We have to stop using carceral logics in bookish spaces
...brought to you by that Ali Hazelwood drama. Oy.
First off, if you’re new, here, hi!! Welcome to Sharanya’s Shelf: a newsletter in which a South Asian writer, educator, and lifelong story-obsessed creative shares her love of stories with you!
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While I did have an actually a pretty excellent reading month, today’s post is gonna be a little bit different. I have thoughts about interactions in bookish spaces lately, and I had to share. Hope they resonate.
As a teacher, I know firsthand that punishing someone into “acting right” doesn’t work.
Good teachers know that when we want a student to change their behavior, the LAST tool we should be reaching for is punitive measures, like taking away their recess time, putting them in time out, or sending them out of the room all together. You know what I was trained to reach for first? Preventative strategies — creating an environment where the child feels safe & cherished and won’t feel the need to “act out” to begin with. Then come relational strategies. Example: talking with the student. Listening to their reasoning, building rapport & understanding with them, not just so they’ll make different choices next time but so that you, as the one who holds more power in the dynamic, can learn to do a better job of guiding them before things even escalate to a point of contention next time.
And, look. I was never a perfect teacher. There was NO day were the preventative strategies were always, 100% working. There were days where I could pat myself on the back because the preventative strategies were effective af, and days where I wanted to crawl under a rock for the number of times I ended up reaching for negative consequences (those days really sucked). And that’s because this is one of THE hardest parts about being an elementary school teacher. That kind of cognitive behavioral work takes a great deal of time, external support, and energy. Above all, it requires humility & a LOT of emotional elasticity — especially when you’re doing that work not with one student or even five students, but 25 or 30 students — or more. In between teaching them how to read, and add three-digit numbers, and what the rock cycle is. Did I mention teaching is hard?
Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about my teacher training in bookish spaces lately. I keep coming back to the fact that punishing someone into “acting right” doesn’t work. And yet, I see folks trying to do just that a lot in bookish spaces.
And, look, I get it. If and when I did reach for negative consequences, it wasn’t because I was eager to punish (though, yes, that can be true for some teachers). It was because I cared. I wanted my students to thrive, to become great in this life, wanted them to harness their varied & wonderful talents to eventually build a world that was better than the one we had. And even though there were times where it was nowhere near logically sound, punishing someone into “acting right” so we could fulfill this grand vision I had in my head of a free & fair society made up of brilliant and caring artists & thinkers & leaders sometimes felt like the last, only option.
Similarly, I think a lot of us in liberal/leftist bookish spaces sometimes engage in punitive tactics because we care. The thing about literature is that it makes us feel deeply connected to our shared humanity. That is usually a blessing, our greatest strength. But lately, I’ve been realizing it could also be a curse. We want our mutuals & our favorite authors to be “good people,” because we feel a personal connection to them through their work. We want to feel like not only are they a good writer or creator but that they are a partner in developing the compassionate, collaborative world we want to live in. And so when they make even the smallest choice that doesn’t live up exactly to the idea of “good” we have in our head, we feel a sudden and shocking sense of betrayal. And then we want to fix the issue, to make the other party “act right” in order to fulfill our visions of a better world, and we think the fastest way to do that is through deprivation & punishment.
In short, we engage in carceral logics — that is, the logic of policing & incarceration. According to the Rochester Decarceration Research Initiative, carceral logics “refers to the variety of ways our bodies, minds, and actions have been shaped by the idea and practices of imprisonment — even for people who do not see themselves connected explicitly to prisons.” My interpretation of this is that because we all live in societies where prisons exist, we have been trained to see prisons as a tool for creating the kind of community we want to live in. That includes every aspect of prison — not only the bars, but the isolation, the use of violence, the dehumanization, etc. We’ve internalized the idea that depriving people of what makes them human — their loved ones, their freedom, their livelihood, maybe even life itself — will teach them — or at the very least scare others — to be…more human, I guess?
If that sounds batshit bonkers to you — good, it absolutely should. This is why Black abolitionists like Angela Davis push for decarceration and to abolish prisons. In her pivotal book Are Prisons Obsolete?, Davis defines decarceration as “a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society.” For me, this looks like recognizing when I’m using prison-like tactics in my relationships and the spaces I engage in, and deprogramming myself from reaching for those tactics at the very first sign of misalignment / conflict. I haven’t gotten to the “finding a constellation of ways to repair harm” part yet, but…that’s the goal.
In the social media landscape, many students of abolition have pointed out that carceral logics manifests as us thinking we can punish someone with prison-inspired tools — cancellation/de-platforming (deprivation of connection & community), nasty, angry commenting (dehumanization/violent language), etc. to make them “act right.” Essentially, we think we can put a metaphorical shock collar around everybody’s mind & use it every single time they do or say even the tiniest thing we don’t like. That shame & mental/emotional brutality will lead us to a better place.
I’ve been observing for some time now this tendency to use carceral logics in book spaces. The most recent — and perhaps silliest — version of this was the Ali Hazelwood drama. For folks who were blissfully asleep/offline/in a land far far away for this: Ali cheekily shared her view on Team Gale vs. Team Peeta (yes, from The Hunger Games) during a panel. People on the internet responded by bullying her off the internet with a flood of nasty comments because they disagreed with her take.
This incident was such an epic example of policing in bookish spaces gone amok. Running an author out of the community over a benign opinion? About book characters? From a series that was published over ten years ago? A book series in which the love triangle is so vastly not the point? The ludicrousness was so stunning even I got acerbic on Beyoncé’s internet (and I make it a point to almost never get acerbic on Beyoncé’s internet).
The thing is, we didn’t arrive here in a vacuum. People didn’t just wake up one morning and go “You know what I’m going to try? Bullying someone off of social media for their opinion on The Hunger Games.” We arrived here through a history of policing folks — including authors/celebrities/etc. — for every single thing they put — or don’t put — out into the ether. Things like: policing whether folks can/should put up a statement regarding an issue, and reaching for carceral tactics when they don’t. If they do say something, policing the wording of that statement…and then reaching for carceral tactics when the wording (rather inevitably) falls short. Throwing authors who’ve made imperfect, even cowardly choices onto the same DNR lists as authors who are loudly, ferociously advocating for genocide (free Palestine, btw).
Now’s a good time to remind everyone that expecting perfection is a tool of white supremacy, so it’s no surprise that the drive for perfection seems to be fueling our use of carceral logics. And, also very unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work. I actually can’t think of a single time when the use of these tactics made the target of them “a better person.” If there is an example, by all means, please share — I’d genuinely love to know. As far as I can tell, all it does is make our minds and our community smaller and smaller, and less effective as a result. And yet, we do it over and over again. Having seen the way folks reach for carceral logics so quickly and eagerly in my time on the bookish internet in order to make people in our community / authors / etc. achieve “goodness” these last few years…is it really that surprising that some people thought it was perfectly acceptable to drive Ali Hazelwood out over Peeta vs. Gale, of all things?
If that isn’t a wake up call to decarcerate our approach to community, I don’t know what is.
Now I want to make something VERY VERY CLEAR: Decarceration does not equal eschewing accountability. We absolutely can and should hold people — especially people in positions of power — accountable for harm they cause. And the thing I’m grappling with — the thing I hope we all start to grapple with — is what accountability could look like in our shared online spaces when we untangle it from carceral logics.
Sometimes, we do need to de-platform authors in positions of power because of how directly and vitriolically they use their platform to harm people (JKR, for example). The BDS movement an example of de-platforming which is meant to push corporations, governments, & their leaders in a certain direction — and history shows that this version of de-platforming can be effective. The textile boycotts during India’s independence movement being a historical example, and the Macmillan boycott specifically in bookish spaces (too bad that went…the way that it did). I also 100% believe we need to have red lines in terms of who we welcome into the community and who we don’t. I have an absolutely non-negotiable “no generative AI” policy when it comes to my daily life, let alone authors/artists I platform. As a general rule on the left, we agree we do not platform Klan folks or Nazis, no exceptions.
But I also believe discarding people instantly for a mistake, imperfect wording, a slightly messy choice, or at the very first sign of misalignment is actually doing the work of white supremacy. Because that is how solidarity & community gets destabilized, how isolation & exhaustion win out, and how nothing changes for the better.
So the questions I am currently wrestling with are this: when are things like calling someone out and/or de-platforming a necessary & effective tool for genuine accountability, and when are they harmful tactics born from carceral logics? When is it that we need to draw a line in the sand, and when is it that we’re making perfect the enemy of good?
Those questions don’t have easy answers, and that’s okay. We might even have different approaches to how we answer these questions, and that’s okay too. As I said earlier about teaching: having the kind of emotional elasticity needed to think outside of carceral logics is fucking hard. It is even harder on social media, which is designed to isolate us through outrage. I certainly don’t get it right all the time. I’ll leave you with this: if you’re a leftist like me, you understand ACAB. But as the saying goes in abolitionist circles: “the first cop we need to abolish is the one inside our heads.”
WHEW if you made it this far, thank you for sticking with me! Here are some things that are coming up on here in the weeks ahead.
Free subscriber friends — since I didn’t get a chance to talk about my June reading in this post, I might do an additional post or a video or something for that! I also have a few more warm takes sitting in my notes app, which are waiting to get out. Topics include:
If America doesn’t like kings, how come we love reading about them so much? (thoughts on the propaganda in some fantasy / romantasy novels)
Bring back conflicts in romance novels, please! (on why I actually like the third act break up, and don’t even hate miscommunication *shrug*)
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Paid subscriber friends — Some more journaling videos are in the works! A journal & gab video, maybe, or perhaps a six-month review of my reading via a walk through of my reading journal. If you have a preference as to what you want to see, let me know in the comments!
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