During the 1970s in the United States, hundreds of feminist, queer,
and antiracist activists were imprisoned or became fugitives as they
fought the changing contours of U.S. imperialism, global capitalism,
and a repressive racial state. In Fugitive Life Stephen Dillon
examines these activists' communiqués, films, memoirs, prison
writing, and poetry to highlight the centrality of gender and
sexuality to a mode of racialized power called the
neoliberal-carceral state. Drawing on writings by Angela Davis, the
George Jackson Brigade, Assata Shakur, the Weather Underground, and
others, Dillon shows how these activists were among the first to
theorize and make visible the links between conservative "law
and order" rhetoric, free market ideology, incarceration,
sexism, and the continued legacies of slavery. Dillon theorizes these
prisoners and fugitives as queer figures who occupied a unique
position from which to highlight how neoliberalism depended upon
racialized mass incarceration. In so doing, he articulates a vision
of fugitive freedom in which the work of these activists becomes
foundational to undoing the reign of the neoliberal-carceral state.
