Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State by Stephen Dillon (review)

These are fertile times for "critical prison studies" with multiple texts in circulation, and particularly generative are those that offer fresh takes on histories of resistance, like Emily Thuma's archives of anti- carceral feminism in All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence and Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier's project on twentieth- century prisoner- led organizing, Rethinking the American Prison Movement.¹ This expanding body of work offers powerful tools for those working to dismantle our nation's racialized investments in the prison industrial complex (PIC), and reminders of the strength and necessity of inside–outside organizing. Yet the joy of resurfacing legacies of resistance is also coupled with grief over their burial—submerged by decades of movement cooptation and repression. As two feminist queers embedded in transformative justice and abolitionist practices, we dove into Dillon's project, a counterhistory that maps the Black, feminist, queer, and anti- imperialist foundations of con-temporary abolition movements.

Fugitive Life is a reminder of the strategic and analytic brilliance of earlier mobilizations, as well as the contemporary left erasure of this powerful trajectory of queer and/or women of color organizing. From Bo Brown to June Jordan, from the George Jackson Brigade to the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries—far from a romantic entanglement with fugitivities, these individuals and collectives fused radical analysis with practice and demanded new worlds that marked no one as disposable. Intersectional before Kimberlé Crenshaw, avowedly international, and queerly nonnormative and boundary-crossing, the genealogies amplified by Fugitive Life reminds us that direct action is a necessary tool for worldmaking. And the costs are high.

Dillon's Introduction, "Escape- Bound Captives: Race, Neoliberalism, and the Force of Queerness," sets the theoretical frame for the book and paints fugitivity broadly as a way of being/knowing. The underground, Dillon argues, is a "parallel universe" that negates normative space/time (40), an "epistemology that opens up other ways of thinking about power" (43), and a "fictional space" (75) of making oneself illegible and invisible to state time and space and surveillance. Dillon's framing implicitly raises the question for us as readers of who counts as a fugitive today, and how we can understand a contemporary geography of the "underground" when space is ever more colonized by high- tech surveillance and carceral control.

Chapter 1, "We Are Not Hiding but We Are Invisible: Law and Order, the Temporality of Violence and the Queer Fugitive," pairs an analysis of the build- up of the racialized neoliberal regime of carcerality in the 1960s and 1970s with the critique and actions of lesbian feminists, in particular those within the Weather Underground. Dillon's argues that 1970s era organizers, far from viewing the market and the prison as disparate spheres, recognized their intimacy. The women's brigade of the Weather Underground, as one example, bombed the Department of Education and Welfare in San Francisco in the name of women "locked up in prisons and mental institutions" and those who "live in projects" or "wait in lines for food stamps" (48). A key through line in Fugitive Life is the lens generated by scholars of racial capitalism, that economic systems are never race neutral, and as Dillon writes, "neoliberalism is a carceral project" (38).

Chapter 2, "Life Escapes: Neoliberal Economics, the Underground, and Fugitive Freedoms," juxtaposes what Dillon terms "neoliberal freedom" (or how capital and the "free market" continued to define the contours of freedom by naturalizing policing and surveillance) with "fugitive freedom"—those working to define subjectivity and life outside of this logic. The free market and other fictions central to the ascendency of neoliberalism, he argues, are "made possible by what it forgets . . . white supremacy, settler colonialism, and heteropatriachy" (59). Dillon also queries how the "freedoms" implied by neoliberalism are haunted by carcerality: capitalism haunted by slavery and the "consent" of the wage labor contract haunted...