To Kill a Mockingjay: Katniss’s Corrosive Queerness in the Hunger Games Trilogy

The third volume of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games Trilogy, Mockingjay, depicts two dystopian political alternatives: the exploitative capitalist Capitol and the planned economy of District 13. Protagonist Katniss Everdeen repudiates both political structures. This article reads her choice through Lee Edelman’s work on futurity and Judith Butler’s work on mourning and violence to suggest that it is possible to read the ending of The Hunger Games Trilogy as a utopian response to Snow’s and Coin’s regimes. While Snow figures Katniss as the victorious Child for the Capitol and Coin figures her as the Child-Soldier for the rebellion, Collins’s epilogue undercuts these symbolic roles and tries to decouple Katniss’s individual future from the futurity of the state. Her choices at the end of the novel manifest a community that is constituted by shared work, mutual interest, and memorial rather than futurity.