The United States relies on carceralism—mass incarceration and institutionalization, surveillance and control—for its continued operation. The criminalization of difference, particularly in relation to race, disability and queerness, renders certain people as perpetually subject to state violence due to their perceived unruliness. This article relies on two case studies, in Toledo, Ohio and Brooklyn, New York to question the construction and co-optation of vulnerability by state agents and focus on interrelated instances of state violence done under the guise of protectionism of and from unruly subjects. We then discuss the response to these instances of violence- from the state in the form of carceral ableism and sanism, and from local activists trying to navigate the shifting contours of protectionist violence by enacting queer transformative justice.

Corrections in the United States most often describes the institution that holds custody of criminalized people, purportedly to reform or reorient them from nonnormative behaviors through isolation, constraint, and force. This article puts forward a more expansive understanding of corrections, so that its applicability extends outside the prison or the jail and into the society imprisoned by similar logics: ones that “correct” deviance through coercive and violent practices. The author joins a queer critique of corrections with one of gentrification, the practice of displacing low-income and racialized people through deregulation of housing policy and unimpeded capitalist “development” of neighborhoods. Through the prism of corrective development, we can witness disposability politics as the convergence of hyper-carceralism, police killings, and social exclusion of those imagined as undesirable. Simultaneously, the state makes an invitation to the gentrifying bodies—the idealized body and being for development—which are white, abled, corporate, and hetero- or homonormative. The analysis centers the work of Safe OUTside the System (SOS), a lesbian, gay, bisexual, two-spirit, trans, and gender-nonconforming people of color collective in Central Brooklyn using abolitionist, anti-violence community organizing to combat the oppressive matrix utilized by gentrifying bodies.

Literature on sexuality and citizenship has demonstrated the myriad of ways that states use legislation to produce, regulate, and protect a sexually and racially “pure” citizen. In the context of the European imperial powers, this citizen is heterosexual, monogamous, and white. In the postcolonial Ugandan context, the development of sodomy legislation shows that this ideal citizen is heterosexual, monogamous, and yet untarnished by contemporary Western ideals (which is undoubtedly paradoxical). This work engages with colonial legislative texts, most notably the Ugandan Penal Code Act of 1950. The author then triangulates this with an analysis of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill and Act and parliamentary record from 1999-2013. With this data, it is argued that the Ugandan construct of an ideal citizen is not only a reactionary result of colonialism, but that it is also demonstrative of the anti-globalization ideology that has heightened in the wake of rapidngoization of the globallgbtirights movement.

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