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Queer Necropolitics and the Expanding Carceral State: Interrogating Sexual Investments in Punishment

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Abstract

This article examines the changing relationship between sexual politics and the carceral state. While sexual and gender nonconforming people have been historically punished for transgressing social norms, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists in Europe and North America have begun to invest in the state punishment of others. Whether supporting hate crime legislation, calling for more police in gentrifying neighborhoods, or participating in police recruitment campaigns, organisations that formerly fought against criminalisation trends now actively support expanding forms of state violence and punishment. Focussing on examples from the British and US context—and drawing from the concept of ‘queer necropolitics’—this article considers how the carceral state has shifted from a key target of queer protest to celebrated guardian of sexual citizenship. Arguing that this process constitutes more than just another story of queer assimilation and co-optation, the article suggests this shift reflects a deeper reconfiguration of sexual politics, where citizenship norms and practices are increasingly infused with a chillingly punitive and deathly logic.

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Notes

  1. This shift is particularly striking when juxtaposed against the demands of early ‘gay liberation’ movements. Decriminalisation of same-gender sex acts, for example, marked a key demand of the homosexual groups that emerged in Europe at the end of the 1800s, and has remained a priority. Likewise, resistance to policing and punishment formed a prominent feature of the gay liberation movements of North America and Europe during the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s (Kunzel 2008; Blasius and Phelan 1997). While punitive trends have previously co-existed alongside decriminalisation campaigns (see for example, Hanhardt 2008), pro-criminalisation strategies have gained prominence in recent years (Aharonson 2010).

  2. By bringing together examples from the USA and Britain, I do not wish to obscure the important social, political and historical differences between the two contexts or suggest that sexual politics play out the same way in each country. However, as I argue below, there are common cross-jurisidictional trends in the way that discourses of sexual citizenship increasingly work in tandem with the expanding neoliberal carceral state.

  3. While the literature on ‘sexual citizenship’ is too vast to summarise here, I generally use the term to describe forms of national belonging that recognise legal, social and kinship rights of LGBT subjects, particularly through demands for relationship recognition, adoption rights, sexual expression, protection from violence and military service. This article builds on previous critiques of sexual citizenship by scholars such as Bell and Binnie (2000), Richardson (2000) and Cossman (2007).

  4. I use ‘carceral state’ to refer to the institutional branches and multi-scalar practices of the state that fulfill policing, discipline and punishment related functions. This includes, but is not limited to prisons, police, probation, psychiatric detention and immigration detention. This term is not meant to suggest that the state is, or operates in, a singular, unified or monolithic form, but identifies practices within government which are deployed around specifically punitive and carceral-focused aims. The prefix ‘neoliberal’ denotes the reconfiguration of the nation state under neoliberal capitalism, signaling both the expanded embrace of market driven economic and social policy, and its goal of producing autonomous, entrepreneurial, self-governing subjects (Brown 2005: Chapter 3; Garland 2001).

  5. Despite the announcements in 2010 that the UK Ministry of Justice would face cutbacks of £1.9 billion over four years, the ‘capacity plan’ for building new prison places has remained virtually untouched, and the net result has been expansion of the prison estate. Much of the short-term ‘savings’ also have been made through outsourcing of services, which has benefited the for-profit prison sector (UK House of Commons Justice Committee 2012).

  6. For critique of simplistic ‘profit-making’ explanations for the growth of prisons, see Wacquant (2010) and Gilmore (2007).

  7. See Agozino (2003), Christianson (2000), Ross (1998), Sudbury (2005).

  8. The title of the Act references two brutal deaths in 1998: Mathew Shepard was tortured, tied to a fence and left to die in Laramie, Wyoming because he was perceived to be gay; and James Byrd Jr., an African American disabled man was tortured and killed by white supremacists in Jasper Texas.

  9. See Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act 2009. Available: http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/pdfs/military_act_2009.pdf.

  10. Introduced by a Republican Senator, the death penalty amendment was included in the version of the bill passed by the US Senate on 23 July 2009. The death penalty amendment subsequently was removed in October 2009 when the House and Senate versions of the bill were amalgamated, and was therefore excluded from the final legislation that was signed into law by President Obama on 28 October 2009.

  11. While some anti-death penalty activists argue for life sentences as a substitute for the death penalty, many groups are challenging this approach as well, arguing that alternatives to prison can better prevent, repair and facilitate accountability for harm. See for example Davis (2003, p. 106).

  12. Despite popular rhetoric, there is no clear empirical evidence that hate crime laws are effective crime prevention measures. This is partly because such legislation relies on the logic of deterrence, which presumes that acts of violence are governed by rational, calculated decisions where individuals are fully aware of, and expect to face, the consequences of their actions. Although tougher sentences may carry some deterrent effect in certain situations, they often are counter-acted by other factors and depend on the nature of the specific offence in question. On the whole, sentence severity has little or no bearing on crime prevention (Doob and Webster 2003). For broader critiques of hate crime legislation, see Spade and Wills (2000), Smith (2007), Moran (2004).

  13. See for example, critiques by Haritaworn et al. (2008) and Long (2009) and (Haritaworn et al. 2014 forthcoming).

  14. A particularly glaring example of this dual strategy is a recent campaign launched by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), titled ‘Criminalize Hate, Not HIV’. The campaign specifically argues for the de-criminalisation of HIV-transmission, on the basis that such laws are harmful and counter-productive, so the use of pro-criminalisation rhetoric with respect to ‘hate’ is particularly striking. See: http://www.ippf.org/our-work/programmes/criminalize-hate-not-hiv. This dual strategy also is evident in global maps and rankings of LGBT rights, which usually include hate crime legislation as a positive measure contrasted with criminalisation of same-sex relationships as a negative measure. See for example, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Organisation (ILGA)’s State-Sponsored Homophobia project: http://ilga.org/ilga/en/article/1161; and the Pew Centre’s report on “The Global Divide on Homosexuality” http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/06/04/the-global-divide-on-homosexuality/.

  15. See for example, the campaign strategies of ILGA-Europe (http://www.ilga-europe.org/), Egale Canada (www.egale.ca/), Stonewall (UK) (www.stonewall.org.uk/) and the Human Rights Campaign (USA) (www.hrc.org/).

  16. As part of the local response, a group emerged calling for an ‘East End Gay Pride’ March in the Tower Hamlets Borough of London. The group’s website featured Union Jack flags and a poster depicting an image of a shirtless, muscular white man with a shaved head and an aggressive snarl on his face, in a stylised form evocative of fascist aesthetics. The March was eventually discredited and cancelled when it was exposed that key members of the organising committee had links with the English Defence League, a far-right anti-Muslim nationalist group. The English Defence League had been trying unsuccessfully to march in the borough of Tower Hamlets for years, as the area is known for its high Muslim population. The organisers’ links to the English Defence League were revealed by Imaan, a queer Muslim organisation based in the UK, as well as by other local queer anti-racist groups (Safra Project 2011; Imaan 2011).

  17. Such lobbying efforts have generated further moves to change the legislation. At the time of writing (July 2013), the Law Commission of England and Wales opened a public consultation on proposals to extend existing hate crime laws to enable harsher penalties in response to hostilities against people on the basis of disability, sexual orientation or gender identity. See: http://lawcommission.justice.gov.uk/consultations/hate_crime.htm.

  18. Several months later, the young man was sentenced to prison for 14 months for possessing al-Quaida materials. He also was charged with spray-painting burqas on advertisements featuring scantily clad women. Whereas this same tactic has been celebrated as art in other contexts (see for example, Chrisafis 2010), in this case it garnered an additional month’s prison sentence (Gray 2012).

  19. For a broader critique of identity politics predicated on claims of injury, see Brown (1995).

  20. See for example, Stonewall’s Serves You Right report, which argues that there has never been a gay equivalent to the Macpherson Inquiry, and suggests that racial issues in policing have been addressed in a way that gay issues have not (Hunt and Dick 2008, p. 11).

  21. Despite my repeated attempts to obtain details about the specific content of the graffiti, local authorities, Rainbow Hamlets representatives and East End Housing workers were unable or unwilling to provide this information.

  22. While a portion of the rising Muslim prisoner population can be attributed to religious conversions taking place in prison, the figures nonetheless indicate a disproportionate criminalisation of Muslim people overall. The report notes that 70 % of the interviewees were Muslims ‘by birth’ and 30 % were converts, but does not distinguish between individuals who converted to Islam prior to imprisonment versus those who converted while in prison.

  23. See for example, the recent cases of two young people who were criminalised for non-disclosure of their gender identity/history to sexual partners. In the first case, McNally v. R [2013] EWCA Crim 1051 (27 June 2013), a female-bodied person who presented as male was given a prison sentence for obtaining sexual consent ‘by deception’. In the second case, a transgender man was criminalised for ‘obtaining sexual intimacy by fraud’ for failing to disclose his transgender status to his partners. See: http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2013/04/09/scotland-equality-network-writes-to-chief-public-prosecutor-after-trans-man-sentenced-over-sex-by-fraud/.

  24. The survey considers no factors of equality other than sexuality, performing the classic disaggregation of sexuality from other vectors of power/identity. Nowhere in the 2011, 2012 or 2013 reports are questions of race, ethnicity, class, ability mentioned. The annual reports are available online: http://www.stonewall.org.uk/at_work/workplace_equality_index_2014/default.asp.

  25. In his 1976 Lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault suggests that biopower emerged as a form of governance in response to the problem of illness at the end of the eighteenth century. It was the problem of endemics causing prolonged illness, rather than epidemics causing death, which created a labour problem for the state: such illnesses ‘sapped the population’s strength, shorted the working week, wasted energy, and cost money, both because they led to a fall in production and because treating them was expensive’ (Foucault 1976/2003, p. 244). ‘Death was no longer something that suddenly swooped down on life – as in an epidemic. Death was now something permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminished and weakens it’ (Foucault 1976/2003, p. 244). Hence the emergence of medical technologies aimed at public health and hygiene, designed to intervene not at the level of individuals, but at the level of populations. This was the emergence of ‘State control over the biological’(Foucault 1976/2003, p. 240).

  26. The controversial force-feeding of hunger strikers also marks a particularly grim form of ‘living death’. See, for example, the brutal account of force-feeding by Samir Najl al Hasan Moqbel who has been held in Guantanamo Bay for 11 years: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/opinion/hunger-striking-at-guantanamo-bay.html.

  27. For example, Regina Kunzel (2008) documents how gay advocacy around prison issues in the USA declined in the 1980s, as the move towards legal rights and inclusion strategies required narratives of respectability that were threatened by prisoner-focused campaigns.

  28. Direct state repression of more radical social movements (particularly in the USA) alongside co-optation of more moderate ones, also has arguably contributed to the narrowing of political struggles to liberal rights focused agendas. The more radical histories of early gay liberationists and trans activists, for examples, have been re-narrated into liberal stories of tolerance and diversity, thereby eclipsing the wider spectrum of political demands that characterised some strands of earlier movements.

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Acknowledgments

This article grew out of conversations initiated by Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco around the concept of ‘queer necropolitics’ as part of their forthcoming edited collection by the same title. My thanks to all three for encouraging me to write this piece and for engaging in fruitful discussion and critique during its formulation. I am also grateful to the following people who gave helpful comments on earlier drafts as well as two anonymous reviewers: Davina Cooper, Elijah Edelman, Jennifer Fraser, Suhraiya Jivraj, Sarah Keenan, Les Moran, Dean Spade and scholars at the Beatrice Bain Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Correspondence to Sarah Lamble.

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Lamble, S. Queer Necropolitics and the Expanding Carceral State: Interrogating Sexual Investments in Punishment. Law Critique 24, 229–253 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-013-9125-1

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