Sarah Lamble

Unsafe (eBook, ePUB)

The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The fiercest battles over gender today aren't just about identity or womanhood-but about punishment, fear, and control

The "gender wars" in Britain and beyond have been driven by a powerful and seductive narrative: that safety can be achieved through exclusion, surveillance, and the policing of difference. Punitive logics have gained momentum across the political spectrum, from ostensibly left feminist campaigns to far-right violence, fuelling a backlash against trans rights and distorting the meaning of safety itself.

Unsafe is a clear-eyed and decisive challenge to the toxic ideas at the heart of this backlash. With patient rigour, Lamble exposes how carceral solutions to safety always fail to address the root causes of harm and only deepen divisions within our communities.

But Unsafe is more than critique. Drawing on abolitionist feminism and insights from grassroots organizing, Lamble makes a principled case for a different vision: one where safety isn't built on punishment but on collective care, radical solidarity and transformative justice.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Haymarket Books
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. August 2026
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9798888906279
• Artikelnr.: 74977133

Autorenporträt

Lamble is a community organizer and Professor of Criminology and Queer Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. Their work explores questions of gender, sexuality, and justice with a focus on feminist and abolitionist alternatives to prisons, police, and punishment. They are based in London.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction: Rethinking safety politics in the wake of the 'gender wars'
Part I: The safety politics of the gender wars
Unsafe: the rise of the "gender wars" in Britain
Traces the manufacturing of a "trans danger" discourse, and how it was
amplified by "gender critical" campaigners, politicians, and corporate
media to escalate the gender wars in Britain.
Weaponizing safety: the carceral politics of the "gender wars"
Argues that carceral politics are a central factor in understanding how and
why the gender wars escalated so rapidly in Britain, and makes the case for
rethinking safety politics more broadly.
How we got here: the neoliberal carceral roots of "bad man" feminism
Traces a political shift in Britain from a broader critique of patriarchal
structures to a narrower focus on the "violent man" as the new enemy of
feminism, and shows "trans danger feminism" as an extension of this logic.
Part II: Carceral politics don't keep us safe
Dangerous others and the problem of sexual exceptionalism
Argues that at the heart of narratives of dangerous sexual predators are
logics of "sexual exceptionalism"-a framing that treats sexual violence as
fundamentally distinct from other harms and people who commit sexual harm
as inherently different from ordinary people.
Why prisons, policing, and punishment don't make us safe
Explains why a feminist abolitionist approach to safety is necessary to
overcome the current impasse of the gender wars and the wider limits of
existing safety politics.
Part III: Building a transformative politics of safety
From symbolic to material safety
Makes the case that an abolitionist approach requires a refocus on the
material conditions necessary for genuine safety, e.g. housing, health
care, food security, and freedom of movement.
From individual to collective safety
Argues that an abolitionist approach to safety requires a reorientation
from individual to collective agency.
Safety through solidarity
Explores what a politics of 'no one is disposable' means in practice, and
how this politics can foster greater practices of safety and liberation for
all.
Conclusion: We keep us safe
Summarizes the importance of building queer anti-carceral solidarities in
both local and international contexts and the necessity of connecting
struggles for gender justice with those of racial, economic, social,
environmental, and anticolonial movements.