Description
This paper stages a creative-destructive encounter between Saidiya Hartman’s vital work of anti-carceral feminism, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. It begins by observing how techniques of shame-production figure in the policing that enforces oppressive forms of social ‘order’, including racial capitalism, ableism, and hetero-patriarchy. Practices of state violence and criminalisation are fundamental to, but not exhaustive of, this policing. Drawing on Hartman’s histories of ‘wayward’ Black women (and refusers of womanhood) and Foucault’s histories of ‘popular illegalities’, I consider the positive role of shameless criminalities in resistance to these hierarchical social orderings.
I argue that pride can be a counter-policing strategy because it takes the weight of expected shame and turns it into a force for bonding, for reimagining sociality as solidarity with and amongst the targets of policing. Simultaneously, I explore some potential pitfalls of a politics of reclaiming – in Foucault’s words – ‘pride in [our] crimes’. The paper is part of a broader project that examines the ideological functions of the concept of ‘the criminal’, demanding a reorientation of political thought to attend to the perspectives of the criminalised.
