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"No More Cages": Feminist Prison Organizing and Contestations of Violence Against Women in the 1970s - Dr. Emily Thuma

This talk will examine the complex relations between feminist antiviolence activisms and the expansion of the U.S. carceral state in the 1970s. Activists who mobilized to oppose rape, battering, and institutional violence in the early post-civil rights era did so in the context of a succession of highly racialized moral panics about crime and social disorder. While liberal feminists' demands for more aggressive criminalization of “violence against women” increasingly folded into law and order campaigns, other activists drew attention to the imbrications of state-sponsored and intimate violence. Thuma will trace a distinctive movement forged by women radicals across lines of race, class, sexuality, and disability during this period that was defined by its intersectional and anti-normative politics and its entwined critique of prisons and mental institutions as sources of gendered violence.

Dr. Thuma received her PhD in American Studies from New York University. She is co-author of a monograph titled, Rethinking the American Prison Movement (Routledge, forthcoming).