As a politic and a practice, abolition increasingly shapes our political moment—halting the construction of new jails and propelling movements to divest from policing. Yet erased from this landscape are not only the central histories of feminist—usually queer, anticapitalist, grassroots, and women of color—organizing that continue to cultivate abolition but a recognition of a stark reality: abolition is our best response to endemic forms of state and interpersonal gender and sexual violence.
Amplifying the analysis and the theories of change generated from vibrant, community-based organizing, Abolition. Feminism. Now. surfaces necessary historical genealogies, key internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to grow our collective and flourishing present and futures.
Angela Y. Davis is Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. An activist, writer, and lecturer, her work focuses on prisons, police, abolition and the related intersections of race, gender, and class. She is the author of many books, from Angela Davis: An Autobiography to Freedom Is a Constant Struggle.
Erica R. Meiners is a Professor of Education and Women’s and Gender Studies at Northeastern Illinois University. A writer, organizer, and educator, Meiners is the author For the Children?: Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State, coauthor of The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence, and a coeditor of The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Toward Freedom.
Beth E. Richie is head of the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Professor of Black Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Richie is the author of Compelled to Crime: the Gender Entrapment of Black Battered Women and Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation and a coeditor of The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Toward Freedom.
Gina Dent is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Legal Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the editor of Black Popular Culture and lectures and writes on African diaspora literary and cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and critical area studies. Her current project, Visualizing Abolition (www.visualizingabolition.ucsc.edu), grows out of her work as an advocate for transformative and transitional justice and prison abolition.