Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex Call for Papers 

Date: 2007-07-01

Currently, at least 65% of transwomen and 29% of transmen have been
incarcerated in the United States. Trans/gender variant people also
disproportionately experience the horrors of poverty, imprisonment, and
criminalization. Captive Genders seeks to offer some frameworks, theories,
and dreams for unthinking these cycles. We see this project as an important
intervention in the emergent field of critical prison studies that will push
discussion past men and women in prison, toward thinking how gender is lived
under the crushing weight of corporal captivity. Along with race, sexuality,
citizenship, class, and all other markers of difference, gender must be
another central category for an understanding of the prison industrial
complex (PIC).

Captive Genders will create a space to think the various ways the prison
industrial complex keeps trans/gender variant communities from thriving. 
Captive Genders will also explore ways in which we can challenge the very
real cultures of violence trans and queer folks experience without relying
on current state-sponsored systems that reproduce the same kinds of violence
they allege to end, such as the current push for "hate crimes" enhancement
legislation.

There is a specificity of survival and power inside prison walls that we
want to be attentive to. However we know the prison industrial complex
involves all aspects of state surveillance, policing and social control and
does not stop at the prison gates. So, we are also interested in work that
explores the punishment of transgender and/or queer bodies outside
traditionally understood spaces of incarceration.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following; Post 9/11
surveillance culture and queer / transgender lives HIV in prison and
surveillance of positive folks outside of prison Cultural/social responses
to violence against trans/gender variant and queer folks that rely on the
State Ways of building power and challenging the PIC Queer sex and
alternative gender formations in prison Policing sex, gender and sex work
Social service/nonprofit denial of gender variance The culture of sexual
violence in prison and its links to gendered power of the State The
marginalization of transwomen, particularly transwomen of color, by the
mainstream gay and lesbian community The length of your work should be a
minimum of 1,000 words.

We would like works that are written for a wide audience. Essays, papers, and creative pieces are all welcome, but please no poetry.

Please include a short biography with your work.

Eric Stanley is a graduate student in the History of Consciousness Program
at UCSC and works with the radical queer direct action collective Gay Shame,
San Francisco. Eric is also the co-director, along with Chris Vargas, of
Homotopia.

Nat Smith is a member of Trans/gender Variant in Prison Committee (TIP) and
an organizer with the Oakland Chapter of Critical Resistance. Nat is also on
the planning committee for Transforming Justice, the first ever conference
focusing on imprisonment and poverty and the trans/gender variant community.

Nat Smith/ Eric Stanley
Email: captivegenders@gmail.com