Please submit your writing via email to: captivegenders@gmail.com or mail to: Captive Genders Anthology 1904 Franklin Street, Suite 504 Oakland, CA 94612

*Deadline for submission: July 1 2007.*
*Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
*Edited by Nat Smith, Eric Stanley

At least 65% of transwomen and 29% of transmen interviewed in a 1999 study had been incarcerated in San Francisco, California[1] <#_ftn1>. Trans/gender variant and queer folks disproportionately experience the horrors of poverty, imprisonment, and systems of criminalization. Along with race, sexuality, citizenship, class, and all other markers of difference, gender must be another central category for an understanding of the prison industrial complex (PIC). *Captive Genders* seeks to offer some frameworks, theories, and dreams for unthinking these cycles. We see this project as an
important intervention in the emergent field of critical prison studies that will push discussion past *men* and *women* in prison, toward thinking how gender and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of corporal captivity.

*Captive Genders* will create a space to think the various ways the prison industrial complex prohibits trans/gender variant communities from thriving. *Captive Genders* will also explore ways in which we can challenge the very real cultures of violence trans and queer folks experience without relying on current state-sponsored systems that reproduce the same kinds of violence they allege to end, such as the current push for "hate crimes" enhancement legislation.

There is a specificity of survival and power inside prison walls that we want to be attentive to. However, we know the prison industrial complex involves all aspects of state surveillance, policing and social control and does not stop at the prison gates. So, we are also interested in work that explores the punishment of transgender and/or queer bodies outside traditionally understood spaces of incarceration.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following;

Post 9/11 surveillance culture and queer / transgender lives

HIV in prison and surveillance of positive folks outside of prison

Cultural/social responses to violence against trans/gender variant and queer folks that rely on the State

Ways of building power and challenging the PIC

Queer sex and alternative gender formations in prison

Policing sex, gender and sex work

Social service/nonprofit denial of gender variance

The culture of sexual violence in prison and its links to gendered power of the State

The marginalization of transwomen, particularly transwomen of color, by the mainstream gay and lesbian community

The length of your work should be a minimum of 1,000 words. We would like works that are written for a wide audience. Essays, papers, and creative pieces are all welcome, but please no poetry. Also, please include a short biography with your work.

Eric Stanley is a graduate student in the History of Consciousness Program at UCSC and works with the radical queer direct action collective Gay Shame, San Francisco. Eric is also the co-director, along with Chris Vargas, of the film,* Homotopia*.

Nat Smith is a member of Trans/gender Variant in Prison Committee (TIP) and an organizer with the Oakland Chapter of Critical Resistance. Nat is also on the planning committee for Transforming Justice, the first ever conference focusing on imprisonment and poverty and the trans/gender variant community.

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[1] <#_ftnref1> A study done by the Transgender Community Health Project, San Francisco Department of Public Health, 1999
http://hivinsite.ucsf.edu/InSite.jsp?page=kbr-07-04-16&doc=2098.461e. Also, we know "trans/gender variant" cannot collect up all the ways we live gender, however we use it to signal the importance of thinking about non-normative genders in relation to the PIC.