“It is not enough to just be urgent and in opposition to state violence but uncritically practice it through exclusion, alienation, sexism, ableism, transphobia, and homophobia and a racist politic of policing authenticity. Prefigurative politics really resonated with me, meaning I wanted the work I did to prefigure the world or communities I wanted to live in.”

-Reina Gossett from Captive Genders (329)

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex contributes to the emergent surge of U.S. based transgender cultural critique over the first decades of the 21^st century. In conversation with monographs by Susan Stryker, Kate Bornstein, J. Jack Halberstam, Judith Butler, David Valentine, Gayle Salaman, Dean Spade, Micha Cárdenas, Kale Bantigue Fajardo, and Mel Y. Chen, edited anthologies such as the Transgender Studies Reader (with a second volume upcoming), Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Trans/Love: Radical Sex, Love & Relationships Beyond the Gender Binary, and Trans Bodies, Trans Selves (forthcoming), and an expanding trans-media network including work by Yozmit, Ignacio Rivera, Kit Yan, Wu Tsang, Felix Endara, Shawna Virago, Sean Dorsey, and the Electronic Disturbance Theater, the collection of texts that is Captive Genders produces critical interventions assembled around embodied transgender, gender deviant, and queer experiences. These interlinked works share a marked shift towards transgender and gender non-conformant bodies as material interfaces with social regimes of gender and sexual control. But to interpret these pieces together as “emergent” is to already discipline their divergent workings and our interaction with them. These transgender and gender deviant interventions are increasing self-aware of the specificities of their mediums and their networked capabilities, whether they are print book, embodied performance, digital video, cell phone video, online installation, or electronic disturbance. And they depart from late 20^th century literary, cultural, and social theory that has tended to emphasize the representational economy of the public sphere—mediated by the linguistic sign—as the chosen field of inquiry and subversion. Therefore, they do not call for a politics of critical interpretation that would “read” an emergent subjectivity along a single plane of social history as much as they work through entanglements with, and transmissions of, the multiple times, spaces, and bodies subjected to the experience of so-called shared society and historical progress. Taking my cue from these transgender and gender devious works, this review of Captive Genders assembles, connects, transmits, and intensifies, rather than performing a critical interpretation.
 
Social movements for decolonization and racial, gender, sexual, and economic justice in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, in connection with social uprisings in Third World colonies and internationally, transformed the American public sphere to include communities segregated and subordinated by the apartheid U.S. state. People of color, civil rights, feminist, Third World, gay liberation, women of color/Third World feminist, leftist, and anti-war movements developed oppositional cultural practices as critical components of mobilizing against institutional white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, classism, homophobia, and heterosexism. These social mobilizations, therefore, did not only inject previously barred communities into the dominant public sphere, but also dismantled institutional public culture through the infusion of divergent, subordinated cultural imaginations. The flexibility and contingency attributed to the system of the sign by Euro-American post-Marxist intellectual and cultural movements after World War II, including postmodernism and poststructuralism, are indebted to the de-structuring of the representational economy of the public sphere by U.S. and Third World anti-colonial and social justice movements, as much as anti-fascist, anti-capitalist critical lineages in Europe and “new” postindustrial and neoliberal conditions. By the 1980s, the political and cultural transformations activated by 1960s/70s liberation movements began to be translated into niche political blocs, niche markets, and niche cultures. As highlighted by several pieces in Captive Genders, this moment of incorporation and backlash coincides with the moment when the penal system under the apartheid U.S. state expands into a booming prison industrial complex, at the edges of the “post”-apartheid American public sphere. The managed inclusion of previously excluded communities and cultural imaginations into the apparatuses of the U.S. state, including state sponsored cultural and economic industries, has had the effect of formalizing cultural and political activism into semi-technical skills and knowledge (including literary and cultural production and interpretation, 501(c)(3) community organizing, and legal and social advocacy) and severing cultural and political work from embodied communities. Also, regulated inclusion by the U.S. state has distanced marginally included, more resourced LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) people, immigrants, people of color, and women from less resourced and poorer segments of these communities, whose direct experience of the state’s administrative and penal systems is often not mediated by measured participation in the public sphere. The writings collected in Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith’s Captive Genders provide multi-vocal accounts of those segments of communities that have been forcibly denied access to the post-apartheid American public sphere. People of color, economically impoverished people, and people with scarce or no access to quality education, health care, and social services make up the vast majority of the nearly 2.3 million people currently incarcerated in U.S. state and federal prisons and local jails, according to the most recent records released by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2010. These numbers do not include those incarcerated and “detained” in U.S. territories, military facilities, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, jails in Native American lands, and juvenile facilities.¹ The mass number of people imprisoned and detained in U.S. prisons, jails, and facilities is bound to increase with the Obama administration’s implementation of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Presently, African American people comprise 12.6 % of the national population, compared to 38% of the U.S. federal or state prison population. White people comprise 72.4% of the national population, compared to 32% of the prison population. Latino/a people comprise 16.3% of the national population, compared to 22% of the prison population. U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics 2010 prisoner reports do not count Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Asians, and people identifying as two or more races in the prison population separately or explicitly. By deduction, these people together make up 7.3% of the prison population, while together comprising 8.8% of the national population.² Although females comprise 7% of the federal and state prisoner population, compared to the 93% male prison population, women make up one of the fastest growing populations in prisons.³ People in prison are predominantly from low-income backgrounds, lacking in educational and economic opportunities. Most are unemployed or under-employed prior to incarceration, do not have high school diplomas, read English below a sixth grade level, and have a history of drug addiction and/or mental illness.⁴
 
There is no official count of self-identified transgender, gender non-conforming, and queer people in prisons and jails. As highlighted in the Sylvia Rivera Law Project’s 2007 Report on the Treatment of Transgender and Intersex People in New York State Men’s Prisons, transgender and gender non-conforming adults and youth experience high rates of systemic discrimination (housing, employment, healthcare, education, public benefits, and social services) and poverty, which contribute to heightened vulnerability to police profiling and brutality and imprisonment. As many of the contributors to Captive Genders point out, transgender and gender non-conforming people are illegible within a rigorously enforced binary gender prison system. The penal legal and prison system assigns prisoners to gender-based prison housing (male versus female prisons) based on prisoners’ genitalia, rather than prisoners’ self-determination, thereby exposing transgender and gender deviant prisoners to targeted policing and abuse. And binary gender prison standards often produce the conflation of trans- and non-conforming gender presentation with homosexuality and HIV positive status—all of which are targets for segregation, administrative isolation, harassment, surveillance, and violence by prison staff and other inmates.
 
The U.S. currently imprisons more people (in total number and per capita) than any other country in the world, including Russia, China, and Iran.⁵ The number of people incarcerated in the U.S. began to skyrocket in the mid-1970s with “tough on crime” policies that included mandated minimum sentencing for drug related offenses. These new policies ran counter to stable, if not diminishing, crime rates and the prevailing public perception that drug addiction was a public health, rather than a criminal court, problem (Schlosser). In 1972, there were fewer than 200,000 people incarcerated in federal and state prisons, in contrast to today’s 2.3 million prisoners.⁶ The nesting of government and private business interests—the prison industrial complex—that was consolidated in the passing of the Rockefeller drug laws in New York in 1973 and then nationalized in the 1980s by the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs, has produced a booming, state subsidized industry that in 2007 drew $228 billion in U.S. federal, state, and local government funding for policing, corrections, and judicial and legal services nationwide and $7.7 billion from California’s state funds alone for prison construction.⁷ But, as the assembly of voices in Captive Genders suggests, the prison industrial complex is much more than a network of interests that can be put in check with reform and regulation. Its existence and continued expansion depend on the normalization of imprisonment, state violence and policing, and criminalization as common-sense solutions to the social problems of poverty, unequal access to quality employment, housing, education, health care, and social services, the de-industrialization of the economy through corporate globalization, and systemic racism, classism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, and sexism. The normalization of the prison industrial complex essentially produces a mass penal colony of segregated, confined, and incapacitated people as the common-sense counterpart to the “free” public sphere.
 
Stanley and Smith’s Captive Genders addresses the specific impact of the prison industrial complex on transgender, gender variant, and queer lives. Together, the writings in this collection argue for the interdependency of contemporary struggles for prison abolition and transgender and queer liberation. Moving beyond the memorializing of the 1969 New York City Stonewall Riots as the inception of the gay liberation movement, the book’s opening texts introduce a vast, unofficial archive of transgender and queer opposition to state violence and criminalization. Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade give a living record of the radical lineage of transgender and queer organizing that continues to develop and transmit transformative approaches to social justice, counter to the official solutions promoted by the well-funded gay rights agenda. Jennifer Worley recalls street organizing by gay and transgender youth involved in survival sex work in the San Francisco Tenderloin in the late 1970s, against routine police street sweeps, harassment, arrests, and beatings. Tommi Avicolli Mecca remembers queens in “radical drag” in 1970s Philadelphia, who used code (“Lily Law” or “Alice Bluegown”) to warn each other when police were targeting presumed prostitutes and those not wearing “two articles of clothing of your ‘appropriate’ gender.” Nadia Guidotto returns to lesbians and gays who overtook downtown Toronto in 1981 after brutal police raids on local bathhouses. These first pieces highlight the resistances of transgender, queer, and gender non-conforming people to systematic surveillance and criminalization by police and penal systems in the U.S. and Canada. They call into question current mainstream LGBT rights-based advocacy that further strengthens the policing, military, legal, and penal mechanisms of the state. As Bassichis, Lee, and Spade argue, hate crimes legislation, same-sex marriage, LGBT inclusion in the military, and LGBT specific reform of the penal system will secure benefits and protections for more resourced segments of LGBT communities, while leaving behind the increasing number of LGBT people, who, regardless of marital status, have no inheritance, no health benefits, no legal immigration status, and no state protection of relationships. Far from challenging compulsory heterosexuality, homophobia, and transphobia, this rights-for-some approach empowers state institutions in criminalizing queer and transgender people, poor people, people of color, immigrants, and people with disabilities.
 
Captive Genders’ second set of articles focuses on the multiplying forms of informal imprisonment experienced by transgender, queer, and gender non-conforming people within “transitional” spaces at the edges of the formal penal system. Based on his work in Louisiana juvenile courts, jails, and prisons, Wesley Ware calls attention to the ways in which the juvenile justice system has become a drop-off station for parents, police, and schools seeking to punish and convert transgender and gender non-conforming youth through state custody, without the right to jury trial or adequate legal representation. From within the confines of her Single Resident Occupancy hotel unit, Ralowe Trinitrotoluene Ampu exposes the geographic grid of institutionalization, surveillance, and control built by a network of politicians, housing development corporations, and mainstream non-profit agencies and underpinning San Francisco’s sci-fi aesthetic. Michelle C. Potts links the abuses inflicted on HIV-positive detainees and prisoners in ICE facilities, state and federal prisons, and jails (including the denial of anti-retroviral medications and medical care, mandatory HIV testing, and segregation and solitary confinement of HIV-positive inmates) to the criminalization of HIV-positive status and transgender/queer bodies mandated by federal and state HIV disclosure statutes and bioterrorism laws since the 1990s. Erica R. Meiners asks if the expansion of sex offender registries since the 1980s, with a focus on child predators, really addresses sexual violence and harm towards children, when 70% of all reported sexual assaults against children are committed in a residence by “acquaintances” and family members, rather than in public spaces by strangers. And Meiners examines the less documented history of sex offender registries, which in the 1940s were used to collect information on “known homosexuals” across U.S. urban centers. Yasmin Nair argues that advocacy for LGBT immigration, including the Uniting American Families Act, has distilled the issue of queer migration down to the narrative of broken relationships between U.S. citizens and their model foreign partners and families. This reduced narrative deflects attention from the brutality, surveillance, and exploitation experienced by undocumented immigrants and the neoliberal economy that has produced the crisis in immigration. Lastly, Lori A. Saffin suggests that the current discussion around anti-transgender hate violence and hate crimes legislation does not deal with the interconnected structural inequalities lived by transgenders of color, who make up the vast majority of those targeted in hate-motivated violence.
 
Following the advocates and activists who map the expanding informal geography and economy of the U.S. penal system are writings by and about gender non-conforming, transgender, and queer prisoners. Kristopher Shelley “Krystal,” an incarcerated black gender-non-conforming lesbian, writes about experiencing harsher court sentencing, ongoing harassment, regulation of her gender appearance (for example, being locked in until she shaved), and the targeted use of excessive force and segregated isolation based on the perception of her more masculine appearance. She has been incarcerated for nine years in California thus far, starting with her time in juvenile hall at age sixteen and then her sentencing to adult prisons when she turned seventeen. Through snippets of his letter exchanges with two middle-aged queer and non-normatively gendered inmates who have lived at least half their lives in prison, Stephen Dillon attempts to describe the “unthinkable” interdependencies between the prison regime’s routine incapacitation and immobilization of prisoners and free civil society. Based on her prior experience in prison, Clifton Goring/Candi Raine Sweet calls attention to targeted, repeated sexual and physical attacks on gender variant, transgender, and queer prisoners by prison staff and other inmates, condoned by the prison administration. Lori Girshick’s survey of masculine-identified people in two California women’s prisons shows the forced feminization of prisoners, policing of behavior viewed as sexual between inmates (“homosecting”), and harsher treatment of masculine-presenting prisoners. Based on inmates’ survey responses, Girshick contends that the current move to further segregate LGBT prisoners within the prison system compounds the damaging effects of the existing gender segregation of prisoners based on their genitalia (rather than their subjective gender identities), as well as the abuse and harassment by prison staff already experienced by incarcerated LGBT people. Paula Rae Witherspoon describes the near impossibility of finding employment on parole and avoiding cyclical re-imprisonment as an excon transsexual woman in Texas. Cholo urges us to help stop the mistreatment and destruction of African American transgender people, transsexuals, and the queer community as a whole in prison. blake nemec recounts witnessing the violent treatment and sexualized intimidation of his friend Kim Love, a transgender prison activist and former prisoner, during an unwarranted police takeover of her apartment. In an interview following nemec’s account, Love talks about the treatment of transgender prisoners, including systematic rape by prison officers, the use of transgender women’s bodies to pacify male inmates, and unequal access to medical attention based on the amount of money prisoners have to their name. While it might be tempting to read these accounts of prisoner life as texts that provide information in the form of letters, first person accounts, memoires, poems, survey results, and fragments of interviews, it may make more sense to read these fragmented accounts as code written under conditions of confinement and policing, transmitted through surveilled prison communications systems, and then re-transmitted by those who can access the representational technologies and economy of “the” or “a” public sphere to be addressed (Warner). Even for those no longer imprisoned, the act of speaking about life in prison involves the laborious translation of a carceral system that works through arbitrary force to incapacitate and coerce bodies into submission, movement, labor, and destruction (Gilmore).
 
Captive Genders’ concluding contributors focus on building interlinked communities of resistance for queer and transgender self-determination and prison abolition. Drawing from prison activism in Canada and Britain, S. Lambel develops a queer/transgender analysis of prison systems in the global north, linking the normalization of gender and sexual policing to the normalization of prisons. Interviewed by Jayden Donahue, Miss Major talks about internal shifts in transgender community organizing that have enabled greater leadership and participation by transgender women, especially transgender women of color, who begin “living outside of the law” the moment they express themselves. Through a poetics based in body memory, Vanessa Huang reflects on the losses sustained and new understandings gained by the anti-prison movement body after the organizationally led defeat of California’s 2005–2008 proposals to build “gender responsive” prisons. Julia Sudbury AKA Julia C. Oparah describes an abolitionist vision and praxis—“maroon abolitionism”—created by black prison activists in the U.S. and Canada, drawing from direct experience with gender oppression and racialized surveillance and punishment and also African diasporic traditions of resistance and spirituality. The final piece by Che Gossett connects divergent imaginings of prison abolitionism and gender self-determination, developed by abolitionist visionary Reina Gossett, political scholar Dylan Rodríguez, and radical organizer Bo Brown in points of contact with broader lineages of exiled transgender social history, radical intellectual work, and anti-prison organizing by prisoners.
 
Stanley and Smith’s Captive Genders is a “rogue text,” more interested in extending the work of transgender and queer prison abolition than offering a stable or definitive collection.⁸ True to this aim, the book closes with toolkits for supporting the abolition of the prison industrial complex, with exercises crafted by Critical Resistance and case studies assembled by Nat Smith. The networked texts of Captive Genders move beyond the confines of the bound-print cultural production to argue for the absolute necessity of abolishing the political and cultural economy of the penal colony underpinning the “free” public sphere. They call for the de-normalizing of state violence, control, and criminalization targeting transgender, gender variant, and queer people, people of color, economically impoverished people, youth, disabled people, immigrants, and women. From there, we may move to question why we are met with the force of the unimaginable when we try to think about life without prisons (Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?). And this question may mobilize us towards the abolition of the society that could have prisons (Moten and Harney).