(DEA2a) Death and Grief in Society I: Theorizing Death, Gender, and Sexuality

The experiences of death and grief are both socially-mediated experiences. They are shaped and influenced by social, cultural, economic, political, demographic, racial, ethnic, and gendered dynamics, among others. The general purpose of this session is to become a meeting point and venue for scholars interested in death studies from a social science and humanities point of view. Tags: Death, Grief, Health and Care

Organizers: Zohreh Bayatrizi, University of Alberta, Audrey Medwayosh, University of Alberta; Chairs: Zohreh Bayatrizi, University of Alberta, Audrey Medwayosh, University of Alberta

Presentations

Mark Gilks, Independent

The trivialisation of death in Western military culture: A Heideggerian analysis

In an ideal-typical sense, the role of the combat soldier in contemporary Western society is paradoxical: On the one hand, they volunteer to die – to make the “ultimate sacrifice”; while on the other hand, they volunteer to kill – to commit what is regarded, in a (post-)Christian world, as a sacred taboo. But how do Western soldiers regard the prospect of their own “sacrifice”; and what is the relationship between this prospect and the prospect of the death of the other at one’s own hands – whether of the enemy or of civilians caught up in war? Focusing on the case of the British soldier in Afghanistan, this paper explores these questions from an existentialist-phenomenological perspective. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s notion of 'Being-towards-death', I argue that the willingness to die and kill in war are grounded, to some degree, in a trivialisation of death in military culture – of one’s own death and of the death of the other. This argument develops in three main steps. First, I conceptualise “death” in a strong existential and paradoxical sense as 'non-existence'. In this sense, death—as Heidegger shows us—is a dreadful and anxiety-provoking prospect. Although largely unfathomable (and, as we see, culturally obscured), this prospect is always lurking in the soldier’s imagination – as will be demonstrated through empirical examples (in the form of testimonials by British soldier). Following Heidegger’s logic, in the second part I theorise how the dreadful prospect of existential death leads the soldier to “flee” into-the-world – which, for the soldier, is a World of military culture in which death is trivialised. Drawing on a variety of first-hand accounts of war by British soldiers, I show how the prospect of 'existential death' becomes obscured and estranged. In particular, I explore how death becomes something which only happens to the other; and that, as a result, one’s own death becomes an inconceivable possibility – as is even tragically illustrated in cases when that death ultimately occurs. Finally, I explore the linguistic significance of death for the British soldier. Specifically, I examine how in military culture death is disguised in abstractions and metaphors. Together, as such, these argumentative steps explore the significance of death ranging from the most existential and unfathomable to the most Worldly and culturally “perverted” (to use Heidegger’s term). We see, for example, how the British soldier expresses all of these notions of death: how, in one sense, it “doesn’t make any sense […] how can you be talking to someone ten minutes earlier and then later on you find out you’ll never talk to them again”; yet, we also see how, when soldiers die, comrades refer to meeting them again at the “bar in the sky”, at the “final rendezvous” where all soldiers will reunite in a kind of warrior heaven. This paper makes three main contributions. First, once the ways in which death is trivialised are understood, the willingness to participate in organised violence (from an individualist perspective) becomes less paradoxical: If death remained as anxiety-provoking as Heidegger theorises, then war (as well as many dangerous activities) would surely be impossible; yet, once trivialised, death is detached from its essential and original anxiety-provoking nature (it is “perverted”), thereby becoming a less dreadful prospect (and even, in the greatest perversions, something to be welcomed). Second, this theory of death enables us to better make sense of acts of violence against others in war, whether the enemy or civilians. Since the trivialisation of one’s own death in military culture leads to the trivialisation of the other’s death, acts of killing become devoid of existential significance and become more akin to procedures – bound up in abstractions such as “professionalism”, “strategy”, “duty”, or “collateral damage”. Lastly, and ultimately, this argument offers a moral and political problematization of death in military culture: Critiquing the tendency to trivialise death in military culture will facilitate a reckoning with the real and existential consequences of war, and hence a reassessment of the willingness—whether personal or collective—to participate.

YAN XUE, University of Alberta

Necropolitics as a bridge between queer death studies and queer migration studies

My Ph.D. research examines an emerging phenomenon whereby Chinese transgender migrants in Canada create kinship ties through the online commemoration of transgender people who have committed suicide in China. In this paper, I discuss the notion of necropolitics and review its usage in queer death studies/QDS and queer migration studies/QMS. By doing so, I reflect on how studying transnational trans kin mourning can bridge the interpellations of transgender intersubjectivities and institutional structures with the inquiries of trans-national geopolitics. I also contemplate the ethical question of how we can study the potential insurgency of transnational queer kin mourning but also be vigilant not to reproduce imperialism and the disparities of power and rights between racialized trans migrants and white trans citizens. Mbemb (2003) conceptualizes necropolitics as institutional forces and processes that enfranchise dominant groups and make their lives liveable while exposing others to significant death risks through deprivation, violence, and abandonment. Both queer death studies and queer migration studies draw from necropolitics. In QDS, it is used to critically theorize queer suicides as results of chronic institutional violence. Scholars contend that suicidal thoughts and attempts are prevalent among LGBT people because they suffer from homophobia and transphobia in family, school, and other social institutions in their daily lives in the long term (Cover, 2013; Hansen, 2021). In some studies of queer suicide, scholars deploy a theoretical framework that combines necropolitics with queer kinship theory. They find that queer kin not only recognize the operations of necropower but also mobilize their sorrow and anger to organize against such operations politically . In QMS, the notion of necropolitics is drawn to conceptualize how queer death is complicated across the border. The prevalence of queer deaths by murder, execution, and suicide in their countries of origin motivates living queer people to emigrate as a means to survive . In the host countrys refugee regime, queer deaths over there are constructed as exceptional human rights violations and moral threats to their queer-friendly modern civilization . While these host countries are eager to 'save' queer lives far away from their national territories, they dismiss and perpetuate queer deaths in their own sovereignty. They are indifferent to queer migrants suicides due to their socioeconomic alienation and frame such deaths as exceptions and individual failures . They also proactively produce queer migrants deaths through the increasingly punitive detention regime (Aizura, 2014; Butler Burke, 2016). QMS and QDS scholars who use the notion of necropolitics also refer to Judith Butlers (2004) ungrievabile death and Kenneth Dokas (2001) disenfranchised grief. They contend that un/grievability and dis/enfranchisement are not overdetermined but shaped by the deceaseds and mourners multiple intersecting identities (Haritaworn, 2012; Snorton and Haritaworn, 2022). Using Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR) as an example, scholars find that while the enumerated deaths are disproportionately trans of colour, and many of whom are immigrants, mourners who eventually benefit from social recognition and trans rights legislation and whose lives become more liveable are exclusively White trans citizens (Edelman, 2014; Snorton and Haritaworn, 2022). The necropower that operates on racialized queers and queer migrants reveals the rift between grievable death and enfranchised grief.

Brett Richardson, Concordia University

Refusing to Lose: The Story of Labour, Masculinity, and White Supremacy Hidden Within the Opioid Crisis

Among the groups overrepresented in the epidemic of drug poisonings in Canada, one, unmistakably, is white men who work in the trades. For these men, the crisis is not singular. They are living and dying in a space where multiple crises meet: a toxic drug crisis, a (white) masculinity crisis, a slow motion crisis decades underway – deindustrialization. It is no more true to say that working class white men are dying from opioids as it is to say that they are dying from loss – the loss of security and status, of pride and privilege, relative to decades gone by. It is no more true to say that they are dying from fentanyl as it is to say that they are dying from the social abandonment of their hometowns, from the spiritual vacuum left when industries and governments take a region’s resources, including the labour from its people, and then leave it, and them, behind. It is no more true to say that they are dying from toxic drugs as it is to say that they are dying from toxic masculinity, from the kind of manliness worn by men who feel they have already lost too much. Sometimes these men embody their refusal by way of tactical gear, by the boots, pants, and, indeed, polo shirts that signal: I will arm myself against further loss. Sometimes they embody their refusal by stabbing needles full of anaesthetic into their flesh, in the paradoxical self-care of self-annihilation, refusing to lose by convincing themselves that there is nothing to lose. The same men so vulnerable to trucker rally refusal are filling the beds of addiction treatment centres, and that is where I met them. Sharing elements of my ethnographic PhD project, I will introduce the audience to the grieving, and often aggrieved, men that I met, and to the transformations being undertaken in recovery. These transformations deserve our attention, because they offer clues about how to address the pervasive problems spreading out from men’s grief. Though treatment is neither an intervention or industry built to deal with the world’s systemic drug and addiction problems, treatment is nevertheless reliably transforming Canada’s wayward men. Encouraged to depend on god, to ask for help, to be of service, and to take responsibility “for their own shit,” the once hardened and sealed off are being changed as men. Though they may not know it, treatment centres are mitigating – minimally, but intriguingly – the risks that men will follow the voices tempting them towards the politics of refusal. Offering a path to a new world, treatment is mitigating the too real possibility that disoriented men will go astray and take us all down with them, holding onto the old one. When I realized that the treatment industry is offering a kind of final stop (and new beginning) for Canada’s migrating men – on pilgrimages that take them from their hometowns, to oilfields, to “rehabilitating” institutions, to the streets of Vancouver’s downtown Eastside – the broader economic crisis revealed itself. Witnessing a remarkable proportion of the more successfully “treated” become enchanted by the prospect of a new career – by an escape route from the “work hard, play harder” industries that nearly killed them – and then be absorbed by an overwhelmed treatment industry desperate for cheap labour, i realized i was watching the manufacturing economy be reborn as the service economy, one labourer-turned-care worker at a time. The treatment industry isn’t merely “catching” the men impacted by industrial decline. It is that decline. In the prophecy foretold by deindustrialization, the recovery worker is the labourer here to treat the symptoms of the very condition that created him. Exchanging power tools for self-help books, he is retrained with the soft skills of the historically feminized care economy, and yet, he is still a man. Reborn as a missionary of recovery, now he must save his brothers from the trenches. Addiction is the crucible that has delivered him into being, and it is the story he will tell in the new world.

Camille Nichols, University of Manitoba

"Fix Your Hearts or Die: A theoretical examination of transgender death and dying"

Recently there has been a call for a “queering” of death studies, troubling and reframing expectations for what makes a life worth grieving and how capitalism and the political apparatus hastens death and eliminates human and non-human entities alike. My paper is a theoretical examination of transgender death and dying through the lens of Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics. Necropolitics aptly illustrates the ways transgender people have been subjugated to such extents that they are in a liminal state of being, continually on the precipice of destruction. This paper is also an exploration of posthumanist conceptions of mortality in a trans context, where death is not necessarily about extermination, but is a cyclical force. This paper contributes to broadening scholarship on death and dying in the social sciences. Focusing on transgender identities challenges dominant narratives of mortality, death, dying, and aging, opening the death studies field to diverse perspectives and theoretical discussion. Public health, choosing who lives and who dies, who withers, and who thrives, is the entirety of the political power apparatus. Necropolitics, according to Mbembe, prohibits life for the marginalised. Higher rates of physical and sexual violence, harassment, and experiences of poor mental health, thoughts of self-harm, and drug use to cope with victimization are detrimental to the lives of transgender people in Canada and can result in early death. Bills and legislation restricting gender-affirming care in the United States exacerbate an already tenuous relationship between 2SLGBTQ+ people and the healthcare system. Transphobic sentiments and hate crimes in the United Kingdom contribute to hostile climate for gender-diverse people. This informs the ways trans people have been subjugated to the point of their experience as what Mbembe calls the “living-dead.” However, death is not always the terminus in a trans context, but a necessity; for example, a deadname is part of what must go to be fully alive. Parts of a previous or even a false identity must be destroyed to create, to transform oneself. It should be understood there is a complexity and even joy in transition. By extending this framework, ideas of human mortality make space for a celebration of life. By following Mbembe’s necropolitics, transgender people have had entire populations exterminated through violence, oppression, and subjugation. Breaking down social dualities and hierarchies is a tool of liberation. Overcoming hegemonic modes of understanding life and death is an imperative. In posthumanism, there is no binary or purity in humanity-- the only constant promise of living on this earth is change. To frame transgender identities as systemically threatened and marginalised is important to understanding barriers to a peaceful end of life. Additionally, questioning established hierarchies, expectations, and reframing death as part of a larger existential experience allows for the further queering of human mortality. If we want to imagine a world where transgender people live, thrive, age, and eventually die an expected death as so many people do now, examining and focusing on transgender experiences is vital scholarship.