ABSTRACT
Representations of US military funerals constitute a necropolitical performative. In his articulation of necropolitics, Achille Mbembe argues that sovereign power can be characterized as the right to determine who shall die. Drawing on Foucault's notion of biopower, in which populations are divided into ‘a split between the living and the dead’ (Mbembe 2003: 17), Mbembe expands the latter half of the equation, finding that within the modern nation-state, entire populations are marked for death, whether by globalizing forces from the outside, or local sovereigns managing their own populations through overt or invisible death (Mbembe 2003). In other words, necropolitics describes the way certain bodies are marked and marketed to as live, lively and deserving of life, wherein other bodies are seen as either already dead or destined towards death: their lives are of little consequence, whereas their deaths consolidate sovereign power. Mbembe conceptualizes necropolitics in relation to global wars, where sovereigns use military might to enact necropolitics on the populations they wish to manage. Armies and soldiers are the agents of Mbembe's necropolitics, operating within war machines: ‘segments of armed men that split up or merge with one another depending on the tasks to be carried out or the circumstances’ (Mbembe 2003: 32). War machines take on many forms, and even the state can ‘transform itself into a war machine’ (Mbembe, 2003: 32). A fundamental characteristic of war machines is their self-sufficiency, as they operate not only as martial power, but also as economic and commercial power. Thus war machines can serve multiple simultaneous functions all under the aegis of waging war and maintaining the divisions between those who ‘deserve-to-live’ and those who ‘deserve-to-die’. In her ground-breaking monograph Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar (2007) draws out the connection between necropolitics and queer theory, recognizing that the targets of necropolitics are marked ‘queer’. For Puar, queer does not connote homosexuality carte blanche, but rather either inhabiting identities or carrying out behaviours that resist rather than align with and uphold the neoliberal state. This political formation is deeply marked by racial and sexual norms, the ghostly remnants of an ongoing imperial history, which demarcates which bodies are queered and marked for death. Puar draws connections between the US war on 52terror, and the conflation of queer and terrorist that maps out a neoliberal necropolitical agenda. She begins an important process of blurring the war front and the home front as profoundly implicated.
