[Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis workshop] Queer Necropolitics

Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis 2015 Annual Workshop
"The Politics of Attachment"

Presentation abstract

Queer Necropolitics

What does it mean to appeal for asylum based on LGBT rights in fortress
Europe? How can we understand the double bind at work when queer freedom is
promised in a context of increased border fortification? In this project I
set out to theorize the biopolitical connections between seemingly
unrelated events through the lens of Achille Mbembe's concept of the
necropolitical. Engaging with an archive of legal and policy texts, media
items and institutional or activist materials, I consider a form of
politics that Mbembe has defined primarily as "the power and capacity to
dictate who may live and who must die" (11). I take inspiration from the
authors of the recently published Queer Necropolitics anthology, who
propose to use the concept of necropolitics to "complicate dominant
understandings of the political by interrogating ways in which sexual
difference is increasingly absorbed into hegemonic apparatuses" (Haritaworn
et al. 1). The complication I want to put forward is to suggest that the
promise of queer freedom in the Netherlands is bound up with the life-
destroying regime of asylum, detention and deportation. This argument is
heavily indebted to Jasbir Puar's work on homonationalism where Puar argues
that inclusion of queer subjects into the ideological apparatus of the
nation-state is inextricably part of the violence that is invested in
securing the nation-state. The discourse of LGBT rights has gained the
capacity to measure and evaluate a nation-state's capability of proper
governance (Puar, Rethinking Homonationalism 336). This production of "gay-
friendly" and "not-gay-friendly" nations serves geopolitical interests in
contemporary coloniality (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages xiv). So in the
context of the migration politics of the Netherlands I ask: how does the
explicit incorporation of LGBT subjects function to consolidate the violent
regime of asylum practices?