"The Queer Queers": Returning to the Radical Roots of Queer Liberation through Prison Abolition
| dc.contributor.advisor | Gash, Alison | |
| dc.contributor.author | Francisco, Nicole | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2021-04-29T15:01:33Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2021-04-29T15:01:33Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2021-04-29 | |
| dc.description.abstract | As a phenomenological inquiry, this project is first and foremost concerned with human experiences of incarceration, queerness, and the lifeworlds that grow up in the overlay. I extend Kendall Thomas’ contention that antisodomy laws legitimize homophobic violence to say that even after their renunciation, antiqueer laws have a resonant effect and continue to legitimize antiqueer violence. Through the narrative of Jason Lydon, Black and Pink’s founder, this dissertation seeks to understand the worldmaking project of Black and Pink. Black and Pink produces an interstitial politics, growing up through the cracks between the criminal justice movement, which fails to engage queers in their fight for carceral justice, and the mainstream LGBTQ movement, which neglects queer prisoners in their fight for queer liberation. Through letter correspondence and a newspaper publication, Black and Pink members inside and outside of prison connect with each other, forging survival relationships and survival community, to respond to threats to queer survival. In a society that assumes state punitive mechanisms as necessary, Black and Pink offers a different path toward survival. Through joining concepts of Dean Spade’s mutual aid and adrienne maree brown’s emergent strategy, and employing them as social movement theory, I demonstrate how the intimate bonds between Black and Pink members cultivate connective action. Black and Pink is a complex organization working to confront carceral antiqueer violence on the micro, mezzo, and macro levels. Black and Pink produces a “fugitive” knowledge that serves as empirical evidence implicating the state as a major thread to queer survival. The stories authored by queer prisoners reveal that systems-based approaches for mitigating harm and violence not only fail to do so, but are exploited and produce altogether new antiqueer violence. When we name the violence of prisons as state-sanctioned homophobia and transphobia, it becomes imperative for queer movements to recognize that it does not make sense to seek remedy from these institutions that are themselves foundries of queer violence. Ultimately, I understand Black and Pink as a project of survival which arrives at abolition through an embodied course. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/26204 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | |
| dc.subject | LGBT | en_US |
| dc.subject | penpals | en_US |
| dc.subject | prison abolition | en_US |
| dc.subject | queer | en_US |
| dc.subject | sexual violence | en_US |
| dc.subject | social movement | en_US |
| dc.title | "The Queer Queers": Returning to the Radical Roots of Queer Liberation through Prison Abolition | |
| dc.type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Department of Political Science | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Oregon | |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph.D. |
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