In recent years, LGBTQ people in the United States have been seduced by the appeals of (neo)liberalism. Despite a long history of anti-state queer resistance, increasingly, queers are looking to the state for (sexual) citizenship, validated via the criminalization of others. This trend is reflected in sweeping support of hate crimes legislation, the individualization of punishment, and the professionalization of LGBTQ identities and organizing. My research shows that the administering of life and citizenship for some queers are contingent upon the slow death of others, and exposes prisons as necropolitical sites of infinite gender and sexual violence. I make the case that, in the face of a growing prison industrial complex and the continued criminalization of queer and trans* people, gender violence is best addressed in the register of prison abolition. I draw on trans*/queer critiques of the PIC, as well as queer theorists’ writing on rights and citizenship.
