Against Carceral Feminisms, Toward Abolitionist Futures

This forum features a range of works by poets and artists, students and teachers, and scholars and activists interrogating carceral feminisms while teasing out the contours of abolitionist futures in and beyond communication studies. “Carceral feminisms” describe a broad swath of feminist responses that draw on carceral structures and mechanisms (e.g., policing, prosecution, imprisonment) to resolve issues of gendered and sexualized violence (Law, 2014; Terwiel, 2020). Bernstein (2007) advanced the term to describe a cross-section of secular feminists working in concert with evangelical Christian activists to combat sex trafficking. Carceral feminists, Bernstein argues, “drift from the welfare to the carceral state as the enforcement apparatus for feminist goals” (p. 143). To accomplish those goals, carceral feminists have passed legislation making anti-trafficking education mandatory for particular job roles (e.g., hotel staff, truck drivers), pairing up with local police to coordinate sting operations that target presumed traffickers, and/or launched broad campaigns that encourage public surveillance and reporting of suspicious activity, for example. One of the consequences of these efforts is the heightened surveillance of sex workers, who are rhetorically framed by carceral feminists as likewise victims in need of saving. Another consequence includes the collective policing of racialized and gendered others who might be suspected of trafficking or being trafficked (Hill, 2018; Fukushima, Hill, & Suchland, 2021). Both consequences place minoritized folks in the hands of the police under the rhetorical auspices of protection.

Feminists aren’t alone in their carceral responses to violence; we have seen a similar increase in what Lamble (2014) terms “queer investments in punishment” to resolve violence against queer and trans folks (p. 151). Queer investments in punishment are made especially evident in hate crimes legislation, which ultimately increases punitive measures for those who enact violence rather than increasing community-building efforts, for example, designed to decrease discrimination and violence. Regardless of the particularity, carceral responses to violence prioritize punishing perpetrators over supporting survivor, victim, and/or community healing efforts e.g. do away with the bad guys, dismiss healing. However, feminist and queer abolitionists have long cautioned against carceral responses to violence showing how carceral structures are themselves constituted in and secured through violence; and that carceral violence especially falls on and adversely impacts Black, Indigenous, and other folks of color at the intersections of difference. In the place of carcerality, feminist and queer abolitionists have advocated for community-based justice mechanisms including restorative justice and/or transformative justice projects, for examples. While restorative and transformative justice frameworks seek alternatives to punitive measures, they differ in their approach to addressing violence. Broadly, restorative justice projects work within the existing punitive structure to focus on repairing harm caused by violent behavior through processes that involve multiple stakeholders including the survivor or victim, the offender, and the community writ large, with the aim of restoring relationships and addressing the underlying causes of the violence. Conversely, transformative justice approaches extend beyond the immediate parties involved in an act of violence and they aim to address and transform the broader cultural propensities that contribute to violence and harm. Transformative justice seeks to challenge societal norms and hegemonic power relations that perpetuate violence and works to create new systems that foster individual and collective well-being (Subramanian & Sharma, 2022; Hsu, 2019). Both approaches reject punitive measures while transformative justice frameworks labor toward more radical ends in that it seeks to fundamentally alter how we understand notions of justice at all.

Feminist communication scholars are uniquely poised to interrogate these carceral responses for what they are: communicative investitures in a patriarchal structure designed to deal with individualized bad guys as opposed to investing in community-building efforts, including restorative, transformative, or other justice programs that do not rely on punitive measures to resolve structural issues that are in fact better engaged in a community of committed feminists, allies, and accomplices. To that end, and to borrow from Davis (2003), my hope is that this Conversation and Commentary forum supports feminist communication educators and scholars committed to (or interested in developing their commitment to) abolitionism to “imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society” (p. 107). As a final brief comment, I want to caution against a binarized notion of carceral/non-carceral responses to gendered and sexualized violence. Terwiel (2020) advances an important “spectrum of decarceration” that gets at the processual labor constitutive of abolitionist futures—futures that are collaboratively forged in the perpetual transformation of self in service of collective liberation. Those transformative possibilities begin in our approach to research, to teaching, and to assumptions about community-building efforts beyond the status quo.

The forum opens with a collaboratively penned essay by Logan Gomez, Matthew Houdek, and Robert Mejia entitled “A Rhetoric that Breathes, a Rhetoric that Heals: In/coherence, Storytelling, and Abolitionist Futures.” In this powerful piece, Houdek, Mejia, and Gomez outline a radical politics of breath through storytelling efforts that open as-yet unknown horizons. At least two communication journals will feature abolitionist work this year in addition to this forum. Gomez, Houdek, and Mejia are co-editing a special issue of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture entitled “Rhetoric and the Abolitionist Horizon: Endings, Openings, Ruptures, Beginnings” due out later this year. In addition, Amber Kelsie and Omedi Ochieng are co-editing a special issue of Quarterly Journal of Speech entitled “Abolitionist Rhetorics” due out later this year. Keep your senses open for these forthcoming issues—and our continued conversation!

Next, Michael Tristano, Jr. pens a letter of reflection—both to a younger version of himself and to those hopeful abolitionist educators entering the Gender and Communication classroom—with the intent of supporting early educators in forging an abolitionist politic constitutive of feminist teaching. We are thrilled to also feature a collaborative work penned by former student members of USC Abolition, an abolitionist collective that worked to decarcerate their private university campus. In their two-part contribution to the forum, the co-authors first reflect on the efficacy of zine making as feminist abolitionist praxis in their essay “No Longer Filed Away: Abolition, Sexual Violence, and Zine-Making Against the University,” particularly as a collaborative means of collecting and circulating critical information about institutional (non) responses to sexual violence in addition to sharing local support resources for students. In addition to the member essay, USC Abolition has given us permission to include the fourth issue of their zine entitled “No Longer Filed Away: Abolition, Sexual Violence, and the University” as a supplemental online appendix to their article (and described in their essay). My/our hope is that sharing the zine coupled with the written reflection might likewise inspire students, teachers, and scholars alike to communicate about the carceral dimensions animating local schooling contexts—and to organize in service of communal care and support, be it in the form of a zine or otherwise. Then, Meggie Mapes articulates radical self-disclosure as a method of abolition and in tension with liberal feminist framings that utilize self-disclosure, especially of experiences with violence, as a tool of the carceral state. By centering reflexive self-implicature as constitutive of radical self-disclosure, Mapes argues for an abolitionist feminist politic that interrogates mundane complacencies in hegemonic power relations with the intent of transforming those complacencies into abolitionist efforts.

Closing the forum is a curated collection of poems by Sean Avery Medlin entitled “The UnFree Echo, Toward Anti-Carceral Poetics.” I first encountered Medlin on the stage, where they performed their original solo hip-hop album “skinnyblk” at the Empty Space in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University in 2019. Since then, our paths have crossed at various community events and as we have moved through and with abolitionist organizations in Arizona. Medlin is a rapper, poet, organizer, and teaching artist based in Phoenix, Arizona. Their work integrates music, literature, and theater to question the limits of Black masculinity, media (mis)representation, and personal narrative and they presently serve as the Writer-in-Residence at Tempe Public Library where they facilitate writing classes for the Arizona public. Following the poetics is a brief transcribed interview exchange between Medlin and myself—in this interview, we discuss Medlin’s approach to poetry as well as the formatting choices they make in their creative works and as they pertain to abolitionist futures.