"WE'RE NOT HIDING BUT WE'RE INVISIBLE" LAW AND ORDER, THE TEMPORALITY OF VIOLENCE, AND THE QUEER FUGITIVE

Shock waves, light waves through earth and air moving us all into one time This time. Our time.

— THE WOMEN'S BRIGADE OF THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND, Sing a Battle Song

In October 1967 Richard Nixon published an article in Reader's Digest titled "What Has Happened to America?" In the article, Nixon lamented that just a few years earlier the "nation seemed to be completing its greatest decade of racial progress" and was "entering one of the most hopeful periods in American History." Yet the progress of the early 1960s dissolved into a "blazing inferno" of "urban anarchy" where "snipers," "looters," and "arsonists" led an "armed insurrection" that exceeded the disciplinary capacities of the police. Nixon did not see the urban uprisings of the late 1960s as symptomatic of "the deep racial division between Negro and white." Instead, they were the omen of a culture that no longer respected authority and the rule of law. The warning signs of this disrespect for law and order were embedded in the weakness of lenient judges, "opinion makers" who blamed society for crime and not the criminal, and, most critically, in the actions of those "who defy the law in the pursuit of civil rights." Nixon argued that the right to protest outside the limits of the law should not exist because "in a civilized nation no man can excuse his crime against the person or property of another by claiming that he, too, has been a victim of injustice." For Nixon, antiracist and anti-imperialist activism threatened the most basic and "primary civil right" of all Americans: the right to be free from "domestic violence."

Central to Nixon's campaign of law and order was a discourse about the relationship between time and violence. He argued, "We cannot have patience with urban violence. Immediate and decisive force must be the first response. For there can be no progress unless there is an end to violence and unless there is respect for the rule of law." The violence of the period's liberation movements threatened to unravel the progress of time's passage so that freedom, the social order, and the nation itself would be propelled backward into the barbarity of lawlessness or destroyed altogether. By contrasting the "immediate and decisive force" of the state to "urban violence," Nixon rendered state violence invisible, making it the precondition for the progress of time and the nation. Revolutionary violence stopped time, while state violence allowed progress to unravel a future filled with freedom, security, and peace. This representation of temporality and its connection to police and the prison would be central to remaking the racial state in the post–civil rights era. Most profoundly the progress of time was conceptualized as a form of security in and of itself; if time stopped or changed direction, the nation's order and integrity would disintegrate. In his 1968 speeches and campaign ads Nixon made clear that foundational to the nation's future was the stability of white supremacy and the order of heteropatriarchy. Radical protest and revolutionary violence were thus positioned by Nixon and others as a temporal force that would queer the nation's future, derailing the nation's progress to an unnamed place that haunted the present. Within the vision of law and order, police and prisons would protect time's steady march forward and thus would secure the nation and its future. The future was described as a space of safety and security in order to maintain the violence of the present and to temper the rage of those who refused to wait for the future's warm embrace to arrive. Nixon argued in more than seventy speeches during his 1968 campaign that law and order was the solution to the crises of state and capital brought on by the 1960s social movements: law and order would undo the ruin of Western time. In short, progress and the future needed the security, rule, and order of police and prisons.

This chapter explores different conceptions of the relationships among time, race, queerness, and violence. As outlined in the introduction, I understand queerness to be a nonidentitarian force that can be produced by dominant and subversive formations. In other words, the racial state can produce populations, spaces, and temporalities as queer. Insurgent formations can also produce forms of queerness that disrupt the biopolitical and necropolitical operations of the neoliberal-carceral state. By analyzing multiple and contrasting queer temporalities I examine two contrasting visions of how neoliberalism and the prison were connected to time and the future: I analyze the rhetoric of late 1960s law-and-order politicians and the epistemologies of 1970s underground revolutionaries. Specifically I examine how a discourse about time and the future was used by proponents of law and order to suture the freedom of the market to the incapacitation of the prison. In addition, I explore how underground revolutionary activists named this process through a queer engagement with temporality. Throughout the chapter I analyze what I term the "temporality of violence." As I document, racialized and gendered forms of state violence undo homogeneous conceptions of time. When one centers racialized and gendered violence in a theory of history, time does not flow evenly, progressing into a better or unknown future. Instead, violence can slow time, reverse it, loop it, make it stop or rush by in a moment of terror; it can also make it disappear forever. And if the future is ossified by the stability of the present, one can also see, know, and feel the future before it arrives. The 1970s writings of imprisoned radicals and underground revolutionaries can be understood as feminist and queer responses to the temporality of progress that supported law and order. The political fugitive haunted the law-and-order state with the threat of queer ways of being, thinking, and living that were outside the normative systems of sexuality, white supremacy, gender, family, and nation. She also lived outside the ways the racial state attempted to order temporality. I contrast these revolutionary visions to the dreams of people, like Nixon, who understood the prison and the market as foundational to the security and normative order of the nation and its future. Indeed, for Nixon and others the very possibility of a future depended on the immobilization of those rendered surplus or resistant to new economic regimes structured around privatization, deindustrialization, deregulation, and financialization. In other words, embedded in the emergent discourses of the neoliberal-carceral state was a vision of the future, one...