This paper proposes understanding decolonial mourning as an articulation of resistance of necropolitical social reproduction. Though the concept of necropolitical social reproduction might sound contradictory, it helps us to understand the negative dialectic constituting social reproduction. Thus, as we will see, it does not just rely on the production of life but is deeply entrenched in the systemic allowing to die and killing of feminized, gendered, sexualized, disabled, racialized, migrantized, impoverished and abandoned bodies. The politics of mourning, specifically decolonial mourning, as affective labor, I will argue, articulates the contradiction and continuum between life and death. As such, it speaks about necropolitical social reproduction. This argument will develop in four steps. First, I will engage with the analysis of feminicide in the Argentinean movement Ni Una Menos through its politics of mourning and relate it to a theoretical genealogy of Latin American feminist theory. Then I will approach necropolitical social reproduction and contrast it to Gladys Tzul Tzul’s proposal of communal resistance to genocidal and extractivist racial capitalism. Following this argument, I will consider Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s understanding of ontological relationality.

Encarnación GUTIÉRREZ RODRÍGUEZ is a Professor in Sociology with a focus on Culture and Migration at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. Previously to this position, she was Professor in General Sociology at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. Moreover, she is a Adjunct Professor in Sociology at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. Among her publications is the book Migration, Domestic Work and Affect, published by Routledge (2010). More recently she has published Decolonial Mourning and the Caring Commons. Migration-Coloniality Necropolitics and Conviviality Infrastructure (Anthem 2023), also with Shirley Anne Tate the Palgrave Handbook in Critical Race and Gender and with Rhoda Reddock Decolonial Perspectives on Entangled Inequalities: Europe and the Caribbean as well with Pınar Tuzcu Migrantischer Feminismus in der Deutschen Frauenbewegung, 1985-2000. Her work engages with affective labor, materialities, institutional racism, racial capitalism and the coloniality of migration.