GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

In "Punks" Cathy Cohen tracks my twenties in Chicago and my political attraction and dilemmas with Queer Nation's rhetorical and performative strategies that could galvanize defiance against normativity yet deny disparities of racialization that collapsed variant sexualities and gender into "reductive categories of straight and queer." Cohen (1997: 457–58) advocates putting intersectional analysis into the practice of coalition building to embrace and proliferate potential allies across difference and focusing on targeting the marginalized "relationship to dominant power which normalizes, legitimizes and privileges" and also pathologizes, denigrates, and demonizes people and lifeworlds.

I would like to carry her provocation of the "question of the radical potential of queer politics" to my current research on the political and bodily struggles of hunger strikers in detention. I am ruminating anew on Cohen's concluding remarks in the final section on destabilizing identity and radical coalitional work. My research on mass prison hunger strikes from 1909 to 2017 examines how bodily defiance struggles across the globe tested carceral institutions and precipitated crises of medical care. In the twentieth century, hunger striking moved from the isolation of prison onto the public stage, becoming central to political defiance. Political allies harnessed print and television media, amplifying through press accounts, public rallies, and sympathy fasts the perspective and bodily experience of prisoners. The struggle of the hunger strikers captivated the public, fueled controversy, and quickened the prisoners' political goals of mobility and removal from [End Page 183] detention. The book's last chapters explore the intersectional strategies and challenges of creating alliances of solidarity for migrants and refugees with publics in the United States and Australia.

One of these strategies that leveraged mobility as a way to produce a spectacle of public protest is the Sikh freedom ride organized in April 2014 in response to hunger-striking Punjabi asylum seekers, who had spent eight months to over a year in an El Paso detention center, despite passing credible fear interviews. The Jakara youth movement in Fresno organized a caravan to draw attention to the struggles of the hunger-striking detainees. Deep Singh, cofounder of Jakara, explains that the inspiration to take action for El Paso detainees came in a discussion with Fresno-based Mexican American and Hmong groups that underlined the "common issues in the different communities" that are riven by state surveillance, immigration deportation, and incarceration (quoted in Romero 2014).

The organizing structure of "caravans" created durational and spatial protest performances that dramatized the urgency of mobility, and drew attention to rallies that publicized the struggles of and solidarity for isolated detainees. The Sikh youth traveled to a Gurdwara in Bakersfield and a Sikh service organization in Pacoima to rally support in their ethnic and religious communities for Punjabi detained immigrants. At a rally organized in the Los Angeles community of Artesia, the youth shared the stage with Latinx and South Asian activists. After driving through the night, the caravan arrived at the El Paso detention center, where some youth were able to interview detainees and share their stories with both local communities and the media afterward. Cayden Mak, who identifies as mixed race and transgender, leads the Asian American immigrant activist organization, 18 Million Rising, and created the hashtag #ELPASO37 to give the caravan a digital platform for grassroots activism to publicize the journey and connect incarcerated asylum seekers from South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Mexico, and Central America and their allies.

These social justice alliances between Sikh American youth and Latinx and Hmong youth, and the advocacy for asylum seekers from across the globe, put in practice Cohen's call to build coalitions that recognized race, ethnic, spiritual, sexual identities, and bridged shared experiences of oppression and challenge to immigration policing and carceral systems. Rather than focus on identity as a limit to creating collective purpose, the networks emphasized intersectional practices of alliance building that could question the normalizing of immigrant and racialized criminality (Cohen 1997: 460).

The challenges of alliance building reverberate in the decision by three Latinx activists, Deyaneira García, Jorge Gutiérrez, and Jennicet Gutiérrez, in May [End Page 184] 2016 to launch a hunger strike in a city park outside Santa Ana Jail after months of protests and negotiations on behalf of transgender immigrants facing deportation. Protesting alongside members of Orange County Immigrant Youth United, Familia-TQLM (Trans Queer Liberation Movement), and DeColores Queer Orange County, they demanded that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) end the detention of transgender immigrants and challenged the Santa Ana city council to terminate its contract with ICE to hold trans immigrants in its sixty-four-bed segregated "pods" facilities specifically designed to detain trans and queer women (Reichard 2016). The transgender activist Jennicet Gutiérrez emphasized the vulnerability of transgender women to being "targeted" and "murdered" and how detention provides no protection from violence (Stanley 2015).

The protests emphasized the structural system of mass incarceration and immigrant detention as a trans, queer, Latinx justice, and freedom struggle. Contesting Santa Ana prison authorities' claims of the safety of their facilities for trans immigrants, Jorge Gutiérrez, a thirty-one-year-old transgender immigrant rights advocate who founded Familia: TQLM, questioned the $27 million debt servicing that propelled the need for revenue and the city's contracts to harvest $7 million a year from the federal government for holding trans and queer immigrants. He argued, "You know where the best place for our queer and trans brothers and sisters is? It's with their communities." "In detention, no matter where, we are harassed, we are made fun of, we are threatened, we are misgendered. We are denied medical access. If you complain about this, they put you in solitary confinement and say it's for your 'safety'—and that is punishment. I believe that is torture. Trans women who have been detained verify this. The Human Rights Watch report verifies this." The protest fast in front of Santa Ana Jail was part of a larger struggle that Jorge Gutiérrez expressed willingness to "put my body out on the line in Santa Ana to protect our communities and families, this is part of a national fight to stop the raids, deportations and close down detention centers" (quoted in Vasquez 2016).

Putting one's body on the line echoed the national mass hunger strikes six months before that connected the struggles in detention centers when hundreds of Punjabi, Bangladeshi, Ghanaian, Congolese, and Central American, Colombian, and Ecuadorian detainees participated in hunger strikes in seven ICE detainee centers from California to Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, and Alabama in October–December 2015. The intersectional coalition building and national solidarity campaign on behalf of hunger-striking immigrants was launched as the "Freedom Giving" campaign put in counterpunctual relief the extreme national feasting during Thanksgiving Weekend 2015. The #FreedomGiving campaign [End Page 185] condemned the reach of the carceral system into the civil confinement of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, repudiating all detentions, deportations, and the ICE bed quotas that structurally sustains a profit-based incarceration industry.

On a local level, these campaigns against the detention and deportation of immigrants intersected with multiple and complex ways in which the US prison system produces people of color as queer, deviant, and dangerous to justify their intensified and extended cycles of incarceration (Vitulli 2012). In December 2015, at Yuba County jail, six women prisoners joined in a hunger strike to support Rajashree Roy, who faced deportation to Fiji, even though she was eight when she came to the United States to join her father after being abandoned by her mother and abused by relatives. At sixteen she was arrested for robbery and battery. Once released from prison, she struggled to survive and feed her children while in an abusive relationship, and she was arrested for misdemeanor petty theft. Because of her prior convictions, the district attorney set bail at $1 million and offered a twenty-five-to-life sentence; Roy accepted a plea bargain of seven years in 2011. She won early release in November 2014, but when Roy stepped foot out of jail, she was picked up by ICE and slated for deportation to Fiji, away from her children (Sohrabji 2015). In Yuba County jail, Roy organized with women imprisoned on a variety of convictions. Roy and her fellow hunger strikers at Yuba County Jail issued a statement: "We are locked up together and refuse to be divided into immigrants and citizens. None of us belong in this cage separated from our families. We join the brave immigrant hunger strikers across the country in fasting to force recognition of our humanity." Roy received free legal representation, and her struggle was publicized by Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Asian Law Caucus, which works with low-income Asian Pacific Islander immigrants in deportation proceedings. Members of ASPIRE, a pan-Asian, undocumented youth-led group affiliated with the legal nonprofit, conducted solidarity fasts outside the jail and insisted on an "end to the unjust policing and the criminalization of all communities of color" (Sohrabji 2015). In 2016 Roy was released from detention and became an advocate for those in detention, lobbying legislators for alternative justice reforms for those whose record of incarceration makes them vulnerable to deportation (Wu 2016).

These creative and conscientious examples of movement building initiated through prisms of ethnic, gender, and sexual identity have the capacity to share resources and concerns, and forge networks of alliance and support. The political activism and social media spotlighted the well-being of particular immigrant detainees and in the process poignantly revealed the pervasive carceral system's inhumanity. The system of civil detention, which borrowed from the prison industrial [End Page 186] complex and criminalization, fostered trenchant critiques of the US prison systems' endemic racism, enumerating the ways it warehouses people of color and produces prisoners as racially other, deviant, and queer. In local jails, populations mixed and shared similar struggles against the structures of unjust policy, anemic legal recourse, widespread criminalization, vulnerability to violence, and relentless caging and confinement. Their critiques of the US prison system, communicated through allies and advocates, reverberated to challenge how the prison-industrial complex polices gender normativity, punishes gender and sexual deviance, and destroys and distorts kinship and social worlds of people of color. These grounds of struggle fed dreams of prison abolition across identities and locations (Vitulli 2012; Stanley 2015).