Introduction to "Queer Healing and Transformative Justice": A Special Issue of QED

Abstract

The COVID- 19 pandemic and international protests of the violences of the prison industrial complex (PIC) have put matters of health, safety, and healing at the forefront of social justice struggles. Prison abolitionists around the world are asking: How do we dismantle systems of oppression foundational to carceral institutions within which and from which we find ourselves needing to heal? Or as Adaku Utah, Nigerian healer and liberation educator, prompts: how do we “create systems and structures that build wellness, safety, care, and power and depend less on the state and systems of violence? What do we need to trans-form in ourselves and in our organizations to build this kind of world ?” 1 (emphasis added) These questions— arguably more urgent than ever in the face of multiple pandemics, unmitigated police violence, and climate catastrophe— animate the articles, essays, poems, and speculative fiction that make up this special issue on queer healing and Transformative Justice. 2 Our contributors, writing from a range of origins, locations, abilities, identities, and subject positions, demon-strate that the work of queer(ing) healing and reimagining how we prevent, disrupt, and intervene in harm is foundational to building abolitionist worlds, in the here and now