Description
From my positionality as a former political prisoner and an exiled scholar-activist, this intervention will look at the sex workers’ prison strike in 2012 in Adra prison in Damascus Suburbs in Syria as a form of everyday queer protest that challenges both; the carceral state and the heteronormative revolutionary discourse that centers on the father figure, the mother, and families as valorized political prisoners in the Syrian revolution. My intervention explores prison abolition theory to rethink the idea of protest, political subjectivity, and social justice in Syria 11 years following the popular protests by drawing on queer feminist and queer Black feminist thought on abolition and fugitivity. This is a critical discussion, especially with the detainees’ file not being part of peace negotiations between the Syrian state and the opposition today, despite the thousands of people detained today since the 1980s and the 2011 uprising. The Syrian opposition calls for the release of political prisoners alone in Syria, limiting prison violence to political prisons alone. In this intervention, I challenge such discourse and expand on prison violence to include all incarcerated people in Syria, including sex workers, non-political prisoners, and the outcasted and ‘queered’ figures in the Syrian revolution discourse. I do this within a context of global narratives where ‘political imprisonment’ is co-opted to justify sanctions policies against Syria, which were effectively implemented by the US Congress in June 2020, in the context of a global pandemic. Therefore, I explore the Syrian opposition’s civil society discourse in the US had successfully lobbied with conservatives in the Trump administration to issue a sanctions law against Syria. These efforts were materialized in June 2020 under the name “The Cesar’s Law,” in reference to a former photographer under the pseudonym Cesar. He took photos of hundreds of detainees tortured to death in Syrian state prisons before defecting from his rank in the secret security forces. Finally, in my intervention, I explore this intersection between sex workers’ prison strike, the politics of sanctions against Syria, and the carceral politics in Syria between the domestic and the global narratives and policies.
