She/Her/Hers

Pronouns, possession and white women’s consumption of gender

Abstract

Gender is a catastrophic oppressive imposition. Gender structures and is structured by settler colonialism, just as it marks and is marked by ongoing investments in anti-blackness. Not only is gender a violent erasure of Indigenous ways of being, but as Spillers (1987) detailed, gender—specifically femininity and womanness—are foreclosed to Black women as an ongoing effect of chattel slavery. In this article, we focus on the pronouns she, her and hers as an artifact of white womanness. In so doing, we trace how white women not only articulate gender as a site of possession—here we specifically draw on Harris’s (1993) notion of the absolute right to exclude—but consume gender in a move toward necrocapitalism. Put another way, white women consume gender to further their presumed goodness, at the same time as—and indeed as a function of—desiring the death of trans women. As a result, trans women are rendered killable subjects, with their killability acting as a necessity for the furtherance of the catastrophe of gender itself. Through the commodification of the pronoun as a signifier of gender (e.g. pronoun stickers and pins, the performative nature of bringing trans women to speak without any resulting transformative change), we argue this acts to further necrocapitalism, especially in the notion “economy of deadly violence”, as it “ensures the maintenance of authority’s spread and permanence” (Sheehi in conversation with Shalhoub-Kevorkian; see Introduction to this special issue for further details).