Description
We are entering an era of enhanced and deepening carceral logics. As racial capitalism’s disastrous social consequences intensify, states are increasingly responding through carceral practices including mass-imprisonment, the fortification and proliferation of borders, and the widespread use of technologies including surveillance, disablement, displacement and criminalisation. Whilst the links between carcerality, racism and gender are becoming established in IR (despite some disciplinary hostility), the links between LGBTQ+ lived experiences, abolitionist politics, queerness and carcerality are less well-explored.
Queerness interpreted in a decolonial sense includes the extent to which racial, gendered and sexual tropes form co-constitutive elements of the colonial project. These tropes help govern those populations who are deemed deviant or pathological, and thus must be controlled and/or locked away. Foregrounding a concern with such structures and technologies, this panel brings together a diverse range of scholars who engage in some way with the carceral state from a queer perspective, whether this be in practical, theoretical or epistemological terms. This engagement also comes from a wide range of empirical perspectives, including scholarly interests in bordering, LGBTQ+ migration studies, state-building and militarism.
