Introduction to Special Topic on Anticarceral Feminisms: Imagining a World Without Prisons

Drawing on findings from a Foucauldian-inspired critical discourse analysis, this article examines the hegemonic ways in which social work engages with criminalized women. Utilizing the analytic of governmentality, I explore the construction of criminalized women in contemporary social work discourse and ask how those constructions support and shape practice with criminalized women. Results show that knowledge production in social work serves as a significant site through which the profession draws on, but also resists, carceral logics. I begin by discussing contemporary social work as a form of neoliberal governance. Specifically, I illuminate the ways in which social work is implicated in surveillance and control and how this involvement is obscured under the framework of helping. I then describe how bold counter discourses, such as those offered by abolitionist and anti-carceral thought foster spaces of resistance within the profession. I argue that social work should claim a stance of radical imagination in which we take seriously the calls to abolish the varying manifestations of the carceral state.

Section: Conclusion: Social Work An Ontological Paradoxmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conclusion: Social Work An Ontological Paradoxmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Social Work With Criminalized Women: Governance or Resistance in the Carceral State?

Leotti

2021

“…During these 4 years, Affilia created a shelter from the storm, publishing issues that interrogated social work—introducing unconventional inquiry within familiar social work settings like foster care and violence intervention; centering intersecting identities with regard to gender, race, ability, sexuality, immigration status, and other orientations, moving further beyond binary conceptualizations; and illuminating the insidious neoliberal context and its tendency to individualize, pathologize, and evaporate concepts of shared mission and fate. This work culminated in Affilia ’s landmark 2020 “Special Topic on Anticarceral Feminisms: Imagining a World Without Prisons” (O’Brien et al, 2020), which powerfully and provocatively brought together theory, empirical study, and practical observations that could move us from “what is” (the role of social work in enacting and preserving a carceral system) to “what could be” (a world without prisons). Global protests over racial violence that were sparked by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery—following on the heels of so many others over such a long time.…”

Section: In These Dangerous Timesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pandemics, Protests, and Feminist Politics of Resistance

Kim

Zelnick

Goodkind

2021

I am going to join all the ones I left at the shore. I am going home soon. I am going wherever I want to go, wherever the hell I want, somewhere, uncertain. I am going forward. I am going where you are going if where you are going is free. -Beltrán (2019, p. 148) In These Dangerous TimesFour years ago, February 2017, the then incoming editor-in-chief team, Drs. Rupaleem Bhuyan, Yoosun Park, and Stephanie Wahab, reflected that their initial enthusiasm to lead Affilia forward into its next chapter had been tempered by the shocking election of Donald Trump. Anticipating what it would mean to foster "feminism in these dangerous times," they identified their mission thus:As social work anticipates a Trump agenda-part of a world-wide resurgence of white supremacist antidemocratic neoliberal agendas that disenfranchise so many-we must refuse further cooptation by state systems that perpetuate violence and oppression. We invite you to join us in our effort-to rethink, to reexamine, to challenge, and decenter, and thus reshape the discourses of social work in these dangerous times. (Park et al., 2017, p. 9)

“…As Chicago social worker, Anjanette Young, reminds us in our recent editorial (Young et al, 2021), police violence against Black women is an everyday occurrence. Affilia's stance against carceral feminism and its reliance on punishment and policing-and our alignment with liberatory and collective notions of community safety-have been uplifted in our Special Topics on Anticarceral Feminisms: Imagining a World Without Prisons (O'Brien et al, 2020) and characterize what we see as foundational tenets of critical feminism.…”

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confidence: 99%

Critical Feminist Reflections on the Atlanta Murders of March 16, 2021

Kim

Goodkind

Zelnick

2021

Self Cite

On March 16, 2021, six Asian American women and two men were slain by gunshot in the suburbs of Atlanta. The media's use of storefront signs with the words "spa" or "massage" signaled the small businesses many of us see in strip malls across the United States. Their association with "Asian women" evokes centuries-old connotations-steeped in power inequities and social/political/economic relationships, driven by exploitation, extraction, dehumanization, and disposability. While these murders took place in Atlanta, their legacies reach back to Japanese occupation, the Korean War, U.S. military occupation, and today's immigration labyrinth.Clearly, white supremacy, the specifics of anti-Asian and anti-immigrant racism, misogyny, and the devaluation of working-class lives-especially among those assumed to be engaged in sex work-were tightly woven into the gunman's search for victims that evening of March 16, 2021. These multiple factors also distort the reactions of a public awoken, once again, to the reality and lethal consequences of anti-Asian racism. While gender, class, and the fetishization of sexualized Asian women's bodies (Azhar et al., 2021) play a role in this recent set of murders, these dimensions were flattened into a singular category, "Asian," obscuring the complex realities of these women's lives. The women murdered in Atlanta, we later learned, were, of course, mothers, wives, aunts, sisters, and daughters, leaving behind devastated family members, friends, and communities. The seemingly daily attacks on older Asian Americans, with a specific brutality towards women, mark another category of disposability and targeted violence that now punctuates the daily news-too often accompanied by accounts of an utter lack of response by bystanders.Again, we ask, why is it a blood bath that makes the daily violence and loss of lives suddenly become a public concern? Why is it that a 9 min 29 s recording made in broad daylight of the murder of George Floyd is that which awakens a nation (yet again) to over 500 years of systematic murders of BIPOC in this country? Each public tragedy momentarily lifts us from the normality of violence that characterizes the everyday lives of so many community members.As incoming Editors-in-Chief of a journal committed to critical feminist analysis and research in social work, we take this opportunity to publicly join others in outrage and sorrow as we mourn the lives lost in Atlanta, that of 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant, those of 23 transgender people murdered in the United States in the first 4 months of 2021, and so many others, to elevate the role that critical feminist scholarship can and must take in our analyses of these intersecting forms of violence and our move forward to meaningful change.Since March 16, the outpouring of messages of solidarity across race reminds us that anti-Asian violence must be understood in the context of racist, misogynist, classist, heterosexist, transphobic, and ableist violence across the globe. Atlanta cannot be understood outside of the brutal...