The growing population of incarcerated Americans remains a critical issue facing policy-makers, citizens, and communities across the country. In Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, editors Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith highlight the underobserved and rarely discussed experiences of genderqueer, queer, and trans/gender nonconforming Americans who are overincarcerated, hypersurveilled, and targeted under the present iteration of corporal punishment in the United States. Specifically, Captive Genders shows how the prison industrial complex (PIC), or what Eric Stanley describes as “a set of relations [that] makes visible the connections among capitalism, globalization, and corporations” (12), works to criminalize those individuals who fall outside of gender norms, enacting quotidian violence against genderqueer, queer, gender nonconforming, and trans people in their daily lives. Thus, as the anthology illustrates, the processes and intentions of the PIC are not anchored to physical prisons themselves. They, instead, have stretched beyond prison walls...
University of California Press