Abstract
This autoethnographic piece, cowritten through letters exchanged between Kitty Rotolo, currently incarcerated in New York State, and Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot, an abolitionist organizer and graduate student in New York City, explores elaborations of trans identity, affinity, and community across prison walls. Reflecting on the authors’ friendship and the possibilities for mutual recognition that queer kinship has afforded them—even across the distance and disposability produced by incarceration—these letters reveal transness as a practice of seeing. Through letter writing and storytelling, the authors explore how Rotolo has negotiated incarceration in men's prisons, including the transphobic violence of prison, in order to articulate and live transness—as individual identity, as resistance, as affinity, as collectivity, and as practice—inside.
