Solidarity’s Refusals

Abstract How does a feminist, anti-racist, refugee solidarity group that fights against a necropolitical border regime come to embrace genocidal necropolitics? Telling a story of the necropolitical archipelago at the borderlands of the European Union and the Balkans, feminist dissent and cross-border solidarity, and the emergence of Austro-German feminist alignment with imperial necropolitics, authoritarianism, and genocide itself, this text calls attention to a new formation of imperial feminism: necrofeminism. Necrofeminism is best contrasted with its close cousin militarized feminist humanitarianism. Whereas militarized feminist humanitarianism justifies occupation and war in the name of saving women’s lives and freedoms, necrofeminism is concerned not with freedom or rescue but with legitimizing the politics of death to the point of endorsing genocide. Examining the conditions of possibility for necrofeminist refusals of solidarity, we find the seeds of necrofeminism in racism, civilizational discourses that understand human rights and democracy as inalienable properties of the imperial West, and self-ascribed moral superiority born of ongoing dominance and colonizing projects. We must counter them by revolting against all politics of death, particularly in times when silence orders the world.