Research and reform strategies aimed at fighting for justice in women’s prisons brought much-needed attention to the neglected role of gender in relation to mass incarceration. However, my research on California “gender-responsive” prison policies and my organizing with incarcerated survivors of violence resulted in striking conclusions. Although gender-based violence and discrimination are pervasive in US prisons, particular gender-identity reforms seeking legal redress within liberal rights-based rubrics, fail to adequately address the problems articulated by people in women’s prisons. Paradoxically, good-intentioned advocates exacerbate suffering by proposing dangerous policies (e.g. sterilization) and because the state appropriates demands for gender reforms in ways that expand repressive prison apparatuses and lead to racialized and gendered carceral violence against both imprisoned people and the communities they leave behind.

This project tracks the study of gender and criminality and women’s prison reform and critiques problematic mobilizations of gender and/or the plight of women prisoners. I identify commonalties shared by less-successful strategies, posit explanations for what the strategies neglect, and suggest alternatives to advocate for all prisoners. This search reflects my extended grappling with one primary question—following the lead of prisoners—what type of research and reform strategies address the deleterious conditions of confinement inside US prisons and jails, without expanding the reach of the carceral state further into communities targeted for debilitation?

I assess gender-identity based reforms in women’s prisons by emphasizing the interconnectedness of gender oppression and racializing assemblages in relation to carceral violence and state power. For example, I place the state’s criminalization of abused women’s resistance to violence in relation to the global processes that fuel prison expansion. Similarly, I examine how the prison, as an institutional site of disciplinary power and a mechanism of racialized population management, relies upon gendered violence (and resistance to it) as a primary means to maintain marginalized communities in a state of debilitation. I anchor counter-narratives in theorizing by prisoners, abolitionists/activists, critical prison, race, and theory scholars and feminists in gender studies, black studies, humanities, and law. I call upon “traditions of the oppressed” to ground punishment technologies in relation to (and extensions of) histories of the transatlantic slave trade/racial slavery, settler colonialism, and indigenous genocide. The purpose of my project is to unravel the logics that legitimize the place of prison in society, to “build communities, not prisons,” and ultimately, to challenge any notion that prisons make us safe or that people should be locked in cages period.

The Collective Come-Up: Black Queer Placemaking in Subprime Baltimore engages the experiences, community organizing, and alternative economic frameworks of black queer and transgender women in the age of “credit-led accumulation” and neoliberal urban planning projects that stimulate the gentrification of black neighborhoods (Soederberg 2013). This black feminist ethnography, situated within the overlapping geographies of urban renewal programs, subprime foreclosure, and speculative urbanism, foregrounds the contested place in black queer spatial imaginaries of private property in a city with 30,000 vacant properties and lots. Specifically, I examine Brioxy’s black land movement in West Baltimore – an effort that seeks to forestall gentrification and “keep the hood black.” From black placemaking to “putting a stake in the ground” against gentrification, I consider how black queer organizers figure the post-crisis financial and real estate markets as sites of both subjection and possibility. Provocatively, the collective puts forth a collectivized model of black private property ownership as opposition to structural processes of gentrification and black displacement. At the same time, they engage in what I call speculative social reproduction across black queer households to confront the antiblackness of speculative finance capitalism.

As a critical intervention, this dissertation discloses the ongoing violence of liberal property and propertied citizenship by contesting contemporary constructions of the subprime foreclosure crisis itself. This project centers archives of effects overlooked in standard accounts, including the life and death of a black transgender woman killed in a vacant residential property. In dialogue with queer of color analyses of capitalism’s contradictions, I characterize Baltimore’s landscapes of subprime architectures and consider the ways that decades of urban renewal and foreclosure policies regulate black trans life and produce untimely death. Case studies of black queer and trans placemaking compel us to consider the ways that black queer and trans folx aim to variously appropriate, disassemble, refuse, or “disidentify” with property and “propertied citizenship” (Mu�oz 1999; Roy 2003).

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, are narrated as a critical moment in United States history. This dissertation is about that narration—the story of 9/11, and the affective nationalisms that accompany that story, as it is told to, through, and around the figure of the child. With this research, I examine the figure of the child. I consider the child as an icon within 9/11 narratives, an audience for a story of national trauma, and a creator and mobilizer of cultural production and its corollary affective nationalism. I examine what role the figure of the child plays in the production of a national imaginary organized around a shared condition of grief, loss, and terror, or, alternatively, of hope and futurity. I ask what a critical examination of the figure of the child within 9/11 discourses reveals about the gendered, raced, and classed production of American nationalist sentiment.

My dissertation, Critical Crossings: Intersections of Passing and Drag in Popular Culture, offers an innovative study of the political possibilities of two related performative strategies: Drag and Passing. "Drag" refers to the excessive performance of feminine gender, i.e. drag queens, but more recently has been linked to other parodic performances such as blackface. "Passing" originated in the post- and antebellum eras when mixed-race African-Americans passed as white to escape oppressions. It denotes the believable portrayal of another identity, usually racial or gendered. Both have long been topics of media representations. Probing where and how they are used differently in popular culture yields insight into the operation of identity, engaging such issues as the social construction of authenticity, performance, and the "real." I argue cinema and television have changed how drag and passing are deployed, such that what passes for reality and authenticity comes into question while the purposes and functions of drag and passing are also changed. I utilize an interdisciplinary multiperspectival cultural studies approach that draws connections across fields of inquiry and theoretical paradigms. Through analysis of context, production, and reception of texts with theoretical insights from queer, feminist, critical race, film, media, and cultural studies, this project shows how these theories can align to create new knowledges about the subversive potential of drag and passing. A series of four case studies that range from Cher, to journalistic passing texts such as Black Like Me and the TV series Black. White., to Divine and John Waters, to Stephen Colbert as pundit passing-in-drag, my dissertation critically reapplies passing and drag to unconventional texts or in unconventional ways to broaden their critical cache while using their unique parameters to reinterpret representational politics in media texts to reveal what has not been seen through traditional critiques of the politics of representation of identity, authenticity, and reality. The resulting analyses show the possible shifting multiplicities not only of identity but also reality and how producing and consuming media through the optics of passing and drag can take authenticity out of the identity equation and redirect attention to aspects of performance, repetition, and modification.