“May Her Memory Be a Revolution”

Rethinking Queer Kinships through Mourning and Trans Necropolitics

Abstract

This essay explores the ways in which queer kinships are manifold through mourning. Using an autoethnographic methodology accounting the suicide of DanVeg, a transwoman and queer activist from Israel/Palestine and a member of the author’s chosen family, the article aims to question the different affects of queer kinships as they unravel through mourning, as well as the challenges trans death pose to them. Examining different mourning practices and subversive political actions following DanVeg’s death, through the lens of critical kinship studies, queer and trans theories of necropolitics, and spectrality theories, it is claimed that eventually queer kinships are a precarious haunting ghost on the nuclear, biological heterosexual family, always in danger of being deconstructed but nevertheless always lingers and posing a threat to the normative kinship matrix.