This collection came together as a result of several years of thinking collaboratively through the intersection of gender, sexuality, violence and precariousness. In particular, the book attends to the changes in queer politics that emerge in contemporary regimes of racism, neo/colonialism, ‘war on terror’, incarceration, border enforcement and neoliberalism. In the place of simple dichotomies of repression versus visibility, or oppression versus rights, chapters in this collection complicate dominant understandings of the political by interrogating the ways in which sexual difference is increasingly absorbed into hegemonic apparatuses, in a way that accelerates premature death (Gilmore 2007) for those who are unassimilable in liberal regimes of rights and representation and thus become disposable. Moving from highly visible and ritualized performances of public grief to killing and abandonment of sexually or racially marked subjects and populations; from warfare in the name of queerness and other forms of sexual exceptionalism to queer lives as ‘bare lives’ (Agamben 1998); and from military funerals to sexualized warzones and zones of abandonment, we ask: What new techniques of governance can be mapped in a context of power which increasingly speaks the language of women’s, gay and transgender rights, protection and diversity? What challenges arise from these complicities and convergences, and how are they best addressed?
In feminist discussions, there has long been an engagement with the question of complicity, most recently around the institutionalization of anti-violence movements (Incite! 2006) and the role of women’s rights discourses in the ‘war on terror’ (e.g. Bacchetta et al. 2002; Thobani 2002). These contestations are largely indebted to intersectional critiques, especially by women of colour, migrant feminists and indigenous feminists. In queer theorizing, debates over the place of rights discourses in regimes of border fortification, militarization and incarceration have arrived belatedly, to collide with a context of LGBT politics and sexuality studies which, especially in Europe, lacks any serious engagement with racism, coloniality, positionality and intersectionality (but see Ahmed 2011; Bacchetta 2010; El-Tayeb 2012; Eng, Halberstam and Muñoz 2005; Ferguson 2003; Jivraj and de Jong 2011; Manalansan 2003; Petzen 2012; Reddy 2011; Tauqir et al. 2011).
Most prominently, Jasbir Puar (2007), tracing the shift from AIDS to gay marriage, identifies a recent turn in how queer subjects are figured, from those who are left to die, to those that reproduce life. Yet, not all sexually or gender non-conforming bodies are ‘fostered for living’; just as only some queer deaths are constituted as grievable (Butler 2004),1 while others are targeted for killing or left to die.
This book comes at a time of growing interest in the necropolitical as a tool to make sense of the symbiotic co-presence of life and death, manifested ever more clearly in the cleavages between rich and poor, citizens and non-citizens (and those who can be stripped of citizenship); the culturally, morally, economically valuable and the pathological; queer subjects invited into life and queerly abjected populations marked for death. Our discussions are inspired by Achille Mbembe’s concept of ‘necropolitics’ – a concept he develops when analysing the centrality of death in subalternity, race, war and terror (Mbembe 2003) – and by Puar’s (2007) insightful elaboration of ‘queer necropolitics’, which attempts to make sense of the expansion of liberal gay politics and its complicity within the US ‘war on terror’, while calling our attention specifically to the ‘differences between queer subjects who are being folded (back) into life and the racialized queernesses that emerge through the naming of populations’, often those marked for death (p. 36).
Our collection assembles various ways of queering the necropolitical and of interrogating claims to queerness in the face(s) of death, both spectacular and banal. Thinking through necropolitics on the terrain of queer critique brings into view everyday death worlds, from the perhaps more expected sites of death making (such as war, torture or imperial invasion) to the ordinary and completely normalized violence of the market. As many of the contributors to this volume point out, the distinction between war and peace dissolves in the face of the banality of death in the ‘zones of abandonment’ (Biehl 2001; Povinelli 2011) that regularly accompany contemporary democratic regimes. These are not merely about exclusion; more insidiously perhaps they create their own forms of deadly inclusion.
The insistence on the unremarkable, the ordinary and the mundane is of particular importance. In contrast to other works in the field that deal with death in relation to queerness and beyond – such as the AIDS epidemic or the Holocaust – contributors in this book focus less on grand moments or processes of commemoration and more on the everyday and the ordinary. In that respect, our orientation (Ahmed 2006) is not so much towards a past that is remembered and celebrated. In the place of the finished past, we turn to the present and future(s), including those haunted futures (Ferreday and Kuntsman 2011; Gordon 2011) where queer vitalities become cannibalistic on the disposing and abandonment of others. Indeed, we argue that the queer nostalgia for other times, coupled with a victim subjectivity that refuses accountability for current privileges and injustices, may itself work to naturalize and accelerate death-making logics in the present (Haritaworn, 2013). Furthermore, in considering the rise of homonormative and transnormative identities as contingent on settler colonialism, anti-blackness and permanent war – which provide the conditions of queer ascendancies – we refuse a view of the past as finished and the present as democratic and post-genocidal (e.g. Morgensen 2010; Smith 2007; see also Bassichis and Spade, Chapter 9 in this book).
Using ‘queer necropolitics’ as a theoretical entry point and as a conceptmetaphor, our book explores the processes, conditions and histories that underpin and sustain a range of ‘unequal regimes of living and dying’ (Luibhéid 2008: 190), consolidating and extending the existing analytical vocabulary for understanding queer politics and experiences. In putting the concept of ‘queer necropolitics’ at the centre of our discussion, the book is in dialogue with the emerging scholarship focussing on the analysis of the necropolitical (see, for example, Inda 2005; Osuri 2006). We extend this body of scholarship by turning our attention to specifically queer aspects: deadly underpinnings of militarized queer intimacies, nationalized practices of queer mourning, assimilationist logics of feminist, gay and transgender rights and criminalizing policies in the name of sexual safety and queer space. Contributors explore the relations between queerness and war, immigration, colonization, imprisonment and other forms of population control in various cultural and political settings. Among the many topics addressed in the chapters of this book are racism in the name of ‘LGBT rights’; queer colonialities; trans migrations; vitality and necropolitics in the new world order; the ontology and phenomenology of sexual and gender violence; the racialization of ‘LGBT’, queer and transgender politics in the ‘wars on terror’; and regimes of remembering and oblivion of queer and non-queer lives and deaths.
But while bringing the queer into the necropolitical, many of the pieces represented here refuse, problematize or challenge knowledge practices and analytical strategies that lead to the collapse of ‘queer’ into categories of identity (e.g. ‘gay’, ‘transgender’, etc.). For some authors, ‘queer’ marks ‘a point of tension to normativity’, where theoretical, analytical, political, and affective friction occurs (see, for example, Martin-Baron, Chapter 2 in this book). For others, ‘queer’ points to differentiated and differentiating values of vitality and futurity. Some authors focus on forms of violence whose brutality routinely goes unremarked and on deaths which remain ungrieved, while others show that rituals of public mourning are also aggressive displays of heteronormativity, neo-colonial national ism and disavowed homosociality; yet others tackle regimes of captivity and technologies of control over multiple borders to reveal everyday processes of gradual exhaustion of subjects and populations.
The questions asked in this book are therefore distinct from a strategy that critiques ‘queer’ in order to seek inclusion into it. While it remains vital to contest the sexism and the homonormativity of queer spaces, the transphobia of women’s movements, and the racism, classism and disablism of both, the chapters assembled here shift gear by asking what this will do to the bigger picture. Taking inspiration from transnational and anti-colonial feminisms (e.g. Grewal and Kaplan 2001; Kapur 2005; Smith 2007), we ask questions along the following lines: What are the conditions under which gendered and sexual subjectivities and political methodologies – from LGBT to gay marriage to hate crime (Nair 2009) – have emerged? How do they travel, in predictable directions, from the West to the rest (Hall 1992) – including the rest in the West, as under conditions of settler colonialism, migration and occupation? If modern genders and sexualities (both dominant and subordinate) have been formed against constitutive Others whose primitivity is signified as perversity – and as a failure to perform proper gender binaries – what is at stake in seeking inclusion through or into these identities (see Cohen 1997; Ferguson 2003; Morgensen 2010; Phoenix 1987)? Given the continued deployment of gendered figures of pathology such as the drunken Indian, the welfare mother, the black mugger/rioter, the repressed Muslim woman/queer and the chronic delinquent/terrorist in contexts of settler/ colonialism, anti-blackness, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism, and war, what would it mean to understand gendered and sexual subjectification as itself a form of necropolitical moulding?
This is not to endorse a ‘vulgar anti-essentialism’ (Crenshaw 1991) that targets and punishes those least legible and most vulnerable for their (again improper) gender performances. Indeed, as concepts such as homonationalism and pinkwashing are gaining currency, we note a worrying tendency to dismiss queer and trans of colour critiques in particular as identitarian, pre-theoretical and inferior. We believe that engaging with biopolitics and necropolitics does not spare us from doing the footwork required to build the less oppressive epistemic communities within which such critical work can happen. For example, soliciting chapters by gender non-conforming authors and on trans politics has been important to us. Several of these chapters (Aizura, Lamble, Shakhsari) indeed ask critical questions about the emergence of recognizable trans identities at this moment of militarization and in/security. In many contexts, racialized hate crime panics have been productive in proliferating victim subjectivities, rendering trans subjects – long the unrespectable margin but newly valuable under racialized numerologies of anti-violence – worthy of protection, visibility and coalition. While trans people of colour in particular are still waiting for allies, the rise of the transnormative subject – with its universalized trajectory of coming out/transition, visibility and self-actualization – must also be interrogated in its convergences with biomedical, neoliberal, racist and imperialist projects (see Snorton and Haritaworn 2013).
Throughout the book, ‘queer necropolitics’ emerges as the concept-metaphor that illuminates and connects a range of spectacular and mundane forms of killing and of ‘letting die’ while simultaneously radically reimagining the meanings, purchase and stakes inherent in ‘queerness’ as a category of analysis and critique. The queer necropolitics examined in the book refer to regimes of attribution of liveliness and deadliness of subjects, bodies, communities and populations and their instantiation through performatives of gender, sexuality and kinship, as well as through processes of confinement, removal and exhaustion. In these analyses, ‘queerness’ is dislodged from systems of referentiality that have primarily connected it to gay and lesbian subjects and identities. The mobility or transferability of the meanings of ‘queerness’ – which may be on occasions best rendered through metaphors of stasis and dwelling, rather than movement – reconfigure ‘queerness’ in relation to a variety of anti- and non-normative forms of life and politics. Discussions of queer necropolitics, therefore, powerfully evoke the production of disavowed subjectivities, socialities, kinning, intimacy and desire while bringing into sharp relief the consolidating alignment of minoritarian projects of lesbian and gay rights advocacy, for instance, with the production, segregation and mining of pathological bodies, spaces and populations within shifting regimes of racism, colonialism and (neo-)liberalism. Queer necropolitics carefully recovers, against totalizing gestures and deeply reactionary and colonizing projects of ‘giving voice’, ‘queer’ as a marker for a different ontology and a radical rethinking of how queer politics and capacities might be resituated in the context of structural violence. In turn, seemingly ordinary forms of slow death and spectacular violence come to illuminate struggles beyond the logic of capital accumulation and imperial plunder.
The chapters in this book use diverse methodologies – textual and visual analysis, ethnography, auto-ethnography, social movement history, institutional analysis, statistical and documentary analysis. They are located within and across a range of inter/disciplinary formations, including critical race, gender, sexuality and legal studies, anthropology, sociology, media and film studies. Our contributors rely on a broad variety of materials: interviews, media items, activist materials, legal and policy texts, documentaries, performances, and casual conversations. What unites the authors is not just the richness of their archives, but their tendency to read these against the grain, in a way that refuses to privilege queer lives over others and attends to the interlinked histories of racial, sexual and other biopolitical formation and regulation. They engage in reading practices that Puar (2007) describes as ‘reading sideways’: the linking together of ‘seemingly unrelated and often disjunctively situated moments and their effects’ such as indefinite detention, affirmative action, gay marriage, the decriminalization of sodomy, and the Abu Ghraib ‘sexual torture scandal’ (Puar 2007: 117, 120). The authors in Queer Necropolitics read queer livability alongside killability, rescue alongside disposability, protection alongside abandonment and celebration alongside violent erasure. This enables them to grasp queer ascendancies within the racially charged atmosphere, within and outside the Eurocentre, where white and whitening subjects legible as female, gay or LGBT enter into visibility and publicity at the expense of racialized bodies that are reinscribed as degenerate (Razack 2002) and sentenced to premature death (Gilmore 2007). The authors examine this with regard to various sites and processes, including the representational economies of queer deaths (Shakhsari, Aizura), the traffic of queer suffering (Ritchie), the production and performance of disavowed intimacy and kinning (Posocco, Martin-Baron), the criminalization of HIV/AIDS, and anti-black assault on subjects and com munities of colour (Gossett). The three sections of the book carry out the task of reading sideways by exploring the place of queer in the making of death worlds; the spatiality of queer necro politics in war- and borderzones; and the queer necropolitics of the prison industrial complex.
In the celebrated essay ‘Necropolitics’, Mbembe (2003) argues that necropolitical analysis supplements the Foucauldian notion of ‘biopower’, that is, ‘a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (Foucault 1981: 138), with a sustained focus on sovereign power as fundamentally concerned with death-making. The contributors to this volume mobilize a diverse range of analytical trajectories that illuminate ‘necropolitics’, i.e. ‘contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death’ (Mbembe 2003: 39), explicitly as a key domain of queer analysis and critique. More specifically, all the chapters in the book draw attention to the contemporary production of ‘death worlds’, that is, ‘new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe 2003: 40, author’s emphasis), with reference to, for example, subjects such as US military personnel (Martin-Baron, Chapter 2), Guatemalan transnational adoptees (Posocco, Chapter 3), and Iranian transgender refugees (Shakhsari, Chapter 5). As Jared Sexton points out, these death worlds are not so new: Mbembe, partly as a result of his selective reading of Saidiya Hartman (Saidiya Hartman 1997) and his sidelining of the central role she accords the captive black female, understates the foundational role of slavery and anti-blackness (including as sexual violence) in modern regimes of institutional violence and social death (Sexton 2010: 32ff.). Another forerunning account of the social and cultural production of human disposability that also highlights the centrality of slavery is that of Orlando Patterson (1982). According to Patterson, slavery, as an institutionalized relation between master and slave and a ‘rights relation’ fundamentally instituted through the law, is grounded in an understanding of the slave as a socially dead person (Patterson 1982: 38–39). Patterson thus coins the notion of ‘social death’ in order to describe a process of depersonalization that relies on the suspension of personhood and belonging through the slave’s exclusion from the community, or the slave’s internal exile. The production of alterity as social death is therefore dependent on processes of expulsion or exclusion, and the redrawing of boundaries of belonging and unbelonging. Yet inclusion, too, according to Patterson, is not benign; rather, it amounts to an essentially violent and (socially) deadly process that produces forms of life in segregated proximity, and which may also lead to exceptional violence and death.2
As Gilmore (2007) has argued and many of this volume’s contributors demonstrate, the acuity and relevance of Patterson’s analysis is not confined to the historical study of slavery as an institution at the heart of modernity. Contemporary carceral regimes in particular continue to instantiate social death through fundamentally racialized and racializing structures of captivity where ‘inhuman humans’ (Gilmore 2007; see also Gray and Gómez-Barris 2010) deemed to be beyond rehabilitation are not only physically removed from the social realm but, more fundamentally, are exposed to premature death. The nexus between racism and the production of ‘living dead’ populations most clearly framed by Gilmore3 is at the heart of many of the chapters in this volume, and is tackled with specific reference to carceral regimes in Part III of the book.
Departing from the distinction between queers folded into life, and those destined for death, contributors in this book demonstrate that the work of queer necropolitics is not limited to individual subjects and bodies; rather, it engulfs whole populations consigned to death. From this perspective, death-making is constitutive of the polis and directly connects to the everyday experience of those perhaps unremarkable, but not less pernicious forms of ‘slow death’ (Berlant 2007), that is, of extreme and yet ordinary ‘physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence’ (2007: 755). For Berlant ‘slow death’ is realized in forms of ‘physical attenuation’ that cannot always be directly attributed to the violent operations of institutions or the state. Indeed, as Rachel Gorman (2013) and Nadia Kanani (2011) show more succinctly through a transnational race and disability studies lens, race and class oppression are at their bases disabling. Neither can slow death, as Berlant argues in her older work on ‘traumatized citizenship’, be reduced to narratives of suffering, whose volume often drones out the banal workings of violence at the hands of the market.4 From this perspective, an exclusive emphasis on social control is too invested in – and continuously reifies and recentres – ‘life’ and the autonomous subject of rights as the foundations of the political. As a subtle counterpoint to necropolitics, Berlant therefore proposes a substantive rethinking of the status and meanings of agency and personhood through a focus on diffused and less spectacular modes of ‘wearing out’, which ultimately aims to problematize those aspects of ‘practical’ necropolitical sovereignty grounded in assumptions regarding the nature of power, the functioning and assumed coherence of institutions – including ‘the state’ and ‘the law’ – as well as the ‘the subject’ of politics. In this book we take ‘slow death’, as much as the inducement of increased susceptibility to premature death, to be constitutive of ordinary death worlds, and point to the challenges inherent in sustaining the critical imaginaries and projects that nevertheless permeate such worlds, against all odds.
Graduated forms of humanity whose very place within ‘the human’ is questioned, suspended or rescinded outright, exist in fragmented sovereignties and spatially delimited enclaves that function as ‘the outside of the inside’ (Esposito 2008; see also Ong 2006). They are located in institutions segregating those categorized as mad, homeless, or poor (Biehl 2001); in the high-rise residential blocks in East Asian mega-cities where migrant domestic labour incarceration routinely occurs (Ong 2006); and in the ‘golden gulags’ (Gilmore 2007) of the US ‘prison industrial complex’.5 In these zones of social abandonment, social inclusion is realized through practices of ‘letting die’, that is, through dying in abandonment (Biehl 2001:139; Povinelli 2008, 2011). Letting die, abandonment and differential belonging are directly connected to the operations of forms of governance in late liberalism that constitute some subjects as morally deserving, while simultaneously justifying punitive measures on those deemed undeserving as necessary, just and rational (Povinelli 2011). The moral economies in play also engender differential and differentiating mourning where only some deaths are acknowledged and constituted as grievable (Butler 2009), as Shakhsari (Chapter 4) and Aizura (Chapter 6) demonstrate so powerfully in their discussions of wars and borderzones.
Our understanding of queer necropolitics is further in conversation with Eric Stanley’s (2011) forerunning discussion. Stanley articulates the sense in which death-making, figured in relation to the brutal murders of trans/queer people in the United States and the exceptional violence inflicted on murdered subjects after death, holds important ontological consequences. The piece documents how this protracted onslaught systematically fails to be registered in public discourse and public consciousness. According to Stanley, the legal category of ‘overkill’ may account for the vicious assaults that these working-class and largely people of colour gender non-conforming subjects are subjected to in death, and for how their remains become the object of further affront. The ‘overkill’ of these subjects is far from an anomaly or an exceptional occurrence; rather, it is central to the reproduction of US liberal democracy. As Stanley explains, ‘overkill’ occupies the same social and political terrain as LGBT identities, where the extreme vulnerability of some can be contrasted to the security of others. LGBT identities appear to be securely tied to subjects of rights to the extent that they become fully invested in claims that anti-queer violence is an exceptional occurrence to be dealt with through the punitive state. ‘Overkill’, by way of contrast, points to a queer ontology of ‘near life’ – a form of existence that echoes the notions of ‘the living dead’ we have discussed in relation to the work of Mbembe (2003) and Agamben (1998), and with reference to the ‘social death’ theorized by Patterson (1982). Spaces of nonexistence populated by ‘near life’ and marked by ‘overkill’ (Stanley 2011) are not external to, but rather constitutive of, the state and the law and form the substratum of contemporary liberal democracies. The chapters in this volume tease out and explore how relations of proximity and contiguity between life and death – as graduated and mutually imbricated domains – articulate in different contexts, and fully within, not outside or beyond, the political.
Our first section further resonates with Anna Agathangelou’s work (2013), which makes the case that neo-imperial free-market capitalist shifts depend on slavery and the animation of queerness as a speculative economy to mediate political value struggles. Agathangelou engages with two archives on queerness, a 2011 speech by Hillary Clinton at the UN regarding African states’ violation of human rights of gays and lesbians, and a 2011 report on the violation of human rights of Iraqi gays. Through these archives, she shows how slavery and queerness are drawn on by a resurgent neoliberalism to sustain regimes of value while generating structures of governance that marginalize slave terror. ‘The slave’ turns into the suturing matter of epistemologies and practices of sexuality, race and geopolitics, whereby ‘the African’ is marked as black through lack of gay rights and ‘Africa’ is figured as the ahistorical scene of the captive flesh. Agathangelou (2013) traces the ruptures in discourses presupposing that the existence of non-procreative sex as foundational capacity threatens the fulfillment of democratic promises while continuing the production of a structuring ontology that requires blackness and the suffering of the slave to erect queerness as a speculative economy.
Although the themes of killing and letting die, mourning and forgetting, privileging and abandonment are discussed throughout the book, this first part, ‘Death worlds’, is dedicated more specifically to the relation between life and death through analyses of the making of death worlds, social death and slow death from a variety of perspectives. In Chapter 1, Che Gossett focuses on ‘the lethality of anti-black, anti-queer and/or anti-trans interpersonal violence’. Gossett argues that the criminalization of HIV/AIDS via the prison industrial complex in the United States is inextricably linked to anti-blackness and the sustained assault against black subjects and communities waged through mass incarceration and other forms of everyday and normalized state violence. Gossett shows that slavery haunts the contemporary deathscapes of the prison industrial complex, with its expansive technologies of control and high- and low-intensity forms that extend well beyond the prison. The chapter details the history of the criminalization of HIV/AIDS and delves into the archives of struggle of queer of colour AIDS activists Kiyoshi Kuromiya and Ortez Alderson. The biographies of Kiyashi Kuromiya and Ortez Alderson provide the thread – lived and embodied – connecting the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, anti-war activism and queer liberation of the 1960s to the political organizing around AIDS and the direct action of ACT UP of the 1990s and into the present. Within the horizon of ongoing AIDS criminalization, ‘lethality’ in Gossett’s analysis encompasses a range of deadly modalities, which include ‘slow violence’. Practices of death-making, however, are also subtended by queer and/or trans abolitionist organizing in these ‘times of chains and corpses’, as Gossett, following James Baldwin, poignantly shows. Gossett draws on traditions of black radicalism, expanding and enriching the theoretical and analytical registers of queer necropolitical analysis, to refocus attention on the relations between anti-blackness and the ‘carceral continuum’ in the organization of social life. For Gossett, the legacy of black radical, queer and/or trans left and AIDS activist political ontology and action is the starting point for a fundamental rethinking of how queer and/or trans struggles might be rearticulated in the contemporary, ever-shifting necropolitical terrain.
In Chapter 2 (Martin-Baron), the necropolitical emphasis on death-making is brought to bear on the analysis of military funerals in the US during the contemporary ‘war on terror’. Martin-Baron argues that US military funerals amount to queer necropolitical performances of kinship. Provocatively, Martin-Baron notes that this insight emerges in the public protests organized by the Westboro Baptist Church, whose demonstrations aimed at disrupting military funeral processions with slogans such as ‘God hates fags’ and ‘Thank God for Dead Soldiers’ are motivated by a view of the US military as fundamentally a harbour for homosexuals. In turn, the response of the Patriot Guard Riders – the group of veterans and jingoist individuals intent on defending the funerary proceedings and shielding the soldiers’ bereaved families from the Westboro Baptist Church protests – and specifically their motorcycle rides alongside the funerary processions, appear as hyperbolic performances of masculinity and nationalism. The Patriot Guard Riders’ aim is to reassert the heterosexuality of the military and its dead, but their leather-clad parades appear to be aesthetically not very dissimilar from those found at gay pride events. Martin-Baron argues that the heteronormative emphasis on the biological family evident in military funerals’ pageantry is troubled by the ever present, and yet disavowed, homosociality of military kinship bonds. In Martin-Baron’s reading, funerals are enactments of queer kinship through which queer same sex intimacy and death-care labour are simultaneously affirmed and made visible, as well as denied and masked. From this perspective, the queer structuring of military intimacy is shrouded in (hyper/in)visibility through performances of homosociality, masculinity, and nationalism. These military funerary performances are the embodiment of patriarchal and colonial structures, and yet they are also reliant on queer affective structures that are constantly deplored, repudiated, or called by another name.
In Chapter 3, Silvia Posocco also questions the status of the subject of rights in late liberalism, including the rights claims of LGBT constituencies, through a focus on the necropolitical analysis of transnational adoption circuits. Posocco tackles these questions from the vantage point of Guatemala, and the analysis of the relation between histories of violence, the emergence and progressive intensification of transnational adoption flows, and processes of social, political, and legal restructuring during the Guatemalan conflict (1960–1996) and its violent aftermath. Historically, Posocco argues, the vitality of the figure of the transnational adoptee was framed as an excess of life generated under the mark of genocidal violence during the Guatemalan conflict. Institutional and legal reforms in the violent post-conflict present reveal renewed concerted claims to the governance – and a renewed incitement to life – of the transnational adoptee. The biopolitics of transnational adoption, however, are underpinned by multiple necropolitical fissures traceable in many social deaths and disappearances. In this view, the testimonies of proud (LGB and non-LGB) parents of adopted Guatemalan children in the Global North ought to be connected to multiple death worlds that not only have the Guatemalan conflict as their horizon, but multiple contemporary processes of (social) death-making as well. The temporary suspension of adoptees’ transnational movement, the prospective adoptees’ indefinite detention in deregulated institutions, and the social disappearance of those placed beyond ‘adoptability’ and kinning are uneven and sometimes incongruent processes that recast queerness as a fundamentally necropolitically differentiated futurity.
All three chapters in Part I insist on a critical engagement with notions of ‘vitality’ and specifically, on the mutual imbrication of ‘vitality’ – as a differentiated and differentiating state – and violence in the making of death worlds. Thus, for Gossett, vitality is articulated through ‘slow death’ and forms of lethality that are fundamentally structured by the discourses and practices of anti-blackness, as evidenced in the workings of the prison industrial complex and the ‘carceral continuum’; Martin-Baron also turns to the United States to show how fantasies of liberal democracy are sustained through the spectacular violent denial of vitality through racialized queer deaths removed from collective memory and consigned to oblivion and the public memorialization as disavowal; for Posocco histories of settler colonialism, conquest, racism and legal exceptionalism sediment in the differentiated vitality and futurity of ‘transnational adoption’ as a phenomenon of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
In different ways, the chapters in Part I also specifically attend to the ontological consequences of a focus on the necropolitical for queer critique, that is, they deal with the complex relations between existence and non-existence in social milieux as well as in representation. Gossett theorizes the making and unmaking of anti-black, anti-queer and/or anti-trans lethality, foregrounding radical challenges to ‘given ontologies’ and struggles to reimagine the social and the political; Martin-Baron points to oscillations between visibility and invisibility that characterize the performative materialization of dead US soldiers and the US military; Posocco gestures to the multiple appearance and disappearance clustering under the sign of ‘transnational adoption’. The chapters in Part I therefore hone the critical vocabulary for thinking about the ontologies of death worlds, resisting redemptive narratives and challenging simplistic understandings. They are in dialogue with contemporary critical scholarship that focuses on processes of death-making – ranging from theorizations of the gradual (Berlant 2007) and yet structural (Gilmore 2007) wearing out of populations, to the remarkably ruthless and yet mostly overlooked murder – and on explorations of the ontological consequences of queer necropolitical analysis (Stanley 2011).
Continuing the discussion of death worlds, Part II of the book, ‘Wars and borderzones’, focuses more specifically on the spatial aspect of queer necropolitics, by looking at zones of displacement, movement, war and everyday abandonment. In that respect, concerns raised in this part owe intellectually to the field of queer migration, queer diaspora and queer of colour critique – fields that address the intersection between queerness and racism, migration and border policing, globalization and diasporic cultural formations (Cruz-Malave and Manalansan 2002; Ferguson 2003; Gopinath 2005; Luibhéid 2002, 2008; Manalansan 2003; Patton and Sanchez-Eppler 2000; Reddy 2011). A close rereading of this work is crucial at this moment where sexuality is becoming racialized as a property of the West and a deficiency on the part of the rest (as well as the rest in the West; see Hall 1992). While the new turn to race, religion and the global south, which is reflected in a mushrooming of courses and conferences on queer globalization, sexual nationalism, queerness, nationalism and racism, transnational sexuality studies, queer postcolonial studies, and intersectionality, appears promising at first sight, it often happens in the absence of sustained contestations of racism and coloniality. Besides erasing a long tradition of, often minoritized, thought and labour on the intersections of gender, sexuality, nation, race and class, the newly institutionalized work often fails to interrupt, and sometimes even intensifies, exceptionalist teleologies, homo- and transnormative complicities, and neo/ colonial geopolitics (Bacchetta and Haritaworn 2011).
In contrast to this, earlier scholarship has problematized a single-issue view of gender and sexuality, while also being mindful of the endless ways in which minoritarian approaches (e.g. those that appear to foreground Third World women) can be appropriated for racist and colonial projects (e.g. Mohanty 1988; Spivak 1999). One highly productive angle for our discussion has been the focus on the intersections of various queer practices, attractions and forms of embodiment – only some of which conform to homonormative and transnormative labels such as LGBT – with movement and displacement. Scholars such as Gayatri Gopinath (2005), Martin F. Manalansan IV (2003), Eithne Luibhéid (2002, 2008) and others brought to the fore the lives and experiences of queer migrants, often ignored by mainstream research, and question the very assumptions, surrounding both the notions of national and diasporic belonging, on one hand, and of white queer politics, on the other. Beginning with the silenced and marginalized experiences of queer migrants, refugees and diasporic subjects, these scholars have often positioned questions of exclusion at the centre of their discussion, be it exclusion from the ability to cross borders, or from acquiring citizenship, or from belonging to a (white) queer scene.
Recently, however, these and other scholars have turned their attention to the violence of inclusion itself, looking at the ways various intersections between racism, border regimes and wars differentiate between those queers folded into legal and political subjecthood, and those destined for wartime killing or everyday deadly abandonment. This critical new turn in theorizing queerness emerged in the aftermath of the ‘wars on terror’ and globalized Islamophobia, even if a simple ‘post 9/11’ periodization misses the longer standing incorporation of queer subjectivities into racial, national and transnational formations of settler/colonialism (Morgensen 2010) and anti-blackness (Bassichis and Spade, Chapter 9 in this book). While most attention has been paid to the problematic sexual formations that have occurred in the context of the US war on terror (Puar 2007), this work coincided with similar scholarship in other contexts, from Australia (Abraham 2009) to Europe (El-Tayeb 2003; Haritaworn 2008; Haritaworn, Erdem and Tauqir 2008; Petzen 2004) and the Middle East (Hochberg 2010; Kuntsman 2009). Many of these writers in turn acknowledge their debt with earlier feminist theorizations of the gendered entanglements of war, racism, nationalism and imperialism (see, for example, Bacchetta et al. 2002; Bhattacharyya, 2008; Hunt and Rygiel 2006; Riley, Mohanty and Pratt 2008; Thobani 2002).
Moving away from queerness as always necessarily transgressive, this heterogeneous queer scholarship has pulled into focus queer complicities with militarism, state violence and imperial carnage – whether through direct actions of killing, or via queer adoration of militarism and war. Jin Haritaworn’s work on queer sexuality in Britain, for example, demonstrates how white gay masculinities ‘loyally repeated the nation’ during the military invasions in Afghanistan in Iraq (Haritaworn 2008); Adi Kuntsman (2008) similarly shows how Israeli gay men and recent Jewish immigrants to the country embrace the soldier as an ultimate queer icon, and specifically adore the soldier for his acts of warfare in Palestine. For national(ist) gay subjects these colonial and imperial wars act as sites of proud gay patriotism and belonging; however, what is particularly important is that war itself figures here as sexy. As Agathangelou, Bassichis and Spira (2008) have likewise suggested, there are ‘intimate investments’ and seductions to violence, which draw one ‘emotionally, libidinally, and erotically in[to] global capitalism’s mirages of safety and inclusion’ (p. 122).
The seductive erotics of war are precisely what facilitate the necropolitical distinction between queers destined for life and those discarded for death. However, this critical attention to the impact of ‘wars on terror’ on feminist and queer politics is not limited to the analysis of deadly distinctions between those queers who are included as legal and (bio)political subjects, and those cast outside state protection or even the boundaries of the ‘human’. Rather, as the contributors in Part II demonstrate, some racialized queer subjects are simultaneously excluded from and incorporated into those deadly regimes of war, occupation, coloniality, exploitation and abandonment. In other words, the discussion of queer necropolitics is here about the simultaneity of racialized queers’ exclusion from zones of the living and their deadly incorporations into sexual war topographies and globalized colonial and imperial borderzones.
Sima Shakhsari, for example, in Chapter 4, demonstrates that in the Western media and political imagination the Iranian transgender refugee emerges at once as a politicized figure in need of protection that authorizes war and imperialism in the Middle East and as a homo sacer whose life is disposable and whose only value is in its circulation in neoliberal economy. Examining three separate but related stories of three queer deaths – Naz, an Iranian refugee trans woman who died in Canada; Ayaz Marhouni and Mahmoud Asgari, two young Iranian men who were hanged in Mashad; and Mark Bingham, an American gay man who died in the 9/11 attack – Shakhsari suggests that within the civilizational logic of imperialism and the ‘war on terror’, the Iranian queer subject is not necessarily outside the neoliberal hegemony. On the contrary, the Iranian queer is incorporated into it, to create and sustain the binary configurations of freedom and oppression, a configuration that is at the core of both representation and management of populations through life or death. Being simultaneously within and outside the neoliberal logic, the Iranian refugee, as Shakhsari convincingly argues, is the queer living dead ‘subject who is produced as desiring the enshrined notions of democracy that govern its bio, and at the same time the one who beholds the danger of terrorism and is therefore subjected to death in the state of emergency to keep alive the ideals of democracy’ (Shakhsari, this volume).
Another way in which racialized queer subjects are incorporated into the civilizational logic of colonial nationalism and ‘war on terror’ as both objects of bio- and necropower is addressed by Jason Ritchie in Chapter 5. Ritchie’s analysis departs from two seemingly unrelated events that took place in 2006 – Israel’s attack on Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and its legislation regarding same-sex marriages and adoption. Ritchie describes the two moments of life and death, inclusion and exclusion as part of ‘the continuous double movement that is Israeli sovereignty’ (Ritchie, this volume): a set of discourses and practices that regulate and govern Israeli/Jewish life, while also regulating the distribution of Palestinian deaths. But it is not simply the relations between lives and deaths that are addressed in this chapter – rather, Ritchie focuses on the ghostly figure of the queer Palestinian – a figure ambivalently positioned at the intersection of bio- and necro - powers; a figure that, in Israeli imagination, haunts both queer lives and Palestinian deaths. Drawing on the analysis of Israeli representations of Palestinian queers’ suffering, Ritchie demonstrates that the Israeli queer subject emerges through the colonial knowledge of the Palestinian queer as both a victim and a threat, whose death becomes the price for ‘realizing the fantasy of queer life under late-modern colonialism’ in Israel/Palestine (Ritchie, this volume).
The final chapter in Part II, Aren Z. Aizura’s Chapter 6, also begins in Israel/Palestine, where lives – and deaths – of Filipino migrant care workers who perform as drag queens are ignored both by the pinkwashing liberal narrative of Israel as a gay-friendly country and by the political and scholarly focus on death in the area as being exclusively about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and colonial occupation. Aizura’s discussion of labour value and gender non-conforming bio-and necropolitics rests on a critical reading of three films, Bubot Niyar, Les travestis pleurent aussi and The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela. Aizura analyzes representational practices of the films in relation to questions of modernity and the politics of death, turning our attention to the ways Euro-American notions of gendered non-conformity and sexual attraction produce putatively ‘gay’ bodies that are simultaneously placed within a liberationalist narrative of gay identities and freedoms and discarded as bodies whose death does not matter. One particularly important intervention made by Aizura’s chapter concerns the notion of trans necropolitics, which, as he argues, cannot be explored without addressing ‘the mobility of gender variant bodies and the circuits of capital they/we exploit and are exploited by’. Trans necropolitics, then, reside not only and not so much in acts of murder by a state or a colonial power, but operate through mundane regimes of abandonment and disposability, of ‘letting die’. Such abandonment does not equal exclusion – on the contrary, Aizura’s chapter points to the notorious paradox of necropolitics: even as some bodies are destined to death, the labour they produce is valuable and thus targeted by the state for a (deadly) incorporation.
What emerges in all three contributions in Part II is the question of queer incorporation into interrelated regimes of life and death, living and dying, prosperity and abandonment. But what also unites the three chapters is their attention to the topographies of life and death; or in other words, to the spatiality of queer necropolitics. All three chapters describe governance of queer lives and deaths in the context of migration, displacement and other forms of movement – be it the transnational labour migration of the Filipino care workers; their movement across Tel Aviv and its queer scene or their disappearing presence once outside the making of the film; the forced immobility of the Iranian refugee (awaiting refugee status in Turkey, arriving to homelessness in Canada) or the ease with which military planners and generals move across the globe in various acts of ‘war on terror’; the everyday movements of the Palestinians through Israeli military checkpoints or the virtual checkpoints posed for them by the Israeli queers.
These ‘topographies of cruelty’ (Mbembe 2003: 40) can be understood as borderzones – inspired by postcolonial feminist work on borders as spaces where ‘formations of violence are continuously in the making’ (Alarcón 1996: 44). Surveillance, minefields, pain, death, loss and clashes of impositions, discussed by scholars of borderlands in the 1990s, operate in today’s borderzones of colonial occupation and transnational migration and military regimes, working both in the realms of identity and cultural formations and in the physicality of the everyday struggle and survival. These borderzones, however, are not only about the movement of wars and the types of militarized global and local governance they produce. Rather, they are also about ‘zones of abandonment’ (Povinelli 2011) and oblivion, where, supposedly released from military and biopolitical targeting, racialized queer and non-queer bodies are left to die, ignored and forgotten.
The third and final part of the book explores another topography of cruelty and its relation to queerness: the prison. If prisons have occasionally been scandalized as sites of ‘torture’ or ‘war crime’ – e.g. in the spectacles of ‘Abu Ghraib’ and ‘Guantanamo’ – the exceptional status of the violence inflicted in these spaces is increasingly put in question. Most succinctly, Avery Gordon (2006) has drawn our attention to the striking overlaps between military and civilian sites of lockdown, in terms of funds, personnel, and techniques of torture/punishment, and the regularity with which epistemologies and methodologies of imprisonment travel across borders, and between exceptionalized contexts of ‘war’ and normalized contexts of ‘peace’. This underlines the need to understand the globalizing prison industrial complex in all its biopolitical, necropolitical and geopolitical dimensions (see also Sudbury 2005).6 While we are not aware of a specifically necropolitical lens being applied to incarceration so far, prisons and psychiatric institutions have regularly been described as sites of social and sometimes literal death (Breggin 1995; Davis 2003; Gilmore 2007; Gordon 2006; Halmi 2008). They serve the production of surplus populations marked as criminal or mad, and their segregation from the realm of the properly alive. These populations are profiled through the same signifiers of criminality and/or madness – poverty, perversion, racial inferiority, physical/mental deficiency, social non-conformity – that in these avowedly post-eugenicist, post-genocidal times are supposed to be firmly in the past (see Roberts 2008). The bodies read this way are the raw material (Davis 2003) from which bio-value is generated in the carceral and biomedical industries that prevail under post-Fordism. As neoliberal restructuring produces disentitled surplus populations, poor racialized people are converted from cheap workers into unproductive bodies that must be controlled and capacitated in novel ways (Ben-Moshe 2011; Gordon 2006; Roberts 2008; Wacquant 2009). They are also, we argue, the raw material from which recognizably queer, disabled and multicultural subjects are carved out. Borrowing from Jodi Melamed (2011), we can note how the emergence of a minoritarian subject that is ‘fit for neoliberal subjectivity’ requires a distinction from disposable populations marked as ‘monocultural, irrational, regressive, patriarchal or criminal’ (ibid.: 87), which we must further examine in its disablist logics (Everelles 2010).7
The chapters in Part III describe incarceration as a method for the production of respectable and innocent genders and sexualities that are worthy of visibility, recognition and protection. Justice and liberation here become co-terminous with the punishment of populations that, in the newly gay-friendly societies of the West, are forced to bear the residues of gendered and sexual violence.8 These populations – ‘Muslims’ (in West Europe), ‘Punjabis’ (in British Columbia), ‘Palestinians’ (in Israel/Palestine), ‘African Americans’ or ‘Latinos’ (in the Californian Proposition 8 debate), ‘Africans’ (in global LGBT rights debates) – become interchangeable in the face of rapidly travelling scripts and methods of liberation, on the one hand, and punishment and neglect, on the other. What they frequently share is that their main path of inclusion has often been through prison doors.
This forces us to examine the prison as a foundational paradigm in liberal democracies (Rodriguez 2010). In the US, a growing body of activist and academic writing conceptualizes the prison system as a continuation of slavery, whose formal abolition was accompanied by an ‘except[ion] for punishment of crime’ (13th amendment of the American constitution; see Gilmore 2007). We may put this nationally conceived insight in transnational conversation with other exceptionalized and commemorated times and spaces. In Germany, forced labour was abolished in the constitution of the Federal Republic, yet allowed to continue in the prison system. While the concentration camps were closed in 1945, prisons and psychiatric institutions were not: in the latter, the first were gassed and killing officially continued until 1948/1949 (Halmi 2008). Rather than treat institutional violence as an anachronistic remnant that can be reformed away, we should seek to understand contemporary carceral and medical industries as key growth sectors in the neoliberal era (Davis 2003).9
The prison (and also the psychiatric institution, which has not received critical attention to the same extent, including in this book) are further key sites for the vitalization of queer subjectivities. Sarah Lamble’s Chapter 7 shows how, with regard to the emergence of hate crime as the new single issue in LGBT organizing, the prison is now a key terrain for queer vitality. This is ironic, as sexually and gender non-conforming subjects, even those with race and class privileges, were long among the prototypical deviants and, with the belated and incomplete decriminalization and depathologization of same-sex and transgender practices and identities, have only just escaped the prison themselves. Several conversions concur at this punitive moment: as sexual justice turns into criminal justice, the homonormative subject nevertheless remains close to the old site of its death, which paradoxically becomes the site of its rebirth as a respectable subject. This goes along with another spatial reconfiguration, by the degenerate inner city into the revitalizing downtown neighbourhood, whose first gentrifiers often include queer and trans people with race and class privileges. As the old trope of the ‘ghetto’ as dangerous (hate) crime scene converges with the new trope of the ‘recovering’ inner city, where the properly alive like to live, eat and party, a certain queer subject comes to life in the shadows of the regenerating buildings. In homo-neoliberal accounts such as urban expert Richard Florida’s (2002), gays are interpellated as ‘creative classers’ whose ‘pioneering’ ventures into hitherto ungentrifiable territory must be encouraged in urban policy (see Tongson (2007) for a critique). This globalized settler colonial fantasy has also returned to Western Europe, where the struggle of queer lovers and hateful Others is regularly scripted through anti-Muslim racism. There, the arrival of queers, which marks an area’s recovery and discovery as a ‘queer space’, goes hand in hand with the displacement and policing of the degenerate bodies once confined to it (Decolonize Queer 2011; Hanhardt 2008; Haritaworn 2013; Manalansan 2005; Razack 2002). This brings home the need to think the necropolitical alongside the geopolitical, and the prison alongside the border and the inner city, and discourses on queer space, safety and security alongside racist, neoliberal and neo/colonial urban, immigration, military and development policies.
Elijah Edelman, in Chapter 8, examines this with regard to prostitution free zones, a spatial profiling instrument that is part of revanchist gentrification policies in Washington, DC. There, anybody ‘looking like a prostitute’ (which regularly interpellates trans feminine people of colour) can be searched, banished and criminalized with no further grounds. Edelman shows how this has in some contexts led to the formulation of a queer and trans politics that begins with the experiences of sexually and gender non-conforming people who are poor, of colour, homeless, criminalized, pathologized, or otherwise precarious, and attends to the intersecting regimes of killing, both spectacular and banal, institutional and interpersonal, which target some much more than others for premature death. However, any such inclusionary moves must themselves account for the ways in which black trans feminine bodies in particular have become the raw material for an expanding LGB(now-including-the)T non-profit sector. In fact, the new tendency in queer, trans and LGBT organizing to include those deemed precarious often reinscribes their killability while securing a newly professionalizing class of experts in the realm of life. As Snorton and Haritaworn (2013) suggest, it is in the moment of their death that those most in need of survival become valuable, as experts, allies and funders become literate and numerate in hate crime paradigms whose main function is to secure further funding. Most starkly, this is illustrated by the globalization of Transgender Day of Remembrance, whose travels again call for a bio-, necro- as well as geopolitical lens (see Bhanji 2013). Thus, TDOR events from Toronto to London to Berlin enable mainly white trans people from the global north to commune by reading out the names and looking at the photos of dead people, mainly poor, trans feminine, black and/or from the global south, who would have unlikely had much access to trans communities while alive (see Lamble 2008). This illustrates how queer and trans vitality, besides symbiotically enhancing the death-making capacities of the market and the state, is often cannibalistic on the lives and deaths of the very people it claims to represent.
Transnational investigations such as Lamble’s are important, as they force us to understand queer necropolitics through various racial formations. If in Western Europe, the drama of queer lovers and hateful others both brings home and renders palpable globalized demonologies of Islam that allow white Europeans to come together and cohere against highly disparate contexts of colonialism, slavery, genocide and migration, in the US white gay activists have treated black people as their significant Other (Bacchetta and Haritaworn 2011). In this context, Morgan Bassichis and Dean Spade argue in Chapter 9 that anti-blackness is founda tional to sexual citizenship claims. Non-black queers become ‘junior partners’ to a violently anti-black state, whose prime lens for blackness is crimin - ality. Rather than a mere by-product of neoliberalism, Bassichis and Spade demand that we understand queer racism as a minoritarian modulation of the structures of anti-blackness, settler colonialism and permanent war that are at the basis of the American project itself.
Yet if queer necropolitics is not reducible to neoliberalism, it is neoliberalism’s capacity to diversify racism and politically correct ‘necessary killing’ (Foucault 1981) by rewriting it into minoritarian languages such as LGBT rights and protection that serves to usher into consent those who have traditionally been critical of the racist state. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of policing. As race and class-privileged queers across the West mobilize police to protect them from ‘homophobic’ and ‘transphobic’ others, for whom the prison is already carved out as natural habitat, the forces that render sexually and gender non-conforming people vulnerable to violence ironically disappear from view. In contrast to the visibility and publicity politics of mainstream hate crime activism, which tend to imag/ine the innocent victim as white, gender conforming, consumptive and respectable, those who are most vulnerable to violence and premature death are left completely unrecognizable in the institutionalized and professionalized anti-violence discourse (Alliance for a Safe & Diverse DC 2008; R. Gossett 2011; Lavers 2011; Young Women’s Empowerment Project 2009). Thus, the kinship with death that all queer and trans people seem to nostalgically inherit (Nunokawa 2007) is very literal for sexually and gender non-conforming people whose race and class locations are marked as targets and topoi of cruelty, for whom more police in the neighbourhood will regularly mean more abuse.10 As activists have long shown, low-income gender non-conforming people of colour are especially easy targets for a criminal ‘justice’ system whose routine deployment of gender and racial violence in the street continues and intensifies in the gender-binaried space of the prison (Mogul, Ritchie and Whitlock 2011; Sears, Clay, Fields and Martinez 2011; Stanley and Smith 2011; Sylvia Rivera Law Project et al. 2009).
As a queer & trans person of color and a person working within gender liberation & self-determination movements I so often hear about death. More specifically I so often interact with the overkilling of queer and trans people, often low income, living with HIV/AIDS, undocumented, disabled and people of color. So much death, so much killing, has made me wonder how to be accountable to (the) dead as well as the living.
(R. Gossett 2011: n.p.)
We have seen how our communities – black, disabled, queer and trans, poor, houseless, drug user, sex worker – have been impacted in the past and at present, by the prison industrial complex and criminalization. We have been subject to obliteration by police violence, so many lives have been extinguished and stolen. We are meant to perish but we are not disposable. Even as the prison industrial complex tries to contain our communities, keep our bodies and genders captive and policed, we know that our political imaginations are free. There are viable alternatives – both that already exist and are being created – to ‘organized abandonment,’ to interpersonal harm, to the regulation of our lives and institutionalized death via the prison industrial complex. Let’s support and expand them.
(C. Gossett 2011: n.p.)
Through the concept-metaphor of queer necropolitics, the contributors to this book broaden our perception of life, death, violence and survival by attending to different sites, such as the borderzone, the warzone, the prison and the gentrifying area. These Mbembian ‘topographies of cruelty’ are by no means an exclusive map of necropolitical spatialities. More work is needed in order to make sense of the queer vitalities that have proliferated across various sites – including institutions of punishment alongside institutions of ‘care’, such as schools, psychiatric units and youth work, as well as the informal spaces and connectivities – the queer ‘scene’, the queer ‘neighbourhood’, the globalizing LGBT movement – that increasingly follow similar punitive and pathologizing logics.
While queer necropolitics is not the only tool through which such work is possible, we have offered it up as an insurgent vocabulary that can help us make sense of the many forms of death that accompany and condition queer claims to life, visibility and protection. Its attraction lies precisely in its ability to capture seemingly unrelated phenomena simultaneously, and to bring back into a shared plane of intelligibility struggles that we are often told are mutually exclusive. It may help us, for example, to understand figures such as the ‘welfare queen’ (Cohen 1997; Roberts 1997), the ‘monster-terrorist-fag’ (Puar and Rai 2002), the ‘drunk Indian’ (Razack 2012), the ‘black rioter’ (Breggin 1995) and the ‘hateful Muslim youth’ (Haritaworn 2013), as related not only to one another but also to the figure of the ‘queer lover’, whose ascendancy from degeneracy occurs in shared environments shaped by the same murderous processes. What would it mean to enter into kinship with these pathologized figures? How might we – from our various positionalities – explore gender and sexuality beyond these necropolitical moulds?
One way to think crucially and responsibly about queer politics in these times is to refuse the call to become what we call ‘happy queers’ (or, indeed, nostalgic queers) whose recruitment for sexual celebration serves to euphemize and accelerate the death of Others – who for some of us indeed include our own. Instead, we must attend to the forces that prepare queer and indeed non-queer bodies for premature death (see also Cohen 2011). Yet our motivation must be to go much further, to foster the survival of those who were ‘meant to perish’ but are not disposable, to repeat Che Gossett’s moving words (2011: n.p.). What would a politics, queer or otherwise, that is serious about such a resistant and allied task look like? How can we engage in unalienated politics, where safer spaces are not won by reproducing cannibalistic, criminalizing and pathologizing regimes or by inserting ourselves into militarizing and security logics, and where the violence of the most powerful (such as the racist and neo/colonial state, the market, the prison and the hospital) is scandalized at least as loudly as the acts of those thus subjugated?
We see the necropolitical as one in a range of possible tools to explore the possibilities of such a politics, since it helps us make sense of the symbiotic co-presence of life and death, manifested ever more clearly in the cleavages between rich and poor, citizens and non-citizens (and those who can be stripped of citizenship at any moment); the culturally, morally, economically valuable and the pathological; queer subjects invited into life and queerly abjected populations marked for death. Yet this book is in conversation not just with those interested in testing the promises and limits of a specifically necropolitical framework, but also with other trajectories of decolonizing gender and sexuality. More generally, it responds to the new hunger for queerly theorizing about structural violence and injustice, from tightening borders, mass incarceration, and the wars without end, to the everyday, banal workings of the market. On an activist level, this is reflected in the growth of feminist, queer and trans movements that radically refigure that which counts as a ‘queer and trans issue’, by moving away from narrow liberal and identitarian notions of protection, tolerance, victimhood and visibility and towards careful mappings of the bigger picture (Bassichis, Lee and Spade 2011). We are especially encouraged to witness, through international collaborations such as this, the growth of a radical queer and trans activism which, stepping into the footsteps of a re-radicalized anti-racist feminism, seeks to fight oppression in all its intersections and manifestations, including the normalized, the banal, and the systemic (Decolonize Queer 2011; Gender Just 2011; Incite! – Critical Resistance 2001; Incite! 2006; Khalass We’re Vex 2013; SUSPECT 2010; Sylvia Rivera Law Project et al. 2009). If this has so far largely remained parochial to the North American context, we hope that projects such as Queer Necropolitics will help us catch up with the moves of capital and ideology, so that resistant knowledges, too, may begin to cross borders and ‘unmap’ (Razack 2002) the geopolitics of violence, abandonment, and death. We hope that this book will be a stepping stone for forging a transnational lens that is adequate to this task.
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1 That performances of grief per se are not the solution is brought home to us by the growing popularity of activisms that capitalize on subaltern deaths while refusing to become accountable to subaltern lives. See later for our critique of Transgender Day of Remembrance.
2 Patterson’s figure of the slave as ‘socially dead’ thus predates Agamben’s (1998) discussion of ‘homo sacer’. Drawing on Roman law, Agamben argues that ‘homo sacer’ refers to ‘the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime’ and may be killed, but not sacrificed or murdered. For Agamben, ‘homo sacer’ therefore lies outside both divine and human law and exists in a zone of indistinction, as ‘the living dead’ (Agamben 1998: 71). See also Sexton’s (2010) critique, of which we became aware after writing this.
3 Gilmore explains that ‘racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death’ (2007: 28).
4 See Kuntsman (2009) and Haritaworn (2013) for critiques of specifically queer formulations of traumatized citizenship claims in contexts where the figure of ‘the homophobe’ is clearly racialized.
5 The ‘prison industrial complex’ refers to the progressive expansion, privatization and marketization of the prison system, phenomena that have been carefully charted in relation to the US (Davis 2003; Gilmore 2007). The growth of the prison industrial complex is unambiguously linked to the progressive mass incarceration of people of colour and the poor.
6 We might add to this further overlaps and continuities, such as between prisons as sites of punishment and psychiatric institutions as sites of reform, or indeed the school, the job centre, the hospital and the prison (see later).
7 The chapters in this book focus on the prison rather than the psychiatric institution. Nevertheless, the two institutions cannot be examined in isolation from one another and follow similar biopolitical logics, techniques of profiling and reform, and methods of confinement (see Halmi 2008; Haritaworn 2013).
8 Here we are in conversation with Onyinyechukwu Udegbe and Darcel Bullen’s unpublished piece ‘Black Incarceration, Gay Liberation: Mapping Queer Necropolitical Power in the Gay Liberation Movement and Prison Industrial Complex’. Bullen and Udegbe draw our attention to the spatial and temporal convergence of gay liberation and prison expansion in California, which besides being considered home to the ‘gayest’ scene also has the world’s largest prison population. Developing Mbembe’s arguments that political power is ‘necro-erotic’, and that ‘death and freedom are irrevocably interwoven’ (Mbembe 2006: 38), they urge us to understand the seemingly unrelated spaces of the gay scene and the prison as ‘co-animated’. Udegbe’s and Bullen’s case study of California can be read as a challenge to existing theories on the relationship between spaces of exceptionalism (a tolerant/queer California that is co-terminous with whiteness or ascendant whiteness) and spaces of exception (a growing prison system with a growing dis/proportion of black and brown bodies). Thus, the prime mode of inclusion for the majority of people of colour in the US, and especially for black, brown and indigenous people, has been through prison doors. As Michelle Alexander (2010) observes in her widely discussed book, with more black men incarcerated now than enslaved in 1850, this trend is if anything intensifying.
9 We must further problematize another periodization, of the war on terror as the birth date of a state of exception that apparently rolls back an older – more natural – state of freedom and democracy (see Agamben 1998). As Andrea Smith and other discussants at the Critical Ethnic Studies conference (Riverside, March 2011) argued in their US context of settler colonialism, anti-blackness, imperial war and liberal multiculturalism, we can understand the shrinking of rights and liberties in the last decade, not as a threat to Western democracies, but rather as their fulfillment (see also Sexton 2010).
10 Ironically, dominant queer historiographies imagine AIDS as belonging in a romanticized past of collective suffering and radical action that revolved around white gay men. This serves to reify death in the present by cutting off from queer community the majority of queer and trans people living with HIV/AIDS, most of whom are poor, of colour and trans feminine (see Chapter 1 (Che Gossett).