From Carceral Feminism to Transformative Justice

Mimi E. Kim’s article moves the critique of carceral feminism into the terrain of practice. Drawing on women-of-color feminism and anti-violence movement history, it explains why reliance on police, courts, and prisons cannot adequately address intimate partner violence, sexual violence, or harm within communities.

Its central contribution is to place transformative justice at the center of feminist anti-violence politics. Kim is not making an abstract argument against prisons; she asks how communities can build accountability, survivor support, repair, and structural change. Abolition, in this frame, is not a refusal to respond to violence but a refusal to hand violence over to institutions that also produce racialized and classed harm.

For FemRes, this paper should be read after critiques of carceral feminism. It turns the question from “why not punishment alone?” to “how else can communities respond to harm?” and connects anti-sexual violence, Black feminism, women-of-color feminism, and prison abolition.