In our social lives, to be visible, to be intelligible is to exist. As Judith Butler (2015) points out, for those who are considered unintelligible, for those whose vulnerabilities are maximized by the action or absence of the State, the struggle to forge alliances must be fundamental for establishing a plural and performative intelligible proposition. A proposition capable of producing a “rift within the sphere of appearance” (Butler 2015: 50), exposing the contradictions already present at the core of the claim for a “universal” right to appear and exist in public. This right, Butler states after Hanna Arendt, is undermined by different forms of power that act as to qualify who can and who can not appear in public. These structures of power can only be questioned by a critical alliance that seeks not to guarantee for themselves the right to appear in the public sphere but to overcome altogether the differential allocation of vulnerability through its modes of visibility, and therefore, its political intelligibility.
Thinking about the networks of solidarity mobilized by contemporary transfeminist movements, where the main slogans in circulation center around the demand to not be killed, it’s possible to say that these movements rely on the performative exercise of rights, demanding “the right to have rights”, to follow Arendt’s axiom. And even though this performativity surfaces in a linguistic manner – “Ni una menos”, “Marielle Presente!”, “Vivas Nos Queremos” –, it gains intelligibility, hence visibility, through corporal movements, acts of resistance and the creation of improvised and ephemeral assemblies. Their appearance within the public sphere is an act that exposes the inefficiency of a right (the right to live and not be injured or murdered by another) in order to reclaim that same right.
The imagination and political practices that take shape inside these social movements confront the necropolitics that systematically murders trans and cis women, and that excludes them from the opportunities of life. As Butler notes: “we are already within the political when we think about transience and mortality. (…) a commitment to equality and justice would entail addressing at every institutional level the differential exposure to death and dying that currently characterizes the lives of subjugated peoples and the precarious, often as the result of systematic racism or forms of calculated abandonment” (2015: 48).