A Door Into Ocean Negative - Wave 1 - HSS14

Explanation/Notes
This file contains the first wave of negative materials vs. the A Door Into Ocean
affirmative. It includes case responses, a Reproductive Futurism Critique, and an
Essentialism Critique. Affirmative responses to these arguments are in the affirmative
file.

Case Responses
1NC Frontline
( ) Their affirmative cannot solve oppression or the degradation of the environment
because it has no focus on capitalism which are the real factors that oppress these two
entities
Beder et al, 1 (Sharon, professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales,
Australia, and Jasmin Sydee, philosopher and blogger on the womans movement, July 2001), Ecofeminism and
Globalisation: A Critical Appraisal DEMOCRACY & NATURE: The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY,
vol.7, no.2, http://www.democracynature.org/vol7/beder_sydee_globalisation.htm)--CRG
A materialist ecofeminist analysis has been developed, in part, as a critique of this spiritual ecofeminism. It sees
spiritual ecofeminism as failing to come to terms with the effects of capitalism, such
as the perpetuation of sexism and environmental damage. In particular material ecofeminists
are critical of the tendency of spiritual ecofeminists to endorse essentialism, that is
the view that men and women are essentially and inherently different in
character and nature. For materialist ecofeminists the fundamental contradiction of
capitalism is not between capital and labour but between production and
reproduction. Valued and economically recognised male labour is separated off from invisible domestic female
service. This is thought to be the deepest contradiction of patriarchal capitalism
because womens reproductive labour remains in nature while mens productive
labour is removed from nature. It is their close connection with nature that is said to put women in the
position of being able to liberate humanity and nature from capitalist domination in order to create new healthy societies.
( ) Womens roles are socially constructed not innate. These structures are not definite
and we have no reason to believe that women wont become dominant when given all
forms of political power.
Otto 2006 - associate professor of environmental humanities at Florida Gulf Coast University (Eric C, Science Fiction
and the Ecological conscience, p.125-126)//GZ

Kings articles in Healing the Wounds and Reweaving the World demonstrate her critical attitude toward affinity
ecofeminism as they also consider ways in which essentialist positions can be revised to preserve their ecological
conscience while introducing a more complex social conscience. Essential to Kings social constructionist position are
the ideas that in patriarchal thought, women are believed to be closer to nature than
men (The Ecology 18) and that the mind-set of hierarchy originates within human
society (Healing 107). In recognizing the social origins of both the woman-nature
connection and the supremacy of hierarchical ontology, King sets herself and her brand of
ecofeminism apart from affinity ecofeminism and reveals social constructionist ecofeminism to
be more politically conscious than essentialist positions. King admits that in choosing nature
over culture and feminine values over masculine values, essentialist thinkers do not adequately
question these illusory dualisms. She notes, too, that womens ecological sensitivity
and life orientationtruths for affinity ecofeministsis a socialized perspective that could
be socialized right out of [women] depending on [their] day-to-day lives (The
Ecology 23). Continuing, she writes, There is no reason to believe that women placed in
positions of patriarchal power will act any differently from men (23). Kings critical
points about ecofeminism help free ecofeminism from some potentially devastating theoretical and practical limitations.
She integrates nature and culture in a way that does not maintain each as
mutually exclusive categories. In social constructionist ecofeminism, the
reformative impulsewhether ecologically conscious, socially conscious, or bothis not tied to a
specific way of living in or with nature as it is in affinity ecofeminism, in which
it seems that reform can only happen with the help of very generally defined
but supposedly universal feminine traits in the absence of equally generalized
masculine qualities. By showing that nature is itself culturally defined and that culture is intricately connected
to and dependent upon the natural worldin essence, by showing that all categories are conceptual categories, whether
nature, culture, female, male, or so forthsocial constructionist ecofeminism insists that reform begins not in
recovering universal values but in understanding the complexities and social contexts behind sustainable value systems
and then employing what we learn to instigate change. As King notes, womens ecological sensitivity is
context-specific, not universal. Just as women can be healers, nurturers, or
defenders of nature, given the cultural contexts they might also be torturers, as we
see in Slonczewskis novel. Likewise, while men can be culturally programmed to be
militaristic, contexts might determine them to be caring.
( ) The 1AC is insufficient to create real changethey are too particular to extend to
other cases
Winter 89 (Steven L. Winter is an Associate Professor, University of Miami School of Law. B.A. 1974, Yeshiva College; J.D.
1977, Columbia University, LEGAL STORYTELLING: THE COGNITIVE DIMENSION OF THE AGON
BETWEEN LEGAL POWER AND NARRATIVE MEANING 87 Mich. L. Rev. 2225., August,1989, KK)
With this preface, we can understand why narrative is insufficient as a medium for the kind of institutionalized meaning
that is necessary if a prevailing order is to make persuasive its claims of legitimation and justification. The process of legal
legitimation that I have described requires three conditions for its success. First, for law to cover the wide variety of fact
situations to which it is to be applied, it must be easily generalizable. Second, for law to appear as legitimate in the
absence of objective justification, it must evoke the kind of automatic sense of validity -- should we call it a "natural law
response"? -- that sense of validity -- should we call it a "natural law response"? -- that is only provided by automatic,
unreflexive culture knowledge. n111 [*2260] Third, for law to function effectively and equitably, it must be communicated
with as high a degree of relative reliability as possible. Narrative cannot fulfill these conditions of generality,
unreflexivity, and reliability in communication. First, narrative cannot structure a category or a model. Because narrative
comes with its instantiations already in place, it can (at best) provide an example with which to motivate a model. Second,
the concrete, specific particulars of any narrative require conscious mediation in the process of analogy necessary for
extension to other cases. Third, at the interpretive level, narrative engages the reader in a reconstruction that risks too
great an indeterminacy. The number of ICMs required to make sense of the varied parts of a story (not to mention the
larger paradigms relative to which one may interpret a story entirely) leaves far too much room for misreading the
author's intent. Like Ezekiel's creatures, the peril presented by narrative is that it will keep its face to us, but retain its
power to move off in any direction without warning.
( ) Ecofeminism alienates male allies in their essentialisation of their suffering
Another problem with ecofeminism is its tendency to alienate men. Men are also
exploited and damaged under capitalism. Even when ecofeminists address
essentialism that may linger in their dialogue, so that men are not simply 'bad' or destructive by
their nature, ecofeminists imply that men are spiritually marginalised and separated from nature through their
experience. The generalisations and uniform assumptions that ecofeminists make
about men are alienating to men: Men never think of life. They only want to
conquer nature and the enemy.[95] These sentiments and blanket statements may arise from a rage that
should not be devalidated but the experiences of men have variety just as womens do. Men, like women are
divided by class, ethnicity and so forth. Many suffer poverty and human rights
abuses as do women.

( ) Ecofeminism doesnt recoginize the dualisms of consumption and production, and
therefore do nothing to address the exploitation of animals in the status quo
Adams, 91 (Carol J., writer, feminist, and animal rights advocate, Spring 1991, Ecofeminism and the Eating of
Animals, Hypatia, Vol. 6, No. 1, Ecological Feminism (Spring, 1991), pp. 125-145, Published by: Wiley on behalf of
Hypatia, Inc., http://www.jstor.org/stable/3810037)--CRG
Not only is the analysis of consequences an important aspect of ecofeminist
thought, but for ecofeminists a failure to consider consequences results from the
dualisms that characterize patriarchal culture: consumption is experienced
separately from production, and production is valued over maintenance. By this I
mean that as a result of the fetishization of commodities associated with capitalist
production, we see consumption as an end in itself, and we do not consider what
have been the means to that end: eating (a dead) chicken is disassociated from the
experience of black women who as lung gunners must each hour scrape the
insides of 5,000 chickens cavities and pull out the recently slaughtered chickens lungs.' Both women
workers and the chickens themselves are means to the end of consumption, but
because consumption has been disembodied, their oppressions as worker and
consumable body are invisible. This disembodied production of a tangible
product is viewed as a positive indication of the economy, but maintenance-those actions
necessary to sustain the environment-is neither measured nor valued. Currently, maintenance of domestic
space or environmental space is not calculated in economic terms- housework is not
calculated in the Gross National Product in the United States, nor are the environmental resources we value (Waring
1988). We do not measure the negative environmental effects of raising animals to be our food, such as the costs
to our topsoil and our groundwater. Maintenance of resources is sacrificed to
meat production.

( ) Turn: the Ecofeminist revolution would destroy the environment
Baden and Noonen, 96 (John A. Baden, Ph.D.,is Chairman of FREE and Gallatin Writers, Douglas Noonan is a research
assistant at FREE and the Gallatin Writers, Inc., an organization for writers of the West, Seattle Times, Sept 4)-- CRG
At no time since its inception two hundred years ago has the ideology of free
market capitalism stood more dominant than it does today. For much of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, communists confidently challenged the advocates of laissez-faire, claiming that their system could
produce more wealth than capitalism and distribute it more equitably. In the process, they boasted that
communism could cure a broad range of social problems, including
environmental pollution.L Following the worldwide collapse of communism, almost all these
claims proved to be false, none more so than the promise to protect the environment. After the Iron Curtain
crumbled and uncensored reporting became possible, academics and the popular press rushed to document the massive
environmental devastation in the Soviet zone.2 The West German magazine Der Spiegel indignantly branded communist
East Germany as an "ecological outlaw of the first rank," noting, for example, that the Buna chemical works in the East
dumped ten times more mercury into its neighboring river in a day than a comparable West German plant did in a year.
The same article also reported that each of the two-cycle cars commonly operated
in the East emitted one hundred times as much carbon monoxide as a western
auto equipped with a catalytic converter. Elaborating on the air pollution problem, an article in
Current History pointed out that East German sulphur dioxide emissions per capita were the highest in the world; the
burden of that particular pollutant exceeded the corresponding figure for capitalist West Germany by a factor of twelve.
Reflecting on these and other environmental contrasts in the summer of i99o, as East and West Germany moved toward
unification, the New York Times reported that "one issue taking on urgency is how the orderly
and clean half of the country can help clean up the disheveled and polluted half....
Quick action is needed because four decades of unbridled industrial spewing
and spilling in East Germany have created an acute crisis for man and nature."3

( ) The affs discussion of heteronormativity re-entrenches sexuality norms which hold
up the structure of capitalism
McNamara, 2k (Liam, academic and philosopher of queer theory, The Political Economy of Sex Profit and
Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism, Culture Machine, Reviews, Rosemary Hennessey,
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/rt/printerFriendly/229/210)--CRG
In Chapter Three, Hennessey attacks the current reigning ideology of neoliberalism, which
involves an increasing drive for profits, globalization, and a general cultural turn
in theory, leading to the assimilation of critical theory by the academy. This has
lead to the abandonment of Marxism and its substitution by cultural
materialism. Hennessey tries to turn the argument back to theories of exploitation, ultimately rejecting
overdetermination in favour of commodity fetishism. She explicitly links heteronormativity to the
emergence of the commodity form, since it is the division of labour that has
allowed the formation of new sexual subjectivities in the consumer society. This
liberation of productive forces has enabled the emergence of new desiring subjects that escape the heterosexual norm, but
this development is underpinned by a new patriarchal hierarchy ushering in a renascent form of heteronormativity.
Hennessey points out how in the nineteenth century sexology and psychoanalytic discourses allowed for new divergent
sexual identities that were swiftly reterritorialized under the 'perversions'. Heteronormative paradigms
have gone on to manage desire by restricting queer desire to the perversions.
Basically Hennessey is trying to historicize Cixous' ideas of a 'patriarchal binary logic' and the persistence of gendered
active/passive roles of sexuality.6 Hennessey links sexual liberation to economic imperatives
and the division of labour in addition to the conventional cultural explanations,
and suggests that desire has been managed and moved away from procreative
norms due to the demands of the new productive forces found in mass
consumption. Hennessey's stance shows a critical understanding of sexual liberation, by the introduction of the
theory of class. Hennessey points out: 'capitalism does not require heteronormative families or even a gendered division
of labour. What it does require is an unequal division of labour' (P&P, 105). Some gay men have adopted
the ideology of the family, but this ideology is generally compulsory for the disadvantaged. At bottom, what
is needed is commodity exchange and surplus value for the few not many. Capitalism still relies on
heterosexuality for the poor, and the new non-normative forms of sexuality are generally reserved for the
affluent consumer subjectivities. These emergent 'postmodern sexualities' are compatible
with the new liquescent forms of the commodity, possessing a fluidity that has
an affinity with the new consumer ethos.
2NC Cap alt cause
Ecofeminism ignores the violence that capitalism perpetuates- and even supports that
violence
Further still, many women are concerned that the emphasis spiritual ecofeminism places
on an ethic for change ignores the effects and power of capitalism in shaping the
lives of women and shaping the globe. Without this dimension, it is argued that solutions
for change remain too rooted in self-realisation and individual and community
change and prevent ecofeminism from coming to terms with the socioeconomic
relationships between North and South or internal national ethnic relations.[13]
White middle class ecofeminists fail to realise that the affluence and lifestyle
choices they are embracing have been afforded to them through the continued
exploitation of the sisters in the South. Their (re)discovery is being sourced through appropriating
the knowledge and experiences of women still treated as Other. Indigenous women, African-American
women and women from the South, it is argued, are still excluded, by material
economic forces, from any re-weaving that is occurring.
This implicates the entire aff- their failure to recognize capitalism as a cause of
oppression results in their failure to break apart the dualism of women and nature
The degree to which women have internalised consumerism cannot be
downplayed or dismissed. Although consumerism is addressed by ecofeminists as a problem for women of
the North created by patriarchal capitalism, they do not adequately take account of power of
consumerism to acculturate women and shape individual self-actualisation.
Although ecofeminists maintain that it is the social experience of women participating in community outside
commodified time and necessity in the realm of reproduction that allows them to experience or know an embeddedness
in nature, is it possible to conjecture that this removes women from their lifetime of
culture and socialisation to the contrary? Certainly not in the North. In the South, as Shiva and Mies
note, people have the raw experience of capitalism subsuming their traditional ways of life and worldviews but this is
true of both men and women. By effectively removing women from Culture, that is the
acculturation and socialisation processes entailed in the work ethic, and
corporate and consumers cultures, materialist ecofeminists actually fail to break
apart the dualism of Culture/Nature. The implication that men are subject to culture and women arent
is a form of essentialism, the very problem a material ecofeminism attempts to address.

2NC Anthro Turn
Ecofeminists hurt animals- they believe in a human/animal superiority because its
natural. That turns the K because the concept of what is natural is used to justify
male superiority
Ecofeminism at times evidences a confusion about human nature. Are we predators
or are we not? In an attempt to see ourselves as natural beings, some argue that
humans are simply predators like some other animals. Vegetarianism is then
seen to be unnatural while the carnivorism of other animals is made
paradigmatic. Animal rights is criticized "for it does not understand that one species
supporting or being supported by another is natures way of sustaining life" (Ahlers
1990, 433). The deeper disanalogies with carnivorous animals remain unexamined because the notion of humans as
predators is consonant with the idea that we need to eat meat. In fact, carnivorism is true for only about 20 percent of
nonhuman animals. Can we really generalize from this experience and claim to know precisely
what nature's way" is, or can we extrapolate the role of humans according to this paradigm? Some
feminists have argued that the eating of animals is natural because we do not
have the herbivores double stomach or flat grinders and because chimpanzees eat meat and regard it
as a treat (Kevles 1990). This argument from anatomy involves selective filtering. In fact,
all primates are primarily herbivotous. Though some chimpanzees have been observed eating dead
flesh-at the most, six times in a month-some never eat meat. Dead flesh constitutes less than 4 percent of chimpanzees
diet; many eat insects, and they do not eat dairy products (Bamard 1990). Does this sound like the diet of
human beings?

Their inability to reconcile the disembodiment of animals means that we can never
find solutions to environmental problems in non ecologically damaging ways
An ethic that links maintenance with production, that refuses to disembody the
commodity produced from the costs of such production, would identify the loss of
topsoil, water, and the demands on fossil fuels that meat production requires and factor the costs of
maintaining these aspects of the natural world into the end product, the meat. It
would not enforce a split between maintenance and production. The cheapness of a diet based on grain-fed terminal
animals exists because it does not include the cost of depleting the environ~ ment. Not only does the cost of
meat not include the loss of topsoil, the pollution of water, and other environmental effects, but
price supports of the dairy and beef" industry mean that the government actively prevents the price of
eating animals from being reflected in the commodity of meat. My tax money subsidizes war, but it also subsidizes the
eating of animals. For instance, the estimated costs of subsidizing the meat industry with water in California alone is $26
billion annually (Hur and Fields 1985a, 17). If water used by the meat industry were not subsidized by United States
taxpayers, hamburger would cost $35 per pound and beefsteak would be $89. The hidden costs to the
environment of meat production and the subsidizing of this production by the
government maintain the disembodiment of this production process. It also means
that environmentally concerned individuals are implicated, even if unknowingly and unwittingly, in this process despite
their own disavowals through vegetarianism. Individual tax monies perpetuate the cheapness of animals'
bodies as a food source; consequently meat eaters are not required to confront the reality of meat production.
Tax monies are used to develop growth hormones like "bovine somatotropin to increase cows' milk production rather
than to help people learn the benefits and tastes of soyfoods such as soymillc-products that
are not ecologically destructive.

2NC Queer Cap Turn
Focus on sexuality creates a fetishized and commodified version of queerness that re-
entrenches capitalism
McNamara, 2k (Liam, academic and philosopher of queer theory, The Political Economy of Sex Profit and
Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism, Culture Machine, Reviews, Rosemary Hennessey,
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/rt/printerFriendly/229/210)--CRG
This leads Hennessey to question forms of queer visibility in commodity culture.
She uses drag as an example, which for Judith Butler is a ludic form of sexuality which through
theatricality and parody exposes discursive forms of sexuality that shape
identity. However, Hennessey points out 'even the option of drag as a flexible sexual
identity depends on the availability not only of certain discourses of sexuality,
aesthetics, style, and glamour but also of a global circuit of commodity
production, exchange, and consumption specific to industrialized economies'
(P&P, 120). Drag is not enabling for everybody, and since this sexual identity is severed from general historical processes,
Hennessey feels Butler has merely fetishized an emergent postmodern sexuality.
However, it is worth pointing out that Hennessey is not suggesting Butler is wrong in celebrating drag, but that she has
overlooked how productive forces underpin such developments, and how discourses of sexual liberation may merely be a
source of 'relative deprivation' for the less affluent. Hennessey's theoretical stance is interesting, because she is explicitly
trying to link theories of commodification with sexuality, and has resisted an uncritical celebration of the new
postmodern sexualities. Similarly, Hennessey displays scepticism for Foucaultian
technologies of the self, since not everybody has the money or consumer finesse
to indulge in this process. In fact, the discourse of heteronormativity that is
subverted in film and fashion can be linked to a less gendered professional
workplace that has emerged through an aestheticization of everyday life, as
opposed to a more general form of liberation desired by Hennessey. The new
postmodern sexualities can be a means of disguising relations of production through a spurious egalitarianism; such a
process occludes the issue of class. A good example of this is the contemporary exploitation
of the 'pink pound', since middle-class homosexuals tend to have a high
disposable income. In order to illustrate this point, and to oppose a historical approach to cultural materialism,
Hennessey examines the film The Crying Game. The way she has addressed this point is by attempting to show how both
sexual and political themes have featured in representations of the empire -- Hennessey contends that cinema has a
mythic function because the political subtext of the film is repressed. The Crying Game is one of these postmodern myths
that suggests sexual identity is a masquerade, but undercuts this radical suggestion by turning the film into a simple
'unveiling of a secret'; the putative radical stance of the film emerges through the heterosexual imaginary, that is,
heterosexual forms of meaning making. Through a Lacanian reading of desire Hennessey suggests that a fascination for
transvestism is due to its exposure of the illusory status of the phallus (i.e. sexual difference emerges through the cultural
matrix of language). The Crying Game suggests that womanhood may not be determined biologically, but is predicated
on the presence/absence of the phallus. However, because the film disapproves of and punishes the phallic woman and
valorizes the man who is in essence a woman (more woman than the phallic woman), the film remains loyal to the
heterosexual imaginary and gendered sex roles. Hennessey deepens the analysis by linking this sexual ambivalence to the
aestheticization of everyday life -- in a commodified lifeworld the phallus may circulate more freely. This also
uncovers a political subtext, where postcolonial anxieties about lost phallic
power are displaced onto a sexual ambivalence encoded by the heterosexual
imaginary. In turn, the issue of race is repressed. Overall, Hennessey's reading of this film points out how the issue
of class and race has receded in the face of the twin hegemonies of postmodern sexuality and postcolonial discourse, and
The Crying Game offers an essentialist and conservative view of the 'real woman'. In the final two chapters,
Hennessey turns to the subject of desire and revolutionary love. Critical analysis
of sexuality in political economy has been subsumed by an overly cultural
approach, shifting the area of thought from class to desire. An example provided is the work
of Gayle Rubin, who switched focus from commodity production to the role kinship
relations play in the formation of sexuality. Hennessey points out how kinship relations are in fact
mediated by political economy, and cannot be examined in isolation. In the work of Dorothy Allison we see a move from
Marxist positions to a 'sex-radical' stance, that tends to equate lust with desire. It is in a similar vein that Hennessey
criticizes the work of Teresa de Lauretis and Elizabeth Grosz, where desire is valorized as a revolutionary force that
makes connections, which unfortunately seems to share many of the aims of late capitalism. This conception of queer
desire is ultimately complicit with contemporary consumerist objectives. Hennessey's work has interesting parallels with
the work of Baudrillard, by uncovering a mirror of production beneath ostensibly radical
feminist theory. Also, these new desiring bodies have emerged outside the historical generation of the needs of the
majority of women, and so have little connection with genuine everyday experience. This can be seen in
American welfare reform, where the sexuality of the poor is targeted by
ideologies of 'personal responsibility'. Hennessey has exposed an implicit hierarchy of discrimination
within bourgeois ideologies of sexual liberation; the poor are seen as being promiscuous and a welfare state burden, while
the rich are merely 'experimenting' or enjoying themselves. When applied to deprived groups,
promiscuity may be recognized as an imputed characteristic employed for the
social legitimation of bourgeois sexual mores.

Women dont have any inherent biological traits
Otto 2006 - associate professor of environmental humanities at Florida Gulf Coast University (Eric C, Science Fiction
and the Ecological conscience, p.123-124)//GZ

Biehls text dismisses ecofeminism as an illegitimate movement caught up in regressive
perceptions of women, inaccurate historical references, and even privileging women over men in a future-
primitive ecotopia. Certainly, Finding Our Way does not picture a productive ecofeminism in its critique of ecofeminist
essentialism. Not all critics of essentialism dismiss ecofeminism altogether, though, because unlike Biehl they speak
from another wing of the ecofeminist movement: social constructionist ecofeminism. Espousing the multiplicity of
perspectives within ecofeminism, Lee Quinby notices, ecofeminism has combated ecological destruction and
patriarchal domination without succumbing to the totalizing impulses of masculinist politics, embracing as political
strategy a plurality of theoretical positions rather than a single, hegemonic stance (123). However, the contrasts
between the brand of ecofeminism discussed above and social constructionist
ecofeminism is nonetheless a contrast that complicates ecofeminist discourse.
Gearharts, Le Guins, and Slonczewskis texts importantly work through this
snag by dialectically negotiating, with varying degrees of success, an
ecofeminism that remains open to essentialist claims while also understanding
the limitations of these claims. Unlike affinity ecofeminism, which sees women and nature as
fundamentally interconnected by virtue of a set of innate feminine values that are at once the sole territory of women
and the preferred values of ecotopia, social ecofeminism sees womens closer relation to
the natural world as socially constructed. Any superior knowledge women may
have about the environment or the natural world stems from their social
position (Mellor 17). A critic of this school of thought, Janet Biehl questions the motive of social
constructionist ecofeminism, asking if it is an attempt to show that [womens
inherent biological traits] are merely social constructions and eliminate them?
(19). But social constructionist ecofeminism has been defined in more detail than Biehl admits, specifically by Ynestra
King.

Reproductive Futurism Critique
Notes

The thesis of the Kritik is simply that ecofeminism takes a stance of positivism and looks towards a better future. Edelman
argues that this is something inaccessible to queer individuals because society sees them as being unable to biologically
reproduce. So, stances of RF politically oppose the queer body. This means the negative accesses the Sedgwick impact in
the 1AC because those unable to reproduce are purged from society and that leads to omnicide. Now yes, queer
individuals have children and they want a future, but this kritik is not playing out on the literal level, but on the societal
and political level. This is not saying that no one should ever try to reproduce, its not a suicide K, etc.
1NC
Ecofeminism is a philosophy entirely based upon reproductive futurism and saving
women and the environment
Irving, 9 (Allan, professor the University of Western Ontario, October 29th 2009, Ecofeminism: our last great hope?
Western News,
http://communications.uwo.ca/com/western_news/stories/__ecofeminism:_our_last_great_hope?____20091029445093
/) --CRG
When the planet is ruined, the continent forlorn in water and smoke, writes Canadian
poet Dionne Brand, in her long, unflinching elegy, Inventory (2006), in which she tallies up the disaster that is the present.
There is a chilling sense of foreboding. There is the sense as well that the sand is fast running out on
our time to act; it may already be too late. However, with the most crucial meeting on climate
change in the history of the planet taking place over 14 days in Copenhagen in early December
involving, it is estimated, 15,000 participants, representing about 200 countries there is a flicker of hope,
even perhaps optimism for the future. Nevertheless it may very well be that our most likely
chance for planetary survival lies in what has come to be known as
ecofeminism. The contemporary environmental movement and ecofeminism can be historically located in 1962
when the marine biologist Rachel Carson (1907-1964) published her pathbreaking study Silent Spring. The books opening
sentence contained its own implied lament: there was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in
harmony with its surroundings. The book reflected Carsons long standing concern that the reckless use of synthetic
chemical pesticides after World War II was not only detrimental to the environment but to human beings themselves as a
part of the natural world. Another formative figure in the intellectual development of ecofeminism is the French feminist
Francoise dEaubonne (1920-2005) who actually came up with the word ecofeminisme; in 1974 she published Le
Feminisme ou la mourt which strongly linked the devaluation of both women and the
earth. Her book provided solid historical arguments that many women in the past used
sound ecological methods that almost always were disrupted by male-
dominated interests. The book was also a call to action: women needed to take steps immediately to save
themselves and the earth simultaneously. If we listened to, and followed the counsel of ecofeminists, dEaubonne
maintained, our planet, close to women, would become verdant again for everyone. Nothing less than the
extinction of people and the planet is at stake, she insisted, and a complete revolution in thought
and action is required. Ecofeminism is the bringing together of environmentalism and
feminism; its the view that there are significant connections between the
domination of women, androcentrism, and the domination of nature, anthropocentrism. These two
dominations are inextricably linked in philosophical discourses, the scientific revolution and the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment. There is a long standing discourse that has created a fundamental dichotomy between subject and object.
The objectification of nature in the thought of Aristotle occurs by locating reality in the objects of the natural world. With
Rene Descartess 17th century discourse on the separation of mind from the body or matter thinking subject from
external object - the justification for domination was solidified. This dualism between an active subject and passive object
suggests literally man who receives, interprets, and organizes the sense data of a passive objective nature. Since
women were often associated and even conflated with earth/nature it was a
simple logical step to both see women as objects and as passive, with men retaining a
higher position in the symbolic order as active subjects. Aristotle did not mince words on this issue. He writes in De
Generatione Animalium the female, as female, is passive and the male, as male, is active,
and the principle of movement comes from him. The father of modern science Francis Bacon (1561-1626) urged his new
man of science to force from nature the secrets she conceals in her womb, to unearth the truth that lies hid in deep
mines and caves and to shape her on the anvil. Nature, as far as Bacon is concerned, must be bound into service
turned into a slave put in constraint and molded to serve mans (not womans) ends. Both nature and women were
nothing more than objects to be undressed and exploited. Two 19th century art works are informative here. A sculpture
located in the entry to the School of Medicine in Paris is entitled, Nature revealing herself to science, reflected the
prevailing view that nature was only too eager to cast off her veil and expose her secrets. In Edouard Manets painting, Le
Dejeuner sur lherbe, a naked women picnics on the grass with two fully clothed men. The overall intention
of ecofeminism is to restore, mend, and empower the hidden, censored and
crushed voices of women and the voices of the distressed and imperiled earth.
Two influential ecofeminists who share similar wishes for a dual liberation although offering differing analyses are
Ynestra King and Starhawk. In 1983 King outlined a number of tenets of ecofeminism. First, she notes that the building of
Eurocentric culture largely in opposition to nature also promotes the subjugation of women since women are often
constructed as being closer to nature. She writes that nature hating and woman hating are particularly related and are
mutually reinforcing. Second, she sees all life on earth as an interconnected web and not a hierarchy. There is a socially
created hierarchy that is then projected on to nature and consequently used to legitimize domination. Third, a healthy
ecosystem containing human and non human dimensions needs to be built on and to maintain diversity. Fourth, our very
survival calls out compellingly for a new or renewed understanding of our relationship to nature. Nothing short of a
radical restructuring of human society based on feminist and ecological principles will suffice. Starhawk is a highly
respected voice in contemporary earth-based spirituality. She is a wiccan and has written extensively on paganism, and
defines the spiritual wing of ecofeminism as based on goddess traditions, indigenous spirituality, and immanence rather
than transcendence. What is necessary, she affirms, is a full understanding and acknowledgement that the earth is alive
and will talk to us, call out to us to act to preserve her life. For Starhawk ecofeminism challenges all relations of
domination. Its goal is not just to change who wields power, but to transform the structure of power itself. It would
seem appropriate to conclude with some lines from another ecofeminist
Canadian poet, Di Brandt. In her 2003 collection, Now You Care, she writes: ....all our night flying
has made us bold, here we come riding quantum-ly through your armoured glass windows on our
multicoloured cyborged wings, still bats, witches, goddesses, still unruly mistresses of our, your,
the worlds pulsing heart.

The pursuit of the future and of optimism leads to the seeking out of all those who
dont fit into the traditional heterosexual reproduction model, rendering them useless
and creating endless violence against them- turns Sedgwick
Edelman, 4 (Lee, philosopher pioneering the radically uncompromising new ethics of queer theory and death drive,
professor in the English Department at Tufts University, November 15, 2004, No Future-Queer Theory and Death Drive,
page: 19, 21)--CRG
Thus, while lesbians and gay men by the thousands work for the right to marry, to
serve in the military, to adopt and raise children of their own, the political right,
refusing to acknowledge these comrades in reproductive futurism, counters their
efforts by inviting us to kneel at the shrine of the sacred Child: the Child who might
witness lewd or inappropriately intimate behavior; the Child who might End information about dangerous lifestyles on
the Internet; the Child who might choose a pro- vocative book from the shelves of the public library; the Child, in
short, who might find an enjoyment that would nullify the figural value, itself
imposed by adult desire, of the Child as unmarked by the adults adulterating
implication in desire itself; the Child, that is, made to image, for the satisfaction of adults, an Imaginary
fullness thats considered to want, and therefore to want for, nothing. As Lauren Berlant argues force- fully at the outset
of 'The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, a nation made for adult citizens has been
replaced by one imagined for fetuses and children?" On every side. our enjoyment of
liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening shadow of a Child whose freedom to
develop undisturbed by encounters, or even by the threat of potential encounters, with an
otherness of which its parents, its church, or the state do not approve,
uncompromised by any possible access to what is painted as alien desire,
retrospectively holds us all in check and determines that political discourse conform
to the logic of a narrative wherein history unfolds as the future envisioned for a
Child who must never grow up. Not for nothing, after all, does the historical construction of the
homosexual as distinctive social type overlap with the appearance of such literary creations as Tiny Tim, David Balfour,
and Peter Pan, who enact, in an imperative most evident today in the uncannily intimate connection between Harry
Potter and Lord Voldemort, a Symbolic resistance to the unmarried men (Scrooge, Uncle Ebenezer, Captain Hook) who
embody, as Voldemorts name makes clear, a wish, a will, or a drive toward death that entails the destruction of the
Child. That Child, immured in an innocence seen as continuously under siege, condenses a fantasy of
vulnerability to the queerness of queer sexualities precisely insofar as that
Child enshrines, in its form as sublimation, the very value for which queerness
regularly lends itself condemned: an insistence on sameness that intends to re-
store an Imaginary past. The Child, that is, marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativty an erotically
charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive
futurism. And so, as the radical right maintains, the battle against queers is a life-and-death
struggle for the Future of a Child whose ruin is pursued by feminists, queers,
and those who support the legal availability of abortion. Indeed, as the Army of God made
clear in the bomb- making guide it produced for the assistance of its militantly pro-life" members, its purpose was
wholly congruent with the logic of reproductive futurism: to disrupt and ultimately destroy Satans power to kill our
children, Gods children. 23
The alternative is to reject the affirmatives positivism and optimism- instead we must
dwell in the negativity of the queer body- only this can avoid the reproductive
futurism proposed by the affirmative
page: 4-5)--CRG
Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we
might, as I argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing it. Not in the hope
of forging thereby some more perfect social order- such a hope, after all, would only reproduce
the con- straining mandate of futurism, just as any such order would equally occasion the
negativity of the queer- but rather to refuse the insistence of hope itself as
affirmation, which is always affirmation of an order whose refusal will register
as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane. And the trump card of affirmation, Always the question: If
not this, what? Always the demand to translate the insistence, the pulsive force, of
negativity into some determinate stance or position whose determination
would thus negate it: always the imperative to immure it in some stable and
positive form. When I argue, then, that we might do well to attempt what is surely impossible -to withdraw our
allegiance, however compulsory, from a reality based on the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism-I do not intend to
propose some good that will thereby be assured. To the contrary I mean to insist that nothing, and certainly not what
we call the good, can ever have any assurance at all in the order of the Symbolic. Abjuring fidelity to a futurism thats
always purchased at our expense, though bound, as Symbolic subjects consigned to figure the Symbolics undoing. to the
necessary contradiction of trying to turn its intelligibility against itself we might rather, figuratively, cast our
vote for none of the above," for the primacy of a constant no in response to the law of the Symbolic,
which would echo that laws foundational act, its self? constituting negation. The structuring optimism of
politics to which the order of meaning commits us, installing as it does the
perpetual hope of reaching meaning through signification, is always, I would argue, a
negation of this primal, constitutive, and negative act. And the various positivitys produced
in its wake by the logic of political hope depend on the mathematical illusion that negated negations might somehow es-
cape, and not redouble, such negativity. My polemic thus stakes its for- tunes on a truly hopeless wager: that taking the
Symbolics negativity to the very letter of the law, that attending to the persistence of something internal to reason that
reason refuses, that turning the force of queerness against all subjects, however queer,
can afford an access to the jouissance that at once defines and negates us. Or better:
can expose the constancy, the inescapability, of such access to jouissance in the social order itself] even if that
order can access its constant access to jouissance only in the process of abjecting
that constancy of access onto the queer.

Framework
2NC
The judge should vote for the team that best deconstructs portrayals of reproductive
futurism in the debate space.
Prefer our interpretation
a) Only the negative accesses good scholarship- ones that are unbiased against the
queer individual on the basis of futurism. Means we have the best I/L to education
b) Queer individuals cannot participate in political discussions currently because of
their alienation from the future- we access the best I/L to fairness
c) The judge has an obligation to view the round through a lens uncolored by
reproductive futurism and should not attempt to fight for the next generation of the
Child
page: 2-3)--CRG
For politics, however radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a
more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works
to affirm a structure, to authenticate a social order, which it then intends to
transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child. That Child remains the perpetual horizon of
every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention. Even proponents of
abortion rights, while promoting the freedom of women to control their own bodies through reproductive choice,
recurrently frame their political struggle, mirroring their anti-abortion foes, as a
fight for our children-for our daughters and our sons, and thus as a light For
the future? What, in that case, would it signify not to be Fighting For the children? How could one take the other
side," when taking any side at all necessarily constrains one to take the side of, by virtue of taking a side within, a
political order that returns to the Child as the image of the future it intends? impossibly, against all reason, my
project stakes its claim to the very space that politics makes unthinkable: the
space outside the framework within which politics as we know it appears and so
outside the conflict of visions that share as their pre- supposition that the body
politic must survive. Indeed, at the heart of my polemical engagement with the cultural text of politics and the
politics of cultural texts politics a simple provocation: that queerness names the side of those not
fighting for the children, the side outside the consensus by which all politics
confirms the absolute value of reproductive Futurism. The ups and downs of political fortune
may measure the social orders pulse, but queerness, by contrast, figures, outside and beyond its political symptoms, the
place of the social orders death drive: a place, to be sure, of abjection expressed in the stigma, sometimes fatal, that
follows from reading that figure literally, and hence a place from which liberal politics strives-and strives quite
reasonably, given its unlimited faith in reason-to disassociate the queer. More radically, though, as I argue here, queerness
attains its ethical value precisely insofar as it accedes to that place, accepting its figural status as resistance to the viability
of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure.
A2: AFF ROTB
We access their ROTB- our reading of the 1NC is a methodological performance, dont
let them gain any ground here. Edelman would indicate that the act of our discussion
of negativity is in-fact our performance as we dwell within the literature. We also
reshape the topic and make it a safer place for women and queer individuals because
only a world that doesnt look towards the future can those individuals be valued.

Link Debate
2NC
Extend the Irving evidence- the entire thesis of ecofem is about looking towards a
better future. The affirmative exists to create a better world post an aff ballot for
women and queer individuals, that hope and optimism for the future alienates the
Queer body who are severed from current politics because of their perceived
biological inability to reproduce.
Dont buy their no link arguments- while they might not have explicitly said in the 1AC
that they are only doing the aff for the future, thats implicit in their impacts. Its
either that or they dont solve any of the affirmative. Prefer our specific link evidence
to the thesis of ecofeminism.

What makes ecofeminism a unique philosophy is its optimism and hope for the future
King, 89 (Ynestra, writer, teacher, activist and mother living in New York City. She is a pioneering ecofeminist, and
author of numerous works on ecofeminism, ecology and nonviolence, Gender/body/knowledge: Feminist
Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, Healing the Wounds: Feminism, Ecology, Nature/Culture Dualism, pg 130,
edited by Alison M. Jaggar, Susan Bordo, google books,
http://books.google.com/books?id=LgFaBY0Txd4C&pg=PA130&lpg=PA130&dq=%22ecofeminism%22+%22pessimism
%22&source=bl&ots=mYzX6MjpA1&sig=CanNsJiuCrfnf9kQhTr5C5dbkko&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uh60U9f0NOXMsQTN8oD
wCg&ved=0CDoQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=%22ecofeminism%22%20%22pessimism%22&f=false)--CRG
The task of an ecological feminism is the organic forging of a genuinely
antidualistic, or dialectical, theory and praxis. No previous feminism can address this problem
adequately from within the framework of their theory and politics, hence the necessity of eoofeminism.
Rather than succumb to nihilism, pessimism, and an end to reason and history, we seek to
enter into history, to habilitate a genuinely ethical thinking-where one uses mind
and history to reason from the is to the ought and to reconcile humanity
with nature, within and without. This is the starting point for
Queer ecofeminism is a philosophy based upon optimism and a hope to change the
world to a less patriarchal and queer affirming place- this rejects dwelling in the
negative like Edelman recommends
Daly, 3 (Lois K, Ph.D. under James Gustafson at Chicago Divinity School, studying the theologies of Karl Barth and
Albert Schweitzer, August 15th 2003, Ecofeminism, Reverence for Life, and Feminist Theological Ethics, Religion
Online, http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2317)--CRG
Fourth, Schweitzers ethic is life-affirming. This includes not only his optimism about the
possibilities for constructive action but also his attention to this world. Schweitzers
ethic does not support any form of nihilistic rejection of this world or any sort of religious
otherworldliness. Individuals, for Schweitzer, come into contact with the divine not by withdrawing from others but by
actively serving them in this world. This ethical mysticism lies at the heart of Schweitzers position. It supports the
sort of world-affirming and life-affirming ethic insisted upon by feminists such as
Beverly Harrison, Isabel Carter Heyward, and Sallie McFague. To conclude: Ecofeminist concerns and
Schweitzers reverence for life provide both challenges and resources for feminist
theological ethics Eco-feminists help us to see the connections between forms of
oppression maintained by patriarchy at the level of dualistic assumptions. At the
same time they challenge us not to lose sight of those connections when we move to the specifically theological dualism of
human/divine. Schweitzers ethic of reverence for life provides an example of an ethic that
takes very seriously a non-dualistic description of the relationships between human
beings and the world and between human beings and God. He challenges us to add to this the analysis of the dualistic
structures that characterize human social relationships.

Even leftist politics like the affirmative have significant undertones of reproductive
futurism and represent a hope for the future for when all is reproductively productive
page: 13-14)--CRG
The consequences of such an identification both of and with the Child as the
preeminent emblem of the motivating end, though one endlessly postponed, of every
political vision as a vision futurity must weigh on any delineation of a queer
oppositional politics. For the only queerness that queer sexualities could ever
hope to signify would spring from their determined opposition to this
underlying structure of the political-their opposition, that is, to the governing fantasy of achieving Symbolic
closure through the marriage of identity to futurity in order to realize the social subject. Conservatives acknowledge this
radical potential, which is also to say, this radical threat, of queerness more fully than liberals, for conservatism
preemptively imagines the wholesale rupturing of the social fabric, whereas liberalism conservatively clings to a faith in
its limitless elasticity. 'l` he discourse of the right thus tends coward a greater awareness of and insistence on, the literal-
ization of the figural logics that various social subjects are made to inhabit and enact, the logics that, from a rational
viewpoint, reduce individual identity to stereotypical generality, while the discourse of the left tends to understand better
the Symbolics capacity to accommodate change by displacing those logics onto history as the inevitable unfolding of
narrative sequence. The right, that is, better sees the inherently conflictual aspect of identities, the constant
danger they face in alterity, the psychic anxiety with which they are lived; but
the left better recognizes historys persistent rewriting of those identities, finding
hope in the fact that identitys borders are never fully fixed. The left in this is always right
from the vantage point of reason, but left in the shade by its reason is the darkness inseparable from its light: the
defensive structure of the ego, the rigidity of identity as experienced by the
subject, and the fixity of the Imaginary relation through which we reproduce
ourselves. This conservatism of the ego compels the subject, whether liberal or conservative politically, to endorse as
the meaning of politics itself the reproductive futurism that perpetuates as reality a fantasy frame
intended to secure the survival of the social in the Imaginary form of the Child.

A2: Not OUR optimism
Um...Yes it is. This card isnt specific to any of Edelmans theories or the way that he
defines optimism. Edelman doesnt critique the premature nature of an action, but
what it looks towards. In this case, its pretty clear: a future free from patriarchy and
homophobia. A Door to Ocean is a utopic vision of a world free from the pains of the
planet Patriarch. Id say thats optimism.

Impacts
Overview
Politics and societal decisions are made based upon the conception that we should
fight for a future Child, the affirmative is proof of this trend. Society views queer
bodies as useless or inherently opposed to the future and to future generations
because they have traditionally not biologically reproduced. That creates violence
against the Queer subject as they are seen as anti-future and anti-hopethats the 1
st

piece of Edelman evidence from the 1NCand results in omnicide as society and
political reforms attempt to purge the imperfect. ,
The impact is hatred of those who cannot create or fight for a future generation- this
inherently impacts the queer body because only heterosexual relations are valued .
Turns their aff.
page: 11-13)--CRG
So. for example, when P. D. James, in his novel he Children of Men, imagines a future in which the
human race has suffered a seemingly absolute loss of the capacity to reproduce,
her narrator, Theodore Faron, not only attributes this reversal of biological fortune to the
putative crisis of sexual values in late twentieth-century democracies-
Pornography and sexual violence on film, on television, in books, in life had
increased and became more explicit but less and less in the West we made love
and bred children," he declares-but also gives voice to the ideological truism that governs
our investment in the Child as the obligatory token of futurity Without the hope
of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being
dead yet live, he later observes, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than
pathetic and crumbling defenses shored up against our ruins.1 While this allusion to Eliots "The Waste Land may
recall another of its well-known lines, one For which we apparently have Eliots wife, Vivian, to thank-What you get
married for if you dont want children?"-it also brings out the function of the child as the prop of the secular theology on
which our social reality rests: the secular theology that shapes at once the meaning of our
collective narratives and our collective narratives of meaning. Charged, after all, with the
task of assuring that we being dead yet live, the Child, as if by nature (more precisely, as the promise of a natural
transcendence of the limits of nature itself), exudes the very pathos from which the narrator of The Children of Men re-
coils when he comes upon it in non-reproductive pleasures of the mind and senses." For the pathetic quality he
protectively locates in non- generative sexual enjoyment-enjoyment that he views in the absence of futurity as empty,
substitutive, pathological-exposes the fetishistic figurations of the Child that the narrator pits against it as legible in terms
identical to those for which enjoyment without hope of posterity" is peremptorily dismissed:
legible, that is, as nothing more than pathetic and crumbling defenses shored up against our ruins. How better to
characterize the narrative project of'I11e Children of Men itself, which ends, as anyone not born yesterday surely expects
from the start, with the renewal of our barren and dying race through the miracle of birth? After all, as Walter Wangerin
Jr., reviewing the book for the New York Times, approvingly noted in a sentence delicately poised between description
and performance of the noveIs pro-procreative ideology: If there is a baby, there is a future, there
is redemption. 13 HQ however, there is no baby and, in consequence, no future,
then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments
understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible
For the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life
itself Given that the author of The Children of Men, like the parents of Mankinds children, succumbs so completely to
the narcissism-all pervasive, self-congratulatory, and strategically misrecognized- that animates pronatalism why should
we be the least bit surprised when her narrator, facing his futureless future, laments, with what we must call a straight
face, that sex totally divorced from procreation has become almost meaninglessly
acrobatic?5 Which is, of course, to say no more than that sexual practices continue to
allegorize the vicissitudes of meaning so long as the specifically heterosexual
alibi of reproductive necessity obscures the drive beyond meaning driving the
machinery of sexual meaningless: so long, that is, as the biological fact of hetero-
sexual procreation bestows the imprimatur of meaning-production on
heterogenital relations. For the Child, whose mere possibility is enough to spirit away the naked truth of
heterosexual sex- impregnating heterosexuality, as it were, with the future of signification by conferring upon it the
cultural burden of signifying futurity- figures our identification with an always about-to-be-realized identity. It thus
denies the constant threat to the social order of meaning inherent in the structure of Symbolic desire that commits us to
pursuing fulfillment by way of a meaning unable, as meaning, either to fulfill us or, in turn, to be fulfilled because unable
to close the gap in identity, the division incised by the signifier, that "meaning," despite itself] means.

Freedom/VTL !
The logic of reproductive futurism prevents individuals of our society from enjoying
freedom for the concern of the future Child
page: 11)--CRG
In its coercive universalization, however, the image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived
experiences of any historical children, serves to regulate political discourse-to prescribe what
will count as political discourse--by compelling such discourse to accede in
advance to the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are never
per mitted to acknowledge or address. Prom Delacroixs iconic image of Liberty leading us into a
brave new world of revolutionary possibility- her bare breast making each spectator the unweaned Child to whom its
held out while the boy to her left, reproducing her posture, affirms the absolute logic of reproduction itself- to the
revolutionary waif in the logo that miniaturizes the politics of Les Mis [summed up in its anthem to futurism, the
inspirational One Day More), we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a
fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of
the Child. That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to
claim full rights to its future share in the nations good, though always at the cost
of limiting the rights real citizens are allowed. For the social order exists to preserve for this
universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly valued than the
actuality of Freedom itself; which might, after all, put at risk the Child to whom such a
freedom falls due. Hence, whatever refuses this mandate by which our political
institutions compel the collective reproduction of the Child must appear as a
threat not only to the organization of a given social order but also, and far more
ominously, to social order as such, insofar as it threatens the logic of futurism on
which meaning always depends.

Solves
We solve ecofeminism- the negative disrupts any social order through negativity
page: 6-7)--CRG
For by figuring a refusal of the coercive belief' in the paramount value of futurity,
while refusing as well any backdoor hope for dialectical access to meaning, the queer
dispossesses the social order of the ground on which it rests: a faith in the
consistent reality of the social-and by extension. of the social subject; a faith that
politics, whether of the left or of the right, implicitly affirms. Divesting such politics of its thematic
trappings, bracketing the particularity of its various proposals for social
organization, the queer insists that politics is always a politics of the signifier, or even of
what Lacan will often refer to as the letter. It serves to shore up a reality always unmoored by signification and lacking
any guarantee. To say as much is not, of course, to deny the experiential violence that frequently troubles social reality or
the apparent consistency with which it bears-and thereby bears down on-us all. It is, rather, to suggest that
queerness exposes the obliquity of our relation to what we experience in and as
social reality, alerting us to the fantasies structurally necessary in order to sustain it and engaging those fantasies
through the figural logics, the linguistic structures, that shape them. If it aims effectively to intervene in
the reproduction of such a reality-an intervention that may well take the form of
figuring that realitys abortion- then queer theory must always insist on its
connection to the vicissitudes of the sign, to the tension between the signifiers
collapse into the letters cadaverous materiality and its participation in a system of reference
wherein it generates meaning itself. As a particular story, in other words, of why storytelling fails, one that takes both the
value and the burden of that failure upon itself queer theory, as I construe it, marks the other side of politics: the side
where narrative realization and derealization overlap, where the energies of vitalization ceaselessly turn against
themselves; the "side" outside all political sides, committed as they are, on every side, to Futurism's unquestioned good.
The rest of this hook attempts to explain the implications of this assertion, but first,
let me sketch some connections between politics and the politics of the sign by
establishing the psychoanalytic context within which my argument takes shape.

Alternative
Overview
The alternative solves- by dwelling in the negative we are able to stand in strict
opposition to
The notion of reproductive futurism must be ruptured by the alternative of negativity
and a rejection of optimism- the aff cannot solve
page: 16-17)--CRG
No more than the right will the left, therefore, identify itself with abortion; instead, as the billboard noted with scorn, it
aligns itself with choice." Who would, after all, come out _for abortion or stand against reproduction, against Futurity,
and so against life? Who would destroy the Child and with it the vitalizing fantasy of bridging, in time, the gap of
signification (a fantasy that distracts us from the violence of the drives while permitting us to enact them)? The right once
again knows the answer, knows that the true oppositional politics implicit in the practice of
queer sexualities lies not in the liberal discourse and patient negotiation of
tolerances and rights, important as these undoubtedly are to all of us still denied
them, but in the capacity of queer sexualities to figure the radical dissolution
of the contract, in every sense social and Symbolic, on which the Future as putative assurance
against the jouissance of the Real depends. With this in mind, we should listen to, and
even perhaps be instructed by, the readings of queer sexualities produced by the
forces of re- action. However much we might wish, for example, to reverse the values presupposed in the
following statement by Donald Wildmon, founder and head of the homophobic American Family Association. We might
do well to consider it less as an instance of hyperbolic rant and more as a reminder of the disorientation that queer
sexualities should entail: Acceptance or indifference to the homosexual movement will result in society's destruction by
allowing civil order to be redefined and by plummeting ourselves, our children and grandchildren into an age of
godlessness. Indeed, the very foundation of Western Civilization is at stake. 1 Before the self-righteous bromides of
liberal pluralism spill from our lips, before we supply once more the assurance that ours is another kind of love but a
love like his nonetheless, before we piously invoke the litany of our glorious contributions to the civilizations of East and
West alike, dare we pause For a moment to acknowledge that Mr. Wildmon might be right- or. more important, that he
ought to be right: that queerness should and must redefine such notions as civil
order through a rupturing of our foundational faith in the reproduction of
futurity?

Queerness is not an identity and it is not a desire to die (not death drive) but it is the
process of disturbing current civil society and resisting the future Child
page: 17-18)--CRG To figure the undoing of civil society, the death drive of the
dominant order, is neither to be not to become that drive; such being is not to the
point. Rather, acceding to that figural position means recognizing and refusing the
consequences of grounding reality in denial of the drive. As the death drive dissolves those
concealments of identity that permit us to know and survive as ourselves, so the queer must insist on
disturbing, on queering, social organization as such-on disturbing, therefore, and on
queering ourselves and our investment in such organization. For queerness can
never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one. And so, when I argue, as I aim to do here,
that the burden of queerness is to be located less in the assertion of an
oppositional political identity than in opposition to politics as the governing
Fantasy of realizing, in an always indefinite future, Imaginary identities foreclosed by our constitutive
subjective to the signifier, I am proposing no platform or position from which queer
sexuality or any queer subject might finally and truly become itself as if it could
somehow manage thereby to achieve an essential queerness. I am suggesting instead that
the efficacy of queerness, its real strategic value, lies in its resistance to a Symbolic
reality that only ever invests us as subjects insofar as we invest ourselves in it,
clinging to its governing Fictions, its persistent sublimations, as reality itself. It is only, after all, to its figures of meaning,
which we take as the literal truth, that we owe our existence as subjects and the social relations within which we live-
relations we may well be willing, therefore, to give up our lives to maintain.

A2: Alt means no hope for Queers/bad for queers
The affirmatives assertions about Edelmans negativity are wrong- While we should
dwell in the negativity, that dwelling allows queer individuals to find strength in
politics to dismantle heteronormative structures within society
page: 22)--CRG
Without ceasing to refute the lies that pervade these familiar rightwing
diatribes, do we also have the courage to acknowledge, and even to embrace,
their correlative truths? Are we willing to be sufficiently oppositional to the
structural logic of opposition-oppositional, that is, to the logic by which politics
reproduces our social reality-to accept that the figural burden of queerness, the
burden that queerness is phobically produced precisely to represent, is that of the force that shatters the fantasy of
Imaginary unity, the force that insists on the void (replete, paradoxically, with jouissance} always already lodged within,
though barred from, symbolization: the gap or wound of the Real that inhabits
the Symbolics very core? Not that we are, or ever could be, outside the Symbolic ourselves; but we
can, nonetheless, make the choice to accede to our cultural production as figures-
within the dominant logic of narrative, within Symbolic reality- for the
dismantling of such a logic and thus for the death drive it harbors within.

A2: Negativity/death drive fails
Only by dwelling in negativity can we find a new form of queer politics- the left-wing
politics of the affirmative leads to queer violence
page: 27-28)--CRG
By denying our identification with the negativity of this drive, and hence our dis-
identification from the promise of futurity, those of us in- habiting the place of the queer may
be able to cast off that queerness and enter the properly political sphere, but only by
shifting the figural burden of queerness to someone else. The structural position of queerness, after all,
and the need to fill it remain. By choosing to accept that position, however, by
assuming the truth of our queer capacity to figure the undoing of the Symbolic,
and of the Symbolic subject as well, we might undertake the impossible project of imagining an
oppositional political stance exempt from the imperative to reproduce the
politics of signification [the politics aimed at closing the gap opened up by the signifier itself }, which can only
return us, by way of the Child, to the politics of reproduction. For the liberal's View of society, which seems to
accord the queer a place, endorses no more than the conservative rights the queerness
of resistance to futurism and thus the queerness of the queer. While the right
wing imagines the elimination of queers (or of the need to confront their existence), the left
would eliminate queerness by shining the cool light of reason upon it, hoping thereby
to expose it as merely a mode of sexual expression free of the all-pervasive coloring, the determining fantasy formation,
by means of which it can seem to portend, and not for the right alone, the undoing of the social order and its cynosure,
the Child. Queerness thus comes to mean nothing for both: for the rightwing the
nothingness always at war with the positivity of civil society; for the left, nothing
more than a sexual practice in need of demystification.
Dwelling within negativity and accepting the death drive is the only way to resist the
Symbolic
page: 26-27)--CRG
It may seem, from within this structure, that the Symbolic can only win; but that would
ignore the correlative fact that it also can only lose. For the division on which the subject rests
can never be spirited away and the signifying order will always necessitate the production of some figural repository for
the excess that precludes its ultimate realization of the One. In a political field whose limit and
horizon is reproductive futurism, queerness embodies this death drive, this
intransigent jouissance, by figuring sexualitys implication in the senseless
pulsions of that drive. De-idealizing the metaphorics of meaning on which
heteroreproduction takes its stand, queerness exposes sexualitys inevitable
coloration by the drive: its insistence on repetition, its stubborn denial of teleology, its resistance
to determinations of meaning (except insofar as it means this refusal to admit such determinations of meaning), and,
above all, its rejection of spiritualization through marriage to reproductive futurism.
Queerness as name may well reinforce the Symbolic order of naming, but it
names what resists, as signifier, absorption into the Imaginary identity of the name.
Empty, excessive, and irreducible, it designates the letter, the formal element, the lifeless machinery responsible for
animating the spirit offuturity. And as such, as a name for the death drive that always informs
the Symbolic order, it also names the jouissance forbidden by, but permeating,
the Symbolic order itself.

Aff cant solve
Affirmative cant solve their Sedgwick impact as they reproduce the same
heteronormative thought processes that they criticize
page: 15-16)--CRG
For, strange as it is that a gay man should say this, when I first encountered that billboard in Cambridge I read it as
addressed to me. The sign, after all, might as well have pronounced, and with the same absolute and invisible authority
that testifies to the successfully accomplished work of ideological naturalization, the biblical mandate Be fruitful
and multiply. Like an anamorphic distortion that only when viewed from the
proper angle assumes a recognizable form, the slogan acquired, through the obliquity of my
subjective relation to it, a logic that illuminated the common stake in the militant rights
opposition to abortion and to the practice of queer sexualities-a common stake all
too well understood [as the literalization of a figural identity] by radical groups
like the Army of God, which claimed credit for the Atlanta terrorist bombings in 1997 of an abortion clinic and a nightclub
frequented by lesbians and gay men. The Cambridge billboard thus seemed to announce what liberalism prefers to
occluded that the governing compulsion, the singular imperative, that affords us no
meaningful choice is the compulsion to embrace our Own futurity in the
privileged form of the Child, to imagine each moment as pregnant with the Child
of our Imaginary identifications, as pregnant, that is, with a meaning whose
presence would till up the hole in the Symbolic-the hole that marks both the
place of the Real and the internal division of distance by which we are constituted as subjects
and destined to pursue the phantom of meaning through the signifiers metonymic slide.

Permutation
A2: Perm do both
1. Perm is severance or intrinsic- the alternative is to reject optimism and instead
dwell in negativity. The affirmatives queer ecofeminism is inherently tied to
optimism, that was the link debate. Thats a voting issue for neg ground.
2. The perm is a voting issue, an attempt to control and coopt the queer movement
and body
3. Perm cannot solve- the alternative is absolute and the truth of queerness cannot
be combined with the optimism of the affirmative
page: 5-6)--CRG
In contrast to what Theodor Adorno describes as the grim ness with which a man clings to himself as to the immediately
sure and substantial, the queerness of which I speak would deliberately sever us from
ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves and hence of knowing
our good. Such queerness proposes, in place of the good, something! want to call "better," though it
promises, in more than one sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing. I connect this something better with
Lacans characterization of what he calls truth, where truth does not assure happiness, or even,
as Lacan makes clear, the good! Instead, it names only the insistent particularity of the subject, impossible Fully to
articulate and tend[ing] toward the real. Lacan, therefore, can write of this truth: The quality that best
characterizes it is that of being the true Wunsth, which was at the origin of an aberrant or atypical
behavior. We encounter this Wunsch with its particular, irreducible character as a
modification that presupposes no other form of normalization than that of an
experience of pleasure or of pain, but of a final experience from whence it springs and is subsequently
preserved in the depths of the subject in an irreducible form. The Wunsth does not have the character
of a universal law but, on the contrary, of the most particular of laws -even if it is universal that
this particularity is to be found in every human being?
4. If this turns into a reject mutually exclusive parts perm- dont let them make it and
give the 1AR and 2AR a lot of leeway.
A2: Perm plan + reject RF
1. The perm is severance. Their affirmative is made of motives for an optimistic future,
they are severing those representations. Thats a voter for neg ground.
2. Double bind- they either dont solve their impacts because theres no actual
progress in the future as a result of the plan or its severance and still optimistic.
A2s
A2: Gay people have kids too
Yes, queer individuals have literal children- however, within the queer political place,
reproductive futurism has inscribed itself within our society and still impacts queer
individuals who desire a future
page: 17)--CRG
It is true that the ranks of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and transgendered
parents grow larger every day, and that nothing intrinsic to the constitution of
those identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, or queer
preclisposes them to resist the appeal of futurity, to refuse the temptation to
reproduce, or to place themselves outside or against the acculturating logic of the
Symbolic. Neither, indeed, is there any ground we could stand on outside that logic. In urging an alternative to the
party line, which every party endorses, in taking a side outside the logic of reproductive futurism and
arguing that queers might embrace their figural association with its end, I am not
for a moment assuming that queers- by which I mean all so stigmatized for
Failing to comply with heteronormative mandates-are not themselves also
psychically invested in preserving the familiar familial narratively of re-
productive Futurism, But politics, construed as oppositional or not, never rests
on essential identities. It centers, instead, on the figurality that is always essential to identity, and thus
on the figural relations in which social identities are always inscribed.
Essentialism Critique
Notes
The Link is essentialism/exclusion (how ecofeminism has historically only focused on the white-middle class woman).
This method doesnt account for the woman of color. The alternative/link evidence from Crenshaw is especially good. If
anything, its a good solvency press against the affirmative.
1NC
Eco-feminist critiques only function to serve white, middle class women
Thompson, 2006 (Charis Thompson, Professor of Gender and Womens Studies, the Associate Director of the
Science, Technology, and Society Center at UC Berkeley, read Philosophy, Psychology, Physiology at Oxford, received her
Ph.D. from the Science Studies program at UC San Diego, previously taught at Science and Technology Studies
Department at Cornell University, at U of I Urbana, and at the History of Science Department at Harvard University,
Back to Nature? Resurrecting Ecofeminism after Poststructuralist and Third-Wave Feminisms, pp. 507, September 2006,
PDF from JSTOR, Accessed: 6/25/14, RH)
Despite the power of ecofeminism to contribute to debate about the rise and consequences of science, capitalism, and
warfare, and despite its ability to unite different strands of feminism in the United States, by the early to mid 1990s
ecofeminism had largely been relegated to a marginal position in feminist theory in the academy. The reasons for this
were several, and in the end this marginalization was perhaps overdetermined. Ecofem- inism in the academy was a
victim of its own success in crossing the academic/lay boundary; cosmopolitan academics distanced themselves from
the touchy-feely, religious, and reproductive celebratory strands; jokes about placenta-eating covens of ex-hippies
became (and remain) common. Third-wave feminisms contained explicit and implicit
critiques of mind-sets that put women in a single category, calling instead for
intersectional analyses thatfar from celebrating the creative and caring unity
of all womenshowed, for example, how much reproductive and caring labor is
outsourced from privileged men and women to women of color, immigrants,
and low-income women.6 Ecofeminism, because of its predominantly white,
middle-class ethos and uptake, was seen as irretrievably marred by
essentialism about women and by regional-, class-, and ethnocentrism. Feminist
anti- militarism, based symbolically on the nuclear arms race, lost steam at the end of the Cold War. Furthermore,
ecofeminisms central structural thesis ran counter to the particular forms in which hugely influential French
poststructuralist thought was making its way across the Atlantic. Ecofeminisms marginalization had multiple causes,
then, and this led to what was, in my opinion, a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Impact is violent exclusion - intersectional approaches are important. Only our
alternative to reject the 1ACs starting point of ecofeminism and take an intersectional
approach can solve this.
Crenshaw, 2004 (Kimberle Crenshaw, Professor of Law at the University of California Los Angeles, BA Cornell
University, JD from Harvard Law school, and LLM from University of Wisconsin Intersectionality of Race and Gender,
http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publishing/perspectives_magazine/women_perspectives_Spring2004
CrenshawPSP.authcheckdam.pdf, Accessed: 6/28/14, RH)
Perspectives: Tell me about the origins of your concept of intersectionality. Crenshaw: It
grew out of trying to conceptualize the way the law responded to issues where
both race and gender discrimination were involved. What happened was like an accident, a
collision. Intersectionality simply came from the idea that if youre standing in the
path of multiple forms of exclusion, you are likely to get hit by both. These
women are injured, but when the race ambulance and the gender ambulance
arrive at the scene, they see these women of color lying in the intersection and
they say, Well, we cant figure out if this was just race or just sex discrimination.
And unless they can show us which one it was, we cant help them. Perspectives:
And this is how the law treats the problem? Crenshaw: It seemed to me to capture the initial
reluctance of courts to credit the claims of women of color when they were
seeking remedies for race and gender discrimination. If the injuries were
simultaneously produced, the law, it seemed, was confounded. Perspectives: Have there
been times when you were personally discriminated against? Crenshaw: If have a story I tell a lot. A member of our
study group at Harvard was the first African- American member of a previously exclusive white club. He invited the rest
of the groupme and another African-American manto visit him at this club. When we knocked on the
door, he opened it, stepped outside, and shut it quickly. He said that he was
embarrassed because he had forgotten to tell us something about entering the
building. My male friend immediately bristled, saying that if black people
couldnt go through the front door, we werent coming in at all. But our friend
said, No, no, no, thats not itbut women have to go through the back door.
And my friend was totally okay with that. Perspectives: How did that affect you? Crenshaw: I understood that we can
all stand together as long as we think that we are all equally affected by a particular discrimination, but the moment
where a different barrier affects a subset of us, our solidarity often falls apart. I began to look at all the other ways that not
only the race and civil rights agenda but the gender agenda are sometimes uninformed by and inattentive to the ways
that subgroups experience discrimination. There are institutional elisions as well. For example, at Harvard, when we
were struggling to get the law school to interview and perhaps hire women and
people of color, the school responded with two committees. One was a gender
committee that studied women candidates; the other was a committee that
studied candidates of color. Not too surprisingly, women of color seemed to fall
through the cracks. Perspectives: Would you call that discrimination? Crenshaw: Traditional thinking might
say, Oh, well, they are intentionally discriminating against women of color. But the reality was that
nobody really thought about women of color. In thinking about discrimination against women
and people of color, women of color are frequently lost. Some of the very early cases where African-American women
challenged employment policies of major industries were quite eye-opening because they showed that gender- and race-
segregated industries had jobs that are deemed appropriate for blacks and jobs that are appropriate for women, but
virtually none available for blacks who were women, or women who were black. Perspectives: So where African-
American men were on the line in the factory, there were no jobs for women because of gender discrimination, and where
women were placed in the secretarial pool or front office, only white women were seen as appropriate as secretaries or
personal assistants. Crenshaw: Exactly. So African-American women said, Hey, we are being discriminated against on
the basis of both race and gender. They wanted to argue compound discrimination. Initially, though, it confounded the
court. In DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, where black womens claims of race and gender discrimination in hiring were
rejected, the court thought that if it gave these women leave to make this claim, they were going to be giving them a super
remedy, something more than everybody else receives.
LINK
2NC Mechanism Link
Their decision to use science fiction is a link-the science fiction genre remains
exclusionary
Walter, 5/30
(Damien Walter, writer of fiction, stories have appeared on BBC radio, graduated Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy
workshop at UC San Diego in 2008, Science fictions real-life war in the worlds, May 30, 2014,
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/may/30/science-fiction-real-life-war-worlds, Accessed: 7/1/14,
RH)
As Samuel Delany noted, at a time when he numbered among the very few black
writers in the field, prejudice within science fiction would "likely remain a
slight force until, say, black writers start to number 13, 15, 20% of the total." Author NK Jemisin
employed Delany's quote in her own Guest of Honour speech at WisCon. Her
incendiary argument to fight against bigotry comes at a the time when she and
other writers of colour including Aliette de Bodard, Sofia Samatar and Nalo Hopkinson command a
higher profile in the genre than ever before. And the resistance Delany predicted has come true. It
is no coincidence that, just as it outgrows its limiting cultural biases, science
fiction should also face protests from some members of the predominantly
white male audience who believed it to be their rightful domain. What the
conservative authors protesting the Hugo awards perceive as a liberal clique is simply science fiction outgrowing them,
and their narrow conception of the genre's worth. Of course, if those authors really wanted to de-
politicise science fiction, they could easily help to do so by admitting the
genre's historic bias and applauding its growth. And by doing everything within their
power to welcome new authors from diverse backgrounds, instead of agitating
for protest votes to push them out. The real prize for science fiction is not diversity for diversity's sake
(although I happen to believe that would be prize enough). We live in a world of seven billion human beings, whose
culture has not been reflected or rewarded in 'the mainstream'. Science fiction from cult novels that reach a few
thousand readers, to blockbuster movies and video games that dominate contemporary culture has the potential to talk
across every remaining boundary in our modern world. That makes it, in my opinion, potentially the most important
cultural form of the 21st century. To claim that potential, it cannot afford to give way to the petulant protests of boys who
do not like to share their toys.
2NC EcoFem Links
The view of ecofeminism fails to address the differences between women of color and
white women-the history of ecofeminism has mainly been focused on white, middle
class women
Ruether, 1997
(Rosemary Radford Ruether, holds a BA in Philosophy from Scripps college, MA in Ancient History, Ph.D. in Classics and
Patristics from Claremont Graduate School, Visiting Professor of Feminist Theology at Claremont School of Theology and
Claremont Graduate University, was professor at Howard University in DC, formerly Carpenter Professor of Feminist
Theology at Pacific School of Religion and Graduate Theological Union, wrote 36 books and over 600 articles,
ECOFEMINISM: FIRST AND THIRD WORLD WOMEN, January of 1997, Accessed: 6/27/14, RH)
It is not enough simply to talk of domination of women as if women were a
homogeneous group. We have to look at the total class structure of the society
fused with racial hierarchy and see how gender hierarchy falls within race-
class hierarchy. This means that women within the ruling class have vastly different
privileges and comforts from women in the lowest class, even though both may be defined
in a general sense as mothers, child raisers, and sex-objects. It also means that there are different
ideologies about upper class and lower class women, exacerbated when racial
ideologies are also present. Thus in American society, the images of thewhite woman as
sheltered leisure class Lady, and the Black woman as strong Mammy or sexually
available tart, shaped by slavery, still inform cultural patterns, despite the much
greater complexity of actual class-race patterns affecting real African American
and Euro-American women today.
Not all women are the same-many women face intersectional oppression from race,
class, sexuality, and gender
Thompson, 2006
(Charis Thompson, Professor of Gender and Womens Studies, the Associate Director of the Science, Technology, and
Society Center at UC Berkeley, read Philosophy, Psychology, Physiology at Oxford, received her Ph.D. from the Science
Studies program at UC San Diego, previously taught at Science and Technology Studies Department at Cornell
University, at U of I Urbana, and at the History of Science Department at Harvard University, Back to Nature?
Resurrecting Ecofeminism after Poststructuralist and Third-Wave Feminisms, September 2006, PDF from JSTOR,
Accessed: 6/25/14, RH)
Of the anti-essentialism arguments, the ones that are most difficult even for Merchants
argument to avoid are those that question whether an ecological sensibility is (always)
a feminist goal. Whose nature is it, anyway? As anti-essentialists rightly insist,
not all women are the same, and many women are part of groups that oppress
other women in intersectional hierarchies of class and nation that cross-cut
the question of ecology. Furthermore, the health risks and other costs of environmental degradation are
disproportionately borne by those with control of the fewest resources, as the scholarship on environmental racism has so
compellingly illustrated. So, no one set of values can be assumed to benefit all women
(equally). In addition, the prerogatives of the preservation of nature are often
invoked in deeply sexist, racist, and transnationally unjust ways. Particular
visions of nature, especially those of a pristine nature, have been used implicitly and
explicitly in legislation against immigrants and in targeting the childbearing
patterns and the survival and labor exigencies of the worlds poor.15 A nature (not
to mention a work and domestic schedule) that allows the stereotypical environmentalist
something like the well-off, au nature or survival-equipped, white male deep ecologist type
familiar from a whole tra- dition of U.S. nature writingto encounter wilderness with little or no
other human company is paid for not just by the kinship web that takes care of
his labor of reproduction offstage, but also by the transnational and domestic
division of labor that underwrites his economic freedom and the protection of his
wilderness. These arguments, if sometimes overstated, make it clear that not all
ecological visions are feminist ones and that feminist ones cannot be assumed
to apply to all women equally.
2NC Turns Case
K turns the case-they create more exclusion through excluding voices of women of
color. Well win a risk of the link means that even if they were a step in the right
direction by ATTEMPTING to discuss oppression faced in the status quo, their method
backfired because their starting point of ecofeminism historically has precluded
discussions of race and class.
2NC Impact
The impact is exclusion of women of color-Women of color can never fairly be
represented. Men of color and white women will never understand what is to be a
women of color, because two the groups are only affected by one part. Failure to
recognize one part will mean the resistance strategies will reinforce the subordination
of the other group, no solvency.
Crenshaw, 1991 (Kimberle Crenshaw, Professor of Law at the University of California Los Angeles, BA Cornell
University, JD from Harvard Law school, and LLM from University of Wisconsin, Mapping the Margins:
Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color, 1991,
http://socialdifference.columbia.edu/files/socialdiff/projects/Article__Mapping_the_Margins_by_Kimblere_Crenshaw.
pdf, Accessed 7/1/14, RH)
The concept of political intersectionality highlights the fact that women of color
are situated within at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue
conflicting political agendas. The need to split one's political energies between two sometimes opposing
groups is a dimension of intersectional dis- empowerment that men of color and white women seldom confront.
Indeed, their specific raced and gendered experiences, although intersectional,
often define as well as confine the interests of the entire group. For example, ra-
cism as experienced by people of color who are of a particular gender- male-
tends to determine the parameters of antiracist strategies, just as sexism as
experienced by women who are of a particular race-white-tends to ground the
women's movement. The problem is not simply that both discourses fail
women of color by not acknowledging the "additional" issue of race or of
patriarchy but that the discourses are often inadequate even to the discrete tasks
of articulating the full dimensions of racism and sexism. Be- cause women of
color experience racism in ways not always the same as those experienced by
men of color and sexism in ways not always parallel to experiences of white
women, antiracism and feminism are limited, even on their own terms. Among the most troubling
political consequences of the failure of antiracist and feminist discourses to
address the intersections of race and gender is the fact that, to the extent they can forward
the interest of "people of color" and "women," respectively, one analysis often implicitly denies the validity of the other.
The failure of feminism to interrogate race means that the resistance strategies
of feminism will often replicate and reinforce the subordination of people of
color, and the failure of antiracism to interrogate patriarchy means that
antiracism will frequently reproduce the subordination of women. These mutual
elisions present a particularly difficult political dilemma for women of color. Adopting either analysis constitutes a denial
of a fundamental dimension of our subordination and precludes the development of a political discourse that more fully
empowers women of color.
2NC Alt
Extend the Crenshaw evidence- Intersectional approach is necessary the 1AC cannot
solve
Womens Studies, 2012 (Myths & Misconceptions about Womens Studies, Fall 2012, blog about feminism,
gender, and womens and gender studies, Intersectionality According to Crenshaw, November 5, 2012,
http://womensstudiesf12.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/intersectionality-according-to-crenshaw, AccessedL 6/29/14,
RH)
Kimberle Crenshaw describes interesectionality as the combination of identities as it applies to many women of color in
American society. The problem that she says arises for these women is the idea that its
hard to assimilate with rights movements due to the fact that they identify as a
certain minority race as well as an oppressed gender. On an even deeper level, no matter which
identity they chose to rally behind, being recognized as as woman is represented majorly by whites, while being
recognized as a particular race is represented by men. Racism as experienced by people of color
who are of a particular gendermaletends to determine the parameters of
antiracist strategies, just as sexism experienced by women who are of a particular
racewhitetends to ground the womens movement. (Crenshaw 363). In such cases, they are
still not properly visible within these subgroups. The significance of acknowledging the way
these identities coexist is to acknowledge the ways in which different people
experience life within American society. Through an awareness of intersectionality, we can better
acknowledge and ground the differences among us and negotiate the means by which these differences will find
expression in constructing group politics (378). It basically means that the sooner we realize that everyones experiences
arent the same, the sooner we will be able to give everyone rights that not only recognizes, but caters to such differences,
in the same way we discussed in class what the perfect domestic abuse shelter would have an environment that everyone
would be comfortable in. Crenshaw uses a variety of examples of the exclusion that occurs for women of color in many
different ways. One difference that is important to note is the separation of structural intersectionality versus political
intersectionality. In some ways this reminded me of Michel Foucaults definition of biopower, where disciplinary actions
and regulatory actions affected each other in interesting ways. Structural intersectionality occurred on what could be
considered a smaller scale, where the rules of a certain area seem to be coincidental and just happen to disenfranchise
certain people. It has a lot to do with social boundaries that are difficult to overcome. Race and gender are
two of the primary site for the particular distribution of social resources that
ends up with observable class differences (360). An example given cites immigrant women who are
afraid to report being beaten by their spouses because they fear deportation. many immigrant women were reluctant to
leave even the most abusive of partners for fear of being deported (360). This being forced to silence is
one of the many ways women remain ignorant of the rights that they do have.
Another way of this is through language barriers which fail to inform women
who dont speak English and are not able to communicate such abuses. Some shelter
turn non-English speaking women away for lack of bilingual personnel and resources(361). These structures are ones
that limit women of color on a level that isnt deliberately employed by people in positions of power to hurt them but still
seriously affects them. The other type of intersectionality that is differentiated is political, which I briefly mentioned
before. The concept of political intersectionality highlights the fact that women of
color are situated within at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue
conflicting political agendas (363). The aforementioned idea that women of color are forced to align with
either women, or their race (and unable to locate a happy medium contributing to both identities) poses a serious problem
when it comes not to deciding which is more important, but which will gain the most results. A historical
example of this exclusion of women of color is clearly apparent in gaining the
right to vote. As mentioned in Lisa Duggans Twilight of Equality, With universal white male
suffrage, the formal equality of state participation could more easily be defined
as distinct from the natural, private inequalities of developing industrial capitalism in the United States
(Duggan 6). The default voting rights went to citizens who owned property, ergo, white males, all other people were
considered property, subordinates or dependents (6). When Blacks gained the right to vote in
1870 with the addition of the 15th Amendment, it was only directed towards
black men. Years later, when the womens suffrage movement occurred in the
twenties, many womens suffrage organizations sought to exclude Black
women in the hopes of preserving white supremacy in the south. Excluding
black women from membership, it garnered significant support from southern
women by asserting that the white womans vote would maintain white
supremacy in the South. In response, black women, such as Mary Church Terrell, formed their own
organization to further suffrage in 1896, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). I would assume that due
to the intentional exclusion of women of color for this specific example, that this is a type of political intersectionality,
where black women were ostracized by both Black men andy white women, and forced to fend for themselves. The only
problem with ends to means such as this has to do with the fact that it is people of power who ultimately get to decide
what rights are given to those without them. If no one is there to back them up,. the struggle becomes exponentially
harder than if they had the help of people who already said rights.

Our method enables us to question the structural disadvantages and discrimination
due to race and gender
Eddo-Lodge 2014
(Reni Eddo-Lodge, black feminist writer and campaigner based in London, she is a Contributing Editor at the Feminist
Times, Call yourself an intersectional feminist?, 2014, http://www.feministtimes.com/call-yourself-an-intersectional-
feminist/, Accessed: 7/2/14, RH)
At one point, intersectionality seemed to be the hot feminist topic of 2013. In a ping pong style game of comment pieces,
this was that sticking point that wouldnt be silenced. But with a liberal press dominated by white feminist voices, there
was a lot of pushback and misrepresentation, with very little right to reply.
It was a relief, then, when Dr Kimberl Williams Crenshaw came to London recently giving a number of public lectures
and a much needed defence of the concept. Currently teaching at Columbia Law School and UCLA, it was Dr Crenshaw
who first gave the word life. In 1989 she named intersectionality the gendered racism and racialised sexism that many
black women had been articulating for decades, in her paper Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black
Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. In 1991, she wrote Mapping the
margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.
At her talk at the London School of Economics last week, the roots of the word were made public to a transfixed, full
housed lecture theatre. It didnt start out as a grand theory of power, the audience were told. It was an effective tool to
help black women who were made invisible by US law.
When I sat down with Dr Crenshaw in the US Embassy a few days earlier, she explained why her law studies led her
intersectionality. That work started when I realised that African American Women
were not recognised as having experienced discrimination that reflected both
their race and their gender. The courts would say if you dont experience racism
in the same way as a man does, or sexism in the same way as a white woman
does, then you havent been discriminated against. I saw that as a problem of
sameness and difference. There were claims of being seen as too different to be accommodated by law. That
led to intersectionality, looking at the ways race and gender intersect to create barriers
and obstacles to equality.
Its not only intersectionality that we can credit Dr Crenshaw for bringing to the public consciousness. Her writing in
critical race theory was part of the body of work that formed the movement. With similar but also wildly different
historical contexts, Critical Race Theory hasnt taken off in the UK the way it has in the US. But we are making progress
with the University of Birminghams Centre for Research in Race and Education being a brilliant example.
I ask Dr Crenshaw to define Critical Race Theory. We look at how historically, groups are organised against each other.
We look at the ways certain outcomes are rationalised by a discourse of meritocracy, which doesnt take into account the
racial ways in which merit has traditionally been shaped and focused. We look at the geographies of race in particular
societies, and what does that have to do with what people have access to, as a matter of just life, and what things people
have to fight for in order to get. We look at things that are relevant to race as a process.
Historically, she says, people are raced. When youre born, youre not inherently anything. But youre
born into a society where your family has already been circumscribed, the group
that you are part of has already been labelled; the country from which you come has already been
framed as outside. All of these things are reproduced by laws, decisions and culture
that dont even have to say race in the specific in order to create it.
Not unlike gendered social constructs, Crenshaws interrogation of what it means to be what we are labelled throws
objectivity into the air. We call it critical because we dont naturalise race. Were not illiberal when it comes to race which
will mean oh if we just ignore everybodys race then everything will be fine. Were critical of the social
structures that produce race. We theorise how it gets produced, and more
importantly what are some of the things that need to be done in order to
dismantle those structures.

Alt is a prereq to the 1ac
(Ava Vidal, British stand up comedian, writes for Wonder Women, Intersectional feminism. What the hell is it? (And
why you should care),http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10572435/Intersectional-feminism.-What-
the-hell-is-it-And-why-you-should-care.html, January 15, 2014, Accessed: 7/2/14, RH)
Intersectionality is a term that was coined by American professor Kimberl Crenshaw in 1989. The concept already
existed but she put a name to it. The textbook definition states:
Quote The view that women experience oppression in varying configurations and
in varying degrees of intensity. Cultural patterns of oppression are not only
interrelated, but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems
of society. Examples of this include race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.
In other words, certain groups of women have multi-layered facets in life that they
have to deal with. There is no one-size-fits-all type of feminism. For example, I am a
black woman and as a result I face both racism and sexism as I navigate around everyday life.
Even though the concept of intersectionality in feminism has been around for
decades, it only seems to have made it into mainstream debate in the past year or
so. And yet still so many people are confused by what it means, or what it stands for.
It doesn't help that the message surrounding intersectional feminism has been somewhat confused in recent months. On
the last BBC Radio 4 Womans Hour of 2013 black feminist Reni Eddo-Lodge was invited on to discuss the year in
feminism. She began speaking about intersectionality and structural racism but was followed by Caroline Criado Perez
who chose that moment to speak about abuse that she had received online by people attacking her under the guise, she
claimed, of intersectionality.
I need to make it clear that Eddo-Lodge was not responsible for any of the abuse that she received, but the conversation
was derailed nonetheless and the opportunity for her to address a large audience on a popular radio show was lost.
Caroline Criado Perez has since apologised.
Regardless, what really matters here is, are people any the wiser as to what intersectionality is and how it affects them?
I'm keen to steer the conversation back to the subject of intersectionality in feminism and what it really means.
To me the concept is very simple. As a black feminist, I do not condone Chris
Brown physically assaulting his (then) girlfriend Rhianna, but I will object if
someone describes him as a black b*****d, as one white woman did to me. It does
not mean that I support domestic violence as she then accused me of doing. It means that I, like the majority of
black women, dont support racism.
The main thing 'intersectionality' is trying to do, I would say, is to point out that
feminism which is overly white, middle class, cis-gendered and able-bodied
represents just one type of view - and doesn't reflect on the experiences of all
the multi-layered facets in life that women of all backgrounds face.
Roqayah Chamseddine is a feminist and writer that explains this further saying: White feminism is
extremely introverted refusing to acknowledge systematic hurdles facing
women of colour (WOC) who are not visible. Our voices need amplifying
because white feminism tokenise us and usurps our voices.
Until the mainstream feminist movement starts listening to the various groups
of women within it, then it will continue to stagnate and not be able to move
forward. The only result of this is that the movement will become fragmented and will continue to be less effective.
Note-so I guess this card raises the question-why not the permutation? But you always
have a link to their method of the 1ac science fiction and the link that they precluded
discussion of WOC in the 1ac. So yeah, this just proves the alt solves the case and alt
impacts, and functions as a turns case.
The study of feminism AND the study of racism are not zero sum but treating the two
as one OR the other recreates oppression.
Crenshaw, 1991
(Kimberle Crenshaw, Professor of Law at the University of California Los Angeles, BA Cornell University, JD from
Harvard Law school, and LLM from University of Wisconsin, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics,
and Violence Against Women of Color, 1991,
http://socialdifference.columbia.edu/files/socialdiff/projects/Article__Mapping_the_Margins_by_Kimblere_Crenshaw.
pdf, Accessed: 7/2/14, RH)
My objective in this article is to advance the telling of that location by exploring the race and gender dimensions of
violence against women of color.3 Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have
failed to consider intersectional identities such as women of color.4 Focusing
on two dimensions of male violence against women-battering and rape-I
consider how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of
inter- secting patterns of racism and sexism,5 and how these experiences tend
not to be represented within the discourses of either feminism or antiracism.
Be- cause of their intersectional identity as both women and of color within dis-
courses that are shaped to respond to one or the other, women of color are
marginalized within both. In an earlier article, I used the concept of intersectionality to denote the various
ways in which race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of Black6 women's employment experiences.7
My objective there was to illustrate that many of the experiences Black women
face are not subsumed within the traditional boundaries of race or gender
discrimination as these boundaries are currently understood, and that the
intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women's lives in ways that
cannot be captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those
experiences separately. I build on those observations here by exploring the various ways in which race and
gender intersect in shaping structural, political, and representational aspects of violence against women of color.8

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