PROJECTS

Monograph

Carceral Coalitions and Trans Inclusion: Accounting for Racial and Gender Violence in Los Angeles  (working title)       

This project interrogates the emergence of the collective activist call for the enforcement of anti-trans hate crimes in the 2010s as rooted in the establishment of state-driven antiviolence strategies from the 1980s onward. The book frames Los Angeles as a transnational and carceral space in order to demonstrate how sexual minoritarian, multicultural and gender-inclusive penal reforms have assisted in the institutionalization of “progressive” technologies of policing and incarceration that continue to have a stronghold today across the U.S. and abroad. Tracing the advent of community-policing, hate crimes, to gay and transgender segregated jailing units in Los Angeles, the book centrally asks how racial and gender identitarian politics from the last four decades have become so deeply entrenched in logics of carcerality.

Reflecting on my own participation in QTBIPoC activist and antiviolence organizing in Los Angeles from 2009-2017, the book is organized by ethnographic vignettes alongside the theoretical frameworks of carceral coalitions and carceral accuracy. These concepts investigate how exactly state agencies enlist minoritarian participation in the reproduction of criminological data and the discourse it subtends. Carceral accuracy indexes how ‘cold calculations’ of counting trans deaths deflects from community-based solutions towards preventing anti-trans violence in the first place. Overall the book challenges the idea that rhetorical and material invocations of “community” and “antiviolence” by state agencies not only do little to interrupt cycles of gender, sexual and racial violence, but in fact contribute to its perpetuity.

Doctoral Project:
Speculative Actuaries of Law: Criminalization of “Hate” in Los Angeles (1984 – 2014)

Chair: Dylan Rodriguez

Committee: Christina Hanhardt, Fred Moten, Jodi Kim

Fields, disciplines, interlocutors

Critical ethnic/race studies, queer/trans* of color critique, queer studies, critical prison studies, community/participatory action research, radical social movements, transnational studies, LGBTQ history