Queer Necropolitics Summary

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The book Queer Necropolitics explores the development of LGTB politics in its complex relation to the existence and disappearance of other marginalized groups, in an honest attempt to challenge the way in which these movements have focused their struggles and demands for a better life.
The book brings into question the traditional conceptions of queerness, life, and death, and construct around them an analysis on the experiences of LGTB activism in a western heteronormative dominant context. Taking Mbembe’s definition of necropolitics, the authors address the politics of life and death, arguing that death is not only related to a physical state but is also represented in the specific situations that the marginalized populations face every day.
Moreover, they introduce the concept of queer necropolitics, used as a concept that “illuminates and connects a range of spectacular and mundane forms of killing and of letting die”. (Haritaworn, 2014) The concept of necropolitics, then, is used to criticize the progressive and liberal regimes of the …show more content…

By presenting the experiences of black queered bodies dealing with HIV, the reaffirming of heteronormativity in the military mourning processes, and the displacement of Guatemalan children adopted by gay couples after the armed conflict; this chapter unites processes of erasure of these bodies that die when unrecognized and marked as Others.
This section questions the permanent subalternization and invisibility of sexualized and racialized bodies used by the LGBT movements in a process that contributes to the perpetuation of dominant and hegemonic structures. Their death is manifested through their objectification and the permanent denial of their status as subjects (Posocco, 2014), who are dispossessed of their status as humans and manipulated to uplift a single queer

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