Abolition. Feminism. Now. is a celebration of freedom work, a movement genealogy, a call to action, and a challenge to those who think of abolition and feminism as separate—even incompatible—political projects.
In this remarkable collaborative work, leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie surface the often unrecognized genealogies of queer, anti-capitalist, internationalist, grassroots, and women-of-color-led feminist movements, struggles, and organizations that have helped to define abolition and feminism in the twenty-first century.
This pathbreaking book also features illustrations documenting the work of grassroots organizers embodying abolitionist feminist practice.
Amplifying the analysis and the theories of change generated out of vibrant community based organizing, Abolition. Feminism. Now. highlights necessary historical linkages, key internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to imagine a future where we can all thrive.
Angela Y. Davis is Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at UC 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.
Gina Dent (Ph.D., English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University) is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Legal Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she received the Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award in the Humanities in 2019 and the Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity in 2007. She previously held positions at Princeton University and Columbia University and was Director of the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research at UCSC, as well as Principal Investigator for the UC Multicampus Research Group on Transnationalizing Justice. Currently, she is Faculty Fellow at the UCSC Institute of the Arts and Sciences, working as a consultant for the Barring Freedom exhibition (San José Museum of Art) and as co-convener of the Visualizing Abolition series of events, which includes the video collection Music for Abolition (https://visualizingabolition.
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. The emphasis of her scholarly and activist work has been on the ways that race/ethnicity and social position affect women's experience of violence and incarceration, focusing on the experiences of African American battered women and sexual assault survivors. Dr. Richie is the author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation (NYU Press, 2012) which chronicles the evolution of the contemporary anti-violence movement during the time of mass incarceration in the United States and numerous articles concerning Black feminism and gender violence, race and criminal justice policy, and the social dynamics around issues of sexuality, prison abolition, and grassroots organizations in African American Communities. Her earlier book Compelled to Crime: the Gender Entrapment of Black Battered Women, is taught in many college courses and is cited in the popular press for its original arguments concerning race, gender and crime. Dr. Richie’s work has been supported by grants from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and The National Institute for Justice and The National Institute of Corrections. She has been awarded the Audre Lorde Legacy Award from the Union Institute, The Advocacy Award from the US Department of Health and Human Services, and The Visionary Award from the Violence Intervention Project and the UIC Woman of the Year Award. Dr. Richie is a board member of The Institute on Domestic Violence in the African Community, The National Network for Women in Prison, A Call To Men and a founding member of INCITE!: Women of Color Against Violence. In 2013 she was awarded an Honorary Degree from the City University of New York Law School and in 2014 she was appointed as a Sr. Advisor to the NFL to work on their domestic violence and sexual assault prevention program.
Publication date: January 18, 2022
“In Abolition. Feminism. Now., Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie—four visionaries whose longstanding abolitionist work is inseparable from their feminist principles—brilliantly show how abolition feminism has always offered the radical tools we need for revolutionary change. Feminist approaches to the carceral regime reveal the connections between state violence and intimate violence, between prisons and family policing, and between local and global organizing. By illuminating the genealogy of anti-carceral feminism and its vital struggles against all carceral systems, the authors compel us to see the urgent necessity of abolition feminism now.”
—Dorothy Roberts, author, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build A Safer World
“In this powerful, wise and well-crafted book, filled with insight and provocation, Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie make it patently and abundantly clear why abolitionist feminism is necessary. Offering vivid snapshots from a political movement, the book explains how organizing to end violence without turning to violent institutions such as prisons and the police as remedies, is how we learn what we need to do to make change possible. Abolitionist feminists, they teach us, in taking up the slow, practical and painstaking work of campaigning, also expand our political horizons and create imaginative tools for world building. Attentive to histories of organising that are too quickly erased, and alive to new possibilities for working collectively in the present time, this book is as capacious and demanding as the abolitionist feminism it calls for. It gives us a name for what we want. Abolitionism. Now.”
—Sara Ahmed, author of Willful Subjects
“This little book is a massive offering on where we have been, where we are right now, and what we are imagining and organizing into being as abolition feminists. Breaking us out of every container and binary, Abolition. Feminism. Now. invites us to be in the complexity and contradictions of our humanity in the massive intersectional work of structural change. The ideas of abolition and feminism are rivers moving through us towards a liberated future which we can already feel existing within and between us. Invigorating and rooting, this text is instantly required reading, showing us how everything we have done and are doing is accumulating towards a post-punitive, transformative future - our lineage is bursting with brilliance! And we are prefiguring this possibility - wherever we are is a site of practice, a place where we are collectively becoming accountable to a justice infused with humanity, compassion and the belief that we can change. This book is a lineage of words and visuals, showing us the beauty of our efforts, and gently reminding us that we are not failing - we are learning, and we are changing.”
—adrienne maree brown, author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice
“Neither manifesto nor blueprint for revolution, this extraordinary book makes the most compelling case I’ve ever seen for the indivisibility of feminism and abolition, for the inseparability of gendered and state violence, domestic policing and militarism, the street, the home, and the world. Combining decades of analytical brilliance and organizational experience, Davis, Dent, Meiners, and Richie offer a genealogy of the movements that brought us here, lessons learned, battles won and lost, and the ongoing collective struggle to build a thoroughly revolutionary vision and practice. A provocation, an incitement, an offering, an invitation to a difficult struggle to which we must all commit. Now.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“This is the book we’ve all needed for a long, long time.”
—Robyn Maynard, author of Policing Black Lives
“Abolition. Feminism. Now. is a demand in every way. It pushes readers not to accept simple stories but to embrace complexity and new ways of thinking. But it is also a celebration of feminist agitators and freedom fighters who undermine the carceral state while building new sources safety, repair, and accountability. Of an ever-changing, growing, and evolving movement that puts survivors at the center of its analysis, not the periphery. And of a historic political struggle that considers freedom worth the fight. And, in the end, the authors make it clear that abolition feminism isn’t on its way; it’s already unfolding all around us.”
—Nia T. Evans, Boston Review
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Join Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie for an urgent conversation moderated by Mariame Kaba.
Edited by Erin Miles Cloud, Erica R. Meiners, et al.
by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, et al.
