Edited by Alisa Bierra, Jakeya Caruthers, and Brooke Lober
Haymarket Books
11/8/2022, paperback
SKU: 9781642598452
In this expansive companion to Abolition Feminisms Vol. I, contributors confront multiple paradigms of punitivity--the foundational logics of family, borders, heterosexuality, colonial violence, and more--to disengage us from root systems of carcerality.
The book transcends various modes and forms: through grassroots praxis, critical research, storytelling, diagrams, poetry, and visual art, these pieces build on the legacies of feminist thinkers who formulated abolitionist critiques of policing, surveillance, and control. The resulting framework provides readers with the resources to cultivate and inhabit a post-carceral world of radical freedom and possibility.
Reviews:
"As inspiring as it is edifying, this phenomenal collection, Abolition Feminisms, Volume 2: Feminist Ruptures Against the Carceral State, offers us a broad range of ideas, images, provocations, and organizing approaches enabled by developing theories and practices associated with abolition feminisms. Thanks to the thoroughgoing familiarity of the editors with the grassroots efforts that constitute the groundwork of abolition feminism, we are offered important tools that help us to recognize punitive logics within and beyond conventional carceral contexts and to support us as we struggle for a world of mutual care, transformative justice, and freedom." -- Angela Y. Davis, author of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
"This essential two-volume collection maps the shared roots between abolitionist life-making and feminist resistance, showing us how rebellious organizing and radical care are always at the heart of real change. Brimming with dispatches across borders and prison walls, archives of movement building, and striking creative work, Abolition Feminisms describes a breathtaking body of freedom practices, galvanizing us to do everything we can to help forge the liberatory future that we urgently need. Anyone who engages this collection is guaranteed to learn some-thing new." -- Mariame Kaba, author of We Do This 'Til We Free Us
"This beautiful two-volume collection of essays, poems, and artwork brings a refreshing vibrancy to the radical work of abolition feminism. Inspiring, accessible, and far-reaching, the books are precisely what is needed right now: clear demands for radical change, reflections on the power of radical organizing, and radical statements of hope. Readers will be lifted up as they turn the pages, where each entry is a reminder of how abolition feminism is critical to freedom struggles, and our movement will therefore be challenged and changed." -- Beth E. Richie, coauthor of Abolition. Feminism. Now.
"Contrary to popular belief, revolutions don't come with handbooks or blueprints. They do carry histories, memories, manifestos, maps, moments of clarity and deep contradictions, dreams, principles, and real people who endure the oppressions they are seeking to overturn. This extraordinary collective of activists, artists, and scholars understand that this is what revolutions are made of, and that through study and struggle we see abolition feminism not as a variant or a tendency within some larger liberatory movement but the revolution we need to genuinely overturn things." -- Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
About the Editors:
Alisa Bierria is a Black feminist philosopher and an assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA. Her writing can be found in numerous scholarly journals and public anthologies, including her co-edited volume, Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence, a special issue of Social Justice. She has been an advocate within the feminist anti-violence movement for over 25 years, including co-founding Survived & Punished, a national abolitionist organization that advocates for the decriminalization of survivors of domestic and sexual violence.
Jakeya Caruthers is Assistant Professor of English & Africana Studies at Drexel University. Her research attends to black political aesthetics within 20th and 21st century cultural production as well as race, gender, sexuality, and state discipline. Jakeya is a principal investigator of an inside-outside research initiative with Survived & Punished California that maps pathways between surviving gender violence, incarceration, and radical possibilities for survivor release. She is also collaborating on a digital archive of feminist decriminalization campaigns waged over the last 50 years.
Brooke Lober is a teacher, writer, activist, and social movement scholar who is currently researching legacies of antiracist and anti-Zionist feminisms in the Bay Area, and teaching courses in the Gender and Women's Studies Department at UC Berkeley.