The Queer Prison Abolitionist Movement

It would be misguided to discuss queer prison abolitionist movements without first thoroughly examining the place of the prison system in the neoliberal imperial project of enemy production (both inside and outside the boundaries of the state). The contemporaneous production of exterior and interior enemies (terrorists and criminals respectively), movement toward and legislation for ostensible (and, importantly, homonormative) queer “equality,” the criminalization of radical activism through increased surveillance, torture, disappearance, and imprisonment, and the exponential growth in the transnationally funded prison system is symptomatic of what, in the article “Intimate Investments,” Anna M. Agathangelou, M. Daniel Bassichis, and Tamara L. Spira deem the “imperial project(s) of promise and nonpromise” (Agathangelou, Bassichis, and Spira 120). Agathangelou, Bassichis, and Spira argue that, inherently a part of empire’s promises to some groups of safety and inclusion in global capitalism is a process of othering by which other groups are constructed as “enemy others,” and by which yet other groups are rendered “‘other Others’ whose life and death do not even merit mention or attention” (123). At the heart of this process lies the imperialist drive to establish and protect the new world order via what M. Jacqui Alexander deems the process of “incorporation and quarantining” (Alexander qtd. in Agathangelou, Bassichis, and Spira 127). This process serves the imperialist ends of militarization by constructing “enemies” which must be contained and/or killed; it also provides a backdrop against which newly legitimized homonormative queer identities can be conceptualized. In other words, by creating classes of racially sexualized...

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