Imagining Queer Justice: Prison Abolition and LGBT Hate Crime Legislation

Panel presentation at Wesleyan University on April 26, 2013 organized by Professor Margot Weiss on queer and trans activism against the prison industrial complex (PIC) and LGBT hate crimes legislation. The panelists discuss possibilities of radical queer and trans justice, practicing a critical abolitionist imagination, and histories of queer resistance to criminalization and state violence. Panelists: Ryan Conrad, a writer, artist, academic, and organizer with Against Equality, speaks about the history of hate crimes legislation, its part in the expansion of the prison industrial complex, and the links between state-sponsored violence, homophobia, transphobia, and the criminal punishment system. Reina Gossett, a trans activist, artist, and writer (featured in The Scholar & Feminist, Captive Genders, and The Spirit Was ...), speaks about radical trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, STAR, and histories and legacies of trans movements for self-determination and liberation. Eric A. Stanley, an activist, filmmaker, and co-editor of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (with Nat Smith, 2011), speaks about imagining otherwise as a queer politics of abolition and rethinking the underground as a site for queer struggles against the state.