In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction to "Queer Healing and Transformative Justice":A Special Issue of QED
  • Alexia Arani (bio) and Anna Renée Winget (bio)

The COVID-19 pandemic and international protests of the violences of the prison industrial complex (PIC) have put matters of health, safety, and healing at the forefront of social justice struggles. Prison abolitionists around the world are asking: How do we dismantle systems of oppression foundational to carceral institutions within which and from which we find ourselves needing to heal? Or as Adaku Utah, Nigerian healer and liberation educator, prompts: how do we "create systems and structures that build wellness, safety, care, and power and depend less on the state and systems of violence? What do we need to transform in ourselves and in our organizations to build this kind of world?"1 (emphasis added) These questions—arguably more urgent than ever in the face of multiple pandemics, unmitigated police violence, and climate catastrophe—animate the articles, essays, poems, and speculative fiction that make up this special issue on queer healing and Transformative Justice.2 Our contributors, writing from a range of origins, locations, abilities, identities, and subject positions, demonstrate that the work of queer(ing) healing and reimagining how we prevent, disrupt, and intervene in harm is foundational to building abolitionist worlds, in the here and now. [End Page 1]

Navigating the Dual Pandemics of COVID-19 and the PIC

Many prison abolitionists, following the brown sisters' lead to "learn from the apocalypse with grace, rigor, and curiosity"3 (Wright, this issue), imagined the COVID-19 pandemic to be a catalyst for collective transformation, a generative opportunity to restructure social relations away from ableist-racial capitalism and towards interdependence and collective care. Yet, much of the world pushes for a "return to normal," prioritizing individual choice, corporate profit, and opportunities for travel and leisure over disabled, immune-compromised, elderly, and poor and working-class lives. In the face of multiple pandemics, economic recessions, waves of state-sanctioned and interpersonal violence, and climate catastrophe, political leaders have largely neglected to take on the robust social, economic, environmental, and political transformations that actually keep people safe and well.

The inadequate responses to the concurrent crises of recent years highlight the eugenicist underpinnings of hegemonic frameworks for health and safety. Whose health and safety are valued, and at what cost? The burdens of the COVID-19 pandemic are disproportionately borne by disabled and immune-compromised people, people of color, immigrants, undocumented people, poor and working-class communities, incarcerated people, caregivers, and people living in the Global South. Corporate greed, xenophobia, and antiblackness have resulted in global disparities in vaccine access as well as scapegoating of racialized populations as cause and carriers of transmission.4 Around the world, bureaucrats, administrators, and business owners are lifting mask mandates, retiring remote access options, and withdrawing relief funds, eviction moratoriums, and vaccines, testing, and treatment.

In a world where "public safety" is largely exercised as the suppression of disorder and dissent, systematically disenfranchised communities—often the very same who are at increased risk of contraction and complications from COVID-19—are disproportionately targeted for policing and criminalization. Prisons, detention centers, and border patrol agents are mass carriers of COVID-19, as well as other preventable, infectious diseases, like hepatitis and HIV.5 Riot police routinely use tear gas and other chemical agents on protestors, engaging in respiratory warfare in the midst of an airborne virus threatening chronic pulmonary disease.

Although police budgets continue to swell, activists around the world are recognizing that decarceration is essential for public health; that prison abolition preserves human life.6 Queer, trans, disabled, and BIPOC activists have been on the frontlines of efforts for decarceration and are leading allied grassroots [End Page 2] movements for mutual aid. Black feminists and queer and trans people of color, in particular, have played a vital role in expanding the project of prison abolition beyond the closure of prisons, jails, detention centers, asylums, and other sites of confinement, though indeed these institutions must fall. Thanks to the contributions of these organizers and activists, a growing number of prison abolitionists are recognizing that carcerality creeps beyond borders and prison walls, shaping social institutions, ideologies, interpersonal...

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