Trans necropolitics: Dialogues on devices of power, death and invisibility in the contemporary world

Abstract

Objective: to analyze the relation between the cisnormative social policies and the invisibility and (physical and symbolic) death of trans entities through their life histories. Method: a qualitative and multicenter research that uses the Necropolitics and Thanatopolitics as a theoretical framework. The study participants were 70 trans individuals from Brazil and Costa Rica who were interviewed in 2014 and 2015. The data were analyzed by means of content analysis. Results: based on the category “Chronicle of various announced deaths”, one can consider many phenomena related to the structural, systematic and institutional violence in the Latin American society which the trans population “experiences”. Those phenomena expropriate the control of the subjects’ lives and impose a “bare” life, inscribing them into general macroeconomics of terror that reveals the (un) productive and destructive potential of the trans necropower. Conclusions: the (un)logical trans necropolitics is an uninterrupted technological practice of structural and institutional violence against the device of transsexuality, which considers death not as a merely biological, but as a moral, social and political phenomenon.