Search Results (14)

‘Marriage equality’ has been a widely used slogan and mobilizing concept for LGBTQ+ rights’ movements across the globe striving for formal recognition for ‘same-sex’ or ‘same-gender’ marriages. In this article, we critically interrogate the terminology and political rationality that have given shape to ‘marriage equality’ campaigns. We demonstrate the structural erasure of non-monogamous relations and populations from the changes hoped for and envisioned in these mobilizations. The lack of any genuine and substantial concern with consensual non-monogamies (CNMs) from most of the literature in the field highlights the close entanglement of marriage with monogamy. As a result, ideas are scarce about how meaningful and adequate legal recognition and social policy provisions for a wide range of intimate, sexual, familial, and/or caring bonds or constellations on the CNM continuum could look like. We argue that the critique of the mononormativity inherent to marriage is fundamental to understanding the role of this in the 21st century. We identify the roots of the mononormativity of marriage in its governmental role as a necropolitical and biopolitical technology, evidenced by its ‘civilizing’ function in white settler colonial projects. Because of this, an expansion of the call for equality to include non-monogamous populations does not resolve but rather aggravates the problem. We conclude that any truly queer politics of CNM consequently needs to be anti-marriage. Full article

A conceptualisation of the COVID-19 pandemic through the analytic lens of a ‘necropolitics as evil’ brings to the fore Hannah Arendt’s theorisation that evil is both an expression of, and a threat to, humanity and its plurality as an intersectional assemblage, and by extension as freedom in political action. Arendt accepts that while evil—as an expression of our humanity—can never be eradicated, it must—as a threat to our common humanity—be confronted. From this perspective, the functioning of race, gender, and wider structural inequalities as operational hinges of COVID-19 capitalism required spaces for resistance and change within the political economy of global inequalities during the recent pandemic. This (concept) paper explores such a conceptualisation through stories of the pandemic and with a particular focus on Indigenous people, marginalised groups such as migrants and asylum seekers, as well as the homeless. It is through the viral logics of cytopathic COVID-19 capitalisms that we confront and resist theoretical pathologies by re-theorising evil as conceptual currency to confront this conjuncture, critique limitations, and meaningfully translate the current societal landscape through this lens. This allows for engaging in a particular kind of reading of Arendt that is contextualised in terms of the stakes of the paper: the importance of thinking about convivialising solidarities in the ongoing pandemic that has been perpetuated by ‘evil political formations/evil governance’ under capitalism, and as such, the structural pathologies that exacerbate COVID-19’s deathly effects. Full article

Resilient necrocapitalism and the zombie genre of representations of current dystopias are persistent in their political purpose in producing changes in the social order to benefit plutocracies around the world. It is through a thanatopolitical lens that we should view the successive losses of life, and this zombie genre has come to represent a dystopia that, for political purposes, is intended to produce changes in societies which have tolerated the violent deaths of women. This article focuses on contemporary Greece and proposes a theoretical framework where femicide is understood as a social phenomenon that reflects a global gendered necropolitical logic which equals genocide. Such theoretical assemblages have to be situated within intersectional imperatives and tacitly as the result of the capitalist terror state performed in an expansive and direct immediate death, exacerbated by the lingering slow social death of the welfare state. The article contends that the scripted hetero-patriarchal social order of the necrocapitalist state poses a unique political threat to societies. With the silence of the complicity of the state, what is necessary is the creation and spread of new political knowledge and new social movements as resilient political tactics of resistance. This article foregrounds an ecofeminist perspective on these issues and considers ways through which new pedagogies of hope can counter the gendered necropolitics of contemporary capitalism in Greece. Full article

Just as necropower discriminates between those who can and those who cannot live, post-mortem circumstances are explicitly affected by an irrefutable gentrification of memory and grievability. Drawing on the political dimension of mourning and on the concept of slow death, this paper proposes a necropolitical reading of All They Will Call You (2017), where Tim Z. Hernandez revisits the 1948 plane crash that killed 28 Mexican deportees at Los Gatos (California) and the subsequent oblivion that prevented their memorialisation except for a mass grave containing their remains and a protest song (“Deportees”) composed by Woody Guthrie. My analysis focuses on Hernandez’s attempts at dismantling the tropes of criminality and expendability that Latino immigrants are associated with as a result of their racialised vulnerability, which are distinctively aggravated in border contexts. Excavating in the background stories of these deportees seems to me an ironic contestation to the failed forensic work that left them unnamed and unritualised for seven decades. And, at the same time, I contend that, in line with the work of many activists and artists in the US–Mexico border, Hernandez mobilises solidarity while transforming our perception of migrant bare lives into one of migrant agency. Full article

Despite the increasing visibility of transgender and gender diverse (TGD) people in U.S. society, current linguistic practices within forensic anthropology and death investigation in general are not TGD-inclusive. This lack of consideration for TGD decedents can cause unnecessary delays in the identification and disposition of their remains; moreover, failing to recognize their true identities is a form of forced post-mortem detransition. Using De León’s concept of necroviolence as a framework, we argue that language can also harm the dead and that the (mis)use of language within medicolegal death investigation reflects and reinforces structural violence against TGD people. Examples drawn from a qualitative review of public details for 87 cases are used to demonstrate how language and language-enforced bureaucratic structures can harm TGD decedents, their loved ones, the broader TGD community, and the process of medicolegal death resolution itself. We then suggest steps that anthropologists, death investigators, and their affiliated partners can take to reduce the systemic necropolitical violence faced by the TGD community. While TGD-inclusive methods will take time to implement at the institutional level, individual practitioners can enact significant change within the system by upholding core standards that recognize and respect the personhood and lived experiences of TGD decedents. Full article

Even though Turkey’s ruling party’s (Justice and Development Party, the AKP) nation-building and desired citizen creation policies have been studied, its use of necropolitical narratives and propaganda in education has not been investigated. This paper addresses this gap by examining how the Turkish state ruled by the AKP has propagated its religious necropolitical narrative through the national curriculum and Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) in school textbooks, and magazines and comic books for children. The paper shows that these texts and comics try to indoctrinate children into a religious cult of martyrdom in different ways by encouraging them to view tragic death and getting killed for the nation as a positive event. This paper argues that these propaganda efforts are part of a religious necropolitical indoctrination campaign that seeks to create a new Islamist and jihadist generation of lifelong supporters of the AKP, which portrays itself in the educational texts as the embodiment of Islam, the Muslim Turkish nation and even the global Muslim community (ummah). This new religious generation is expected to believe that dying for the Islamist populist authoritarian regime is the greatest honour a person can bring upon themselves. This paper contributes to the necropolitics literature by showing that not only adults but also children have been targeted by authoritarian rulers’ necropolitical propaganda attempts to create desired citizens who are ready to die for the regime, believing this is a religious obligation. Further research is needed to assess if and to what extent this propaganda has an impact on children. Full article

Global Health Governance (GHG) uses a set of financial, normative, and epistemic arguments to retain and amplify its influence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the GHG regime used its own successes and failures to prescribe more of itself while demanding further resources. However, the consistent failures of this form governance and its appeasement to a dominant neoliberal ideology lead to the following question: Is the global health governance regime failing at its goal of improving health or succeeding at other political and ideological goals that necessitate such failures? Using concepts and ideas from social theory and post-colonial studies; I examine the definitions, epistemic basis, and drivers of GHG and propose certain conditions for the legitimacy of a global health governance system. Examining historical and current cases, I find that the GHG regime currently fails to fulfil such conditions of legitimacy and instead creates spaces that limit rather than help many populations it purports to serve. Those spaces of sickness confine people and reduce them into a state of health subalternity. In being health subalterns, people’s voices are neither sought nor heard in formulating the policies that determine their health. Finally, I argue that research and policymaking on global health should not be confined to the current accepted frameworks that assumes legitimacy and benevolence of GHG, and propose steps to establish an alternative, emancipatory model of understanding and governing global health. Full article

Necropolitics centers on the dark side of biopolitics, but if we are to take seriously Jacques Ranciere’s reassignment of ‘politics’ and ‘police,’ then what is revealed by necropolitical analysis is not simply the capacity to ‘make and let die’, but also the policing of a contingent order sustained by necropolitics. I describe this process as the necropolice-economy, and in this paper demonstrate its contours with reference to the COVID-19 pandemic which, I argue, has revealed the expendability of particular populations under conditions of risk and uncertainty. My analysis proceeds in three parts. First, I present the thesis of necropolice economy, arguing that the capitalist system has historically produced not simply a political economy, but a policed economy that induces a necropolitics of dispensability for unproductive or replaceable populations. Second, I develop this thesis by examining the relegation of society in relation to the economy amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Third, I argue that the inability of states to be decisive in the pandemic reveals that the sovereign prerogative to decide on the exception is constrained by capitalist forces. This suggests that the world market is itself a sovereign force, though it is one that remains ever dependent on state violence. To conclude, I ask whether we can channel the trauma of death made visible into processes of memorialization that might catalyze revolutionary action, rather than accelerating the evolution of our necropolice economy into its next capitalist guise—I ask, provocatively, whether an emancipatory necropolitics might yet result from the contemporary moment. Full article

The literature on martyrdom has not, so far, systematically analysed a constitutionally secular state’s extensive use of religion in propagating martyrdom narratives by using state-controlled religious institutions. This paper addresses this gap in martyrdom literature. In addition, even though some studies have analysed how martyrdom narratives have been used for political purposes in Turkey for mythmaking and building a collective memory, a religious institution’s active use by the state for the purposes of mythmaking and collective memory building has not been studied. This paper shows that the contents of the Friday sermons, that reach at least 50 percent of the country’s adult males every week, have moved from Turkish nationalist understanding of militarism and martyrdom to more radical, Islamist and pro-violence interpretations that actively promote dying for the nation, homeland, religion and God. The sermons also emphasise that new generations must be raised with this pro-violence religious spirit, which is also novel. Full article

Brazil has made international headlines for the government’s inept and irresponsible response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, sex worker activists have once again taken on an essential role in responding to the pandemic amidst State absences and abuses. Drawing on the theoretical framework of necropolitics, we trace the gendered, sexualized, and racialized dimensions of how prostitution and work have been (un)governed in Brazil and how this has framed sex worker activists’ responses to COVID-19. As a group of scholars and sex worker activists based in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, we specifically explore the idea of sex workers as “essential workers”, but also of sex work as, essentially, work, demonstrating complicities, differences, and congruencies in how sex workers see what they do and who their allies in the context of the 21st century’s greatest health crisis to date. Full article

The struggles of China’s gay sex workers—men who sell sex to other men—illustrate how the multi-layered stigma that they experience acts as a form of necropolitical power and an instrument of the state’s discrimination against gay sex workers who are living with HIV. One unintended side effect of this state power is the subsequent reluctance by medical professionals to care for gay sex workers who are living with HIV, and discrimination from Chinese government officers. Data obtained from 28 gay sex workers who are living with HIV provide evidence that the necropower of stigma is routinely exercised upon the bodies of gay sex workers. This article examines how the necropolitics of social death and state-sanctioned stigma are manifested throughout China’s health system, discouraging gay sex workers from receiving health care. This process uses biopolitical surveillance measures as most of gay sex workers come from rural China and do not enjoy urban hukou, thus are excluded from the medical health care system in urban China. Public health priorities demand that the cultured scripts of gendered Chinese citizenship must reevaluate the marking of the body of gay sex workers as a non-entity, a non-human and socially “dead body.” Full article

This article presents results of a first-hand investigation that took a year of ethnographic work (methods of observation and interviews) during 2016–2017, with the post-structural theoretical framework of Gilles Deleuze, on the United States–Mexico border, in the San Diego-Tijuana corridor. The Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies of the University of California San Diego, PREVENCASA A. C., and Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosi supported this research. In this research, statistical data, observations, and synthesis of in-depth interviews were utilized about those defined as the ‘dispossessed’: users of hard drugs, and/or in homelessness conditions of discrimination in a highly contrasting border such as that of the United States and Mexico. Among the main results are the relations between mental and embodiment limits, necropolitics and territory, as well as the approach of post-structural political discourses about the body and mind that allow us to understand the subjectivities in question, proposing two types of homelessness. Full article

This article analyses the function and symbolic currency of Poland’s recent literary and artistic motif of the returning Jew, which brings the nation’s Jewish Holocaust victims back to their homes as ghosts, spectres and reanimated corpses. It explores the ability of this trope—the defining feature of what I call ‘Polish Holocaust horror’—to cultivate the memory of complicitous and collaborative Polish behaviour during the Holocaust years, and to promote renewed Polish-Jewish relations based upon a working-through of this difficult history. In the article I explore Władysław Pasikowski’s 2012 film Aftermath as a self-reflexive product of this experimental genre, which has been considered ethically ambiguous for its necropolitical treatment of Jews and politically controversial for its depiction of Poles as perpetrators. My analysis examines haunting as central to these popular cultural constructions of Holocaust memory—a device that has been used within the genre to mourn but also expel guilt for the previously forgotten or supressed dispossession and murder of Jews by some of their Polish neighbours. Full article