Female Keep Separate & the Hot Tray Hooper: Jail Life, Gender & the Violence of Inclusion

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This book collects texts by an anarchist named Rabbit, reflecting on two periods of incarceration by the Canadian state. “The trick with jail is that you need to turn time into a v erb, make it into something you’re doing.” First published as a zine in 2015, "The Hot Tray Hooper, and Other Stories Told While Doing Time" is set in a men’s provincial prison. There we meet Rabbit’s fellow prisoners: their stories, the ways they do their time, as well as what those new to jail have to learn about the rules that they—under the boot of state violence—make, enforce, and resist amongst themselves. It has a literary quality and an attention to the messy details of people’s real lives that makes it stand out in the sea of prose produced by radicals. The second piece, “Female Keep Separate: Prisons, Gender, and the Violence of Inclusion,” was written in the summer of 2020 and is a sharp and incisive critique of prison reform and trans liberalism. In it, Rabbit brings together an uncompromising and astute political analysis with her experience—subsequent to the events of “Hot Tray Hooper”—of navigating a new period of incarceration as a trans person. She shows how the “privilege” of her being locked in a women’s prison—made possible by the legal “victory” of Bill C-16, which added gender identity to the list of categories protected by federal law, alongside race and sex—how her “gender-affirming” imprisonment was not a reprieve from the gendered violence of incarceration, but an instantiation of it. She describes how her gender identity was not just accepted or even dealt with by the prison administration, but actively shaped by it. She urges us to look critically at the sorts of things we—trans people, feminists, prison abolitionsts—are fighting for, what we see as progress, and to resist recognition from and inclusion within the structures that reproduce human misery. “Adopting the state’s purely positive understanding of gender identity can lead us to oversimplify our understanding of (hetero-)sexism and end up defending the state’s projects from reactionaries when we should be attacking them on our own terms.” Together, these writings offer rich and vital material for reflection and discussion among those of us who want to live in a world without the relentless assaults of carcerality and gender. Table of Contents Introduction The Hot Tray Hooper & Other Stories Told While Doing TimeCell CountCell 16: The Brothers Do Their TimeCell 15: Mr. Hung and Why I Didn’t Try for ParoleCell 14: The Hot Tray HooperCell 13: Black GuysCell 12: I Gotta Change Up My CrimesCell 11: Of Gods and BirdsCell 10: The Light through the Door That MorningCell 9: Câlisse...Cell 8: Why Sometimes the Word Solidarity Makes Me NervousCell 7: Kingsley and BigsCell 6: When Dawn Is a Fluorescent TubeCell 5: One Thousand Paper CranesCell 4: A Perpetual Motion MachineCell 3: The Chief and the BankerCell 2: How He Learned She Didn’t Deserve ItAs Minutes Become Seconds Female Keep Separate: Prisons, Gender & the Violence of Inclusion Show more