Haritaworn Jinthana - Queer Necropolitics

Queer Necropolitics mobilizes the concept of necropolitics in order to illuminate everyday death worlds, from more expected sites such as war, torture or imperial invasion to the mundane and normalized violence of racism and gender normativity, the market, and the prisonindustrial complex. Contributors here interrogate the distinction between valuable and pathological lives by attending to the symbiotic co-constitution of queer subjects folded into life, and queerly abjected racialized populations marked for death. Drawing on diverse yet comple mentary methodologies, including textual and visual analysis, ethnography and historiography, 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.

This book 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. Moving between diverse geopolitical contexts the US and the UK, Guatemala and Palestine, the Philippines, Iran and Israel the chapters in this volume interrogate claims to queerness in the face(s) of death, both spectacular and everyday.

The book will appeal to activist scholars and students from various social sciences and humanities, particularly those across the fields of law, cultural and media studies, gender, sexuality and intersectionality studies, race, 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.

Silvia Posocco is Lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London.

Social Justice

Series editors: Sarah Lamble, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK, Kate Bedford, University of Kent, UK, Davina Cooper, University of Kent, UK, and Sarah Keenan, SOAS, UK

Social Justice is a new, theoretically engaged, interdisciplinary series exploring the changing values, politics and institutional forms through which claims for equality, democracy and liberation are expressed, manifested and fought over in the contemporary world. The series addresses a range of contexts from transnational political forums, to nation-state and regional controversies, to small-scale social experiments. At its heart is a concern, and inter-disciplinary engagement with, the present and future politics of power, as constituted through territory, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, economics, ecology and culture.

Foregrounding struggle, imagined alternatives and the embedding of new norms, Social Justice critically explores how change is wrought through law and governance, everyday social and bodily practices, dissident knowledges, and movements for citizenship, belonging, and reinvented community.

Titles in this series:

Intersectionality and Beyond: Law, Power and the Politics of Location
Emily Grabham, Davina Cooper, Jane Krishnadas and Didi Herman (eds.), 2009

Regulating Sexuality: Legal Consciousness in Lesbian and Gay Lives
Rosie Harding, 2010

Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow
Nicholas Blomley, 2010

Anarchism and Sexuality
Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson (eds.), 2011

Queer Necropolitics
Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, Silvia Posocco (eds.), 2014

Forthcoming:

Power, Politics and the Emotions: Impossible Governance?
Shona Hunter

Law, Environmental Illness and Medical Uncertainty
Tarryn Phillips

After Legal Equality
Robert Leckey (ed.)

Global Justice and Desire: Queering Economy
Nikita Dhawan, Antke Engel, Christoph H.E. Holzhey and Volker Woltersdorff (eds.)

Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance
Mariana Valverde

Protest, Property and the Commons
Lucy Finchett-Maddock

Regulating Sex After Aids: Queer Risks and Contagion Politics
Neil Cobb

Subversive Property: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging
Sarah Keenan

The Sexual Constitution of Political Authority
Aleardo Zanghellini

Queer Necropolitics

Edited by
Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman
and Silvia Posocco

First published 2014
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

a GlassHouse Book

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2014 Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco

The right of Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco to be identified as editors of this work, and the individual chapter authors for their individual material has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-415-64476-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-79830-0 (ebk)

Typeset in Baskerville and Gill Sans by
Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

SUNERA THOBANI

JIN HARITAWORN, ADI KUNTSMAN, AND SILVIA POSOCCO

PART I
Death worlds

CHE GOSSETT

MICHELLE R. MARTIN-BARON

SILVIA POSOCCO

PART II
Wars and borderzones

SIMA SHAKHSARI

JASON RITCHIE

AREN Z. AIZURA

PART III
Incarceration

SARAH LAMBLE

ELIJAH ADIV EDELMAN

MORGAN BASSICHIS AND DEAN SPADE

This book was born in hard times. This also goes for its publishing climate. It has been more than four years since the Queer Necropolitics panel at the American Anthropological Association in 2009 where our collective first began taking shape. We wouldnt want to miss these four years and the sustained cross-Atlantic conversations on queer necropolitics that happened in them. Yet we also feel the need to honour the attrition and exhaustion weve often experienced, after writing countless emails and book proposals, knocking on and waiting in front of many doors, which is a place we share with other non-Ivy League intellectuals with unintelligible positionalities, excessive critiques, and not enough mentorship. When we started out, we were three British-based academics with little pedigree and sticky, hard-to-pronounce, harder-to-publish names. Our topic long seemed unpublishable however trendy it has become since.