Kay Whitlock is a writer and organizer whose work analyzes structural violence and inequality in the United States with a primary focus on policing and the criminal legal system. She brings to her work a mode of analysis that pays close attention to the distribution of violence and hardship at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, citizenship status, and geography. She is an abolitionist.
Her new book, Carceral Con: The Deceptive Terrain of Criminal Justice Reform, written with sociologist and critical race scholar Nancy A. Heitzeg, will be released by the University of California Press in September 2021.
With Joey L. Mogul and Andrea J. Ritchie, she is co-author of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (2011). She is co-author, with Michael Bronski, of Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics.
She has written for Political Research Associates (a progressive think tank whose work focuses on combatting right-wing politics and movements), the American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker peace and justice organization,) and Queers for Economic Justice. Her essays, analysis, and opinion pieces have been published by Truthout, Beacon Press Broadside (blog), In These Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and a number of periodicals and journals. Her work also appears in several anthologies.
