A Revolting Archive: Incarcerated Trans Resistance and the Destruction of Neoliberal Realism

This co-authored essay explores the radical potential of three works in the trans incarcerated writing canon, arguing that concepts of postcoloniality, including cultural hybridity and social death, are discursive lenses through which to read this genre and are conditions to which this canon explicitly responds. We celebrate the recent scholarship that centers the trans incarcerated experience—even when it is written by those ostensibly outside the prison. We argue that the criminalization of queer people and people of color interpolates these scholars into a solidaristic set of discursive gestures which raise questions of “double” or “triple consciousness,” the potentiality of ancestor models of kinship, and the role of the intellectual in opposing prisons. This essay suggests that the contribution of trans incarcerated literature to the archive of critical carceral studies is a record of the ‘queer agenda’ of “collective revolt,” offering active strategies of abolition and liberation imagination.