"WE'RE HERE! WE'RE QUEER! FUCK THE BANKS!" On the Affective Lives of Abolition

There's something strikingly queer, and queerly utopian, about abolition. Literalizing the metaphor of Jose Esteban Munoz's (2009: 1) famous statement, "Queerness is not yet here. . . . The here and now is a prison house," this essay argues that the process of affectively reorienting space and minds toward abolition is a queer act. While surely, for 2.5 million people caged by the United States, the here and now is literally a prison house, abolition lives within its walls. An abolitionist analysis is queer in its strategic orientation toward futurity and its refusal