Queers against Corrective Development

Abstract

Abstract Corrections in the United States most often describes the institution that holds custody of criminalized people, purportedly to reform or reorient them from nonnormative behaviors through isolation, constraint, and force. This article puts forward a more expansive understanding of corrections, so that its applicability extends outside the prison or the jail and into the society imprisoned by similar logics: ones that “correct” deviance through coercive and violent practices. The author joins a queer critique of corrections with one of gentrification, the practice of displacing low-income and racialized people through deregulation of housing policy and unimpeded capitalist “development” of neighborhoods. Through the prism of corrective development, we can witness disposability politics as the convergence of hyper-carceralism, police killings, and social exclusion of those imagined as undesirable. Simultaneously, the state makes an invitation to the gentrifying bodies—the idealized body and being for development—which are white, abled, corporate, and hetero- or homonormative. The analysis centers the work of Safe OUTside the System (SOS), a lesbian, gay, bisexual, two-spirit, trans, and gender-nonconforming people of color collective in Central Brooklyn using abolitionist, anti-violence community organizing to combat the oppressive matrix utilized by gentrifying bodies.