All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence
Emily L Thuma
(Author)
Description
During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Emily L. Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, prisoners' and psychiatric patients' rights, and gender and sexual liberation. All Our Trials explores the organizing, ideas, and influence of those who placed criminalized and marginalized women at the heart of their antiviolence mobilizations. This activism confronted a "tough on crime" political agenda and clashed with the mainstream women's movement's strategy of resorting to the criminal legal system as a solution to sexual and domestic violence. Drawing on extensive archival research and first-person narratives, Thuma weaves together the stories of mass defense campaigns, prisoner uprisings, broad-based local coalitions, national gatherings, and radical print cultures that cut through prison walls. In the process, she illuminates a crucial chapter in an unfinished struggle--one that continues in today's movements against mass incarceration and in support of transformative justice.Product Details
Price
$24.95
Publisher
University of Illinois Press
Publish Date
March 02, 2019
Pages
246
Dimensions
5.9 X 0.7 X 8.9 inches | 0.75 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780252084126
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Emily L. Thuma is an assistant professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Tacoma.
Reviews
"With deep compassion, Thuma offers one of the most compelling historical analyses of how feminist activism of Black, queer, and criminalized women has worked to resist the long and dangerous reach of the carceral state. All Our Trials is an important text in the growing fields of critical prison studies and anti-carceral feminism and a critical addition to activist reading lists."--Beth Richie, author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation
"In the contemporary context of social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, which criticize the ever growing prison-industrial complex and draw attention to illegitimate violence perpetrated by agents of the state, All Our Trials provides a genealogy of the ideas behind alternatives to criminal justice; the roots of restorative and transformative justice theories can be found in the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s." --Punishment and Society
"All Our Trials transforms our understanding of both the history of feminism and of the carceral state. In her deeply compelling account, Thuma documents the work of activists who centered the lives of the most marginalized in their social justice imaginary and their political agenda, producing an anticarceral feminist politics and an expansive analysis of the interconnections between interpersonal and state violence. A crucial and timely read as we wrestle with gender, race, and violence today."--Regina Kunzel, author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality
"Thuma packs tremendous detail and insight into this short, well-written book. I recommend it!" --Chris Dixon, Writing with Movements
"All Our Trials is a tour de force. It stands among the best books on the history of modern feminist politics and represents one of the most elucidating histories of the US carceral state produced to date. Emily Thuma centers criminalized women's ideas and organizing, providing graceful historical analysis that will undoubtedly influence current conversations about imprisonment, gender, and sexual violence. This history opens a fiercely urgent path toward an anticarceral feminist future."--Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
"Thuma's historical approach to women, prisons, and policing is insightful and thorough. Though never directed to, the reader will certainly feel compelled to more directly contemplate or approach the present issue, but at the very least, All Our Trials is an incredibly effective antidote to the most crippling condition that stands in the way of dismantling the carceral state: apathy." --Women's Studies