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Section III 2015: So. .. Things are going to get better someday right? (Text message from J, 3 months before his suicide in a jail cell) We know the weapons, past and present: a police baton, a disease, a bed sheet, an assault rifle. (White supremacy, government neglect, stigma, capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism. . .). My queer family died in Orlando. And in the back of a truck, and in a police car, and a jail cell. My ancestors died before I arrived, but I believe they are with us as ghosts, they are here with us in every new death. (.. . This is an essay, [I think], about grief, queerness, whiteness, anger, and my friend's death; not necessarily in that order.) What is it to live with ubiquitous grief, with the trauma of probable death? We can ask this of Black Americans. We can ask this of transwomen. We can ask this of many queers. Is it a livable life if circumstances create a banality out of daily risk of death? Is it a livable life, Judith Butler asks, if it is not also grievable? Depending on which social media one follows, the nation did grieve for Orlando. But which Orlando? Gay victims? American victims? Latinx victims? How did grievers make sense of victims? Which victim construct provided permission for sorrow? Butler (2004) writes, On the level of discourse, certain lives are not considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized; they fit no dominant frame for the human, and their dehumanization occurs first, at this level. This level then gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanization which is already at work in the culture.

This essay examines the rhetorical and structural divides between the “inside” and “outside” carceral world as they exist within the intersections of racialized state violence and biopolitics. It is also a reflection on my embodied experience, as a volunteer and activist, inside penal and correctional facilities, not in an attempt to center my “freeworld” body as more important than the embodied experiences of incarcerated people, but rather to trouble that binary altogether and to use my experience as a perceived outsider to illuminate what I call the compounds of projected deviance.  I will use my experiences working in jails as well as my experiences teaching yoga in an addiction correctional facility to argue for prison abolition and transformative justice, particularly in relation to resettlement. Drawing on the work of prison and queer studies, I argue that space, race, and sexuality interlock in significant ways in historical and contemporary prisons and jails. I will also use my reflections to argue that the feminist project of sexual liberation and autonomy must start with a rejection of sexual Othering for the most marginalized members of society: incarcerated people.