puget sound brittenham queirolo neg weber round2

8/10/2019 Puget Sound Brittenham Queirolo Neg Weber Round2

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Queerness is social death by way of sexualized alienation—the institution of the closet

atomizes queers and prevents the development of a critical consciousness against

heterosexism. There are no institutions of civil society to which the queer can

appeal—the institutional labels enforced by the mainstream movement and codifiedin LGBT can’t do justice to the lived oppression of the queer. Every facet of

heterosexual society is contoured to the extermination of queerness—reject their

ideologies of neutrality.

The Mary Nardini gang writes:

(Mary Nardini gang, clandestine criminal queers from Wisconsin, “Toward the Queerest Insurrection,”

available at http://zinelibrary.info/files/QueerestImposed.pdf)

VI

A fag is bashed because his gender presentation is far too femme.

A poor transman can’t afford his life-saving hormones.

A sex worker is murdered by their client.

A genderqueer persyn is raped because ze just needed to be “fucked straight”.

Four black lesbians are sent to prison for daring to defend themselves against a straight-male

attacker.1

Cops beat us on the streets and our bodies are being destroyed by pharmaceutical companies

because we can’t give them a dime. Queers experience, directly with our bodies, the violence and

domination of this world. Class, Race, Gender, Sexuality, Ability; while often these interrelated and

overlapping categories of oppression are lost to abstraction, queers are forced to physicallyunderstand each. We’ve had our bodies and desires stolen from us, mutilated and sold back to us as a

model of living we can never embody Foucault says that “power must be understood in the first

instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which

constitute their own organization; as the processes which, through ceaseless struggles and

confrontations, transforms, strengthens or reverses them; as the support which these force relations

find in one another, thus forming a chain or system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and

contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the straztegies in which they take

http://zinelibrary.info/files/QueerestImposed.pdf




effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the

formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.” We experience the complexity of

domination and social control amplified through heterosexuality. When police kill us, we want them

dead in turn. When prisons entrap our bodies and rape us because our genders aren’t similarly

contained, of course we want fire to them all. When borders are erected to construct a national

identity absent of people of color and queers, we see only one solution: every nation and borderreduced to rubble.

This violence is the ontological condition of possibility for American liberal democracy:

straight society grounds itself through the bashing of the queer, driven by a

heterosexual economy of desire that extracts pleasure from the suffering of the queer

body.

Stanley 2011 (Eric, “Near Life, Queer Death Overkill and Ontological Capture,” Social Text 107 s Vol.

29, No. 2 s Summer 2011)CJQ

If for Agamben bare life expresses a kind of stripped- down sociality or a liminal space at the cusp of

death, then near life names the figuration and feeling of nonexistence, as Fanon suggests, which

comes before the question of life might be posed. Near life is a kind of ontocorporal (non) sociality

that necessarily throws into crisis the category of life by orientation and iteration. This might better

comprehend not only the incomprehensible murders of Brazell, Paige, and Weaver, but also the terror

of the dark cell inhabited by the queer survivor of the Holocaust who perished under “liberation.”33

Struggling with the phenomenology of black life under colonization, Fanon opens up critical ground for

understanding a kind of near life that is made through violence to exist as nonexistence. For Fanon,

violence is bound to the question of recognition (which is also the im/possibility of subjectivity) that

apprehends the relationship between relentless structural violence and instances of personal attacks

evidenced by the traumatic afterlives left in their wake. For Fanon, the Hegelian master/slavedialectic, as theoretical instrument for thinking about recognition, must be reconsidered through the

experience of blackness in the French colonies. For Fanon, Hegel positions the terms of the dialectic

(master/slave) outside history and thus does not account for the work of the psyche and the historicity

of domination like racialized colonization and the epidermalization of that power. In other words, for

Fanon, when the encounter is staged and the drama of negation unfolds, Hegel assumes a pure battle.

Moreover, by understanding the dialectic singularly through the question of self- consciousness, Hegel,

for Fanon, misrecognizes the battle as always and only for recognition. Informed by Alexandre Kojève

and Jean- Paul Sartre, Fanon makes visible the absent figure of Enlightenment assumed by the

Hegelian dialectic. For Fanon, colonization is not a system of recognition but a state of raw force and

total war. The dialect cannot in the instance of colonization swing forward and offer the self-

consciousness of its promise. According to Fanon, “For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the masterlaughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but

work.”34 Hegel’s dialectic that, through labor, offers the possibility of self- consciousness, for the

colonized is frozen in a state of domination and nonreciprocity.35 What is at stake for Fanon, which is

also why this articulation is helpful for thinking near life, is not only the bodily terror of force;

ontological sovereignty also falls into peril under foundational violence. This state of total war, not

unlike the attacks that left Brazell, Paige, and Weaver dead, is at once from without — the everyday



cultural, legal, economic practices — and at the same time from within, by a consciousness that itself

has been occupied by domination. For Fanon, the white imago holds captive the ontology of the

colonized. The self/Other apparatus is dismantled, thus leaving the colonized as an “object in the

midst of other objects,” embodied as a “feeling of nonexistence.”36 While thinking alongside Fanon on

the question of racialized difference, violence, and ontology, how might we comprehend a

phenomenology of antiqueer violence expressed as “nonexistence”? It is not that we can take thespecific structuring of blackness in the French colonies and assume it would function the same today,

under U.S. regimes of antiqueer violence. However, if both desire and antiqueer violence are

embrocated by the histories of colonization, then such a reading might help to make more capacious

our understanding of antiqueer violence today as well as afford a rereading of sexuality in Fanon’s

texts. Indeed, Fanon’s intervention offers a space of nonexistence, neither master nor slave, written

through the vicious work of epistemic force imprisoned in the cold cell of ontological capture. This

space of nonexistence, or near life, forged in the territory of inescapable violence, allows us to

understand the murders of queers against the logics of aberration. This structure of antiqueer violence

as irreducible antagonism crystallizes the ontocorporal, discursive, and material inscriptions that

render specific bodies in specific times as the place of the nothing. The figuration of near life should

be understood not as the antihuman but as that which emerges in the place of the question of

humanity. In other words, this is not simply an oppositional category equally embodied by anyone or

anything. This line of limitless inhabitation, phantasmatically understood outside the intersections of

power , often articulated as “equality,” leads us back toward rights discourse that seeks to further

extend (momentarily) the badge of personhood. The nothing, or those made to live the death of a

near life, is a break whose structure is produced by, and not remedied through, legal intervention or

state mobilizations. For those who are overkilled yet not quite alive, what form might redress take, if

any at all ?

Queers are always the exile of any community—whiteness constitutes itself though an

annihilation of the possibility of deviance. The consistent exclusion of queers not only

from the discourse of the 1AC but also from the material socialities of the nation

create an impetus toward antiqueer annihilation intrinsic to the advocacy of the

affirmative.

Again, we echo the Mary Nardini gang:

(Mary Nardini gang, clandestine criminal queers from Wisconsin, “Toward the Queerest Insurrection,”

available at http://zinelibrary.info/files/QueerestImposed.pdf)

See, we’ve always been the other, the alien, the criminal. The story of queers in this civilization has

always been the narrative of the sexual deviant, the constitutional psychopathic inferior, the traitor,

the freak, the moral imbecile. We’ve been excluded at the border, from labor, from familial ties.

We’ve been forced into concentration camps, into sex slavery, into prisons. The normal, the straight,

the american family has always constructed itself in opposition to the queer. Straight is not queer.

White is not of color. Healthy does not have HIV. Man is not woman. The discourses of

heterosexuality, whiteness and capitalism reproduce themselves into a model of power. For the rest





of us, there is death. In his work, Jean Genet 1 asserts that the life of a queer, is one of exile - that all

of the totality of this world is constructed to marginalize and exploit us. He posits the queer as the

criminal. He glorifies homosexuality 2 and criminality as the most beautiful and lovely forms of

conflict with the bourgeois world. He writes of the secret worlds of rebellion and joy inhabited by

criminals and queers. Quoth Genet, “Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not

aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general’s sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds.

Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.”

And, the historic patterns of white supremacy which structure civil society are made

possible through the co-constitutive undoing-s of gender, sexuality, and race that are

enacted during the middle passage and enforced through the colonization of the “New

World.” The imposition of gender fragility necessitates a relationship of vulnerability:

without attending to the constitutional nature of hetero-patriarchy their critique will

never achieve freedom for queer bodies who will remain forever marked as inhuman.

Richardson 2012 (Matt, “My Father Didn’t Have a Dick” Social Death and Jackie Kay’s Trumpet, GLQ:

A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Vol. 18 No. 2-3, pp. 361-379)CJQ

Perhaps the best way to unpack the implications of Colman’s crisis of manhood is to begin with an

earlier instantiation of gender crisis that took place from the moment that black bodies were ripped

away from the African continent. In the now foundational essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,”

Hortense Spillers asserts that black captives were stripped of the genders that they were used to, then

regendered at the other end of the Middle Passage — disallowed from continuing with the gender

systems from the places they were from and prohibited from participating in the gender systems

simultaneously demanded from them.2 I contend that the undoing and reworking of black gendercategories is a key facet of social death .3 Orlando Patterson defines social death as the condition in

which slaves are forced into the position of natal alienation, dishonor, and disrespect from which they

cannot recover. Extending from Patterson’s definition, I consider how social death reaches beyond the formal end of

slavery and colonialism. As Sharon Holland contends, “ Some subjects never achieve, in the eyes of others, the

status of the ‘living .’ ”4 For these purposes, “living” is having available to oneself a full range of subjectivity and citizenship. The

gendered aspect of social death gives us a perspective from which to explore its queer implications .

Recognizing the continued impact of slavery, Spillers challenges us to make a decision not to futilely follow “the

master’s” definitions of gender down the (hetero)patriarchal rabbit hole of normativity but to gain

“insurgent ground” by taking a stand outside the “traditional symbolics” of gender.5 Of specific interest here

is what it would mean for black men to embrace the feminine within themselves.6 In this essay, I follow Colman’s burgeoning awareness of his

own queerness: the fact that gender fragility and uncertainty are a part of what makes black bodies already

dead to the Scottish nation. It is this truth that Colman finds unbearable and the condition with which he ultimately has to come to terms.

As a queer, Joss is the one to make this aspect of social death salient. His literal death and the

subsequent revelation of his queer gender identity bring everyone’s gender anxieties into relief

alongside their longing for normative gender categories. Colman is unaware of his figurative death until his father

physically dies. I am especially interested in how Colman comes to see himself as socially dead as well — a black man who is



ultimately in a feminized position in relationship to legitimate patriarchal white masculinity. Here I agree

with Darieck Scott’s argument in Extravagant Abjection that blackness is a hybrid position, at once “hypermasculine and feminine.”7 I would

like to depart from his assertions that black male abjection does not have to belong solely to the feminine

register in order to examine where male abjection and femininity meet. What if we imagined that the sociologist

Robert Park was at least partly right, in that in some fundamental ways the black is structurally the “lady of the races ”?8

The structural meeting of black manhood and femininity does not have to be an occasion for distress.It could be an opportunity to reimagine and improvise other registers for black manhood — perhaps even

through the maternal. Misogyny assumes that the feminine is the end of possibility. How can we transform

positionality into potential ? Perhaps black queerness provides the site from which this burden of

decision can be most clearly rendered, given its positionality outside the nation and even outside

blackness

The alternative is an abolitionist ethic of gender self-determination: drawing together

multiple strands of anti-colonial, black, trans, queer and anti-capitalist critique, this

political orientation opposed to the normalizing projects of incarceration is the best

position from which to create a collective movement united in the abolition of theseoverlapping oppressions. Only the starting point of gender self-determination allows

for the critical subversions of normativity that deflect everyday pain onto queer and

trans bodies.

Stanley 2014 (Eric, “Gender Self -Determination” in TSQ: Trans Studies Quarterly, Vol. 1-2, pp 89-

92)CJQ

Gender self-determination is a collective praxis against the brutal pragmatism of the present, the

liquidation of the past, and the austerity of the future. That is to say, it indexes a horizon of possibility

already here, which struggles to make freedom flourish through a radical trans politics. Not only a

defensive posture, it builds in the name of the undercommons a world beyond the world, lived as adream of the good life.1 Within at least the US context, the normalizing force of mainstream trans

politics, under the cover of equality, operates by consolidation and exile. Or put another way, through

its fetishistic attachment to the law and its vicissitudes, mainstream trans politics argues for inclusion

in the same formations of death that have already claimed so many. This collusion can be seen in the

lobbying for the addition of ‘‘gender identity’’ to federal hate crimes enhancements. While the

quotidian violence many trans people face—in particular trans women of color—is the material of

daily life, this push for the expansion of the prison-industrial complex through hate crimes legislation

proliferates violence under the name of safety. Legislative and semilegislative apparatuses from the

United Nations and NGOs to local governance have begun to include similar language around “gender

equity.” Champions of such moves might cite the Yogyakarta Principles (2007), which are the findings of

a human rights commission convened to foreground ‘‘Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity’’ globally,

or such recent decisions as that of the Australian government to add a third gender option of ‘‘X’’ to

their passports as signs of progress. However, an ethic of gender self-determination helps us to resist

reading these biopolitical shifts as victories. Here the state and its interlocutors , including at times

trans studies, work to translate and in turn confine the excesses of gendered life into managed

categories at the very moment of radical possibility .2 To begin with the ‘‘self’’ in the wake of

neoliberalism might seem a dangerous place to turn a phrase, especially one that is suggested to offer



such radical potentiality—and perhaps it is. After all, the ‘‘self ’’ in our contemporary moment points

most easily toward the fiction of the fully possessed rights-bearing subject of Western modernity, the

foil of the undercommons. However, here it is not the individual but a collective self, an ontological

position always in relation to others and dialectically forged in otherness, that is animated . The

negation of this collective self, as relational and nonmimetic, is the alibi for contemporary rights

discourse, which argues that discrete legal judgments will necessarily produce progressive change.

Rather than believe that this is an oversight of the state form, critics of human rights discourse remind

us that this substitution is a precondition of the state’s continued power. Antagonistic to such

practices of constriction and universality, gender self-determination is affectively connected to the

practices and theories of self-determination embodied by various and ongoing anticolonial, Black

Power, and antiprison movements. For Frantz Fanon and many others, the violence of colonialism and

antiblackness are so totalizing that ontology itself collapses ; thus the claiming of a self fractures the

everydayness of colonial domination. The Black Panther Party for Self Defense echoed a similar

perspective in their 1966 Ten Point Plan. Self-determination, for the Panthers and for many others, is

the potentiality of what gets called freedom. Connecting these histories, ‘‘gender self-determination

is queer liberation is prison abolition ’’ was articulated by the gender and queer liberation caucus of

CR10, Critical Resistance’s tenth anniversary conference in 2008 (The CR10 Publications Collective, 2008:

7). To center radical black, anticolonial, and prison abolitionist traditions is to already be inside trans

politics.3 From STAR’s (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) alliance with the Young Lords in New

York City and the recent organizing against US drone attacks led by trans women in Sukkur, Pakistan, to

Miss Major’s words that anoint this essay, these forms of gender self -determination, even if left

unnamed, argue that national liberation and the overthrow of colonial and carceral rule must be

grown together with gender liberation (see Littauer 2012). Gender self-determination opens up space

for multiple embodiments and their expressions by collectivizing the struggle against both

interpersonal and state violence. Further, it pushes us away from building a trans politics on the

fulcrum of realness (gender normative, trans, or otherwise) while also responding to the different

degrees of harm people are forced to inhabit. As a nonprescriptive politics, its contours cannot always

be known in advance—it is made and remade in the process of its actualization, in the time of

resistance and in the place of pleasure. Becoming, then, as Gilles Deleuze might have it—or more

importantly, as Miss Major lives it (Stanley and Smith 2011)—is the moment of gender self-

determination: becoming liberated as we speak.



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They argue that the constitutive functionality of racism is to produce an impulse

toward criminal extermination acting against women of color: this works ironically to

construct a normalized understanding of what “Latina” is. How can I be a Latina when

la familia is a cabal always working toward my exclusion?

Hennessy 2K [Rosemary, Professor of English at Rice University, Profit and Pleasure, Pg. 4-5. //tjs]

One of the most notable and trenchant features of Butler's analysis is her extension of feminism's theory

of gender as culturally constructed to the more radical argument that the internal coherence of the

identities -man" or "woman" presumes institutional heterosexuality. Much of the oppositional force of

her critique lies in its insistent claim that heteronormativity is absolutely central to the bourgeois

ideology of expressive and coherent selfhood. This imaginary representation, she argues, "conceals

the gender discontinuities that run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual, gay, and lesbian contexts

where gender does not necessarily follow from sex, and desire or sexuality generally does not seem to

follow from gender" (199oa, 135-36). From this perspective, heterosexuality, which is generallyassumed to be an expression of the core of oneself, is exposed as a precarious fabrication always

potentially at risk.

A focus on feminine bodies fails to account for a plurality of gender identities; their

mode of analysis can’t account for everyone and constructs an excess population of

trans people who they exclude.

Butler 2004 (Judith, Prof. Rhetoric and Comp. Lit. at UC-Berkeley, “Undoing Gender,” Pp. 6, Routledge

Press)CJQ

If a decade or two ago, gender discrimination applied tacitly to women, that no longer serves as the

exclusive framework for understanding its contemporary usage. Discrimination against womencontinues —especially poor women and women of color, if we consider the differential levels of

poverty and literacy not only in the United States, but globally—so this dimension of gender

discrimination remains crucial to acknowledge. But gender now also means gender identity, a

particularly salient issue in the politics and theory of transgenderism and transsexuality. Transgender

refers to those persons who cross-identify or who live as another gender, but who may or may not have

undergone hormonal treatments or sex reassignment operations. Among transsexuals and

transgendered persons, there are those who identify as men (if female to male) or women (if male to

female), and yet others who, with or without surgery, with or without hormones, identify as trans, as

transmen or transwomen; each of these social practices carries distinct social burdens and promises.



The impact is a queer investment in carceral death and confinement—Antiqueerness

projects death onto black, brown, and red bodies, whose performances of life all come

into conflict with the regulated confines required by an ontological structure of

domination. Their rhetoric dissolves antiqueerness beneath a veneer of some anti-

essentialist politics, but this belies the ways in which their performance of the 1ACleaves the trans and queer body to exile.

Lamble 2014 (Sarah, “Queer Investments in Punitiveness,” in Queer Necropolitics, Pp. 161-162)CJQ

Each of these examples involves the direct or indirect mobilization of discursive, financial or labour-

related resources towards state practices of imprisonment and punishment. Given the ongoing colonial

legacies of the carceral state, the disproportionate number of people of colour in prison and racial

character of expanding prison populations, these queer investments in punishment are , by their very

nature, investments in state racism and violence . In this way, such investments are symptomatic of

what Jasbir Puar, drawing from Achilles Mbembe’s work, describes as queer necropolitics. Necropolitics

can be understood as technologies of power that (re)produce social relations of living and dying, suchthat some populations are ushered into the worlds of life and vitality, while others are funnelled into

what Mbembe calls death worlds, worlds of slow living death and dead living (Mbembe 2003). Death

here includes literal physical death, but also social, political and civil death - the social relations of

death, decay and dying that emerge from prolonged exposure to violence, neglect, deprivation and

suffering. Offering a corrective to Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics,18 Mbembe puts forward ‘the

notion of necropolitics and necropower to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary

world, weapons are deployed in the interest of the maximum destruction of person and the creation of

death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to

conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead' (2003: 40). In other words, while

biopolitical powers work to manage, order and foster life for citizens worthy of protection, suchpowers work in tandem with necropolitical powers that produce death for those destined to

abandonment, violence and neglect. Taking up this concept within contemporary queer politics, Puar

thus draws attention to the ways in which the folding into life of some queers is predicated on the

folding out of life of others (Puar 2007: 36). While Mbembe’s analysis focuses primarily on situations of

military occupation colonialism and war, the modern prison arguably constitutes another key

instantiation of necropower. For the prison is also a site that produces the conditions of living death ;

it is a place where bodies are subject to regimes of slow death and dying. Not only are deprivation,

abuse and neglect regular features of incarceration itself, but the monotonous regime of caged life -

the experience of ‘doing time’ - involves the slow wearing away of human vitality and the reduction of

human experience to a bleak existence (Scratonand McQulloch 2009; Taylor 2000). The prison servesas a site of mass warehousing of bodies in conditions that often resemble the death worlds that

Mbembe describes. While the modern prison was designed as an institution that aimed in part to train

prisoners as productive workers, obedient citizens and docile subjects a strategy that used disciplinary

power in the broader service of biopolitical power (Foucault 1978/ 1995) - contemporary prisons are

little more than mass warehouses for poor, racialized and otherwise disenfranchized populations

(Gilmore 2007).



Ignoring antiqueerness as constitutive of the performance of the 1AC disavows their

participation in the erasure of queerness internal to Latina communities. The granting

of recognition comes to be constitutive of the promise of personhood—their

disavowal of their own antiqueerness, their omission of the erasure of queerness

intrinsic to Latina community, IS a new link to the kritik that reifies the normalizedstructures of pain that erasure antiblack, antibrown, antiwoman, and antiueer

violence.

Stanley 2011 (Eric, “Near Life, Queer Death Overkill and Ontological Capture,” Social Text 107 s Vol.


Thinking violence as individual acts versus epistemic force works to support the normative and

normalizing structuring of public pain. In other words, privatizing antiqueer violence is one of the

ways in which the national body and its trauma are heterosexualized, or in which the relegation of

antiqueer violence, not unlike violence against women, racist violence, violence against animals (none

of which are mutually exclusive), casts the national stage of violence and its ways of mourning asalways human, masculinist, able- bodied, white, gender- conforming, and heterosexual. For national

violence to have value it must be produced through the tangled exclusion of bodies whose death is

valueless. To this end, as mainstream LGBT groups clamber for dominant power through attachment

of a teleological narrative of progress, they too reproduce the argument that antiqueer violence is

something out of the ordinary.22 The problem of privatizing violence is not, however, simply one of the

re- narration of the incidents. The law, and specifically “rights” discourse, which argues to be the

safeguard of liberal democracy, is one of the other motors that works to privatize this structural

violence. Rights are inscribed, at least in the symbolic, with the power to protect citizens of the nation-

state from the excesses of the government and against the trespass of criminality. In paying attention

to the anterior magic of the law, it is not so much, or at least not only, that some are granted rightsbecause they are human, but that the performative granting of rights is what constitutes the promise

of humanity under which some bodies are held. This is important in thinking about the murder of

Brazell, and about antiqueer violence at large, because it troubles the very foundations of the notion

of protection and the formative violence of the law itself . According to the juridical logic of liberal

democracy, if these rights are infringed upon, the law offers remedy in the name of justice. This

necessary and assumptive formal equality before the law is the precursor for a system argued to be

based on justice. In other words, for the law to lay claim to something called justice, formalized

equality must be a precondition. The law then is a systematic and systematizing process of

substitution where the singular and the general are shuttled and replaced to inform a matrix of

fictive justice. Thus for the law to uphold the fantasy of justice and disguise its punitive aspirations,

antiqueer violence, like all structural violence, must be narrated as an outlaw practice and

unrepresentative of culture at large. This logic then must understand acts like the murder of Brazell

in the singular. Through a mathematics of mimesis the law reproduces difference as similarity. By

funneling the desperate situations and multiple possibilities into a calculable trespass kneading out

the contours and the excess along the way, equality appears. To acknowledge the inequality of



“equality” before the law would undo the fantastical sutures that bind the U.S. legal system . In the

hope of being clear, for the law to read antiqueer violence as a symptom of larger cultural forces, the

punishment of the “guilty party” would only be a representation of justice . To this end, the law is

made possible through the reproduction of both material and discursive formation of antiqueer, along

with many other forms of violence



1NR



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Stanley 2011 (Eric, “Near Life, Queer Death¶ Overkill and Ontological Capture,” Social Text 107 s Vol.


“Dirty faggot!” Or simply, “Look, a Gay!”

¶ These words launch a bottle from a passing car window, the target¶ my awaiting body. In other

moments they articulate the sterilizing glares¶ and violent fantasies that desire, and threaten to enact,

my corporal undoing.¶ Besieged, I feel in the fleshiness of the everyday like a kind of near life¶ or a death-

in- waiting. Catastrophically, this imminent threat constitutes¶ for the queer that which is the sign of

vitality itself. What then becomes¶ of the possibility of queer life, if queerness is produced always and

only¶ through the negativity of forced death and at the threshold of obliteration?¶ Or as Achille Mbembe has

provocatively asked, in the making of ¶ a kind of corporality that is constituted in the social as empty of

meaning¶ beyond the anonymity of bone, “But what does it mean to do violence to¶ what is

nothing?”1¶ In another time and place, “ ‘Dirty nigger!’ Or simply, ‘Look, a¶ Negro!’ ” (“Sale nègre! ou simplement: Tiens, un nègre!”)opened Frantz¶ Fanon’s chapter 5 of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Lived Experience¶ of the Black” (“L’expérience vécue du Noir”), infamously

mistranslated¶ as “The Fact of Blackness.”2 I start with “Dirty faggot!” against a logic of flattened substitution and

toward a political commitment to nonmimetic¶ friction. After all, the racialized phenomenology of

blackness under colonization¶ that Fanon illustrates may be productive to read against and with¶ a

continuum of antiqueer violence in the United States. The scopic and¶ the work of the visual must

figure with such a reading of race, gender, and¶ sexuality. It is argued, and rightfully so, that the instability of

queerness¶ obscures it from the epidermalization that anchors (most) bodies of color¶ in the fields of

the visual. When thinking about the difference between¶ anti- Semitism and racism, which for Fanon was a question of the visuality ¶ of

oppression, he similarly suggests, “the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness.”¶ 3 Here it may be useful to reread Fanon through an

understanding¶ of passing and the visual that reminds us that Jews can sometimes not ¶ be unknown in their Jewishness. Similarly I ask why

antiqueer violence,¶ more often than not, is correctly levied against queers. In other words, the¶

productive discourse that wishes to suggest that queer bodies are no different¶ might miss moments

of signification where queer bodies do in fact¶ signify differently. This is not to suggest that there is an

always locatable,¶ transhistorical queer body, but the fiercely flexible semiotics of queerness¶ might

help us build a way of knowing antiqueer violence that can provisionally¶ withstand the weight of

generality.4

puget sound brittenham queirolo neg weber round2

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