Abolition Feminisms Vol. 2: Feminist Ruptures against the Carceral State

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    Alisa Bierria, Jakeya Caruthers, Brooke Lober (eds.)

    Publisher: Haymarket Books

    Year: 2022

    Format: Paperback

    Size: 328 pages

    ISBN: 9781642598452

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In this expansive companion to Abolition Feminisms Vol. I, contributors confront multiple paradigms of punitivity—the foundational logics of family, borders, heterosexuality, colonial violence, and more—to disengage us from root systems of carcerality. 

The book transcends various modes and forms: through grassroots praxis, critical research, storytelling, diagrams, poetry, and visual art, these pieces build on the legacies of feminist thinkers who formulated abolitionist critiques of policing, surveillance, and control. The resulting framework provides readers with the resources to cultivate and inhabit a post-carceral world of radical freedom and possibility. 

What People Are Saying

“This essential two-volume collection maps the shared roots between abolitionist life-making and feminist resistance, showing us how rebellious organizing and radical care is always at the heart of real change. Brimming with dispatches across borders and prison walls, archives of movement building, and striking creative work, Abolition Feminisms describes a breathtaking body of freedom practices, galvanizing us to do everything we can to help forge the liberatory future that we urgently need. Anyone who engages this collection is guaranteed to learn something new.” Mariame Kaba, author of We Do This ‘Til We Free Us

“This beautiful two volume collection of essays, poems, and artwork brings a refreshing vibrancy to the radical work of Abolition Feminism. Inspiring, accessible and far-reaching, the books are precisely what is needed right now; clear demands for radical change, reflections on the power of radical organizing, and radical statements of hope. Readers will be lifted up as they turn the pages, where each entry is a reminder of how abolition feminism is critical to freedom struggles, and our movement will therefore be challenged and changed.” Beth E. Richie, co-author of Abolition. Feminism. Now.

“Contrary to popular belief, revolutions don’t come with handbooks or blueprints. They do carry histories, memories, manifestos, maps, moments of clarity and deep contradictions, dreams, principles, and real people who endure the oppressions they are seeking to overturn. This extraordinary collective of activists, artists, and scholars understand that this is what revolutions are made of, and that through study and struggle we see Abolition feminism not as a variant or a tendency within some larger liberatory movement but the revolution we need to genuinely overturn things.” Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“Abolition Feminisms: Organizing, Survival & Transformative Practice upend feminism’s relegation to an afterthought or appendage of abolition and urges us toward social arrangements defined by caring collectively. Perhaps one of the most exquisite volumes on abolition feminism to date, this gathering of essays, dispatches, art, and poetry features a constellation of vibrant theorists including those who have been criminalized and imprisoned. Abolition Feminisms offers original insights into the everyday terror and annihilating deprivation facing people inside women’s prisons, the work of imprisoned people to challenge gender and sexual oppression, the structuring role of gender violence to the logic and technologies of the carceral state, the nexus of imperial and domestic modes of repression, the carceral production of gender and sexual normativity, settler colonial and antiblack carceral violence and more. Bierria, Caruthers, and Lober effectively establish abolition’s feminist provenance in an utterly brilliant account of abolition feminism’s decolonial heart, intimate practice, and radical momentum. This collection will be an instant classic in feminist and queer of color critique.” Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity

“The creative, political, intellectual interventions in this book, with their deeply intersectional locations of study and methods of analysis, fuel our ongoing work to understand what we are taking apart and to tear it down fully, once and for all. These articles, poems, and images also provide the warm, inviting entry points we need to imagine how bold, risky, ordinary work done by brave, ordinary people is the only path for building a world in which it is impossible for anyone to put anyone in a cage.” Dean Spade, from the foreword

Table of Contents
(Titles in quotes are poetry or visual art.)
  • Foreword
    Andrea J. Ritchie
  • Introduction: Making a Clearing
    Alisa Bierria, Jakeya Caruthers, & Brooke Lober


PART 1: DISMANTLING CARCERAL INTIMACIES

  • ACAB Means Abolishing the Cop in Our Heads, Hearts, and Homes: An Intergenerational Demand for Family Abolition
    Tamara Lea Spira, Dayjha McMillan, Madi Stapleton, and Verónica N. Vélez
  • "Purgatorio"
    Shellyne Rodriguez
  • State-Sanctioned Suicides and Life-Making Resistance in Carceral Contexts
    Colby Lenz
  • Beyond #StopAsianHate: Criminalization, Gender, and Asian Abolition Feminism
    Edited and introduced by Hyejin Shim, participants also include Stephanie Cho, Yves Tong Nguyen, Ny Nourn, and Connie Wun
  • "Protect Celeste Guap"
    Inés Ixierda
  • “All Canned Foods Are Expired but Still Edible”: A Critique of Anti-Violence Advocacy and the Perpetuation of Antiblackness
    Romina Garcia
  • "Aunt Hester’s Scream"
    kai lumumba barrow
  • Stay Connected at All Costs
    Alisha Walker in conversation with Red Schulte
  • "when he dies"
    Jasmine Tabor


PART 2: REFUSING REFORM, RESISTING CAPTIVITY
  • "The Precarity of Crossing, SOIL Project"
    Shana M. griffin
  • Domestic Terror: Women’s Prisons and Assata Shakur’s Abolitionist Refusal
    Jess Issacharoff
  • "From a knife"
    Yola
  • Bad Apples, Rotted Roots, and the Three Rs of Reformist Reforms
    Ren-yo Hwang
  • Refusing the Value of Immigrant Fear: An Abolitionist Feminist Critique of Sanctuary by Police
    Lee Ann S. Wang
  • "Controlled Burns" Molly Costello
  • Social Work and the Partner Assault Response Program: A Critical Pathology Report
    Rosalie Donaldson-Kronenbuerger and Mark Mullkoff
  • Prison is Not Feminist, Service is Not Liberation: Punishment, Service, and a Web of Detainment
    Kayla Marie Martensen


PART 3: MAKING A CLEARING
  • "No Cops on Stolen Land"
    Summer-Harmony Twenish
  • A Letter for Darnella Frazier: A Black Feminist Abolition Map of the Forgotten
    Whitney Richards-Calathes
  • Radical Mothering for the Purposes of Abolition
    Nadine Naber, Johnaé Strong, and Souzan Naser
  • "All Incarceration Is Family Separation"
    Mon M
  • Teaching Abolitionist Praxis in the Everyday
    Qui Alexander
  • Tools for Building Dream Worlds That Serve Us: A Review of Fumbling Towards Repair by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan
    Xhercis Méndez
  • "seachange"
    Tabitha Arnold

Tags: abolition ....... Alisa Bierria ....... Andrea Ritchie ....... Brooke Lober ....... Cece McDonald ....... Erica R. Meiners ....... feminism ....... Haymarket Books ....... Jakeya Caruthers ....... Prisoners & Prisons ....... Victoria Law .......