State Violence, Women, and the Myth of Care

Catalog description

When did care become carceral? Is carceral care a universal experience or an aimed state project? With a focus on the experiences of Black women and Black mothers, this course will explore the dissemination of violence (administrative and material) within domestic violence advocacy services—with a particular emphasis on carceral care. Collectively, we will examine the experiences of Black women and Black mothers across disciplines that center race, gender, class, and sexuality, and investigate how compulsory (state-mandated) “good citizenship” classes, mothering classes, and other forms of pedagogical discipline and surveillance have become central to the structuring of DV advocacy services. Through a feminist - decolonial - abolitionist lens, we will employ comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives with an emphasis on constructed subjectivity. Course content will center alternative forms of knowledge produced by marginalized women and communities of color. To explore “carceral care” we will investigate advocacy services in its different forms, within prisons (state sponsored “care”), non-profit organization practices, and legal policies—our collective exploration will not only illuminate the punitive forms of care experienced by Black women but also center the ways in which Black women continue to fight for their autonomy. We will consider work by: Saidiya Hartman, Simone Leigh, Christina Sharpe, Hortense Spillers, Tiffany Lethabo King, and Katherine McKittrick.