In this landmark work, four of the world's leading scholar-activists issue an urgent call for a truly intersectional, internationalist, abolitionist feminism.
As a politics and as a practice, abolitionism has increasingly shaped our political moment, amplified through the worldwide protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a uniformed police officer. It is at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement, in its demands for police defunding and demilitarisation, and a halt to prison construction. And it is there in the outrage which greeted the brutal treatment of women by police at the 2021 Clapham Common vigil for Sarah Everard.
As this book shows, abolitionism and feminism stand shoulder-to-shoulder in fighting a common cause: the end of the carceral state, with its key role in perpetuating violence, both public and private, in prisons, in police forces, and in people's homes. Abolitionist theories and practices are at their most compelling when they are feminist; and a feminism that is also abolitionist is the most inclusive and persuasive version of feminism for these times.
Abolition. Feminism. Now!
'This extraordinary book makes the most compelling case I've ever seen for the indivisibility of feminism and abolition' Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
'Attentive to histories of organising that are too quickly erased, and alive to new possibilities for working collectively in the present time, this book is as capacious and demanding as the abolitionist feminism it calls for' Sara Ahmed, author of Willful Subjects
Review
This extraordinary book makes the most compelling case I've ever seen for the indivisibility of feminism and abolition, for the inseparability of gendered and state violence, domestic policing and militarism, the street, the home, and the world. Combining decades of analytical brilliance and organizational experience, the authors offer a genealogy of the movements that brought us here, lessons learned, battles won and lost, and the ongoing collective struggle to build a thoroughly revolutionary vision and practice. - Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
In this powerful, wise and well-crafted book, filled with insight and provocation, the authors make it patently and abundantly clear why abolitionist feminism is necessary . . . Attentive to histories of organising that are too quickly erased, and alive to new possibilities for working collectively in the present time, this book is as capacious and demanding as the abolitionist feminism it calls for. It gives us a name for what we want. Abolitionism. Now - Sara Ahmed, author of Willful Subjects
About the Author
ANGELA Y. DAVIS is Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. An activist, writer and lecturer, her work focuses on prisons, police, abolition and the related intersections of race, gender and class. She is the author of many books, including Women, Race and Class and Freedom Is a Constant Struggle.
GINA DENT is associate professor of feminist studies, history of consciousness, and legal studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the editor of Black Popular Culture, and lectures and writes on African diaspora literary and cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and critical area studies. Her current project Visualizing Abolition grows out of her work as an advocate for transformative and transitional justice and prison abolition.
ERICA MEINERS is Professor of Education and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern Illinois University. She is the author of several books including For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State.
BETH E. RICHIE is Professor of Criminology, Law and Justice and Black Studies, Sociology, Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her most recent book is Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America's Prison Nation.
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