Gender and Necropolitics
I first heard about the concept of necropolitics, not in a philosophy classroom, but in an organizing space. I was working with a few activists and they recommended doing a reading of a section of a book called Queer Necropolitics. Necropolitics is this concept developed by Achille Mbembe to theorize about the political power involved in determining who is to do, who is killable. Queer necropolitics is about the way that the state and other institutions determine who is killed on the basis of their gender and sexuality.
I like the concept of necropolitics, at least applied to gender and sexuality, because it highlights the structural violence involved in gendered oppression. I have a paper (Richardson (2025)) where I talk about how the philosophical discussion about trans identity tends to highlight interpersonal instances of misgendering. I think this is important, but it understates the extent to which anti-trans structural violence is a major problem. In my paper, I don’t have enough space to speak extensively about necropolitics, but I basically think that anti-trans necropolitics is a huge part of the story of structural oppression.
This survey article by Islekel (2022) is helpful because it gives a state-of-the-art on gender and necropolitics. I highly recommend that people read it. Here is the abstract:
This article focuses on gender in the theoretical framework of necropolitics. To this end, I first articulate the role of gender in Mbembe’s own account, and then explicate necropolitics as a conceptual tool that accounts for the overwhelming presence of death in contemporary politics. Gender is an undertheorized element of Mbembe’s account of necropolitics; as it takes a secondary role while accounting for racial and (post)colonial violence. Nevertheless, necropolitics provides a helpful tool of analysis for gendered violence, and specifically gendered death. Through situating gendered death within the framework of necropolitics, we can move from power to resistance with respect to the contemporary politics of death, and articulate how other politics of death are formulated in transnational feminist, queer, and trans movements. Thus, necropolitics as a conceptual tool is helpful in understanding how contemporary colonial gender system works through not only an articulation, but optimization, of death.