Abolition Feminisms

Abolition. Feminism. Now. is a celebration of freedom work, a movement genealogy, a call to action, and a challenge to those who think of abolition and feminism as separate—even incompatible—political projects. In this remarkable collaborative work, leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie surface the often unrecognized genealogies of queer, anti-capitalist, internationalist, grassroots, and women-of-color-led feminist movements, struggles, and organizations that have helped to define abolition and feminism in the twenty-first century. This pathbreaking book also features illustrations documenting the work of grassroots organizers embodying abolitionist feminist practice. Amplifying the analysis and the theories of change generated out of vibrant community based organizing, Abolition. Feminism. Now. highlights necessary historical linkages, key internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to imagine a future where we can all thrive.

This groundbreaking double-volume engages the theme of abolition feminisms, a political tradition grounded in radical anti-violence organizing, Black feminist and feminist of color rebellion, survivor knowledge production, strategies devised inside and across prison walls, and a full, fierce refusal of race-gender pathology and punitive control. This analysis disrupts the politics of carceral feminism as conversations about the ramifications of the prison-industrial complex continue.

Abolition Feminisms: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice, offers wide-ranging feminist abolitionist methods for liberation forged in collectivity, radical care, and transformation.

In this striking study of the pre–Civil War literary imagination, Karen Sánchez-Eppler charts how bodily difference came to be recognized as a central problem for both political and literary expression. Her readings of sentimental anti-slavery fiction, slave narratives, and the lyric poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson demonstrate how these texts participated in producing a new model of personhood—one in which the racially distinct and physically constrained slave body converged alongside the sexually distinct and domestically circumscribed female body. Moving from the public domain of abolitionist politics to the privacy of lyric poetry, Sánchez-Eppler argues that attention to the physical body blurs the boundaries between public and private. Drawing analogies between black and female bodies, feminist-abolitionists use the public sphere of anti-slavery politics to write about sexual desires and anxieties they cannot voice directly. However, Sánchez-Eppler warns against exaggerating the positive links between literature and politics. She finds that the relationships between feminism and abolitionism reveal patterns of exploitation, appropriation, and displacement of the black body that acknowledge the difficulties in embracing “difference” in the nineteenth century as in the twentieth. Her insightful examination of these issues makes a distinctive mark within American literary and cultural studies. This title is part of UC Press’s Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1993.

In this expansive companion to Abolition Feminisms Vol. I, contributors confront multiple paradigms of punitivity—the foundational logics of family, borders, heterosexuality, colonial violence, and more—to disengage us from root systems of carcerality. The book transcends various modes and forms: through grassroots praxis, critical research, storytelling, diagrams, poetry, and visual art, these pieces build on the legacies of feminist thinkers who formulated abolitionist critiques of policing, surveillance, and control. The resulting framework provides readers with the resources to cultivate and inhabit a post-carceral world of radical freedom and possibility.

A unique book, tracing forty years of anti-racist feminist thought In a moment of rising authoritarianism, climate crisis, and ever more exploitative forms of neoliberal capitalism, there is a compelling and urgent need for radical paradigms of thought and action. Through interviews with key revolutionary scholars, Bhandar and Ziadah present a thorough discussion of how anti-racist, anti-capitalist feminisms are crucial to building effective political coalitions. Collectively, these interviews with leading scholars including Angela Y. Davis, Silvia Federici, and many others, trace the ways in which black, indigenous, post-colonial and Marxian feminisms have created new ways of seeing, new theoretical frameworks for analysing political problems, and new ways of relating to one another. Focusing on migration, neo-imperial militarism, the state, the prison industrial complex, social reproduction and many other pressing themes, the range of feminisms traversed in this volume show how freedom requires revolutionary transformation in the organisation of the economy, social relations, political structures, and our psychic and symbolic worlds. The interviews include Avtar Brah, Gail Lewis and Vron Ware on Diaspora, Migration and Empire. Himani Bannerji, Gary Kinsman, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Silvia Federici on Colonialism, Capitalism, and Resistance. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Avery F. Gordon and Angela Y. Davis on Abolition Feminism.

In the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration, The Feminist and the Sex Offender makes a powerful feminist case for accountability without punishment and sexual safety and pleasure without injustice. With analytical clarity and narrative force, The Feminist and the Sex Offender contends with two problems that are typically siloed in the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration: sexual and gender violence, on the one hand, and the state’s unjust, ineffective, and soul-destroying response to it on the other. Is it possible to confront the culture of abuse? Is it possible to hold harm-doers accountable without recourse to a criminal justice system that redoubles injuries, fails survivors, and retrenches the conditions that made such abuse possible? Drawing on interviews, extensive research, reportage, and history, The Feminist and the Sex Offender develops an intersectional feminist approach to ending sexual violence. It maps with considerable detail the unjust sex offender regime while highlighting the alternatives we urgently need.

A personal and political manifesto vying for an antiracist socialist feminist movement of movements The world is burning, flooding, and politically exploding, to the point where it’s become clear that neoliberal feminism—the kind that aims to elect The First Woman President—will never be enough. In this book, Zillah Eisenstein asks us to consider what it would mean to thread “socialism” to feminism; then, what it would mean to thread “abolitionism” to socialist feminism. She asks all of us, especially white women, to consider what it would mean to risk everything to abolish white supremacy, to uproot the structural knot of sex, race, gender, and class growing from that imperial whiteness. If we are to create a revolution that is totally liberatory, we need to pool together in a new working class, building a radical movement made of movements. Eisenstein’s manifesto is built on almost half a century of her antiracist socialist feminist work. But now, she writes with a new urgency and imaginativeness. Eisenstein asks us not to be limited by reforms, but to radicalize each other on differing fronts. Our task is to build bridges, to connect disparate and passionate people across aisles, state lines, picket lines, and more. The genius force demanding that we abolish white supremacy can also create a new “we” for all of us—a humanity universally accepting of our complexities and differences. We are in uncharted waters, but that is exactly where we need to be.