Protecting Protection and the Criminality of Failure: Incarcerated Belongings and ‘Failure to Protect’ Laws

• In Event: Resisting the Containment and Control of the Carceral State

Abstract

Focusing on the women of color detained under “failure to protect” laws in the US, I point toward the institutionalized violence embedded in the settler logics of protection. Drawing from Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of intimate terrorism and physical and metaphorical borders, I explore how the white, heteropatriarchal family centers the violent logic of protecting the state against non-domestic and domestic deviance. Adding to Angela Davis’s urgent call that we recognize the “secret prisons” within our own borders, I outline a decolonial feminist approach to thinking about the not-so-secret prisoners who failed to protect.

Presenter

• Megan Sibbett, University of Oklahoma