“Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Cosmopolitics – Feminist And Queer Interventions: An Introduction” by Christine Quinan And Kathrin Thiele: Summary and Critique

Introduction: “Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Cosmopolitics – Feminist And Queer Interventions: An Introduction” by Christine Quinan And Kathrin Thiele

“Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Cosmopolitics – Feminist And Queer Interventions: An Introduction” by Christine Quinan and Kathrin Thiele first appeared in 2020 in the Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (pp. 1–8), and offers a foundational rethinking of contemporary politics through a feminist and queer lens by bringing together the interrelated frameworks of biopolitics, necropolitics, and cosmopolitics. Published online on December 15, 2019, the article interrogates the contemporary socio-political landscape, especially amid the European refugee crisis, global populism, and systemic marginalization, using interdisciplinary methods to explore how certain lives are cultivated while others are marked for death. Drawing from thinkers like Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe, the authors delineate how biopower governs populations by “making live and letting die,” while necropolitics more radically examines how power “makes die” and sustains death-worlds. Importantly, they expand the conversation by incorporating Isabelle Stengers’ concept of cosmopolitics, which resists universalism and invites multiple worldviews into the political realm, thus challenging exclusionary logics of liberal humanism. The introduction is pivotal for literary and cultural theory, as it proposes a new ethical-political paradigm that refuses indifference and instead calls for nuanced engagement with life, death, and coexistence beyond the human. Through references to cultural texts like Those Who Feel the Fire Burning, and by integrating affect theory, posthumanism, queer of color critique, and decolonial feminism, Quinan and Thiele argue for a reworlding politics — one that reimagines recognition, relationality, and justice outside neoliberal and necropolitical constraints. Their work has since become a cornerstone for scholars examining intersections of power, embodiment, race, and more-than-human agencies in contemporary literary and political theory.

Summary of “Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Cosmopolitics – Feminist And Queer Interventions: An Introduction” by Christine Quinan And Kathrin Thiele

🔍 1. Introduction: Framing the Political Through Film

The authors open with Those Who Feel the Fire Burning (Knibbe, 2015) as an affective and poetic lens into the European refugee crisis.
Key Quote: The film “blurs existential boundaries… between life and death, truth and fiction… or subjectivity and objectivity” (p. 2).

This cinematic metaphor introduces the bio/necro/cosmopolitical triad by revealing “the matter of life and death in this contemporary climate” (p. 2).

⚖️ 2. Biopolitics: Managing Life

Rooted in Foucault’s theories, biopolitics is the modern state’s power to “make live and let die” (Foucault, 2003).
It regulates populations and disciplines bodies through diffuse mechanisms of control.

Key Quote: Biopolitics governs “a new body, a multiple body… that cannot necessarily be counted” (Foucault, 2003, p. 245; cited on p. 3).

💀 3. Necropolitics: The Power to Let Die

Building on and critiquing biopolitics, Mbembe’s necropolitics centers the state’s power “to make die,” especially through warfare and border control.
Key Quote: Necropolitics creates “death-worlds… forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life” (Mbembe, 2003, p. 40; cited on p. 4).

Exposes racialized, gendered, and class-based “zones of abandonment.”

🌀 4. Cosmopolitics: Beyond the Humanist Political

Borrowed from Isabelle Stengers, cosmopolitics challenges liberal, anthropocentric definitions of politics and knowledge.
Key Quote: Cosmopolitics emphasizes “the unknown constituted by the multiple, divergent worlds and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable” (Stengers, 2005, p. 995; cited on p. 5).
It refuses easy political solutions and calls for thinking with complexity and indeterminacy.

🌍 5. Feminist and Queer Interventions

The article brings queer and feminist theory into biopolitical and necropolitical discourse.
It foregrounds marginalized bodies excluded from normative political life: “those who do not – or cannot – conform to a white, middle-class, heteronormative… existence” (p. 5).
Key Quote: “Biopolitics and necropolitics are not opposites. Rather, they are ‘two sides of the same coin’” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 122; cited on p. 4).

🔗 6. The Role of Race, Affect, and Assemblage

Authors highlight the work of:
- Kyla Schuller (2018): Biopolitics shaped through race and sentimental regulation.
- Alexander Weheliye (2014): Racializing assemblages differentiate full humans from not-quite-humans.
- Mel Y. Chen (2012): The animacy hierarchy interrogates who/what counts as living.
Key Quote: “Race… disciplines humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans and nonhumans” (Weheliye, 2014; cited on p. 4).

🏳️‍🌈 7. Queer Necropolitics and Trans Resistance

The issue builds on Jasbir Puar’s (2007, 2017) analysis of queer necropolitics and how LGBTQ+ visibility coexists with systemic violence.

Trans and queer bodies, particularly of color, are exposed to intensified state violence while being instrumentalized by neoliberal tolerance.
Key Quote: “Queer subjects invited into life and queerly abjected populations marked for death” (Haritaworn et al., 2014, p. 2; cited on p. 4).

🌌 8. Cosmopolitics as Posthumanist and Decolonial Intervention

Cosmopolitics is presented as a posthumanist and decolonial reorientation of politics.

It disrupts modernity’s claim to objectivity, allowing for relational, more-than-human ways of knowing and being.
Key Quote: “Equality does not mean… all have the same say… but that they all have to be present in the mode that makes the decision as difficult as possible” (Stengers, 2005, p. 1003; cited on p. 5).

📚 9. Contribution of the Special Issue

The issue collects interdisciplinary works bridging literary analysis, posthumanism, environmental justice, and queer of color critique.

Examples include:
- Yoon on “cosmo-poetics” via Margaret Rhee’s poetry.
- Tai on environmental illness and decolonial healing.
- Marten and Cielemęcka on biodiversity, gender, and ecological purity.
- Tucker on homonationalism in South Africa.
- Winnubst on anti-Blackness and neoliberal fungibility.
Each article explores forms of resistance to biopolitical/necropolitical violence and gestures toward cosmopolitical futures.

🕯️ 10. Concluding Thought: The Specter of Haunting

Quinan and Thiele return to the ghost metaphor from Those Who Feel the Fire Burning and Avery Gordon’s (2008) Ghostly Matters.

Key Quote: “Haunting… registers the harm… and produces a something-to-be-done” (Gordon, 2008, p. xvi; cited on p. 7).
The articles respond to this haunting, insisting that we cannot remain indifferent.

Theoretical Terms/Concepts in “Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Cosmopolitics – Feminist And Queer Interventions: An Introduction” by Christine Quinan And Kathrin Thiele

📌 Term/Concept	📖 Explanation	🎯 Example/Usage in Article
🧬 Biopolitics	A mode of power that regulates life through population management, health, reproduction, and norms.	Foucault’s idea of “making live and letting die”; used to explain how the modern state governs bodies and life (p. 3). Refugee border control is an example of biopolitical regulation.
⚰️ Necropolitics	A power structure that determines who must die; the politics of death and exposure to death.	Coined by Achille Mbembe: “the power to make die”; evident in refugee deaths in the Mediterranean and racialized state violence (pp. 3–4). It highlights “death-worlds” where people live under conditions of social and physical death.
🌌 Cosmopolitics	A politics that includes multiple worldviews, resisting universalism; embraces indeterminacy.	From Isabelle Stengers: “the unknown constituted by multiple, divergent worlds” (p. 5). Rejects traditional cosmopolitanism in favor of plural ontologies. Applied to reimagine politics beyond humanist norms.
💥 Death-Worlds	Social contexts where people are exposed to persistent threats, reducing them to the “living dead.”	Refugee camps, war zones, and impoverished regions where people are left to die by neglect (Mbembe, 2003, p. 40).
🧠 Affect	Pre-personal forces that shape emotional responses and political action.	Explored through Knibbe’s film Those Who Feel the Fire Burning—the ghost-narrator stirs affect to provoke empathy and reflection (p. 2).
🧬 Racializing Assemblages	A framework to understand how race shapes who counts as human.	Alexander Weheliye’s term: Race disciplines subjects into “full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (p. 4). Useful in queer of color critique.
⚙️ Animacy Hierarchy	A ranked system of what is considered animate or valuable.	Mel Y. Chen’s concept: challenges divisions between living/dead, toxic/alive. Example: differential value assigned to disabled, queer, or racialized bodies (p. 4).
🏳️‍🌈 Queer Necropolitics	Examines how queer subjects are differently exposed to death within state logics.	Puar et al.: “queer subjects invited into life and queerly abjected populations marked for death” (Haritaworn et al., 2014, p. 2; cited on p. 4). Highlights tension between visibility and vulnerability for queer/trans people.
🌍 Cosmopoetics	A poetic practice that listens to difference and embodies cosmopolitics.	In Hyaesin Yoon’s article, Rhee’s Kimchi Poetry Machine is a “diasporic feminist technology of listening to difference” (p. 5).
🧪 Bioresistance	Acts that resist or subvert biopolitical regulation and control.	In Sikora’s analysis of David Wojnarowicz, queer art is seen as a form of bioresistance that “expands possible lifeworlds” and escapes disciplinary norms (p. 6).
⌛ Slow Death/Slow Violence	Gradual, often invisible harm caused by systemic neglect or environmental destruction.	Berlant and Nixon’s terms: used to describe how neoliberal neglect kills over time—especially in poor, racialized, and nonhuman populations (p. 4).
🧠 Posthumanism	A theoretical approach that critiques human exceptionalism and centers more-than-human entanglements.	Employed to rethink subjectivity and politics in planetary, ecological, and technological terms (p. 5). Example: transcorporeality between human and land in Tai’s article.
🔗 Fungibility	The interchangeable value of human life, especially in racial capitalism.	Explored by Winnubst: “anti-Blackness as the ontological grounding” of neoliberal order; lives reduced to exchangeable commodities (p. 6).

Contribution of “Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Cosmopolitics – Feminist And Queer Interventions: An Introduction” by Christine Quinan And Kathrin Thiele to Literary Theory/Theories

📚 1. Contribution to Biopolitical Literary Theory

Integration of Governance and Narrative: The article shows how biopolitics shapes the stories we tell and whose stories are told in literature and culture.

Key Quote: “Biopolitics governs ‘a new body, a multiple body’… a social subject who willingly self-implements the basic rules of Law” (Foucault, 2003, p. 245).
Literary Impact: Encourages close reading of characters and populations in texts as biopolitically regulated subjects—e.g., whose lives are managed or surveilled by systemic power.

⚰️ 2. Contribution to Necropolitical Literary Criticism

Reframing Death in Literature: It extends literary analysis to account for how death and dying are politically structured, particularly in marginalized communities.

Key Quote: “Necropolitics uncovers how certain bodies are cultivated for life and others are systemically marked for death” (p. 4).
Literary Impact: Promotes attention to death-worlds in literature, such as refugee narratives, racialized death, and queer precarity—as seen in ghostly narrators and post-apocalyptic figures.

🌌 3. Cosmopolitics and Posthumanist Literary Theory

A Non-Human-Centric Approach to Literary Worlds: The text reorients literary theory away from Enlightenment humanism toward more-than-human entanglements.

Key Quote: “A cosmos detached from politics is irrelevant… a politics not attached to a cosmos is moot” (Stengers, 2005, p. 995).
Literary Impact: Invites literary scholars to read for planetary relationality, multispecies entanglements, and poetic indeterminacy, especially in eco-criticism and speculative fiction.

🏳️‍🌈 4. Queer Theory and Queer Necropolitics

Challenging Homonormative and Homonationalist Narratives: The article highlights the contradictions between queer visibility and queer disposability.

Key Quote: “Queer necropolitics as a tool to make sense of the symbiotic co-presence of life and death” (Haritaworn et al., 2014, p. 2).
Literary Impact: Supports readings of literature that interrogate how queer and trans characters are either integrated into neoliberal celebration or sacrificed within narrative logics of violence.

🧬 5. Critical Race Theory and Racializing Assemblages

Race as a Structuring Principle in Literature: The article draws on Alexander Weheliye’s concept of “racializing assemblages” to show how race configures subjectivity.

Key Quote: “Race disciplines humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans and nonhumans” (Weheliye, 2014; p. 4).
Literary Impact: Enables literary critics to analyze how racialized bodies are rendered legible or illegible in texts, especially through embodiment, law, and death.

🌿 6. Environmental Humanities and Eco-theory

Cosmopolitics and Environmental Illness: Through discussions of healing, ecology, and transcorporeality, the article contributes to reading environments as politicized spaces.

Example: Aurora Levins Morales’s writings are analyzed as “cosmopolitical re-worlding” (p. 5).
Literary Impact: Deepens the ecological reading of texts by centering affective and embodied relationships between bodies and land, pollution, or toxicity.

🧠 7. Affect Theory in Literary Studies

Affect as Aesthetic and Political Force: Emphasizes how cinema and literature provoke affect as a means of critique and transformation.

Key Quote: “Affect… is intimately tied up in the film experience… as that which forces us to feel” (p. 2).
Literary Impact: Invites analysis of emotional responses in literature—not as private feelings but as political and embodied affects shaped by structures of power.

🧪 8. Posthumanism in Literary Theory

Undoing the Human as Literary Norm: The article contributes to posthuman literary studies by troubling Enlightenment views of humanity and rational subjectivity.

Key Quote: Cosmopolitics demands “a most complex constellation of various participating perspectives and (non-)agencies” (Stengers, 2005, p. 1003).
Literary Impact: Enriches readings of literature that feature machines, animals, ghosts, or spirits as narrative agents or ethical participants.

🔗 9. Feminist Literary Criticism and Decolonial Theory

Foregrounding Marginalized Voices and Ways of Knowing: The article mobilizes Black feminist thinkers like Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers.

Key Quote: “Participating politically in a foundationally bio- and necropolitically structured world requires complicating the political equation” (p. 5).
Literary Impact: Supports readings of feminist and decolonial literature that challenge Eurocentric and patriarchal ideas of universality and linear progress.

Examples of Critiques Through “Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Cosmopolitics – Feminist And Queer Interventions: An Introduction” by Christine Quinan And Kathrin Thiele

📚 Work	⚙️ Theoretical Lens	🔍 Critique Based on Quinan & Thiele	🧵 Thematic Focus
📘 Shuggie Bain (Douglas Stuart, 2020)	⚰️ Necropolitics	Highlights how working-class, queer bodies in Thatcher-era Glasgow are exposed to state abandonment. Shuggie’s life is shaped by the slow death of poverty, alcoholism, and social neglect — echoing Mbembe’s “death-worlds” and Berlant’s “slow death” (Quinan & Thiele, p. 4).	Queer precarity, social death, economic collapse
📘 Girl, Woman, Other (Bernardine Evaristo, 2019)	🧬 Biopolitics + 🧠 Cosmopolitics	Explores how Black British women’s lives are managed through institutions (education, class, sexuality). The novel resists a singular subjectivity and aligns with Stengers’ cosmopolitics by portraying divergent worldviews and temporalities (Quinan & Thiele, p. 5).	Intersectionality, queer Black feminism, multiplicity
📘 Brexit and British Politics (Geoffrey Evans & Anand Menon, 2017)	⚙️ Biopolitics	Offers material for critique rather than a literary work itself; the authors describe state control and manipulation of populations via economic promise and fear. From Foucauldian biopolitics, the Brexit state “makes live and lets die” based on national inclusion/exclusion (Quinan & Thiele, p. 3).	Nationalism, migration, sovereignty
📘 The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson, UK release: 2021)	🌌 Cosmopolitics	Though an American author, this UK-distributed novel envisions a global rethinking of politics across species and planetary systems. Resonates with Stengers’ call for posthumanist and cosmopolitical assemblages—multiple agencies shaping futures (Quinan & Thiele, p. 5).	Climate crisis, planetary justice, speculative futures

Criticism Against “Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Cosmopolitics – Feminist And Queer Interventions: An Introduction” by Christine Quinan And Kathrin Thiele

⚖️ 1. Over-Expansion of Theoretical Scope

The essay attempts to weave together biopolitics, necropolitics, and cosmopolitics alongside feminist, queer, decolonial, and posthumanist critiques.

Critique: This ambitious synthesis may result in conceptual dilution, where none of the frameworks is fully developed or deeply interrogated in its contradictions.

🔁 2. Lack of Concrete Political Praxis

While the text calls for “different engagements” and “less indifferent” approaches, it remains primarily theoretical.
Critique: Critics might argue the article lacks specific action-oriented strategies, leaving it open to accusations of academic abstraction in the face of urgent political violence.

💬 3. Ambiguity in the Concept of Cosmopolitics

Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitics is framed as a mode of indeterminacy and openness to the unknown.
Critique: Some may see this as intellectually evasive, offering “no ‘good’ definition” (Stengers, 2005) and thus hard to operationalize in literary, activist, or policy contexts.

🔍 4. Limited Engagement with Global South Contexts

The piece is centered on European border crises and Western theoretical traditions (Foucault, Mbembe, Stengers).

Critique: Despite referencing decolonial thinkers like Wynter and Weheliye, it could be seen as Eurocentric in emphasis, with less engagement with non-Western ontologies or Southern feminist voices.

🧩 5. Inaccessibility of Language

The text frequently employs dense theoretical language and intertextual references across disciplines.
Critique: It risks being inaccessible to non-specialist readers, including activists, students, or marginalized communities it aims to empower.

🏳️‍🌈 6. Tension Between Queer Inclusion and Queer Erasure

The article praises queer inclusion in resistance, but also acknowledges co-option into neoliberal state projects (e.g., homonationalism).
Critique: Some may argue the text doesn’t fully resolve this tension, leaving unclear where queer theory should position itself in relation to biopower and necropolitics.

⏳ 7. Limited Temporal Depth

The piece emphasizes current crises (migration, neoliberalism) but is short on historical genealogies of these power formations.

Critique: Critics might note a lack of historical depth, especially regarding colonial legacies, early feminist movements, or the longue durée of racial capitalism.

Representative Quotations from “Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Cosmopolitics – Feminist And Queer Interventions: An Introduction” by Christine Quinan And Kathrin Thiele with Explanation

🔢 #	🗣️ Quotation	💡 Explanation
1️⃣	“This deadly dynamic also changes the world and who we are in it.”	Refers to the normalization of necropolitical violence in border regimes, and how it shapes both subjectivity and political reality.
2️⃣	“Biopolitics and necropolitics are not opposites. Rather, they are ‘two sides of the same coin.’”	Citing Braidotti, the authors show how life and death governance work together under contemporary regimes of power.
3️⃣	“Cosmopolitics ‘happens in the mode of indeterminacy’.”	Refers to Stengers’ notion of cosmopolitics as a space of uncertainty and multiplicity — an alternative to universalist political projects.
4️⃣	“Who gets to live and who must die – or who must live and who is let die.”	From Mbembe’s necropolitics, this quotation reveals the asymmetrical control over life and death that defines modern governance.
5️⃣	“Haunting…is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done.”	Borrowing from Avery Gordon, the authors argue that political violence continues to haunt societies, demanding ethical and political action.
6️⃣	“Refugees are attempting to survive in Europe, a purgatory-like space situated somewhere between living and dying.”	Describes the refugee condition as a liminal state, invoking necropolitical governance that renders lives ‘ungrievable’ or suspended.
7️⃣	“Affect…is intimately tied up in the film experience.”	Emphasizes the political role of cinema and affect theory, showing how emotions are tools for activating political consciousness.
8️⃣	“Equality does not mean that they all have the same say…but that they all have to be present in the mode that makes the decision as difficult as possible.”	Stengers’ radical cosmopolitical ethic: everyone must be accounted for, even if they do not hold power. Politics becomes an uncomfortable reckoning.
9️⃣	“Neoliberalism both appropriates and positively values social difference as celebration of life and diversity…”	Quoting Winnubst, the authors highlight how diversity discourse in neoliberalism masks deeper systemic anti-Black violence.
🔟	“We offer cosmopolitics…to envision a move towards otherwise feminist and queer futures…”	The ultimate aim of the article — to reimagine political and ethical futures beyond biopolitical and necropolitical domination.