interrogating the State as Caretaker of Latina Girls in Foster Care - Isabella C. Restrepo, University of California, San Diego

• Framing the “Loka”: Uncovering the Psychotic Veil from “Care” and “Safety” - Katherine Maldonado, University of Utah

Chair

• Irene Franco Rubio, University of California-Berkeley

Biographical Information

Joana Chavez is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar from the Inland Empire, and a PhD candidate in the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research interests include Chicana/Latina history, gender and sexuality, carceral studies, archives, and testimonios. Her research analyzes gendered carceral spaces and uses testimonios to uplift young women of color’s voices in these spaces. Joana is a community archivist for the Million Dollar Hoods Project- a multidisciplinary and community-engaged initiative that aims to document the human and fiscal costs of mass incarceration in the greater Los Angeles region.

Katherine Maldonado Fabela, Ph.D., is from South Central Los Angeles and holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include critical criminology, health, inequalities, and visual methodology. Her current book project examines the experiences of Latina/Chicana mothers within the carceral system, focusing on their interactions with the child welfare system. The study highlights the violence and grief these mothers face, the impact on their mental health, and mechanisms of recovery and healing through motherwork strategies.

Kayla Marie Martensen (she/her) is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminology at the University of New Mexico. Kayla’s areas of expertise include critical carceral studies, abolition, state violence, and the juvenile legal system. She has authored and co-authored several publications related to these areas, including contributions to gender, ethnicity, and juvenile justice. Her current research on community-based juvenile justice reforms in Chicago proposes an emerging theoretical framework, the web of detainment, to illustrate the collaboration between juvenile justice and the community-based service sector as a representation of the broader collusion between the carceral and social welfare states. Kayla is a qualitative researcher who uses abolition feminism as a methodological and empirical framework in search of liberatory knowledge production. Kayla was previously a postdoctoral scholar in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at Oregon State University, working under an NSF-funded ADVANCE grant. Kayla’s interest in academia as a first-gen Mestiza (mixed race Filipina) from Chicago is rooted in scholarship as an act of resistance. However, she remains inquisitive about the ways academia continues to serve as an arm of the carceral state.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Isabella C. Restrepo (she/they) is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research analyzes the criminalization of California’s Latina girls in foster care. Their work theorizes at the intersections of feminist abolition studies and girlhood studies to argue that the foster care system is an extension of the carceral state that utilizes carceral tactics against racialized youth. A UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Ethnic Studies department at UC San Diego, Restrepo’s research offers a critical lens that excavates the criminalization and pathologization that is inherent in the foster care system and centers the experiences of racialized Latina foster girls with carceral tools like behavioral diagnosis and mandated services. In addition to her academic work, Restrepo leverages their research through workshops for mental health workers to help them understand their roles in expanding the reach of the carceral state for the criminalized youth they work with. The ethos of this work centers around the question: how can clinicians and mental health workers minimize the harm caused by an inherently harmful system?

Amoni Thompson (she/her pronouns) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her dissertation explores what Black girls’ visual and material cultures might teach us about the value of the interior, self-possession, and Black spatial practices. Her work has been published in The Black Girlhood Studies Collection: Imagining Worlds for Black Girls, becoming undisciplined: an academic zine, and the Journal of Visual Arts Research.