Tracksuits, Traumas and Class Traitors (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781036989491)

Tracksuits, Traumas and Class Traitors

by D. Hunter

The follow-up to the underground success of Chav Solidarity, this is a fiercer, more rigorous book about how the poorest and most marginalised people practise abolition, care, and survival every single day, and about the fight for dignity in the face of unrelenting contempt.

Across ten essays, D. Hunter returns to the first twenty-five years of his life, spent moving in and out of prison, the care system, and homelessness. But where his debut told the stories, this book dissects them. Each chapter examines a single relationship, with his grandfather, a partner, his father, a Black friend caught in the cycle of incarceration, and turns an unflinching eye on both the violence Hunter suffered and the violence he inflicted. He refuses the easy scripts of victimhood or redemption, using tools drawn from auto/ethnography, class analysis, whiteness studies, queer theory, and prison abolition to ask harder questions.

At the centre is the idea of the "class traitor" the everyday act of turning your own powerlessness against those below you, of hoarding whatever small privilege, money, or leverage you have rather than redistributing it. Treachery, Hunter argues, is not just an individual failing but a collective process, one that all of us, himself included, are caught inside under white-supremacist, patriarchal capitalism.

Harrowing, funny, self-implicating, and genuinely hopeful, Tracksuits, Traumas and Class Traitors is memoir and revolutionary theory at once: a book about how we might learn to take care of one another outside the state, and rebuild communities that this system has devastated. A blunt, necessary challenge to anyone who claims to be on the side of the oppressed.