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"Perry Zurn explores the political philosophy of curiosity-the heartbeat of political resistance and a critical factor in social justice"--

Abstract
This article takes the twenty-five-year anniversary of C. Jacob Hale's "Suggested Rules for Non-transsexuals Writing about Transsexuals, Transsexuality, Transsexualism, and Trans___" (1997) to reflect on the nature of accountability to and within trans communities. Against the backdrop of interviews with Hale and his thought partners for the piece (e.g., Talia Bettcher, Jack Halberstam, and Naomi Scheman), Zurn draws out the historical context of the "Rules," but also the affective, theoretical, and political frictions (and intimacies) that underlie them. Generated in the late 1990s scene of trans theory and activism, Hale's "Rules" were more than a corrective to cis-centric "positions" on trans people circulating at the time (esp. by Bernice Hausman); they were also a testament to friendship, as well as to the philosophical insights of María Lugones, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sandy Stone. Although written for non-trans writers, it was Hale's intention that the "Rules" also apply in trans-trans contexts. Indeed, in a world today where trans people are in fact leading trans studies, Hale's injunctions to humility in our approach to trans* peoples and to faith in the existing wisdom of trans life is prescient. So is his invitation to theorize on the rough ground of living and struggling together.

After reviewing the use of isolation in US prisons and public restrooms to confine transgender people in solitary cells and single‐occupancy bathrooms, I propose an explanatory theory of eliminative space. I argue that prisons and toilets are eliminative spaces: that is, spaces of waste management that use layers of isolation to sanctify social or individual waste, at the outer and inner limits of society. As such, they function according to an eliminative logic. Eliminative logic, as I develop it, involves three distinct but interrelated mechanisms: 1) purification of the social center, through 2) iterative segregation, presuming and enforcing 3) the reduced relationality of marginal persons. By evaluating the historical development and contemporary function of prisons and restrooms, I demonstrate that both seek to protect the gender binary through waves of segregation by sex, race, disability, and gender identity. I further argue that both assume the thin relationality of, in this case, transgender people, who are conceived of as impervious to the effects of isolation and thus always already isolable. I conclude that, if we are to counter the violence of these isolation practices, we not only need to think holistically about eliminative spaces and logic, but also to richly reconceptualize relationality.

Formed in the wake of May 1968, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) was a radical resistance movement active in France in the early 1970's. Theorist Michel Foucault was heavily involved. This book collects interdisciplinary essays that explore the GIP's resources both for Foucault studies and for prison activism today

Cover -- Half-Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of Abbreviations -- Foreword -- Active Intolerance: An Introduction -- Part I History: The GIP and Foucault in Context -- 1 The Abolition of Philosophy -- 2 The Untimely Speech of the GIP Counter-Archive -- 3 Conduct and Power: Foucault's Methodological Expansions in 1971 -- 4 Work and Failure: Assessing the Prisons Information Group -- Intolerable 1 -- Part II Body: Resistance and the Politics of Care -- 5 Breaking the Conditioning: The Relevance of the Prisons Information Group -- 6 Between Discipline and Caregiving: Changing Prison Population Demographics and Possibilities for Self-Transformation -- 7 Unruliness without Rioting: Hunger Strikes in Contemporary Politics -- Intolerable 2 -- Part III Voice: Prisoners and the Public Intellectual -- 8 Disrupted Foucault: Los Angeles' Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) and the Obsolescence of White Academic Raciality -- 9 Investigations from Marx to Foucault -- 10 The GIP as a Neoliberal Intervention: Trafficking in Illegible Concepts -- 11 The Disordering of Discourse: Voice and Authority in the GIP -- Intolerable 3 -- Part IV Present: The Prison and Its Future(s) -- 12 Beyond Guilt and Innocence: The Creaturely Politics of Prisoner Resistance Movements -- 13 Resisting "Massive Elimination": Foucault, Immigration, and the GIP -- 14 "Can They Ever Escape?" Foucault, Black Feminism, and the Intimacy of Abolition -- Notes on Contributors -- Index.

The concept of possibility has long been intertwined with the discourse of curiosity. The way things might be can disturb the way things are, but we have to be ready for it. Curiosity provides that readiness. There is a kind of critical curiosity that opens the space of possibility by exploiting the instability of the present, second guessing its current contours and exploring how else the world might be constructed or understood. Put differently, it is because of curiosity that revolutions in science, knowledge, and society become possible. The two work in tandem. If curiosity can be a critical comportment toward the possible, then to fully understand possibility one must also understand curiosity. In this brief essay, we take a moment to think that jointure. How might curiosity studies illuminate possibility studies? From our respective vantage points of philosophy and neuroscience, we analyze possibility through curiosity. In doing so, we ultimately illuminate the novelty bias that informs both concepts, the network structures that characterize them, and the adjacent worlds and opportunities they offer.