ABSTRACT
While scholars have rightly explored the ways that both punitive practices such as long-term solitary confinement and collateral consequences such as felon disenfranchisement render current and former prisoners as socially and civically “dead,” less attention has been paid to the form of parasitic “life” constructed as its antithesis. This is in part due to an epistemology of ignorance that blocks the recognition or acknowledgment of the pleasures of membership, citizenship, and freedom constitutively produced by this form of life and death. Because individuals may cling to these pleasures even when faced with the knowledge of their parasitic behavior, a more radical and confrontational form of “knowing” is called for in response. To this end, I follow the abolitionist work of CeCe McDonald alongside Sara Ahmed’s figuration of the “feminist killjoy” as models for how to re-center analyses of incarceration around voices and narratives of currently and formerly incarcerated persons, not simply as a form of disruptive ideology critique, but as a distinctive form of disruptive affect.
