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100 | 4 Shifting Markets of Power Building Tenders, Con Bosses, Queens, and Guards Bull was a long-time building tender, appointed by guards to keep order in the “tanks”— dormitories where inmates slept on Texas prison farms. Dumpling was a new young inmate, and even though he should have been sent to a unit for first-termers, he was assigned to the Retrieve Farm. When the transport dropped Dumpling off, the captain paraded him before the farm’s building tenders, or BTs, who hollered obscene remarks about the newcomer and begged the captain to let them have him in their tank. The captain made a half-hearted attempt to settle down the BTs. Perhaps in consolation , he offered to let Dumpling choose the tank that would be his new home, and, consequently, which of the BTs would control him. Dumpling said that it did not matter, so the captain taunted, “You mean it don’t matter who fucks you in yore ass?” Building tenders’ rape of other prisoners was no secret. When guards and building tenders collaborated in dominating weaker prisoners—and all prisoners were weaker than the BTs—they created what passed for good order in the Texas prison.1 Bull, armed not just with knives but with recognition as a state agent, forced Dumpling into sexual servitude. Eventually, Dumpling fought back. He found a razor blade, and one night, while the two were in Bull’s bunk, Dumpling cut off Bull’s penis. Bull, as building tender, had respect from one and all around him. But when he stood naked, wounded and pleading for help, the guard yelled at Bull to quiet down and quit spraying blood on the floor. Bull was no longer the building tender, but just “this ol’ nigguh wit his dick cut off.” On the phone with his superior, the guard asked, “Cap’n, kin ya’ll hurry? This sonuvabitch is ableedin all over everthang.”2 Disgraced, disarmed , and emasculated, Bull was worthless to the guards. Although Dumpling was punished and lost good time toward release, from then on, other inmates left him alone. He had proven himself in blood. He was no longer a “galboy” and had “earned his right to sleep in hell.”3 Shifting Markets of Power | 101 Power and authority in Texas and California prisons in the Depression wove together overt and covert networks, relationships that ensnared the guard, Bull, Dumpling, and the rest. Select prisoners played lynchpin roles in each state. Building tenders like Bull were the key figures in Texas, but in California, prisoners called “con bosses” were the most important. As the heads of prison departments and managers of productive processes, con bosses cultivated political and economic relationships to their personal advantage, often to the detriment of other prisoners. Building tenders and con bosses linked the official productive forces of the prisons to their informal economies, where markets of economic, sexual, violent, symbolic, and bureaucratic capital combined in dense networks of authority. Each of these systems undermined the possibilities of inmate solidarity, as prisoners frequently found themselves pitted against one another, rather than against the keepers of their institutions. To this end, the BT and con boss systems undermined the “con ethic” that midcentury sociologists identified and romanticized , which suggested that prisoners supported each other against their keepers.4 The BT and con boss systems were effective because, at their core, they appealed to prisoners’ masculinities, expressions of difference and power that were arguably more important to inmates’ lives than class or even race, or their shared status as prisoners. Consequently, these markets of power and violence, steeped in masculine identification, came from “above” as well as from “below,” from the state as well as from the domestic sphere’s foundational form of inequality.5 Prisoners inhabited a welter of masculinities , which were indexed in multiple ways to work, race, violence, sexuality, wealth, and self-control. The range of masculinities that male prisoners in Texas and California embodied overlapped with each other and with those on the outside, though as historian Regina Kunzel convincingly demonstrated , American prisons constantly “queered” commonsense understandings of gender.6 Yet the specific conditions in Texas and California prisons gave rise to different configurations of masculinity, with different forms emerging as hegemonic, and dominating alternative forms.7 Yet there was some room for maneuver, especially in California. There, queens—men who glamorized and traded on their effeminacy—managed an alternative fund of power to negotiate the Depression’s penal economy. The con boss...

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