“Criminalization is the Antithesis of Care”: Contextualizing the Dobbs Decision with Black Queer Abolitionist Feminism

Sarah Haley is an associate professor of gender studies and history at Columbia University with research interests in the history of gender and women, carceral history, Black feminist history and theory, prison abolition, and feminist archival methods. She is the author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (2016). Her writing has been published in edited volumes as well as journals including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, the Journal of African American History, GLQ, and Women & Performance. Haley is currently working on a book titled “The Carceral Interior: A Black Feminist Study of American Punishment, 1966–2016.” Prior to arriving at Columbia, she worked as a paralegal and an organizer with the hospitality workers’ union, UNITE HERE. Haley was the founding director of the Black Feminism Initiative at UCLA. She currently organizes with Scholars for Social Justice.

Andrea J. Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating, and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender-nonconforming people for the past three decades. She is the author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (2017) and Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies (2023), as well as coauthor of Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (2015) and No More Police: A Case for Abolition (2022). She cofounded the Interrupting Criminalization initiative with Mariame Kaba, as well as the In Our Names Network, a network of over twenty organizations working to end police violence against Black women, girls, and trans and gender-nonconforming people. She currently hosts the Invest/Divest Learning Communities at the Community Resource Hub and supports dozens of organizations across the United States working to divest from policing and invest in community safety. She has authored numerous research reports, articles, and opinion pieces on policing, criminalization, mass incarceration and immigration enforcement.

Emily L. Thuma is an associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma. She is the author of All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence (2019).