From carceral security to abolitionist safety: The emergence of the transformative justice movement to end intimate violence
- Brazzell, Melanie Susan
- Advisor(s): Gordon, Avery
Abstract
This dissertation addresses the topic of violence and collective action to transform it through close study of the movement for transformative justice for intimate and gendered violence. The work track the pasts, presents, and potential futures of this struggle to build non-carceral, community-based responses to harm beyond policing and prisons. I locate the movement in a lineage of organizing led by Black, Indigenous, women of color, and abolitionist feminists working at the intersections of state and intimate violence, of sexism and racism. Because there is so little academic literature on transformative justice, this research is exploratory, focusing on four deceptively simple questions: What organizations exist? How have they have evolved over time? What do they do? What principles unite their various practices? The dissertation explicates the movement's praxis through the concept of positive safety, which emphasizes interdependence and connection, contrasting it to the carceral state's logic of negative security, which focuses on separation. I do so by drawing on archives, interviews, and participant observation, carried out with an ethos of participatory and community accountable research. This work contributes to larger sociological debates about the relationship between individual and structure and between theory and practice, particularly as they unfold over time through processes of contestation and transformation. The first half of the dissertation looks historically at the roots of the movement, narrating its emergence in the early 2000s within the anti-violence sector as a (re)vitalization of radical, grassroots tendencies of positive safety. These had previously been pushed into abeyance by carceral feminist co-optation of the anti-violence movement in the 1970s and 80s, when negative security logics rose to prominence. These chapters use the social movement dimensions of organizational structure, resources, strategy, framing/ideology, and collective identity to explore processes of social movement transformation like co-optation and (re)vitalization. In the second half of the dissertation, I look at contemporary transformative justice praxis, expounding the concept of positive safety across four domains: the movement's understanding of violence, survivor support, perpetrator accountability, and justice through the community rather than the state. Across these domains, I develop an abolitionist theory of the self, agency, responsibility, and collectivity. I contrast them to their respective carceral feminist approaches, using a Marxist methodology of immanent critique to argue that carceral feminism's contradictions undermine its own putative aims to end gender-based violence. These chapters use intimate violence as a portal to explore larger structures of violence, and deploy ethnographic case studies to analyze how movement practice and theory dialectically co-constitute one another. I close the dissertation by looking at three possible futures for the movement at a crucial juncture of increased popularity since the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020.