Toward Abolitionist Genealogy

Abstract

AbstractIn this essay, I offer a brief for “abolitionist genealogy” as a method and philosophical practice. By locating instances of this method within the work of prison abolitionists who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated (specifically organizers of the 2016 National Prison Strike, CeCe McDonald, and the abolitionist organizations generationFIVE and Black and Pink), I argue that such a method is already available to theorists and critical historians of the present if we are willing to attend to the absences and presences that constitute our academic communities. I ground my brief for abolitionist genealogy by centering the experiences of queer, trans, gender‐nonconforming, and intersex incarcerated people as exemplary (rather than exceptional) of how prisons and jails are fundamentally violent places which cannot, as McDonald puts it, be made safe. Lastly, I link these concerns to the broader question of queer and TGNCI visibility politics in carceral institutions such as the jail/prison and the university.