ABSTRACT
This chapter positions itself within a growing body of critical feminist, queer and trans writings on racism, militarism, gentrification, and imprisonment. 1 Like others before me, I seek to scandalize the complicity of sexual and gendered politics in state violence and neglect, and the reinvention of practices such as the dismantling of the welfare state, the mass incarceration of the chronically unemployable, and the wars without end as signs of love, care, diversity, and vitality, often in the name of human (including women's, gay and, in a much more complicated way, trans) rights. In this, I am drawing on Jasbir Puar's queer necropolitics 2 to explore how new sexually and gender non-conforming citizenries are invited into life, to leave the realm of death, and of the perverse, to other “populations targeted for segregation, disposal, or death” (Puar 2007: xii). Puar draws our attention to the sexual productiveness of the “war on terror,” which enables the U.S. and other “western” nations to invent traditions of gay-friendliness and sexual freedom (despite continuing homophobia) against a common enemy whose monstrosity is fantasized as intimate im/property.
