Normalcy: An Illusion of Expected Certainty

Author(s)	Ms. Khushi Sahni
Country	India
Abstract	This paper grew out of a classroom engagement with CeCe McDonald's talk "I Use My Love to Guide Me," which was assigned as part of a broader discussion on abolition, policing, and identity. What began as a reflection on that one talk expanded into a wider inquiry into how the Indian criminal justice system, despite its stated purpose of ensuring public safety, often ends up reproducing the very hierarchies of power and exclusion it claims to guard against. The paper sits at the intersection of law, race, and gender, using McDonald's account of the discrimination faced by Black trans women as a lens to examine how "normalcy" itself functions as a tool of control — deciding who gets to feel safe and who is left exposed to policing. It draws on Angela Davis' writing on the gendered structure of incarceration, the Combahee River Collective's framework of liberation, and Margaret Burroughs' poetry, weaving together academic and literary voices to ask a fairly simple question with a complicated answer: can law ever move from policing identity to repairing it?
Keywords	policing and discrimination, prison abolition, black queer and trans identity, intersectionality, legal reform, safe space, normalcy
Field	Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On	2026-08-12

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