Week 3. Trans Justice

Text by Elliot Richardson

For this discussion the group read Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment in the Prison Industrial Complex, a group of essays Edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith. These essays invoked a robust discussion on how to create abolitionist activist spaces which are sustainable and empower people to collaborate with one another. One of the core ideas of this text is to focus on the “possibility of the impossibility”, encouraging abolitionists to imagine a world in which prisons are not needed, a task which conventional society has deemed “impossible”. This concept opened up a discussion on “what does an abolitionist space actually look like?” In attempting to flesh out this idea, one of the participants brought up that an abolitionist space should evoke some component of joy, as it is essential to the act of imagining the possibility of a future in which trans bodies no longer belong to the carceral state. Another participant noted that to create this joy one needed to create empowerment through connection with one another under the common goal of achieving abolition. The conversation then turned to discussing existing power structures, such as the nonprofit industrial complex, which is often not a viable tool for abolition as it relies on upholding the economic systems which they claim to dismantle. One participant, however, warned against making perfect the enemy of the good in terms of creating this abolitionist space, noting that although it is important to be mindful of the powers at play, an abolitionist space will never truly be “perfect”. Dr. Susan Stryker interjected with stories of the joy that resulted from creating abolitionist efforts as relates to Compton’s Cafeteria and that the creation of these events, within itself, created a sense of empowerment and imagination surrounding them. This was connected to the creation of this working group, noting that our presence here and engagement in this conversation is a component of the creation of an abolitionist space at the Compton’s site. We ended the conversation by outlining steps we would like to take to be more collaborative and inclusive with stakeholders as we continue with this project.