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• 1 2014-07-27T21:13:35-07:00 Necropower, Opacity and Movement 11 plain 2015-01-05T12:16:03-08:00

  To understand the violence that is the penalty for failing to pass, and the larger sociopolitical structure in which shifting and flickering become a crucial act of survival, a deeper consideration of necropolitics is useful. Achille Mbembe describes how necropower finds its model in the colonial regime of governance, saying “the sovereign right to kill is not subject to any rule in the colonies. In the colonies, the sovereign might kill at any time or in any manner,” and adds that today, it is not always state power that enacts the violence of murder. (Mbembé, 2003) Contemporary scholars writing about the legacy of women of color feminism including Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty point to the ongoing project of colonialism as a means for understanding global inequity, pointing out that Third World women now live all around the globe and that neocolonialism operates through the economic form of neoliberalism. As such, one can understand the constant threat of death that Mbembe describes in the colonies as existing today for people of color, who have histories of colonization, and for varying degrees of intersectional oppressions including transgender people, poor people and disabled people. 

  Mbembe points to Foucault’s definition of racism as the basic structure of a mode of politics that finds it’s purest contemporary example in the occupation of Palestine. On July 18^th, 2014, Anonymous, the global hacktivist movement, performed #OpSaveGaza in solidarity with Palestine, a “coordinated cyber-attack” which has “taken down over a thousand of crucial Israeli websites” (International Business Times UK). Artist and theorist Zach Blas has written about the relevance of Anonymous for queer politics, calling techniques like theirs “informatic opacity”, the ability to be opaque to informatic surveillance as seen in the NSA’s prism program and biometric facial recognition systems (Blas, 2014). Blas’ writing is based on decolonial theorist Edouard Glissant’s writing. Blas writes “Glissant’s aesthetico-ethical philosophy of opacity… is paradigmatic: his claim that ‘a person has the right to be opaque’ does not concern legislative rights but is rather an ontological position that lets exist as such that which is immeasurable, nonidentifiable, and unintelligible in things” (Blas 2014). What I would add to Blas and Glissant’s ideas is that the ability to be nonidentifiable is exercised daily by trans people who simply pass, or by femmes of color who can be unnoticed when passing through a dangerous situation. What matters most is not the moment of being opaque or invisible, or the moment of being visible and therefore representable, as so much identity politics has focused on, but the ability to shift between being visible and invisible. Following Deleuze, Bergson, Massumi and Keeling, I am arguing for a focus on movement over position in order to account for the contemporary realities of the fields of mediation that form the ground for contemporary western identities, but also to account for the lives of trans people of color for whom shapeshifting is not only a desire, but a necessity for survival. Movement, from invisible to highly visible and back, is a necessary skill in an environment that seeks to control one’s visibility for you.

  Yet the modulation of visibility is not only a form of resistance, it is also a form of oppression, as Mbembe points out in the case of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which relies on techniques of “hologrammatization” and creates a situation in which “invisible killing is added to outright executions”. The hologrammatization of trans people’s identity can be seen in the everyday deployments of holograms on recent driver’s licenses and passports, and is another form of media that relies on shifting light to particular angles to be seen. A discussion of androids would be incomplete without a consideration of drones, that operate with invisibility only belied by aurality, though a deep consideration is beyond the scope of this paper. Relying on Fanon’s accounts of colonial space, Mbembe adds to this that the goal of the occupation is to “render any movement impossible” (29-30).

  Next: Female Android Hackers and Femme Camouflage

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