North American Necropolitics and Gender: On #BlackLivesMatter and Black Femicide

Abstract

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?

Which Identity Frames Boost Support for and Mobilization in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement? An Experimental Test

“…The findings from our survey experiment suggest that using gender or LGBTQ+ identity frames as the master frame for the Black Lives Matter movement does not mobilize any particular subgroup more, but does demobilize African American men. While further investigation is required to parse out precisely why African American men demobilize in response to these frames, this adds to growing literature about the difficulty of creating movements that are both viewed as intersectional and are widely supported (Ayoub 2019;Threadcraft 2017).…”

‘Give me liberty or give me Covid!’: Anti-lockdown protests as necropopulist downsurgency

“…1. Others have extended Mbembe's concept to contemporary practices of femicide (Wright 2011, Threadcraft 2017 or offered similar ones: necroculture (Thorpe 2016), political necrophilism (Fromm 1973, Daly 1978, Castronovo 2001, necrocapitalism (Banerjee 2008) and the necrocene (McBrien 2016). Together, this cluster highlights how the homi-suicide dynamic has been synthesized across multiple levels (interpersonal, cultural, planetary, and economic).…”

“Tough Love”: The Political Theology of Civil Disobedience

“…Civility’s critics have good grounds for looking skeptically on the claim that scenes of black suffering will sway white audiences, particularly in an era marked by the ubiquitous circulation of images of spectacular black death (Threadcraft 2017). As Hooker charges, the assumption “that black sacrifice will induce shame among white citizens, which will in turn produce a re-orientation to racial justice is thus a particular account of white moral psychology that fails to take the effects of racialized solidarity into account” (2016, 460).…”