Beyond Hate: Queer Metonymies of Crime, Pathology and Anti-Violence

This is a reprinted chapter from Jin Haritaworn’s book Queer Lovers and Hateful Others: Regenerating Violent Times and Places (Pluto, London, 2015). The book addresses how neoliberal and carceral politics were rewritten in the languages of welfare and care through the invention of a new folk devil, the ‘homophobic Muslim’ in the 2000s and 2010s. The chapter was one of the first to interrogate hate crime as a paradigm of violence and anti-violence from a critical queer perspective. Using an Ahmedian affect framework, Haritaworn argues that hate is a risky diagnostic to organise around, since it always already sticks to racialised bodies. Tracing figurations of violence, homophobia, youth crime and madness through a range of media, activist and policy texts, Haritaworn argues that the drama of queer lovers and hateful Others has unfolded in close proximity to wider crime discourses that are set in the gentrifying inner city. The homophobic Muslim emerges as a psy profile that comes with an arsenal of techniques of punishment and reform, and a bio-, necro- and geopolitical horizon and orientation towards degenerate bodies and spaces that are turned into disposable sites of value extraction. This has implications beyond what kind of languages we choose to use in our organising. The chapter calls for an abolitionist imagination that leaves behind both the prison and sites more often considered caring and benevolent, including the communities we wish to build ourselves.