Abstract
Queer Necropolitics opens out an urgent and still infrequently examined domain of queer studies by examining the predicament of gay, lesbian, and transgender men and women who cannot enjoy the rewards of a racially exclusive, economically privileged, and culturally intolerant notion of LGBT rights. This theoretically ambitious volume concerns an all too evident inequality in contemporary queer politics. The metanarratives of ‘coming out’, urban gentrification, and corporate self-fulfilment that have characterised 21st-century gay rights, endorsed by multi-national corporations, and enshrined in anti-hate crime legislation in many western states, exclude far more readily than they include. The predicament of gay men in Islamic or Christian cultures outside the West is often treated ethnocentrically, gender inequality persists, while transgender men and women remain largely ignored; indeed, white working-class gay men are equally likely to be treated as pariahs within a defiantly middle-class gay subculture. None of this has prevented LGBT rights from being adopted superficially for neo-imperial military expeditions, as justification for intensified regimes of drone warfare and airport surveillance, and as branding for corporate diversity. The contributors provide further and compelling descriptions of exclusion and intolerance, but the volume moves beyond this to show just how far claims about hate crime and anti-homophobia discourse have helped to perpetuate the very inequalities they profess to solve.
Haritaworn, Kuntsman and Posocco’s volume probes uncomfortable realities and, in doing so, represents a major contribution to queer studies. It brings Achille Mbembe’s theorisation of ‘necropolitics’ into play to explore the way in which death, as reality and as symbolic designation, is deployed in contemporary society. Additionally, it draws on a literature critiquing the racism of white gay male activism, and the disturbing eagerness of western states to adopt seemingly pro-LGBT policies, especially when these dovetail with neoliberal and Eurocentric priorities both domestically and internationally (Puar, 2007). Engaging with Butler’s examination of lives that can be considered ‘grieveable’, and hence be accorded cultural worth, Haritaworn, Kuntsman and Posocco’s volume shows time and again how metropolitan gay rights activism colludes in criminalising and displacing economically disadvantaged groups and non-western cultures (Butler, 2006).i As Bassichis and Spade contend, gay rights discourse often ‘produces blackness as ‘straight’ and gayness as white’ (p. 197). This tendency is intensified by what Lamble identifies as the link between ‘sexual citizenship claims’ such as gay marriage and adoption, and LGBT politics’ increasing use of ‘punitive rationalities and policies’ within hate crimes legislation (p. 153). A London LGBT group Rainbow Hamlets’ statement that it was pleased to see a 23-year-old Muslim sentenced to eight weeks in prison, inevitably with deleterious consequences for his future economic and psychological well-being, serves as a crystal clear exemplar of this volume’s thematic contribution (p. 157).
Being acknowledged as a gay or trans man or woman comes with a hefty price tag, both for non-western queers, and for those situated in marginal positions within western economies. Aizura’s sensitive reading of texts such as The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, Bubot Niyar and Les travestis pleurent aussi, develops a compelling cultural account of ‘trans femininity’ (p. 131) both within and beyond the West. Reading the fictional documentary film about Filipina trans woman Raquela Dios’s career as a camgirl who hopes to meet a westerner who will take her to Paris, Aizura shows how pernicious claims about professional self-improvement in the sex industry facilitate the expression of Raquela’s gender which might be otherwise condemned in Filipino society (p. 142). Achieving trans cultural visibility is only available to Raquela after engaging with the neoliberal economy of internet porn. This type of virtual ethnography reminds us of the economic burden of trans identification in a non-western, but virtually connected, nation.
The book’s importance is theoretical too. Haritaworn, Kuntsman and Posocco’s focus on ‘necropolitics’ brings this important analytic term to the fore. Despite its increasing appearance in article-length studies, ‘necropolitics’ has rarely received anything like the theoretical and cross-disciplinary exploration represented by the present volume. Although, as the editors convincingly demonstrate, economies of death, and populations of the ‘living dead’, have a genealogy in critical theory that predates Mbembe, ‘necropolitics’ has much to offer ethnographic and critical discussions of society and culture in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Mbembe, 2003). The disturbing idea of human beings being consigned to the status of the ‘living dead’, denied legal, biomedical, and cultural recognition, has as much resonance on the peripheries of African megacities, as it does in western societies increasingly damaged by austerity.
A major contribution to queer and transgender studies, this book will also interest a wide range of readers in anthropology, black studies, critical prison studies, postcolonial and gender studies. Although it may not attract them, it should also be essential reading for scholars interested in security, warfare, and military history. Finally, activists and interested general readers concerned by issues around immigration policy, penal reform, and transmisogyny will all find much useful material within ‘Queer Necropolitics’ (Haritaworn and Snorton, 2013).