ABSTRACT
There are many things lost in the naming of a death as a “gay youth suicide.” In what follows, I offer a preliminary analysis of the prolific media attention to gay youth suicides that began in the United States in the fall of 2010. I am interested in how this attention recalls affective attachments to neoliberalism that index a privileged geopolitics of finance capitalism. I have been struck by how the discourses surrounding gay youth suicide partake in a spurious binarization of what I foreground as an interdependent relationship between bodily capacity and bodily debility. These discourses reproduce neoliberalism’s heightened demands for bodily capacity, even as this same neoliberalism marks out populations for what Lauren Berlant has described as “slow death”—the debilitating ongoingness of structural inequality and suffering.1 In the United States, where personal debt incurred through medical expenses is the number one reason for filing for bankruptcy, the centrality of what is termed the medical-industrial complex to the profitability of slow death cannot be overstated.2 My intervention here is an attempt to go beyond a critique of the queer neoliberalism embedded in the tendentious mythologizing that “it gets better” by confronting not only the debilitating aspects of neoliberalism but, more trench
