Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer鈥檚 interpretation of facts and data.
Murmurations: Queering Abolition
Why you can trust us
A note from adrienne maree brown: micha c谩rdenas is an inventor and artist, and a thrilling new transfemme Latinx writer. Her book on transness as portal to alternate universes (excerpted below) is going to blow everyone鈥檚 mind.
In the beautiful book , Jos茅 Esteban Mu帽oz writes, 鈥淭he here and now is a prison house.鈥� Our present is in Gaza, live streamed on our phones. Our present is a global imperial order in which President Joe Biden will do anything to maintain his colonial outpost in the Southwest Asian and North African region, including being a party to genocide and alienating who voted for him.
Racialized capitalism ensures that it is far more profitable to drop thousands of bombs, the equivalent of more than , on a trapped population of 2 million people in Gaza, killing more than , than to provide them with sustenance and democracy.
Abolition demands an end to colonialism, so abolitionists must be part of the movement for a free Palestine. As a statement from the coalition notes, 鈥淲e, queer Palestinians, are an integral part of our society, and we are informing you: From the heavily militarized alleys of Jerusalem to Huwara鈥檚 scorched lands, to Jaffa鈥檚 surveilled streets and cutting across Gaza鈥檚 besieging walls, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.鈥�
I am an abolitionist, and I wrote Cora, one of the protagonists in , a book I published in 2023, as a character willing to make great personal sacrifices to dismantle the prison-industrial complex.
When I was writing Atoms Never Touch, then president Trump was enforcing a , turning the Islamophobic racism of the U.S. government into policy, making centuries of Orientalism plain as the words on his executive orders. In the book, many of these acts are represented by the fascist president who wins the election in Cora鈥檚 world.
Cora is frustrated and furious about the president in her world being elected despite his record of sexual assault. In her emotional state, she finds the courage to break out of the rules governing her normal life鈥攈er day job, retirement account, and credit score鈥攁nd do something revolutionary.
Cora decides to use her hacking skills to delete criminal records, thus releasing people from prison. Even if her motivations are good, it鈥檚 a misguided attempt at creating social change through an individual, lone action, apparently disconnected from larger social movement strategies.
As Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown write in , 鈥淲henever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction.鈥�
I was profoundly inspired by this idea and moved to write Atoms partly in response to it. Yet Atoms does not imagine a world without fascism, colonialism, or Islamophobia; instead, it depicts the traumatic details of the unfolding of those things even more powerfully across the U.S., in the alternate timeline that Cora lives in.
But Atoms does imagine a possible way out that鈥檚 perhaps utopian and perhaps mere wish fulfillment: In this world, love between two trans Latinx women brings about a scientific discovery that allows everyone to travel between possible universes. This focuses on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, an interpretation of the fact that subatomic particles exist in many locations at once until detected, which posits that all possible universes do exist.
In , Karen Barad refers to the cognitive repression and psychosocial factors that prevent physicists, and the public, from accepting the unruly conclusions of quantum mechanics that point to multiple universes.
In Atoms, Cora and Rea study the equations of quantum physics using an algorithmic visualization tool that allows them to interact with possible outcomes of equations in augmented reality. They do find a way out of the prison house of the present, out of the dystopian timeline that is global neocolonialism and racial capitalism and into somewhere else.
Yes, it is perhaps fantastical and utopian, but I ask us to consider the possibility of a universe where life can be different from the oppressive order that structures our lives today. The way out starts with Cora鈥檚 own rejection of the gender she was assigned at birth, leading her to find solidarity with oppressed people everywhere, and leading her to a relationship worth fighting for.
Mu帽oz wrote: 鈥淨ueerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.鈥�
While trans liberation is not yet here and a free Palestine is not yet here, we can feel this possible future just as surely as we can feel the warmth of the sun.
We will find each other because we are worth fighting for. We will be free from the policing systems of cis-heteropatriarchy here and in Palestine, in our lifetimes, or in some possible future timeline.
Editor鈥檚 Note: In the first three chapters of Atoms Never Touch, the reader is introduced to the main characters, Cora, an abolitionist computer hacker, and Rea, who is slipping through alternate universes. Below is an excerpt from the book.
That night, I lay on the couch with tears streaming from my eyes, watching a fascist be elected president of the United States.
I received a text from my dear friend Xandra: 鈥淗ey Rea, come join me downtown at the protest. We鈥檙e at Figueroa and Pico!鈥� I canceled my classes and drove to meet her. I couldn鈥檛 be alone, crying on my couch; I had to be with people. I was grateful to be in a city with so many other Latinx people. It was a city where the election of this man who had associated our people with rapists, when he himself was one, was met with massive outrage. People were flooding the streets en masse, waving Mexican flags, covering their faces with bandannas, driving lowriders alongside the march.
We marched for hours, keeping our chants simple for all the people who were there marching for the first time and didn鈥檛 know the more fun but more elaborate beats of chants from other movements. When Xandra had to leave, I stayed with the march. We marched up and down hills, the march leaders routing around the police whenever they tried to stop our march at an intersection. At one point, deep in downtown, on Flower and Eleventh, we could see the lights of police cars coming from far away, slowly, as we realized another march with hundreds of people in it was marching toward our contingent to join us! Our march was already around a thousand people strong before even stopping to allow them to come down Eleventh and merge with ours.
My voice was hoarse from chanting. The march had been so impulsive that no one had even brought a bullhorn. These were not experienced organizers so much as they were people who had thought that activism was hopeless until now. Maybe they still thought it was hopeless, but there seemed to be a collective need to scream and cry, in public, together.
That鈥檚 when I noticed her also standing just outside the crowd. A Latina woman whose muscular, tattoo-covered arms were revealed by her Black Lives Matter t-shirt, the sleeves of which she had stylishly cut off herself. Flowers trailed down her gorgeous brown arms, connected by curves resembling the traces of particles like pions, the result of high-speed collisions produced in accelerators and supernovas, which exist only briefly when a high-energy proton collides with another particle. I felt myself still in that moment as I looked at her. Her eyes locked on the police; she was wearing ear buds. Her eyes were glassy like she was looking at something I couldn鈥檛 see, and her fingers were twitching busily. It looked like she was using an invisible keyboard鈥攕urely, she had auglenses and was recording this entire scene.
The rays of light and shadow scanning across her body alternated from red to blue and white, creating a cacophony of angles that she seemed unmoved by. Her beauty was unfolding in my consciousness as I noticed how close she was standing to the police, even as they were violently pushing people back with their electric bicycles. She was close enough to see their badge numbers鈥攐r at least those whose badge numbers were not covered with black tape, as most were that night.
The chanting, the sirens, and the helicopter all faded away as she held a stillness that mirrored my own. In the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, many of the impossibilities that quantum mechanics presents, such as action at a distance and the uncertainty of particle locations, are solved by the idea that in any quantum experiment with multiple possible outcomes, all outcomes exist in different universes. Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon of two particles that can be separated across vast distances and yet the quantum states of one particle still correlate to changes in the other. Einstein referred to this as spooky action at a distance.
Almost any event can be a quantum experiment, such as a flickering lightbulb as evidence that even light exists in packets or quanta. Still, moments like this one have always felt to me like experiments of particular relevance. How can we ever know all the possible outcomes and variables that contributed to the meeting of two people? What quantum effects happen in the moment when the police car鈥檚 red light flashes off her body and sends that image to my brain, resulting in this powerful attraction? What patterns of shape, like the movement of her hair, reach the neural networks in my hippocampus, interact with my memory, and create this feeling of warmth down my body? How does the context of this political moment, and her act of resistance within it, register in that pattern recognition and interact with all the work I鈥檝e done on myself to heal and build healthy relationship patterns in such a way that I decide to walk toward her?
This excerpt from appears by permission of the publisher.
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micha c谩rdenas
, Ph.D, is an artist and associate professor of critical race and ethnic studies, and performance, play, and design at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Critical Realities Studio. She is the author of Atoms Never Touch (AK Press, 2023) and Poetic Operations (Duke University Press, 2022), which was the co-winner of the Gloria Anzald煤a Book Prize from the National Women鈥檚 Studies Association. c谩rdenas鈥� is also the co-author of Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs (Atropos Press, 2010) and The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (Atropos Press, 2012). She is a first-generation Colombian American.
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