Figure 8.1 Alexis’ map
Necropolitical regulations of trans feminine bodies of colour in the nation’s capital
In this chapter, I consider how necropolitical geospatial policies regulate, in both expulsion and discard, trans feminine bodies2 of colour on the streets of Washington, DC. These policies, such as the prostitution free zone (PFZ), serve to illuminate how exclusionary practices reflect gendered, sexualized, raced and embodied elements of neoliberal citizenship demands. Specifically, the geo-social function of the PFZ reveals how necropolitical ideologies articulate with space and homo(necro)nationalism, wherein the visibility of trans (feminine) bodies of colour in economically viable space is articulated as a threat to safety and the presence of criminality.
Around 11 pm, the HIPS van (‘Helping Individual Prostitutes’ – or ‘People’, depending who you ask – ‘Survive’) rolls up in front of the house. Janis is in the ‘hot seat’ tonight. She rolls down her window, beckons out to me and, armed with an apple and caffeinated gum, I slide into the back seat, taking care not to knock over the precariously situated pitchers of lemonade at my feet.
I’m tired, even with the two cups of coffee sloshing in my stomach. The past several weeks – months even – have been hard. Between the recent murder of Lashai Mclean, the shootings of trans women along Eastern Avenue and this week’s vicious attack on three young trans women of colour by a drunk, off-duty police officer,3 a lot of those who are among HIPS’ clients, volunteers or allies are tired. Many trans activists are angry. And many of those working the streets are terrified. But, perhaps most frustrating of all, the media, the mayor and the majority of local ‘LGBT’ groups in the city seem unaware, or at least not too concerned with, how quotidian this level of violence has become for many of the young black and Latina trans women we will see tonight. The violence is not new; rather, through the right confluence of events, and the shocking behaviour of an off-duty member of the Metropolitan Police Department, these recent events have captured some local attention.
As the van cuts through the humid summer air, Susan, the team leader and driver for the evening, yells names over the pounding music, introducing me to April, a newly minted volunteer on only her second night out on the van. We make conversation as we attempt to organize and decipher the contents of the bathtub-size bin of condoms, lube, and paper bags that sits between us, illuminated only by the occasional brush of light from the street lamps cruising by. Yes, we have enough of the Tuxedos but we’re out of the Loves. Shit, we’re out of Magnums and – as Janis yells back – with the budget cuts we need to limit the Magnums to request only and, even then, only a few. OK, we’ll push the Orange and Grays and try to get rid of some of these damn city dispensed – but free – off-brands that crowd the bin.
We pull up to the HIPS office around 11:30 pm, collect the bins from the van, and after unlocking the rusting iron gate shielding the convenience store-style door underneath, we shuffle our heavy loads down the hallway and down two flights of stairs to another padlocked unmarked door. ‘Why’s it always smell like weed down here?’, Janis wonders out loud as she juggles the box of syringes and tips with a jug of lemonade in the other arm. I wonder the same thing. HIPS’ strip mall location, across the street from what little remains of DCs public housing, shares its walls with a discount furniture store and a boarded-up office. This location is a new one for them, a departure from their previous home: a dilapidated and cramped office on the other side of the city. That office, poorly ventilated, fan filled in the summer and sweater demanding in the winter, was located in the heart of Adams Morgan. Adams Morgan, a thoroughly gentrified neighbourhood in the northwestern quadrant of the city, is a beloved and popular drinking destination point for many of the city’s up-and-coming young politicos. Masses of white 20-somethings swarm the narrow sidewalks along 19th Street Friday and Saturday nights, escaping their university-based enclaves for an evening out. Come last call, the taxi cabs clog the road, all awaiting their turn to whisk the drunk back to their college campuses, often only moments after their evening libations have found their way from the stomach to the crowded concrete gutter below. As the neighbourhood grew in popularity eventually HIPS could no longer afford the rapidly rising rents for the office and was displaced to this comparatively spacious and cheap unit in the northeastern quadrant of the city. Yet, as HIPS’ staff quickly discovered, many of HIPS’ clients, though living only a short distance away, don’t feel safe coming to this new location, known for gun- and street-based violence.
We pack the van tight with prophylactics, candy, works and related supplies along with enough lubricant to cram the Washington monument into the Pentagon. We’re running late; it’s almost 1 am and we have a lot of folks to see tonight before the streets quiet down and Janis turns the van back towards the office at 5 am. We settle into our seats and begin our journey around the district with the hope that when sunlight eventually illuminates the dim streets, there will be no frantic early morning emails circulating about another body found. In these moments, moving through the interstitial time between dark and light, I can’t help but silently wonder what compels so many to ignore the deaths at our doorsteps: our own communal failure to uphold one of the most fundamental of sanctified US and international human rights: the right to live.
In many ways, the route HIPS takes around DC to provide condoms, syringe exchange and HIV testing to those working, or just hanging out, on the streets provides a spatial template for how gender and racialized ideologies regulating who belongs where, and why, articulate with state-sanctioned violence. The route HIPS takes is determined by where potential clients, and others who may benefit from their services, can be accessed. HIPS’ clients, and their target populations, include street-based sex workers, many of who are also young trans women of colour. Significantly, these women report, both anecdotally and in official capacities (Alliance for a Safe & Diverse DC 2008) an extraordinarily high incidence of violence, from those they encounter on the street to those charged with protecting the public, such as the police. Disturbingly, this violence is ignored or erased in media reports, at the governmental level, and, perhaps most disconcerting among most local and national ‘LGBT’ rights organizations. My concern here is to unpack how this category of a queer necropolitical other, in this context the disposable brown trans feminine body, is constructed and articulated within the cityscapes of and political practices within Washington, DC, the symbolic belly of the beast of US nationalism and pride.
As context, it is known that between 2000 and 2011, 11 trans feminine persons of colour (primarily black, all but one younger than 25 years old) were murdered. Out of this group, only two of these murders have been solved. This ‘homicide clearance rate’ of less than 20 per cent is roughly one-quarter of the general homicide clearance rate in DC, which is reported to be nearly 80 per cent (MPD 2010: 18). Additionally, of the numerous reports of violence that HIPS receives with unrelenting regulatory, very few are ‘cleared’, taken seriously, or managed appropriately by police. As a result, fewer and fewer instances of violence and assault are reported to MPD out of, at best, frustration and, at worst, fear of additional violence at the hands of the police themselves (Alliance for a Safe & Diverse DC 2008).
As I explore in this chapter, this disregard – the complicit exceptionality of violence and death of trans feminine bodies of colour – reflects not only a form of queer necropolitics but also a form of what I term necronationalism that dually relies on hetero- and homonationalistic discourses of viable life. Necronationalism, built on necropolitics, focuses on the ways in which the erasure and death of the bad (queer) citizen–worker body carves out the ideological and physical space for the good (queer) citizen–worker body to emerge. As this relates to mainstream LGBT disinterest in this kind of queer suffering, we can highlight the necro-nationalistic projects of homonationalistic queer regulatory ideologies through the formation of a homonecronationalism. Specifically, I build here on Duggan’s notion of homonormativity (Duggan 2003) and Puar’s discussion of homo-nationalism and queer necropolitics (Puar 2007) to highlight the queer regulatory formations that further nation-state sanctioned violence on the queer bodies of those ostensibly within the borders of the LGBT ‘community’.
While a queer necropolitics already implicitly refers to the role of the nation-state in the power to let live and let die, I utilize homonecronationalism to highlight how the technology of letting live and letting die functions to serve and promote homonationalist projects in the reproduction of viable queer citizens (e.g. those fulfilling the requirements of homonormative ideological reproductivity) from those otherwise considered included within LGBT rights paradigms. These regulatory ideologies, or rules, work as self-fulfilling ideals. Indeed, the rule, in creating the exception and ‘maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule’ (Agamben 1998: 18). That is, in the creation of states and spaces of ‘exception’ – wherein the death of a citizen is acceptable – the exception acts to concretize the borders of this acceptability. In this context, queer necropolitics, as referring to the relationships between sexualities, violence and new modalities for population control, provides the tool to not only unpack how queer(ed) bodies are allowed to die but, in a homonecronationalist sense, how these queer deaths serve homonationalist agendas which valorize whiteness, domesticity and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture invested in consumption (Duggan 2002). Puar extends the discussion of ‘mechanics of queerness as a regulatory frame of biopolitics’ as including ‘erecting celebratory queer liberal subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the sexually pathological and deviant populations targeted for death (queerness as population)’ (Puar 2007: 24). In this context, the ‘terrorist’ comes from within in the form of trans feminine persons of colour – always-already-criminalized as economic deviants – as a threat to homonormative desires in nationhood.
I explore the production of (homo)necronationalism by first addressing how the deregulation of capital, as the life force of the US nation-state, shapes the landscapes of the city through gentrification projects. Capital, as forms of monetary, ideological or cultural modalities of power, has the capacity to both create and destroy value of space, and the bodies within it. I then turn to how these capital processes impact somatically anchored bodies, which are organized as biopolitically worthy or necropolitically disposable via nation-state intervention. Next I consider how neoliberally informed spatial policies of exclusion, such as the prostitution free zone (henceforth, PFZ) exemplify how the policymakers, and developers, in DC displace and criminalize always-already suspect bodies. In particular, these policies function to target trans women of colour, who, as I explore in this chapter, come to symbolize the antithesis of nation-state sanctioned embodiment. I then discuss how trans community members and activists living in DC have discussed the role of the PFZ in their lives. Building on this, I turn to how DC officials have responded to the mounting violence against trans feminine bodies of colour in DC. In short, this chapter considers how interrelationships between local, national and transnational ideologies of citizenship, sexuality/gender, embodiment, race and space coalesce around structures and tools of displacement and erasure. I consider here how, and why, these tools are deployed in the name of preserving safety and security, yet function to erase, both metaphorically and literally, visible trans feminine bodies of colour from the Washington, DC cityscapes.
To be clear, the murders and hypercriminalization of trans women of colour in DC do not simply indicate an intolerant public or urban-localized trans phobias; this violence, and the reaction of those in power, are directly linked to racialized and gendered systems of disregard and disposability borne out of centuries of enslavement, genocide and oppression of American Indians, blacks and coloured ‘Others’, as well as women, queers and gendered ‘Others’.4 Instead, just as ‘driving while black’ refers directly to the systemic practice of racial profiling in policing practices, ‘walking while transgender’, in the context of its original iteration5 and within the context of this chapter, refers specifically to the ‘crime’ trans women of colour ‘commit’ of visibility.
Spatially and geographically defined, the ‘city’, and how bodies come to be regulated by its terrain, is a powerful site of ideological work. In thinking about the particular spaces in which the regulation of bodies at work and place can be visualized, the ‘inner city’ becomes a ‘soft spot for the implementation of neoliberal ideals’ (Hackworth 2007: 13). Gentrification, in addition to the destruction of public services, including affordable housing, clinics and community meeting space in deference to corporate development, ‘can be seen as the material and symbolic knife-edge of neoliberal urbanism representing the erosion of the physical and symbolic embodiment of neoliberal urbanism’s putative other – the Keynesian activist state’ (Hackworth 2007: 98). This is particularly true within the cityscapes, wherein the combination of limited space, fluctuating economies and shifting cash flows literally transform the physical landscapes into nearly unrecognizable forms of redevelopment.
The cityscape provides a productive ground in which to visualize processes of neoliberalism, nationalisms and bio/necropolitics. In the context of trans-gender, transsexual or gender-non-conforming bodies and practices, particular forms of gender transgression operate as a threat to sex/gender normativity. For those bodies that fail to be capitally productive (e.g. engaging in the formal economy) along with failing to be ideologically productive, displacement and erasure are inevitable.
We can begin to understand the ways in which bodies are utilized by systems of power through notions of biopower and, as a flipside, necropolitics. Most simply, biopower highlights the ways in which human bodies come to be regarded, manipulated and regulated by sovereign powers in a quest for ideological and capital productivity. Biopower is ‘a constitutive form of power that takes as its object human life’ (Foucault 1977: 212). Biopolitically, neoliberalistic modes of governance capitalize on the ‘capacity and potential of individuals and the population as living resources’ (Ong 2006: 6). In other words, the potential for the productivity of the body hinges on the cooperation and investment on the part of the subject insofar as it is permitted to engage in projects of productivity.
In many ways, we can conceptualize the violence of gentrification as a way in which necropolitics articulates with space. As opposed to biopolitics, which concerns itself with how bodies can be made productive, necropolitics explores the exceptionality of death among bodies identified as disposable. Indeed, ‘the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’ (Mbembe 2003: 11). It is the power to let live and the power to let die. It is through these ‘biopolitical breaks’ that ‘enable the power to kill’ (Osuri 2009: 35). Thus taxonomies of race, sexualized and gendered difference, created through biopolitical technologies, serve to demarcate that which is valuable from that which is not (e.g. the good citizen versus the bad citizen). It is within these zones of exceptionality that the homo sacer, Agamben’s formulation of the body that may be killed with impunity but not in sacrifice (Agamben 1998), is designed. Those bodies marked as ideologically suspect through biopolitical evaluation occupy a state wherein value can only be found within death – occupying a subjectivity that promises neither death nor life.
Gentrification carves out literal geographic spaces of exceptionality, wherein the management of sovereignty and sovereign bodies does not sit within the nation-state but rather is co-managed by the nation-state and capital investors. It is this relationship between the nation-state and the land developers that creates these ‘death worlds’ where destruction, erasure and death become acceptable. The way necropolitics articulates with bodies in space in gentrifying spaces represents the expression of ‘necrocapitalism’ (Banerjee 2008). Gentrification, as a kind of necrocapitalistic reformation of space, renders bodies that stand in the way of capital productivity as pathological and malignant tumours in an otherwise healthy expansion of capitally productive landscapes. Specifically, the necrocapitalist ‘practices of organizational accumulation that involve violence, dispossession, and death’ provide the logic that buttresses the destruction of public housing and low-income neighbourhoods, as well as the bodies that once occupied those spaces (Banerjee 2008: 1543). As I explore in this chapter, it is through unpacking the collusions between the government and private industry in the elimination of unproductive (e.g. immigrant, brown and queer) bodies that illuminates the queer homo sacer of the DC urban landscape.
Prostitution free zones (PFZs), and other spaces of hyperpolicing, function to keep particular bodies out through police and policy based regulation. Specifically, PFZs, deployed globally, serve to regulate particular classed, raced and gendered bodies. Zones of exclusion, zero-tolerance zones and other similar geospatial policies are not and have not been limited to Washington, DC. Rather, exclusionary spaces have historically served a broader societal role to delineate and segregate those bodies deemed sick, pathological, undesirable and, in some cases, disposable. Proponents of PFZs may consider them as a kind of ‘policy of choice’ wherein the geospatial representation of the sovereignty of the nation-state, in this case the Metropolitan Police Department, works to criminalize those engaged in illegal activities which they are believed to have a ‘choice’ to commit. Theoretically, PFZs have also been situated as a spatial formation of sex work (Hubbard, Matthews and Scoular 2008: 137), a zone of exclusion (of some activities and/or bodies over others; Scharff 2005: 324) and as a way in which to dislocate the ideologically and capitally unproductive homo sacer sex worker body (Sanchez 2004: 862). PFZs are unlike other spatial regulations of sex work, such as ‘the Magdalene asylum, the state-registered brothel and the red-light district’ (Hubbard et al. 2008: 137), which work to keep particular bodies and practices within their bounds. Instead, PFZs work to keep out those bodies and practices deemed suspect.
Within Washington, DC, the first laws governing sex work were passed in 1910 and 1914 (Alliance for a Safe & Diverse DC 2008: 7), with laws governing solicitation dating to 1935. The first PFZ was put into effect on Friday 8 September 2006 as a way in which to protect the ‘health and safety’ of residents, according to Charles H. Ramsey, Chief of the Metropolitan Police under Mayor Anthony Williams. To be clear, sex work, solicitation and other sex work-related practices were already illegal under DCs general law; the PFZ would stand as a necropolitical spatial and temporal hyper-enforcement of these laws. Immediately following the first implementation of a PFZ in DC, the MPD released the following statement on its website:6
001 ‘While some people may
002 still want to characterize prostitution as
003 a “victimless crime”,
004 nothing could be further from the truth
005 for those residents who must endure
006 the presence of prostitutes
007 and their paraphernalia
008 in our neighborhoods,’ Chief Ramsey said.
009 ‘Our city has made great progress
010 over the last several years in reducing prostitution –
011 in particular, the presence of brazen street walkers in many of
012 our communities.
013 But we know we must do even more to combat this very serious problem.
14 The new Prostitution Free Zone law
015 will give our officers one more tool
016 for moving prostitutes and their Johns
017 off the corner and out of our neighborhoods.’
(Ramsey’s PFZ Statement, MPD 2006)
As evidenced in this text, Ramsey constructs a very clear binary between that which is ‘us’ and that which is ‘them’. Ramsey situates ‘us’ as those ‘residents who must endure’ (1:005–006) and ‘them’, as the prostitutes (1:007). He continually reproduces this imagined binary, wherein neighbourhoods (1:009, 1:017), communities (1:012), officers (1:015) belong to ‘us’, the good landowning citizen, protected by the nation-state’s soldiers: the officers and the chief of police himself. Ramsey clearly structures ‘them’, the ideological other here, as the ‘brazen’ prostitute’, who pollutes with disregard the neighbourhood with their mere presence (1:006), ambiguous paraphernalia (1:007) and their ‘Johns’ (1:016). He situates these prostitute bodies as dangerous, dirty and a threat to safety of the public; within this paradigm, sex workers are placeless entities, embodying illegality, always corrupting the moral landscapes of the good and incapable of community and residence. In short, their bodies exemplify that which the nation-state deplores: that which not only should, but must, be destroyed. Disturbingly, Ramsey engages here in a kind of ‘population management and socio-spatial control with discourses of community, risk and security’ as a means to subdue the potential to render the ‘prostitute’ a citizen (Sanchez 2004: 871). That is, these bodies are not deserving of nation-state protection, home and place but are, instead, situated as foreign, reviled and dangerous.
According to the MPD, PFZs are deployed in areas either experiencing high rates of arrests for solicitation and prostitution-related offenses or in response to complaints from local residents (MPD 2010). To be clear, these areas do not necessarily constitute the areas of greatest sex work within the city; rather, they constitute spaces of liminality and contested use, nearly always situated along gentrifying borderlands. In addition to more ‘stereotypical’ acts of prostitution, such as approaching cars and offering sex in return for money, the following all constitute legitimate grounds for arrest and forced removal, according to the MPD policy, as:
Information from a reliable source indicating that a person being observed routinely engages in or is currently engaging in prostitution or prostitution-related offenses within the Prostitution Free Zone … Knowledge by an officer that the person is a known participant in prostitution or prostitution-related offenses.
According to this policy, if one has ever been convicted or has been ‘known’ to engage in ‘prostitution or prostitution-related offenses’ their presence within the confines of an active PFZ constitutes grounds for removal and arrest. That is, these bodies are marked, permanently, as deviant, pathological and inherently criminal.
In many ways PFZs sit at the intersection of the ‘juridico-political and the biopolitical’ (Mitchell 2006: 102). The exclusion of ‘undesirables’ from the urban terrain ‘must be seen as part of a broader process by which the law includes, weighs and assesses all urban denizens’ (Carr, Brown and Herbert 2009: 1962). That is, deviant bodies come to serve as necropolitical anchoring points, indexing that which is morally suspect and intrinsically disposable. This kind of ‘exclusionary regime’ emphasize ‘the undeserving and the unreformable nature of deviants’ (Beckett and Western 2001: 44). That is, similar to the cordoning off of prisoners and other ‘enemies of the state’, zones of exclusion work to physically and socio-politically cut off bodies spatially from the general public. Thus, if we situate one of the basic rights of ‘citizenship’ as the ‘right to access and use specific kinds of space’, zones of exclusion thus operate to delineate between those who qualify as potential citizens, and those who do not (Hubbard 2001: 54).
Additionally, PFZs in DC operate in line with what is expected of a ‘post-justice city’ in which urban policies are emerging ‘based on social and racial containment, the purification of public spaces, the subsidization of elite consumption, the privatization of social reproduction, the normalization of economic insecurity and pre-emptive crime control’ (Peck 2004: 225). This kind of spatial governmentality, wherein the nation-state’s policies work to ‘manipulate the spatial order of a region or community’ works to materialize this neoliberal ethos (Sanchez 2004: 262). Thus, PFZs do not actually attend to the crux of the ‘crime’ or ‘criminal’ but rather merely shift the practices to a different space not deemed as valuable as that within a PFZ and, in this case, this implicitly refers to racial and gendered practices.
The particular ways different trans conceptualizations of space coalesce around PFZs provides a powerfully clear image for how classed, racialized and (cis)sexualist policies and powers impact trans communities in DC. In early 2007 members of the DC Trans Coalition, including myself, began interviewing trans community members about their experiences as a ‘trans’ identifying person living in the District. This research provided the data for the initial phase of a DC-specific trans ‘needs assessment’ conducted by community members in DC (DCTC 2011). As an element of this research, we utilized ‘map making’ as a conduit to discuss lived experience with space and place (a technique explored within gay map making in Leap 2005: 238; see also Leap 2009: 205). In this context, community-produced maps of a city allow for conceptualizations of space and place to be visualized in new and innovative ways (Bhagat and Mogel 2007: 6; Geltmaker 1997: 234). Moreover, it is through a ‘subversion’ of normative maps that the streets and spaces of the city are rendered dynamic spaces of lived experience (Perkins 2003: 345; Pinder 1996: 405; see also, in a specifically ‘queer’ sense, Halberstam 2005).
At the close of this initial phase, we had collected a total of 108 maps and narratives from trans-identifying people living in DC, wherein, significantly, 55 per cent of all participants referred to the ‘strolls’ as areas they consider trans space (DCTC 2011: 2). Strolls, or areas identified by community members or police as areas in which sex workers gather to find clients, were the topic of greatest representation within the entire first phase.7 Importantly, these areas were not discussed as simply spaces in which one works but rather were overwhelmingly situated as places in which one goes to find community.
Alexis, a black trans woman in her mid-30s and also a DC native, was one of the participants of this project who discussed her relationship to the strolls in DC. She spoke with sadness about all the places in the city she used to go but that she could not go to anymore. She produced a map of DC that represents a ghost image of that which once was (Figure 8.1).
Figure 8.1 Alexis’ map
At first glance, her map follows a traditional map of DC, taking care to identify major roads framing the off-centre diamond shape of the city. But, with deeper inspection, her maps represent a particular series of streets and places that she intermittently labels with an emphatic ‘Hell No’. She lists out bars and clubs, some existing and others torn down to make way for a baseball stadium (discussed in rich detail in Leap 2009). She also marks out THE, or Transgender Health Empowerment, an organization working to provide support and services to trans women seeking to get out of sex work. The streets she includes on her map are areas project participants identified as places they could meet and hang out with other trans women of colour. For Alexis, as someone with a criminal record related to sex work, and as someone who has struggled with substance reliance issues, these streets are laden with a particular kind of danger. Alexis faces the possibility of incarceration were she to engage with her community in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
We see a similar kind of battle taking place in Danielle’s map in Figure 8.2.
A black trans woman in her mid-20s, Danielle depicts the city as one where THE is featured prominently in the middle of the map, with the title caption of ‘This place has helped me a great deal’. Near the bottom of the map, she features her church, another beacon of support. In her map, THE is a central figure that overshadows the presence of K St and Eastern Ave, both known sex worker strolls. That is, through this juxtaposition, she situates THE as operating to displace the importance, and danger, these streets may serve in her life. The support, and community, THE can provide serves to supplant that which many others in this project have found on those streets. THE is the ‘good’ space and the strolls on K St and Eastern Ave, where Lashai Mclean was murdered and two other trans women shot, occupy spaces to be avoided.
Figure 8.2 Danielle’s map
Following several particularly violent months for young trans women of colour (along the strolls and otherwise) the Mayor’s Office responded to growing public outcry and offered up a solution: they would hold an employment training class for trans community members. As evidenced in this proposed solution to address violence against trans women, bodies can presumably shift from necropolitical disposability to biopolitical worth, but only through playing the role of the good neoliberal citizen. Yet, the limits of this shift and how one might authenticate one’s ability to be productive as a trans subject (Irving 2008) highlight how a ‘recourse to normativity’ erases or prevents any salient political or social difference (Aizura 2006: 302). For trans women of colour, access to this neoliberal productivity may prove impossible.
While no statistics exist for trans employment rates in DC, the only nationwide study conducted about trans communities reveals that unemployment and underemployment are profound issues for many trans community members nationally. The first nation-wide report of its kind, conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in 2009, reported grim findings as to the general livelihoods of the general trans population. Respondents experienced twice the rate of unemployment compared to the general population with 97 per cent reporting harassment or mistreatment on the job due to their transgender status. Moreover, according to this study, 15 per cent of trans respondents reported living on $10,000 a year or less, twice as high as the general population. Finally, 19 per cent have been or are homeless; 11 per cent have faced an eviction; and 26 per cent have been forced to find temporary space (NGLTF 2009). Other studies across the US report similar findings, with trans women of colour often facing the greatest degree of home-lessness, un/underemployment and police abuse and discrimination (Clements-Nolle, Marx, Guzman and Katz 2001: 915; Davis and Wertz 2010: 467; Wilson et al. 2009: 902). To be certain, these statistics are a stark reminder that many trans community members do not have the same kind of access to employment others along the LGB spectrum may enjoy. Moreover, trans persons of colour, particularly those identifying within a feminine spectrum, may turn to street-based work in order to survive. As a result, many are more likely to experience victimization, whether from the general population or from police.
In September 2011, the Mayor’s Office began holding weekly meetings between the Mayor, Vincent Gray, his Liaison to the LGBT community, Jeffrey Richardson, and the Chief of Police, Cathy Lanier, with trans activists and community members. As an immediate way to address joblessness and unemployment, Gray’s office offered to hold a trans-specific ‘Project Empowerment’ programme, an employment training and placement programme.
Project Empowerment is a pre-existing 5 million dollar work-training programme offered by the Department of Employment Services (DOES) to find viable work for those facing institutional barriers. As detailed on the DOES website, Project Empowerment is:
[A] welfare-to-work program [that] begins with orientation and pre-employment assessment at which time barriers to employment are diagnosed, and an individually tailored employability plan is devised for each participant … these components are tied together through a continuous regimen of case management and job coaching, which provides support for the participant and employer.
(DOES 2011)
Importantly, like many government-initiated programmes, Project Empowerment requires several key standards be met for one to qualify for the programme. As hinted in the DOES description, one cannot be currently participating in any publicly subsidized programmes, including foods stamps or disability. Participants are paid DCs hourly minimum wage ($8.25 per hour) for their participation in the daily course (to be paid only when one completes the course). Following a month-long series of classes guiding students on how to dress properly and act professionally, participants are then placed with local partner agencies (such as the DC Metro system) for employment and are continued to be paid at minimum wage. Following several months of this initial placement, the partner agency is then invited to hire the participant officially, but not required to do so.
This programme provides a very clear structure for how the capitally (and ideologically) unproductive, in this case victimized trans women (predominantly of colour), are to be recuperated by the nation-state. The demands of this programme outline how one is to access productive citizenship. Rather than regard citizenship as a simple ‘rights and duties’ model, I employ here a definition of citizenship that demands ‘the performance and contestation of the behavior, ideas, and images of the proper citizen’ (Manalansan 2003: 14). Indeed, one is not simply born into citizenship; one must actively cultivate and reproduce ideologies sanctioned by the nation-state.
In short, the Mayor’s solution to curb violence against trans feminine bodies of colour functioned to create a binary wherein some are granted the opportunity to claim biopolitical worth at the cost of divorcing themselves from a community that is to be left at the necropolitical wayside. This form of ‘reclamation’ while superficially rendering these subjects of potential worth, instead functions as a form of ‘differential exclusion’ (building on Sanchez 2004).8 That is, rather than ‘including’ these subjects within a typography of biopolitical worth, as ‘differential inclusion’ would function, differential exclusion ‘focuses on those groups whose labor is disacknowledged entirely, and who are consequently organized relative to categories of criminality and to their exclusion as subjects of labor and biopower’ (Sanchez 2004: 861). In this context, Project Empowerment always-already situates certain subjects as unproductive and, as Project Empowerment graduates can attest to, the failure to secure gainful employment following the end of the programme then stands to reiterate the failure of the subject to become biopolitically worthy.
Project Empowerment, as a singular solution, fails to address the structural violences that promote the ongoing victimization of trans feminine bodies in the streets. Significantly, Gray did not offer to reconsider how the PFZs force women into working more isolated and dangerous areas or how DCs own policies are facilitating the wrongful criminalization and death of trans women in the streets. Instead, his administration offered up a way the women could redeem themselves, as potential citizen–worker bodies, further implicating the violence against trans feminine bodies as earned, if not deserved.
The ways in which DC officials have managed the violence against visible trans feminine bodies of colour within DC landscapes represents a form of what I discussed as necronationalism. As an extension, the ways LGBT groups have ignored this violence – deaths within their own community – reflect homonecronationalistic work. Importantly, homonormativity reproduces the heteronormative ‘ideology of American individualistic liberalism’ rather than attempting to ‘queer’ notions of the ‘good citizen’ (Seidman 2001: 323). Those bodies failing to engage in a homo ‘recourse to normality’ (Aizura 2006:3 02) are thus denied access to queer citizenship.
While the issues raised by participants in their narratives and maps in this project ranged across a wide array of topics and issues, rarely, if ever, did participants express concern over the topics most national LGBT civil rights groups focus on: the right to serve in the military, getting married to their loved one, adopting children, or even the impact of hate crimes legislation – all political mainstays for the US’ largest national LGBT rights organizations (the Human Rights Campaign, HRC 2011, Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, as indexed through the repeated use of ‘equality’, GLAAD 2012, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, as reflected by topics of publications and research, NGLTF 2012; and Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians And Gays, as issues that relatives and allies of LGBT people should be concerned with, PFLAG 2012). Contrasted to these issues, the spatial depictions collected in this project, and the discussions that emerged around them, focused on issues of employment, access to health and legal resources, violence and trans coalitional support and empowerment. Additionally, at the local level, groups and organizations that are intended to support LGBT persons were criticized for their lack of trans specificity or support. When set in conjunction with the silence from groups such as HRC, GLAAD and PFLAG after any of the murders of trans women in DC from 2010 to 2011, this reflects a larger structural lapse of meaningful and productive inclusion of the T in LGBT for all trans subjects and perhaps, more importandy, how homonationalism functions in conjunction with necropolitics to support the exceptionality of death for those Ts not ‘worth’ caring for. The refusal of the nation-state, or many queer publics, to acknowledge and attend to the relentless pain inflicted on these bodies and minds reflects an engagement with nationalistic ideologies that find these bodies to be ideologically and capitally unproductive. The continued revitalization of this violence, set alongside lukewarm governmental concern, serves to continually resituate trans feminine bodies of colour as not only criminal bodies, but as acceptably disposable bodies and subjects.
One of the participants of a needs assessment project I helped conduct is now dead. She9 was murdered. Early one morning, still blowing the hot mist rising from the glossy black surface of my morning coffee, I came across this fact. In that terrible moment, my own vitality thrust out against her death, my heart pounded and an arid desert spread through my mouth. I gripped my searing hot mug in my hands, letting the heat sting my skin while I stared back at the images and words staring at me. As the member of the group responsible for maintaining the confidential records of who participated in the project I was, in that moment, the only one who knew how specific elements of her private life story bled into the public narrative of her death story. I was overwhelmed. I desperately wanted to share this now bridged narrative of two disjointed stories: how her life articulated with her death in truly painful ways. But, who was I to decide how, and why, confidentiality might be broken? Who was I to decide what elements of her life should be linked to her death? What are we to do with the death stories of those who had only consensually offered their life stories? Had she died so that others might live? I spent several days struggling to determine how my own ethics articulate and contradict, as an anthropologist, an activist, and as a white, gender normative appearing male, enabled with all the power and privilege afforded to the segment of the trans community of which I am a member.
I raised these questions during a meeting with local trans community members and activists involved with the needs assessment project. Instead of finding clarity in that room I was reminded of how high the stakes really are, and how the death of a friend, a niece, a daughter or a complete stranger is both an opportunity to loudly mobilize and the time for respectful silence. As the conversation began, suggestions were delicately offered: ‘What if we just don’t connect their map to their death? Would that be enough anonymity?’ ‘As long as we didn’t use their actual name, it should be okay, right?’ But as each voice added to the growing din of ethical and moral confusion, the sense of where the grey area began and ended was increasingly smudged. ‘What if we ask her family what they want?’, one person added, only to be swiftly cut short with a stern and hurt, ‘Her family hated her.’ The voices grew louder, at times choking over the words, tears began to flow and some sought comfort in the shoulders near them. There was no clear answer. There was no distinct right and no distinct wrong. Her death had been her death and her life had been her life. Our choices to make either productive in her absence stem out of our own desires: she can neither consent nor deny our desires to render vitality out of that which is no more. Instead, we are left with the macabre paradox of how to manage death with so much life at stake. At the close of that meeting, Carla, a Latina trans woman and a veteran and pioneer of trans activisms in DC for the past 30 years left us with these words of wisdom: ‘We wouldn’t be where we are today if we hadn’t been using the bodies of the dead to get us here.’
Indeed, violence, precarity and death are, to activists like Carla and to many of the clients of HIPS and other direct service agencies in DC, a reality of daily life. Necropolitics, for Carla, and perhaps even for the academics engaging with it, transforms death into productive entry points for engaging with structural violence and systemic inequity. Yet, rather than utilize the death of some trans subjects to represent trans loss through imperialist projects of reclamation (as discussed in Lamble 2008) or as the opportunity to simply mourn the loss of life, activists like Carla have identified how to structure dying and death into platforms of change for the living. Even within the barren death worlds and inside a seeming wasteland of corpses, fissures can be wrenched open through which vitality, and life, emerge.
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1 DC-based trans and sex worker activist Darby Hickey discusses the use of this phrase as borne out of the ‘almost constant profiling of transgender and transsexual women (particularly women of color) as sex workers by police’ (Hickey 2008).
2 Throughout this chapter, I intentionally refer to the body of the subject, rather than the subject, in contexts where I want to highlight the situated reduction of subjectivity to flesh. That is, in contexts where the subject is denied subjectivity, such as in the criminalization and hyper-embodiment of trans feminine persons of colour, I make reference to this body within the text. My appreciation to Morgan Bassichis for noting this distinction.
3 In this 26 August 2011 event, off-duty police officer Kenneth Furr solicited sex from the trans women of colour, whom he eventually shot at in the car. After refusing his solicitations, they were threatened with a gun by Furr, leading to a series of events wherein they, accompanied by several friends, were trapped in a car with Furr who shot directly at them while he stood atop the hood of the car. Ultimately, Kenneth Fun-was found guilty in October 2012 of only two of the eight charges filed against him -assault with a dangerous weapon and solicitation of prostitution - and would serve only a suspended sentence of 14 months, the time he spent awaiting trial, of a three-year and 30-day prison sentence. At the time of writing, February 2013, Furr, while only facing a three-year probation for his attacks, has indicated he is appealing the conviction (Riley 2013).
4 As exemplified in Bassichis and Spade, in this volume.
5 As recounted by Darby Hickey in her discussion of the phrase, personal communication. My appreciation to Jin Haritaworn for stressing the implicit racialization of this phrase.
6 I have reformatted the original print of this statement to allow a more focused reading on ideological frames.
7 As context, 19 per cent of participants were male identifying, FTM or identified within a trans masculine spectrum. 80 per cent of participants were female identifying, MTF or identified within a trans feminine spectrum. 81 per cent of participants self-identified as people of colour, while 19 per cent identified as white. Among those that identified as people of colour, 31 per cent of participants identified as Latina/o and 50 per cent identified as African American or black. The reported ages of participants ranged between 18 to 83, with a mean reporting age of mid-30s. All demographic information was provided by participants during the data collection process. Not all individuals included the most popular demographic features within their self-identification.
8 My gratitude to Silvia Posocco for identifying the utility of differential exclusion in this context.
9 To be clear, this is not to claim, or deny, this was a trans feminine-identifying person.