News

Posted on

Queering Abolition

American Quarterly just published an conversation between me, Eric A. Stanley and the authors of Queer (In)Justice.  You can download it here.  Speaking of abolition, last week’s public forum about King County’s plans to pour a ton of money into rehabilitating our youth jail and the court buildings where kids of color get sentenced to jail and parents of color get their kids taken away was very contentious. I wrote something about what happened and why the forum should not have been shut down here.

In other news, Normal Life is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award! Some of the finalists in the Seattle region are reading together on April 25 at 7pm at Vermillion. Hope to see you there!

Posted on

Romantic Friendship, Palestine and California

A few recent things to share: Here is a link to a radio interview between me and the brilliant and inspiring activist-scholars Eric Stanley and Reina July about trans politics and prison abolition that took place in January on Romantic Friendship radio.  I also want to share this open letter created by activist from a recent LGBTQ delegation to Palestine that I participated in in January.  Please sign on!  Below is a photo from my trip–a mural on a part of the separation wall.  I’m working on creating some writing about my trip to share with photos that will hopefully be posted here soon.  Finally, Toshio Meronek recently interviewed Eric Stanley and I about Captive Genders and Normal Life in advance of our trip to speak at UC Davis. You can read Toshio’s article here.

Posted on

Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement With Everything We’ve Got

Captive GendersMorgan Bassichis, Alex Lee, and I co-authored “Building an Abolitionist Trans & Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got” in the anthology Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric Stanley and Nat Smith. A Mandarin translation is available here: 全力打造一個以廢除為目標的跨性／酷兒運動).

Learn more about Captive Genders here. 

Posted on

Laws as Tactics

I wrote “Laws as Tactics” published in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law in 2011. You can read it here.

Abstract:

This symposium invites us to consider the impact of Judith Butler’s work on legal scholarship in the area of gender and sexuality. I am interested in reflecting particularly on trans politics and law for two reasons. First, because Butler’s work has had such a significant impact on the emergence of the current iteration of trans politics of the 1990s and 2000s. Second, because I believe there is a great deal more that Butler’s work can offer to significant questions facing trans resistance formations as the field of trans legal rights advocacy institutionalizes and as trans legal scholarship engages and responds to that institutionalization. In particular, I am interested in how Butler’s work has provided analytical models for considering the role that norms and normalization play in both disciplinary and biopolitical modes of governance relating to gender. This analysis is essential to understanding the limitations of certain legal rights frameworks for addressing harms created by racialized and gendered systems of meaning and control.

Full Text