Abolition Feminisms Vol. 1: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice

This groundbreaking anthology engages the theme of abolition feminisms, a political tradition grounded in radical anti-violence organizing, Black feminist and feminist of color rebellion, survivor knowledge production, strategies devised inside and across prison walls, and a full, fierce refusal of race-gender pathology and punitive control. This analysis disrupts the politics of carceral feminism as conversations about the ramifications of the prison-industrial complex continue.

Contributors include: molly ackhurst, Anne-lise Ah-fat, Asantewaa Boykin, Melanie Brazzell, Lauren Caulfield, Esmat Elhalaby, Christine Finley, Joseph Hankins, Whess Harman, April Harris, Eileen Jimenez, Lacey Johnson, Mimi Kim, Victoria Law, Tabitha Lean, Colby Lenz, Shirley Leslie, Meenakshi Mannoe, Cece McDonald, Erica R. Meiners, Kelsey Mohamed, Nadine Naber, Gloria A. Negrete-Lopez, Ky Peterson, Minh-Ha T. Pham, Amanda Priebe, Romarilyn Ralston, Clarissa Rojas, Samah Saleh, Tina Shull, dean spade, Ash Stephens, Vanessa Eileen Thompson, Emily L. Thuma, and Jana Traboulsi.

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