Cultural Studies Program

"Abolition Means All: Queer Abolitionist Theories & Practices"

Please join us on October 18th at 5:30pm at The Bishop Bar for editors and contributors to the volume Surviving the Future: Queer Abolitionist Strategies come to present their work and lead a workshop. Copies of Surviving the Future will be available through Morgenstern's.

About the Book:

Surviving the Future is a collection of the most current ideas in radical queer movement work and revolutionary queer theory. Beset by a new pandemic, fanning the flames of global uprising, these queers cast off progressive narratives of liberal hope while building mutual networks of rebellion and care. These essays propose a militant strategy of queer survival in an ever-precarious future. Starting from a position of abolition—of prisons, police, the State, identity, and racist cisheteronormative society—this collection refuses the bribes of inclusion in a system built on our expendability. Though the mainstream media saturates us with the boring norms of queer representation (with a recent focus on trans visibility), the writers in this book ditch false hope to imagine collective visions of liberation that tell different stories, build alternate worlds, and refuse the legacies of racial capitalism, anti-Blackness, and settler colonialism. The work curated in this book spans Black queer life in the time of COVID-19 and uprising, assimilation and pinkwashing settler colonial projects, subversive and deviant forms of representation, building anarchist trans/queer infrastructures, and more. Contributors include Che Gossett, Yasmin Nair, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Adrian Shanker, Kitty Stryker, Toshio Meronek, and more.

Scott Branson is a queer/transfemme Jewish anarchist writer, translator, community organizer, and teacher. They translated Jacques Lesage de la Haye’s The Abolition of Prison and Guy Hocquenghem’s second book of essays, Gay Liberation after May ’68, for which they also wrote a critical introduction. They coedited Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies with Raven Hudson and Bry Reed for PM Press. Scott is the author of Practical Anarchism: A Daily Guide
and is currently working on a book on trans youth liberation. They often contribute to The Final Straw Radio, a weekly anarchist radio show and podcast.

Isabella Mancini is a queer, white, abolitionist social worker from Chicago. By day, she manages homeless outreach programs. She also organizes with Pushing Envelopes Chicago and Chicago400 Alliance, providing comprehensive re-entry support and building community with formerly incarcerated queer and trans people, and people on criminal registries. She lives by the principles of harm reduction and trauma informed care, and believes that our work is not finished until everyone is free from all forms of imprisonment, surveillance, registration, and punishment.

Stephanie Zarate is a Latina, recently incarcerated trans femme, an abolitionist, and a current Pushing Envelopes Chicago collective member. She previously called NYC home, where she organized with Black and Pink NY and Sylvia Rivera Law Project. She is passionate about helping LGBTQIA+ people and all captives of the prison industrial complex.

Series Description

Cultural Studies has often been framed as a method of approach, a way of understanding and interpreting the relationship between cultural narratives and social and political institutions with particular attention to questions of power and resistance. The past few decades have seen several challenges to this method, from the new materialist critique of the linguistic turn to post-critical and auto-theoretical emphases on aesthetics, affect, and memoir. These movements have been especially central to work in queer studies and queer of color critique, most centrally expressed in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s complaint about the stultifying sameness of approach in queer theoretical writing and its mistaken fidelity to exposure and persuasion as activist modes. These challenges have broadened the scope of humanities research, taking in archives formerly left to the sciences and modes of thought once considered too creative to count as academic arguments. The resulting profusion of subjects and styles reflects the robustness of our field in a way often overlooked by the so-called method wars.

This year, Culture Nights seeks to celebrate and enrich our work on how we write and what we write about with a series of meetings that push us beyond the form of scholarly writing. How can we understand these forms as producing criticism, and what sort of criticism do they produce? Our series invites scholars whose works have taken the form of films, pamphlets, and how-to books, archival and visual curation, plastic and fabric art practices, and event-creation, to discuss how (and whether!) they see their work as forms of criticism. As a way of putting our interests into practice, we will encourage presentations that experiment with form and media, including film screenings, interviews, readings, and collaborative workshops.