This panel examines contemporary issues at the nexus of queerness, carceralism, and resistance. It offers a critical exploration of the intersections between gender, sexuality, and violence, both within and beyond carceral systems. This discussion includes papers that address gender boundaries in carceral contexts, the weaponisation of safety politics in trans rights debates, and the portrayal of anti-queer violence in news media. The aim of this panel is to foster critical discussion on the influence of carceral systems and logics on societal responses to gender and sexual non-conformity and to highlight the urgent need for queer anti-carceral approaches in criminology.

This paper traces the rise of Britain’s ‘gender wars’ by examining how carceral safety politics are driving debates about transgender rights. Though framed in the mainstream media as identity disputes (women versus trans, sex versus gender), Britain’s gender wars are more accurately understood as battles over safety, including competing claims around danger, victimisation, and threat. The rise of an anti-trans backlash and the mainstreaming of ‘gender critical’ politics in Britain gained traction by asserting that trans rights jeopardise the safety of women and children. By weaponizing fears of violence, ‘gender critical’ campaigners have been able to reframe attacks on trans rights as protective measures for women.

Carceral politics also helps explain why anti-trans politics have taken on a distinctive cross-political character in Britain. In most international contexts, anti-trans politics are firmly associated with right-wing populism. Yet in Britain, many of the leading ‘gender critical’ voices come from the left, including feminist and women’s groups. Carceral safety claims provide a key link between right and left anti-trans mobilisations in Britain. Examining how these carceral logics foster conflict, demonise others, and redirect resources away from harm prevention and into social policing and punishment, the paper argues for a queer anti-carceral rethinking of safety politics as necessary to address the current impasse of the gender wars.

This paper investigates the portrayal of anti-queer violence in online queer news media, addressing a significant gap at the intersection of queer, cultural, and media criminologies. Through a content analysis of 1,657 articles from outlets across the US, UK, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand from 2019-2021, we examine how queer news media constructs anti-queer violence, focusing on the representation of perpetrators and victims, inferred theories of crime causation, and the promotion of specific ideologies of justice. Our findings reveal that queer media reporting reinforces (hetero- and homo)normative discourses on sexuality and gender diversity and promotes the community’s investment in ‘law and order’ constructions of crime. We argue that these representations obscure the structural causes of anti-queer violence and reproduce ‘tough on crime’ discourses, advocating for the expansion of the criminal legal system to ‘protect’ LGBTIQ individuals from inherently dangerous ‘others.’ To conclude, we suggest that these findings underscore the need to critically re-evaluate queer media’s role in shaping public understandings of anti-queer violence and its implications for informing criminal justice policy and practice.

A core feature of prisons is their institutionalization of a fixed male/female binary. Yet, definitions of and responses to prison gender boundary violation are historically variable. This paper draws on archival data, 20 months of ethnography, and 136 interviews to investigate the making, managing, and navigating of gender boundaries in California men’s prisons from 1941 to 2018. As prisons transformed over the period of this study, prison administrators managed gender boundaries on the basis of the changing penal logics and resources at their disposal (successively using strategies of segregation, treatment, risk management, and bureaucratic assimilation). Prisoners, in turn, made strategic choices about navigating gender boundaries to deal with the pains of confinement in shifting penal contexts. Prison gender boundaries thus reflect an evolving conflict between the prison’s efforts to label, control, and confine bodies and prisoners’ capacity to resist.