ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on four types of 'massacres' as examples of how the queerness of massacre culture cuts across communities of difference and shares a politics of activism against death-making and the vanishing of non-white, non-straight and non-male bodies. The first considers the "slow death" of everyday structural violations based on difference, the second appears to be related to queer people at the intersections of race and religion, the third to life in the quest for economic domination in the name of an American dream, and the last takes life from the planet and other sentient beings. The precarity or impossibility of safety in massacre culture means that citizens exist in a constant state of hypervigilance and carry an embodied and affective sense of injurability. The anxiety that massacre culture produces at ever-alarming rates can swamp interpersonal and cultural connection, as well as peace, in a culture that seems to perpetuate massacre in even the most mundane ways.
