TRANS NECROPOLITICS: DIALOGUES ON DEVICES OF POWER, DEATH AND INVISIBILITY IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

ABSTRACT

Objective:

to analyze the relation between the cisnormative social policies and the invisibility and (physical and symbolic) death of trans entities through their life histories.

Method:

a qualitative and multicenter research that uses the Necropolitics and Thanatopolitics as a theoretical framework. The study participants were 70 trans individuals from Brazil and Costa Rica who were interviewed in 2014 and 2015. The data were analyzed by means of content analysis.

Results:

based on the category “Chronicle of various announced deaths”, one can consider many phenomena related to the structural, systematic and institutional violence in the Latin American society which the trans population “experiences”. Those phenomena expropriate the control of the subjects’ lives and impose a “bare” life, inscribing them into general macroeconomics of terror that reveals the (un)productive and destructive potential of the trans necropower.

Conclusions:

the (un)logical trans necropolitics is an uninterrupted technological practice of structural and institutional violence against the device of transsexuality, which considers death not as a merely biological, but as a moral, social and political phenomenon.

DESCRIPTORS:
Transsexuality; Necropolitics; Thanatology; Death; Collective health

RESUMO

Objetivo:

analisar a relação entre as políticas sociais cisnormativas e a invisibilização e morte (física e simbólica) das entidades trans, por meio de suas histórias de vida.

Método:

pesquisa qualitativa e multicêntrica que utiliza as teorias da Necropolítica e Tanopolítica como referencial teórico. Participaram desta pesquisa 70 pessoas trans do Brasil e Costa Rica entrevistadas durante os anos 2014-2015. Os dados foram analisados segundo a análise de conteúdo.

Resultados:

a partir da categoria elencada “Crônica de várias mortes anunciadas” pode-se pensar em muitos dos fenômenos que estão relacionados com a violência estrutural, sistemática e institucional nas sociedades latino-americanas que são “usufruídos” pela população trans. Ditos fenômenos expropriam aos sujeitos do controle da sua vida, e lhes impõe uma vida “nua” e os inscreve em uma macroeconomia geral do terror que torna visível o potencial (im)produtivo e destrutivo do necropoder trans.

Conclusões:

conclui-se que a (i)lógica necropolítica trans é uma prática tecnológica ininterrupta de violência estrutural e institucional contra o dispositivo da transexualidade, que considera a morte não como um fenômeno meramente biológico, mas moral, social e político.

DESCRITORES:
Transexualidade; Necropolítica; Tanatologia; Morte; Saúde coletiva

RESUMEN

Objetivo:

analizar la relación entre las políticas sociales cisnormativas y la invisibilización y muerte (física y simbólica) de las entidades transexuales por medio de sus historias de vida.

Método:

investigación cualitativa y multicéntrica que utiliza las teorías de la Necropolítica y Tanopolítica como referentes teóricos. Participaron de esta investigación 70 personas transexuales de Brasil y Costa Rica, entrevistadas durante los años de 2014-2015. Los datos fueron analizados según el análisis del contenido.

Resultados:

a partir de la categoría incluida “Crónica de varias muertes anunciadas” se puede pensar en muchos de los fenómenos que están relacionados con la violencia estructural, sistemática e institucional en las sociedades latinoamericanas y que son “usufructuados” por la población transexual. Dichos fenómenos expropian a los sujetos del control de su vida, les imponen una vida “desnudo” y los inscribe en una macroeconomía general del terror que hace visible el potencial (in)productivo y destructivo del necropoder transexual.

Conclusiones:

se concluye que la lógica o ilógica necropolítica transexual es una práctica tecnológica ininterrumpida de violencia estructural e institucional contra el dispositivo de la transexualidad que no considera a la muerte como un fenómeno meramente biológico sino moral, social y político.

DESCRIPTORES:
Transexualidad; Necropolítica; Tanatopolítica; Muerte; Salud colectiva

INTRODUCTION

In this article, we use some contemporary philosophical and legal positions to travel through the concepts of Mbembe’s¹ concept of necropolitics and Agamben’s concept of thanatopolitics², aiming to analyze the relationship between cisnormative social policies and the invisibility and (physical and symbolic) death of trans entities by means of their life histories.

Specifically, the question investigated in this work arises as a result of the need to reflect on a set of events the trans population experienced, which were witnessed in the completion of the doctoral dissertation entitled: “Life histories and social representations of sex, body, gender and sexuality among transsexual people in Brazil, Canada and Costa Rica”, and which we will call, generically and provisionally, intransigent violence, whose most paradigmatic references are homicides, suicides,^1-3 massacres, mutilations and forced displacements of this population, (direct- and indirectly) promoted by several abstract and dictatorial legal frameworks, deriving from conflict dynamics that, overall, respond to a cis-heteronormativity enforced in the present postcolonial societies.

In this context (and perhaps as a complement), it is important to point out that some authors^5-8 concentrate on the postcolonial experience to study particularly the recent history of Africa, the case of Palestine and the phenomena of Nazism and terrorism and question whether the notions of disciplinary power and Foucault’s biopower are sufficient to discuss the necro-thanatological practices and devices of modern times.

They also question whether these concepts are enough to make visible this ominous and paradoxical set of powers that seem to pervert the sense of governing (subjects, ethnicity and populations) and that shift the times and spaces of what we call (indefinitely) violence, as well as its respective rituals of affection and mourning.

Corresponding to these inquiries, the philosophers mentioned above rely on Foucault’s analysis by means of a singular form of interpretation, to indicate that death is a (more or less) sophisticated and specific technology of colonial origin to manage certain populations in the world.

Although some philosophers speak only of death in a literal sense, we consider it pertinent to understand death in a broader sense in this article: literal and symbolic-metaphorical. The latter is related to the non-recognition of citizenship, personified in the concept of precarious citizenships.¹⁰ Consequently, we consider that the act of killing could be associated with homicide, but also with exposure to death, replication of death risks, invisibility, expulsion, stigmatization and social exclusion of some populations (here the trans group).

Cumulatively, in spite of this reality, it is considered that, in the process of death administration that necro-thanatopolitics supposes in the current neoliberal context, Foucault’s formula of “making live” takes on a new paradoxical stance linked to “letting die” (or instigating death).⁹

In fact, this (un)logic can be appreciated in the consolidation of a diffuse field of exclusion and socioeconomic extermination, in which certain social and federal necropower practices deliberately “push” certain human groups (the trans population in this case) to death and invisibility (concept adapted from the Anglo-Saxon word erasure).

Based on these realities, it is worth emphasizing the dichotomous paradox in the contemporary world between valuable vs. disposable (or pathological) lives, as well as the new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subject to living conditions that give them the name of living dead, citizens without citizenship or, in the words of Agamben, of homo sacer.⁶

Confined to this terrain of generic brutality, we agree on the idea that power in postcolonial times takes the form of necropolitics, as it advocates as a standard the death of anyone who is unable to fit within his manipulative and prescriptive norms.⁵

Considering the issue in view of these aspects, we aim to analyze the relationship between the cisnormative social policies and the invisibility and (physical and symbolic) death of the trans entities, through their life histories. Thus, our intention in this manuscript is not solely to enter the problematization about the concept of death or its typification, but to approach it in its broadest sense, that is, in the moral and political sense, always linked to the trans reality.

Finally, we start from the premise that, to realize this epistemological discussion, we need to consider that the analysis of Mbembe and Agamben has a remarkable potential to understand multiple contemporary political processes through the study of the practices that (co-)establish them - their historicity and singularity. Therefore, we logically depart from the need to inscribe this analysis into a new discursive temporality, within the horizon of the theorization the trans epistemologies opened. We grant the analysis it a new style and greater potential for its use as a box of conceptual tools in which colonial domination structures subsist, like in Latin American countries, but which could undoubtedly be extended to other latitudes of Anglo-Saxon origins.

METHOD

This is a qualitative, sociohistorical research that used the complete life histories as a procedural technique to collect information during the years 2014 to 2015. The universe of participants chosen consisted of 70 trans participants from two different countries, being 35 participants from Brazil and 35 from Costa Rica: 60 trans women and ten trans men.

It is important to emphasize that, in this study, we used the concept of “trans woman” to refer to people who were identified at birth as belonging to the “male sex”, but who identify with the female gender. Consequently, the term “trans man” in the scope of this research refers to persons who were identified at birth as belonging to the “woman sex” and who identify with the male gender.

The choice of the context was intentional because it corresponded to the native countries of the two researchers, thus working with participants from two hubs on the American continent (Central and South America) and with the two languages of each region (Spanish and Portuguese). For the development of this research, we received the explicit cooperation and authorization from two non-governmental organizations: the Association for the Defense of Human Rights with a focus on Sexuality (ADEH) and the Support Association for the Trans Population (TransVida). The first is located in Florianópolis, state capital of Santa Catarina, Brazil, and the second in San José, capital of Costa Rica.

The participants were selected through the snowball technique, in which initial participants affiliated with the aforementioned institutions indicated new collaborators (peers) who could contribute to the object of this study, thus constituting a network of indications.

The selected inclusion criteria were: participants over 18 years of age, with citizenship in these two countries, who self-identified as trans people (both trans women and trans men), who were at the beginning, middle or end of the transition process, or who did not wish to make any physical changes, but who fought for the claim to use their name and social pronoun. Only intersexual persons were excluded - we consider intersexual as those persons who were designated at birth with conditions of genital ambiguity according to anatomical, histological and/or cytological criteria.

The project was submitted for evaluation to the Ethics Committee for Research involving Human Beings of the Federal University of Santa Catarina, registered under CAAE 37753414.1.0000.5355 in Brazil. After the explanations, clarifications and their acceptance, we requested the participants to sign the Free and Informed Consent Form, translated in both languages. Cumulatively, the primary researcher conducted the interviews with an average length of 75 minutes. The date and place for the interview were defined a priori by the participant. With the subjects’ authorization, the statements were recorded and later transcribed and transcreated. In order to preserve the participants’ anonymity, the statements were identified using the word “Trans woman” or “Trans man”, followed by an Arabic number and each participant’s country of citizenship.

Bardin’s content analysis guided the critical-reflexive analysis process in this research. This process unfolded in three phases: pre-analysis, material exploration and interpretation. In the pre-analysis phase, the 70 interviews were subject to careful skimming, aiming to verify if the themes of violence, death, suicide, stigma, social invisibility/erasure were constant variables in the participants’ life histories.

Then, the exploration phase of the material occurred, which consisted of a series of coding and classification operations of what was being narrated through each testimony in function of the explicit meanings. In this phase, the data were coded to systematically transform them and aggregate them into descriptive content units.

After this organization, the units of meanings and categories were chosen, which were classified and aggregated in the category: “Chronicle of several announced deaths”. Finally, in the inference and interpretation stage of the data, the reported life histories were associated with the theories of necropolitics and thanatopolitics, addressing at the same time the concepts of necropower, sovereignty, bare life, bios, zoe, homo sacer, among others.

This multifocal analytical perspective allowed us to reveal the complex epistemic and theoretical-methodological map that underlies the plurality of trans being, thinking and knowing and its relation with the contemporary necropower.

RESULTS

This presentation of the results is aimed at revealing the practices that produce deaths through a systematic exercise of violence and terror against trans people. This is the trans necropower, that is, the submission of the lives of people who identify themselves within the trans spectrum to the power of death and invisibility.

The following testimonies arising from the content analysis of the interviews and that justify the category “Chronicle of several announced deaths”, explain the trans people’s (contact) life with necropower, necropolitics, death, suicide, transphobia and invisibility:

my family used to call me, that is, they still call me a freak. When they saw how I am today with a beard and transformed, with a voice a little thicker, they look and say: ‘Okay, no more of this horror and this freak’. They (the family) said they would rather see me die murdered than have to look at my face. They said: ‘You can only wait for someone to be kind enough to kill you, because we are unable to kill you. We will never accept you, we will never take in this freak’. That’s why I think about ending my life every day, sometimes I do not want to live anymore (Trans man 5, Brazil, 2014);

did you know that we trans, we die very young? If you start to see in Argentina, Colombia and Chile the life expectancy is like 25 or 30 years, here in Costa Rica they do not kill us much because they are permanently afraid to go to jail or something, but if they mistreat us, but they do spit on us, they throw stones at us, they yell stupid things at us when we are on the street, they look at us with ugly eyes when we walk during the day and they force us to commit suicide (Trans woman 17, Costa Rica, 2015).

The above statements converge in the sense that the trans necropolitics is an uninterrupted technology of systemic, structural and institutional violence against the transsexuality device, as it permeates social life - including the various family, school and cultural variables - and especially political life, in its game of cis-heterosexist oppression.

In view of this complexity, an intersection between sexes, bodies, genders, sexualities, violence, (necro/bio)power, invisibility/erasure, discrimination and precariousness is necessary, at a time of contemporary regimes of transphobia, racism, neo(post)colonialism, wars, terrorisms, immigrations, recolonizations, imprisonments, border reinforcements, capitalisms and economic neoliberalisms.

The following testimonies illustrate this reality concretely. It is also observed that some of the participants, while exploring their memories and telling their life histories, remembered the pains their bodies carried when facing the continuous blows received from the necropolitical (un)logic:

they [the family] said that they preferred to see me die murdered than to have to look at my face. There in the street I’ve also been called Satanic, abnormal, everyone wants to see me dead like I’m a cockroach, want to see me whipped, humiliated because to them being trans is a curse (Trans woman 20, Brazil, 2014);

I remember once, walking down the street, I ran into a mae [a man] who murmured blatantly: ‘How great it would be to bump into one of those damn transvestites standing on the corner of the INS and break their nose or shoot them down! ‘And the man said it without fear, without shame, amidst of a group of other men who applauded and laughed at his evil desires. That’s why I tell you that I cannot stop feeling threatened and afraid, thinking about all the times they want to kill me and the times when death walks by my side (Trans woman 11, Costa Rica, 2015);

society shouts at us and reminds us that we are dirty, bitches and damned. That kills us little by little, they do not know, but they are killing us, they do not see us as trans people or as transvestites. They do not see that we can be their daughters, sisters or aunts, they prefer to crucify us, put us to the stake and burn us alive (Trans woman 32, Costa Rica, 2015).

According to the above statements and based on Mbembe and Agamben’s concepts, it can be articulated that life and death are revealed, no longer as scientific or natural, but as political and moral concepts and, as such, are subject to arbitrary decisions, in which the role of the omnipresence of legal and social normativeness in the process of exclusion, invisibility, rejection, stigmatization and fetishization of the trans body is evidenced.

Therefore, based on the core issue unveiled in the prior statements and the experience gained in the fieldwork, we can talk about trans necropolitics, linked not only to legal frameworks or from a post-colonial perspective, but necropolitics that has been brewing from the social, sexist, class-based and heterocisnormative regulations. We are referring here to decrees, regulations and social frameworks that impose specific obligations, activities and performances according to our plastic and voluble genitals and our plastic and artificial genders. These necropolitics can decree death and (symbolic and material) destruction since the delicate phases of our lives, even since before we were born through the use of compulsory, prescriptive (and not only descriptive) technologies like the ultrasound.

Thus, in this field of subtleties and impositions, one needs to clarify the complex articulation between the machineries of cis-heterosexist power and the federal ideologies. Indeed, the ghost of the nation-state continues operating as it did in the old colonies, in order to justify the conquest of thought as a way of annihilation: to build mechanisms to standardize the mentalities, to dominate the imaginary and to hijack the bodies and desires.

There is, however, a particular problem, which is: this power runs parallel to figures and devices that overflow the structure of the State, as are families, non-progressive spiritual support institutions and educational institutions.

A crucial aspect to understand the kinds of devices and technologies of contemporary trans necropolitics is the understanding that, while milestones that seek to legitimize violence remain grounded in modern notions - such as the war against trans people, sovereignty and the enemy - it is no longer pretended that the monopoly of violence is found in the State.

As a result, a series of devices (people and institutions) intertwine and combine to assassinate, generate the necessary terror, control the imaginary and exterminate any kind of figure that escapes the organizational (and obsolete) principles declared “normal” in Goffman’s sense, as demonstrated in the following statements:

did you know that here in Brazil every 24 hours one of us dies beaten up? It is a reality, the people do not like us and want to see us dead (Trans woman 13, Brazil, 2014);

the only thing I know is that we are dying little by little. In Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, it is a crime to be a transvestite or transsexual, that is why people feel entitled to kill us and get rid of us as if we were dogs. They kill us and throw us away like a garbage bag (Trans woman 28, Costa Rica, 2015).

In line with the statements and the (un)logic of the trans necropolitics, it is observed that the vulnerability and symbolic torture of the body - which represents an alterity according to the paradigms consolidated as hegemonic and (supposedly) natural - are a discursive and pragmatic issue mediated by different people and social institutions.

In this sense, it seems that there is constant panoptic and structural surveillance through different institutions in the contexts investigated. These institutions are: the family (which replicates the established and historically consolidated social policy), non-progressive religion (which condemns attitudes that escape its understanding), medicine (especially from psychiatry), which employ the threat of abnormality, sin and pathologization to place and expose this body under suspicion and death. This can be expressed in the following statements:

there the people are extremely macho, you know what it is like, the gaucho, right? [...] Going back to the story, I was the young girl everyone rejected and beat up, I have always been and continue being. My teachers treated me like an animal, it has always been hard, it’s been really difficult, really ... it’s very sad to have to face this reality, to see how they judge you and beat you. It’s hard to see how your friends die at the hands of the killers, or by injecting industrial silicone into their breasts, thighs, butt, all because we cannot get access to health care ... all due to prejudice and all that” (Trans woman 33, Brazil, 2014).

They do not kill us directly, but they force us to kill ourselves. I have three friends who already committed suicide because their families never understood them, they turned their backs on them, they kicked them out of the house like a dog and they could not stand that resentment and killed themselves. They were always ridiculed and beaten by the neighbors ... I remember that one of them jumped in front of a car and the other two hung themselves. But these are not suicides, they are murders, everyone has this blood on his hands, it is the fault of everyone, of the government, of society, of the whole country (Trans woman 30, Costa Rica, 2015).

These statements reveal that trans necropower is an operational, one-way and prescriptive force of identities (whether generic or of sexual desire) in the contemporary Latin American societies.

As observed, it is precisely a kind of symbolic network that branches across society and is governed by heterocispunitive rules of behavior based on political, aesthetic, economic and religious interest of a dominant and historically dominant group.

In the same context and articulated in different ways and to different extents, we consider that the performativity and the impossibility to get out of the binary discourse of sexual, bodily, generic and erotic normativity - which encompasses restrictive and standardizing mechanisms as methods of singularization and classification among human beings - allow us to understand and even justify the trans necropolitics and, consequently, the acts of violence, discrimination, suicides, torture and death against alterity.

DISCUSSION

Some authors^5,8 point out that biopolitics cannot be understood without its counterpart, necropolitics, thanatopolitics and exception in the colony. Based on these epistemological anchorages we can examine, on the one hand, this fundamental space of violence that is found in all postcolonial life histories, and which need emphasis in order to understand the conditions the current policy was developed in. Second, it helps us to think of society in its contemporary condition in order to problematize how this paradigm continues operating, mainly in dissenting and unintelligible identities.

In the fetishization and fragmentation of the trans body that morality, politics and society diagnose, catalog and condemn as strange and plausible to homicides (literal and metaphorical), most often characterized by the impunity of the aggressor, one can perceive the effect of transphobia and terrorism, suffered through various forms of violence and abandonment.¹²

Now the trans body that breaks through the apparent normality (in Goffman’s sense), devoid of any right and freedom, presents itself as defenseless and becomes abject to others and often to itself. Note that - perhaps - the most refined level of panoptic control and punishment of trans necropolitics roots in this implantation of naturalized and self-decreed death.

It is clear that panoptic power creates psychological control, in which trans people are forced to control and supervise themselves in order to comply with the ethical-moral, aesthetic-expressive and institutional expectations expressed by a hegemonic, cishetero, dictatorial and phallocentric society.

In this sense, complex social dichotomies are evidenced: repression versus visibility, oppression versus rights, emphasizing how technologies and social apparatuses reinforce the mechanisms of lack of recognition of citizenship and, consequently, accelerate the processes of premature death in the trans identities and for those whom the social, political and representational regimes regard as disposable.

We speak of technologies and apparatuses of control and mastery over diverse and polysemous frontiers (of behavior) to unveil the processes of gradual wear and objectification of the subjects and populations that escape the expected reality.

In the same train of thought, we agree with some authors that we are living in a time of chains and corpses, deaths, loss, mourning, rage and activism in response to mass incarcerations of dissident identities, arrests, criminalizations, transphobia, violence and trans discrimination.^4-5,13

These (metaphorical and literal) incarcerations are the result of the normalization projected in the ideological displays that heterocisnormative post-colonialism promotes. All this political, economic, and consequently social reorganization composes a mosaic of trans necropolitics as a tool that gives meaning to a symbiotic co-presence of life and death, manifested in the divisions between heterosexuals vs. dissidents (miscellaneous), cis versus trans, citizens vs. precarious citizens, cultural, moral and economically valuable people vs. those pathologized by the different disciplines, queer^* citizens invited to live vs. those considered to be wretches marked with the seal of death.¹⁴

Related to this thought, it can be verified that trans necropolitics implements death mechanisms that could be portrayed through the metaphor of slavery Mbembe alludes to in his theory.⁵

Nevertheless, the condition of slave will be personified by the trans person permeated not only by ethical-political, but also by legal-moral determinants. This metaphor evidences the result of a triple loss: loss of a home, work and education; loss of rights over his body and loss of one’s political status. This triple loss amounts to absolute domination, alienation from birth and social death - which is the sanitization of public spaces.

The political-legal structure, however, the slave plantation - here the trans community - is undoubtedly the space in which the trans slave belongs to the master. Articulated in different ways and proportions, the figure of the master gains different hues, represented by the figure of the State and those who reproduce the social standards of behavior considered appropriate or pseudonormal.

In this sense, it should be noted that the trans person has to obey without questioning the absence of logic and the social bans. On the opposite, (s)he will be humiliated, beaten or exposed to death. On the other hand, in this trans slavery scenario, we believe that the heterocisnormative policy - through the transmission of its exclusionary, totalitarian and authoritarian statutes and devices - establishes a collective thought of normality and suitability in relation to what is expected of a man and a woman, converting on the one hand those people who escape these ideals in abject beings, slaves of restrictive thinking and citizens without citizenship. On the other hand, it turns the people who match this cisheterosexual reality/standard into moralist sovereigns, sociopaths, hit men and terrorists who have the (necro)power to reproduce this discourse, signal, discriminate, stigmatize and even murder the alterity that does not fit these statutes, without any type of punishment, as these are simply following the orders of a social policy that was historically established and validated by religion, society, morals, law and medicine. Similarly, in line with this (un)logic, Giorgio Agamben’s thanatopolitical thinking recovers the Roman figure of the homo sacer to represent the non-citizen being that lacks rights and acknowledgements by the State or by any social or moral support institution.⁸

Therefore, it is a doubly excluded being: by civil law and by religious social law, whose double exclusion exposes it to violence and death. For this reason, death can be carried out and go unpunished. It is thus evident that the proper place of a person whose life is “bare” (life that has no rights or recognition of citizenship) is beyond criminal law and sacrifice, in an area of indifference that it had been irremediably confined to by sovereign mandate.^7-8

At this point, it seems to us that the homo sacer could be another paradigm capable of explaining the essence and functioning of the trans necropower on dissident people whose lives are “bare”. Therefore, we consider it valid to make a semantic comparison between the homo sacer and trans people, because it is evident that, in our contemporary world, these lives are reduced to their mere biological condition (to the concept of zoe and not to the concept of bios), representing the abstract bareness of being simply human.

In view of this reality, it is necessary to examine the trajectories by which the ontology of the exception and the antagonistic relation with the standards of cis behavior have turned into the regulatory base and justification of the right to kill, to make invisible or to promote suicides.

This seems to be the key point, as we refer to the symbolic, restrictive and complex invisibilities as a manifestation of a panoptic-penal, legislative and social control that ignores and assassinates - promotes death, suicides and makes invisible - the dissident bodies and simultaneously excludes those who travel in unequal, unintelligible, inequitable and irreconcilable circuits.

We also agree with the fact that, in the process of making live/letting die, living/dying, spaces and contexts are (re)created in which the death (and suicide) of some hominis sacri is acceptable.^6-8 In that sense, crossing the border of the unacceptable justifies the violence, discrimination, phobia, invisibility/erasure and death of some identities, based on necropolitics that focus on the ways in which the bodies need to be erased, banned and murdered by not conforming to the socially prefixed ideological model.

The games of the necropower and thanatopower are inscribed in this abstract diagram of necropolitical forces through organizational and artificial devices that control future actions. Their mechanisms are strategic, they appropriate the knowledge and the distorted discourse of an era that considered them as true - the necropower interacts with and simultaneously constitutes knowledge.

In the same way, they belong to knowledge and power. They sustain the visible and the invisible, what they can word and the (extra)temporal strategies. They use a heterogeneous set to implant their thinking, which includes discourse, imaginaries, representations, laws, administrative measures, social, moral and humanistic statements, among others.^5,15-17

Necropolitical power is the network established among these elements that not only declare death and invisibility in trans identities, but also perpetuate acts that help segregate and hinder the recognition of their identity in those people who struggle to survive and refuse to die.

As shown, trans necropolitics is understood as a social, cultural, and symbolic gear that produces other grammatical codes and social interactions through the management of death and invisibility. These terms are part of a discursive taxonomy that seeks to undo the complexity of the criminal fabric in the cisnormative context, and its connections with globalization, the binary construction of gender as a political performance and the creation of capitalist subjectivities, recolonized by the economy and represented by the trans people.

In other words, trans necropolitics is the reinterpretation and exhaustive execution of the bio/necropower, largely based on the (un)logics of coping with the forces of life and death, yet it exerts a pseudoliberty, but which can only be understood in the notion of stealing it from others.

Moreover, there is explicit concern with proposing the confrontation of the challenges of necropolitics by means of the development of new forms of understanding of sex, body, gender and sexuality, not as products of social or biological essences, but of discursive and prescriptive practices.

By deconstructing these traditional social understandings, we will be able, first, to liberate a population that does not fit into this restricted and asphyxiating reality of its inevitable deadly outcome, and subsequently to re-signify the language that establishes these traits as definitive and designates them as the main ordering forces of social relationships.

Finally, having appealed to the notion of deconstruction, we turn to the thoughts exposed throughout Caravaca-Morera’s dissertation to propose the start of the demystification of the cis-heteronormative order and to remember that our sexes are prosthetic, artificial, cybernetic, diverse; that our genders and sexualities are disordered, nomadic, mutable and volatile, and that our bodies are socially (de)constructed and de(naturalized) texts.

CONCLUSION

Through this narrative, we understand that the normative models, whether social or legal, reflect the lack of pragmatic evolution that has been necessary to combat the necropolitics against trans identities. This is a consequence of the fragile and timid will between the individual and collective interests inherent in this matter.

On the one hand, there are some timid efforts to find a way out of the recognition of the human rights of those who identify within the trans spectrum. At the same time, however, there is a latent fear of re-signifying broadly consolidated social and legal historical structures, such as the institutions of sex, body, gender and sexuality.

The topographies of ambiguous cruelty the research participants described, which were interpreted in the light of Mbembe and Agamben’s theory, draw a non-exclusive map for trans identities, but there are other identity spaces that may share the same characteristics.

The reference framework of necropolitics associated with intersectionality (articulation and analysis of systems of domination and historical privileges in terms of race, class, sexuality and gender) offers a potential tool to explore the possibilities of activating the political against the structural, systematic and institutionalized violence and current inequities, as it provides us with a view of the symbiotic co-presence between life and death, expressed in much more evident ways among the furrows of contemporary post-colonial life that ranks citizens vs. hominis sacri.

This articulation is necessary to meet and mitigate the various stigmas (public stigma, self-stigma and structural stigma) that bind a trans person with other variables, such as religion, race, ethnicity, physical disability, immigration, sex-service, male and female homosexuality, bisexuality, pansexuality, criminal detention (or criminal exclusion), poverty and low education.

In the light of this production, we can think of many phenomena that may be related to the violence the trans people experience in our Latin American societies. Those phenomena expropriate the control of the subjects’ lives and impose a “bare” life, inscribing them into general macroeconomics of terror that reveals the (un)productive and destructive potential of the necropower.

Mbembe and Agamben’s significant analytic contribution, particularly in this study, is related to the fact that, in the context of ex-colonies and within the framework of coloniality/postcolonialism, we can use Foucault’s tools to address different phenomena, but being aware that, although his method is appropriate, the content of his investigations (technologies and devices) is insufficient to explain all the current realities.

This study invites us to research and problematize the specific technologies that operate in our contexts, to uncover their singular and contingent rationalities, always inscribing them in an intersectional, inclusive and progressive perspective (in a trans genealogy).

It also poses a major challenge (in the academic sphere and in other state-owned and social institutions): to produce comprehensive categories that make populations considered subaltern and unintelligible socially and legally intelligible (comprehensible, clear, decipherable).

Connected to these thoughts, it is clear that the institutionalization of gender fluidity, of the complex and (perhaps) ineffable interaction among the identity identifications, continues to represent one of the greatest challenges to ensure equity and equality in health, education and work systems. Therefore, many other studies and practices of social justice are needed to combat the physical and symbolic deaths, invisibility, stigma and depathologization of the post-colonized (un)logics, representations and imaginaries of people and other socialization (and domestication) institutions of bodies, such as schools, families, churches, workplaces, political environments, among others.

Finally, this study shows that, although there are some differences in political, ethnic, cultural and linguistic terms between the research contexts, there are significant similarities between the life histories and daily coexistence with stigma, structural violence and trans necropolitical practices. This arises as a result of the existence of legal and social practices rooted in patriarchal and heterocissexist models that do not distinguish between Latin American or Anglo-Saxon contexts.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  21 June 2018
• Date of issue
  2018

History

• Received
  02 Dec 2016
• Accepted
  20 July 2017