Walking through Necropolitics

As I’ve written a few times online, I’m a bit of a Tapophile –– which is someone who enjoys cemeteries and that sort of thing (in my case, a slight death obsession.) Some tapophiles are into making rubbings of gravestones, etc, but not me. I like walking in them, looking at the art — that sort of thing. I mean — I went to Paris, and instead of seeing the Louvre or such, I went to a cemetery (Père Lachaise– where Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, and over a million others rest.)

I’m currently back in SEPa, house sitting for a week. I previously did some research about the founder of my fraternity, Dr. Samuel Brown Wylie Mitchell Aug 16, 1828-Aug 16, 1879) and discovered he was buried at Chestnut Hill United Church in Germantown, maybe twenty miles away. I thought I’d go pay my respects and take some pics. What I found was a small churchyard where many of the stones were broken, and almost all of them were unreadable — the years of weather had worn away the names on the sandstone markers. I was unable to locate Dr. Mitchell’s resting place, even with the help of the delightful church historian, Ovid.  (Side note: I was delighted to discover that this church is not just LGBT friendly, but specifically trans-supportive!)

I’ve written about this topic before — that of dying while transgender. I maintain that a tombstone is an inadequate marker. Yes, it gives the facts, but nothing about who they were. Maybe an epitaph or something, but can a sentence or two really encapsulate a life? And that’s assuming we are even buried with our True Names at all, and not our dead names.

One ah them there fancy academic terms I learned during my book lernin’ is Necropolitics. Necropolitics was coined by Achille Mbembe, and states “that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.” (Mbembé, 2003, p. 11). Wow — hard core. Applying that to transgender people brings us to Trans Necropolitics, C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn’s (2013) application of the term defined as:

“that value extracted from the deaths of trans people of color vitalizes projects as diverse as inner-city gentrification, anti-immigrant and anti-muslim moral panics, homonationalism, and white transnormative community formation… the lives of trans people of color in the global North and West arc celebrated, and their deaths memorialized, in ways that serve the white citizenry and mask necropolitical violence waged against gender variant people from the global South and East” (p.66).

Once you read it, it’s hard to deny. In some ways, I believe that certain segments in power think the only value of transgender people in general is to push their agendas of fear and control. We are valuable as a weapon or statistic — not as thinking, feeling human beings.

Human beings are buried with the name they used in life on our memorials/urns/obituaries (assuming we have one.) All too often, we are misgendered and dead-named after we pass — if we are identified at all.

I thought about those lives as I sweated in the sun, looking at the worn away headstones of people who lived and died long before my grandparents were born — who lived in an era vastly different than ours in most ways, but held one thing in common with us: in both eras, transgender people are outcasts.

Many wonderful people are working hard in the corridors of power, or out on the streets bleeding, to change this. We are educating one at a time. At that rate, we may be accepted by the time that those doing this work are just headstones, urns, or footnotes.

Figure that a person stays in living memory for maybe 90 years, then all are gone who might remember them. Their lives, unless they did something of note, become the few words on a stone, or a footnote in a text.

I hope that my daughter will live to see transgender people recognized as just people — but I doubt it. I hope I’m wrong. Until then, it’s up to all of us to change what we can, and have value beyond a statistic or stone.

Be well.

References:

Mbembé, J. A., & Meintjes, L. (2003). Necropolitics. Public culture, 15(1), 11-40.

Riley, S. C., Jin, H., Aren, A., & Susan, S. (2013). Trans Necropolitics.

Tags: featured, History, Identity, opinion, Transgender

Category: Transgender Body & Soul