Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric Feb 2026 Open Access

“Something to Connect to and Hope for”: Abolitionist Worldmaking and Queer Literacies in Prison

Alexandra Cavallaro ; Filimon Fregoso

Abstract

The rise of mass incarceration since the 1970s in the United States and the many ways that prisons touch our lives have positioned prisons as inevitable—even essential–-institutions (e.g., Davis, 2003). Prison abolitionists challenge this norm by offering alternatives that do not rely on prisons to solve social problems and address violence. Drawing from a collection of over 500 letters from the LGBT Books to Prisoners archive, we examine the many ways that abolitionist literacy practices contribute to envisioning this future. The literacy practices of the incarcerated letter writers, we argue, challenge the ways that incarcerated people are meant to engage and what they are meant to know, allowing for the building of new immaterial and material worlds. These queer immaterial worlds are the textual worlds where queer lives, experiences, and desires exist within the prison system; they are often ephemeral, leaving ghost-like traces as people navigate both the affirming and community-building role of literacy practices in prison, as well as the dangers associated with those same practices. The imaginative practice that these letter writers engage in is essential to the broader work that envisions a more abolitionist future. As acts of worldmaking, these literacy practices have much to teach us about what it means to imagine an abolitionist future, and to practice worldmaking in a world of impossibility.

Journal
Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric
Published
2026-02-24
DOI
10.59236/rjv25i1pp5-44
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Topics
literacy studies community literacy
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