Abolition and the Black Feminist Imagination -SM Rodriguez for Oxford Abolitionist Imaginaries and Praxis
S.M. Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Gender, Rights, and Human Rights at the London School of Economics
Please join the Oxford Abolitionist Imaginaries and Praxis Discussion Group for the first discussion of the term, "Abolition and the Black Feminist Imagination" with SM Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Gender, Rights, and Human Rights at the London School of Economics.
Rodriguez’s research joins anti-carceral, Black, and trans feminist approaches to interrogate sex as a political projection unto the body and as an action, especially as related to criminal law and “correctional” practices. Centring African Diasporic people and places, they question global and transnational structures of racialisation, punishment, and movement-making.
In their first monograph, The Economies of Queer Inclusion: Transnational Organizing for LGBTI Rights in Uganda (2019), Dr. Rodriguez analyses the effects of transnational advocacy on Ugandan LGBTI (kuchu) organising during the four-year period in which the Ugandan government considered the “Kill the Gays Bill”. The work situates kuchu activism in the simultaneous navigation of domestic, anti-gay criminalisation and global inequalities reinforced by international human rights apparatuses. Using interviews, ethnography, and an analysis of fourteen years of Ugandan parliamentary records, Dr. Rodriguez explores the impact of transnational financing on antigay ideologies, gay rights movement-making, and legislating morality. The Economies of Queer Inclusion was shortlisted for the American Sociological Association Distinguished Book Award Honorable Mention (2021).
Dr. Rodriguez currently researches and writes on penal abolition, healing justice, and transformative change-making in queer of colour communities.