Queer Necropolitics Research Articles

‘The glowing fireflies’: Invisible activism under China’s queer necropolitics

In China, the escalating repression of gender and sexual diversity has given rise to ‘queer necropolitics’. ‘Queer necropolitics’ – a concept we build on – refers to the hegemonic ability to determine who is allowed to suffer, survive, or thrive. We examine China’s sustained re-enforcement of traditional gender norms, which has rendered queer communities non-existent from official recognition. In this context, we aim to understand how China’s state queer necropolitics has shaped queer organising in the country. From 2021 to 2022, we conducted 26 semi-structured interviews with a diverse cohort of self-identified LGBTIQ+ members and activists across 12 provinces in China. We find that the interplay of legal invisibility and politicised, moralised visibility has placed queer communities under hegemonic governance techniques of suppression. The paper argues that China’s queer necropolitics has established invisible activism. The juxtaposition of invisibility with activism denotes the quiet, implicit, and everyday embodied acts of communal care among queer communities as a form of resistance. Building on the metaphor of ‘glowing fireflies’ shared by a research participant, invisible activism presents a more sustainable approach than conventional rights-based activism. The paper expands our understanding of politically antagonistic practices, acknowledging the diversity and complexity embedded within queer activism.

Iatrogenic necropolitics: forced anal examinations and state-sanctioned homophobia

In 2016, Human Rights Watch, an international human rights organisation, published a report on the use of forced anal examinations to identify and prosecute putative ‘homosexuals’. The report provided detailed descriptions and first-person accounts of these examinations in several countries in the Middle East and Africa. Drawing on theories of iatrogenesis and queer necropolitics, this paper uses these accounts and other reports of forced anal examinations to explore the role of medical providers in the ‘diagnosis’ and prosecution of homosexuality. The goal of these medical examinations is explicitly punitive rather than therapeutic, making them quintessential examples of iatrogenic clinical encounters which harm rather than heal. We argue that these examinations naturalise socioculturally derived beliefs about bodies and gender that construct homosexuality as ‘readable’ on the body through close medical inspection. These acts of inspection and ‘diagnosis’ reveal broader hegemonic state narratives of heteronormative gender and sexuality, both within countries as well as internationally as different state actors circulate and share these narratives. This article highlights the entanglement of medical and state actors, as well as contextualises the practice of forced anal examination within its colonial roots. Our analysis offers the potential for advocacy and holding medical professions and states accountable.

Queer punishments: School safety and youth of color in the United States

ABSTRACT Although educational research and policymaking in the United States has generally framed LGBTQ youth and youth of color as mutually exclusive groups, LGBTQ youth of color are increasingly included in discourses surrounding school safety. These discourses tend to position youth as vulnerable, at-risk subjects who are passive victims of interpersonal homophobia. Using the theoretical frameworks queer of color critique and queer necropolitics, and a situational analysis mapping strategy, we analyzed GLSEN’s 2019 National School Climate Survey report, breakout reports on LGBTQ youth of color, and related advocacy efforts. These frameworks helped us consider how school climate research and policymaking relies on carceral logics that center and uphold whiteness. The GLSEN reports function as a form of embedded science that mobilizes individual understandings of violence and queer investments in punishment. We offer queer of color critique as a strategy for researchers and policymakers to get unstuck on school safety.

Queering the Racial Other: Towards a Queer Africa

This paper aims to explore recent developments in queer representation in 21st century African literature. Africa’s history with the legitimization of homosexuality is complicit with politics of invisibility, silencing, erasure and rigid cultural ideologies. The Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA) of Nigeria which was enacted in 2014 saw a furore among both old and new generation African writers who were embittered by the systemic erasure of LGBTQIA+ lives. Wole Soyinka’s portrayal of the mulatto Joe Golder in The Interpreters was the closest that an African writer had come to representing a non-straight, non-heterosexual character in the panorama of African literature. While the only accomplishment of Soyinka’s character remains a sympathetic portrayal of a homosexual, it also suggests the possibility of closeted queer presence in Africa. The beginning of the 21st century witnessed a bold flourish of queer literature - Chris Abani’s GraceLand (2004) and Jude Dibia’s Walking with Shadows (2005) present queer protagonists who struggle to come to terms with their queerness and radicalize anachronistic notions of gender and sexuality. Later works by new generation African writers have effectively succeeded in debunking the premise that ‘homosexuality is un-African’ on which the draconian SSMPA had been built. Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees (2015) reinvents the bildungsroman by placing a queer African girl as the hero of her story. Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020) explores the liminalities of gender and sexuality, the rites of passage that presages the fate of self-identified queer people within a social context that is hostile to sexual difference. This paper will analyze how all these works re-write the history of African queer people into the nation’s body politic by strategically applying pertinent theoretical frameworks like race, gender and sexuality, biopolitics, politics of heteronormativity, and queer necropolitics.

Monstrous awakenings: Queer Necropolitics in Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee's Death Threat

The study of Queer Necropolitics has established that white futurity regularly relegates trans women of colour to zones of death and sacrifice. What has received less attention, however, is how trans women of colour use art to challenge these murderous assemblages. A primary example of this is Shraya and Lee's (2019) graphic novel Death Threat, which re-envisions a series of transmisogynistic hate letters that Shraya received in 2017. Taking Death Threat as my point of entry, I ask how trans women of colour can repair death into live-affirming art, giving substantive focus to the text's tendency to conflate the literal death of the body with the ‘social death’ of being misgendered. From here, I explore how Death Threat transforms the death worlds of trans women of colour into sites of agency and, in so doing, troubles and expands the analytical boundaries of Queer Necropolitics.

가운뎃점으로 삶과 죽음이 뭉쳐질 때 : HIV 감염의 만성질환화와 삶·죽음의 퀴어성

1990년대 중반 효과적인 표준 치료가 확립되면서 HIV는 더 이상 감염 그 자체로 사망에 이르게 하는 질환이 아니라 약물을 통해 조절 가능한 만성질환이 되었다. 이 글에서 나는 HIV 질환의 만성화에도 불구하고 이를 중대한 삶의 위기로 경험할 수밖에 없었던 사람들의 경험을 기반으로 한국 사회에서 생명 정치가 작동하는 주요한 방식을 규명한다. HIV 감염 이후 신체적 손상과 장기 입원을 경험한 감염인들과 이들을 보살피게 된 가족 및 돌봄자의 경험을 서사화하고, 이들의 경험에서 드러나는 삶과 죽음의 기이한 병치를 살펴본다. 여기서 퀴어성(queerness)은 성 정체성 및 성적 표현의 지표를 한정적으로 의미하지 않는다. 이 글에서 퀴어성은 다종의 비규범성을 폭넓게 의미하며, 특히 생명 정치의 장에서 신체의 생물학적 지속과 사회적 죽음의 기이한 결합이 야기하는 비인간화를 규명하기 위해 사용되었다. 한국 사회에서 HIV 감염이 퀴어 존재의 출현을 야기하고 삶과 죽음의 공시적 기생을 강제하는 양상은 치료 영역에서의 차별과 배제뿐만 아니라 기본적인 친족 관계에서부터 발생하며, 장기 요양의 시장화와 시설화를 통해서 공고화된다. 마지막으로 이러한 인간다운 삶을 불가능하게 하는 조건에도 불구하고 돌봄의 상호성에 기반을 둔 퀴어 친족이 만들어지는 과정을 포착하고, 이러한 실천이 담지하고 있는 관계적 힘의 창발성에 주목한다.

Queer necropolitics of asylum: Senegalese refugees facing HIV in Mauritania

ABSTRACT Since 2008, homosexuality has been the subject of recurrent public controversies in Senegal, sometimes accompanied by police arrests and popular violence. In this context, a migration route has opened up to Mauritania, where some are granted refugee status by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Among them, a few are selected for ‘resettlement’ in a host country in North America or Europe. Many of these Senegalese gay men residing in Mauritania are infected with HIV. In recent years, some of them have returned to Senegal in a very deteriorated condition, leading in several cases to death; others have died in exile in Nouakchott. This article reports on the living conditions and access to health care of Senegalese gay men who went to Mauritania hoping for resettlement to the Global North by the UNHCR. It is based on semi-directed interviews with Senegalese gay asylum seekers as well as members of NGOs, health structures and institutions (including the UNHCR) in Nouakchott and Dakar. It shows that, despite the UNHCR's demonstrated commitment to refugee protection, the asylum (and specifically resettlement) system exposes those who rely on it to increased, sometimes fatal, health risks.

Queer Necropolitics in the Decapolis: Here and There, Now and Then

Abstract This article seeks to disrupt the deadly deployment of boundaries that mark particular people as normative or queer, socially living or dead. Conversing with the Decapolis of Mark 5:1-20 and Washington D.C.’s prostitution free zones (pfz), the present project deploys a hauntological and critical spatial response, that locates points of contact between transwomen of color in the U.S. capital and the possessed Gerasenes. This article challenges biblical scholars to lean into historiography that sees such stories—from the tombs and from the pfz—as politically active in and of themselves, and with one another. Mark 5:1-20 is imagined here as a place constructed by alliances of queer bodies spatialized into unlivability. Such alliances are resources for thinking beyond the neocapitalist drive to create deadly normativity through insides and outsides, suggesting that biblical texts are always already infused with demands from places where life is suffocated.

Mapping queer ‘celebratory moment’ in India: necropolitics or substantive democracy?

AbstractUsing the theoretical framework of queer necropolitics indicating the negation of subjecthood to trans-queer of colour while assimilating white privileged gays through homonormative gestures like marriage and domesticity in the USA, the paper compares the diverse reactions of the Indian ‘urban corporate gay’ constituency and the marginalized transgender communities following the legalization of ‘homosexuality’ in India recently. Through an analysis of social media texts from the former and reflections of the latter, I propose a ‘critical intersectionality’ to politicize the idea of queer community mobilizations in India. While critically reflecting on the limits of ‘consumer citizenship’ of the privileged gay, the paper attempts to foreground the voices of transgender ‘counterpublics’ to draw attention to and problematize the idea of ‘community’ (re)iterated through popular and legal discourses.

Muslim–queer encounters in Rio de Janeiro: Making sense of relational positionalities

For recently arrived West African migrants in the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro, the virtual and street encounters with travesti sex workers and queer beach goers provoked questions of relative power and status as experienced from a social margin of local Brazilian society. Based on ethnographic fieldwork since 2014, I address the question of how my Muslim interlocutors’ encounter with queers facilitate a particular and partial reading of Brazilian social relations, their legal mediation and their individual and social valuations. Moving between queer, postcolonial, queer of color and Muslim queer scholarship, I situate the local encounters of Muslim West Africans and queer subjects to differentiate and transcend the global framework of homonationalism and queer necropolitics. Situational positionalities result from the interplay of multiple geographical and social locations that, in their contradictions and interdependencies, are characteristic of contemporary urban configurations.

Queer necropolitics of forced migration: Cyclical violence in the African context

This article seeks to theorize queer necropolitics—the ability for states to decide who lives and who dies—within the context of forced displacement. In doing so, I link the literature on African sexualities, necropolitics, and queer migration and ask the following questions: How do African states engage in necropolitics that fuel forced displacement for queer people? And, how do forcibly displaced queer migrants navigate and survive in heteronormative spaces within the wider context of racialization in Cape Town? I argue that forcibly displaced queer migrants face ongoing forms of displacement based on various dimensions of ‘non-belonging’ from country-of-origin to relocation.

Queer reproduction revisited and why race, class and citizenship still matters: A response to Cristina Richie.

In the dialogue between Timothy F. Murphy and Cristina Richie about queer bioethics and queer reproduction in this journal, significant points of the emergent and extremely important discussions on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and queer bioethics are raised. Richie specifies correctly that queer bioethics can either complement or contradict LGBT bioethics and the queer standpoint against heteroconformity and heterofuturity is decisive here. As the field of queer bioethics is such a recent and essential part of consideration for bioethics and as it is still evolving, the objective of this intervention is to provide both an overview of important milestones of queer bioethics and to highlight that queer bioethics is not mono-logic and monolithic. To exemplify queer bioethic's 'many-headed monsters', queer reproduction is revisited and complemented by a European viewpoint. It is central to my argument and here I disagree with Richie that to be against heterofuturity does not necessarily mean to be against queer reproduction. However, I also argue that there are other reasons why queer reproduction should not be pursued at all costs. Finally, I discuss the most recent debates on race, class and citizenship, for example, queer necropolitics. These points still need to be addressed in queer bioethical agendas.

Queer Necropolitics and the Expanding Carceral State: Interrogating Sexual Investments in Punishment

This article examines the changing relationship between sexual politics and the carceral state. While sexual and gender nonconforming people have been historically punished for transgressing social norms, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists in Europe and North America have begun to invest in the state punishment of others. Whether supporting hate crime legislation, calling for more police in gentrifying neighborhoods, or participating in police recruitment campaigns, organisations that formerly fought against criminalisation trends now actively support expanding forms of state violence and punishment. Focussing on examples from the British and US context—and drawing from the concept of ‘queer necropolitics’—this article considers how the carceral state has shifted from a key target of queer protest to celebrated guardian of sexual citizenship. Arguing that this process constitutes more than just another story of queer assimilation and co-optation, the article suggests this shift reflects a deeper reconfiguration of sexual politics, where citizenship norms and practices are increasingly infused with a chillingly punitive and deathly logic.

Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)

754 Many thanks to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Geoff Eley, Dana Luciano, Nasser Hussain, Roger Rouse, Adam Thurschwell, and Martha Umphrey for their meticulous engagements, as well as to audiences at Amherst, Johns Hopkins, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Chicago, American Political Science Association, American Studies Association, and Cleveland State. Special nostalgic thanks to Virginia Chang, my original collaborator in the Obesity and Poverty conference (2002). 1. See David Harvey, “The Body as Accumulation Strategy,” Spaces of Hope (Berkeley, 2000), pp. 97–116. To call Harvey polemical is not to devalue his profound contributions to understanding the productive destructiveness of capital; in his work, a polemic is a call for precision, not a way of drowning it out. Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)