Session 5:

Abolish Civilizing Violence

Thursday 15 April 2021 ~ 4:20 - 5:45pm Pacific

Recording available here (88 mins)

The struggle against the Neoliberal Queer is a struggle against policing, the military, borders, and carceral state relations

Gary Kinsman

Drawing on my work on the making and unmaking of the neoliberal queer and for the 3^rd edition of The Regulation of Desire this presentation aims to:

1) Outline what neoliberalism is and the historical/social emergence of the neoliberal queer.

2) Point to the centrality of support for the police and the carceral state to this emergence of the neoliberal queer. This includes support for the Canadian Charter as the road to rights and how this is built on settler colonialism and settler homonationalism. In this context the limitations of the apology for the Canadian War on Queers and the attempt to incorporate some queers into patriotism and militarism will be addressed.

3) The historical struggles against the neoliberal queer including those against collaboration and liaison committees with the police. This will include the resistance to the bath raids in Toronto.

4) Struggles for queer refugees to get into ‘Canada.’ The contradiction between formal rights and the tightening up of borders for queer and trans BIPOC people. The need for a no one is illegal approach.

5) More recent struggles against the police and the carceral state including Black Lives Matter and Pride Toronto. The need to extend opposition to the police having an organized institutional presence within Pride events to a broader abolitionist position including opposition to all funding for the police and building alternatives to policing and carceral state relations.

6) How can we develop more active support for abolitionist approaches within queer communities?

Gary Kinsman is a queer liberation, anti-racist, anti-poverty, and anti-capitalist activist in solidarity with Indigenous struggles. He was involved in the resistance to the Toronto bath raids, the We Demand an Apology Network, and is currently involved in the No Pride in Policing Coalition where he helped organize the Defund and Abolish All Police rally in Toronto on Pride Day 2020. He is the author of The Regulation of Desire (which he is currently working on a 3^rd edition of), and co-author (with Patrizia Gentile) of The Canadian War on Queers. Recent book chapters include “Policing Borders and sexual/gender identities: queer refugees in the years of Canadian neoliberalism and homonationalism,” in Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights: (2018); “Forgetting National Security in ‘Canada’” in Choudry (ed.) Activists and the Surveillance State; “Not a Gift From Above,” in Dummit and Sethna, No Place for the State; and “Learning from AIDS Activism for Surviving the COVID-19 Pandemic,” in BTL Editorial Committee, Sick of the System (ebook). He shares his time between Toronto and Sudbury, where he is Professor Emeritus at Laurentian University . His website is https://radicalnoise.ca/

Prisons, Food Apartheid, and Abolition Geographies: Food as a Tool for Liberation

Kanav Kathuria

Examining the relationship between food conditions in prisons and in communities under food apartheid reveals how carcerality extends beyond the walls of confinement through the use of food as a tool for control, power, and subjugation. In many urban areas across the United States, residents in neighborhoods with high rates of incarceration are simultaneously the same residents most often denied access to affordable, nutritious, and fresh foods. In prison, the experience of eating is transformed from a source of nourishment into a mechanism of dehumanization, violence, and premature death, due in part to long-term impacts on individuals’ physical and mental health. Outside of prison, decades of racialized disinvestment, dispossession, and discriminatory practices such as supermarket redlining continue to obstruct access to fresh foods in predominantly Black and low-income neighborhoods.

By reframing prisons and spaces of food apartheid as two interrelated processes resulting in premature death—rooted in the logics of Anti-Blackness and racial capitalism—this paper proposes that the struggle for food sovereignty must necessarily incorporate the abolition of the wider conditions giving rise to prisons. An inequitable distribution of fresh and nutritious foods is not just an unfortunate byproduct of our food system; our food systems—from correctional food provision to the disposability of Black and brown farmworkers to prison agriculture—depend on carceral logics to survive. To conclude, we explore the role of food in creating and nurturing, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes, “abolition geographies”—moments of temporal or spatial liberation that move us one step closer toward the commune.

Kanav Kathuria’s work lies in the intersection of prison abolition, public health, and food justice. He is a 2019 Open Society Institute Baltimore Community Fellow and the founder of the Farm to Prison Project, a Baltimore-based organization that changes food conditions in correctional facilities to use food as a tool for liberation. Kanav’s research and interests fall under the frameworks of revolutionary abolitionism and racial capitalism with a focus on the predatory carceral state.

Queers Against Corrective Development: LGBTSTGNC Anti-Violence Organizing in Gentrifying Times

S.M. Rodriguez

Corrections in the United States most often describes the institution that holds custody of criminalized people, purportedly to reform or reorient them from nonnormative behaviors through isolation, constraint and force. This article puts forward a more expansive understanding of corrections, so that its applicability extends outside of the prison or the jail and into the carceral society imprisoned by similar logics: ones that “correct” deviance through coercive and violent practices. I join a queer critique of corrections with one of gentrification, the practice of displacing low income and racialized people through deregulation of housing policy and unimpeded capitalist “development” of neighborhoods.

Through the prism of corrective development, we can witness disposability politics as the convergence of hyper-carceralism, police killings, and social exclusion of those imagined as undesirable. Simultaneously, the state makes an invitation to the gentrifying bodies – the idealized body and being for development – which are white, abled, corporate, and hetero- or homonormative.

The analysis centers the work of Safe OUTside the System (SOS), a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two-Spirit, Trans and Gender-Non-Conforming People of Color collective in Central Brooklyn using abolitionist, anti-violence community organizing to combat the oppressive matrix utilized by gentrifying bodies.

S.M. Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of Criminology and Director, LGBTQ+ Studies at Hofstra University, Department of Sociology. They are the author of the book, The Economies of Queer Inclusion: Transnational Organizing for LGBTI Rights in Uganda (2019). Dr. Rodriguez is currently working on two book projects: Abolition in the Academy: Scholar-Activism and the Movement for Penal Abolition and Marked for Removal: Perpetual Coloniality, Gentrification, and Queer Abolitionist Praxis in New York City. A dedicated scholar-activist and educator committed to transformative change, Dr. Rodriguez seeks to contribute to our understanding of gender and racial justice as they intersect with social movements.