Status Updates From The Long Term: Resisting Li...

Often the terms we use--"domestic violence", "rape", "stalking"--call up legalistic definitions that require definitive lines of demarcation. They make it hard to talk about the everyday messy ways that mistreatment and abuse live out... Creating a shared vocabulary can shift us from debating whether an experience is "bad enough" to constitute abuse [... to addressing it] w/o having to fit... the state's definition.

While its adherents would likely reject the descriptor, "carceral feminism" describes an approach that sees increased policing, prosecution, and imprisonment as the primary solution to violence against women. This stance does not acknowledge that police are often purveyors of violence and that prisons are always sites of violence.

Of course, survivors deserve that people who harm them are held accountable and face consequences that feel real. Yet the system we have very rarely is effective, because it either targets people falsely or when you try to use it because you have been told it will work, it doesn’t.

In prison, the precariousness of life in a system designed to confer premature death is juxtaposed with the abiding slowness of everyday existence that is the reality for people facing life sentences.