Week 11
Survive and punished
Key Questions
How are survivors of violence punished by the carceral system? How do various carceral systems — prisons, jails, ICE, child protective services — collectively interact to punish survivors?
What are the ways in which the criminalization of survival has been resisted? How can this be contextualized within a broader anti-carceral movement?
Required Materials:
Justine van der Leun, “‘No Choice But to Do It’: Why Women Go to Prison”
Allison Griner, “The Woman Confronting the US Prison-to-Deportation Pipeline”
Emily Thuma, “Lessons in Self-Defense: Gender Violence, Racial Criminalization, and Anticarceral Feminism”
Supplementary Materials:
Emily Thuma, “Against the ‘Prison/Psychiatric State’: Anti-violence Feminisms and the Politics of Confinement in the 1970s”
Lauren Gill, “Prosecutors Ignored Evidence of Her Estranged Husband’s Abuse. She Faces 25 Years in Prison for Murder.”
Emily Hobson, Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left, “A More Powerful Weapon: Lesbian Feminism and Collective Defense”
Adam Rhodes, “Criminalizing Queerness”
Sabrina Rubin Erdely, “The Transgender Crucible”
Anna Moore, “Ny Nourn: The Woman Convicted of Murder and Pardoned — Who Now Fights for Other Battered Woman”
Justine van der Leun, “Death of a Survivor”
Angelika Albaladejo, “Child Law Penalizes Moms for Abusive Partners”
Alex Campbell, “He Beat Her and Murdered Her Son — And She Got 45 Years In Jail”
Alex Campbell, “This Battered Woman Wants to Get Out of Prison”
Mariame Kaba, “Black Women Punished for Self-Defense Must Be Freed From Their Cages”
Survived & Punished, “Defending Self-Defense”
Mariame Kaba and Brit Schulte, “Not a Cardboard Cutout: Cyntoia Brown and the Framing of a Victim”
Lemonada Media and Spiegel & Grau, “Believe Her”
Samantha Michaels, “Her Boyfriend Killed Her Baby While She Was at Work. Oklahoma Is Sending Her to Prison.”
Victoria Law, “Black Sexual Violence Survivors Are Telling Their Stories — Only to Be Punished”
Lisa Vetten and Kailash Bhana, Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex, “The Justice for Women Campaign: Incarcerated Domestic Violence Survivors in Post-Apartheid South Africa”
Ella Fassler, "A Survivor of Violence and Her Sibling Share How the Legal System Punishes Them"
exercise
The state — and its attendant tentacles (prisons, jails, police, etc.) — is typically portrayed as a savior or protector in regard to intimate partner violence. However, both the state and abusive partners operate through similar actions and logics. What connection can be drawn between these two types of violence? Use the diagram below to map out the similarities between intimate partner violence and state violence.
