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The Perils and Privileges of Vulnerability: Intersectionality, Relationality, and the Injustices of the U.S. Prison Nation

The Perils and Privileges of Vulnerability: Intersectionality, Relationality, and the Injustices... Erinn Gilson The social injustices associated with mass incarceration and the carceral state have found ample critical theoretical and activist expression in recent years. Further, many critics have sought to expose the depths of these injustices through intersectional analysis inclusive of race, gender, and socioeconomic class and other dimensions of social identity and position (Crenshaw 2012; Richie 2012; Durazo, Bierria, and Kim 2011­12). My aim is to bring the concept of vulnerability to bear on these analyses. Vulnerability is a crucial concept given its normative salience: it points us to wrongs done but also to the basis for justice. Any adequate consideration of vulnerability, however, demands attentiveness to how complex social identities and positions mediate experiences of vulnerability.1 If we are concerned with the way state power produces and exacerbates harmful vulnerability in institutions such as prisons, jails, detention centers, courtrooms, and public spaces under police surveillance, then we must reckon with how the workings of the carceral state presumes (and produces) discrete identities. An intersectional framework allows both this consideration and an analysis of how the subject positions marked out by such institutions reinforce inequality and generate precarity. Yet, vulnerability makes possible an analysis in excess of http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png philoSOPHIA State University of New York Press

The Perils and Privileges of Vulnerability: Intersectionality, Relationality, and the Injustices of the U.S. Prison Nation

philoSOPHIA , Volume 6 (1) – Aug 6, 2016
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Abstract

Erinn Gilson The social injustices associated with mass incarceration and the carceral state have found ample critical theoretical and activist expression in recent years. Further, many critics have sought to expose the depths of these injustices through intersectional analysis inclusive of race, gender, and socioeconomic class and other dimensions of social identity and position (Crenshaw 2012; Richie 2012; Durazo, Bierria, and Kim 2011­12). My aim is to bring the concept of vulnerability to bear on these analyses. Vulnerability is a crucial concept given its normative salience: it points us to wrongs done but also to the basis for justice. Any adequate consideration of vulnerability, however, demands attentiveness to how complex social identities and positions mediate experiences of vulnerability.1 If we are concerned with the way state power produces and exacerbates harmful vulnerability in institutions such as prisons, jails, detention centers, courtrooms, and public spaces under police surveillance, then we must reckon with how the workings of the carceral state presumes (and produces) discrete identities. An intersectional framework allows both this consideration and an analysis of how the subject positions marked out by such institutions reinforce inequality and generate precarity. Yet, vulnerability makes possible an analysis in excess of

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philoSOPHIA – State University of New York Press

Published: Aug 6, 2016

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