@thespiritwas / thespiritwas.tumblr.com
On February 7th at 4PM EST please join me for an online discussion based on these a series of videos I made with Dean about prisons, Trans & gnc communities, the moral panic around psychiatric disabilities and where to go from here! Register today and join us for this exciting experiment in creating online learning spaces that contribute to activist conversations.
hey NYC area friends!
i'm doing another event at the New Museum this coming Thursday and I would love for you to be there! it will feature two amazing artists, Chris Vargas & Eric A Stanley, who will screen their prison break film, CRIMINAL QUEERS!
Jeannine Tang & I will moderate the conversation, it should be great.
did i mention its free? it is *free!*
here's the full description, i hope to see you there!
Thursday June 7, 2012, 7:30 pm
New Museum Theater
Free
As transgender issues, artists, and theory have received greater recognition in contemporary art discourses and institutions since the 2000s, activist Reina Gossett, art historian Jeannine Tang will discuss the role of art and artists in recent movement building, and how contemporary art figures in critical trans politics today.
This will feature a screening of the film "Criminal Queers," followed by a conversation with filmmakers Eric A. Stanley and Chris Vargas. "Criminal Queers" visualizes a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex and toward a world without walls.
Remembering that prison breaks are both a theoretical and material practice of freedom, this film imagines what spaces might be opened up if crowbars, wigs, and metal files become tools for transformation.
By expropriating the "prison break" genre the question of form and content collapse into a rhythm of affective histories as images of possibility materializes even after possibility itself is foreclosed.
Follow Yoshi, Joy, Susan and Lucy as they fiercely read everything from the Human Rights Campaign and hate crimes legislation to the non-profitization of social movements. Criminal Queers grows our collective liberation by working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
This event is supported by the New Museum, Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. A parallel conversation on recent organizing and movement building will be hosted by Sylvia Rivera Law Project on Friday, June 8 at 6pm. ** Reina Gossett is a trans activist working at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project as Director of Membership and was formerly director of the Welfare Organizing Project at Queers for Economic Justice as well as a Soros Justice Fellow on staff at Critical Resistance.
Eric A. Stanley works at the intersections of radical trans/queer aesthetics, theories of state violence, and visual culture. While completing a PhD in the History of Consciousness department at UCSC, Eric along with Chris Vargas, directed the films Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers (2012) which have been screened at Palais de Tokyo, LACE, Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow and SF Cameraworks among numerous other venues. Eric is also the editor of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2011) which was recenlty selected as a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.
Jeannine Tang is an art historian teaching as Academic Advisor at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, while completing her doctoral work at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Chris E. Vargas is a film and video maker based in Oakland, CA, whose thematic interests include queer radicalism, transgender hirstory, and imperfect role models. He earned his MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011. Since 2008, he has been making, in collaboration with Greg Youmans, the web-based trans/cisgender sitcom Falling In Love...with Chris and Greg. Episodes of the series have screened at numerous film festivals and art venues, including MIX NYC, SF Camerawork, and the Tate Modern. With Eric Stanley, Vargas co-directed the movie Homotopia (2006) and its feature-length sequel Criminal Queers (2012). His solo video projects include Extraordinary Pregnancies (2010), Liberaceón (2011), and ONE for all... (2012).
** During the run of the exhibition "Museum as Hub: Carlos Motta: We Who Feel Differently," Motta invites local queer artists, activists, and academics to hold public events on select Thursday evenings in the Museum as Hub. Events include a conversation about transgender issues in contemporary art, a lecture on queer and feminist theologies, a workshop on HIV/AIDS activism today, a “cruising” walk, a presentation of a book about queer responses to gay inclusion in the military, and a collective reading of queer texts, all of which address critical issues of contemporary queer culture in the United States.
A culmination of 9 years of work, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project marks the release of the U.S. Department of Justice's National Standards to Prevent, Detect and Respond to Prison Rape as a significant victory. The Department of Justice’s new standards come in response from recommendations from the Sylvia Rivera Law Project -including those of incarcerated trans and gender non conforming members- and allied organizations.
These standards apply to all federal facilities as well as all prisons, jails, police holding cells, juvenile detention centers, and community confinement facilities that receive federal funding. All federal facilities must comply immediately and other facilities must comply within one year.
While a major victory, one incredible failure of the standards is to cover immigration detention facilities, which means many trans and gender non conforming people are still vulnerable to the forms of violence that these standards seek to address. Today President Obama issued a memorandum stating the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services are required to develop their own standards for the implementation of PREA over the next eight months. Despite the implementation of these standards trans and gender non conforming immigrant communities continue to navigate intensifying policing and detention, as seen with the implementation of Secure Communities.
The standards address several problems transgender people, as well as those with intersex conditions, face, including:
“We believe the final rule's prohibition on genital searches for the sole purpose of ‘determining’ an individual's genital status is a significant victory,“ said Staff Attorney Elana Redfield. “We are especially pleased with the requirement that agencies make individualized assessments about the placement of transgender, gender non-conforming and intersex individuals, and prohibiting blanket policies that determine placement based solely on genital status.”
As an organization, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project provided four rounds of comments to different proposed standards over the past nine years. These were informed by incarcerated ` members of the SRLP’s Prisoner Advisory Committee many of whom also sent in individuals comments. The Sylvia Rivera Law Project remains adamant that correctional institutions recognize the widespread feelings of presently and formerly incarcerated LGBTI individuals that in many cases, LGBTI-specific housing such as the former “gay housing” at Rikers Island, is often a safer option.
“PAC members' contributions were undoubtedly vital to the ultimate adoption of regulations responsive to the realities of incarceration,” said SRLP Equal Justice Works Fellow Chase Strangio. “The final standards promulgated by DOJ adopted many suggestions put forth by PAC members and we are hopeful that they will provide some leverage to hold correctional institutions accountable for the abuses suffered by all individuals held involuntarily in detention.”
In New York, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project will continue to advocate with the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision and the City Department of Corrections to ensure compliance with the new rules. This step is an important effort in reforming systems of incarceration that target, isolate and expose our communities to violence and death. As we hold this rule as victory, we also recognize the limitations of reform in correctional systems that are in place to maintain systems of hierarchy, capitalism, violence and racism that formed the basis for slavery, convict-leasing, Jim Crow legal frameworks and ultimate provide the backdrop for many of our constitutional frameworks.
“It is by balancing the tension of victory and sadness that we hope to continue to build alternative visions for justice that center the histories of transgender, gender non-conforming and intersex people of color, immigrants and low-income people,” said Strangio.
Chase Strangio, Equal Justice Work Fellow
212.337.8550 ext 302
One of the most beautiful publications to come out of the movement for prison abolition, gender self determination and liberation. Please check it out!! click here for the crisp, clear and full version.
