How, When and Why We Should #sayhername: #blacklivesmatter and Black Femicide

Feminists have long concerned themselves with how societies think about the body, the relationship between approaches to the body and politics and the impact of both on the standing of women in society. The most pressing issue regarding the relationship between the black body and politics, however, is the considerable recent attention given to how the body politic produces its dead. I examine the difficulties feminist activists have confronted in their efforts to de-center the cis-male body in recent necropolitical struggles. I also question their approach. The activists who launched the #sayhername campaign, for example, also attempt to intervene in the meanings given the bodies of the dead, but they struggle to have the names Sandra Bland and Rekia Boyd, repeated as often, and in truth mean as much, as Trayvon Martin, Alton Sterling and Mike Brown, the latter’s name carries so much meaning that it can stand as almost a synonym for the entire #blacklivesmatter movement. I argue that black women will be disadvantaged by a politics that argues that the same thing that happens to black men also happens to black women and that they should instead take an intersectional approach to both necropower and how state power intersects with the black body. This will mean attending to death without spectacle. For example, while it is true that every 28 hours a black man is killed by the police, it is also true that every 21 hours a black woman is killed by an intimate partner. Challenges to necropower that are not sufficiently intersectional will not stem the production of the black feminine dead. Often the state is not the biggest threat of violence in a woman’s life and should not be privileged as the death distributing mechanism.