Talk by Laura McTighe
Assistant Professor of Religion
Florida State
We Spoke Our Truths:
refusing gendered criminalization,
making abolition feminism geographies
Over the last three decades, the incarceration of women, trans and gender nonconforming people has exploded in the United States, increasing more than eightfold and at twice the rate of men’s. Dr. Laura McTighe’s research aims to offer a history of our present that challenges both the stories we tell about gendered criminalization and the tools we use to tell them. The central claim of her work is that gendered criminalization had to be continually reasserted through changing modes of religious and scientific punishment precisely because of criminalized women’s, trans and gender nonconforming people’s challenges from within and beyond the prison walls. Thus, centering the sacred worlds they made together can help us to differently understand the prison’s beginnings, which is essential for imagining its ends. “We Spoke Our Truths” puts this claim into action through rigorous, abolition feminism research and organizing project that partners with formerly incarcerated women, trans and gender nonconforming people of color across the South as experts in excavating the histories of the institutions that once held them captive and in mapping the geographies of freedom they create today.