Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex by Eric A. Stanley & Nat Smith

Author:Eric A. Stanley & Nat Smith [Stanley, Eric A. & Smith, Nat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Law, Gender & the Law, Social Science, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781849352345
Google: W1K3CgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1849352348
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2015-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

Free Markets and Captive Bodies

In the last forty years, neoliberalism has become a pervasive mechanism for organizing institutional and discursive life in the United States and around the world. As an ideology and epistemology, it is embedded in our values, thoughts, and desires; it is a technology that structures collective common sense. Neoliberalism manages cultural, political, and economic life to prioritize and maximize the mobility and proliferation of capital at all costs.6 Neoliberalism attempts to “free” the market and private enterprise from constraints implemented by the state. This is accomplished by dismantling unions; public funding of social services (welfare, education, infrastructure, and so on); environmental, labor, health, and safety regulations; price controls; and any barriers to “free trade.” The neoliberal project is to disembed capital from any and all constraints.7 In addition, any state-owned institutions that control key industries like transportation, energy, education, healthcare, food, water, and prisons, are privatized in the name of efficiency, deregulation, and freedom.

Discourses of personal responsibility, choice, and individuality are central to the ideological and institutional shifts that have taken place under neoliberalism. Under neoliberal regimes of freedom, one’s subjection to “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production” of premature death through homelessness, abject poverty, illness, over-work, addiction, or incarceration is the result of an isolated, individual choice.8 This logic is used against those hardest hit by environmental devastation, imperialism, forced famine, privatization of services and deregulation of governments, the restructuring of paid and unpaid work, the dismantling of welfare apparatuses, increased policing and surveillance, and the hyper-immobilization of black and brown bodies in an ever-expanding regime of incarceration and detention.9 Simply, those most susceptible to production of premature death are blamed for their vulnerability to regimes of power far beyond their control: the drowned, the starved, the impoverished, the bombed, the occupied.

In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey argues that neoliberalism is “a political project to re-establish the conditions of capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites.”10 For Harvey, neoliberalism is fundamentally about the restoration of class power to a handful of powerful corporations and individuals. Yet, Harvey disregards the ways that white supremacy and heteropatriarchy are central to neoliberalism’s distribution of profit, power, and death. Harvey fails to account for the ways that, as neoliberalism funnels capital upward, one’s access to a variety of life chances are diminished in ways that are profoundly racialized and gendered. Neoliberalism does not just produce terror, to paraphrase Henry Giroux, or “downsize democracy” in the words of Lisa Duggan; it also produces and proliferates possibilities for some lives to grow and prosper.11 Neoliberalism is not just a project of capital; it is also a project of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. It proliferates capital at the same time that it proliferates whiteness and heteronormativity.

The neoliberal turn has been part of a broader strategy of state and corporate counterinsurgency mobilized in the wake of revolutionary decolonization movements threatening capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy.12 In the 1970s, the United States, a “normatively aggressive, crisis-driven state,” facing political insurrection

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.