Anti/social Abolitionism Available to Purchase

It has been almost twenty years since Lee Edelman's No Future manifesto emerged as a shot across the bow of the cis/heteronormative future of “The Child,” as well as an early entry in the “antisocial turn” in queer studies. It has also been nearly fifteen years since José Esteban Muñoz's ruminations on queer futurity and “anti-antirelational” queerness in Cruising Utopia. More recently, Virginie Despentes writes of former paramour Paul Preciado's desire for a “utopian gender,” adding another wrinkle to the prospects for sex-gender dissidents to imagine a future in which their lives and livelihoods escape state surveillance, phobic publics, and legal obstacles to self-determination. This article attempts to craft a utopian pyramid, first comparing the rhetorics of No Future, Cruising Utopia, and Preciado's Apartment on Uranus for some versions of still-emergent and nascent utopian knowledge projects. Then, another triangle, this one of utopian political projects: police/prison abolition, sex work decriminalization/destigmatization, and visions of queer/trans liberation. The author attempts to outline shared discursive strategies between these projects and how they inflect both the antisocial and the utopic. How do struggles for queer and trans liberation and minoritarian self-determination necessarily implicate anti-carceral logics, not least around the highly sex-gendered, classed, and racialized labor of the sex trades?