On Rescuable and Expendable Life: Bioavailability, Surplus Time, and Queer Politics of Reproduction

Abstract

This article questions the political branding of settler Canada as a place of sanctuary. I examine two seemingly paradoxical processes: “private-public partnership” in queer refugee settlement programs and migrant detention centres in Canada. This article argues that rescue and capture are not contradictory, but dialectical features of human bioeconomy. Such an economy renders the reproduction of life, vitality, and time bioavailable for extraction. In this sense, the queer refugee as rescuable and the detained as expendable are both the subject of value extraction. Although human bioeconomic processes do not promise life vitality, queer refugees and migrants do find ways to assemble a liveable life. Taking cues from Saidiya Hartman’s “innovators of life genre,” I discuss community building as processes of queer reproduction of liveability, countering bioeconomic violence.