Queer Necropolitics

Queer Necropolitics comes at a time when the intrinsic and self-evident value of queer rights and protections, from gay marriage to hate crimes, is increasingly put in question. It assembles writings that explore the new queer vitalities within their wider context of structural violence and neglect. The book mobilises the concept of ‘necropolitics’ in order to bring into view everyday death worlds, from more expected sites such as war, torture or imperial invasion to the mundane and normalised violence of racism and gender normativity, the market, and the prison-industrial complex. Its contributors interrogate the distinction between valuable and pathological lives by attending to the symbiotic co-constitution of queer subjects folded into life, and queerly abjected racialised populations marked for death. Moving between diverse geopolitical contexts – the US and the UK, Guatemala and Palestine, the Philippines, Iran and Israel – the chapters interrogate claims to queerness in the face(s) of death, both spectacular and everyday. Drawing on textual and visual analysis, ethnography, historiography and more, the authors argue that the distinction between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ dissolves in the face of the banality of death in the zones of abandonment that regularly accompany contemporary democratic regimes.

The book will appeal to activist scholars and students from various social sciences and humanities, including cultural and media studies, critical legal studies, gender, transgender, queer, sexuality and intersectionality studies, critical race and ethnic studies, violence and conflict studies, as well as those studying nationalism, colonialism, prisons and war. It should be read by all those trying to make sense of the contradictions inherent in regimes of rights, citizenship and diversity.

Jin Haritaworn is Assistant Professor of Gender, Race and Environment at York University in Toronto; Adi Kuntsman is Simon Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK; and Silvia Posocco is Lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London