Reviews

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, Second Edition by Nat Smith, Eric A. Stanley

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pink_distro's review against another edition

5.0

really amazing collection. i cant even think of how i would pull out highlights because of the breadth and depth of the many different writings.

there are histories here, mini-memoirs, theoretical writings, sociological (kinda?) studies, a few more artistic explorative writings, interviews, and more. all of them deal with transness, queerness, and the prison-industrial-complex, each in all of their expansiveness. there are tales of individual experiences and collective organizing, and there is all together a sharp analysis of how gender, policing, imprisonment, sexuality, race, power, class, and more operate. and that analysis rises from careful examination of and often self-reflection on the realities trans/queer/gender-non-conforming people in prison, in housing projects, in outside anti-prison organizations, in street economies, in riots, in border crossings, in bathhouses, in pen-pal relationships, and indeed in conservative 'lgbt rights' lobbying groups that are on the other side of the P-I-C.

im grateful for all that's been brought together in this book and what it gives abolitionists, trans people, and their comrades. now i just am hoping i revisit the entries in here as much as they deserve !!

emceeawkward's review against another edition

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slow-paced

4.0

katiehicks's review

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4.5

An amazing and thought-provoking introduction to the theories which make up the prison abolition movement. The centering of formerly incarcerated folks, especially queer ones, and the inclusion of first hand accounts of the violence of the carceral state was extremely powerful.

That being said, I would have liked some sort of afterward by the editors to contextualize everything we just read. With so many different contributing authors (which, IMO was the appeal of this book), it would have been nice to have some sort of consistent through-line, especially since the grouping of the essays was sometimes very loose.

Some of my favorite quotes (from the first half, by the second half I was highlighting basically everything):

“When we recognize crime as symptomatic of broader social injustices rather than individual bad choices, we are better able to devise strategies that address root causes and actually reduce harm and violence.”

“Some argue that the answer to this problem is to encourage people to report violence to police and to advocate for criminal punishment against those who commit such acts of violence. But the introduction of hate crimes laws has not reduced violence against queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people. In fact, when we examine the overall impact of the criminal system, imprisonment has never worked effectively to protect communities from harm.”

“Addressing violence within and against our communities is a far too serious, urgent, and widespread an issue to be left to a system that has proven to be an utter failure when it comes to community safety.”

“The existing criminal justice model poses two main questions in the face of social harm: who did it? How can we punish them? (And increasingly, how can we make money from it?) Creating safe and healthy communities requires a different set of questions: who was harmed? How can we facilitate healing? How can we prevent such harm in the future?”