Abstract

In this essay, I offer a brief for “abolitionist genealogy” as a method and philosophical practice. By locating instances of this method within the work of prison abolitionists who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, I argue that such a method is already available to theorists and critical historians of the present if we are willing to attend to the absences and presences that constitute our academic communities. I ground my brief for abolitionist genealogy by centering the experiences of queer, trans, gender-nonconforming, and intersex incarcerated people as exemplary of how prisons and jails are fundamentally violent places which cannot, as McDonald puts it, be made safe. Lastly, I link these concerns to the broader question of queer and TGNCI visibility politics in carceral institutions such as the jail/prison and the university.