by Eric Stanley
Social Text, Issue 107: Summer 2011
This article examines forms of queer (non)sociality I call near life that are forced to exist, as nonexistence,... more
This article examines forms of queer (non)sociality I call near life that are forced to exist, as nonexistence, outside the bounds of possessive humanism. Through a reading of the brutal murders and disarticulation of a number of trans/queer people, I suggest the legal category of "overkill" as a way of apprehending a queer ontology that stands in contrast to the security of an LGBT identity. That the murdered were working class and largely people of color and/or trans/gender nonconforming marks this interpersonal violence as a restaging of larger iterations of necropolitical state violence. As antiqueer violence is written in the social as an outlaw practice, I argue, via Frantz Fanon's reading of Hegel, that these forms of violence are not an aberration but are central to the reproduction of liberal democracy in the United States. Against redemption--violence is the province of the queer, but this does not signal the totality of negation nor the end of queer resistance.
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