Monstrous awakenings

Queer Necropolitics in Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee's Death Threat

Bibliographic Data

ID4367181
AuthorsJade Crimson Rose Da Costa (0000-0002-7605-6321, York University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume24
Issue4
Pages618-646
Publication date2023-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/14647001221085944
OpenAlexW4223980368
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited25

The study of Queer Necropolitics has established that white futurity regularly relegates trans women of colour to zones of death and sacrifice. What has received less attention, however, is how trans women of colour use art to challenge these murderous assemblages. A primary example of this is Shraya and Lee's (2019) graphic novel Death Threat, which re-envisions a series of transmisogynistic hate letters that Shraya received in 2017. Taking Death Threat as my point of entry, I ask how trans women of colour can repair death into live-affirming art, giving substantive focus to the text's tendency to conflate the literal death of the body with the 'social death' of being misgendered. From here, I explore how Death Threat transforms the death worlds of trans women of colour into sites of agency and, in so doing, troubles and expands the analytical boundaries of Queer Necropolitics

Aesthetics · Art · Queer · Social science · Sociology · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy