Eric A. Stanley

Nat Smith

A collection which represents years of struggle in the transgender, gender variant and queer liberation movements and the movement for the abolition of the prison industrial complex. Often discriminated against and harassed on the outside, time in prison can be especially difficult for this already marginalised group of people who may exist between the prison system's male/female institutions. Vulnerable to attack and often denied medical care or protection beyond segregation, they are often overlooked by mainstream rights campaigns.

Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex

Captive Genders

Johanna Burton

Tourmaline

Reina Gossett

The increasing representation of trans identity throughout art and popular culture in recent years has been nothing if not paradoxical. Trans visibility is touted as a sign of a liberal society, but it has coincided with a political moment marked both by heightened violence against trans people (especially trans women of color) and by the suppression of trans rights under civil law. 'Trap Door' grapples with these contradictions. The essays, conversations, and dossiers gathered here delve into themes as wide-ranging yet interconnected as beauty, performativity, activism, and police brutality. Collectively, they attest to how trans people are frequently offered "doors"--Entrances to visibility and recognition -- that are actually "traps, " accommodating trans bodies and communities only insofar as they cooperate with dominant norms. The volume speculates about a third term, perhaps uniquely suited for our time: the trapdoor, neither entrance nor exit, but a secret passageway leading elsewhere.

Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility

Trap Door

Eric A. Stanley examines the forms of violence levied against trans/queer and gender nonconforming people in the United States and shows how, despite the advances in LGBTQ rights in the recent past, forms of anti-trans/queer violence is central to liberal democracy and state power.

Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable

Atmospheres of Violence

"Captive Genders is an exciting assemblage of writings—analyses, manifestos, stories, interviews—that traverse the complicated entanglements of surveillance, policing, imprisonment, and the production of gender normativity. Focusing discerningly on the encounter of transpersons with the apparatuses that constitute the prison industrial complex, the contributors to this volume create new frameworks and new vocabularies that surely will have a transformative impact on the theories and practices of twenty-first century abolition." —Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz "The contributors to Captive Genders brilliantly shatter the assumption that the antidote to danger is human sacrifice. In other words, for these thinkers: where life is precious life is precious." —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California "Captive Genders is at once a scathing and necessary analysis of the prison industrial complex and a history of queer resistance to state tyranny. By analyzing the root causes of anti-queer and anti-trans violence, this book exposes the brutality of state control over queer/trans bodies inside and outside prison walls, and proposes an analytical framework for undoing not just the prison system, but its mechanisms of surveillance, dehumanization and containment. —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? Captive Genders was the first book of its kind. It remains the touchstone for studies of trans and gender-queer people in prison. It has been revamped to appeal to recent broadened interest. With a new Foreword by CeCe McDonald and essay by Chelsea Manning.

A Lambda Literary Award finalist, Captive Genders is a powerful tool against the prison industrial complex and for queer liberation. This expanded edition contains four new essays, including a foreword by CeCe McDonald and a new essay by Chelsea Manning. Eric Stanley is a postdoctoral fellow at UCSD. His writings appear in Social Text, American Quarterly, and Women and Performance, as well as various collections. Nat Smith works with Critical Resistance and the Trans/Variant and Intersex Justice Project. CeCe McDonald was unjustly incarcerated after fatally stabbing a transphobic attacker in 2011. She was released in 2014 after serving nineteen months for second-degree manslaughter.

Eric A. Stanley

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