Trans Embodiment & the Prison Industrial Complex —
Captive Genders was the first book of its kind. It remains the touchstone for studies of trans and gender-queer people in prison. It has been revamped to appeal to recent broadened interest. With a new Foreword by CeCe MacDonald and essay by Chelsea Manning.
"Captive Genders is an exciting assemblage of writings—analyses, manifestos, stories, interviews—that traverse the complicated entanglements of surveillance, policing, imprisonment, and the production of gender normativity. Focusing discerningly on the encounter of transpersons with the apparatuses that constitute the prison industrial complex, the contributors to this volume create new frameworks and new vocabularies that surely will have a transformative impact on the theories and practices of twenty-first century abolition."
—Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz
"The contributors to Captive Genders brilliantly shatter the assumption that the antidote to danger is human sacrifice. In other words, for these thinkers: where life is precious life is precious."
—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
"Captive Genders is at once a scathing and necessary analysis of the prison industrial complex and a history of queer resistance to state tyranny. By analyzing the root causes of anti-queer and anti-trans violence, this book exposes the brutality of state control over queer/trans bodies inside and outside prison walls, and proposes an analytical framework for undoing not just the prison system, but its mechanisms of surveillance, dehumanization and containment.
—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?
Eric A. Stanley is a radical queer activist, outlaw academic, experimental filmmaker.
Nat Smith is a member of Trans/gender Variant in Prison Committee and an organizer with Critical Resistance.
CeCe McDonald was unjustly incarcerated after fatally stabbing a transphobic attacker in 2011. She was released in 2014 after serving nineteen months for second-degree manslaughter.