1ac
Status quo prostitution laws frame prostitutes as monstronsity. Constructions of risk
criminalize and reinforce stigma against sex workers and transwomen of color
Aizura 14
Aren Z. Aizura is assistant professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of
Minnesota “Trans feminine value, racialized others and the limits of necropolitics” Chapter 6 "Social
Justice : Queer Necropolitics”, Florence, KY, USA: Taylor and Francis, 2014. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 28
August 2014.
That is, sex workers are both produced as vectors of HIV contamination and seen as the repository of risk, which then displaces risk 'reduction' measures from other
individuals and populations to sex workers. The
representation and regulation of sex work are structured by
understanding individual sex workers as monstrous and prostitution itself as a monstrosity — 'fear
sustains the motion of the sex worker monster, a "beast who is all body and no soul"' (Shah 2010: 143).
Regulation measures aimed at reducing risk to the 'normal population' are, in themselves,
normativizing. Shah's analysis could be extrapolated to other locations and historical moments in which
the criminalization of sex work has been inextricably linked to the desire to 'save' sex workers from
themselves. It also recalls my earlier point about the conflation of trans women and sex workers. Reading the hate directed at trans women as an extension
of, and analogical to, this fear of sex workers reinforces an analysis of hatred and violence directed towards trans women as imbricated in transnational circuits of
reproductive labour and biopolitical control. The
representation of sex workers as slaves and victims is key here.
Drawing on Mbembe's (2003) characterization of the slave as an 'instrument of labour', who is 'kept
alive but in a state of injury', Shah argues that that sex workers' representation as modern slaves casts
them as the living dead: '(infectious) zombie- like monsters needing to be rescued back into non-sex
worker "alive-in-life" humanity'. Those pruriently labelled 'sex slaves' thus must be rescued and
simultaneously normalized through anti-trafficking initiatives. For Shah, the necropolitics of sex work takes
place at the same time, paradoxically, as the same bodies are being brought 'back to life' through the
mechanics of rescue: biopolitically constituted as a population to be managed and whose lives require
fostering. While this gives us a useful analogy to think through the biopolitics of transphobic violence, premised on equivalence of exchange and management
of risky populations, the rescue narrative does not seem to apply to actual trans sex workers. Transgender sex workers are
neither the ideal victim subject of sex-trafficking rescue narratives nor deemed as worthy of rescue. In relation to transgender sex workers,
however, an assemblage of necropolitical and biopolitical processes also work simultaneously and in
contradiction. Risk operates on an axis with the capacity to criminalize, move along, eject, and arrest.
The assumption of sex work operates as a convenient method of criminalizing trans women: for example
in San Francisco, Washington, DC, and numerous other cities, being visibly trans and carrying condoms is
a legal pretext for arrest (Hodgson 2012; Human Rights Watch 2012). In this example, trans women are framed as risky or
deviant individuals whose disappearance from the street makes life safe for others.
The street is not safe for the outlaw
Every avdeine is a grave yard in waiting when we
Stride through crowds of mean mugs and glares like cross hairs lining up
Line up the fire squad
They are directed at me too and I feel it
Their furred browns and wrinkled nose express their discontent
Their desent
Of our transgender reality
It’s a fallacy to think that realty doesn’t included me
I am not I
I am we
Che Gossett writes…
Che Gossett is a black gender queer and femme fabulous writer and activist. They are a contributor to
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (eds. Nat Smith and Eric Stanley)
and The Transgender Studies Reader v. II (eds. Aren Azuira and Susan Stryker)."Social Justice : Queer
Necropolitics”, Florence, KY, USA: Taylor and Francis, 2014. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 28 August 2014.
Mbembe thus relates the politics of life to the politics of death. 'I examine those trajectories by which the state of exception and the relation of
enmity have become the normative basis of the right to kill' (Mbembe 2003: 16). One of Mbembe's prime examples is the settler colonial
occupation of Palestine, where areas such as the NVest Bank are cordoned off via an Israeli carceral—military industrial complex of occupation
and apartheid. The
necropolitical also indexes various anti-black enterprises and state violence, from lynching,
Jim Crow-era racial apartheid and terrorism, to contemporary militarized police violence against black
people crystallizing in 'stop and frisk' orders and reminiscent of slave patrols, to outright police
assassination of black 'citizens' such as Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant and so many others. It was in response to
'this record of mass slayings on the basis of race, of lives deliberately warped and distorted by the willful creation of conditions making for
premature death, poverty and disease' that the 195 1 UN petition presented by Paul Robeson and William Patterson, 'We Charge Genocide',
materialized (Patterson: 1970). The title of the petition is as instructive as it is declarative: 'We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the
United Nations for Relief From a Crime of The United States Government Against the Negro People'. The petition was in response to anti-black
racism, through which bio- and necropolitical violence converges in state violence against black 'citizens'. As
James Baldwin in so
passionately argued in Evidence of Things Not Seen: 'Blacks have never been, and are not now, really
considered to be citizens here. Blacks exist, in the American imagination, and in relation to American
institutions, in reference to the slave codes: the first legal recognition of our presence remains the most
compelling' (Bald%in 1995: 31). This is echoed in Colin Dayan's elegant and harro% ing account in The Story of Cruel and Unusual, which
traces how 'the ghost of slavery still haunts our leg-al language and holds the prison system in thrall' (Dayan 2007: 16). The vast
landscape of the prison industrial complex (PIC) can thus be described more generally as an example of
what Mbembe calls a 'deathscape' — ' and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations
are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead' (Mbembe 2003: 40). The
prison industrial complex is an always already anti-black, violently anti- queer and anti-transgender
enterprise that perpetuates what Saidiya Hartman names the 'afterlife of slavery' (Hartman 2008: 6). It
institutionalizes forms of restricted life: following 're-entry', a formerly incarcerated person loses access to public housing, benefits and federal
educational loans and faces chronic joblessness due to stigma. Incarceration
has been historically employed as a means
of maintaining an anti-black and white supremacist sociopolitical and racial capitalist order — from
antebellum 'black codes' that criminalized vagrancy (Dru Stanley 125—126) post-'emancipation', to more
recent attempts to extinguish the spirit and destroy the momentum of black liberationist movements in
the United States (ranging from surveillance and sabotage of the Revolutionary Action Movement, to
COIN TELPRO, to the current renewed targeting of Assata Shakur). Journalist Shane Bauer (2012) has documented how
in California, the mere possession of black radical literature results in being criminalized as gang related and put in solitary housing units (SHU)
— a form of torture from which exit is uncertain, whose administration is often based on whether one informs on other incarcerated people
(Bauer 2012: 1—4). Prisons thus continue
the logic of COIN TELPRO which aimed to neutralize and eliminate
black freedom movement(s). The prison industrial complex is at once a manifestation of a disciplinary
and of a control society. The prison is one of the central and proliferating oppressive technologies
through which bio- and necropolitical violence and the apparatuses of surveillance that reinforce it
are naturalized. The insidious morphology of the carceral is such that even as it is dismantled via
lobbying for decriminalization and decarceration, on the one hand, it proliferates via extended modes of
surveillance and control — ankle bracelets, probation and parole — on the other.
Cops with county locks out to police and protect their insecurity
Frightened by the fluidity of and pink and blue
Freighted by the sight of black
Booming our subconscious with the beat of our bodies
We were meant to see ourselves in Monica Jones
A manifestation of the malice of trans
But what we see, is glitter
We will not let our light shine through your prism
It was never made for us, ever when we are innocent we are already guility
Vitulli 14
[Elias Walker Vitulli is a doctoral candidate in American studies at the University of Minnesota. His dissertation examines the history of the
incarceration of gender-nonconforming and trans people in the United States. His article, ‘‘ ‘A Means of Assuring the Safe and Efficient
Operation of a Prison’: Administrative Segregation, Security, and Gender Nonconformity,’’ is forthcoming in GLQ.TSQ: Transgender Studies
Quarterly Volume 1, Numbers 1–2 * May 2014 19 a 2014 Duke University Press ]
One night in June 2011, as they walked through a South Minneapolis neighborhood to the grocery
store, CeCe McDonald, a young African American trans woman, and a group of her friends, all also
African American and queer, were attacked by a group of white people who yelled racist and
transphobic slurs at them, including ‘‘faggots,’’ ‘‘niggers,’’ and ‘‘chicks with dicks.’’ When one of their attackers smashed
a glass into McDonald’s face, the attack escalated into a physical fight, during which one of her attackers
was fatally stabbed. When police arrived on the scene, they arrested only McDonald.1¶ McDonald was
later charged with two counts of second-degree murder. Initially, she was placed in solitary confinement at the Hennepin
¶
County men’s jail, and she received insufficient medical care for a serious cut on her face, which eventually became infected. In May 2012,
McDonald accepted a plea agreement in which she pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and
was sentenced to prison for
forty-one months. In June, she was transferred to the men’s prison in St. Cloud, Minnesota. In January
2014, McDonald was released from prison after serving nineteen months.¶
We will not argue for inclusion in the same formations of death that have claimed so
many translatin@s and black trans women lives. The united states cant exist without
separating us from our identity, without segregating our bodies into the penitentiary,
Vitulli 14
[Elias Walker Vitulli is a doctoral candidate in American studies at the University of Minnesota. His dissertation examines the history of the
incarceration of gender-nonconforming and trans people in the United States. His article, ‘‘ ‘A Means of Assuring the Safe and Efficient
Operation of a Prison’: Administrative Segregation, Security, and Gender Nonconformity,’’ is forthcoming in GLQ.TSQ: Transgender Studies
Quarterly Volume 1, Numbers 1–2 * May 2014 19 a 2014 Duke University Press ]
McDonald’s experiences stitch together a web of racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence and
criminalization that many trans people, especially trans women of color, experience daily. Her story is
emblematic of the experiences of trans people whose lives come in contact with the prison-industrial
complex. Over the past decade, some scholars and activists have begun to use the term prison-industrial complex to describe the mutually
beneficial and far-reaching relationship between state and private interests that promotes the prison system as a central response to social,
economic, and racial problems (see, e.g., Davis 2003; Gilmore 2007; Rodr ́ıguez 2006). The
prison-industrial complex is a
dynamic and productive web of white supremacist, neoliberal, heteropatriarchal, and gender-normative
power that targets social deviance for criminalization and imprisonment and secures normativity. In
practice, certain populations marked as racially, sexually, gender, and/or class deviant—such as lowincome African American men, trans women of color, and gender-nonconforming queer women of
color or aggressives — are criminalized, portrayed as suspicious and dangerous, disproportionately
incarcerated, and subjected to violence, while whiteness, heterosexuality, and non-trans status are
decriminalized. In other words, policing, prisons, and punishment are organized by and help construct race,
gender, sexuality, and class in the United States.¶ While throughout its history the prison system has been a central site of
social, racial, gender, and sexual formation and control, it has taken on new importance since the 1970s. Responding to the needs of
globalization and dein- dustrialization and as
part of the backlash against racial justice movements of the 1950s to
1970s, the United States began to rapidly grow its prison population from an average daily population of
about 300,000 at the beginning of the 1970s to nearly 2.3 million today. This rise in prison population
has been fueled by racialized law enforcement, prosecution, and sentencing that have produced a
prison population that is approximately 70 percent people of color. The new mass scale of the prison system has been
termed ‘‘mass incarceration’’ to mark how certain populations are targeted for systematic imprisonment
and to describe its devastating impacts on targeted communities, most centrally low-income black
communities but also many trans and queer communities.¶ Law enforcement’s targeting of queer,
gender-nonconforming, and transgender people is not new. The history of trans people in the United
States has been a history of criminalization. Throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, gender nonconformity, cross-dressing, and homosexuality were criminalized through laws and
policing practices. Susan Stryker (2008) argues that trans communities and identities often formed and
coalesced in response to experiences of persistent police scrutiny, harassment, and violence. This history
produced what Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock (2010) call ‘‘queer criminal archetypes,’’ which persist into the present.¶
Today, people who are visibly gender nonconforming, especially those who are also marked as racially
and/or economically deviant, are often viewed by police as particularly suspicious and subject to intense
surveillance, violence, and arrest. Trans women often report being stopped by police under the
suspicion that they are sex workers, an experience so common it has been labeled ‘‘walking while
trans.’’ Queer criminal archetypes affect policing and also prosecution, sentencing, and treatment within
penal institutions. This criminalization, cou- pled with endemic employment discrimination, poverty,
homelessness, racism, and family rejection, has led to the disproportionate incarceration of trans and
gender-nonconforming people. Within jails and prisons, trans people are almost always placed in a sex-segregated institution based
on their genitals and are expected to conform to the norms of the sex of the institutions. Prison admin- istrators often view gendernonconforming and trans prisoners as security threats¶ and subject them to increased surveillance and punishment, denial of medical care and
appropriately gendered clothing and grooming products, isolation in segregation, and verbal, physical, and sexual harassment and assault.¶
Imprisoned trans and gender-nonconforming people, like McDonald, have fought against their
criminalization and the prison-industrial complex’s attacks on their gender identities and expressions for
more than a century (Kunzel 2008; Stanley and Smith 2011). Yet their words, lives, and experiences are rarely part
of trans studies conversations. As criminalization and disproportionate incarceration continue and as
trans people continue to experience harassment and violence throughout the prison-industrial complex,
the experiences and life chances of significant segments of our communities will be intimately bound to
the prison-industrial complex.
Thus we advocate the emancipation of the outlaw by nullification
Leavitt 12
Adrien Leavitt JD, magna cum laude, Seattle University (2011), BA, Smith College (2004). “Queering Jury
Nullification: Using Jury Nullification as a Tool to Fight Against the Criminalization of Queer and
Transgender People” Seattle Journal for Social Justice Volume 10 | Issue 2 Article 2 April 2012
More expansively, queer jurors who are prison abolitionists can use jury nullification to effect transformative change. Simply put, queer
abolitionist jurors should always nullify. In this application, jury nullification becomes a highly effective tool to subvert the racist, homophobic,
transphobic, violent, and unjust criminal legal system. While this conception of jury nullification is more expansive than Butler’s—and therefore
may exceed the logic used by him to show that black jury nullification is morally permissible—abolition- based queer jury nullification is
nonetheless morally justifiable. In fact, abolition-based queer jury nullification furthers Butler’s primary goal of reducing the burden of
imprisonment on vulnerable communities. Indeed, as highlighted previously, the
collateral consequences of imprisoning
queer and trans people are intolerably severe and can only be remedied by the abolishing the prison
system and replacing it with a more humane and healing method of addressing antisocial behavior.258
Like black jury nullification, queer jury nullification is morally justifiable due to the continuing and systematic
failure of the democratic system in the United States to protect queer people, typified by the
criminalization of queer identities. Queer people and their sympathizers should not be morally obligated to enforce a system that
perpetrates violence on them and members of their community. While the ideal of the “rule of law” suggests neutral interpretation and
application, in reality this is impossible to achieve. As a result, the
law cannot lead to justice in every case, making queer
jury nullification appropriate to ameliorate the deeply held stereotypes and assumptions made about
those who refuse to subscribe to heteronormative sexualities and gender identities. Additionally, queer
people’s underrepresentation as legal decision makers had the result of creating a legal system
reflecting norms that were not assented to by queers and other political minorities. As in the Magna Carta
era, without another method of changing these unjust laws, jury nullification is the appropriate avenue .
Finally, regardless of the facts of the case or the law at issue, queer jury nullification is morally justified simply to avoid sending queer people
into inherently violent prisons where they are likely to be sexually and physically abused, subjected to verbal harassment and degradation, and
forced to endure the physiological punishment of nearly constant segregated isolation.
Our gender self-determination is necessary to confront anti-black and trans
misogynistic policing that denies our bodies citizenship, and represents us as criminal.
Gossett 14
Che Gossett is a black gender queer and femme fabulous writer and activist. They are a contributor to
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (eds. Nat Smith and Eric Stanley)
and The Transgender Studies Reader v. II (eds. Aren Azuira and Susan Stryker)."Social Justice : Queer
Necropolitics”, Florence, KY, USA: Taylor and Francis, 2014. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 28 August 2014.
Our communities, poor, black, queer and trans — women in particular — face malign neglect and
social abandonment, from homelessness to job discrimination and criminalization. So many lives have
been extinguished by barrages of police bullets, suffered under police brutalization, been left to perish
and die 'While in police and/or state custody, or killed by other penal technologies of torture and
execution. Incarcerated trans people face sexual violence and involuntary disclosure of HIV/AIDS
status by guards, are penalized for violating the prison- enforced binaried gender regulations, and are
subjected to physical isolation and solitary confinement (Grant, Jaime M. , el al. 201 1: 158—173). The prison regulates
and attempts to reinforce a racialized penal gender binary — by outlawing and criminalizing gender nonconformativity and black radical aesthetics by controlling dress, hairstyles and other forms of expression,
as is further shown by Gabriel Arkles in his recent article 'Correcting Race and Gender: Prison Regulation of Social Hierarchy Through Dress' (Arkles 2012). Incarcerated trans women of colour
are often specifically targeted by guards and other incarcerated people. In Pennsylvania, legal cases speak to the trans misogynistic and sexual violence within the prison system that
incarcerated trans women of colour face. In one of these cases, a trans woman of colour was sexually harassed and coerced by a guard and once she spoke out about the violence she was
penalized and transferred from the prison where she was being held, % hich was designated as the women's prison, to one designated as the men's prison (Kulwiki 201 1). Similar to the so-
the carceral-political imaginary is growing accustomed to and therefore,
in pure neoliberal multicultural fashion, beginning to recognize, all of our sexual and gender diversity.
However, the queer and trans inclusion promised by carceral order is the so-called 'freedom' to be
held in queer and trans inclusive prison cages. Anti-black and trans misogynistic police violence
against black trans women continues: Duanna Johnson in Memphis (Brown 2008: 15) and Nizah Morris were found vvith fatal head injuries after receiving a
called 'feminist' response of 'gender responsive' prisons,
'courtesy ride' from local Philadelphia police (Tackzyk 2003: 16). The biopolitical regulation of carceral state (as opposed to self!) gender determination is also exemplified by the sentencing of
CeCe McDonald, for physically defending and protecting herself against a racist, homo- and transphobic attack. I The state's attempts to 'determine' LMcDonald's gender continue (Solomon
2012: para. 6). Yet in the face of this, queer and/or trans liberationist marches and actions from Paris to Manhattan have popularized messages of enduring love and support to free cece.
The political project of gender self-determination as an abolition of the policing of gender(s), bodies and
lives has roots in the revolutionary trans political horizon outlined by Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson and other members of the
1970s collective Street Transsexual Action Revolutionaries (STAR). In 1971, Marsha P. Johnson spoke of STAR's
politics of queer and trans decarceration: 'we'd like to see our gay brothers and sisters out of jail and on
the streets again' (Jay 1992: 1 13). STAR placed sex worker dignity, gender self-determination, trans liberation,
housing justice and anti-capitalism at the very core of their organizing. Similar to the Panthers, they came together to create
interstitial radical spaces against organized abandonment, providing housing and clothing for each other and protecting each other. Rather than retreating from the violently anti-trans and
anti-queer world, or eng-aging only in polemics and manifesto writing, they also actively worked to transform it. STAR was proto-intersectional and specifically centred sex workers, homeless
STAR like so many radical trans and queer organizations of
that time period, was abolitionist in the sense that it did not look to prisons and police for solutions to
social, economic and political injustice. Rather, it struggled for gender self- determination and against
policing — of bodies, genders and sex — and centred formerly or currently incarcerated people, poor
people, sex workers and queer homeless youth in its political organizing work. ' MJe were fighting for our lives', Sylvia
Rivera told Leslie Feinberg in an interview about the Stonewall era (Feinberg 1999:97). Indeed, gender self-determination and HIV decriminalization remain a
critical part of the continuing struggle for trans and queer life in the face of carceral violence and
policing.
youth and incarcerated queer and trans people, particularly people of colour.
This reclaiming of our bodies
transgressive renaming
This act of explaining that
james has always been short for Jamie
her family is more queer than nuclear
her home is when bae is near
her heart races when cops flash fears of county
so we write blocks with our eyes on mens cell blocks
Overthrow of colonial and carceral rule must be grown together with gender
liberation, the struggle for gender self-determination is a struggle against the policing
of racialized bodies, genders and sex
Stanley 14
[Eric A. Stanley is a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of Communication and Critical Gender Studies at the University of
California, San Diego. Eric is an editor of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (2011) and has published
articles in Social Text, Women and Performance, and American Quarterly., “Gender Self-Determination” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly
Volume 1, Numbers 1–2 * May 2014 19 a 2014 Duke University Press ]
Gender self-determination is a collective praxis against the brutal pragmatism of the present, the
liquidation of the past, and the austerity of the future. That is to say, it indexes a horizon of possibility
already here, which struggles to make freedom flourish through a radical trans politics. Not only a
defensive posture, it builds in the name of the undercommons a world beyond the world, lived as a
dream of the good life.1 Within at least the US context, the normalizing force of mainstream trans politics, under
the cover of equality, operates by consolidation and exile. Or put another way, through its fetishistic
attachment to the law and its vicissitudes, mainstream trans politics argues for inclusion in the same
formations of death that have already claimed so many. This collusion can be seen in the lobbying for the addition of
‘‘gender identity’’ to federal hate crimes enhancements. While the quotidian violence many trans people face — in
particular trans women of color — is the material of daily life, this push for the expansion of the prisonindustrial complex through hate crimes legislation proliferates violence under the name of safety.
Legislative and semilegislative apparatuses from the United Nations and NGOs to local governance have
begun to include similar language around ‘‘gender equity.’’ Champions of such moves might cite the Yogyakarta Principles
(2007), which are the findings of a human rights commission convened to foreground ‘‘Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity’’ globally, or
such recent decisions as that of the Australian government to add a third gender option of ‘‘X’’ to their passports as signs of progress. However,
an ethic of gender self-determination helps us to resist reading these biopolitical shifts as victories.
Here the state and its interlocutors, including at times trans studies, work to translate and in turn confine the
excesses of gendered life into managed categories at the very moment of radical possibility.2 To begin
with the ‘‘self’’ in the wake of neoliberalism might seem a dangerous place to turn a phrase, especially one
that is suggested to offer such radical potentiality — and perhaps it is. After all, the ‘‘self ’’ in our contemporary moment
points most easily toward the fiction of the fully possessed rights-bearing subject of Western modernity,
the foil of the undercommons. However, here it is not the individual but a collective self, an ontological
position always in relation to others and dialectically forged in otherness, that is animated. The
negation of this collective self, as relational and nonmimetic, is the alibi for contemporary rights discourse,
which argues that discrete legal judgments will necessarily produce progressive change. Rather than believe
that this is an oversight of the state form, critics of human rights discourse remind us that this substitution is a precondition of
the state’s continued power. Antagonistic to such practices of constriction and universality, gender selfdetermination is affectively connected to the practices and theories of self- determination embodied by
various and ongoing anticolonial, Black Power, and antiprison movements. For Frantz Fanon and many others, the
violence of colonialism and antiblackness are so totalizing that ontology itself collapses; thus the
claiming of a self fractures the everydayness of colonial domination. The Black Panther Party for Self Defense echoed a
similar perspective in their 1966 Ten Point Plan. Self-determination, for the Panthers and for many others, is the
potentiality of what gets called freedom. Connecting these histories, ‘‘gender self-determination is
queer liberation is prison abolition’’ was articulated by the gender and queer liberation caucus of CR10,
Critical Resistance’s tenth anniversary conference in 2008 (The CR10 Publications Collective, 2008: 7). To center
radical black, anticolonial, and prison abolitionist traditions is to already be inside trans politics.3 From
STAR’s (Street Transvestite Action Revo- lutionaries) alliance with the Young Lords in New York City and the recent
orga- nizing against US drone attacks led by trans women in Sukkur, Pakistan, to Miss Major’s words that
anoint this essay, these forms of gender self-determination, even if left unnamed, argue that national
liberation and the overthrow of colonial and carceral rule must be grown together with gender
liberation (see Littauer 2012). Gender self-determination opens up space for multiple embodiments and their
expressions by collectivizing the struggle against both interpersonal and state violence. Further, it pushes
us away from building a trans politics on the fulcrum of realness (gender normative, trans, or otherwise)
while also responding to the different degrees of harm people are forced to inhabit. As a nonprescriptive
politics, its contours cannot always be known in advance — it is made and remade in the process of its actualization, in the time of resistance
and in the place of pleasure. Becoming, then, as Gilles Deleuze might have it—or more importantly, as Miss Major lives it (Stanley and Smith
2011)—is the moment of gender self- determination: becoming liberated as we speak.
The nessicity for white cultural purity demands white self-decriminalization through
the criminalization of the racialized other. Socio-political institutions have constructed
themselves to maintain criminality and exclusions
Martinot 10 (Steve, Instructor Emeritus at the Center for Interdisciplinary Programs at San Francisco State University, The Machinery of
Whiteness: Studies in the Structure of Racialization, Temple University Press, 2010, pg. 20-23)//DS
Having its origin in coloniality, “racialization” emerges from a history of criminality, including
kidnapping, false imprisonment, forced labor, murder, contempt for personhood, assault, torture, and
theft of land. In all this, whiteness signified dominance, or the production of dominance, and as Ruth Frankenberg argues, still
does (Frankenberg 1993, 231). “Race” and white- ness remain a power hierarchy that takes that criminality as
its tradition. Today, in its daily relationship to black people, for instance, it models itself on that colonialism through its violation
of the (social) contract (disenfranchisement), stalking (in department stores and police profiling), social exclusion (school tracking and
neighborhood segregation), consistent terrorism (police brutality), fraud (redlining and disparate mortgage rates), extortion (felonization of
misdemeanors), and blackmail (plea bargaining). All of these constitute elements of the process of racialization. Insofar as the
primary
symbology of race has become the criminalization of the racialized, the socio- political function of that
criminalization is precisely to decriminalize whites in their acts of racialization. It is the relation
between the criminalization of others and white self-decriminalization that marks the history of race
and whiteness in the United States. Let us mention a few moments in the trajectory of this relation. In 1800 a group of
free African-Americans from Pennsylvania petitioned Congress to end the slave trade and begin the
abolition of slavery altogether. A mere twenty-four years had passed since the Declaration of Independence had proclaimed all to
have the right to liberty. Though the petition was mild in its terms and correct in its utilization of respectable channels of political expression, it
was rejected outright by Congress, and resulted in a move to deny (that is, to criminalize) the right to
petition for African-Americans (Litwack 1961, 34). In an 1806 congressional debate on how to deal with smugglers of slaves into
the United States after the slave trade was banned, some suggested that the smuggled slaves should be freed and released, thinking that would
dissuade the smugglers. Southern
Congressmen argued that free black people “threatened to become
‘instruments of murder, theft, and conflagration,’” and that while slavery might be cruel it was the
only way to ensure “the safety of the white community.” Both sides then agreed that Africans, if freed, would perish
quickly with no one to give them assistance (Robinson Introduction 21 1971, 325–326). In other words, at the highest levels of
government, pro- slavery and anti-slavery advocates united in affirming this white supremacist
“realism” that no one would provide these victims of criminality (e.g., kidnap- ping, enslavement, abandonment to
the elements) a helping hand. Where white criminality toward black people was acceptable, a prodemocratic ethic of political or social inclusion of people wronged by their capture remained
undiscussable. When black people were disenfranchised under Jim Crow, it meant that they could not testify in court against a white
person. Thus, white decriminalization with respect to black people was even written into the law and into
court procedures. When police barriers and electoral malfeasance pre- vented more than 100,000 black people from voting in Florida in
2000 (see note 8), the issue that was permitted to emerge as a political concern was not the criminality of the police or electoral personnel who
had deprived people of the vote, but rather that people themselves had voted in an inept manner (hanging chads, for instance). Those
prevented from voting were given no voice. In contradistinction, a
myriad of socio-political institutions (corporations, unions,
political parties, electoral systems, etc.) have constructed themselves in a manner to maintain white dominance
over the social categories into which whites have placed all others (hiring bias, segregationism, etc.). Individual
racism has relied on that institutional integument to preserve the culture of domination that makes individual racism both possible and
permissible. Today,
during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the same ethic persists. In Jena,
black self-defense is criminalized and white aggression is decriminalized. Immigrants from Latin
America, without proper papers, are detained indefinitely when not immediately deported, even
though indefinite detention is a violation of the Constitution. The Constitution holds that habeas corpus shall not be
withheld from anyone except for extreme (mili- tary) threats to public safety. The mere fact that these immigrants do not
have the proper papers is used to decriminalize the violation of its own Constitution by an entire
branch of the Justice Department (Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE]). Yet only marginal organizations, such as the
ACLU or immigrant rights movements, seem to recognize the criminality of this. (We look more closely at the connection between slavery and
being an “illegal” immigrant in Chapter 5.) This
sense of legitimate violation of the Constitution is not unconnected
to the white purity concept. White self-decriminalization, central to the ethic of whiteness, provides it
with its sense of cultural purity. This “cultural” purity is not the same as the original white purity
condition by which whites defined themselves and race in the first place. What it marks, however, is an
extension of that originary purity concept to the domain of social identity, insofar as both define
themselves through what they have defined as “other.” But the ethical inversion contained in white
self-decriminalization works against itself. To construct whiteness out of a purity concept implies
imposing a non-purity, an impurity or corruption, on others through that “white” perspective. They become
less than human. But to associate the purity condition with an anti-democratic dehumanization of
other people means to depend on the criminality of exclusionism, and on the necessity to
decriminalize the whiteness produced. The originary purity concept thus corrupts itself. Whiteness
cannot escape the corruption of basing a sense of humanity (and of its humanity) on an exclusionism. One
reason many white people wish to think of themselves as simply human is to evade the inherent
corruption that whiteness imposes on them. The exclusionary ancestry that has produced one as
white stands in contradiction to being “just human.” But to shift identification in that way means to submerge oneself in a
corrupted concept of the human because it emerges from white society, already imprisoned in a supremacism and its artificial division of
humanity. To seek to see oneself as simply human without dis- mantling the purity/corruption binary by which whiteness has defined itself is to
accept the white supremacist corruption of the human. The
idea of being “simply human” might allow white people
to think of races as existing in some kind of parity, on a horizontal plane. But this horizontality is then
only another form of decriminalization of the criminality of having imposed a vertical hierarchy on
people in the first place. Many white people claim that whiteness and white supremacy are not the same thing, and they seek a sense
of whiteness that is not supremacist. We examine whether this is a possible position to take, or whether one’s non-acceptance of white
exclusionism implies a non-acceptance of whiteness itself, in Chapter 7. But as
Frankenberg warns us, white people simply
assume a natural or universal significance for what they do or say. For them, the assumption of
individuality seems assured, since they can “dys-consciously” (to use Frances Rains’s term [1998, 87]) ignore their
participation in what is done to other people socially. The white individualist, for instance, is one who thinks he or she can
escape what the system does because individual acts are by nature not systemic. But such “innocence” is a luxury provided the hegemonic,
which allows them to ignore the fact that the meaning of their acts is pre- cisely systemic. That is what “hegemony” means. Indeed,
“hegemony” is itself one of the meanings that individualism is given.
To seek dysconscious com- fort in one’s
individualism ignores the fact that the meanings individual acts obtain are social meanings, given by
others, and that the acts of those of a hegemonic group are thereby given hegemonic meanings. It is a
reflection of the white self-decriminalization ethic that for the hegemonic mind, a white person’s acts
represent only themselves while a black person’s acts (for instance) represent “their race” (McIntosh 1997).
Reforms function to transform institutions to preserve a cultural structure that expels
and enslaves the outlaw
Martinot 12 (Steve, Instructor Emeritus at the Center for Interdisciplinary Programs at San Francisco
State University, White Supremacy, the Colonial Commodification of The Land, and the Corporate
Structure, Understanding & Dismantling Privilege, Volume 2, Issue 1, February 2012, pg. 6-7)//DS
This history is well known. After
the violent overthrow of the Reconstruction governments, black debt
servitude through the crop lien system was instituted to keep black farmers tied to the land. When
agrarian populism failed to rise above its racism and establish real financial independence (a longer story), a campaign for complete
segregation was launched on the basis of a paranoia toward black sexuality. Many black men were
murdered by mobs because of wild accusations of assaults on white women.2 I myself remember reading,
during the 1950s, of a black man convicted of rape in Florida for having spoken to a white woman on the telephone. The result was the
construction of a massive system of segregation giving white society totalitarian control over black
people. Again: paranoia, white consensus, and violence. We see this structure of white racialized identity in the
invasion of Iraq. First, there was the paranoid campaign about weapons of mass destruction, fabricated stories about Iraqi nuclear
programs, and Iraq’s involvement in organized terrorism, etc. And the mainstream bought all that, despite international refutations, because it
spoke to an inherent paranoia. Though
there were massive protests against the proposed invasion, once it
began, white solidarity kicked in ("support the troops") and the resistance eroded. Though no Iraqi weapons
program was found, the violence of the invasion cemented support for the war even in its fallaciousness
and criminality. The manifestations of this white identity structure are endless. The cold war, the war
on drugs, the anti-affirmative action movement ("reverse discrimination"), the anti-immigrant
movement, and the mass incarceration resulting from the a priori criminalization of people of color
are all examples of its operation. Even though the civil rights movements established the principle of equality before the law,
through its recognition and building of community autonomy as a response to and defense against racism, that community autonomy was
denigrated and turned into a source of criminality, and the principle of equality before the law turned upside down, as a way of colorlessly
attacking and imposing police occupation and mass incarceration. Both have found general acceptance in white society. The
thing to
understand about a cultural structure is that it both renders large political and social events familiar
and recognizable, and it guides individual actions in ways that not only harmonize with the larger
events, but make alternative procedures hard to conceive. An alternative to prison for dealing with
crime is anathema. If the majority of prisoners are there for pot possession, that in itself makes
marijuana decriminalization unthinkable. In other words, the cultural is what goes without saying. Cultural
norms are not regulations or directives. They map out domains and limits of comportment in which
there is space for different attitudes and activities, but beyond which comportment ceases to be
recognizable or familiar. Racism, each time it appears in events, has a certain familiarity as the
signifier for white solidarity and consensus. Housing and education remain segregated. Labor unions
discriminate internally in terms of leadership positions, or fighting for promotions on the job. For city
governments, urban renewal programs became ways of breaking up communities of color. Before we
ask how to combat it, we have to ask the question why, after 200 years of progressive people fighting
against it, each resurgence of racism works so well. And that is the purpose of examining white
racialized identity as a cultural structure. It is not a psychological phenomenon. Racism, representing
white solidarity and consensus, constitutes a ticket to belonging and membership for white people,
the means by which white people obtain their identity as white. Those familiar with the unfolding events in Jena,
Louisiana,3 or Tulia, Texas,4 know what happened in the white parts of town there.