Power Blossoms

Based in Southern California, Power Blossoms is an abolitionist organization bringing together queer and trans people on both sides of prison walls in the fight against hierarchies and State oppression.

We provide financial support to those inside, process and reply to mail, run a penpal program, coordinate parole and re-entry support, send out a quarterly newsletter, and send out birthday cards to LGBTQ+ prisoners in California prisons.

This is all done by volunteers funded by community efforts! For the cost of a stamp you can help support the necessary work we do to maintain connections in our community. Please consider donating to us here: https://www.powerblossoms.org/donate

We're always accepting new volunteers, even if you're outside California! All we ask is a 30 minute a week time dedication, check out our website to learn more!

Our penpal program can always need more penpals, and if you're able to support we greatly appreciate it. We accept individual penpals as well as penpods, so if you have a community queer group or a group of friends you can all take turns supporting your penpal!

Hello! For this week we decided to highlight bell hooks (1952-2021), a modern philospher known for her intersectional feminist work and publications across the social sciences. hooks argued for a personal politic which recognizes the personal reflections and anecdotes of oppressed populations as, if not more, valuable than knowledge legitimized through the academy.

Her work is conciously accessible, in the tradition of many other black feminist philosophers, so to reach broader audiences and facilitate discussion. "Men and the Will to Change" (a work we someday would love to post on here) is a great example of this as hooks argues for gender as an oppressive structure for all peoples.

The work we have chosen is an interview that was done with hooks in 1997 with the Media Education Foundation where she discusses how racism is coded into film and how our cultural stories reinforce racist biases. hooks explains that studying popular culture allows us to better understand and see the oppressive structures of our society.

We specifically chose this transcript because hooks discusses her theory of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. The theory came from hooks criticism of white feminism's "patriarchy" concept because she felt that term alone does not accurately describe the nature of our governing oppressive structure. At Power Blossoms and as abolitionists, our organizing is commited to this framing because it is a foundational recognition that these oppressive structures are interrconnected and all must be addressed to make progress. One cannot be a feminist and a capitalist, for example.

Hello! This week, we're looking at "Necropolitics" by Achille Mbembe, the article which proceeded his book of the same name.

Mbembe presents necropolitics as the production and regulation of death to the ends of imperial and colonial oppression. He argues necropolitics, while related to biopower (how socieities regulate the lives of their populations to the advantage of the state) is seperate because the aim of colonial and imperial states using necropower is not to regulate their oppressed populations, but to keep them in a "living dead" state where they have no power over their own bodies or actions to be disposed of by the state at will.

Necropolitics, he argues, guides the institutions of slavery and apartheid, and is epitomized by the Israeli occupation of Palestine. These examples are what Mbembe calls "death-worlds"- the populations subjected to these conditions are in perpetual states of death and their deaths serve to further the interests of the colonial, "civilized" metropole.

The United States has both a necropoloitical history and present. For the context of our work, the prison industrial complex creates "death worlds" within prison walls where prisoners are denied basic necessities, are tortured at the will of those around them, and they are receptacles for those left by the wayside in the wake of deindustrialization and the gutting of welfare, amongst other social fractures.

As a bit of a bonus reading, "Those Who Walk Away from the Omelas" by Ursula K LeGuin is a necropolitical story. It illustrates Mbembe's point very clearly, and is a useful tool for understanding this theory and the societies which make use of it, including our own.

Hello all! This week we're looking at "Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolistionists" written collectively by the Prison Research Education Action Project in 1976.

This text was foundational to the formation of the abolitionist movement in the 70's going on to influence the work of Angela Davis. The glossary it provides is still what abolitionist vocabulary is largely drawn from, and its mission statement that “The abolitionist ideology is based on economic and social justice for all, concern for all victims, and reconciliation within a caring community.” still guides the abolishonist movement today.

It's nature as a historical text means many of the resources it describes are no longer available, some programs mentioned have been shut down as 'Tough on Crime" became increasingly popular, and this text is not able to anticipate the crisis of incentivized incarceration private prisons have been responsible for. That being said, when one is hoping to organize against entities which seem permanent, or inevitable, like capitalism or incarceration, it is strenghtening to see these things have always been vehemently resisted and sucessfully challenged.

We reccomend this text if you want somewhere to start or somewhere to find community with your convictions. This work is posted in the Anarchist Library, which is a resource we highly reccomend to access other works which help to challenge us and our world for free.

This week, we've decided to focus on "carceral feminism" an issue discussed by Elizabeth Bernstein in her article: "Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns"

Carceral feminism refers to the movement of radical feminists in the 1980's who belived in employing a carceral feminism to punish the patriarchy using the state to achieve gendered justice. In that context, it was radical feminists siding with conservative politicians on anti-pornography laws. This keeps feminism in a neoliberal space- directed towards individual actors, punishing individuals rather than dealing with social structures, and feeding into the profit machine of the prison industrial complex.

In the article, Bernstein specifically discusses how these feminists advocate for further state and punitive involvement in sex trafficking rather than recognizing factors such as imperialism and poverty. She discusses how these feminists are employing myths of white supremacy, such as protecting one's white wife or daughter from the violence of imagined black or brown abusers and keeping women in the subjected category of innocent beings needing protection.

Ultimately, carceral feminists are those who have "visons of social justice as criminal justice". Finishing this article, we hope you begin to question your own associations of punishment and justice. Is it just to control, observe, and regulate the behavior of all to be able to swiftly and thouroughly punish the few? Are we as feminists lashing out at those we can reach within the patriarchy because those truly responsible for sexual exploitation and the conditions which enable it are beyond our reach?