Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith’s (eds.) Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex is a groundbreaking and long-awaited anthology that performs the critical task of breathing transgender and gender queer voices, visions, and lives into movements for prison abolition. The collection centers a multiplicity of transgender, gender nonconforming, and queer perspectives in a discussion of society’s reliance on policing, punishment, and cages to produce illusions of safety while enacting and entrenching systems of violence. Expanding the conversation on gender, sexuality, and criminalization in multiple dimensions, contributors fundamentally shift the terrain and goal posts of movements for safety and liberation.

transgender, gender nonconforming, queer, policing, punishment

Citation: Social Justice Vol. 37, No. 4 (2010-11): 149-150.