Symposium on Diverse Epistemologies: Beyond Perpetrators: Black Men Against Sexual Violence and the Genealogy of Prison Abolition

"In September 1973, William Fuller and Larry Cannon founded Prisoners Against Rape, an organization comprised of individuals who committed rape, feminist anti-sexual violence workers and organizations, and individuals invested in combating rape and rape culture. As Black men, both in their twenties and both perpetrators of sexual violence serving time in Lorton Reformatory, they knew well the racialized, gendered, and sexual logics that structured carceral institutions.They also took accountability for the harm they inflicted on others through education and collective self-help. Prisoners Against Rape had membership across at least two other carceral facilities. Chiefly, this talk is concerned with understanding what centering the experiences, writings, and appearances of these Black men can teach us about prison abolition as we continue to build toward a different kind of future. I revisit the work of Prisoners Against Rape to situate them within a Black queer abolitionist genealogy from which they are often ignored or minimized. In doing so, I examine how their attentiveness to acts of violence within the prison system against queer subjects, their interrogation of violence against women, and their theorization of the economics of sexual violence situate Black men not simply as perpetrators of violence but as necessary agents in the dismantling of the carceral state. Their work is particularly significant given the longer historical construction of Black men as sexual predators and the ways that the prison industrial complex disproportionately impacts Black men." -Dr. Terrance Wooten

We're excited to welcome Dr. Terrance Wooten, an Affiliate of the Center for Black Studies Research, to share his knowledge on Black men against sexual violence and the genealogy of prison abolition. Dr. Wooten is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara, which he joined after serving as a 2017-2018 Mark Steinberg Weil Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland. Dr. Wooten's scholarly interests are located at the intersections of Black studies, gender and sexuality studies, studies of poverty and homelessness, and carceral studies.

Please RSVP or register in the PDF!