Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State

During the 1970s in the United States, hundreds of feminist, queer, and antiracist activists were imprisoned or became fugitives as they fought the changing contours of U.S. imperialism, global capitalism, and a repressive racial state. In Fugitive Life Stephen Dillon examines these activists' communiques, films, memoirs, prison writing, and poetry to highlight the centrality of gender and sexuality to a mode of racialized power called the neoliberal-carceral state. Drawing on writings by Angela Davis, the George Jackson Brigade, Assata Shakur, the Weather Underground, and others, Dillon shows how these activists were among the first to theorize and make visible the links between conservative "law and order" rhetoric, free market ideology, incarceration, sexism, and the continued legacies of slavery. Dillon theorizes these prisoners and fugitives as queer figures who occupied a unique position from which to highlight how neoliberalism depended upon racialized mass incarceration. In so doing, he articulates a vision of fugitive freedom in which the work of these activists becomes foundational to undoing the reign of the neoliberal-carceral state.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments  vii Introduction. "Escape-Bound Captives": Race, Neoliberalism, and the Force of Queerness  1 1. "We're Not Hiding but We're Invisible": Law and Order, the Temporality of Violence, and the Queer Fugitive  27 2. Life Escapes: Neoliberal Economics, the Underground, and Fugitive Freedom  54 3. Possessed by Death: Black Feminism, Queer Temporality, and the Afterlife of Slavery  84 4. "Only the Sun Will Bleach His Bones Quicker": Desire, Police Terror, and the Affect of Queer Feminist Futures  119 Conclusion. "Being Captured Is Beside the Point": A World beyond the World  143 Notes  155 Bibliography  171 Index  185

About the Author :
Stephen Dillon is Assistant Professor of Critical Race and Queer Studies in the School of Critical Social Inquiry at Hampshire College.

Review :
"Dillon’s overall project returns a genealogy of antiprison politics to con-temporary queer theoretical debates on temporality, fugitivity, and desire. ... [His] text is thus not only a valuable contribution to Black feminist thought and queer studies but also a model for abolition itself." - Cameron Clark (GLQ) "This is an excellent book for our times, an era provoking fresh outrage over children in cages and the brutal treatment of bodies fleeing violence by states that claim to honor human rights. It is a time to bathe in the spirit of many of the authors Dillon presents. Fugitive Life is a compelling reminder of the logics of the carceral state as they have been unfolding over centuries, and the inevitable - if frequently intangible -logics of resistance that also result." - Keally McBride (Politics and Gender) “In Fugitive Life, Stephen Dillon uses the writings of fugitive activists to analyze how gender, race, and sexuality were deployed in the development of a new system of power in 1970: the neoliberal-carceral state. The book is beautifully written and a significant intervention that is sure to become a foundational text in a number of academic fields.” - Erin Mayo-Adam (Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics) “Beautifully written, Fugitive Life is a key text for readers in American studies, criminology, queer studies, Black studies, and-keenly-for those of us who count ourselves as ongoing scholars of, and participants in, radical social and political movements.” - Melanie Brazzell and Erica R. Meiners (QED)