Queer Fire: Liberation and Abolition

This special issue brings together scholars, artists, and activists working at the intersections of queer theory, critical race studies, and radical movements to consider prison abolition as a project of queer liberation and queer liberation as an abolitionist project. Pushing beyond observations that prisons disproportionately harm queer people, the contributors demonstrate that gender itself is a carceral system and demand that gender and sexuality, too, be subject to abolition. The contributors offer fresh analytical lenses, personal reflections, and unequivocal calls to action to the ongoing work of constructing liberatory futures without prisons, police, or the tyranny of colonial gender systems. In the essays collected here, they explore trans identity and community across prison walls, consider how gentrification functions as a carceral mechanism, meditate on the importance and ethics of queer art, and argue for the necessity of anticarceral queer politics that do not look to punishment for justice.

Contributors. Marquis Bey, Caia Maria Coelho, Stephen Dillon, Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot, Jesse A. Goldberg, Jaden Janak, Alexandre Martins, Alison Rose Reed, S. M. Rodriguez, Kitty Rotolo, Lorenzo Triburgo, Sarah Van Dyck