We are pleased to host the 22nd session of our Political Economy Teach-In Series, “Beyond Criminalisation: Rethinking Justice, Law and the State”, on 29 April at 2 pm UTC with Estefanía Vela.
Registrations are open: bit.ly/42g3Rzu
Estefanía Vela Barba studied law and works at Intersecta, a Mexican feminist research and advocacy organisation committed to ending discrimination in Mexico through the promotion of intersectional, evidence-based, and non-punitive policy solutions.
One strategy that feminists throughout the world have pursued has been criminalisation, that is, the use of criminal law, which includes the use of cops and prisons, as a form to name, protect, repair, and punish gender based violence. This has led to the creation of new crimes, to diverse and, in some cases, harsher forms of penalties, and to a series of reformed criminal law institutions, as is the case of “special” prosecutor offices. Why is it important to question the use of criminal law by feminists? What do we know about how criminal law operates? And how should this knowledge impact what we fight for, particularly when it comes to engaging with the State?
Reading List
Explore below a curated selection of resources authored by Global South feminists. For a more comprehensive collection on this and other feminist topics, visit the South Feminist Knowledge Hub.
We welcome your contributions! If you know of other resources that should be included in this reading list, please submit them via this form or email us at knowledgehub@southfeministfutures.org.
English
Unintended Consequences: Feminism and Punitive Policies in Mexico
Author: Intersecta
A collection of essays that analyse the failures of criminal and carceral approaches to reduce gender violence and show the counterproductive consequences of these measures. The authors seek to show that the criminal system not only does not guarantee victims what they supposedly want—the punishment of their aggressors—but that this system can generate further social damage, even for the victims themselves. They provide concrete evidence of the adverse effects that the punitive paradigm in Mexico has had on those it intended to protect: women, girls, and other groups discriminated against based on gender.
Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, Vol. 1
Author: Angela Davis
From trailblazing political activist Angela Y. Davis, a major new collection of essays and interviews that argue for a radical rethinking of our prison systems. Combining decades of analytical brilliance and lessons from organising both inside and beyond prison walls, Davis addresses the history of abolitionist practice, details the unique contributions of women to abolitionist struggles, and offers the radical tools we need for revolutionary change.
Look Inside Become Ungovernable: An Abolition Feminist Ethic for Democratic Living
Author: H.L.T. Quan
Become Ungovernable is a provocative new work of political thought setting out to reclaim ‘freedom’, ‘justice’, and ‘democracy’, revolutionary ideas that are all too often warped in the interests of capital and the state. Revealing the mirage of mainstream democratic thought and the false promises of liberal political ideologies, H.L.T. Quan offers an alternative approach: an abolition feminism drawing on a kaleidoscope of refusal praxes, and on a deep engagement with the Black Radical Tradition and queer analytics. With each chapter anchored by episodes from the long history of resistance and rebellions against tyranny, Quan calls for us to take up a feminist ethic of living rooted in the principles of radical inclusion, mutuality and friendship as part of the larger toolkit for confronting fascism, white supremacy, and the neoliberal labor regime.
Author: The Feminist Fault Lines group
This report critiques carceral and punitive measures and criminalisation to address gender-based violence, especially in the context of marginalised communities of the global South. It advocates for non-punitive approaches to gender-based violence, such as structural transformation. Part of the problem with the logic of carcerality or even the logic of punitivism is that it individualises the act of causing and being the recipient of harm, and extracts the acts from the social context, in which the violence was not only made possible but often supported.
African Feminisms for Abolitionist Futures
Author: S.M.Rodriguez
This article emancipates penal abolitionist theorising from whiteness by centring Black political womanhood. It cross-reads three narratives of borderless resistance, considering Claudia Jones, La Mulâtresse Solitude, and Stella Nyanzi as figures who fight and collectivise before, during and after incarceration. As coloniality remains present for the three, the author endeavours to connect their struggles in and for the present and frame their resistance using Black, African, and anticarceral feminist literature.
Against Punitivism and Impunity in Mexico: a New justice
Author: Paola Zavala Saeb
The article discusses a shift in the justice system in Mexico from punitive measures to a restorative and preventive approach. It highlights how heavy reliance on incarceration exacerbates violence and creates obstacles to transformative justice. It talks about a new model of justice that takes a preventive and restorative approach and distinguishes between behaviour that causes high social impact and serious human rights violations and illegal behaviour that can be resolved by alternative justice mechanisms.
Author: Soha Abdelaty
At the most basic level, criminalisation involves passage and enforcement of criminal laws. While framed as neutral, decisions about what kinds of conduct to punish, how, and how much are very much a choice, guided by existing structures of economic and social inequality based on race, gender, sexuality, disability, and poverty, among others. A more comprehensive approach will address the structural inequalities leading to violations.
Beyond #StopAsianHate: Criminalization, Gender, & Asian Abolition Feminism
Authors: Yves Tong Nguyen, Ny Nourn, Hyejin Shim, Connie Wun, Stephanie Cho
A panel discussion with Southeast and East Asian American abolitionist organisers on how white supremacy and criminalisation shape the experiences of gendered racial violence for Asian people. Panelists discuss the ways that stigma, abandonment, and violence from within Asian American communities can lead to false solutions and increased harm for the most vulnerable among us.
French
Prison abolition is a feminist struggle
Author: Marlihan Lopez
Some people believe that being a feminist and a prison abolitionist are two things that don’t go together, as many feminists campaign for the criminalisation of gendered violence. For my part, I believe the opposite: feminism and prison abolition are two inseparable struggles.
Authors: Angela Yvonne Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, Beth E. Richie; Foreword by Rokhaya Diallo
Abolition requires profound changes in the way we fight oppression and work towards the world we want. For us, feminism offers a kind of political and ideological roadmap to guide these efforts. This sense of urgency, this ‘right now’, is multiplied tenfold by the long history of daily struggles within black, racialised, immigrant, queer and indigenous communities.
Author: Jackie Wang
Jackie Wang examines the current workings of capitalism in the United States, illustrating various aspects of the prison continuum such as the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, racial profiling, cyber-governance and algorithmic policing. How do a prison network and the apparatus of police repression relate to the violence of the economy and racism? Is this a direct continuation, in a different guise, of the system of slavery that lasted until the nineteenth century and on which the United States of America was founded?
Portuguese
Instead of clamouring for more punishment, why don’t we seek radical changes in society?
Author: Júlia de Miranda
How long will we remain hostage to the construction of the ideal victim, because a woman who has been raped needs to meet all the moral criteria of the ‘beautiful, demure and domestic’ to be recognised as deserving of protection?
Punitivist Feminism is a Weapon
Author: Lívia Reis
We need to take a critical look at the real possibilities of liberation from a system that creates crimes and applies laws in a misogynistic, racist and classist way under the pretext of promoting safety and security, while at the same time criminalising us and preventing us from exercising autonomy over our own bodies.
Why does feminism need to be anti-punitivist?
Author: Natália Sousa
The more intense the punishment, the stronger the idea that the crime will not be repeated. With this promise, punitivism finds support among the population, the media, and the political class, while at the same time it is used by the state as an instrument to combat violence. But why doesn’t it work?
Spanish
Gender in criminal law: punitive illusion, feminist critique of punitive illusion
Author: Lucía Núñez
This book traces the history of criminal law in Mexico from a feminist perspective, masterfully inserting itself into a tradition of thought and analysis that is now almost half a century old and yet is not easily known and recognised in academic circles and among jurists in general.
Author: Ana Sofía Rodríguez Everaert
The commitment of states to finding solutions to gender-based violence is an undeniable achievement of feminism. The historical demands of the various feminist movements have forced governments to take concrete measures to tackle this problem and its consequences. However, what at first appears to be good news is not so when, on closer inspection, many of these measures are limited to a punitive logic in which the condemnation and punishment of violence takes precedence over reparation, prevention and the redistribution of resources. A movement originally concerned with liberation now sees the penal apparatus, including its latest and most dramatic expression, the prison, as its fundamental ally.
Feminism at the Crossroads of Punitivism
Authors: Deborah Daich; Cecilia Varela
Is the penal sphere and its scheme of victims and perpetrators an adequate way of thinking about and resolving conflicts? How do we produce laws that protect women without descending into penal inflation? Is the best alternative, in all cases, to prohibit what we consider undesirable or illegitimate? How can feminists explore the potential of restorative justice? What happens to the symbolic potential of the penal system (and its practical effects) once it is set in motion?
Punitivism and feminism in the case of Lucía Pérez: a look at this false dichotomy
Author: Cristina Montserrat Hendrickse
Trans lawyer Cristina Montserrat Hendrickse analyses why the dichotomy being pushed by sectors that have always worked to categorise and divide the feminist movement is false. In doing so, they create social fractures that allow them to fuel conferences, research, and controversies from which they benefit.
National Inventory of Militarization,
Authors: Intersecta; México Unido Contra la Delincuencia; Drug Policy Programme
The National Inventory of Militarisation is a database aimed at documenting militarisation in Mexico and contributing to the identification and understanding of the legal mechanisms through which it occurs, the public actors involved in these processes, and the arguments used to justify their actions. The publication of the Inventory is accompanied by a findings report that includes an analysis of what these transfers mean for democracy and human rights.
Arabic
Why should the #MeToo movement avoid punitive feminism?
Author: Feminist Consciousness
“We must be precise in our identification of the origin of this scourge: power. Sexual harassment and assault are pervasive in our society as a result of the spread of extreme wealth and extreme poverty.”
Towards Anti-Carceral Feminist Justice in Egypt
Author: Farah Ghazal
“If the state is inherently patriarchal, how can we seriously expect it to do justice to gender-related injustices? This is the question anti-carceral feminism asks.”
Author: Fatima M. Ali
How does Morocco’s justice system deal with the reality of complex violence against women? What are the limits of the criminal approach? How has it led to the emergence of critical theses of so-called ‘carceral feminism’? How can violence against women be addressed outside the prison context? In this article, Amna Taras questions the criminal justice system, first in terms of its effectiveness, then in terms of its function and its patriarchal nature.
Rape and execution: When we justify a crime with a second offence
Author: Khawla Al Farshishi
Following the frequency of homicides in Tunisia, especially those associated with the female body, such as rape, diversion, and mutilation of the victim’s body, voices calling for the application of the death penalty as a deterrent have risen. But what is the relationship between the crime of rape and the death penalty, and how have many observers in Tunisia linked the increase in violence and crimes to the lack of implementation of the death penalty?
Abolitionist Feminism in Palestine
Author: Fatima M. Ali
Liked this article? Share it!
