Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Khalilah L. Brown-Dean (Quinnipac University)  — “Fighting From a Powerless Space: Women of Color in the U.S. Criminal Justice System”

The last two decades have witnessed a concerted effort to denounce the undeniable racial disparities resulting from America’s addiction to punishment. I argue, however, that it’s necessary to address the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and hyperincarceration. Women of color in the United States are arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated at a rate that far exceeds their share of the population. I introduce the concept of “authentic power” to interrogate a policy space that systematically devalues the lives of women of color and, in turn, challenges traditional notions of feminist leadership.

Khalilah L. Brown-Dean is Associate Professor of Political Science at Quinnipiac University and a collaborator with the QU Prison Project. Her work stands at the intersection of law, politics, pop culture, and public policy. She is featured in the documentaries The Color of Justiceand Extinction and received the 2017 Game Changer Award in Public Safety and Criminal Justice. She has authored numerous academic and popular pieces on topics such as felon disenfranchisement, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the death penalty, the politics of mental health, and American elections. Her forthcoming book from Polity Press is entitled, Identity Politics in the United States: Context and Controversy.

Liat Ben-Moshe (University of Illinois, Chicago) – “Not in Our Name: Carceral Ableism/ Carceral Feminism”

Disability and madness are largely missing from analysis of incarceration and its resistance. When disability or madness are present they are conceived as a deficit, something in need of correction (medically/psychiatrically or by the correction industry).

It is often said that people with various mental differences, disabilities and substance users who are caught in the criminal injustice system need medical help and treatment and not incarceration. But repeatedly what is touted as treatment is no less coercive and normalizing. In addition, today, disability and mental health are used as justification for prison and jail expansion. I will discuss such ‘alternatives’ through the frame of what I call carceral ableism and sanism. This presentation will demonstrate that disability and mental difference are not (only) medical conditions but the basis of social movements with deep histories of oppression and resistance. I will use deinstitutionalization as one such example. 

Liat Ben-Mosheis an Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her upcoming book “Politics of (En)Closure” examines the connections between prison abolition, disability and deinstitutionalization in the U.S. (forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press). Dr. Ben-Moshe is the co-editor (with Allison Carey and Chris Chapman) of Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (Palgrave 2014). She is an activist/scholar who has worked and published on such topics as deinstitutionalization and incarceration; prison abolition; disability, anti-capitalism and queerness; inclusive pedagogy and disability culture; and disability in Israel/Palestine.

Lena Palacios (University of Minnesota) – “Teaching against the Grain of Carceral Common Sense in White-Dominant Feminist Studies Classrooms”

How can Indigenous and/or race-radical feminist activist-scholars learn and teach about counter-carceral logics and prison abolition in white-dominant feminist studies classrooms embedded within white settler, neoliberal universities in ways that produce countercarceral knowledges? Rather than share ready-made, clear-cut strategies or solutions for teaching and learning prison abolition “the right way,” I discuss how the “felt theory” (Million 2009) and activist-scholarship of Indigenous feminist and race-radical women of color feminist formations have offered us a pedagogical roadmap that: 1) denaturalizes white settler colonialism, carceral feminisms, and their genealogies; 2) challenges a liberal politics of visibility, inclusion, and recognition that is complicit in upholding carceral logics; and 3) models an affective economy in stark opposition to that proffered by the carceral, settler state. Since, as Indigenous feminist Dian Million reminds us, “we dance in a politically electrified field most of our lives” (2011, 316), teaching/learning abolition necessitates that we critically examine our investments in upholding carceral logics of innocence/guilt, in denying the motivating role of fear, shame, trauma, and social rejection in our lives and activism, and in retreating back into the comfortable embrace of an individuated “purity politics” (Shotwell 2016) that mistakenly believes that there is a demarcated and pure “outside” to the current system. Lastly, I meditate on what it means to—as Gloria Hull and Barbara Smith (1982) wrote in their manifesto for Black women’s studies—“maintain a constantly militant and critical stance toward the place where we must do our work.”

Lena Palacios is an Assistant Professor in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Lena’s research and teaching focuses on critical prison studies, Black, Indigenous, Chicana/Latina queer and trans feminisms, girls’ and girlhood studies, transformative justice and community accountability, media justice, and youth-led participatory action research. Lena is working on a manuscript that puts Indigenous, Black, Trans and Two-Spirit peoples, their ideas and lives into conversation, as well as adds to the raging debates about the nature of the settler colonial and carceral state projects in both the United States and Canada.