Governing and securing the territorial volumes of burial: transformations in the political economy and domestic geopolitics of death

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores how transformations in the domestic geopolitics of burial space has produced new logics in respect of property, security and capacity as forms of volumetric and material governance. Focusing on the everyday practices of municipal burial space during the late 19th century in England, this paper builds on feminist political economy approaches to interrogate the emergence of volumetric securitization through transformations in the material politics of burial across a changing socio-technical environment. The volumetric geopolitics of burial shows how embodied experiences and practices of interment illuminate specific class-based death cultures and economies through intimate and affective ecologies of governance. Drawing on examples of two cemeteries located on the Wirral Peninsula during the implementation of the Burial Laws and Amendments Acts (1852–85), this paper looks at how burial volumes are governed, understood, contested and coexist, and the affective and embodied sensibilities that mobilize securitizing behaviours across cemetery space.