Achille Mbembe coined the term necropolitics as a corrective to Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics to account for “those figures of sovereignty whose central project is … the material destruction of human bodies and populations” most evident on the plantation and in the colony. Melissa Wright has added that the politics of gender is central to the politics of death. She highlights state officials' efforts to assign meaning to the bodies of the slain as critical to the successful operation of necropower and argues that activists can contest attempts to mark the dead as subjects deserving of death. Mbembe's and Wright's delineation of necropolitics illuminates much about contemporary US racial politics. This article examines how black activists and others challenge official efforts to assign meaning to the bodies of the slain. It also examines the difficulties feminist activists confront in their attempts to decenter the cis-male body in recent necropolitical struggles. In a context in which spectacular violent deaths have been crucial in moving black death from the margins to the center of political debate, black feminists must reckon with the fact that, because of significant differences between homicide and femicide, black women suffer from a spectacular violent death deficit. What can drive concern toward these more private deaths?

Editors Rachel Brown and Deva Woodly bring together Mara Marin, Shatema Threadcraft, Christopher Paul Harris, Jasmine Syedullah, and Miriam Ticktin to examine the question: what would be required for care to be an ethic and political practice that orients people to a new way of living, relating, and governing? The answer they propose is that a 21st-century approach to the politics of care must aim at unmaking racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, the carceral state, and the colonial present. The politics of care is an approach to political thought and action that moves beyond the liberal approach which situates care as a finite resource to be distributed among autonomous individuals, or as a necessarily feminine virtue. Instead, those elucidating the politics of care for the contemporary era draw on rich interdisciplinary traditions and social movements to theorize and practice care as an inherently interdependent survival strategy, a foundation for political organizing, and a prefigurative politics for building a world in which all people can live and thrive.

This article challenges contemporary understandings of the US carceral state by confronting the realities of exceptionally high rates of homicide victimization among Black women and considering the implications for equality and understandings of the carceral state. We propose that neither the US state nor the US penal order can be fully understood without taking account of the exceptionally high rates of violence to which Black women are exposed. Conceptions of the carceral state that do not situate criminal justice within the larger context of raced and gendered subject formation depict criminal "justice" as an arena composed almost entirely of adult males. This obscures the realities of how state form contributes not only to criminal justice practices but also to risk of violence. Black women are uniquely situated at the intersection of risk of violence, and risk of experiencing the collateral damage of the carceral state. Without significant attention to issues of connectivity and care, which are directly affected by the carceral state and by inter-personal violence, we cannot fully understand the concepts of "carceral" or "state".

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