Reviews - Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies

The writing was mostly too academic for me, and I didn’t fully understand a lot of what I read. Light on the lived experiences, heavy on the “in this essay I will…”. Some of the sections were more accessible, like the one on COVID and queerness. But the overall percentage of essays that really resonated with me wasn’t high enough.

angcar's review

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challenging informative

A series of essays umbrella-ed under abolitionist topics. This isn't a primer or introductory work, this is queer abolitionists writing for other queer abolitionists. Very academic in its language, as unfortunately a lot of abolitionist theory is.

lexischnaser's review

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3.0

3.5 stars. Learned a lot and also thought “what?” a lot. Been doing a lot of thinking about how we need to convey abolitionist/other ideas that are largely rooted in academia in theory in ways that are more accessible to the masses. The average person (me) probably has to look up what epistemological means every time they come across it and that is not productive for knowledge and movement building!! It is hard for me to really get behind essays like these that (rightfully) critique institutions of power (higher ed) but then still use their money (sometimes unavoidable) and language to try to argue ways for how things should be different. Anyway