Tinkering with Violence: Costs and Benefits of Carceral Reforms on Behalf of LGBT Prisoners -- talk by Chase Strangio

This talk will explore how our legal system interventions on behalf of LGBTQ people in prison rearrange the violence of the prison regime without eliminating it. Looking at the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) in particular, Chase Strangio will discuss the costs of the advocacy strategies pursued by LGBT organizations and prisoner rights advocates and assess the impact of the reform-based engagement with the prison system on incarcerated advocates and free world advocates. 

Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) is a Staff Attorney with the ACLU’s LGBT & AIDS Project. Chase’s work includes impact litigation, as well as legislative and administrative advocacy, on behalf of LGBTQ people and people living with HIV across the United States. Chase has particular expertise on the treatment of transgender and gender non-conforming people in police custody, jails, prisons and other forms of detention. 

Prior to joining the ACLU, Chase was an Equal Justice Works fellow and the Director of Prisoner Justice Initiatives at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, where he represented transgender and gender non-conforming individuals in confinement settings. In 2012, Chase founded the Lorena Borjas Community Fund, an organization that provides direct bail/bond assistance to LGBTQ immigrants in criminal and immigration cases. Chase is a graduate of Northeastern University School of Law and Grinnell College.

Arresting Violence | Reconceptualizing Justice

In this time of militarized policing, racially targeted state violence, and mass incarceration how do we envision queer and feminist justice?

This year’s Gender and Sexuality Seminar will pursue this question through a variety of lenses: scholarly, archival, legal, and activist. We will examine how race, gender, and sexuality intersect in the criminal legal system, and discuss how they shape the possibilities for—and the risks involved in—intervention and dissent.

Given social media’s vital role in enabling unprecedented forms of political organization, and news media’s often problematic role in perpetuating the biases at hand, we hope the seminar series will be a forum for thinking strategically about cultural engagement in the academy, the classroom, and on local and national levels.

A day-long Symposium on April 1, 2016 will bring all four seminar speakers back for a culminating panel and will feature a keynote speaker.

Sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard and the Committee on Degrees in Studies 
of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.