In Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State, Stephen Dillon uses the writings of fugitive activists to analyze how gender, race, and sexuality were deployed in the development of a new system of power in 1970: the neoliberal-carceral state. The book is beautifully written and a significant intervention that is sure to become a foundational text in a number of academic fields. At once a work on critical race theory, queer studies, racial and ethnic politics, and political theory, Dillon's new book examines the politics of the hundreds of feminist, queer, and antiracist activists who were imprisoned or became fugitives in the 1970s and used their imprisoned or fugitive statuses to make explicit connections between neoliberalism and the rising prison state, which they saw as dependent upon one another. Dillon's work uses a discourse and historical analysis framework that draws from an innovative archive of communiqués, literature, films, memoirs, prison writing, and poetry produced by fugitive activists. Through this analysis, Dillon illuminates how these activists envisioned the fugitive as a queer figure “who is the site of a dramatic reimagining of freedom that points the way out even as life is increasingly surrounded” by the oppressive forces of racialized state power.
The book is broken into four chapters that both outline the ideology of neoliberal thinkers in the post-Civil Rights Movement era and present queer, feminist, and antiracist fugitive critiques. Chapter 1 begins by investigating how the “law and order” politics of Goldwater and Nixon cast the potential for a utopian future on a free market capitalism that rendered immobile those resistant to the racialized economic regime through imprisonment and subjugation. Stated differently, this part illuminates how “law and order” rhetoric was deployed to denigrate and violently suppress those seen as a threat to an unfettered free market economics. The chapter continues with an examination of how underground lesbian activists and members of the Weather Underground theorized prison, the market, and time as it related to this “law and order” rhetoric. Chapter 2 continues exploring the ways that US penal policies were imagined as central to the free market through the writings of neoliberal thinker Milton Friedman in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom. The chapter juxtaposes Friedman's theory of freedom against the memoirs of fugitive activists and Susan Choi's novel American Women, demonstrating how activists produced an alternative conception of freedom founded on running away.
Chapter 3 examines the writings of three imprisoned black feminist fugitives (Angela Davis, Safiya Bukhari, and Assata Shakur) in order to construct the historical foundations of the neoliberal carceral state. In this chapter, Dillon argues that “these prison writings connected an emergent neoliberalism to chattel slavery through a queer conception of temporality… ‘possession’” (p. 25). The chapter illuminates how, rather than disappearing with reform, slavery and imperialism haunt or possess the present, limiting opportunities. Through the poetry of Audre Lorde and June Jordan, chapter 4 examines how the activists of the 1970s simultaneously warned that the state sought to capture desire to bolster normative orderings (through policing and incarceration), and used desire as a form of escape. The book ends by bringing together the writings of Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and Beverly Smith (Black feminist thinkers) and the writings of Rita Brown, lesbian antiprison activists, anti-imperialist feminists, and black lesbians. In illuminating how foundational black feminist thinkers and fugitive queer activists complement and build off one another, Dillon outlines how fugitive politics is necessary for full comprehension of the systems of marginalization and oppression constructed by the neoliberal-carceral state.
Fugitive Life is especially notable because it reimagines activist writings within the canon of literature that critiques neoliberalism and the carceral state. In doing so, Dillon makes a significant intervention in a number of academic fields whose longstanding critiques of state power draw from political movement activism of the past without actively engaging with activists. Dillon makes the writings of fugitive activists central to his critique of state power, demonstrating how we cannot understand the development of neoliberalism without also acknowledging that its maintenance is premised on the rise of mass incarceration and more punitive policing technologies. The book, thus, delineates how the figure of the fugitive activist makes visible the contours of the contemporary neoliberal-carceral state.
Although the book brilliantly relays the interconnectedness of the prison state and the contemporary permutation of free market capitalism, at times I wanted more explicit connections between past and present. As a historical project, Fugitive Life's construction of “law and order” politics echoes through the decades. For example, Nixon's conceptualization of antiracist and anti-imperialist activism as a violent threat to economic freedom and individualism, in Dillon's analysis, mirrors contemporary conservative rhetoric. Without directly stating so, the book makes a strong case that today's far right politics have their roots in the reactionary politics of the 1970s. However, the lack of explicit connection is also part of the book's beauty. Dillon allows for the reader to imagine past and present connections and, consequently, provides space, not only for parallels between conservative politics of yesterday and today, but for the fugitive activism of the past and the political movement formations of the future. For this reason, Fugitive Life would work well in undergraduate or graduate seminars. Fugitive Life will be of particular interest to those who study queer, gender, and racial and ethnic politics in the US and those beyond the academy who are interested in political movement formation and activist critiques of neoliberalism and the carceral state.
