Talk: Queer and Trans Resistance, Abolition, and Mutual Aid by Dean Spade
- Event Date: Wednesday, October 30, 2019
- Time: 4:00 pm (CDT)
- Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
- Cost: Free Admission
Part of the Center for Advance Study Initiative on Abolition
“Mutual aid” is a term used for projects where people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable. Famous examples of mutual aid projects include the Black Panther Party's Free Breakfast Program, the Young Lords Party's hijacking of New York City's tuberculosis testing mobile unit to bring TB testing to high-risk, medically neglected neighborhoods, and feminist organizing to provide underground abortions in the 1970's.
In this presentation, Dean Spade will examine how mutual aid might counter the demobilizing frameworks for understanding social change and expressing dissent that dominate the popular imagination, and examine the benefits as well as challenges faced by contemporary organizations mobilizing through mutual aid.
Abolition is an exciting new initiative examining the radical, yet realizable, possibilities of abolition in its many forms. Abolition is not solely defined by the negative process of dismantling destructive structures and systems, but primarily seeks to build the type of society we want to live in, one that does not require disposing of entire sectors of our social world, but creates the conditions where all can survive and thrive. It is about redirecting the massive resources spent on systems of oppression toward positive investments like education, public health, and restorative justice. The goal of this new initiative is to examine the multiple, convergent forms of power in the at times intersectional areas of prisons, police, immigrant justice, gendered and sexual violence, environmental justice, disability justice, and more, in order to propose an abolitionist democratic present and future.
This Center for Advanced Study event is co-sponsored by the Department of Asian American Studies (external link), Department of Gender & Women’s Studies (external link), Education Justice Project (external link), and the Student Cultural Programming Fee.