4 - Trans-motherhood on the edge: Competing necro and biopolitics in the lives of transgender mothers living with HIV

Presentation Abstract
Foucault argues that modern states deploy knowledges that invest individuals and populations with certain properties that will make them amenable to surveillance and regulation. At the same time, the life course of marginalised communities is largely determined by the governance of state necropolitics. This paper considers the competing necropolitics and biopolitical investment in Malaysian transgender communities and the means through which transgender women living with HIV in turn establish sovereignties through Islamic learning and family formation in their role as foster mothers. This paper argues that although the state has historically exerted its necropolitical influence over trans subjectivities, ‘disallowing [their lives] to the point of death’, Islamic institutions and bureaucracies have instead been a ‘positive’ influence on life of trans Muslim women who intend to be foster mothers. The bio-political force of Islamic bureaucracies has hailed trans women as women with a (social) reproductive purpose, mainly in assuming the parental role as adopters of orphaned and abandoned children. We find that transgender women can create a space by biopolitics of Islamic bureaucracies to, in turn, foster life by being foster parents.