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-**Weheliye 14** Alexander Weheliye, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, 2014, "Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human," |
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-We are in dire need of alternatives to the legal conception of personhood that dominates our world, and, in addition, to not lose sight of what remains outside the law, what the law cannot capture, what it cannot magically transform into the fantastic form of property ownership. Writing about the connections between transgender politics and other forms of identity-based activism that respond to structural inequalities, legal scholar Dean Spade shows how the focus on inclusion, recognition, and equality based on a narrow legal framework (especially as it pertains to anti-discrimination and hate crime laws) not only hinders the eradication of violence against trans people and other vulnerable populations but actually creates the condition of possibility for the continued unequal "distribution of life chances." If demanding recognition and inclusion remains at the center of minority politics, it will lead only to a delimited notion of personhood as property that zeroes in comparatively on only one form of subjugation at the expense of others, thus allowing for the continued existence of hierarchal differences between full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This can be gleaned from the "successes" of the mainstream feminist, civil rights, and lesbian-gay rights movements, which facilitate the incorporation of a privileged minority into the ethnoclass of Man at the cost of the still and/or newly criminalized and disposable populations (women of color, the black poor, trans people, the incarcerated, etc.). To make claims for inclusion and humanity via the US juridical assemblage removes from view that the law itself has been thoroughly violent in its endorsement of racial slavery, indigenous genocide, Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex, domestical and international warfare, and so on, and that it continues to be one of the chief instruments in creating and maintaining the racializing assemblages in the world of Man. Instead of appealing to legal recognition, Julia Oparah suggests ~~we should be~~ counteracting the "racialized (trans)gender entrapment" within the prison-industrial complex and beyond with practices of "maroon abolition" (in reference to the long history of escaped slave contraband settlements in the Americas) to "foreground the ways in which often overlooked African diasporic cultural and political legacies inform and undergird anti-prison work," while also providing strategies and life worlds not exclusively center on reforming the law. Relatedly, Spade calls for a radical politics articulated from the "‘impossible’ worldview of trans political existence," which redefines "the insistence of government agencies, social service providers, media, and many nontrans activists and nonprofiteers that the existence of trans people is impossible." A relational maroon abolitionism beholden to the practices of black radicalism and that arises from the incompatibility of black trans existence with the world of Man serves as one example of how putatively abject modes of being need not be redeployed within hegemonic frameworks but can operationalized as variable liminal territories or articulated assemblages in movements to abolish the ground upon which all forms of subjugation are administered. |