Thanks to the owner of the most stylish collection of eyeglasses I have seen, Kate Clinton, for including Normal Life among her favorite books of the year in The Progressive’s “Favorite Books of 2012.” And thanks to the Modern Language Association/GLQ Caucus’s Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize Committee for honorable mention for Normal Life. Such a treat to be recognized alongside this year’s wonderful winners of that prize, Chandan Reddy’s Freedom with Violence and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism.
I am teaching a January Term class at Seattle U for the first time, starting in a few weeks. It will be a four day intensive about imprisonment. I just posted the syllabus in case it is of interest.
I also wanted to share some new videos. GritTV recently posted an interview that Laura Flanders did with me.
http://blip.tv/grittv/dean-spade-the-most-imprisoning-nation-in-the-world-part-1-of-2-6482091
Also, I recently attended the World Social Forum: Free Palestine! in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I was part of a Queer Visions contingent that put on two public panels, this one and this one. Here’s the talk I gave about marriage and the military and pinkwashing:
Big thanks to Robert Nichols for interviewing me for Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action.
The Circuit, which is the online journal of the California Law Review, just published a response piece I wrote. I responded to an article that Prof. Russell Robinson wrote about the K6G unit at the Los Angeles County Jail, which is a unit designated for trans women and queer men. In my response, I suggest that the K6G unit, which was developed after a lawsuit brought on behalf of queer prisoners but has utterly failed to protect them, is a clear example of why we need prison abolition scholarship and politics in order to sufficiently analyze and confront the violence faced by queer and trans prisoners.
I wrote “The Only Way to End Racialized Gender Violence in Prisons is to End Prisons: A Response to Russell Robinson’s Masculinity As Prison,” published by California Law Review Circuit in December 2012. You can read it here.
GLQ recently published a review of Nat Smith and Eric Stanley’s Captive Genders, Regina Kunzel’s Criminal Intimacy, and my book Normal Life. Thanks to Eli Vitulli for writing the review! You can read it here.
I’m writing from Brazil, where I have traveled to attend the World Social Forum Free Palestine and specifically to participate in the Queer Visions gathering and public panels here focused on anti-pinkwashing work. The Queer Visions meetings were convened by the wonderful activists from Pinkwatching Israel who gathered 16 international activists doing anti-pinkwashing work in their own contexts. Here is a video from the Assembly that ended the Forum of anti-pinkwashers presenting a resolution. Below are some pictures from the march in Porto Alegre–the one with lots of purple is a feminist/women’s solidarity contingent that had beautiful quilted signs. I also wanted to share the sweet news that Wania and Ewe have translated my 2004 essay, For Lovers and Fighters, into Polish! You can grab it in Polish here.
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of joining Laura Whitehorn in the Radical Book Tent at the Baltimore Book Festival, organized by the wonderful people at Red Emma’s.
In other news, I’ve added a bunch of reviews of Normal Life to the writing page on this site, in case they interest you.
Also, I want to recommend an exciting new book, The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard. You can order a copy to be sent to a prisoner when you order your own on the Topside Press website. Please do!