These are Sara’s posts, as she wasn’t able to upload individual posts of her own:<\/p>\n
\u201cCaptive Genders,\u201d Regulatory Sites: Management, Confinement and HIV\/AIDS<\/p>\n
This chapter opens by recounting the heartbreaking death of Victoria Arellano, an undocumented immigrant and transgender woman who died in ICE custody after being denied proper medical treatment despite her HIV positive status. She was 23 and died within 8 weeks of being taken to a processing center. Velasquez-Potts explains that Arellano\u2019s death is illustrative \u201cas a testament to the ways that transgendered immigrants have a particularly violent relationship with the prison industrial complex.\u201d Both articles about her death and reports on HIV positive inmate treatment fail to account for the additional challenge transgender people face while incarcerated.<\/p>\n
Velasquez-Potts then turns to the story of a man named Daniel Allen who was prosecuted for a felony after a physical altercation with a neighbor during which the neighbor alleged Allen bit him. Allen, who is black, gay and HIV positive, was charged under bioterrorism laws for biting the man with the intent to infect him. These laws construe Allen\u2019s body as a weapon and perpetuate the way trans and queer bodies with HIV\/AIDS are seen as threat to western society.<\/p>\n
Can we relate this correlation of pathology and racism to anything in the sphere of current events? (We definitely can). Does Trump\u2019s misnomer of the novel Coronavirus as \u201cthe Chinese virus\u201d make a similar statement about race and disease as threats to western society? Why are we so apt to look for an \u201cother\u201d to blame for disease (whether it be gay people, people from China, etc) when European colonial settlers introduced dozens of fatal diseases to the lands which they imperalized?<\/p>\n
Alabama and South Carolina prisons have segregated facilities for inmates who are HIV positive. The author argues that this policy serves to police, stigmatize and regulate gender and sexuality expression rather than prevent the spread of disease. HIV positive prisoners are forbidden from handling food at the facility because administration believe general prison population would not want \u201copenly gay\u201d inmates serving meals. This conflation of sexuality and disease of reminiscent of a time when the disease causing AIDS was referred to as GRID: gay-related immune deficiency.<\/p>\n
Blood and the often racist narratives surrounding it have legitimized state violence from chattel slavery to solitary confinement. Confinement creates more violence and surveils bodies that don\u2019t identify with the sexual and gender norms society has set forth for itself, forfeiting their personhood through contracting a disease that is supposedly the physical manifestation of an internal affliction. As of the article\u2019s writing, more than 107 people have died in ICE custody since 2003. What do the ideas of territorial integrity, borders, and \u201cillegal aliens\u201d have to do with colonialism, white power structures and our larger conversations about incarceration (and who is most affected by it)?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cCaptive Genders,\u201d From a Native Trans Daughter<\/p>\n
The chapter \u201cfrom a Native Trans Daughter\u201d artfully weaves together the author\u2019s personal experiences with incarceration and scholarship on the prison industrial complex and settler colonialism. Young grew up in Hawaii as an indigenous, transgender woman from a working class family. Her relationship to the carceral system began at age 7 when her mother was arrested. As is so tragically often the story for low-income families of color, Young fell victim to the same carceral state her mother did when she was arrested in Washington for burglary following a dispute with her cousin. Her public defender was unhelpful and did not present the mitigating circumstances that surrounded the event, as a result Young was convicted of a felony.
\nAfter recounting this narrative, she turns to Angela Davis\u2019 scholarship to understand her own conviction. Davis links the disproportionate incarceration of POC and working class people to increased prosecutorial power, diminished public defender functions and the imposition of mandatory minimums that reduce judicial discretion. Because the Prison Industrial Complex impacts marginalised communities disproportionately, the PIC invokes settler colonialism and gendered racial violence. Young was forced to trade sexual favors for physical safety and observed how incarceration affected not only the physical realities of the inmates but their minds as well, writing: \u201cTaking on the failures of a system without critically examining the limits of personal choice often led a number of cellmates to conflate their sense of responsibility with issues beyond their control.\u201d
\nHow does this observation relate to Breaking Women and the ideas about self, blame and \u201crenting out your head\u201d that are introduced in the book?
\nYoung then recounts how Hawaii and its native people have been affected by imperialist, white settler mentalities. Hawaiians have been surveilled, incarcerated and dispossessed of resources, power and land by white Americans since the 1840s. The author tells the story of Queen Liliuokalani, forcibly deposed by colonial settlers because her reign posed a threat to white supremacy and patriarchy. Young argues in this chapter that narratives about incarceration, race and gender must expand to include indigenous peoples and transgender or genderqueer individuals. This perspective highlights the importance of intersectionality to understanding the experience of these individuals within the PIC, which Young believes should be abolished.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
These are Sara’s posts, as she wasn’t able to upload individual posts of her own: \u201cCaptive Genders,\u201d Regulatory Sites: Management,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4375,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[13397],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/genderpoliticsprisons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/genderpoliticsprisons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/genderpoliticsprisons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/genderpoliticsprisons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4375"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/genderpoliticsprisons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/genderpoliticsprisons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/genderpoliticsprisons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/genderpoliticsprisons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/genderpoliticsprisons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}