Abstract This article deals with mostly negative ideological images of refugees, as they erupted in political graffiti and street art (stickers, stencils, various inscriptions) in Slovenia during the so-called refugee crisis from the fall of 2015 on. Its basic questions are three: How is the ideological process of othering the refugees constructed in political graffiti? How does this relate to dominant discourses and practices in Slovenian society (from official politics to mass media)? What were the reactions against such sprayed hate speech (so pro-refugee graffiti)? The process of othering progresses in two steps: refugees are first imagined as an unified mass that is radically different from imaginary notions of “Slovenianism” and “Europeanism,” which then serves as the basis for differentiation between more and less acceptable of them. On these grounds, four different ideological images are created: a refugee as a criminal, a refugee as an uninvited visitor, a refugee as a powerless victim, and a refugee as a global proletarian. About 150 original photos of anti- and pro-refugee graffiti, mostly from Slovenia (but for comparative reasons also from the whole region), are analyzed using the semiotic method as developed by its classics and finally interpreted with Theodor Adorno and Alexander Mitscherlich's concepts of “displacement of hatred” and Seymour Martin Lipset's concept of “extremism of the center.”

Abstract This eclectic set of essays includes work about Zoom, the murder by police of Rayshard Brooks, blackness and public space, and black joy and uchromatism.

Abstract It is rare to find visual representations of female sexual pleasure in sexological treatises. Robert Latou Dickinson's Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy (1932) uses illustrations of sexual response to avoid making his text sensuous or pornographic. Like the charts in William Masters and Virginia Johnson's Human Sexual Response (1966), these drawings are carefully nestled between statistics and physiological summaries to embed them within the realm of the scientific and pedagogical. However, both are presumed to be racially unmarked. This article shows how blackness disrupts visual representations of pleasure and femininity while theorizing how the line functions as a way to maintain a norm. Against this, the potential of brown jouissance emerges via the zigzag style of contemporary Filipino artist Jevijoe Vitug. In his portrait, a glimpse of racialized, sensual excess emerges.

Abstract This article examines the role of the visual in instances of recorded anti-Black racial violence and pushes against dominant discourses of the technological rescue narrative—that technology and more visibility will lead to different outcomes of accountability, protection, and safety. Instead, this article argues that the tightly bound association of anti-Black racial violence's recognizability to the visual has created a dynamic that simultaneously moves us closer to and further away from its ontological truths. Examining Twitter as a multisensorial platform and its users’ imaginative engagements with the #IfIDieInPoliceCustody hashtag memorializing Sandra Bland's death, the author identifies that users craft an anticipatory nonspectatorship, a mode of imaginative witnessing arising from the contexts of technological and visual failure and the situated imaginations of Black epistemologies. These users register a deep suspicion of the evidentiary and refuse the spectacular of racial violence's visual form, instead highlighting its ubiquitous and quotidian nature by asserting themselves into their own scenes of visual failure and becoming witnesses to their own imagined deaths. Finally, in identifying the visual failures surrounding Sandra Bland's jail cell, the author illuminates how the ontology of the glitch can demonstrate the mechanics of white supremacy's operations.

Abstract Examining Black women's experiences with policing, this article argues that police terror is not predicated upon gender; rather, it enacts gender by undoing gender. Thus, it requires a new arithmetic of time and space in order to read beyond normative, hypermasculine narratives of police violence. While the dominant discourse of race and policing asserts that police terror disproportionately affects Black men, the frequency of Black women's experiences with police terror attunes to a lingering yet deadly impact beyond the linear, Cartesian dimensions of body counting, a frequency the article terms sequelae. Policing stretches and bends time and space as part of its (un)gendering practice. Through a brief survey of cases in Brazil and the United States, this article considers sequelae as a new arithmetic for calculating the multiple frequencies of police terror against Black women. Specifically, the article examines the case of Luana Barbosa dos Reis, a Black lesbian mother who was beaten to death by police officers in São Paulo in 2016. The article argues that her beating was an act of (un)gendering—a desire to both discipline her as a Black female/mother and erase her potential humanity by denying her desired gender identification (female). In this sense, her death was an act of anti-Black terror “in the wake.” Through a close reading of the police ledger, the police report, and the physical violence she endured, the article argues that her story teaches us the need for a new way of counting the frequency of police terror in relationship to time, space, and the Black female/mother body.

This roundtable considers trans theory’s status as a site of thinking racialization, empire, political economy, and materiality in the current historical, institutional, and political moment. We ask, what does it mean to think trans in a time of crisis?, and what is the place of critique in a crisis?, acknowledging that global crises are not insulated from trans, and trans is not insulated from the world. This roundtable looks to materialist formations to think trans now, including a new materialism premised on thinking about trans embodiment outside of trans as subject position, the materialism of objects and commodities, and a historical materialism shaped by queer of color critique.

This article considers the queer problem of Indigenous studies that exists in the disjunctures and disconnections that emerge when queer studies, Indigenous studies, and Indigenous feminisms are brought into conversation. Reflecting on what the material and grounded body of indigeneity could mean in the context of settler colonialism, where Indigenous women and queers are disappeared into nowhere, and in light of Indigenous insistence on land as normative, where Indigenous bodies reemerge as first and foremost political orders, this article offers queer Indigenous relationality as an additive to Indigenous feminisms. What if, this article asks, queer indigeneity were centered as an analytic method that refuses normativity even as it imagines, through relationality, a possibility for the materiality of decolonization?

This article takes up the issue of substance use disorder, arguing that the discourses surrounding the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic and the present-day opioid epidemic rely on similarly racialized rhetoric, and examining the implications regarding pain and suffering, safety and employment of establishing substance use disorder as a (white) disability and not a (black) criminal liability as it was understood throughout the Reagan-Bushera War on Drugs. These racially disparate characterizations of substance use disorder help shape and in turn are perpetuated by the respective technologies of rehabilitation and criminalization developed in response. This article takes the debate surrounding the categorization of substance use disorder as a prominent case study in how state and civil society understand and relate to an emergent disability through the deployment of law and technology.

In this special issue, the contributors argue that plasticity, the capacity of living systems to generate and take on new forms, is a central axis of biopolitical governance. While plasticity has a specific meaning in the life sciences, conceptually it has infused a broad range of theoretical, material, and scientific idioms for describing the malleability of a given body or system. Each of these conceptions of plasticity provides an account of malleability that, seemingly inexhaustible in its disorganizing qualities, has sometimes been framed as a resource for the disruption of normalizing systems of power. The articles in this special issue show that, by contrast, plasticity does not resist but is actually enlisted by state power through biopolitics. “The Biopolitics of Plasticity” investigates how race and state power actually depend on and enlist malleability and formlessness to govern living populations and individuals. By unevenly distributing the capacity of corporeal malleability, plasticity functions as a key logic underpinning the modern notion of racial difference. The issue’s introduction proposes a critical reckoning with the racial politics of this important concept to ask new questions about how to understand the organic malleability of the body and such categories as race, sex, gender, and sexuality.

Studies of queer and trans suffering, resilience, care, and vitalities are invariably also investigations into the difficult and painful articulations of lives that feel worth living and deaths that feel okay dying. The notion of resiliency, referring to a conditional state of overcoming difficult situations, neglects to fully encompass our understandings of risk, vulnerability, and life. This article explores the ways in which Washington, DC–based trans activists discuss shared coalitional labor as constituting that which renders viable life—or, in some cases, what they describe as deaths worth dying—in a contemporary moment that is distinctly violent. While health researchers have long noted the beneficial role that a coalition serves in better representing needs in research, this article focuses on how individuals meet their needs not through solitary and normative resilience strategies but within and through spaces of coalitional action. This approach to radical care and viable life encourages us to rethink how a necropolitics of trans life—lives marked as morally suspect and intrinsically disposable—coexists with a notion of trans vitalities that this article develops. Ultimately, embracing the concept of trans vitalities is not simply a refusal or disavowal of projects of normalization or the commodifiability of trans rights but, rather, a vigilance toward the violently homogenizing expectations of the heterogeneity of lived experience.