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This panel examines trans-queer art and artists in resistance to the neoliberal carceral state (Dillon, 2017). The four presenters consider intersectional critiques of prisons, policing, surveillance, and administrative violence and investigate various visual strategies employed to dismantle narratives that render queer bodies disposable. Following individual presentations, the panelists will engage in a discussion facilitated by Nicole Fleetwood, Associate Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University and expert in the field of art and incarceration.

The crisis of mass incarceration has made its way into mainstream politics in the last 5 years in part due to the transgender activists of color who have been at the forefront of prison abolitionist movements for the last 5 decades. While mainstream media displays a seemingly insatiable visual appetite for trans and queer bodies, these same transgender women, and trans-queer people--particularly of those of color and possessing low-socioeconomic status, continue to experience violence at increasingly high rates (Stanley, 2015).

If we are to understand the prison industrial complex as an infrastructure of oppression upheld in part by the dominant narrative that people of color, poor people, and queer people are ‘dangerous’ (to the white-capitalist-heteropatriarchy), it is critical to examine the visual language of criminalizing queerness, and further consider the work of artists grappling with efforts to shift the narrative while remaining wary of the traps of visibility.