The Right to Maim

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…