Death and Other Penalties by Lisa Guenther Scott Zeman Geoffrey Adelsberg

Author:Lisa Guenther, Scott Zeman, Geoffrey Adelsberg [Lisa Guenther, Scott Zeman, Geoffrey Adelsberg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780823265305
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2015-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Prison Abolition and a Culture of Sexual Difference

Sarah Tyson

Violence against women is a public issue because of feminist movements. This huge cultural shift is certainly worthy of celebration. Making sexual assault, domestic violence, and family violence public issues is not, of course, the primary goal of feminists—ending them is. But it would be counterproductive impatience to fault feminists for not having yet eradicated these widespread problems—entangled as they are with the main structures of social life, including family, law, rights, and gender. So it makes sense that we should applaud feminism’s outing of violence against women, even as we work to eliminate it more fully. There is, however, a recalcitrant and troubling problem in much feminist antiviolence work that presents a formidable obstacle to reaching its ultimate goal: many feminists working to eradicate violence have come to rely on prisons and the apparatus of the carceral state more broadly.

In this chapter, I recount briefly how feminist antiviolence work has become complicit with mass incarceration. Then, I make the case that support of mass incarceration is at odds with the feminist goal of ending violence against women. I suggest that, for help in thinking beyond prisons, we look to grassroots organizations already working within communities to find noncarceral responses to violence; my analysis focuses particularly on Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA) based in Seattle.1 Finally, I turn to the work of Luce Irigaray to argue that organizations like CARA are not just anticipating life after prisons but creating the conditions necessary for life without prisons. The primary aim of this chapter is to further develop theoretical resources for feminist prison abolitionist work as part of the struggle to end violence against women.

Feminists and the Carceral State

Marie Gottschalk has shown that the founders of many of the early rape crisis centers viewed the state and hierarchical professions as part of the larger problem of patriarchy that allowed and facilitated a culture of violence against women. Gottschalk notes that the founders of the first rape crisis centers “self-consciously maintained a distance from law enforcement agencies, hospitals, and conventional social services and assumed a militant stance toward professionals in such organizations. . . . A number of feminists involved early on in the anti-rape movement looked askance at the punitive arm of the state.”2 However, in the quest to legitimize the importance of the issue of violence against women, as well as to garner state and federal funding, “women’s groups entered into some unsavory coalitions and compromises that bolstered the law-and-order agenda and reduced their own capacity to serve as ideological bulwarks against the rising tide of conservatism.”3

We can see this larger historical trend in the history and prehistory of CARA. Its earlier incarnation, Seattle Rape Relief (SRR), one of the first rape crisis centers in the country, closed in 1999.4 Although there are many reasons for SRR’s closing, including monetary ones, Alisa Bierria and CARA write that the center “was impacted by the professionalization of a once-grassroots antiviolence movement, and SRR’s volunteers identified this shift in the organization’s political identity as the main reason for its demise.

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