Carceral Kinship: Future Families of the Late Leviathan

This essay examines the monstrous first as a figure haunting Western legal history, stripped of rights and often merging with the animal, and second, as a divergent sociality borne of emergencies, crises, and faultlines of late liberal governmentality. In particular I ask how the figure of the pathological and violent gang member structures debates about the US‐Mexico border crosser, and the limits of humanity before the law. The essay moves from a genealogy of the gang member in Honduras, to the refugee asylum seeker of 2018, to ask what forms of difference‐making, in the form of new monstrosities, might inform new notions of kinship and solidarity amid anthropocenic futures.