Incarcerated Resistance: How Identity, Gender, and Privilege Shape the Experiences of America's Nonviolent Activists

233 Pages·2022·1.261 MB·English

by  Anya Stanger

Incarcerated Resistance

Incarcerated Resistance
How Identity, Gender,
and Privilege Shape the
Experiences of America’s
Nonviolent Activists
Anya Stanger
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Lexington Books
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any elec-
tronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without
written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages
in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Stanger, Anya, 1979–, author.
Title: Incarcerated resistance : how identity, gender, and privilege shape the experiences
of America’s nonviolent activists / Anya Stanger.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and
index. | Summary: “Grounded in the lives of some of its most committed nonviolent
activists, Incarcerated Resistance tells a story of anti-war resistance, what it means to
‘go to jail for justice’ in the contemporary United States, and shows how identity mat-
ters in both the activation of prison witness, and as a key shaper of individual experi-
ence”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021046604 (print) | LCCN 2021046605 (ebook) | ISBN
9781793605610 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793605627 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Passive resistance—United States. | Civil disobedience—United States.
| Peace movements—United States. | Prisoners—Political activity—United States.
Classification: LCC HM1281 .S729 2022 (print) | LCC HM1281 (ebook) | DDC
303.6/10973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046604
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046605
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
To Professor John Samuel Burdick. Your memory is a blessing.

Contents
Preface ix
Introduction xiii
1 Justice Action Prisoners in the School of the Americas Watch
and Plowshares Movements 1
2 Nonviolent Resistance in an Imperial State: Prison Witness 23
3 Like a Chiropractic Adjustment: Aligning Actions and Beliefs
through Identity-Work 57
4 Embodiment, Privilege Power, and the Experience of Action 99
5 Prison Communities 123
6 A Visitor in Someone Else’s House: The Standpoint of Justice
Action Prisoners 155
7 Journey through Prison Witness: The Significance of Privilege
and Gender 183
Appendix: List of Participants 191
Bibliography 193
Index 209
About the Author 213
vii

Preface
An hour or so into my first interview, I asked Ann Tiffany what had changed
as a result of her 1997 line-crossing at Fort Benning. Brightly and without
hesitation, she replied, “me!”1 In that moment, I knew that I wanted to tell
this story through the prism of its participants, centering their lives rather than
the strategy they chose to employ. This required a theoretical framework that
was broader and more intimate than what I had found in social movement or
civil resistance scholarship. At the same time, I realized that a transnational
feminist framework could shed light on Ann’s experience; for its insistence
on beginning with the personal while connecting to the global, and for its
work on the subjects of identity, privilege, and solidarity. Hence, in under
two hours of actual “research,” the edifice of the project I had first imagined
transformed, and this project took shape.
In the research and writing process, the choice to focus on personal
accounts as windows into larger structural patterns did not always feel com-
fortable. Almost all of the people represented in this research have dedicated
their lives to challenging the forces that drive injustice. Over and over, par-
ticipants told me that their activism was not about them. Yet there I was, writ-
ing a book about them. However, because of the unusual and intentional ways
in which my participants live, by centering them, this book is also about the
issues they care so much about. In the end, I hope that my participants agree
that what can be learned through their personal stories significantly reveals
the workings of violence in all of our lives, and how necessary it is to resist it.
This book is the result of years of research and work, only some of which
is my own. It exists because of the generous (and ongoing) gifts of time,
trust, and wisdom provided by its 43 participants. It is their lives that I share
here: their intelligence, experiences, moral clarity, humor, courage, and faith
that provide all of the ideas that are most interesting and important. To the
ix