Queer Library is a new feature on Bonjour, Cass! Every Friday I’ll write about a queer book on my shelves, an upcoming book I’m looking forward to reading, a review, or anything else related to LGBTQ books.
Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You
Edited by Ryan Conrad
Published by Against Equality Press
Release date: November 1, 2012
Prisons Will Not Protect You takes a critical stance against the prison industrial complex and the systems of inequality and violence perpetuated by hate crime legislation. This archival anthology introduces the history of this legislative solution and interrogates the gay community’s unquestioned loyalty to the prison industrial complex. It argues that hate crime legislation, which enhances penalties and can be used to bring in the death penalty, does not address actual causes of harm and violence and only funnels massive numbers of people into the profit-driven prison system.
These essays also examine certain specific cases of violence towards queer and trans people, including the New Jersey Four and the Texas Four, demonstrating the vulnerability of gendered, raced, and classed queer bodies within the labyrinthine and mundane realities of law enforcement. Prisons Will Not Protect You exposes deadly links between state-sponsored violence, homophobia, transphobia, and the criminal punishment system while articulating the need to build better solutions to end all forms of violence.
I already own the first book in this series, Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage
Part of the appeal of Prisons Will Not Protect You is that while I had heard most of the arguments in A Queer Critique of Gay Marriage, I haven’t really heard any arguments against hate crime legislation. I’m looking forward to checking it out and adding it to my library!
Really curious about both this and the first in the series. Also, excellent idea for a feature
Thanks Ana! I’m really looking forward to reading it.
Woo-hoo, LGBTQ Fridays! Both of these books look great; it’s so important to look at the problems of the status quo institutions that so much of the mainstream LGBTQ movement is trying to get into. Sometimes we forget to ask ourselves if these institutions are actually something we want to be a part of in the first place, because the fight to get in is so hard.
It sounds like this book has some valid points, but what an odd title!
It’s quite provocative, no?
This sounds interesting Cass!
I like books that take on the common wisdom of their own point of view. It’s particularly brave here when there’s an instinct among an oppressed minority to want to coalesce behind one opinion. Resisting that instinct takes you to such deep places like it sounds like these books do. Now, if we could only get politicians to take on their own parties in the same way.
I had no idea this series even existed; how incredibly useful.
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