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ジェンダー研究第 23 号

2020 年

特別寄稿論文Troubling Trans: Necropolitics, Trans Bodies, and Genealogies ofGovernance1
Nael Bhanji

Trent University

chalk board [chawk-bawrd] n. a smooth hard panel, usually green or black, forwriting on with chalk; a blackboard. 1―Oxford English Dictionary
Blackboard chalk, sidewalk chalk, chalk
dust, chalk-boards, and chalk lines. These
are the objects that haunt me. Over the past
few years, I’ve found myself inspired, andsome might say obsessed, by chalk’s inherently paradoxical qualities. On one hand,
chalk animates the psychic pulse of life;
its powdery residue evoking memories offiercely-contested hopscotch games, thevelvety echo of blackboard erasers, or the
stained remnants of childhood’s innocence
outlined in the hopscotch grids graduallyfading on sun-bleached sidewalks. Chalkmarks surface the stories of our presents
too as transitional objects that, throughtheir ubiquitous presence in institutional
life, prop our authorities as trans scholars,or undergird our work as trans activists inthe symbolical carving out of public space

for a politics of liveability.
But, on the other hand, chalk often indexes the morbid abjection of those anonymous bodies whose wretched outlines
signal the violent territory of any crime
scene. Used to mark the rough outline ofa body’s awkward position in death, chalkmarks allow for a visual representation ofviolence without the gruesomeness of its
lived materiality. Indeed, this practice ofshowing a body without actually showing
the body has always had a dramatic effectin its deployment for the purpose of capturing the public’s imagination. At once
poignant and cartoonish, chalk outlines
are sanitized spectacles that, in outlining
the figure of abbreviated life, animate thepsychic pulse of death.
As a template for harnessing affect—

1 This article is an abridged version of the following article:
Bhanji, Nael, 2019, “Necrointimacies: Affect and the Virtual Reverberations of Violent Intimacy.”
Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry.  http://capaciousjournal.com/article/necrointima
cies/?fbclid=IwAR00GFI3s8GYR2f-d0YUmPFGCPco0oj3mDO8dUVtE3ZgXuGi7-Tfcauylnc

DOI：10.24567/00063796

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Troubling Trans: Necropolitics, Trans Bodies, and Genealogies of Governancefor inviting a sort of public intimacy thataround the universal hard-wired fear ofmortality— the chalked outline marks the
symbolic abdication of space once occupied by the now-deceased body. However,
because the outline can only represent avoid left by the corpse, the chalked outline
imputes presence while simultaneously
conjuring up absence. Put simply, when
one knocks at the door of these chalk outlines, what one finds is that there is and is
no body home.
So let me begin by tracing a rather zigzaggy path back from an unfinished end:
Between March 2008 and December 2018,
almost 3000 trans people were murdered
globally as a result of anti-trans violence.
The brutality of their deaths serve as astark reminder of the expendability oftrans lives: 1,145 trans people shot, 577
stabbed, 306 beaten, 104 strangled or
hanged, 72 stoned, 59 asphyxiated or suffocated, 45 decapitated or dismembered,
44 tortured, 40 burned, 37 cut along thethroat, 36 run over by a vehicle, 36 other,and 481 not stated (TGEU 2018). Thesefigures represent the tip of the proverbial
iceberg. Absent from the list are those
whose deaths were unreported, mis-categorized, or those who, by virtue of theirexpendability, simply went missing.
Years ago, I had been actively involvedin organizing, and speaking at, “Transgen-der Day of Remembrance” 2 vigils— colloquially referred to as TDOR— in Kingston, Ontario and the Greater Toronto
Area in Canada. In Kingston, the usual
practice was to organize volunteers to lie
on the ground so that chalk outlines could
be traced around their bodies. Once anoutline had been traced upon the ground,the name of a deceased trans-identified
person—and, occasionally, the means bywhich their life was brutally cut short—
was usually written in the empty void created by the lines. Although the number ofoutlines drawn varied from year to year,
the victims of transphobic violence werealways overwhelmingly trans women ofcolour.
It was during these first few events that

Figure 1: Chalk outline, 2006. Photo by author.

2 To provide some brief contextualization, TDOR vigils began in San Francisco in 1999, are they
are now international events that commemorate and memorialize the lives of trans people whohave died as a result of anti-trans violence. While accurate worldwide estimates of anti-transviolence are still hard to obtain what we do know is that the victims of transphobic violence are
overwhelmingly trans women of colour.

106ジェンダー研究I started to feel the first stirrings of what I
later came to recognize as a fraught ambivalence, not only to the tension between
the narrativization of trans life and transdeath, but also to the ritualesque function of the TDOR vigil. As a trans personof colour at a predominantly white postsecondary institution, I was often called
upon to either read the list of names aloudor to help prepare for the event by drawing chalk outlines around the university
campus. On one such occasion, as I lay on
the ground, waiting patiently for a memberof the campus queer society to trace theoutline around my body, I found myself
grappling with the implications of my own
involvement with the politics of TDOR—
particularly in terms of the narrative erasure of race and class in shaping anti-transviolence (Figure 1).
In the very act of offering my own bodyas a placeholder whose traced outline represented an ‘other’ body, I was also facedwith the traces of a representation that
could not be contained within the outlines
of my own body contours. In that moment,
the chalk outline was both a literal tracingof my body and an abstracted sign whose
traces exceeded their intended utility—
an instant where my body, to transpose a
Brian Massumi-ism (2002), was as immediately actual as it was virtual, and wherethat virtual body was simultaneously rendered actual. The chalked outline, in otherwords, literally re-membered, re-virtualized, and made hypervisible the body as aspectacle of both life and death— a spectacle that illustrates how the TDOR vigil,

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like many acts of remembrance, is always
haunted by what it cannot contain.
What emerged from these early encounters with chalk outlines at TDOR eventswere a series of tentative questions about
the necropolitical value of racialized transdeath in structuring trans politics: How
do narratives of racialized loss constructtrans liveability? How are these losses—
and, by extension, the memorials theyengender— constitutive of identitarianpolitics? Whose bodies are conjured up at
the same time as others are consumed? In
short, what is the work of racialized transdeath in indexing whiteness and trans life?
In “Necropolitics,” Achille Mbembesuggests that “becoming subject…supposes upholding the work of death” (2003, 14).
So inextricable is the politics of race fromthe politics of death, argues Mbembe,that one truly becomes a subject throughconfrontation with the death of an Other.
Mbembe’s formulation of necropolitics
has been of great interest to critical racetheorists in examining how dead or dying
marginalized bodies have been fetishistically inscribed into the order of power
within state narratives to justify the geopolitical landscape of torture (Alves 2013;
Dillon 2012; Haritaworn 2015; Puar 2017;
Smith 2013). Several trans scholars, too,have explored the place of the racialized
trans body using a necropolitical critique(ćardenas 2017; Shakhsari 2013; Snortonand Haritaworn 2013). These convergences illustrate that there is a pressing needto theorize trans politicality through anintersectional framework that goes be-107Troubling Trans: Necropolitics, Trans Bodies, and Genealogies of Governanceyond static formulations of “gridlocked”(Massumi 2002) identity and takes into
account the affective intensities that circulate around, through, and within the deador dying trans body. As this article illustrates, although trans lives are expendable,trans deaths are not. The afterlife of transdeath is a time of intimate politicality: memorials and vigils are at once performed
enactments of mourning and formative
elements of melancholic worldings predicated upon the mobilization of spectacularized and racialized trans death.

Chalked Up: Expendability and theLimits of (Ac)countability
Chalked up [chawked up] n. Brit. Ascore, tally, or record.
– Oxford English Dictionary
Few remember the life or death of
Chanelle Pickett. In 1995, twenty-threeyear-old Pickett, a black woman living
in Boston, was savagely attacked whena man she had met in a bar discoveredthat she was trans. According to reports,
he beat and throttled her for almost eightminutes before she died. Her attacker, athirty-five-year-old white man, was eventually acquitted. Upon hearing of the lesser assault charge of two-and-a-half years,
Toni Black, a trans activist, expressed dismay, stating, “I’ve seen people get morejail time for abusing animals…we’ve been
judged expendable” (Steinberg 2005, 522).

It is this haunting concept of humanexpendability that I find myself drawn to,and, as such, I must ask questions that arenecessarily uncomfortable: What is an expendable life? How does any community(ac)count for its own expendability? Expendability, it seems, describes that sudden point at which the stubborn potentiality of human life edges into the realm ofobjectification. Indeed, Black’s observation about the ways in which trans lives
have been “judged expendable” suggeststhat trans liveability is always alreadyforeclosed by the predestined fate of anecessary 3 sacrifice. The disposability of
Pickett’s life allows for an appreciationof the multiple arcs of expendability thatcharacterize the narratives of trans womenof colour as marked by a banal disposability that Giorgio Agamben calls the “state of
exception” (1998, 12). What is especiallypeculiar about the privilege of these statesof exception is their indispensability to theproject of communal meaning-making. To
this end, I argue that first, it is only in premature death that these disposable (trans)
lives have surplus value, and second, thisis the case precisely because of their affective capacity to produce political effects
within the trans community.

Necrointimacies: Affect and the Virtual Reverberations of Violent Intimacy
The face on my laptop screen is frozen

3 My use of “necessary” here is deliberate as I seek to highlight the ways in which racialized transdeaths are positioned as always already constitutive of trans political life.

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ジェンダー研究in a mute scream of pain. Her matted hairand t-shirt are almost the same shade ofyellow, splattered with shocking bloomsof bright red blood. Her brown body, contorted with the exhausting agony of trying to protect itself from the blows being
rained on it by the man looming over her,is covered in dust and streaks of blood.
Captured with his arm mid-swing, theman’s threatening trajectory signals thecertainty of further violence that will bedirected at the pleading woman lying in
the pockmarked rubble of a deteriorating street. A man in a blue shirt walks
towards them, his indifference to the brutality betrayed by the casual trajectory of
his stride. Nearby, with his arms hanging
loosely by his side and his hands tensed
in the universal gesture of readiness, another man stands, watching the scene unfold with an eerie expression of calmness
on his face. There is no help for the woman
being beaten in this screenshot: the men
are at once casual observers and willing
participants in this spectacle of violence.
In the second picture, the woman has
clearly already been beaten for some time.
The ground beneath the sky blue of her
denim shorts is wet with the errant droplets of blood that completely obscure herswollen face. In the foreground, the bodiesof the men have been frozen in a moment of
malevolent deliberation. The third picturein this frame remains the hardest to lookat. Because I now know what will happen
next. In this final screenshot, there are fivemen in the process of lifting the woman’s
limp body and dumping it into a wheelbar-

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row. As two men wrestle with her legs, another man clutches the drenched collar of
the woman’s t-shirt in order to gain better
leverage over her body. Partially obscuredby the others, the last man in this frame
carries a large plank of wood.
***
Her name was Dandara dos Santos. On
February 15, 2017, the 42-year-old transwoman was dragged from her home in
Fortaleza, Brazil, by eight men. In frontof a group of cheering neighbours, Santos
was kicked, punched, and hit with shoes
and a large plank of wood. Still conscious
and bleeding profusely, she was thendumped into a wheelbarrow and taken toa back alley where she was beaten again
before being shot to death. Every painful
minute of the savage attack—the laughter, the taunts, the sounds of an unyielding plank of wood on vulnerable skin, andthose horrifying last minutes where a terrified, bare-breasted Santos pleads for her
life—was captured on video, shared on theinternet, and circulated on Facebook.
Within a month of her death, these images of Santos’ battered body appeared on
my social media feeds. The most commonly shared link was to an article publishedby the Daily Mail. Titled “Transsexual
woman is beaten to death in Fortaleza,
Brazil,” this article included both video
stills of Santos’ murder as well as thestreamable, uncensored video of her final
moments (Al-Othman 2017). Shared publicly by trans-identified and gender-nonconforming friends and acquaintances,
the real-time spectacle of Santos’ death109

Troubling Trans: Necropolitics, Trans Bodies, and Genealogies of Governancebecame an instantaneous anchoring point
for reactions that ranged from the immediacy of communal outrage to disclosuresof individual anger. Shaken, trans people
in Canada reached out publicly and reaffirmed the need to keep fighting for thepassage of Bill C-16. 4 Meanwhile, peppered amongst reflections on the precarious nature of trans rights under the Trump
regime, many comments from American
allies also alluded to the barbarism of thecultural heritage of the Brazilian men responsible for Santos’ murder.
Sifting through these comments andreactions, many of which cemented thebrutality of anti-trans violence as characteristic of life ‘over there,’ another pattern
emerged: an intimacy, or sense of belonging and a “shock or relief at being ‘in’something with others” (Stewart 2007, 27)
that can only be wrought from the unassimilable nature of proximity to a spectacle of violence. Nowhere was this clearer
than in a Facebook post that encouraged
everyone to watch the video and “tell atrans person you love them.”
Posted by a white trans man living in
Canada, this public status update subsequently appeared on my Facebook’s newsfeed because it had garnered over 261 reactions, including expressions of anger orsadness. What was immediately startling
was how many times this post had beenshared. Together with the embedded video,
the screenshots of Santos’ final moments

Figure 2: Facebook screenshot, March 9, 2017.
Included with author’s permission.

in this call to “[g]o tell a trans person you
love them” was circulated 69 more times
within the span of a few days.
In the midst of all of the political debates and emotional reactions, a handfulof trans-identified people of colour posted
their own responses to the Santos video,
asking others to stop sharing this videoof a trans woman of colour being killed.
Qwo-Li Driskill, a prominent Two-Spirit
scholar, issued a public Facebook post critiquing the commodification of Santos’
death in the service of trans remembrance(Figure 2). For Driskill, the circulation of
Santos’ death was akin to “postcards oflynchings,” a salient reminder of the ambivalence with which the racialized andgendered subject has historically been objectified and then disappeared in the service of whiteness, capitalism, and empire.

4 Colloquially known as the “Transgender Bill,” Bill C-16 was passed in June 2017 and added gender identity and gender expression to the prohibited grounds of discrimination enshrined under
the Canadian Human Rights Act.

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ジェンダー研究

Viral Necrointimacies and Spectacularized Violence
Chalk [chawk] n. a white soft earthly
limestone (calcium carbonate) formed
from the skeletal remains of sea creatures.
– Oxford English Dictionary
In the aftermath of her death, the viral intimacy of dos Santos’ dying body
became a consumable event, generating
affective responses that galvanized politicality or inspired public intimacy amongwhite trans activists. But by the end of
the week, the novel immediacy of the reverberations of that initial shock wore off
and Santos disappeared into the archivesof remembrance, her brown body foreverfrozen in the three screenshots that canstill (always) be called upon to offer theviewing public a morbid panorama of yet
another brutal end.
While it is important to bear witness
to the undeniable fact that trans womenof colour are being killed in record numbers, what does it mean that the transcommunity often coalesces in feelings ofbelonging and communality via the virtual ‘shareability’ of the spectacularized,
dis-membered racialized corpse? How
can we think through these intimacies ofbelonging that can only ever be affirmed
from the safe distance that is granted by
the banality of ordinary trans violencesthat are emblematic of a place that is ‘over
there’? How do we make sense of the violent intimacies that are evoked in the remembrance, or reverberative ritual, of wit-

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nessing bare life at its barest end? Whatthen becomes of the possibility of racialized trans life when its value is produced
always and only through death?
The re-animation of the death throesof Santos’s racialized body works in theservice of what, I argue, is a specificallyhomonational trans-affirmation, and it is
not a singular phenomenon. In “Retelling
Racialized Violence, Remaking White Innocence,” Sarah Lamble (2008) illustrates
how the online memorial pages for the victims of anti-trans violence are dominatedby pictures of white trans victims while
the individual memorial entries of transwomen of colour are often accompanied
by a silhouetted outline of the missing
body. As Lamble argues, this use of the generic “No Photo” photo has a two-pronged
effect: First, by virtue of its genericization,
the ghostly silhouette used on the TDOR
website obscures the ways in which thebodies affected by anti-trans violence arealso marked by interlocking oppressionsof race, class, ability, and sexuality. Second, transphobia is privileged as the singular cause of anti-trans violence.
While Lamble’s text is notable for its
critique of the rehabilitation of the unrepresentability of racialized anti-transviolence through universalized whiteness,since 2008, the politics of trans remembrance has been transformed from one that
decontextualizes the unrepresentability ofviolence—via Lamble’s notion of genericization—to a consumptive spectacle thatnow reterritorializes the trans body ofcolour via repetitions of virtualized vio-

111

Troubling Trans: Necropolitics, Trans Bodies, and Genealogies of Governancelent intimacy. The TDOR website is now
peppered with media links that invariably
spectacularize the murders of trans women of colour in particular via graphic descriptions and uncensored pictures.
When examining the media links forover 600 victims of transphobic violence
that were memorialized on the TDOR
website between 2009 and 2018, I foundthat when a trans woman of colour was
murdered, the accompanying media linkbeneath her name invariably spectacularized her death, thus objectifying her
body in service of the broader politics ofremembrance. Racialized trans bodies are
no longer erased through genericization
but, instead, are graphically brutalized
post-mortem. Replacing the staccatoed
efficiency of descriptive nouns that areeasily boiled down to the singular, bareboned truth of a brutal end, this memorial
website, populated with almost entirely racialized bodies, has become increasingly
enfleshed with the raw viscerality of visual
representation.

Necrointimacies

In The Affective Fabrics of Digital
Culture, Adi Kuntsman (2012) traces thevirtual banality of everyday violence indigitized spaces. Pointing to “the ways
in which feelings and affective states canreverberate in and out of cyberspace, intensified (or muffled) and transformed
through digital circulation and repetition”(1; emphasis mine), Kuntsman’s thoughtprovoking ethnographic exploration ofreverberation signals the importance of at-

112

tending to the affective and political workof violence while remaining ‘attuned’ tothe potentiality of movement. Kuntsman
writes,
Reverberation is a concept that makes
us attentive to the simultaneous presence of speed and stillness in online
sites; to distortions and resonance,
intensification and dissolution in theprocess of moving through various
digital terrains. For example, it allows us to see how the movement ofviolent words in online domains canintensify hatred and hostility throughwhat Sarah Ahmed describes as ‘affective economies’ (2004a), where
the power of emotions accumulates
through circulation of texts. But reverberation also enables us to see how
the injurious effects of online violent
speech can be muffled. For example,
it can momentarily dissolve into ‘smileys’, ‘winks’ and laughter (although
not disappear entirely!). (Kuntsman
2012, 2)
Spectacles of violence, as Kuntsman illustrates, leave traces of themselves notunlike the gradually fading vibrations leftby an echo’s reverberations. This linkage
between ‘reverberation’ as a prolongationof sound and the affective economies ofviolence allows for an appreciation of thereflective continuity of effect, of those ripples and vibrations left in the wake of violent encounters that can be felt or sensed
despite their remove.

ジェンダー研究The reverberating quality of violence
produces a lingering effect, allowing spectacles of violence to ‘bounce’ around suchthat they transfer the watered-down tracesof violence’s origin stories through disparate moments of absorptive reflection or
unpredictable refraction. For a brief moment, within the abstract and fragmented
space of the internet, the feelings of loss,
trauma, and fear that circulated as a response to Santos’ death were given somesemblance of substance, coalescing into
something more than just emotion. Sharedthrough the ‘feeds’ of trans-identified people and their allies, the close-up magic ofSantos’ re-animated death opened worlds
by inviting intimacy (“hug a trans person”)
while also drawing the world’s boundaries
ever closer by positioning violence as aproblem that is always already located‘elsewhere’.
Reverberation allows for an appreciationof the links between ordinary violence andintimacy, but it does not fully account for
the way in which the intimate proximitywith brutalized racialized bodies prefigure
the “affective charge of investment” (Cvetkovich 2003, 49) that mobilizes trans communities within discourses of whiteness.
Reverberation is an emergent expression of
belonging prefigured through visual economies of a violent intimacy with racialized
abjection. In other words, the desire to‘reach out’ in trans-personal affirmation isa re-active response to the displacement of
yet another form of intimacy—one where
the racialized Other is consumed for the
purposes of community building (hooks

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2006). In consuming the Other, the material realities that structure bare life are
effectively effaced while structuring a deracialized intimacy forged through proximity with racialized violence.
Following Kuntsman’s formulations,resonance is a phenomenon that occurs
when the physical properties of a particular material allows it to emphasize or reinforce sound. Thus, if the reverb is thegradual “dying out” of sound, then resonance describes the buzzing/rattling sustenance of a particular frequency. Whatis important here is that resonance is object-based, and an object that ‘resonates’
is one that supplements the original vibration because of its ‘likeness.’ Expanding
Kuntsman’s metaphor, we can say that thevirtual proximity to the event of Santos’
re-animated death reverberated––or echoed––through the community as a sign of
intimacy because her identity as a transperson ‘resonated,’ or provided a point of
likeness, for those who identify as trans orgender-nonconforming. In death, the figure of Santos resonated because ‘likeness’
traversed along the figure of her imperiled
body, coalescing into the immediacy of intimacy through which a “weirdly floating‘we’ snaps into a blurry focus…[taking] ona life of its own, even reflecting its own
presence” (Stewart 2003, 27-28). However,this reductive approach to an imperiledtrans identity as the singular basis of victimized affiliation fails to account for how
the specifically racialized figure of the dying Santos—marked by the state of exception in life—became a shareable object in113

Troubling Trans: Necropolitics, Trans Bodies, and Genealogies of Governancedeath that one isAs fungible commodities, racialized
corpses have historically been relegatedto the status of spectacular objects, “permanently available for the ‘full enjoyment’of white people” and “incapable of being
violated” (Bassichis and Spade 2014, 195).
The political economy of memorializationmust be understood in terms of the colonial histories that govern the production,
distribution, and possession of intimacy(Lowe 2015). “Sealed into crushing objecthood” (Fanon 1967, 109), trans womenof colour featured in the graphic pictureson the TDOR website mirror historical
discourses that objectify bodies of colour as both excessive and necessary forsocial life. This hyper-spectacularizationof banal violence—where identification
is formed through the ambivalent oscillations between categories of the human and the inhuman—finds its parallelin other situations. As Kuntsman offers,“the imprisoned orphan, the prepubescentsex worker, the refugee, and the innocent
toddler dying of AIDS are such figures,
figures of an appeal, a sex appeal that is
racial, that is meant to humanize and naturalize what otherwise functions merely asa calculation of risk” (Kuntsman 2012, 28).
Practices of memorialization are symbolically and affectively mediated by discourses of inclusion and exclusion, yet, all
too often, the consumption of racialized
death is offered as a stand-in for the former while justifying the material struc-tures that suture the latter. Only in death
do trans women of colour emerge as larger-than-life subjects, accruing in macabre
value in proportion to their violent ends.
Bare lives and abject deaths highlight theexcess of race, the safe remove from racialized space allowing the Other to “beeaten, consumed, and forgotten” (hooks
2006, 380). Conspicuously absented fromthe theatre of trans politicality in life, theviolent intimacy of death enlivens transsubjects of colour through graphic descriptions of racialized corporeal obliteration
sanitized by the façade of a re-narrativized
post-mortem subjectivity. Since the act of
witnessing death bypasses real-time individual presence, there is no risk in this version of proximity to the racialized object.
Instead, death can be summoned up fromthe rubble, its value extracted and reconstructed for mass consumption, and thenvanquished once again. And vanquished it
must be, because the intensity that intimacy demands requires a sustained engagement through the repeated spectacularization of racialized loss.
Extending Mbembe’s focus on the disposability of bodies via the right to kill andreflecting upon the spectacle of the dying/dead trans body in the order of power, I
return to my concept of trans necrointimacies to describe this spectacular affective economy of trans-homonationalism
and the cannibalization of racialized decay upon which the former is dependent. 5
As an object par excellence, the brutal-

5 This attachment to the dead actually gives the corpse power over the living, an ironic instance114

ジェンダー研究ized corpse of the racialized Other contains a resonant quality that is predicatedon economies of fantasy and pleasure.
By virtue of violence’s distance from theimmediacy of real-time proximity, the racialized figure that is Santos is at once excessive and erased, allowing it to first be
claimed as an object for trans memorialization, then be consumed in the service ofwhiteness, and then be further utilized as
evidence of a distant barbarism. Thus, we
see that together with the embedded video, the screenshots of Santos’s racialized
body reverberated at an intensity throughwhich the circulation of the consumableintimacy of her death tentatively resonatedin the form of appeals to belonging within
neoliberal frameworks of (trans)sexual
citizenship (i.e., via recourse to Canadianor American nationalism, necessarily positioned as safely removed from the barbarism of ‘elsewhere’).
As the provisional end-product of an affective circulation of the violent intimacies
so necessary to the political project of re-

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membrance, “resonance” extends Kuntsman’s acoustic metaphor to describe a turnto a kind of trans-normativity that is dependent upon the spectacularized violent
intimacy of racialized, trans(gender) bodies as the living dead. The intimate spectacle of the dead or dying racialized bodyinvites the witnessing white body into anaffective citizenship that requires that the
Other be simultaneously possessed andrepudiated. To behold the corpse of the
Other is to flirt with the exotic—with thepossibility of being ‘changed’ by transnecrointimacy—while remaining securely
attached to the tether of trans-normative
positionality. What resonates is not transidentity as a point of affiliation but, rather,whiteness and trans-normativity as emergent forms of belonging through the scopophilic consumption of the racialized body.
Resonance is thus the retrospective reproduction of reverberation, 6 and ‘likeness,’or trans-normativity, is formed retroactively through the chalky necrointimaciesof racialized trans memorialization.

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6 Forgive the alliteration.

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