Notes on the (Im)possibilities of an Anti-colonial Queer Abolition of the (Carceral) World

Abstract

Abstract This article aims to reflect on the politics of contemporary carceral LGBT movements and to delineate the (im)possibilities of an anti-colonial queer abolitionism. From the southern Americas, the authors elaborate a brief genealogy of the punishment of queer bodies in Brazil, marking the impossible promises of safety made by the penal “cystem.” By elaborating a critique of carcerality in LGBT contemporary politics, the authors argue for a refusal of the colonial world's solutions to violence. Amid (im)possibilities, this article formulates some elements for anti-colonial, queer abolitionist practices that envision the end of prisons and police, as well as the abolition of gender, sexuality, class, and race as structures of this world. It presents the refusal, the imagination, an ethics of incommensurability, and an active daily building of other possibilities as imbricated elements of anti-colonial, queer abolitionist struggles. Those practices may well be a path to set on fire this world, this present prison house, in the name of queer abolitionist futures.

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