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Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex is the newest title that deals with issues of gender and sexuality released by the US-based anarchist publishing collective AK Press.  This anthology, co-edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, contains contributions from prison abolitionists in both the United States and Canada focusing on a broad range of issues relating to queer and trans/gender-non-conforming people and incarceration.

By beginning with the history of queer and trans/gender-non-conforming people’s relationship to state violence and incarceration, Captive Genders attempts to reframe the question of how to deal with issues of harm without relying on the prison industrial complex to solve our problems.  By foregrounding the history of gay bar raids, gendered clothing requirements, sodomy laws, and other carceral histories of policing gender and sexuality, this collection challenges the assumption that we can and should reform the prison system to work for us.

They convincingly argue that the prison industrial complex isn’t simply the material sites of captivity (ie. jails, immigrant detention centers, juvenile justice facilities, military jails, holding rooms, court rooms, etc.), but an overwhelming set of relations between these carceral sites and capitalism, globalization and corporations (think: prison labor, privatized prisons, prison guard unions, food suppliers, telephone companies, commissary suppliers, etc).  By imagining the prison system as a network in this way, we have a much larger and nefarious view of how prisons work.  The prison industrial complex is not necessarily designed to deal with harm and provide reconciliation, but to provide the appearance of justice while punishing the unwanted, non-normative (ie. gendered, racialized, sexualized, etc) bodies always already rendered illegal.  Not to mention, certain someones are making a killing off the entire process.  Could this potential profit be what is fueling the conservative fervor behind the Omnibus Crime Bill C-10 here in Canada one might ask?

This collection also goes on to challenge the logic of hate crimes legislation, amongst other things, as a cornerstone of so-called progressive liberal politics.  Again the contributors are asking why we are relying on the very same system that disproportionately affects queer and trans/gender-non-conforming people to deal with issues of violence and harm.  Especially when longer prison sentences mean more crowded prisons and inevitably an expansion of the prison system.  If the prison industrial complex disproportionately affects queer and trans/gender-non-conforming people, why would we ever want to engage in any sort of activism that expands the size and reach of the prison system?

The academics, activists, and incarcerated folks that have contributed to this volume make a compelling argument for rethinking how we deal with harm in our communities and moreover, how our new found reliance on the PIC to deal with anti-queer and trans violence has actually further entrenched a system that likely does more harm than good.  In closing we are asked, “What, then, might a world look like in which harm is met with healing and support, rather than displacement and re-violation produced by the prison industrial complex?”  Although not offering any concrete solutions, this book provides a much needed reality check on how we, as queer and trans/gender-non-conforming people engage in politics relating to violence, the prison system, and so-called justice.

Captive Genders is available through AK Press online or at the Concordia Community Solidarity Co-op Bookstore located at 2150 Bishop Street (corner of Sherbrooke West).

CAPTIVE GENDERS co-editor Eric Stanley