Neoliberal Geopolitical Order and Value

AbstractNeo-imperial free-market capitalist shifts depend on animating slavery as terror, and queerness as a speculative economy, to mediate political value conflicts and displace antagonisms. I engage with two archives on queerness, a 2012 speech by Hillary Clinton at the UN on African states' violation of human rights of gays and lesbians, and a report on the violation of human rights of Iraqi gays (2011). Through these archives, I interrogate how slavery and queer economies are drawn upon by a resurgent neoliberalism to constitute and erect regimes of value while generating structures of violence and governance that impede our understanding of the emergence of fungibility as a modality of slave terror. 'The slave' emerges as the suturing inert matter out of which epistemologies and practices of economies of sexuality, race and geopolitics are harvested. Importantly, 'the African' is marked as black through lack of gay rights and 'Africa' in multiple sites is figured as the a-historical scene out of which flesh is captured. I trace the ruptures in discourses and corporeal practices presupposing that the existence of non-procreative sex as foundational capacity threatens the reproduction of the global order and the fulfilment of democratic promises while continuing the production of a structuring ontology that requires blackness and the suffering of the slave, the extracted energy necessary to differentiate and to suture queerness as a speculative economy.Keywords: slavenecropoliticsanti-blackness as terrorfungibilityvalueglobal queer AcknowledgementsMy special thanks go to the two anonymous reviewers, Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, Silvia Posocco, Kyle D. Killian and Elizabeth Thompson for their helpful feedback.Notes on contributorAnna M. Agathangelou teaches in Political Science and Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto, and is co-director of Global Change Institute, Nicosia. She is the author of The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation-States (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004) and co-author with L.H.M. Ling of Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (Routledge, 2009).Notes1. Economies of blackness, as I articulate it here, is a 'forestructure of inquiry' simultaneously an oppositional socio-onto-spatio-temporal framework that analyzes and describes the processes/spaces constituted by and through socially situated beings. The framework of economies of blackness allows us to trace this violence by looking at the conjunction of different material sites such as ecology (i.e., land), body, and language to enable us to see how these spaces remain subject to 'primitive' accumulation and exploitation, on the one hand, and on the other, remain charged spaces of struggle against neocolonial imperialisms and their different kinds of penetrations and extractions (Agathangelou Citation2009: 189).2. This assault highlights that capital fundament condition is theft, the wresting of communities of their insurgent erotic energies oscillating between 'euphoric speculation and austere refoundation' (Cooper 2012: 656) with slavery as its pivot.3. Analogizing is an imperial strategy of erasure, property, mystification, displacement, literal dispossession, and fungible violence that enables capital to capture as well as generate in unexpected ways 'hidden' patterns anew. Dayan problematizes analogies in law and she states: 'legal language makes possible such a compulsion for analogy; its choice of images, its reiterated terms and punishing effects. It is through the law that persons gain or lose definition, become victims of discrimination or inheritors of privilege' (Dayan Citation2011: 246).