Necropolitical Landscapes: Queer Death and Resistance in My Government Means to Kill Me

Abstract

This article presents a queer necropolitical re-reading of Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me by placing the novel within the framework of state-sanctioned abandonment, racialized queer vulnerability, and resistance. Even though the novel is often looked at and read as a work of historical or LGBTQ fiction, this article tries to reread it through the lens of queer, drawing from the theoretical contributions of scholars like Michel Foucault, Achille Mbembe, and Jasbir Puar. It tries to analyse how institutions like the state, the prison-industrial complex, the medical system, and even certain segments of the queer community participate in regulating life and orchestrating slow death for marginalized queer subjects, especially poor and Black individuals. The analysis demonstrates how the novel exposes mechanisms of biopolitical neglect. This article argues that My Government Means to Kill Me does not simply document the AIDS crisis, or gay history in America. Rather, it offers a way to look at the necropolitical logic that continues to determine which lives are grievable and which are rendered disposable.