Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: Intolerability, at its core, is a state of not being able to endure any longer-a kind of impossible weight which aims only to break the bearer.What does it mean to expose that which is intolerable?Is it a call to reform the intolerable to a state of bearability for some momentary span of time?Is it rationalizing the conditions of intolerability as circumstantial and/or unprovable?Is it developing and reproducing institutions, infrastructure, ideological apparatuses and administrative power that simply predetermines what is and is not tolerable in the name of justice?Or is it predetermining the correct pathways in which dissent and protest are allowable in the name of intolerability?At first sight, what appears as a mundane taupe administrative building with enormous blue windowpanes on its façade, upon closer inspection, dons opaque sea glass windows that deliberately produce a feigned sense of transparency.Through a subtle mirroring back to onlookers, the building offers the illusion that one should simply keep calm, complicit and carry on.This building, of a generic pro-institutional aesthetic of the early aughts, is in fact the St. Louis City Justice Center (CJC), a euphemistic moniker for the city's main downtown jail of largely pre-trial detention.In the early hours of February 6, 2021, at 2:30am, over 100 incarcerated individuals at the CJC took control of its two units by collective force, staging death-defying pleas to the outside world to witness the intolerable COVID-19 conditions within.Safety and safe quarantining within prisons remains an oxymoron given the impossibility of social distancing and the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) and crucial access to hygiene.The CJC was the third-reported prisoner-led protest over COVID-19 carceral conditions since December 2020.How does one therefore advocate for the improvement of life within the belly of the beast of the carceral universe?Those inside, rather than following the approved reporting mechanisms such as procedurally onerous inmate grievance forms, broke the very rules that permit state-
Source: Foucault Studies
Author: Ren-yo Hwang
Institution: Mount Holyoke College
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4200208501