Necropolitics as a bridge between queer death studies and queer migration studies


YAN XUE, University of Alberta

My Ph.D. research examines an emerging phenomenon whereby Chinese transgender migrants in Canada create kinship ties through the online commemoration of transgender people who have committed suicide in China. In this paper, I discuss the notion of necropolitics and review its usage in queer death studies/QDS and queer migration studies/QMS. By doing so, I reflect on how studying transnational trans kin mourning can bridge the interpellations of transgender intersubjectivities and institutional structures with the inquiries of trans-national geopolitics. I also contemplate the ethical question of how we can study the potential insurgency of transnational queer kin mourning but also be vigilant not to reproduce imperialism and the disparities of power and rights between racialized trans migrants and white trans citizens. Mbemb (2003) conceptualizes necropolitics as institutional forces and processes that enfranchise dominant groups and make their lives liveable while exposing others to significant death risks through deprivation, violence, and abandonment. Both queer death studies and queer migration studies draw from necropolitics. In QDS, it is used to critically theorize queer suicides as results of chronic institutional violence. Scholars contend that suicidal thoughts and attempts are prevalent among LGBT people because they suffer from homophobia and transphobia in family, school, and other social institutions in their daily lives in the long term (Cover, 2013; Hansen, 2021). In some studies of queer suicide, scholars deploy a theoretical framework that combines necropolitics with queer kinship theory. They find that queer kin not only recognize the operations of necropower but also mobilize their sorrow and anger to organize against such operations politically . In QMS, the notion of necropolitics is drawn to conceptualize how queer death is complicated across the border. The prevalence of queer deaths by murder, execution, and suicide in their countries of origin motivates living queer people to emigrate as a means to survive . In the host countrys refugee regime, queer deaths over there are constructed as exceptional human rights violations and moral threats to their queer-friendly modern civilization . While these host countries are eager to 'save' queer lives far away from their national territories, they dismiss and perpetuate queer deaths in their own sovereignty. They are indifferent to queer migrants suicides due to their socioeconomic alienation and frame such deaths as exceptions and individual failures . They also proactively produce queer migrants deaths through the increasingly punitive detention regime (Aizura, 2014; Butler Burke, 2016). QMS and QDS scholars who use the notion of necropolitics also refer to Judith Butlers (2004) ungrievabile death and Kenneth Dokas (2001) disenfranchised grief. They contend that un/grievability and dis/enfranchisement are not overdetermined but shaped by the deceaseds and mourners multiple intersecting identities (Haritaworn, 2012; Snorton and Haritaworn, 2022). Using Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR) as an example, scholars find that while the enumerated deaths are disproportionately trans of colour, and many of whom are immigrants, mourners who eventually benefit from social recognition and trans rights legislation and whose lives become more liveable are exclusively White trans citizens (Edelman, 2014; Snorton and Haritaworn, 2022). The necropower that operates on racialized queers and queer migrants reveals the rift between grievable death and enfranchised grief.

This paper will be presented at the following session: