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

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.

Automated summary

This article discusses the findings of Queer Necropolitics, which reveals that white futurity often relegates trans women of color to zones of death and sacrifice. However, less attention has been given to how trans women of color use art to challenge these murderous assemblages. Using Shraya and Lee's (2019) graphic novel Death Threat as an example, the author explores how trans women of color can transform death into life-affirming art and expand the analytical boundaries of Queer Necropolitics.