The Right to Maim

Abstract

Many things are lost in the naming of a death as a "gay youth suicide." 1 In what follows, I offer a preliminary analy sis of the prolific media attention to gay youth suicides that began in the fall of 2010. 2 I am interested in how the hailing of this event recalls affective attachments to neoliberalism that index a privileged geopolitics of finance capitalism.These tragic deaths were memorialized in numerous public statements, vigils, and public displays of mourning.I have been struck by how the discourses surrounding gay youth suicide partake in a spurious binarization of an interdependent relationship between bodily capacity and bodily debility.These discourses reproduce neoliberalism's heightened demands for bodily capacity, even as this same neoliberalism marks out populations for what Lauren Berlant has described as "slow death"-the debilitating ongoingness of structural in equality and suffering. 3 In the United States, where personal debt incurred through medical expenses is the number one reason for filing for bankruptcy, the centrality of what is termed the medical-industrial complex to the profitability of slow death cannot be overstated. 4 My intervention here is an attempt to go beyond the critique of the queer neoliberalism and homonormativity-indeed, homonationalism-embedded in the tendentious mythologizing that "It Gets Better" by confronting not only the debilitating aspects of neoliberalism but, more trenchantly, the economics of debility.If the knitting of finance capitalism and the medical-industrial complex means that debility pays, and pays well, how can a politics of disability move beyond the conventional narratives of re sis tance to neoliberalism?What are the vectors for a politics of disability if debility marks the convergence of capitalism and slow death via its enfolding into neoliberalism?Disability and debility can be thought of as two concepts describing similar phenomena under late capitalism with strikingly diff er ent effects and

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