New video and slideshow

Earlier this year I was invited to share a manifesto at the Tate Museum in London as part of the Gender Talents show. I couldn’t make it, so I made a video with Basil Shadid to capture some of the themes of Normal Life.  The Barnard Center for Research on Women just released the video on their website.

Impossibility Now from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.

The images in it go by quickly so I also made an annotated slideshow that you can watch at your own pace and learn what the images depict. You can also watch the video on youtube to see a version with captions (press CC).

While I was gathering images for the film I got completely stumped a couple times about how to illustrate certain ideas.  Two artists came to my rescue and created powerful images that I needed.

This one is from Mickey Dehn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This one is from Talcott Broadhead.

 

Radio, Buzz and Stopping Jail from Being Built!

KPFA did some great programming around Pride this year focusing on critical queer and trans political resistance and critiques of same-sex marriage, gay military service and other hallmarks of wealthy white gay politics.  Here is a whole day of programs that aired on Pride Sunday. Here is a show focusing on the critique of same-sex marriage advocacy, including Kenyon Farrow, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and me. In other news, Buzzfeed published a list of 24 Americans Who Changed the Way We Think About Transgender Rights.  I’m excited to be on any list with Sylvia, Marsha, Miss Major, Lou and all these other amazing people.

Finally, I am so excited by all the inspiring work being done by Washington Incarceration Stops Here.  We are doing an awesome postcard campaign about what people think our county really needs rather than a new youth jail and family court buildings.  And we’re building a coalition of groups who have signed on to our Points of Unity.  If your organization wants to sign on, no matter where you are, please let us know! We’re also starting a zine so please let us know if you have art or writing you’d like to contribute or if you can help spread the word to people who may want to contribute, especially youth and people impacted by criminalization and child welfare systems.

Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform

I wrote an article called “Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform” in Signs, published in 2013. You can read the full text online here, or download it here.

Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform

Abstract: 

Critical race theory generally and intersectionality theory in particular have provided scholars and activists with clear accounts of how civil rights reforms centered in the antidiscrimination principle have failed to sufficiently change conditions for those facing the most violent manifestations of settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and xenophobia. These interventions have exposed how the discrimination principle’s reliance on individual harm, intentionality, and universalized categories of identity has made it ineffective at eradicating these forms of harm and violence and has obscured the actual operations of systems of meaning and control that produce maldistribution and targeted violence. This essay pushes this line of thinking an additional step to focus on the racialized-gendered distribution schemes that operate at the population level through programs that declare themselves race and gender neutral but are in fact founded on the production and maintenance of race and gender categories as vectors for distributing life chances. In the context of intensifying criminal and immigration enforcement and wealth disparity, it is essential to turn our attention to what Michel Foucault called “state racism”—the operation of population-level programs that target some for increased security and life chances while marking others for insecurity and premature death. This essay looks at how social movements resisting intersectional state violence are formulating demands (like the abolition of prisons, borders, and poverty) that exceed the narrow confines of the discrimination principle and take administrative systems as adversaries in ways that pull the nation-state form itself into crisis.

Full Text

New Syllabus, Review, Blogpost and Translation

I’m co-teaching a class this semester with Prof. Katherine Franke about the law of occupation and colonialism.  The class looks at the occupation of Palestine, US colonialism in Guam, Puerto Rico, North America, Hawaii and the Marshall Islands, the US occupation of Iraq, and more.  You can see the syllabus here.

I also wanted to share a new review of Normal Life by Ro Velasquez Guzman in Shameless magazine, and a new blogpost I wrote for SRLP’s blog about how recent debates about gun control and mental health relate to trans politics and criminalization.  Finally, HUGE THANKS to Morgan Ztardust for translating “For Lovers and Fighters” in Spanish.  The translation is here.