Abstract
In 1972, when Michel Foucault was asked, “Do you know of a model prison?,” he responded:
The problem is not a model prison or the abolition of prisons. Currently, in our system, marginalization is effected by prisons. This marginalization will not automatically disappear by abolishing the prison. Society would quite simply institute another means. The problem is the following: to offer a critique of the system that explains the process by which contemporary society pushes a portion of the population to the margins. Voilà.1
Throughout the GIP documents, Foucault and his coauthors argue that “none of us is sure to escape the prison” because the police and prison are so unimaginably expansive—physically, discursively, and epistemologically—that one is always already ontologically “marked by police custody.”2 In this formulation, the prison is more than an institution composed of cages, corridors, and guard towers; it is also a system of affects, desires, discourses, and ideas that make the prison possible. Thus, the prison captures not just bodies, but also feelings, desires, and forms of knowledge. The prison could disappear tomorrow and the types of power that give rise to its reign could live on in other forms such as the regimes we call freedom, rights, and the state or structures like settler-colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy.
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Notes
Foucault, “Le grand enfermement” (1971), FDE1, no. 105, 1174.
Foucault, “(Manifeste du GIP)” (1971), FDE1, no. 86, 1042.
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 182.
Ibid., 5.
Grace Hong and Roderick Ferguson, “Introduction,” in Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 13.
Saidiya Hartman, in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), writes, “This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (6).
Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Beth Richie, “Queering Anti-Prison Work: African American Lesbians in the Juvenile Justice System,” in Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex, ed. Julia Sudbury (New York: Routledge, 2005).
On queer of color critique, see Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). On critical trans politics, see Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law (Cambridge: South End Press, 2011).
Angela Y. Davis, “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglas and the Convict Lease System,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), 74–96; Hong and Ferguson, “Introduction,” 9.
Grace Kyungwon Hong, “Existentially Surplus: Women of Color Feminism and the New Crises of Capitalism,” GLQ 18.1 (2012): 87–106; Ferguson, Aberrations, 110–137.
Brady Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 11.3 (2007): 313–356.
Foucault, “(Sur les prisons)” (1971), FDE1, no. 87, 1043 and Foucault, “Non, ce n’est pas une enquête officielle” (1971), FGIP-AL, 68.
Foucault, “Prisons et révoltes dans les prisons” (1973), FDE1, no. 125, 1296.
Ibid., 1297.
Foucault, “Enquête sur les prisons: brisons les barreaux du silence” (1971), FDE1, no. 88, 1047.
Michel Foucault as quoted in Marcelo Hoffman, “Foucault’s Politics and Bellicosity as Matrix for Power Relations,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 33.6 (September 2007): 766.
Foucault, “Préface” (1971), FDE1, no. 91, 1063.
Foucault, “Pouréchapper à leur prison …” (1972), FGIP-AL, 155.
Linda La Rue, “The Black Movement and Women’s Liberation,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995), 164.
Frank Wilderson, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 37.
Roderick Ferguson, “On the Specificities of Racial Formation: Gender and Sexuality in the Historiographies of Race,” in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Daniel Martinez HoSang, Oneka LaBennet, and Laura Pulido (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 55.
Ibid., 55.
Joy James, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 24.
Daniel Defert, “Quand l’information est une lutte” (1971), FGIP-AL, 72.
Ibid.
Ibid., 73.
Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures Of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (New York: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xiii.
Ibid., xxiv.
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 18; Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital, xxx.
Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Safiya Bukhari, The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison and Fighting for Those Left Behind (New York: The Feminist Press, 2010), 1.
Ibid., 2.
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
Ibid., 95.
Ibid., 100.
Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 144.
Ibid., 145.
Ibid., 2.
Assata Shakur, “Women in Prison: How We Are,” in The New Abolitionists: (Neo) Slave Narratives and the Contemporary Prison Writing, ed. Joy James (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 85.
Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Malden: Polity Press, 2013), 19.
Elsewhere I have written about Shakur’s writing in order to consider the connections between chattel-slavery, neoliberalism, and the prison. See Stephen Dillon, “Possessed by Death: The Neoliberal-Carceral State, Black Feminism, and the Afterlife of Slavery,” Radical History Review, 112 (Winter 2012): 113–125.
Julia Sudbury, “Celling Black Bodies: Black Women in the Global Prison Industrial Complex,” Feminist Review 80 (2005): 162–179; Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Beth Richie, Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered, Black Women (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Foucault, “Il y a un an à peu près …” (1972), FGIP-AL, 198.
Foucault, “Je perçois l’intolérable” (1971), FDE1, no. 94, 1073.
Foucault, “Luttes autour des prisons” (1979), FDE2, no. 273, 813.
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 22.
Francis Beale, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995), 154.
Ibid., 154.
The Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995), 237.
Jennifer C. Nash, “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality,” Meridians, 11.2 (2011): 1–24.
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Dillon, S. (2016). “Can They Ever Escape?” Foucault, Black Feminism, and the Intimacy of Abolition. In: Zurn, P., Dilts, A. (eds) Active Intolerance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137510679_18
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