The Body is Where Freedom Begins: Black Feminist Embodiments of Carceral Abolition

Abstract

The Body is Where Freedom Begins: Black Feminist Embodiments of Carceral Abolition investigates how Black individuals intimately live, resist and care amid carceral forces. This interdisciplinary project brings together carceral abolition and healing justice to borrow theoretical and methodological tools from Carceral Studies, Black Feminist Thought, and Queer and Trans Studies. Carceral abolition, a topic within Carceral Studies, is a project to end policing and imprisonment by cultivating a society that addresses socioeconomic inequalities that lead to incarceration. Healing justice is the process of centering individual and collective healing in movements for social change. Healing justice is an activist praxis that argues that to address socioeconomic issues such as racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and environmental degradation, one must uplift healing work that invokes care, ways in which individuals prevent and deal with harm, for the bodies of our communities. I argue that it is everyday forms of care in the afterlife of slavery and ongoing colonial projects, that allow for survival and resistance amid carcerality, which are significant for carceral abolition. Understanding a transformation of intimate relationships as integral to carceral abolition, this project utilizes historical analysis, literary analysis, podcast analysis and also semi-structured interviews with healing justice facilitators in Minneapolis to link communal relationships, care work andsocial justice.