With and Beyond Los Angeles’s Daddy Tank: Gender, Confinement, and Queer Desire

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article outlines a carceral history of Los Angeles through the policing of gender, and in particular, the policing of queer brown masculinity. It traces the twinned regimes of gender and prison in Los Angeles to Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s 16th century colonial fiction about the capture of a gender nonconforming warrior queen Calafia, who ruled the mythical island of California. The violent logics of Calafia’s capture persist in the city’s carceral expansion and continue to impact gender nonconforming people today. Through an engagement with community histories that document spaces for gender confinement, such as the Daddy Tank, a cellblock used for masculine expressed people and lesbians at the Sybil Brand Institute in the 1970s, this paper centres moments of queer excess that counter such spaces. I follow Nancy Valverde, a Chicana butch elder, whose stories of detention for ‘masquerading’ in Los Angeles in the 1950s have much to teach us about gender nonconformity – from its policing to the liberatory possibilities of queer resistance.