Queers against Corrective Development

Abstract

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.

Queering the Courts

“…LGBTQ+/queer person walking home alone at night or the black person sitting on the wrong part of the bus (Rodriguez, 2022). Therefore, this study views the emotionally violent experience of the courts as 'corrective' towards queer behaviours deemed outside the 'norm'.…”

“…(2) the removal of this body from the public to correct the "balance" of the social environment." Society will assimilate a person if they behave appropriately and fulfil their expected role without deviation, or it will "remove" the individual, often through incarceration (Rodriguez, 2022). Purportedly, prisons correct anti-social, criminal behaviour (Girschick, 2011).…”

“…Corrective violence against takatāpui/LGBTQ+/queer people is in the various institutional bodies and individuals' cultural and social exchanges (Rodriguez, 2022). Rodriguez (2022) proposes queering all gender-based violence, including men-on-women domestic violence, by viewing it as an attack in service of gender correction.…”

“…Corrective violence against takatāpui/LGBTQ+/queer people is in the various institutional bodies and individuals' cultural and social exchanges (Rodriguez, 2022). Rodriguez (2022) proposes queering all gender-based violence, including men-on-women domestic violence, by viewing it as an attack in service of gender correction. Through that understanding, research should analyse similarities between men-on-women violence, anti-LGBTQ+/queer violence and state-endorsed corrective violence as different expressions of the same normative gender system (Rodriguez, 2022).…”

“…Rodriguez (2022) proposes queering all gender-based violence, including men-on-women domestic violence, by viewing it as an attack in service of gender correction. Through that understanding, research should analyse similarities between men-on-women violence, anti-LGBTQ+/queer violence and state-endorsed corrective violence as different expressions of the same normative gender system (Rodriguez, 2022). The violence against women due to their perceived 'misbehaviour' by an aggressor shares intentions with the violence against the…”