Week 7
carceral feminism
Key Questions
What is carceral feminism? What are the ways in which feminists have contributed to the carceral system?
How have feminists historically resisted carceral violence? How does this legacy contribute to a genealogy of abolition feminism?
How is the carceral system gendered? How does it function as a form of gendered oppression and violence?
Required Materials
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete, “How Gender Structures the Prison System”
Aya Gruber, “Against Carceral Feminism”
Robin Mcduff, Deanne Pernell, and Karen Saunders, “Open Letter to the Anti-Rape Movement”
Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth Richie, Abolition Feminism Now, “Feminism”
Supplementary Materials
Judith Levine and Erica Meiners, The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence, “Feminists Confront Sexual Harm”
Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, “Enduring Legacies”
Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, “Policing Paradigms and Criminalizing Webs”
Anne Gray Fischer, “Police Sexual Violence Is Hidden In Plain Sight”
INCITE! and Critical Resistance, “Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex”
Emily Thuma, All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence, “Intersecting Indictments: Coalitions for Women’s Safety, Racial Justice, and the Right to the City”
Bree Carlton and Emma Russell, Resisting Carceral Violence: Women’s Imprisonment and the Politics of Abolition, “Women Against Prison: Anti-Carceral Feminist Critiques of the Prison”
Victoria Law, “Against Carceral Feminism”
Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation, “How We Won the Mainstream but Lost the Movement”
Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation, “Black Women, Male Violence, and the Buildup of a Prison Nation”
Kristin Bumiller, In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence, “The Sexual Violence Agenda: Feminists and the State”
Sarah Cate, “Beyond Panic and Punishment: Brock Turner and the Left Response to Sexual Violence”
Meg Sri, “Feminist Groups Are Right to Rally Against the Brock Turner Inspired Crime Bill”
Judith Levine, “The Problem of Punishment”