God's Necropolitics

 

"Official indifference to crimes against certain targeted groups when not out-and-out encouragement of them, often with active police involvement, adds to other forms of dehumanisation of victims from these groups as a way of signalling that since they are less than human, there is really no crime involved. Some 80% of murdered victims are subjected, alive and dead, to carbonisation, decapitation, and stoning, which echo other crimes in which dehumanisation is an essential part: raping and killing young girls, throwing small children into the river, tying a dying girl to a tree, turning a car into a gas chamber in which a man is publicly executed. Sadism and brutality after a body is dead, sometimes called “overkill”, is particularly associated with anti-queerness, and a clear message that this can be done to any subject who is labelled as less than human in a framework where the cidadão de bem (good citizen or, in reality, white, heterosexual male, with money and power) represents the heteropatriarchal family, and where “good” is clearly divided from “evil” by a moral panic whipped up by the straw man of “gender ideology”, which is allegedly an ideological apparatus designed to indoctrinate children in sexual perversity and undermine “God’s” traditional family. All this ties in with a ubiquitous use of torture, as Amnesty International describes: “It is either committed by agents of the state … or with their connivance … Crucially, it is a crime that persistently goes unpunished [and] the vast majority of victims are … often of Afro-Brazilian or indigenous descent”. The paradox is that systematic anti-LGBTQI+ violence is dismissed by the very system that enshrines it, as random, individual, a question of private phobias. But maybe it’s not such a paradox because this means that appearances of respect for the law can be kept up by sometimes punishing it. Moreover and especially, keeping queer issues as a “personal” matter enlists the cidadão de bem as an (often armed) agent of the state who will take the matter of family protection into his own hands."

READ ARTICLE BY

 

Brazil, Amazon, World: God's Necropolitics - CounterPunch.org