WGSS 355 - Abolition Feminism: Race, Gender, Sexuality and Critical Prison Studies

Cross-Listed as AMST 355

This course explores the history and politics of, and theoretical approaches to, gender and sexuality in relation to the racial politics of mass incarceration, or what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the “carceral geography” of the United States. By engaging recent work in queer and trans studies, feminist studies, and critical prison studies, we will consider how prisons and policing have shaped the making and remaking of race, gender, and sexuality from slavery and conquest to the contemporary period, and consider how the racialized harm of the criminal punishment system is often enacted through the policing of gender and sexuality. We will examine how police and prisons have regulated the body, identity, and populations, and the larger social, political, and cultural changes connected to these processes. While we will focus on the carceral system itself, we will also think of policing in a more expansive way by analyzing the racialized regulation of gender and sexuality on the plantation, in the colony, at the border, in the welfare office, and in the hospital, among other spaces, historical periods, and places. This is a community engaged course, and in the second half of the semester, students will work closely with the organization REP MN on a community-engaged project. Every year. (4 Credits)