Penn Women’s Center, 3643 Locust Walk

Join us for an afternoon of documentary films profiling activists Kiyoshi Kuromyia and Marsha P. Johnson followed by a teach-in with activists Reina and Che Gossett about prison abolition and legacies of transgender activism.

Films will be screened from 1:30-3:00 pm; teach-in/discussion 3-4:30 pm. 

Reina Gossett lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn and believes creativity & imagination are vital in movements for self determination.  She is a trans activist & artist, working as membership director at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and blogging at thespiritwas.tumblr.com.  Reina’s work has been featured in Barnard College’s The Scholar & Feminist Online, as well as Captive Genders: Trans Embodiement & The Prison Industrial Complex, Post Post Script Press and Randy Magazine.

Che Gossett is a member of ACT UP Philadelphia, on the steering committee of the HIV Prevention Justice Alliance, a board member with the Sex Worker Outreach Project and has been involved in queer and/or trans and gender nonconforming decriminalization, decarceration and prison industrial complex abolitionist organizing. Che is currently working on a biography of queer AIDS activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya.

It’s SRLP’s first calendar, designed by artist Caroline Paquita featuring artwork of SRLP Prisoner Advisory Committee members

This calendar was designed using the artwork of SRLP’s Prison Advisory Committee (PAC) members andcollages by artist, Caroline Paquita.  As PAC members are housed in New York State detention facilities, artists use whatever limited materials are available to them.  Often we receive drawings, poetry and doodles on used envelopes, lined paper or on corners of manila folders. Even while existing in some of the most violent and isolating conditions, members of PAC (like so many oppressed communities) continue to find ways to survive, resist and break down the distance and physical barriers created to systematically divide our communities.  This calendar was designed to raise funds to support the ongoing work of SRLP and to extend the reach of PAC.  It was also created to expand our historical knowledge, honoring those like Sylvia Rivera who never stopped fighting for us.

This essay reviews three recently published books that stand at the intersection of queer/trans studies and critical prison studies. These books show the multiple and complex ways that queerness pervades the US prison system and the devastating effects of criminalization and incarceration on queer, gender- and sexual-nonconforming, and LGBT people. The author argues that this scholarship also demonstrates the need for queer and trans studies to engage with the US prison system and for critical prison studies to use queer analytics and examine the incarceration of queer and LGBT people.

Here is the fb page for the event.

A panel with Eric Stanley, Dean Spade, Ralowe Ampu, and Vikki Law at the Law and Disorder conference in Portland, OR.

Also, a bit of an interview I did with Yasmin Nair and Ralowe Ampu is now translated into Spanish, you can read that here.

We are planning to do a few more Captive Genders events this fall in Canada and Southern California. Teaching Captive Genders in a class or reading it in a group this upcoming year is a great way to support the book and help build our collective abolitionist analysis.