Necrointimacies: Affect and The Virtual Reverberations of Violent Intimacy

Abstract

What is the work of racialized trans death in structuring white trans life? Tracing the chalky encounters of 'ordinary' racialized violence, this article extends Achille Mbembe's (2003) concept of necropolitics to bear upon the centrality of racialized trans death in organizing contemporary trans life. In particular, this research analyzes how the circulation of necropolitical affects-what I have termed trans "necrointimacies"-coheres a morbid sense of belonging through fear, trauma, and the consumption of racialized death in rituals of trans memorialization.

The Early 1990s and Its Afterlives: Transgender Nation Sociality in Digital Activism

“…The annual TDOR remains the most well known and successful format for memorializing transgender death, in which groups read out the names and the autopsy-like reports of their deaths (cf. Bhanji, 2019). The practice of reading out in first person the description of a murder creates a “spectacle of violence” that Lamble (2008) finds ultimately undermines the antiviolence activism by “sensationalizing brutality, objectifying the dead, and exploiting raw emotion” (p. 36).…”