Edelman Kritik

KNDI 2011 Edelman Kritik
K Lab Adam Pease
Edelman Kritik
Edelman Kritik..........................................................................................................................................1
1NC Shell 1/5...........................................................................................................................................2
1NC Shell 2/5...........................................................................................................................................3
1NC Shell 3/5...........................................................................................................................................4
1NC Shell 4/5...........................................................................................................................................5
1NC Shell 5/5...........................................................................................................................................6
***ESSENTIAL BLOCKS***.......................................................................................................................7
2NC Impact Framing / Root Cause...........................................................................................................7
A/T: Permutation....................................................................................................................................11
A/T: Framework.....................................................................................................................................14
A/T: Nihilism...........................................................................................................................................15
A/T: Essentialism....................................................................................................................................16
***ALTERNATIVE***..............................................................................................................................17
Alternative = Sinthomosexuality............................................................................................................18
Alternative = Unintelligibility..................................................................................................................19
Alt Solvency............................................................................................................................................21
***LINKS***..........................................................................................................................................24
Link Generic........................................................................................................................................25
Link Space Exploration........................................................................................................................26
Link Temporality..................................................................................................................................27
Link Identity Categories.......................................................................................................................28
Link Queer Alliance / Incorporation....................................................................................................29
Link Filling the lack..............................................................................................................................30
Aff: Permutation.....................................................................................................................................31
***AFF ANSWERS***.............................................................................................................................34
Aff: Alt Solvency (or lack thereof)..........................................................................................................35
Aff: Pedophilia Turn................................................................................................................................37
Aff: Natality Turn....................................................................................................................................38
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Aff: Cede the Political.............................................................................................................................39
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1NC
The aff is indebted to an educational futurism where the figural Child tames the queer
excess of childhood in favor of projecting a coherent subject that sustains the nation
Greteman & Wojcikiewicz 2014 [ Adam J., Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art Education at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago; Steven K., Assistant Professor in the College of Education at Western
Oregon University | The Problems with the Future: Educational Futurism and the Figural Child Journal
of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2014]
I touch the future, Christa McAuliffe said, I teach. This resonates with educators. By passing on skills, knowledge, and
ideas that will be used at later times, they reach out to an unseen future and touch it. Teachers tell their students to
study and work hard, for the things they are learning will be needed in the future. The lesson of the day may be applied to a test at the end of
the week, or it may be the basis for work that will be carried out at the next grade level. It may even help prepare a student for college, or for a
job, or for a fulfilling life. Whatever the specifics, the commonality here is that learning
now prepares students for a yet
unknown then. Teaching and schooling are suffused with concern about , discussion of, and focus on the future.
This theme of futurity carries on beyond school walls and enters political discourse on education.
President John F. Kennedy noted, Children are the worlds most valuable resource and its best hope for the future, while Malcolm X claimed
education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today. But, education
is not merely
directed toward the future of the individual, but also toward the future of the nation. A Nation at Risk, the oft-
quoted 1983 US Department of Education report on the state of American education, tells us that, People are steadfast in their belief that
education is the major foundation for the future strength of this country. They even considered education more important than developing the
best industrial system or the strongest military force, perhaps because they understood education as the cornerstone of both . . . Very clearly,
the public understands the primary importance of education as the foundation for a satisfying life, an enlightened and civil society, a strong
economy, and a secure Nation (National Commission on Excellence in Education, The Publics Commitment section, 1983, para. 2). Close to 20
years after the publication of A Nation at Risk, the most sweeping educational reform effort of our time, No
Child Left Behind,
returned the focus back to the Child, continuing the focus on the future in education and the necessity of
the Child to maintain the competitiveness of the nation . As former president George W. Bush asserted in one of his last
speeches in office, NCLB, . . . starts with this concept: Every child can learn. We believe that it is important to have a high quality education if
one is going to succeed in the 21st century. Its no longer acceptable to be cranking people out of the school system and saying, okay, just go
you know, you can make a living just through manual labor alone. Thats going to happen for some, but its not the future of America, if we want
to be a competitive nation as we head into the 21st century (Bush, 2009, para. 22). And more recently, President Obama, in a speech when he
was running for the office, asserted, We are the nation that has always understood that our future is inextricably linked to the education of our
children (Obama, 2008, para. 10). Along the same lines, the current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has stated that, Today, more than
ever, better schooling provides a down payment on the nations future (Duncan, 2009, para. 15). Within
these statements, the
future cannot be separated from those it relies onpredominately children. These assumptions made
in regards to children, their role in the future, and schools roles in creating that future are seemingly
ingrained in our society and our politics. The presence of this future focus may seem uncontroversial, its influence benign. Such
assumptions may appear to be natural and beyond question, particularly since this futurist-focus originated, in part, with the spread of
education during the Enlightenment, with its progress-oriented philosophical perspectives. Yet, we wish to question these assumptions, to
explore how they can set narrow boundaries around children in schools. In carrying out this task, we employ the work of Lee Edelman and John
Dewey to examine the educational ramifications of the focus on the future, which we call educational futurism after Edelmans (2004)
reproductive futurism. Our argument seeks specifically to explore how educational futurism imposes limits on educational
discourse and privileges a certain future, thus making it unthinkable to imagine ways outside of such a
privileged future. We turn to Edelman for his reproductive futurism, which is embodied in the regulatory figure of the Child, because it
is seems particularly apt to the educational settings, practices and discourses which are our concern. This figural Child for Edelman
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 (2004, p. 11). The Child exists in
discourse and it limits discourse from engaging the unruly lives of children . The Child, for Edelman, is not representative of
children. It is all there is. And actions taken in the name of the Child ignore, even exclude, the particularities
and contexts that make children who they are alive and unique. Edelmans challenge then offers up a threat to
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educations identification with the Child, a challenge that is not simply nihilistic, but which rather aims to see what is denied consideration and
action. His project, heavily reliant on Lacans death drive, offers
a challenge to a future whose beat goes on to expose
the way the political regime of futurism, unable to escape what it abjects, negates it as the negation of
meaning, of the Child, and of the future the Child portends (pp. 153154). He insists, as such, on a politics that does not
seek accommodation within such logic but an embrace of the negation, the unintelligible place of queerness, for it is in such an embrace that
queer ethics can engage the violence against non-normative bodies. Dewey makes an appearance here because, though he has been narrowly
and inaccurately portrayed as the benign father of student-centred, activity-oriented, open, and laissez-faire classroom methods, his positions
are far more nuanced, and far more radical, in relation to children and the future (Dewey, 1938; Petrovic, 1998; Popkewitz, 2005; Prawat, 1995;
Schleffler, 1974; Wong and Pugh, 2001). He presents a critique of a future focus in education that shows how such a focus means a loss, not only
of present opportunities, but also of the promised future for children. Dewey, read in relation to Edelmans engagement with futurism, offers a
place within educational discourse to explore the possibility to engage educational futurism in ways that challenge the discourse of the Child
illustrated in our opening statements. To focus on Deweys radical insights then is to challenge the innocent position to which he is often
relegated. After all, it is the innocent Dewey, like the innocent Child, that supports and carries forward the status quo. Our focus on the radical
insights of Dewey position him against the status quo, and against the Child, bringing a different, though complementary, perspective to our
engagement with Edelman. Before moving forward, we would like to note that our approach in this analysis is not entirely new. As a critique of
futurism, it questions a general characteristic of modernism, namely, a foundational belief that we will get there someday (Lagemann, 2000).
This belief asserts that wherever there might be, and in whatever endeavour we are engaged in, the point is that progress is possible and that
our actions can be justified in the name of the inevitable and promising, though distant, end. This belief, the heart of futurism, has, in this
postmodern time, been challenged on many occasions. Our argument, however, seeks specifically to explore how futurism, expressed through
the iterative construction of the Child, shapes the ways that we can think about children and education. We will begin our analysis by describing
Edelmans reproductive futurism and its relation to education specifically. In this we will address Edelmans the notion of the Child, the Childs
relation to children, and the impact of these concepts on education. Following this we will introduce John Deweys views of growth, life, and
education, and show how these views can be read to engage a similar critique of the role of the future and the workings of normative or
regulatory subjects.With our two theorists in place, we will seek to draw out connections and disconnections between them, illustrating the
ways in which educational futurism ignores or overlooks the lived experiences of children. We conclude by briefly noting the queerness of
children and the impact of such queerness on broadening discussions of the future of children. EDELMANS REPRODUCTIVE FUTURISM AND THE
CHILD Edelman, in his book No Future (2004) uses queerness as a stance to critique, and resist, what he calls
reproductive futurism. He lays out the boundaries of reproductive futurism as, . . . terms that impose an ideological limit
on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by
rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this
organizing principle of communal relations (2004, p. 2). Edelman claims that reproductive futurism sets the notion
of reproduction, along with its complementary and concurrent idea of looking to the future, as dominant, even natural,
guides for being and acting in the political realm . Because of this dominance, anything which lies outside of this
brand of futurism lies outside of the pale of political thought and action. It is, in short, unintelligible. Reproductive
futurism acts, in Edelman, through the Child, an image, an identity, and a political tool that he refers to as the privileged
embodiment of the future (Edelman, 2007, p. 471). We are no more able to conceive of politics without a fantasy of
the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child (2004, p. 11). The Child
creates a logic by which the political, within contemporary American politics, must be thought (p. 2), since: . . . 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 social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of it inner Child (pp. 23, italics in original). It
is the Child that shapes and inspires social and political action , action which is aimed at a future for the Child, and this
underpins any ideology in contemporary politics. Edelmans critique seeks to challenge this to embrace the negativity of that
which is negated by the Child to disrupt the narrative trajectory the Child maintains and engage the unruly. Edelmans critique and exposure of
the Child and the Childs structuring logic illustrates that the Child is exclusionary, de-legitimising all that which is not future-focused, or which
does not benefit the Child in all its innocent, sentimentalised, and decontextualised (non)identity. The Child takes up the whole
frame, permitting nothing else to be seen, recognised, or thinkable. However, Edelman makes it clear that the Child he
writes of is figural and therefore not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children (p. 11). Rather the figural
Child serves to regulate political discourseto prescribe what we count as political discourseby compelling such discourse to
accede in advance to the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are never permitted to acknowledge or address (p. 11). In
order to reveal the Child, and the full range of the meanings of the Child for discourse and action, Edelman (2004) proposes the unthinkable:
he threatens the Child by queering it, since 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 (p. 3). In queering the Child, these hidden discourses and contexts are
exposed, and the Child is portrayed, not as the widely and easily accepted stand-in for children, but as an oppressive figure that closes down
possibility and denies particularity, all in the name of a future that is mere repetition and just as lethal as the past, a future that is normatively,
narrowly defined but never to be reached. (p. 31). It is important to understand, in this analysis, that to queer the Child in the name of children
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is, by extension, to put children in the position of the queer. This, in turn, opens up many possibilities. Yet, making the claim that children are
queer may provoke anxiety, or outrage because of the reach of the figural Child. Such a statement on the queerness of children, especially in the
realm of education, disrupts the innocence of the Child as imagined and portrayed. It challenges the frame that sets the Child up as in need of a
proper curriculum, in need of protection. Edelman acknowledges as much noting that, for the cult of the Child permits no shrines to the
queerness of boys and girls, since queerness, for contemporary culture at large . . . is understood as bringing children and childhood to an end
(p. 19). Such anxiety, or even outrage, is useful for our purposes, for it helps reveal the contextualised, complex, and perhaps troubling realities
that lie beneath the bland image of the Child. The
Child is not an innocent position. The Child is indeed the
representative of positions that have been utilised politically to assault and reject those who do not
support the Child. The stories that have been told about the Child have followed a narrow narrative trajectory and to take a stand against
the Child is to offer different stories, different narrative trajectories, and challenges to the future. In offering a challenge to this dominant story
line on the Child asks that we stand against the maintenance of innocence, for it is its maintenance that inhibits experience and learning
(Archard, 2004; Bruhm and Hurley, 2004; Buckingham, 2000). This maintenance of innocence on the part of the Child is
an important piece of what separates the Child from children, and what makes the political Child such a
totalising force for the suppression of children. This Child is one who is always innocent, always protected, and, as the
potential for anxiety and outrage already mentioned alludes to, always inexperienced. Experience taints, disrupts, and ends
innocence. And yet, experience itself is a vital characteristic of learning. Thus children in schools, those who
are learning, are always already in a queer position. The Childs image of innocence is merely an exclusionary political position, a
central reference point in a wider mythology of childhood that helps uphold an unjust moral order in which both adults and children are subject
to the oppressive politics of purity (Davis, 2011, p. 381). To argue against the Child and its innocence is to open up that which the Child closes
off, the real experiences and desires of children. DEWEYS FOCUS ON GROWTH AND THE PRESENT IN EDUCATION John Dewey did not write
about Queer Theory, or about the Child, but he did write about experience, and about how the political and educational discourses and actions
of his day acted to deny the realities and experiences of children in the name of a future that would never be realised. Deweys ideas on
education are rooted in his overall concern with growth. He equated education with growth, and growth with life (Dewey, 1916, 1934/ 1980,
1938; Granger, 2000; Hansen, 2000). This would, at first glance, seem itself to be a future-focused position, but Dewey adds that both education
and growth must proceed for their own sakes. Since growth is the characteristic of life, he claims, education is all one with growing; it has no
end beyond itself (Dewey, 1916, p. 53). However, ifgrowth is regarded as having an end, instead of being an end
(1916, p. 50, italics in original), problems arise. This conception of growth arises when childhood is treated as an
imperfect state during which children are moving toward adulthood , the end of growth in the future. Dewey
pushed against the notion that children were incomplete adults, and that education was merely a matter of preparation for
the future. The idea that growth has an end violates Deweys ideas about growth, life, and education. Furthermore, it leads to a whole host
of problems in schooling, all of which come down to the fallacious idea of viewing schooling as preparation for the fixed future of adulthood
rather than as an end in itself. With a fixed end in mind as to the results of education, the goal of education becomes not
openness and growth, but conformity: Since conformity is the aim, what is distinctively individual in a young person is brushed aside, or
regarded as a source of mischief or anarchy. Conformity is made equivalent to uniformity. Consequently, there are induced lack of interest in the
novel, aversion to progress, and dread of the uncertain and the unknown. Since the end of growth is outside of and beyond the process of
growing, external agents have to be resorted to, to induce movement toward it (Dewey, 1916, pp. 5051). This
conformity reins in the
excess, the aspects of the individual that do not speak to a future already structured by the logic of
conformity. In doing so, there occurs a refusal to engage that which is unknown or uncertain. Deweys engagement here asked
to open the bounded-ness of the Child to the excesses, the unruliness of childrens experience. This, as
Dewey noted, might be regarded as mischief or anarchy because such states challenge the futurism of
an education that imagines a fixed end or telos. As such, education for the future neglects the present, including the powers
of present learning in terms of interest and motivation. Such external motivators to learn become ingrained in school
systems, which then swing between harsh and open methods, without changing their essential nature as
future-focused and structured by the logic of the Child. This swinging pendulum, rather than creating a challenge to the
structures of education, leads to deadening systems of learning reiterating the centrality of the figural Child. Dewey notes this in regards to
systems in punishment where, Everybody knows how largely systems of punishment have had to be resorted to by educational systems which
neglect present possibilities in behalf of preparation for a future. Then, in disgust with the harshness and impotency of this method, the
pendulum swings to the opposite extreme, and the dose of information required against some later day is sugar-coated, so that pupils may be
fooled into taking something which they do not care for (Dewey, 1916, p. 55). For Dewey, then, the future is driven by the present. Educational
experiences which lead to growth, valued for their own sakes and on their own terms, prepare students for a future which is undefined, but
which will certainly consist of further experiences. To set a definite future is to eliminate the idea of growth for its own sake, and to set a course
for conformity. And with a definite future acting as a static goal, with only conformity to look forward to, present experience becomes so devoid
of creativity, liveliness and appeal that behaviour management techniques are the only recourse of the educator who hopes to keep students
involved in their schoolwork. Dewey thus provides a telling challenge to the schools of his time and to the schools of today, and gives us a
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critique of educational futurism that describes its classroom outcomes. Far from being a mere supporter of student-centred pedagogical
activities, Dewey emerges as a radical critic of any educational practice that relies on bribery or compulsion to make up for a lack of the sort of
compelling experiences that engage students in the immediate and, by promoting growth, prepare them for future experiences. For Dewey, the
cost of educational futurism was a deadened classroom where carrots and sticks are the dominant features, and where the end is a static and
ever-unreachable goal of adulthood, a modernist dream of perfect knowledge where all the pain and preparation of schooling experiences
finally pays off, and a goal to which the present is blithely sacrificed. DEWEY AND EDELMAN IN CONVERSATION For both Dewey and
Edelman, the drive toward the future begins with the positioning of children relative to some regulatory
figural ideal. Edelman identifies this ideal as the figural Child, while Dewey identifies it as the state of adulthood, which may also be
characterised as the figural Adult. This positioning creates notions of children that are merely incomplete, either because they are waiting to
grow up, or because they are not supposed to grow up at all. Deweys idealised Adult never changes because adulthood is never reached.
Edelmans idealised Child, actually an idealised present projected forward into an ever-receding future, is unchanging, as it always stands for
what is to come in the name of those who will, in later days, no longer be children. The Child must always remain a Child in order to retain its
power as a driving symbol. Yet, as such it is frozen, an identity every bit as static as Deweys Adult. Because of the ways that these theories
intersect, we can bring Dewey and Edelman together to focus on the figure of the Child in educational discourse and practice, taking
reproductive futurism, the Child, Deweys Adult, and his call for an education valuable in the present to offer a different story for education and
children. In many ways, these theories fit well together. Children, after all, go to school, and so it is to be expected that the figure of the Child
might loom large in education. And, as we have already established, education can be seen as a largely future directed activity driven by the
Child, whether that future is the future application of a lesson, the future life of a student, or the future success or failure of the nation. It is, we
maintain, even as naturally future-directed as reproduction. And the
Child, the representative of reproductive futurism, is
as directly associated with schooling as with reproduction; both reproduce the next generation, one
through birth, the other through instruction but both reproductions are reigned in, fearful of the
excessive, the unique, the individual. For all that, we do not wish to imply that Edelman and Dewey occupy interchangeable
positions. The differences between the Child and the Adult may reflect cultural and temporal differences, a movement from a society which
viewed childhood as incomplete adulthood to one which views adulthood as, at best, childhood carried forward. These differences may also
come from the sources of these theories, their very different views and approaches to politics, or even from Edelmans queer stance and focus
on opposition to reproduction versus Deweys straight stance with its faith in progress, though a progress that lacks a set and static end. For all
their differences, however, Edelman and Dewey still share much of an outlook. Both
show the experience of the now, with all
of its uncontrolled, excessive possibilities, unregulated desires and unknown ends, brought under
control, and thus deadened, by references to a totalising image that controls political and educational
discourse and action. Dewey puts forth the idea that the immediate experiences of childhood are being sacrificed to a fixed and
unreachable Adult. For Dewey, children being educated were never meant to completely know themselves, and as such continually experience,
struggle with and against the world. Edelmans critique raises the possibility that the immediate experiences of childhood are structured by the
logic of the Child while also present a possible threat to the perfect and innocent image of the Child. For Edelman, the Child regulates
experiences for children and adults to maintain its logic, a logic that structures responses, as shown earlier, from ideological perspectives
whether liberal or conservative.
The affs figuration of education as production of human capital facilitates a post-

fordist futurity that harvests black and brown bodies for return on investments
Gill-Peterson 2015 [Julian, Assistant Professor of English and Children's Literature at the University of
Pittsburgh | The Value of the Future: The Child as Human Capital and the Neoliberal Labor of Race,
Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 1/2, (Spring/Summer 2015)]
Ten9Eight is in part a racial uplift film for a multicultural era, in which the celebration of ostensible legal equality and the cultural relativism of
ethnicity authorize rigid competition between assimilating immigrant groups and the exceptional isolation of African Americans (see Chow 2002
and Sexton 2008). While the students in Ten9Eight are all African American, Latino, or recent immigrants, the communities and families of the
black competitors incur the most diegetic pathologization. Melodra- matic and stereotyped tales of drugs, alcohol, prison, sexual abuse, foster
care, homelessness, teen pregnancy, and the specter of death govern their biographies. In the face of this cultural pathology, an individual
narrative of overcoming is rehearsed: Ten9Eight unambiguously suggests that start- ing businesses is the only way for black children to break a
pattern derivative of the Moynihan report. As
with Daniel Patrick Moynihans The Negro Family (United States Department of Labor
1965), systemic
inequalities and the planned maldistribution of life chances by race can be criticized as a
moral wrong, but their actionable field of remedies is simultaneously confined to the private sphere of
individual improvement. The will to overcome and disavow the signifier "inner city" in places like Baltimore, Chicago, New York City,
and Washington, DC returns again and again in Ten9Eight. One competitor, JaMal Wills, explains that he wants to win the competition because
he "doesn't want to end up dead. Rather
than understanding these narratives of black childhood only as
representations of a purely ideological devaluation , a cultural ruse for the neoliberal states institutionalized racial
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exploitation, an
analysis of the proposed labor function of the film s children maps the new social contract for
which they are targeted as human capital. Not for nothing do Ten9Eigh s promotional materials emphasize that Thomas
Friedman of the New York Times said, Obama should arrange for this movie to be shown in every classroom in America" (qtd. in Ten9Eight:
Shoot for the Moon 2014). There is an ideological conceit in Friedmans suggestion, since the film is not addressed to every classroom but rather
targets under the category of "inner city" the black and brown bodies whose futurity is of so little value to the nation that public investment in
their education or communities is absolutely out of the question. Still, Friedmans proposition is also symptomatic of a mode of investment in
the productivity of children whose dispersed strategies cohere through the calculating force of what we habitually signify in using the terms
"race," "gender," and "class." The
value of the future contracted through neoliberal child labor assigns risk and
speculates on the future of kids as the incorporation of race, gender, and class - economic coefficients
that materialize as the growing bodies of children. Ten9Eight suggests that the racialization of labor and
investment might be understood as originary of American neoliberalisms reason, its political
economization of life s growth from infancy to adulthood through childhood. Under this neoliberal social
contract childhood becomes a form of futures trading . The phrase is not mtonymie, but emphasizes that capitalism
does not mobilize subjects with a preexisting race, gender, or class; rather, it is a subjectification
machine that reorganizes human life into those categories. As with UNCF, Ten9Eight transforms black and brown
children into human capital by restaging education as an entrepreneurial labor. In his 1978-79 collected lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel
Foucault (2007) turns likewise to the child as his example in diagramming American neoliberalism. What
distinguishes American
neoliberalism, according to Foucault, is its theory of human capital, a theory that permits "the extension of
economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain," the social (219) - once Annies shelter. American neoliberalism
reproaches political economy for ignoring the centrality of labor to the production of capital, but unlike Marx, it makes labor into capital (224).
Human capital makes Homo economicus into an entrepreneur of the self, taking the self as its basic
resource, projected into the future through potential wages . This enterprising self represents a theory not of labor power
but what Foucault calls "capital-ability" (225). When neoliberal economists began to define human capital in the 1950s and 1960s they argued
that all human behavior could be analyzed in economic terms by adapting theories of utility max- imization from Adam Smith and Jeremy
Bentham. Gary S. Becker, one of human capitals major proponents, worked over his career on economic analyses of racial and gendered
discrimination, crime and punishment, marriage, divorce, and child-rearing, which he summed up in the title of his Nobel Prize lecture (Becker
1992): "An Economic Way of Looking at Life." The economic rationalization of human life also worked to discredit state projects to reduce
inequality or combat poverty, especially where they accounted for race and gender. By making human value and its return a factor of private
investment in the individual, human capital rendered unreasonable alternate modes of economic redistribution, particularly those both public
and based on social justice. Becker s Treatise on the Fam- ily , for instance, argues that a sexual division of labor, where women stay at home
investing in the human capital of children while men work, is more efficient than equal pay for equal work (1981, 22-23). Becker also argued
that state programs aimed at redressing racialized economic inequality were less effective than a color-blind and competitive labor market
(1957, 129). Within
this framework the theory of human capital deploys the child to recalculate the value of
the future in terms of private investment. The theorys scriptural basis is a passage in Smiths Wealth of Nations on "fixed capital"
([1776] 1909, 225), capital held as stock for the enhancement of the production, but not the circulation, of commodities. According to Smith,
there are four types of fixed capital: machines, buildings, land, and "the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants and members of a
society" (228). This last form becomes human capital. Smith continues: "The acquisition of such talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer
during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expense, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person. Those
talents, as they make a part of his fortune, so do they likewise that of the society to which he belongs. The improved dexterity of a workman
may be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labour, and which, though it costs a
certain expense, repays that expense with a profit" (228). Human capital names a production cost that enhances the quality of workers, repaid
with a surplus in future output. As Foucault emphasizes, the theory of human capital is less preoccupied with innate
capacities than with acquiring new skills. Education was hence the first target of economists : in one classic
essay, Jacob Mincer (1974) calculates the increase to workers' salaries from additional years of schooling through regression formulas. Yet
human capital is also dependent on childhood, understood as the critical period of development , and for
this reason Foucault turns his attention to the child in The Birth of Biopolitics . Through "the inversion of the relationships [sic] of the social to
the economic" (2007, 240), in his words, "we thus arrive at a whole environmental analysis, as the Americans say, of the childs life which it will
be possible to calculate, and to a certain extent quantify, or at any rate measure, in terms of the possibilities of investment in human capital"
(230). Foucault does not broach race in this lecture. Yet the
theory of human capital might be understood as a global
strategy for rationalizing American racism, consolidating work on "discrimination coefficients" (Becker 1957,
6) and the rational value of crime (1968) to explain ostensibly irrational, nonproductive human behavior. In Becker s
work on family economics, he understands what he calls "the price of children" (198 1, 93) in opposition to the Malthusian anxiety about
fertility, according to which children are valuable in quantitative terms. Becker suggests that it is instead "the interaction between quantity and
quality" that explains parental investment in children, and he points to Anglo-American history, where, as quantitative income, education, and
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health increased toward the end of the nineteenth century, the amount of children born declined sharply, a trend repeated after the postwar
baby boom (106-7). Becker reads these demographic trends as parents concentrating their resources more efficiently to invest in the increased
quality of each child born. A child in whom more time and money is invested from birth will eventually yield greater returns on human capital,
obviating the need for more kids. Although it leads to a color-blind conclusion, race is far from absent in Becker s formulas. The child is not a
tabula rasa for him; rather, "rates of return on human capital are more sensitive to endowments" than other commodities (113-14). An
"endowment" might be as ambiguous as personality or attractiveness, but it also includes "the sex, race, ability, age, allocation of time, social
background, and many other characteristics of children 3 ' ( 120). Race
is a primary coefficient of American human capital,
affecting the average base value of children's bodies, as well as the rate of return on investment,
something of which parents are conscious. "Families usually must commit most of their investments," Becker suggests, "before
they know much about their children's market luck" (119). Human capital hence turns childhood into futures trading for
parents, who have to speculate on the effect of endowments like race and gender on their investments.
This framework rationalizes racism in taking the perspective of the abstract parents who always
"maximize their utility by choosing optimal investments in the human and nonhuman capital of children"
(136). In this calculus, as Becker puts it, "discrimination against minorities not only reduces their income but also the effect of their family
background on income" (137), thus lowering the value of their future. As an example, he argues, "Black families should be less stable than white
families, if only because blacks are much poorer and black women earn much more relative to black men than white women do to white men"
(231; emphasis added); not surprisingly, he cites the Moynihan report as evidence. Black families both would have less money to invest in the
human capital of their children and would expect less of a return than white families, reducing their incentive to make investments, and by
analogy reducing the state s incentive to do the same. Becker suggests that taxes levied for "public education and other programs to aid the
young may not significantly benefit them because of compensating decreases in parental expenditures" (153). Since children are assumed to be
property of parents, if the state steps in to redistribute inequality through public education parents will invest less in human capital to
compensate. Given that human capital rationalizes investment as a private practice, even though race and gender are understood as
coefficients their value remains private, so that the conversion of education and other forms of care into labor becomes the only way to address
endemic inequality. This genealogy of human capital contextualizes Ten9Eighs otherwise presumptuous claim: if children of color have almost
no public value to the United States, then it becomes reasonable, even "rational," for them to shoulder the labor of their own education by
covering its cost through entrepreneurship. Not only does the state have no motivation to invest in the future of black and brown kids but also
the cost of public education is so risky for the nonwhite contestants in Ten9Eight that they must bear it in competition to prove their future
value to the nation. In this light, Foucaults definition of American neoliberalism misses the originary force of racialization in evaluating human
life s course by monetizing the growing body of the child. And while Foucault adds that the return on investment in human capital is "the
child's salary when he or she becomes an adult" (2007, 260), thirty-five years later, in a digital economy the salary of the child is not necessarily
only bound to adulthood. Childhood
is also futures trading because increasingly children are generating revenue
streams during childhood as supplements to or substitutes for future salaries, particularly through a
digital economy of social media and mobile phones that decomposes children into data aggregates of
likes, consumer interests, tastes, and attitudes that can be bundled and exchanged. In this form of child labor, a
feminized, stylized whiteness in social media juxtaposes itself to Ten9Eight. Consider the "haul" video. On YouTube haul videos are usually
included as a recurring segment on channels devoted to fashion or beauty. In a haul video, the host presents her shopping from the day. Clothes
are not usually modeled but taken out of the bag, held up to the camera, and presented with commentary on how to wear them, what they go
with, why they are good for this season, or how cheap they are. In a viral video con- temporaneous with Ten9Eight , Blair, or "juicystar07," who
has hosted her channel since 2008, presents "Forever 21 Haul" (2009). Blair is sixteen at the time and emphasizes that she works two service
industry jobs to buy the clothes and makeup she features. In this video, which has to date about 1.75 million views, she intersperses items for
winter from Forever 21 with appeals to her viewers to follower her on Twitter and watch her other vlog posts. The haul video exemplifies the
role of digital labor in childhood as futures trading because it produces value through what is otherwise a purely social activity: style. It is an
example of how consumption is production, considering that its identification with a store is free advertising (as is this essay unfortunately).
YouTube also generates profit through views, quantifying attention as a capacity of users: at the point of 1.75 million views, Blair is paid a
percentage of the ad revenue that YouTube pulls in from her video. (I had to watch a thirty-second ad to see Blair s video on YouTube, so I was
also compelled to produce value through attention within the once ostensibly nonmarket activity of thinking and writing.) Finally, the haul video
foregrounds the collapse of labor and consumption: many, like Blair s, are about saving money. She, for instance, is most proud of a six-dollar
pair of jeans on clearance. It is fair, further, to speculate that the jeans were made by the hands of a girl or young woman whose value to the
global economy is calculated very differently from Blair s, in a factory in Southeast Asia (Hicken 2012). The
juxtaposition of children
in these contemporary forms of child labor is not incidental: on the one hand, there is the black child,
often a boy, on the threshold of social or biological death; on the other hand, there is the cheery,
suburban white girl to whom futurity accrues easily. As Ten9Eight dramatizes, the privatization of public education requires
that its investment risk be devolved onto children through entrepreneurship of the self, particularly for black and brown bodies that have almost
no public value to the nation, save for programs like UNCF. The YouTube haul videos produced by white girls add that even investment in the
ideologically valuable child as human capital cannot wait until adulthood to begin demanding returns,
not even for the white Annie of reproductive futurism: surplus value must be extracted through digital
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labor below the threshold of inhumanity attached to "child labor" by Progressive Era reformers, Western feminism, and
human rights discourse (see Macleod 1998, 107-20). The white girl is called upon to produce surplus value online through gendered rehearsals
of consumption, which cultivate human capital as good style. No longer a dramatic inhumanity, child labor in its digital form passes quietly
under the radar because it is fully socialized . it happens without calling itself work. Side by side, Ten9Eight and the haul video underscore how
neoliberal child labor has served to intensify stratifications of race, gender, and class by recontracting how value is added to and produced by
human life. These calculations of human capital far outrun the child figure given by Edelman. Even Blair is no Annie; if her style channel is akin to
Annie s virtuosic labor of singing and dancing, Blair still works two jobs to pay for her clothes. Moreover, the fact that a black boy s or girls value
remains so low to the nation that walking down the street is enough reason to incur murder at the hands of a police officer or civilian who will
not be held responsible, a fact painfully repeatedly demonstrated, underscores the insidiousness of Beckers economic rationalization of
American racism. Still, Ten9Eight remains the celebrated solution to the racialized dimension of human capital, the outcome of a total
privatization of race that has restricted politics to the narrowest economy possible. To
understand the contemporary
arrangement of child labor beyond industrial forms, in which the value of the future has to be calculated
as it arrives, and in which labor both consists of entrepreneurship of the self while also reaching digital
simulation online, what we might pursue is a materialism of the child that does not need to "fuck Annie."
The demands on American children today, violently maldistributed by race, class, and gender, call upon a materialism that understands the child
as more than a Symbolic figure underwriting reproductive ideology. The child today is the focus of a broader unequal
distribution of wealth, the perpetuation of debt, the extension of work to all life-building activities, and
the implosion of public education and welfare. In a sense, the child is as central to capital as it was during Fordism, but the
contours of that centrality have changed with the value of the future. A materialism of the child that dispenses with the
imperative of affirming no future at all will be left with the more complex task of working toward
something other than the labored austerity offered by Ten9Eight or YouTube celebrity. It remains to be seen if Better Futures can
be unyoked from its trademark.
Their investment in human capital targets the child queered by color as an object of
political economic manipulation
Gill-Peterson 2015 [Julian, Assistant Professor of English and Children's Literature at the University of
Pittsburgh | The Value of the Future: The Child as Human Capital and the Neoliberal Labor of Race,
Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 1/2, (Spring/Summer 2015)]
"A mind is a terrible thing to waste. But a wonderful thing to invest in." This slogan greeted pedestrians during a
recent winter at a bus stop on Manhattans Upper West Side. The bus ad was for Better Futures, a simulated stock option
that capitalizes on a meta-awareness of financial capitalisms role in the destruction of public education and
the racialization of the achievement gap in the U nited States. The United Negro College Fund (UNCF), perhaps sensing a need
to adapt to the dominant funding arrangement of the neoliberal market, has jumped into the sphere of finance - or its careful simulation. In an
effort to solicit "investors/' passersby are asked to make donations to what is the latest version of UNCF s historically important college-funding
program, one adapted for the era of information capitalism by a forecasting algorithm on its website that can tell potential investors exactly how
many dollars of "social return" will be produced for each dollar spent. Suggesting, in turn, that investors imagine the viral proliferation of the
campaign from bus stop to Internet, the ad asks "friends" to contribute through social media, so that the future dollars on the screen can
multiply precisely and exponentially (United Negro College Fund 2013). Each "share" of Better Futures costs ten dollars and UNCF displays its
simulated return value on its home page: 0.96% per dollar per annum. Despite
a marketing strategy suggesting that the
developing minds of children of color are really worth more "socially" than monetarily, the efficient
conversion of those minds into dollars in the calculator undermines any final distinction . The simulation
achieved by UNCF coincides with Marx s (1978, 335) basic formula for capital accumulation, which financialization fully reflects: M-M', "money
which begets money." The missing "C" here (M-C-M'), recall, is intentional. As Marx details in the first volume of Capital , the commodity can be
removed to simplify the formula because its beginning and end is circulating money. Perhaps, though, the missing "C" might also be in this case
the child. For Better Futures, the commodity is the cognitive capacity of children's neuroplasticity, their
capacity to learn (the "mind" that is, according to UNCF s well-known slogan, "a terrible thing to waste"). This capacity is
quantified by its projection into a probable future, stretched out as financial speculation across the life
span of the child and divisible into discrete spheres by UNCF s calculator that include not only eventual salary but also "health savings,"
"crime savings," and the nebulous "other savings" (United Negro College Fund 2013). In speculating on the value of the future
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by monetizing the body and mind of the child of color , UNCF suggests that the value of the child to neoliberal capital is not
identical to the idealized modern concept of childhood as a shelter from the labor market, one that took root as whiteness in the Progressive Era
(see Macleod 1998). If the orphan Annie incarnates this child figure of American industrial capitalism, the vulnerable, white, and feminine future
citizen who must be saved by the nation from the dehumanizing and immoral dangers of the market, she has likewise become in recent years
the avatar of the reproductive futurism diagnosed as endemic to the social, most famously according to Lee Edelman, who unceremoniously
declares in No Future (2004, 29), "Fuck Annie." Reproductive
futurism, for Edelman, signifies the centrality of the
child figure to the social organization of time and its root value as political: the child is the emblem of the
future in whose name the totality of society is contracted, a precious resource governing the parameters
of public politics and private sociality to secure the welfare of tomorrow in a stable form (reproduction),
consigning queerness to the purely negative. Edelman argues that only an affirmation of the fully negative, which would
comprehend the annihilation of Annie and everything vouchsafed by her image, could possibly overcome the straitjacket of the future upon
which she calls.1 The savvy logic of UNCF in Better Futures signals, however, how distant Annie is from the
generation of children growing up in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and its neoliberal
antecedents. Edelmans Lacanian- Symbolic reading of the child under industrial capitalism, to be sure, obscures how labor was the norm
for working-class and racialized children in the United States, especially girls, immigrants, and African Americans. Yet the catastrophic
arrangement of today s generation is located in a different political economy from Annie s : alongside the
persistence of industrial child labor is the simultaneity of high youth unemployment (United States Department of Labor 2014) with the
unprecedented capitalization of children s bodies, near infinite student debt (Norris 2014),
hyperconsumption, and declining health prospects in an age of biomedicine and the childhood obesity
"epidemic" (Centers for Disease Control and Pre- vention 2014). The ideological structure of reproductive futurism reads too narrowly for a
generation now coming of age with globally lower life expectancies, diminished prospects for retirement, and a general precarious forecast
compared with the correlative expectations of their parents. The future of these kids feels austere and diminishing because their present
already is. If
the child as the Symbolic anchor of reproductive futurism typical of Fordism has been eclipsed
by the precarious and volatile conditions of contemporary capitalism - a capitalism that does not need the slow,
sheltered fantasy of childhood as deferral of labor - then the relation of the child to the value of the future might be
better approached through the lenses of labor and materiality. This does not exactly amount to a critique
of No Future. Edelman is clear that "the image of the Child" ought "not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children"
(2004, 11). The Symbolic function of the Child-with-a-capital-"C precisely holds hostage the capacity to
think otherwise about actually existing children. The problem is not the impulse of Edelmans analysis: there is no
shortage of projective work being done by the child figure today. Yet vital though the child figure remains
to the future, its value must nevertheless be calculated within the ambit of contemporary economic,
ecological, and political catastrophes that threaten the viability of any future for humans in ways that
override the optimistic ideology of American liberalism, however facetious it may have been (see Sheldon
2013). The UNCF stock option redefines college education for children of color as an investment activity, and in so doing
it judges educations value not as a liberal equalizer of opportunity but as a form of "human capital" that
black and brown bodies cannot afford to pass up. Following UNCF s proposition, this essay explores cinematic texts and
media of contemporary American childhood to understand the economy of the future. The present calculation of the value of the future
suggests that race, not only sexuality, might be understood as the coefficient that incorporates the laboring body from childhood. If
modern
childhood, as Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009, 13-16) carefully outlines, is structured by a temporality of delay - delay of
labor and delay of heteronormative sexuality - the queer problem of "growing sideways" that it
generates is also, as she explains, more an expression of the twentieth century than of the twenty-first. What
is at stake in this essay is hence less a lateral growth than the circumstances surrounding the person Stockton calls "the child queered
by color": a child who, being nonwhite, is barely a child, unable to inhabit the scenography of innocence
assigned to American childhood. If one cultural narrative designed to compensate for this debility, as Stockton reminds us, "is to
endow those children with abuse" (33), then perhaps, in the film and media that follow, another narrative seeks to make those children work for
it.
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Politics is structured around the image of the child their drive to
unite the fantasy of a heterosexual world makes endless violence
inevitable.
Edelman 4, Lee Professor of English at Tufts, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
Drive,
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 find information about dangerous
"lifestyles" on the Internet; the Child who might choose a provocative 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
adult's adulterating implication in desire itself; the Child, that is, made to image, for the satisfaction of adults, an Imaginary fullness
that's considered to want, and therefore to want for, nothing. As Lauren Berlant argues forcefully 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." 22
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, terroristically 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 Voldemort's 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
seige, 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 finds itself condemned: an insistence on sameness that intends to restore an
Imaginary past. The Child, that is, marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity :
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
its purpose was wholly congruent
bomb making guide it produced for the assistance of its militantly " pro-life" members,
with the logic of reproductive futurism: to "disrupt and ultimately destroy Satan's power to kill
our children, God's children."
Reproductive futurism culminates in a homonationalist consolidation of empire where

imperial wars secure the future through the extermination of deviant black and brown
communities
Schotten 2015 [C. Heike, Associate Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty in Women's
and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston "Homonationalist Futurism:Terrorism
and (Other) Queer Resistance to Empire." New Political Science 37.1 (2015): 71-90.
In queer theory, No Future has largely been read as making an argument regarding the constitutive heteronormativity of the social order.
Edelman names this heteronormativity reproductive futurism and argues that it inevitably dooms homosexualsbranded as non-reproductive
sexual nihiliststo instantiating societys death drive. I contend, however, that No Future can be understood more generically as a work of
political theory, especially given that Edelman explicitly describes its subject matterreproductive futurismas the logic within which the
political itself must be thought.14 Identifying this political theory, however, requires some appropriation, given that, ultimately, Edelman is
more concerned with Lacan than politics. Reading with and into the text, then, I propose three modifications of the psychoanalytic politics
Edelman advances in No Future in order to more fully appropriate it for political theorizing.15 The first is to insert a distinction between the
futurism and reproductive futurism he discusses, the latter being understood as a specific version of the former. Put simply, futurism
is
synopsized by the presupposition that the body politic must survive, 16 the putatively apolitical article of faith in
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the necessary continuity of politics as such. [E]very political vision, Edelman claims, is a vision of futurity.17 More specifically,
reproductive futurism is characterized by a set of values widely thought of as extrapolitical: values that center on the family, to be sure, but
that focus on the protection of children.18 The iconographic signifier of reproductive futurism is the child; its mantra, Whitney Houstons
rendition of the secular hymn, I believe that children are our future, a hymn we might as well simply declare our national anthem and be done
with it.19 Reproductive futurism is the apolitical imperative that the present be held in service to the childrens future adulthood: [W]e are no
more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of a 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.20 Whether discussing the survival of the body politic (futurism) or the
future as symbolized by the child (reproductive futurism), Edelman is clear that the presuppositions of both are deemed apolitical, although that
is precisely what makes them so oppressively political.21 For the presuppositions of (reproductive) futurism are the very terms of politics as
such. To participate in politics at all, even in protest or dissent, requires that one submit to the framing of political debateand, indeed, of the
political fieldas defined by the terms of ...reproductive futurism: terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such.22 This
is how and why Edelman says that there is no future for queers: politics itself designates queers as futureless. By
definition, politics
seeks to install an order of sameness through the ideological (re)production of a future that promises a
seamless plenitude of meaning. Rather than acknowledge the impossibility of such an achievement, however, this failing is instead
foisted onto a person, people, or set of forces that instantiate that impossibility in their very existence. These unforgivable obstacles to
futurisms achievement are queers: the queer dispossesses the social order of the ground on which it rests: a
faith in the consistent reality of the social ... a faith that politics, whether of the left or of the right,
implicitly affirms.23 Defined as non-reproductive sexual nihilists, the positioning of queers as cultures self-indulgent,
sex-obsessed death drive thus functions to secure the health, happiness, and adult normality of
heterosexually reproducing humanity. While this persuasive reading of heteronormativity and homophobia has generated the
most critical enthusiasm for No Future, I want to argue that reproductive futurism is neither exhaustive of the political nor futurisms exclusive
form. However hegemonic, reproductive futurism is only one of the forms this calamity might take.24 For clearly one can invest in the future
as signified by any number of possible oppressive and unattainable ideals: not only the child, but also, for example, Christ, security (for example
Hobbes), or the American way. As
Edelman himself observes, The Child, in the historical epoch of our current
epistemological regime, is the figure for this compulsory investment in the misrecognition of figure. 25
Futurism itself, however, he calls the substrate of politics.26 My second proposed modification follows from the first, its mandate being to
situate Edelmans political theory more distinctly within history.27 In this regard, suspicious reader John Brenkman helpfully provides the
political theory references missing from No Future, noting that modern critical social discourse, whether among the Enlightenments
philosophes, French revolutionaries, Marxists, social democrats, or contemporary socialists and democrats all engage in the kind of future-
wagering Edelman describes as definitively political.28 Historically, Brenkman is correctfuturism
is a distinctively modern
phenomenon that must be tethered to, among other things, the advent of industrial capitalism,
colonialism, and the rise of the nation-state. This second modification makes clear that, in naming futurism, Edelman has
identified a fundamental baseline of modernity and the workings of modern politics. However, Brenkmans concern is less with history than the
fact that Edelman seems to foreclose the possibility of such critical discourse by consigning it to the same status as the discourse of the Catholic
Church and the religious Right. While Brenkmans point is well-taken, it is already Edelmans. For, whether liberal or conservative, Left or Right,
communist or fascist, every modern political theory is invested in the repetition and reproduction of the social order, cast as a future
aspirational ideal, to which the present is held hostage. This is as true of conservative movements as of radical or revolutionary onesmodern
politics as such is defined by its investment in reproducing an order of sameness at the expense of the difference of now.29 Tavia Nyongo has
argued that Edelmans reading of homophobia operates as a kind of nostalgia for a political moment already past, a moment when
homosexuality really did pose an ominous and spectral threat to the social order, but does so no longer.30 Howeverand this is the third
modification I wish to assertthe queer of No Future is by no means a crudely identitarian homosexual subject, nor is the child solely
emblematic of procreation and childrearing. Edelman would agree with at least part of this point. He insists there is nothing intrinsic to the
constitution of those identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, or queer that predisposes 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.31 And indeed,
it is not difficult to find examples of gay reproductive futurism, the most obvious being the movement for marriage equality. As former Human
Rights Campaign (HRC) President Joe Solmonese puts it: The fight for marriage equality for samesex couples is quite possibly the most
conventional, family-friendly equal rights struggle ever. He continues, History bends not only toward fairness and equality, but also toward
common sense. Marriage strengthens couples and families, who in turn help strengthen their communities, one at a timeleading ultimately to
a stronger, more robust nation.32 Mixing nationalism into a gay progress narrative of ever-expanding equality and familial inclusion, Solmonese
here writes the playbook for reproductive futurisms political palatability. Tellingly, Andrew Sullivans earlier praise of gay marriage is even more
explicit on this count, invoking the importance of the futures promise not just in the name of the children, but more specifically for gay children,
who must be saved from having otherwise been born into futurelessness: More important, perhaps ... its [marriages] influence would be felt
quietly but deeply among gay children. For them, at last, there would be some kind of future; some older faces to apply to their unfolding lives,
some language in which their identity could be properly discussed, some rubric by which it could be explained not in terms of sex, or sexual
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practices, or bars, or subterranean activity, but in terms of their future life stories, their potential loves, their eventual chance at some kind of
constructive happiness. They would be able to feel by the intimation of a myriad examples that in this respect their emotional orientation was
not merely about pleasure, or sin, or shame, or otherness (although it might always be involved in many of those things), but about the ability
to love and be loved as complete, imperfect human beings. Until gay marriage is legalized, this fundamental element of personal dignity will be
denied a whole segment of humanity. No other change can achieve it.33 As we can see, even when the Child is gay, its salvific promise is neither
diverted nor diluted. It simply straightens out the queer threat potentially posed by bent children.34 Dangling the lure of constructive
happiness before the eyes of youths for whom not sugarplums but sex parties dance in their heads, Sullivan here offers up the gay version of
reproductive futurism, paternalistically reassuring us that a life of sex for sexs sake is the meaningless, self-indulgent, anti-civilizational existence
every good moralizer ever told us it was. Taken together, Sullivan and Solmonese helpfully illustrate the fact that Edelmans argument is, in the
end, not really about identity and not even about gay people (or, for that matter, straight people). Futurism
is a logic that
transcends the specifics of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and queer in Edelmans vocabulary
does not necessarilyor, perhaps, even primarily, anymore, as Nyongo suggestsstand in for gay and lesbian people. But,
to return to my third modification, this also means that the child is not irrevocably tied to the existence, reproduction, or raising of historical
children.35 In other words, even as the non- or anti-identity politics of Edelmans figure of queerness is increasingly evident, he neglects to
establish the similarly and necessarily nonidentitarian iconography of the future he inscribes (which also returns us to my first proposed
modification, the distinction between futurism and reproductive futurism). The queer as homosexual and the Child as historical child may be
concrete, daily exemplars of (certain ubiquitous if not exclusive versions of) heteronormativity. However, understood as a specific
form of a more generalized futurist logic, it becomes clear that the child cannot simply be equated with
reproduction, child-bearing, and child-rearing, just as the queer cannot simply mean homosexual in
Edelmans temporal sense. The child, along with the queer, is a crucial space for political and historical concretization of Edelmans
radical but otherwise unduly narrow political project. Puar: Terrorism, Homonationalism, and US Sexual Exceptionalism The HRCs language
of nationhood and the non-exclusivity of the child as futurist icon are the places to begin pushing
Edelmans queer theory toward an explicit engagement with the politics of race, nation, and US empire .
For Solmoneses statement is not simply the rhetoric of reproductive futurism. It is also the language of homonationalism, a term Jasbir Puar has
coined to document the transition under way in how queer subjects are relating to nation-states , particularly the
United States, from being figures of death (in other words, the AIDS epidemic) to becoming tied to ideas of life and
productivity (in other words, gay marriage and families).36 Homonationalism is an abbreviated combination of the words
homonormative and nationalism, the former term borrowed from Lisa Duggan, who describes the new homonormativity as a political
realignment of the late 1990s/early 2000s in which gay rights became compatible with certain neoliberal, anti-statist, conservative, American
nationalist viewpoints.37 Combining homonormativity with nationalism, then, Puar augments Nyongos critique, arguing that the
assimilation of certain gay and lesbian subjects into the mainstream of American normalcy, respectability, and
citizenship has entailed the fleeting sanctioning of a national homosexual subject 38 who is complicit
with heterosexual nationalist formations rather than inherently or automatically excluded from or opposed to
them.39 One effect of homonationalism in the post-9/11 context of the War on Terror is the perverse sexualization or
queering of Arabs and Muslims (and all those held to be such) in the figure of the terrorist, a figure of
monstrosity, excess, savagery, and perversion. To be clear, Puar is not suggesting that the terrorist is the new queer. Rather, she is arguing
that queerness is always already installed in the project of naming the terrorist; the terrorist does not appear as such without the concurrent
entrance of perversion, deviance.40 Neither an identity nor a defining behavioral activity (for example, homosexuality), Puar
elaborates
queerness as a biopolitical tactic that functions to define and divide populations through processes of
racialization, a management of queer life at the expense of sexually and racially perverse death in
relation to the contemporary politics of securitization, Orientalism, terrorism, torture, and the
articulation of Muslim, Arab, Sikh, and South Asian sexualities .41 In this view, the contemporary U.S. heteronormative
nation actually relies on and benefits from the proliferation of queerness.42 Homonationalism, as a biopolitics of queerness,
functions to discipline and (re)produce homosexuality as white, American, patriotic, and upwardly
mobile while designating people of color, immigrants, and Arabs and Muslims as both heterosexual and
yet dangerously queeras terrorists or failed and perverse bodies that always have femininity as their reference point of
malfunction, and are metonymically tied to all sorts of pathologies of the mind and bodyhomosexuality, incest, pedophilia, madness, and
disease.43 As is evident, queerness in Puars account veers from any simple conflation with gay and lesbian subjectivity; as she says, Race,
ethnicity, nation, gender, class, and sexuality disaggregate gay, homosexual, and queer national subjects
who align themselves with U.S. imperial interests from forms of illegitimate queerness that name and
ultimately propel populations into extinction. 44 The happily married couples that populate the HRCs literature and website, then,
13
K Lab Adam Pease

would be the homonational, or properly queer; the monster terrorist fag abjected into existence through torture at Abu Ghraib or Guanta
namo, detained indefinitely in any of the USs many illegal prisons, surveilled incessantly in mosques and cafes, and stigmatized as suffering
from arrested development by the psychologizing literature of security studies, would be the improperly queer.45 Puars
point is that
these queernesses go together and require one another, much as , I think, Edelman can be seen to be
arguing that the child and the queer go together and require one another. What Puar concretizes, however, in
theorizing queerness as a process of racialization46 is not simply the analytic point that queer and homosexual are distinct but, more
importantly, the urgently political point that the abjected or improper queer who stands outside the social order and is in effect antagonistic to
it is, in this contemporary moment, much more likely to be a Muslim or someone perceived as looking like a Muslim to the American gaze
than, let us admit it, the newly engaged same-sex couples thronging state houses in Minnesota, Connecticut, and Colorado (much less the
homosexual figure of queerness in No Future). Understanding
queerness as a process of nationalization and
racialization also concretizes and expands the understanding of heteronormativity or , in Edelmans words,
the future. For the terrorist in Puars analysis resists or denies a future that is symbolized and defined not
only or simply by the child, but also by the American nation and secular Christianity . As she says, In the political
imagination, the terrorist serves as the monstrous excess of the nation-state.47 Post-9/11, Puar notes that this terrorist threat is undeniably
linked with Islam, which often serves as its explanation.48 As she observes, Islam signifies, to the ostensibly secular and modern US, both
excess and savagery: Religious belief is thus cast, in relation to other factors fueling terrorism, as the overflow, the final excess that impels
monstrositythe different attitude toward violence signaling these uncivilizable forces.49 Puars
reading suggests that Islam
threatens the futurist temporality of American empire. Cast as retrograde, backward, and frozen in pre-
modern religiosity, Islam threatens the progress narrative of US imperial wars which are alleged to bring
ever-greater freedom, not only to women and homosexuals, but also to uncivilized, savage, and
undemocratic people(s) and nations around the world.50 Finally, then, it is important to note that as Islam has been queered or come
to signify queerness, it does so in two ways: first, through the phobic association of Islam with terrorism; and, second, through the racist and
Orientalist conflation of Islam with homophobia, anti-feminism, and sexual backwardness more generally. Putting Puars analysis in an Edelman-
esque frame, we might say that the figure of the terrorist who threatens national goals, progress, hopeindeed, the nations very existence
can be cast as the excessive, anti-social, future-denying figure of the queer in Edelman. Or, we might say that just as the domain of normativity
has expanded to include some gay people, correspondingly, the domain of (inassimilable) queerness also has shifted. Puars analysis of the
collusion between homosexuality and U.S. nationalism51 as producing two figures, the homonormative patriot and the queer terrorist, notes
them as, on the one hand, the embodiment and normative achievement of the social order and, on the other hand, the dissolution and
destruction of that social order.52 No longer designating the homosexual per se, queer names the monstrously raced and perversely
sexualized Arab/Muslim/terrorist Other that threatens the American social and political order, an order that (some) properly gay and lesbian
subjects can now, through their incorporation into normative American national life, inhabit and reproduce. In sum, we have a theorization of
queer wherein the sexually backward Muslim is led by the irrationality and violence of her/his religion to annihilate those who serve and
protect freedom for all. In this analysis of the sexually exceptional homonational and its evil counterpart, the queer terrorist of elsewhere,53
the terrorist is to the HRC what, in Edelmans analysis, the queer is to the child.54 Edelman and Puar: Theorizing Resistance Puars
theorization of homonationalism is a significant contribution to queer theory and an essential corrective to Edelmans otherwise
historically and racially unmarked analysis of (reproductive) futurism . Her work allows us to critique futurism in ways that are
responsive to the specificities of its racial and national workings, consequences gapingly unattended to by him. While Edelman deftly parses the
logic of power in terms of futurisms hegemony, he fails fully to unpack its coercive force by focusing solely on futurisms relationship to an
exceedingly narrow version of non-reproductive homosexuality. Although he claims that the theory of politics he explicates in No Future is
indifferent to race, arguing that the fascism of the babys face ... subjects us to its sovereign authority as the figure of politics itself ... whatever
the face a particular politics gives that baby to wear Aryan or multicultural, that of the thirty-thousand-year Reich or of an ever expanding
horizon of democratic inclusivity,55 what is clear is that the reproductive futurism he critiques is symptomatic of a very specific bourgeois class
culture within the imperial US, a culture that garners his criticism only insofar as it is bound up with heteronormativity.56 By contrast, Puars
demand that we focus our attention on the racial and nationalized logics of queerness(es) and the unexpected complicities between queers,
nationalism, and empire remains only suggestive of futurisms determinative role, never naming it specifically. Now, this is likely because Puar
neither endorses nor conceptualizes futurism as a useful diagnosis of modern politics, just as Edelman may very much wish to privilege (white
male homo) sexuality in his psychoanalysis of futurism. However, I suggest that authorial intentionsboth Puars and Edelmansbe
respectfully disregarded, not only because we have become savvy to the multiple begged questions inherent in any invocation of authorial
intention, but also because more than our scholarly work is at stake when it comes to forging critical resistance to US imperial power. Indeed,
while the net effect of Edelmans analysis is that only white gay men are considered the deathly threat portended by queerness in No Future, 57
if we return to his definition of queer and insist on distinguishing between futurism and reproductive futurism, we note that queer
designates anyone who fails to abide by the rules of social temporality that is, anyone who sacrifices the
future for the sake of the present . As such, futurisms ruthless machinations stigmatize all sorts of
populations as emblematic of the death and destruction of the social order. This broad array of misfits and
perverts may include some gay, lesbian, and queer people. It necessarily also includes the terrorist and Muslim whom Puar argues are
biopolitical targets of abjected queerness. This analysis also suggests that temporality is a crucial axis of determination
14
K Lab Adam Pease

regarding all enemies of the social order, a notion that links Edelmans political theory to other important work in radical
queer politics. For example, in her definitive essay, Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?, Cathy
Cohen argues for a re-thinking of marginal positionality in terms of ones relation to power rather than in terms of a binary categorization of
queer vs straight. She cites the examples of the prohibition of slave marriages and the long history of obsession with black womens
reproductive choices in the US as examples of ostensibly heterosexual people inhabiting positions outside the bounds of normative sexuality
because of race, class, and property status. In arguing for a more capacious, intersectional queer politics that is accountable not simply to the
question of who is and is not heterosexual but, more broadly, to the question of what each of our relationships with and proximity to power
may be, Cohen writes: As we stand on the verge of watching those in power dismantle the welfare system through a process of demonizing the
poor and youngprimarily poor and young women of color, many of whom have existed for their entire lives outside the white, middle-class
heterosexual normwe have to ask if these women do not fit into societys categories of marginal, deviant, and queer. As we watch the
explosion of prison construction and the disproportionate incarceration rates of young men and women of color, often as part of the economic
development of poor white rural communities, we have to ask if these individuals do not fit societys definition of queer and expendable.
Cohens understanding of queer as a kind of non- or anti-normativity based on ones proximity to
power might also be understood in terms of futurism and its flouting by deviants. For, if the key
characteristic of queerness is a temporal one, then having too many babies is just as much a threat to
Americas future as not having any at allit just depends on which queers we are talking about (not only
Reagans welfare queen, but also recall the manufactured election-year discourse about anchor babies).59 Naming these explicitly makes
futurism a useful tool to diagnose the contemporary political moment from a radical queer perspective that does not fetishize sexuality as either
the primary domain of subordination or the sole focus of political struggle and resistance.
Such a refusal of chaos and attempt at fulfilling the lack causes never-
ending queer violence
Sedgwick 8 (Eve, Professor of English at Duke University, Epistemology of the Closet,
second revised edition, California at Berkeley Press, p. 127-130)
From at least the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, scenarios
of same-sex desire would seem to have had a
privileged, though by no means an exclusive, relation in Western culture to scenarios of both
genocide and omnicide. That sodomy, the name by which homosexual acts are known even today to the law of half of the United States
and to the Supreme Court of all of them, should already be inscribed with the name of a site of mass extermination is the appropriate trace of a double
In the first place there is a history of the mortal suppression, legal or subjudicial, of gay
history.
acts and gay people, through burning, hounding, physical and chemical castration,
concentration camps, bashingthe array of sanctioned fatalities that Louis Crompton records under the name of gay genocide, and
whose supposed eugenic motive becomes only the more colorable with the emergence of a distinct, naturalized minority identity in the nineteenth
In the second place, though, there is the inveterate topos of associating gay acts or persons
century.
with fatalities vastly broader than their own extent: if it is ambiguous whether every denizen of the obliterated Sodom was
a sodomite, clearly not every Roman of the late Empire can have been so, despite Gibbon's connecting the eclipse of the whole people to the habits of a
few. Following both Gibbon and the Bible, moreover, with an impetus borrowed from Darwin, one of the few areas of agreement among modern
Marxist, Nazi, and liberal capitalist ideologies is that there is a peculiarly close, though never precisely defined, affinity between same-sex desire and
some historical condition of moribundity, called "decadence," to which not individuals or minorities but whole civilizations are subject. Bloodletting
on a scale more massive by orders of magnitude than any gay minority presence in the culture is the "cure," if cure there be, to the mortal illness of
decadence.If a fantasy trajectory, utopian in its own terms, toward gay genocide has been endemic in Western
culture from its origins, then, it may also have been true that the trajectory toward gay genocide was
never clearly distinguishable from a broader, apocalyptic trajectory toward something
approaching omnicide. The deadlock of the past century between minoritizing and universalizing understandings of
homo/heterosexual definition can only have deepened this fatal bond in the heterosexist
imaginaire. In our culture as in Billy Budd, the phobic narrative trajectory toward imagining a time after the
homosexual is finally inseparable from that toward imagining a time after the human; in the wake of
the homosexual, the wake incessantly produced since first there were homosexuals, every human relation is pulled into its
shining representational furrow. Fragments of visions of a time after the homosexual are, of course, currently in dizzying circulation
in our culture. One of the many dangerous ways that AIDS discourse seems to ratify and amplify preinscribed homophobic mythologies is in its
pseudo-evolutionary presentation of male homosexuality as a stage doomed to extinction (read, a phase the species is going through) on the enormous
scale of whole populations. 26 The lineaments of openly genocidal malice behind this fantasy appear only occasionally in the respectable media, though
they can be glimpsed even there behind the poker-face mask of our national experiment in laissez-faire medicine. A better, if still deodorized, whiff of
that malice comes from the famous pronouncement of Pat Robertson: "AIDS is God's way of weeding his garden." The saccharine luster this dictum
gives to its vision of devastation, and the ruthless prurience with which it misattributes its own agency, cover a more fundamental contradiction: that,
to rationalize complacent glee at a spectacle of what is imagined as genocide, a proto-Darwinian process of natural selection is being invokedin the
15
K Lab Adam Pease

context of a Christian fundamentalism that is not only antievolutionist but recklessly oriented toward universal apocalypse. A similar phenomenon,
also too terrible to be noted as a mere irony, is how evenly our culture's phobia about HIV-positive blood is kept pace with by its rage for keeping that
dangerous blood in broad, continuous circulation. This is evidenced in projects for universal testing, and in the needle-sharing implicit in William
Buckley's now ineradicable fantasy of tattooing HIV-positive persons. But most immediately and pervasively it is evidenced in the literal bloodbaths
that seem to make the point of the AIDS-related resurgence in violent bashings of gays--which, unlike the gun violence otherwise ubiquitous in this
It
culture, are characteristically done with two-by-fours, baseball bats, and fists, in the most literal-minded conceivable form of body-fluid contact.
might be worth making explicit that the use of evolutionary thinking in the current wave of
utopian/genocidal fantasy is, whatever else it may be, crazy . Unless one believes, first of all, that same-sex object-
choice across history and across cultures is one thing with one cause, and, second, that its one cause is direct transmission through a nonrecessive
genetic path--which would be, to put it gently, counter-intuitive--there is no warrant for imagining that gay populations, even of men, in post-AIDS
generations will be in the slightest degree diminished. Exactly to the degree that AIDS is a gay disease, it's a tragedy confined to our generation; the
long-term demographic depredations of the disease will fall, to the contrary, on groups, many themselves direly endangered, that are reproduced by
direct heterosexual transmission. Unlike genocide directed against Jews, Native Americans, Africans, or
other groups, then, gay genocide, the once-and-for-all eradication of gay populations, however potent
and sustained as a project or fantasy of modern Western culture, is not possible short of the eradication of the whole
human species. The impulse of the species toward its own eradication must not either, however,
be underestimated. Neither must the profundity with which that omnicidal impulse is
entangled with the modern problematic of the homosexual: the double bind of definition between the homosexual,
say, as a distinct risk group, and the homosexual as a potential of representation within the universal. 27 As gay community and the solidarity and
how can it
visibility of gays as a minority population are being consolidated and tempered in the forge of this specularized terror and suffering,
fail to be all the more necessary that the avenues of recognition, desire, and thought between
minority potentials and universalizing ones be opened and opened and opened?
Heteronormative overkill seeks to wash queer bodies out of history. Gratuitous

violence is fundamentally subject defining and constitutes the role of Homo Sacer in
liberal democracy.
[Trigger Warning, graphic depiction of violence in card]
Stanley 11
Eric Stanley, Near Life, Queer Death: Overkill and Ontological Capture Social Text, 107, 2011,
Killing Time
He was my sonmy daughter. It didnt matter which. He was a sweet kid, Lauryn Paiges mother, trying to reconcile at once her childs murder
and her childs gender, stated outside an Austin, Texas, courthouse. 24 Lauryn was an eighteen-year-old transwoman who was brutally stabbed
to death. According to Dixie, Lauryns best friend, it was a regular night. The two women had spent the beginning of the evening working it
as sex workers. After Dixie and Lauryn had made about $200 each they decided to call it quits and return to Dixies house, where both lived. On
the walk home, Gamaliel Mireles Coria and Frank Santos picked them up in their white conversion van. Before we got into the van the very first
thing I told them was that we were transsexuals, said Dixie in an interview. 25 After a night of driving around, partying in the van, Dixie got
dropped off at her house. She pleaded for Lauryn to come in with her, but Lauryn said, Girl, let me finish him, so the van took off with Lauryn
still inside. 26 Santos was then dropped off, leaving Lauryn and Coria alone in the van. According to the autopsy report, Travis County medical
examiner Dr. Roberto Bayardo cataloged at least fourteen blows to Lauryns head and more than sixty knife
wounds to her body. The knife wounds were so deep that they almost decapitated her a clear sign of
overkill.
Overkill is a term used to indicate such excessive violence that it pushes a body beyond death. Overkill is
often determined by the postmortem removal of body parts, as with the partial decapitation in the case of Lauryn Paige and the dissection of
Rashawn Brazell. The
temporality of violence, the biological time when the heart stops pushing and pulling
blood, yet the killing is not finished, suggests the aim is not simply the end of a specific life, but the
ending of all queer life. This is the time of queer death, when the utility of violence gives way to the
pleasure in the others mortality. If queers, along with others, approximate nothing, then the task of ending,
16
K Lab Adam Pease

of killing, that which is nothing must go beyond normative times of life and death. In other words, if Lauryn
was dead after the first few stab wounds to the throat, then what do the remaining fifty wounds signify?
The legal theory that is offered to nullify the practice of overkill often functions under the name of the trans- or
gay-panic defense. Both of these defense strategies argue that the murderer became so enraged after the
discovery of either genitalia or someones sexuality they were forced to protect themselves from the
threat of queerness. Estanislao Martinez of Fresno, California, used the trans-panic defense and received a four-
year prison sentence after admittedly stabbing J. Robles, a Latina transwoman, at least twenty times with
a pair of scissors. Importantly, this defense is often used, as in the cases of Robles and Paige, after the murderer has
engaged in some kind of sex with the victim. The logic of the trans-panic defense as an explanation for
overkill, in its gory semiotics, offers us a way of understanding queers as the nothing of Mbembes query .
Overkill names the technologies necessary to do away with that which is already gone. Queers then are
the specters of life whose threat is so unimaginable that one is forced, not simply to murder, but to
push them backward out of time, out of History, and into that which comes before. 27
In thinking the overkill of Paige and Brazell, I return to Mbembes query, But
what does it mean to do violence to what is
nothing?28 This question in its elegant brutality repeats with each case I offer. By resituating this question in the positive,
the something that is more often than not translated as the human is made to appear . Of interest here, the
category of the human assumes generality, yet can only be activated through the specificity of historical and politically located intersection. To
this end, the
human, the something of this query, within the context of the liberal democracy, names
rights-bearing subjects, or those who can stand as subjects before the law. The human, then, makes the
nothing not only possible but necessary. Following this logic, the work of death, of the death that is already
nothing, not quite human, binds the categorical (mis)recognition of humanity. The human, then, resides
in the space of life and under the domain of rights, whereas the queer inhabits the place of
compromised personhood and the zone of death. As perpetual and axiomatic threat to the human, the
queer is the negated double of the subject of liberal democracy.
Understanding the nothing as the unavoidable shadow of the human serves to counter the arguments
that suggest overkill and antiqueer violence at large are a pathological break and that the severe nature
of these killings signals something extreme . In contrast, overkill is precisely not outside of, but is that which
constitutes liberal democracy as such. Overkill then is the proper expression to the riddle of the queer
nothingness. Put another way, the spectacular material-semiotics of overkill should not be read as (only)
individual pathology; these vicious acts must indict the very social worlds of which they are
ambassadors. Overkill is what it means, what it must mean, to do violence to what is nothing.
Notions of preserving some sort of future for our species valorize reproductive,
heterogenital sex, while subordinating queer sex to nothing more than meaningless
acrobatics. This impregnates heterosexuality with the future of signification,
necessitating violence against queerness.
Edelman 2004 (Lee Edelman, Prof. English at Tufts University, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
Drive, 2004, pp. 11-13)
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),
17
K Lab Adam Pease

excludes the very pathos from which the narrator of The Children of Men recoils when comes
upon the nonreproductive pleasures of the mind and senses. For the pathetic quality he
projectively locates in nongenerative 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 of identical to those for which
enjoyment without hope of posterity so peremptorily dismissed legible, that is, as nothing
more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins. How better to
characterize the narrative project of Children of Men itself, which ends, as anyone not born
yesterday surely expects form 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
novels pro-creative ideology: If there is a baby, there is a future, there is redemption. If,
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 the futureless future, laments, with what we must call as straight face, that sex
totally divorced from procreation has to become almost meaninglessly acrobatic? Which is, of
course, to say no more than that sexual practice will 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 meaningfulness: so long, that is, as the
biological fact of heterosexual 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 to 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
Heteronormativity instills a fundamental fear of impurity in society; this amplifies

systemic violence against queerness and places our species on a trajectory towards
omnicide.
Sedwick 1990 (Eve Sedgwick, Professor of English CUNY, Epistemology of the Closet, 1990, pp. 127-
130.)
From at least the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorray, scenarios of same-sex desire would seem
to have had a privileged, though by no means an exclusive, relation in Western culture to
18
K Lab Adam Pease

scenarios of both genocide and omnicide. That sodomy, the name by which homosexual acts are
known even today to the law of half of the United States and to the Supreme Court of all of them,
should already be inscribed with the name of a site of mass extermination is the appropriate
trace of a double history. In the first place there is a history of the mortal suppression, legal or
subjudicial, of gay acts and gay people, through burning, hounding, physical and chemical
castration, concentration camps, bashing--the array of sanctioned fatalities that Louis Crompton
records under the name of gay genocide, and whose supposed eugenic motive becomes only the
more colorable with the emergence of a distinct, naturalized minority identity in the nineteenth
century. In the second place, though, there is the inveterate topos of associating gay acts or
persons with fatalities vastly broader than their own extent: if it is ambiguous whether every
denizen of the obliterated Sodom was a sodomite, clearly not every Roman of the late Empire can
have been so, despite Gibbon's connecting the eclipse of the whole people to the habits of a few.
Following both Gibbon and the Bible, moreover, with an impetus borrowed from Darwin, one of
the few areas of agreement among modern Marxist, Nazi, and liberal capitalist ideologies is that
there is a peculiarly close, though never precisely defined, affinity between same-sex desire and
some historical condition of moribundity, called "decadence," to which not individuals or
minorities but whole civilizations are subject. Bloodletting on a scale more massive by orders of
magnitude than any gay minority presence in the culture is the "cure," if cure there be, to the
mortal illness of decadence. If a fantasy trajectory, utopian in its own terms, toward gay
genocide has been endemic in Western culture from its origins, then, it may also have been true
that the trajectory toward gay genocide was never clearly distinguishable from a broader,
apocalyptic trajectory toward something approaching omnicide. The deadlock of the past
century between minoritizing and universalizing understandings of homo/heterosexual definition
can only have deepened this fatal bond in the heterosexist *imaginaire*. In our culture as in *Billy
Bud*, the phobic narrative trajectory toward imagining a time *after the homosexual* is finally
inseparable from that toward imagining a time *after the human*; in the wake of the
homosexual, the wake incessantly produced since first there *were* homosexuals, every human
relation is pulled into its shining representational furrow. Fragments of visions of a time *after the
homosexual* are, of course, currently in dizzying circulation in our culture [book published in 1990
-Alec]. One of the many dangerous ways that AIDS discourse seems to ratify and amplify
preinscribed homophobic mythologies is in its pseudo-evolutionary presentation of male
homosexuality as a stage doomed to extinction (read, a phase the species is going through) on
the enormous scale of whole populations.26 The lineaments of openly genocidal malice behind
this fantasy appear only occasionally in the respectable media, though they can be glimpsed even
there behind the poker-face mask of our national experiment in laissez-faire medicine. A better, if
still deodorized, whiff of that malice comes from the famous pronouncement of Pat Robertson:
"AIDS is God's way of weeding his garden." The saccharine lustre this dictum gives to its vision of
devastation, and the ruthless prurience with which it misattributes its own agency, cover a more
fundamental contradiction: that, to rationalize complacent glee at a spectacle of what is imagined
as genocide, a proto-Darwinian process of natural selection is being invoked--in the context of a
Christian fundamentalism that is not only antievolutionist but recklessly oriented toward universal
apocalypse. A similar phenomenon, also too terrible to be noted as a mere irony, is how evenly
our culture's phobia about HIV-positive blood is kept pace with by its rage for keeping that
dangerous blood in broad, continuous circulation. This is evidenced in projects for universal
testing, and in the needle-sharing implicit in William Buckley's now ineradicable fantasy of
tattooing HIV-positive persons. But most immediately and pervasively it is evidenced in the
19
K Lab Adam Pease

literal bloodbaths that seem to make the point of the AIDS-related resurgence in violent
bashings of gays--which, unlike the gun violence otherwise ubiquitous in this culture, are
characteristically done with two-by-fours, baseball bats, and fists, in the most literal-minded
conceivable form of body-fluid contact. It might be worth making explicit that the use of
evolutionary thinking in the current wave of utopian/genocidal fantasy is, whatever else it may be,
crazy [sic]. Unless one believes, first of all, that same-sex object-choice across history and across
cultures is *one thing* with *one cause*, and, second, that its one cause is direct transmission
through a nonrecessive genetic path--which would be, to put it gently, counter-intuitive--there is
no warrant for imagining that gay populations, even of men, in post-AIDS generations will be in
the slightest degree diminished. Exactly *to the degree* that AIDS is a gay disease, it's a tragedy
confined to our generation; the long-term demographic depredations of the disease will fall, to
the contrary, on groups, many themselves direly endangered, that are reproduced by direct
heterosexual transmission. Unlike genocide directed against Jews, Native Americans, Africans, or
other groups [the disabled -Alec], then, gay genocide, the once-and-for-all eradication of gay
populations, however potent and sustained as a project or fantasy of modern Western culture,
is not possible short of the eradication of the whole human species. The impulse of the species
toward its own eradication must not either, however, be underestimated. Neither must the
profundity with which that omnicidal impulse in entangled with the modern problematic of the
homosexual: the double bind of definition between the homosexual, say, as a distinct *risk
group*, and the homosexual as a potential of representation within the universal.27 As gay
community and the solidarity and visibility of gays as a minority population are being
consolidated and tempered in the forge of this specularized terror and suffering, how can it fail
to be all the more necessary that the avenues of recognition, desire, and thought between
minority potentials and universalizing ones by opened and opened and opened?
The sacralization of the Child as an idol of reproductive futurism depends on the

sacrifice of the queer. Privileging large scale impacts over the systemic violence
outlined in our criticism is the kind of bankrupt rationale that legitimizes violence in
the first place.
Drive, 2004, pp. 28-31)
Bernard Law, the former cardinal of Boston, mistaking (or maybe understanding too well) the
degree of authority bestowed on him by the signifier of his patronymic, denounced in 1996
proposed legislation giving health care benefits to same-sex partners of municipal employees.
He did so by proclaiming, in a noteworthy instance of piety in the sky, that bestowing such access
to health care would profoundly diminish the marital bond. Society, he opined, has a special
interest in the protection, care and upbringing of children. Because marriage remains the
principal, and the best, framework for the nurture, education and socialization of children, the
state has a special interest in marriage. With this fatal embrace of a futurism so blindly
committed to the figure of the Child that it will justify refusing health care benefits to the adults
that some children become, Law lent his voice to the mortifying mantra of a communal
jouissance that depends on the fetishization of the Child at the expense of whatever such
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fetishization must inescapably queer. Some seven years later, after Law had resigned for his
failure to protect Catholic children from sexual assault by pedophile priests, Pope John Paul II
returned to this theme, condemning state-recognized same-sex unions as parodic versions of
authentic families, based on individual egoism rather than genuine love. Justifying that
condemnation, he observed, Such a caricature has no future and cannot give future to any
society. Queers must respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by
insisting on our equal right to the social orders prerogatives, not only by insisting on our equal
right to the social orders coherence and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the
Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand here anyway in each and every
expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose
name were collectively terrorized; fuck annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent
kid on the Net; fuck laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of symbolic
relations and the future that serves as its prop.
We might like to believe that with patience, with work, with generous contributions to lobbying
groups or generous participation in activist group so generous doses of legal savvy and electoral
sophistication, the future will hold a place for us a place at the political table that wont have to
come at the cost of the places we seek in the bed or the bar or the baths. But there are no queers
in that future as there can be no future for queer, chosen as they are to bear the bad tidings that
there can be no future at all: that the future, as Annies hymn to the hope of Tomorrow
understands, is always / A day / Away. Like the lover son Keats Grecian urn, forever near the
goal of a union theyll never in fact achieve, were held in thrall by a future continually deferred
by time itself, constrained to pursue the dream of a day when today are one. That future is
nothing but kid stuff, reborn each day to screen out the grave that gapes from within the lifeless
letter, luring us into, ensnaring us in, reality's gossamer web. Those queered by the social order
that projects its death drive onto them are no doubt positioned to recognize the structuring
fantasy that so defines them. But they're positioned as well to recognize the irreducibility of that
fantasy and the cost of construing it as contingent to the logic of social organization as such.
Acceding to this figural identification with the undoing of identity, which is also to say with the
disarticulation of social and Symbolic form, might well be described, in John Brenkman's words, as
"politically self-destructive."33 But politics (as the social elaboration of reality) and the self (as
mere prosthesis maintaining the future for the figural Child), are what queerness, again as figure,
necessarily destroys necessarily insofar as this " s e l f " is the agent of reproductive futurism
and this "politics" the means of its promulgation as the order of social reality. But perhaps, as
Lacan's engagement with Antigone in Seminar 7 suggests, political self-destruction inheres in the
only act that counts as one: the act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having
a life. If the fate of the queer is to figure the fate that cuts the thread of futurity, if the jouissance,
the corrosive enjoyment, intrinsic to queer (non)identity annihilates the fetishistic jouissance
that works to consolidate identity by allowing reality to coagulate around its ritual
reproduction, then the only oppositional status to which
our queerness could ever lead would depend on our taking seriously the place of the death
drive we're called on to figure and insisting, against the cult of the Child and the political order it
enforces, that we, as Guy Hocquenghem made clear, are "not the signifier of what might
become a new form of 'social organisation,' " that we do not intend a new politics, a better
society, a brighter tomorrow, since all of these fantasies reproduce the past, through
displacement, in the form of the future. We choose, instead, not to choose the Child, as
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disciplinary image of the Imaginary past or as site of a projective identification with an always
impossible future. The queerness we propose, in Hocquenghem's words, "is unaware of the
passing of generations as stages on the road to better living. It knows nothing about 'sacrifice
now for the sake of future generations' . . . [it] knows that civilisation alone is mortal."34 Even
more: it delights in that mortality as the negation of everything that would define itself,
moralistically, as pro-life. It is we who must bury the subject in the tomb-like hollow of the
signifier, pronouncing at last the words for which we're condemned should we speak them or
not: that m are the advocates of abortion; that the Child as futurity's emblem must die; that the
future is mere repetition and just as lethal as the past. Our queerness has nothing to offer a
Symbolic that lives by denying that nothingness except an insistence on the haunting excess that
this nothingness entails, an insistence on the negativity that pierces the fantasy screen of
futurity, shattering narrative temporality with irony's always explosive force. And so what is
queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us is this willingness to insist
intransitivelyto insist that the future stop here.
The alternative is radical negativity. We perform an analysis of the 1ac

in order to unsettle and dismember the violent assumptions of
hetero-sexist sovereignty that overdetermine the political.
Berlant and Edelman 14 (Lee, Professor of English at Tufts, Laura, Professor of English at
the University of Chicago, Sex, or the Unbearable, Page vii-x, NKF)
The following chapters approach the scene of relationality by focusing on the negativity that can make it so disturbing.
Negativity for us refers to the psychic and social incoherences and divisions , conscious and unconscious
alike, that trouble any totality or fixity of identity. It denotes, that is, the relentless force that unsettles the
fantasy of sovereignty. But its effects, in our view, are not just negative, since negativity unleashes the energy
that allows for the possibility of change. So too nonsovereignty, a term to which well return, invokes the
psychoanalytic notion of the subjects constitutive division that keeps us, as subjects, from fully
knowing or being in control of ourselves and that prompts our misrecognition of our own motives and desires. At the
same time, nonsovereignty invokes a political idiom and tradition, broadly indicating questions of self-control, autonomy, and the
constraints upon them. To encounter ourselves as nonsovereign, we suggest, is to encounter relationality itself, in the psychic, social,
and political senses of the term. For that reason, this book attends to those moments when negativity
disturbs the
presumption of sovereignty by way of an encounter, specifically, an encounter with the estrangement and
intimacy of being in relation. Sex is exemplary in the way it power- fully induces such encounters, but such
encounters exceed those experiences we recognize as sex. These dialogues explore such
encounters while simultaneously recording and performing one. It could be no other way.
Relationality always includes a scenic component, a fantasmatic staging. It puts into play reaction, accommodation, transference,
exchange, and the articulation of narratives. Just what an encounter entails, however, remains for us unresolved. As it must. For an
encounter refers to an episode, an event, its fantasmatic scene, and the myriad misrecogni- tions that inform the encounter and
define its limit. Our various ways of theorizing such encounters with relation shape our different views of the political and affective
consequences of social embeddedness. We are constantly asking, What do our distinctive responses to each
other and our cases tell us about the structural conditions that produce the encounter with
nonsovereignty in the first place? Though the negativity inseparable from the sexual encounter comes to the fore most
insistently in the final chapter of this book, it makes itself felt repeatedly in the dialogues that follow . For en-
counter in all its ambiguity shapes the experience of sex , giving rise to various forms of response, including, as
the first two chapters suggest, optimism and reparativity. We wonder throughout these dialogues whether it is possible to endure the
experience of relation in the absence of optimism for bearing or surmounting what overwhelms us in ourselves and in each other.
Is optimism, in fact, invariably at work in negativity? Or, conversely, is optimism a disavowal of whats unbearable in negativity?
Do we even mean the same thing by optimism? This book attempts to hold such questions steadily in view. Even where we disagree
with each other in the ways that we address them, though, we proceed together through the breaks and divisions that enable
conversation, politics, and the creation of new social forms. Sex, or the Unbearable is thus an experiment in the forms of theo-
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retical production. It proceeds from the belief that dialogue
may permit a powerful approach to negativity,
since dialogue has some of the risk and excitement we confront in the intimate encounter. Not for nothing
does the oed list communication and conversation as the primary meanings of intercourse. In its dialogic structure, then, this
book takes shape as collaboration, argument, and exploration at once .
It belongs to an experimental genre in which
theory, politics, and close textual analysis encounter the pedagogical necessity of responding to
the provocations of otherness. Dialogue commits us to grappling with negativity,
nonsovereignty, and social relation not only as abstract concepts but also as the substance and
condition of our responsesand our responsibilities to each other. Reimagining forms of relation entails imagining
new genres of experience. These chapters try to extend the generic contours of theoretical writing by making exchange, dialogic give-
and-take, a genuine form of encounter. By that we mean that throughout this book we try to attend not only to what we can readily
agree upon but also to what remains opaque or unpersuasive about the others ideas, what threatens to block or stymie us.
frustration, anxiety, becoming defensive, feeling mis- understood: we see
Resistance, miscon- struction,
these as central to our engagement with each other and to our ways of confronting the challenge of negativity and
encounter. Far from construing such responses as failures in the coherence or economy of our dialogues, we consider them indis-
pensable to our efforts to think relationality. An
academic culture in the United States still dominated by the
privilege of the monograph only rarely affords occasions for critics to converse with each other
in print. That may reflect conversations low place in the hierarchy of literary genres . Structurally
determined by interruption, shifts in perspective, metonymic displacements, and the giving up of control, conversation complicates
the prestige of autonomy and the fiction of authorial sovereignty by introducing the unpredictability of moving in relation to
another. One never can know in advance to what ones interlocutor will respond or what turns the conversation may take through
the associations of a single word. We are aware that what were saying here sounds a lot like what we say about sexand that, of
course, is the point. As the book proceeds, the structural resonances among sex, politics, and theory become ever more insistently
the focus of our analysis.
Queer negativity begins at the level of the self and branches out to capture the
apocalyptic moments of destruction wherein the underlying structures of
heteronormative hegemony are disrupted. This isnt a series of sacrifices for some
unassured future, but a commitment to the here and now.
Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism:
The Death Drive and the Human, Published in Queering the Non/Human, 2008, pp 57-58)
What characterises queer apocal(o)ptic/ism? It is queer's relentless questioning of all categorical

imperatives, including the ontology Queer itself. The unremitting desire to undo, disrupt and
make trouble for norms. The recognition that queer is transitory and momentary and thus might
be superseded or become defunct as an interpretative tool at some future date, as well as the
dedication to examining the notion of utility itself. It is queer's commitment to the here and now,
the present, not putting faith in the always postponed future but in making an immediate
intervention. It is the anti-assimilationist bent in queer theory, the activist strain with its refusal
to be defined by or in terms set down by the dominant culture in any given situation. It points to
the fact that queer is brought into being through acts of resistance, the recognition of the
potential futility of resistance because of the norm's propensity for cooption and reinvention,
but the drive towards resistance all the same. It is the trace of queer's investments in
deconstruction and psychoanalysis, the refusal to normative coherence as fantasy and the making
visible of the instability that constitutes any one thing. It characterises queer's dedication to end
things and traumatic events, its commitment to death whether it is the mournful rage of
activists in response to queer deaths arising from suicide, HIV/AIDS or queer bashings; the
theorist's inventiveness to the point of unintelligibility in an attempt to cast off the psychical death
wrought by the identitarian strai(gh)tjacket (Haver 1997), or the anarchic proclamations of death
to the compulsions of heteronormativity. It is the queer embodiment of 'the death-drive, always
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present in any vital process' (Freud 2003/1933, 98). Queer itself is haunted by the death drive,
driven both towards its own 'death' and by the knowledge that it will must - end; towards a
time when it will be either superseded or no longer useful, needed, required, or desired (Butler
1993, 228). Queer apocal(o)ptic/ism also encapsulates the apocalyptic moments at which the
death drive becomes the destruction drive in the service of shattering an imposing illusion
produced as a shifting signifier of heteronormative hegemony. In this, queer apocal(o)ptic/ism
begins at the level of the self. It refers to an unremitting self-interrogation, the constant
production of unease at the level of identification - unsettling the very desire for social
recognition as an identifiable subject in the realisation that 'queer must insist ... on
disturbing ... and on queering ourselves and our investment in [social] organization. For queerness
can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one' (Edelman 2004,17).
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2NC
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2NC Impact Framing / Root Cause
Heteronormativity is the all-encompassing standard of normalization used to discipline

and punish queer bodies, as such, it is the site of on-going systemic violence against
queerness.
Elias et al. 2003 (Karen E. Lovaas PhD, John P. Elia PhD & Gust A. Yep PhD, Professor at San Francisco
University, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, no. 2/3/4, p.18, 2003)
In this passage, Simmons vividly describes the devastating pervasiveness of hatred and violence in
her daily life based on being seen, perceived, labeled, and treated as an Other. This process of
othering creates individuals, groups, and communities that are deemed to be less important, less
worthwhile, less consequential, less authorized, and less human based on historically situated
markers of social formation such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and nationality. Othering
and marginalization are results of an invisible center (Ferguson, 1990, p. 3). The authority,
position, and power of such a center are attained through normalization in an ongoing circular
movement. Normalization is the process of constructing, establishing, producing, and
reproducing a taken-for-granted and all-encompassing standard used to measure goodness,
desirability, morality, rationality, superiority, and a host of other dominant cultural values. As
such, normalization becomes one of the primary instruments of power in modern society
(Foucault, 1978/1990). Normalization is a symbolically, discursively, psychically, psychologically,
and materially violent form of social regulation and control, or as Warner (1993) more simply
puts it, normalization is the site of violence (p. xxvi). Perhaps one of the most powerful forms
of normalization in Western social systems is heteronormativity. Through heteronormative
discourses, abject and abominable bodies, souls, persons, and life forms are created, examined,
and disciplined through current regimes of knowledge and power (Foucault, 1978/1990).
Heteronormativity, as the invisible center and the presumed bedrock of society, is the
quintessential force creating, sustaining, and perpetuating the erasure, marginalization,
disempowerment, and oppression of sexual others.
The affirmatives futuristic focus necessarily isolates conflicts and crises as events, spatially
bounded with beginnings and endings. This myopic focus marginalizes the individuals who
suffer systemic violence every day.
Cuomo 1996 (Chris J. Cuomo 1996, War is not just an event: Reflections on the significance of
everyday violence, 1996, Hypatia, Volume 11, No. 4, pg 1, proquest.)
Philosophical attention to war has typically appeared in the form of justifications for entering into
war, and over appropriate activities within war. The spatial metaphors used to refer to war as a
separate, bounded sphere indicate assumptions that war is a realm of human activity vastly
removed from normal life, or a sort of happening that is appropriately conceived apart from
everyday events in peaceful times. Not surprisingly, most discussions of the political and ethical
dimensions of war discuss war solely as an event--an occurrence, or collection of occurrences,
having clear beginnings and endings that are typically marked by formal, institutional
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declarations. As happenings, wars and military activities can be seen as motivated by identifiable,
if complex, intentions, and directly enacted by individual and collective decision-makers and
agents of states. But many of the questions about war that are of interest to feminists---including
how large-scale, state-sponsored violence affects women and members of other oppressed
groups; how military violence shapes gendered, raced, and nationalistic political realities and
moral imaginations; what such violence consists of and why it persists; how it is related to other
oppressive and violent institutions and hegemonies--cannot be adequately pursued by focusing
on events. These issues are not merely a matter of good or bad intentions and identifiable
decisions.In "Gender and 'Postmodern' War," Robin Schott introduces some of the ways in which
war is currently best seen not as an event but as a presence (Schott 1995). Schott argues that
postmodern understandings of persons, states, and politics, as well as the high-tech nature of
much contemporary warfare and the preponderance of civil and nationalist wars, render an event-
based conception of war inadequate, especially insofar as geer is taken into account. In this essay,
I will expand upon her argument by showing that accounts of war that only focus on events are
impoverished in a number of ways, and therefore feminist consideration of the political, ethical,
and ontological dimensions of war and the possibilities for resistance demand a much more
complicated approach. I take Schott's characterization of war as presence as a point of departure,
though I am not committed to the idea that the constancy of militarism, the fact of its
omnipresence in human experience, and the paucity of an event-based account of war are
exclusive to contemporary postmodern or postcolonial circumstances.1Theory that does not
investigate or even notice the omnipresence of militarism cannot represent or address the
depth and specificity of the everyday effects of militarism on women, on people living in
occupied territories, on members of military institutions, and on the environment. These effects
are relevant to feminists in a number of ways because military practices and institutions help
construct gendered and national identity, and because they justify the destruction of natural
nonhuman entities and communities during peacetime. Lack of attention to these aspects of the
business of making or preventing military violence in an extremely technologized world results
in theory that cannot accommodate the connections among the constant presence of
militarism, declared wars, and other closely related social phenomena, such as nationalistic
glorifications of motherhood, media violence, and current ideological gravitations to military
solutions for social problems.Ethical approaches that do not attend to the ways in which warfare
and military practices are woven into the very fabric of life in twenty-first century technological
states lead to crisis-based politics and analyses. For any feminism that aims to resist oppression
and create alternative social and political options, crisis-based ethics and politics are problematic
because they distract attention from the need for sustained resistance to the enmeshed,
omnipresent systems of domination and oppression that so often function as givens in most
people's lives. Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the absence
of declared armed conflicts is peace, the polar opposite of war. It is particularly easy for those
whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter the
realities of militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an ethical, political
concern only regarding armed conflict, creates forms of resistance to militarism that are merely
exercises in crisis control. Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally
occurs, or when the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not
to respond in ways that make resisters drop all other political priorities. Crisis-driven attention to
declarations of war might actually keep resisters complacent about and complicitous in the
general presence of global militarism. Seeing war as necessarily embedded in constant military
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presence draws attention to the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is happening nearly all
over, all of the time, and that it is perpetrated by military institutions and other militaristic agents
of the state. Moving away from crisis-driven politics and ontologies concerning war and military
violence also enables consideration of relationships among seemingly disparate phenomena,
and therefore can shape more nuanced theoretical and practical forms of resistance. For
example, investigating the ways in which war is part of a presence allows consideration of the
relationships among the events of war and the following: how militarism is a foundational trope
in the social and political imagination; how the pervasive presence and symbolism of
soldiers/warriors/patriots shape meanings of gender; the ways in which threats of state-
sponsored violence are a sometimes invisible/sometimes bold agent of racism, nationalism, and
corporate interests; the fact that vast numbers of communities, cities, and nations are currently
in the midst of excruciatingly violent circumstances. It also provides a lens for considering the
relationships among the various kinds of violence that get labeled "war."
Violence against the queer is reproduced based on a fundamental denial of the death
drive.
The Death Drive and the Human, Published in Queering the Non/Human, 2008, pp 65)
For Edelman, reproductive futurism presents 'an always impossible future' (11), 'a fantasmatic
future' (31) which translates queerness, I think, into heteronormativity's aggressor the Queer
- a repository for displaced feelings of anxiety. This anxiety arises because of the existence of
the death drive within (Klein 1997/1946,4) and the subject's resultant fear of death (Klein
1997/1948, 28, 29); the fear that the future will never arrive or that the subject will not be alive
to experience in it. Thus anxiety arising from the presence of an internal threat (that is, the death
drive) is deflected outwards to become the fear of an external threat (that is, the Queer). This
internal object of fear is displaced onto the Queer who then 'becomes the external
representative of the death instinct' (Klein 1997/1948, 31). Through a denial both of the
existence of the death drive and the social's narcissistic investment in the Child as the wish
fulfilment of its desired immortality, heteronormativity projects the death drive onto the figure
of the Queer who comes to stand in for everything that is considered to be dangerous to the
Child and thus the future. It is my contention that reproductive futurism operates by first
denying the presence of the death drive through the inauguration of a fantasy of self-fulfilment
at the same time that the anxiety of heteronormativity's own internal shortcomings and
disciplining mechanisms are displaced onto the Queer (A. Freud 2000/1937, 69-82). The
instantiation of this fantasy arises, in the words of Anna Freud, because 'the mere struggle of
conflicting impulses suffices to set the defence mechanisms in motion' (69).
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A/T: Permutation
The permutation is a coercive universalization that, through reproductive futurism,
places an ideological limit on queerness. Their intent to set out a teleogical trajectory
of progress will culminate not in the incorporation of our advocacy, but rather in the
eradication of it.
Reproductive futurism imposes, according to Edelman, 'an ideological limit on political discourse
as such, preserving in die process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering
unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this
organizing principle of communal relations' (2). Reproductive futurism absorbs all challenges and
translates them into more of the same. It operates in a similar way to Monique Wittig's concept
of the straight mind in that 'when thought of by the straight mind, homosexuality is nothing but
heterosexuality' (1992,28). Reproductive futurism is a more specific term than heteronormativity
in that it describes the process through which heterosexuality becomes heteronormative.
Heteronormativity is thus a term to describe a conglomerate of effects while reproductive
futurism signifies the process through which such effects are wrought. It is all-encompassing,
operating at the level of ideology so that it sets limits on, not just what we think or do, but also on
what and how we desire. Desire itself becomes reproductive futurism in its 'translation into a
narrative', 'its teleological determination' through politics which 'conforms to the temporality of
desire', 'the inevitable historicity of desire' (Edelman 2004, 9).
Reproductive futurism is, what I call, 'heterocycloptic', bound up with the desiring gaze and the
setting-out of a developmental trajectory of 'progress' moving endlessly towards a 'better'
future, in the process imposing a panopticon like self-surveillance: 'It's a machine in which
everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised'
(Foucault 1980, 156). It is apocalyptic in the sense that desire itself becomes a trap, a disciplining
device in which the norm becomes inextricable from the natural. This technology of power a
'coercive universalization' (Edelman 2004, 11) operates at the level of fantasy and through the
figure of the Child: 'the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come
to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust' (11). In this, the Child
becomes inextricably linked to the future and in turn to politics, and is thus reduced to a trope
delimiting what will get to count as the future in advance. Reproductive futurism I believe
exercises power contradictorily through a web, a net, a grid. It encourages, perhaps
contradictorily, the proliferation of desires - a looking-out as opposed to a gazing-within - in the
service of repressing any conscious self-awareness of the death drive. Reproductive futurism is
therefore, what I term, 'hetero-prophetic' in that it tries to set out programmatically what will
transpire in the future; a future 'endlessly postponed' (13), thus holding the present to ransom.
If it is invested in eschatology, it is only as a veneer to discipline those into enslavement to its
ideals.
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The permutation still links to the critique, queer temporality is an ateological
alternative that is by definition hostile to the chronological organization the
affirmative hopes to combine it with.
Lippert - University Assistant in English and American Studies @ the University of Vienna 2008
(Leopold, Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis, November. [PDF Online @]
othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf) Accessed Accessed 07.02.11 jfs
In Edelmans critique of culture, queerness occupies a temporality that extends no future. On

the contrary, queer times are firmly stuck in the contemporary, a childless realm that harbors
only 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 (Edelman, Future, 13). Detrimental to the futurist regime and its
accompanying principle of social structuring, heteronormativity, the contemporary becomes
the quintessential queer temporality, an odd time axis that opposes chronology and teleology,
and that seems to have, says Edelman, no social purpose whatsoever.
Queerness is the fundamental difference repressed by the Symbolic, the permutation

attempts to tie this difference to its antithesis telos. In other words, the
transformative potential of our kritik is lost when it simply becomes a means to an
end.
Runions 2008 (Erin Runions, specialist in Hebrew bible and gender studies, Queering the Beast: The
Antichrists Gay Wedding, 2008, Publishe din Queering the Non/Human, pp 103-104.)
The apocalyptic logic used to bolster arguments for family values and to write laws against same-sex marriage is
very much like logic that allows for exception to the law and torture. Within the nation, laws protect the human, comprised of
those who correctly desire integration into family, nation and Christian secular humanity. Raw
sex or what is perceived as raw sex - is banished by law. Exceptions to law are made for those who are outside of this eschatological
trajectory, and who therefore must be associated with the hated (yet desired) raw sex. All of this is more than a little depressing, given the deep
entrenchment of these views. So, by way of conclusion, I would like to make a final turn, to try to queer the image of the political enemy as
homosexualised antichrist. Like bare life, and like raw sex, the antichrist is both included and excluded in the political (and religious) symbolic order. I have
shown that this liminal position can pose physical danger to those who are identified as antichrists; but I would also like to explore the resistant potential
for the danger that the antichrist poses to the symbolic order. As I have argued, what has been so potentially threatening about the antichrist for
apocalyptic exegetes through the ages is that he mixes the human and the inhuman, to the degree that they cannot necessarily be told apart. The
antichrist represents both a perverted sexuality and a desire for one-world order. In the antichrist's kingdom, presumably, all humans are lumped together
with the inhuman (the demonic), without attention to religion, national affiliation, gender, or sexuality. Antichristic desire is not confined by borders
(national or otherwise), by categories of difference (human/inhuman). A similar point about queer desire is made with some urgency by Edelman in his
short essay, 'Unstating Desire', which argues against using the language of family or political state/affiliation to describe the queer intellectual enterprise.
He writes, 'Queer theory might better remind us that we are inhabited always by states of desire that exceed our capacity to name them. Every name only
gives those desires confiictual, contradictory, inconsistent, undefined a fictive border' (1994, 345). Antichristic desire confuses identity, transgresses
borders and confounds telos. It is polymorphously perverse. Moreover, the antichrist is deceptive. This danger is what makes the figure of the antichrist so
powerful: he cannot simply be recuperated as another point of identity; his deceptiveness threatens every identity. There is no telling who might be the
antichrist, and whether or not there might be more than one. The antichrist could be anyone (even someone married). The double and separate
identification of the antichrist as political enemy and as gay suggests that the political enemy might not be outside the nation at all, might not even
wield weapons, but might simply desire wild, non-heteronormative, non-teleological sex. Indeed the very capitalist mechanisms (for example, marketing)
that the US strives to protect alongside humanity depend on raw sex. Isn't everything sold through appeal to wildly promiscuous desire, even as the selling
forecloses on desire and attaches it to telos? The uncertainty as to the locus of antichristic desires (domestic or foreign) works against the claims of
empire. While the racialised, Muslim (non-national), homosexualised antichrist is essential to the production of the US's mission to save marriage and
humanity, the inhuman antichrist within the nation troubles the straightforward assessment of the US's relation to being, having and saving universal
humanity (strangely queer already). The deceptive presence of the antichrist within - via raw sex troubles the US's suitability to protect heteronormative
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sex, and with it the family, the nation, humanity and the very concept of the human. Of course, this is precisely why efforts are so strong to ban gay
marriage, as an attempt to rid the nation of raw sex and antichristic desire. The right to protect the future of humanity that is, US hegemony is at
Edelman's use of
stake. The deceptive presence of the antichrist puts the (heteronormative) messianic claims of the US into question. Here
Jacques Lacan to reclaim queerness as the death drive, in No Future, is instructive. Edelman's project is to use
the antisocial impulses of desire to deconstruct the oppressions made in the name of identity . In
his analysis, identity is bound up with teleology, with time and with the future; it is through hopes for the future that identity is given meaning.
Futurity, as he so cuttingly argues, is tied up with the Child 'as the preeminent emblem of the motivating
end' (2004, 13), and therefore with heteronormativity. Queer desire disrupts the future-oriented
trajectory of identity, and with it, the social. Queer desire is oppositional, it embodies
negativity, it disrupts rather than conjoins. Edelman wishes to take queer difference seriously, to
reclaim the proliferation of queer desires, as a negativity that can disrupt identity and the social.
The point is to disrupt 'normativity's singular truth' (2004, 26). In his words, 'queerness attains its ethical
value precisely insofar as it ... accept [s] its figural status as resistance to the viability of the
social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure' (2004, 3).
For Edelman, queerness is that difference that has been repressed in subjects' entry into the
heteronormative symbolic order for the sake of unity and coherence, yet without which difference the subject
could not function. Queerness, like raw sex, and bare life, is both included and excluded from the social order and its exclusion must be mined for its
potential to disrupt the borders of inclusion. Queerness is like the death drive; it is that force emerging from 'the gap or
wound of the Real that inhabits the Symbolic's very cor e' (2004, 22). It moves backward away from the future.
Queerness, like the death drive, 'refuses identity or the absolute privilege of any goal'. It denies
teleology and rejects spiritualization through marriage to reproductive futurism' (2004, 27). It disrupts the
eschatological future that is established by the Child. It is, therefore, what Lee Quinby might call anti-apocalyptic. The figure of political
enemy as queer antichrist embodies the queer function of the death drive. Like queerness, the antichrist is
inimical to the future and its logic of heteronormativity. Like queerness, the figure of the political enemy as queer antichrist is
necessary to the functioning of the system; it is that which allows the machine to move into imperialising place. The queer
enemy as antichrist must be recognised in its role in motivating and enabling the production of US politico-reproductive eschatology as truth. Yet it
stands as a wrench in the system. It threatens to disrupt the future of the family and with it the
future of the nation. Its desire erupts everywhere, anywhere. It threatens to unsettle certainty
about the human, and therefore also certainty of the US mission in the world. The importance
of this role needs to be acknowledged and affirmed, if the 'truth' of US sovereignty is to be
contested. The role of the political enemy as queer antichrist ought not to be repudiated.
Acceptance and valorisation of this figure's disruption of national eschatology might assist in
what Edelman calls, '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 to us, by way of the Child, to the
politics of reproduction' (2004, 27). The antichrist disrupts meaning through the proliferation of uncontainable desires (called
perverse), and through deception. The antichrist demonstrates what post-structuralism has been insisting: meaning may not be what it seems. The queer
antichrist defies certainty.
Incorporation of queerness into prescribed economies of signification is an act of

domestication that denies queerness its transformative potential.
Huffer, 2010. (Lynne, Prof of Womens Studies at Emory. Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations
of Queer Theory. Pg.1)
But somehow, over the years, the queer has become a figure who has lost her generative
promise. She turned in on herself and became fro zen into a new, very American identity. And if
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the transformation itself is to be celebrated, the final freezing is not. Getting stuck in identities
that are often politically or medically engineered, the queer is drained of her transformative,
contestatory power. This is where History of Madness can help us, as the story of a split that
produced the queer. Not only a diagnosis of the great division between reason and unreason,
Madness is also a contestation of that division's despotic "structure of refusal... on the basis of
which a discourse is denounced as not being a language [and] as having no rightful place in
history. This structure is constitutive of what is sense and nonsense" (M xxxii).
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A/T: Framework
We should use the academic setting to facilitate change, rather than roleplaying as
policymakers we should take this chance to challenge the heteronormative structures
that pervade the Academy.
Elias 2003 (John Elias, Professor at San Francisco University, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, no.
2/3/4, p. 64, 2003)
Akin to organized religion and the biomedical field, the educational system has been a major
offender. Wedded to disseminating the idea that heterosexuality is the ultimate and best form
of sexuality, Schools have maintained, by social custom and with reinforcement from the law,
the promotion of the heterosexual family as predominant, and therefore the essence of normal.
From having been presumed to be normal, heterosexual behavior has gained status as the right,
good, and ideal lifestyle (Leck, 1999, p. 259). School culture in general is fraught with
heteronormativity. Our society has long viewed queer sexualities as . . . deviant, sinful, or both,
and our schools are populated by adolescent peers and adult educators who share these
heterosexual values (Ginsberg, 1999, p. 55). Simply put, heteronormativity and sexual prejudice
pervade the curriculum at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels (for examples
of this and ways of intervening, see: Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 1997; Letts & Sears, 1999; Lovaas,
Baroudi, & Collins, 2002; Yep, 2002). Besides the hegemonic hold schools have had regarding a
heterosexual bias, school culture continues to devote much energy to maintaining . . . the
status quo of our dominant social institutions, which are hierarchical, authoritarian, and
unequal, competitive, racist, sexist, and homophobic (Arnstine, 1995, p. 183). While there has
been modest success in addressing various forms of prejudice in schools (Kumashiro, 2001), what
is sorely lacking is serious attention to how the intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender
are interwoven and dialectically create prejudice (e.g., racism, classism, and hetero[sexism]).
Schools would be an ideal site to interrogate, and begin to erode, the kind of hegemony upon
which heterosexism rests and is supported. To date, not much is being done in a systematic
fashion to disrupt the ways in which U.S. schooling has perpetuated such hierarchies. It seems to
me that sexuality education is ripe for the opportunity to challenge heterosexism in school
culture; however, public school-based sexuality education is presently in serious crisis, as it has
turned mostly to the business of pushing for abstinence- only sexuality education. According to
federal legislation, states that accept funding for this form of sexuality education require that
young people are taught to abstain from sexual activity until they get married. This has numerous
implications for relationship construction; a more in-depth description and analysis of this form of
sexuality education will follow later in this essay.
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A/T: Nihilism
Our argument is not nihilistic, it is apocalyptic. Our embrace of the death drive is a
subversive blow against the system that ruptures the assumed coherence of
reproductive futurism.
Many readers have found Edelman's argument to be oppressively nihilistic; however, he does not
speak of self-destruction in the sense of suicide or organic nothingness, but rather as a refusal
to submit to the disciplining of fantasy in the service of reproductive futurism: 'political self-
destruction inheres in the only act that counts as one: the act of resisting enslavement to the
future in the name of having a life' (30).10 In response to those who insist that No Future is a
stagnant and stagnating force, I offer Jonathan Dollimore's remark that 'death is not simply the
termination of life ... but life's driving force, its animating, dynamic principle' (1998, 192).
Edelman's rejection of 'the future [as] mere repetition and just as lethal as the past', coupled
with his insistence that 'the future stop here' (2004, 31), demonstrates for me his commitment
to the 'queer and now' in his formulation of queerness. This attendance to the fleetingness of the
queer moment without an investment in the future, this acceptance of the death drive is not a
death wish, a desire for annihilation but rather a loosening of futurity's strangulating grip, an
attempt to exercise agency in a world that offers but its spectre. In the words of Jacques Derrida:
'To learn to live means to learn to die, to take into account, to accept complete mortality
(without salvation, resurrection, or redemption - neither for oneself nor for any other person)'
(2004).
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A/T: Essentialism
Our analysis is not a universalization but rather a genealogy of how power has used
the Child to valorize reproductive futurity. This kind of Foucauldian analysis is the only
way idols of normalization can be challenged.
In their introduction to Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, Steven Bruhm and Natasha
Hurley respond to what they see as Edelman's setting-up of the Child as 'the anti-queer' with the
view that 'queerness inheres instead in innocence run amok' (2004, xiv). Edelman's treatment of
the Child has been denounced by those who see him as flattening out the category and
universalising one such usage of its figural status, without taking account of the fluctuating
contours of that category over time. Edelman's analysis is not a historical one, but a genealogical
meditation on how the Child has come to be signified as natural and the marker of the future to
which everyone must bow, 'the prop of the secular theology on which our social reality rests'
(2004, 12). Edelman follows the lead of others such as Michel Foucault (1978/1976) and Judith
Butler (1990) in interrogating how the Child, politics and the future have become entangled to
such an extent that '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' (Edelman 2004,11). No
Future works to denaturalise this myth. In his work on sexuality, Foucault traces the ways in
which power works through technique and normalisation rather than repression or interdiction
(1978/76, 89). Edelman shows that a similar thing is in place with respect to the future in which
'a notional freedom' stands in for 'the actuality of freedom' (2004, 11) in the heterocycloptic
gaze unblinkingly directed towards the chimera of the future. Reproductive futurism fixates on
the future as fetish so the Child becomes but a means to an end; a prosthetic conduit through
which access to the future can be achieved.
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Alt
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Alternative = Sinthomosexuality
Our alternative is sinthomosexuality: This is a coupling of Lacans notion of the
symptom, the small slice of abject failure in the knot holding the Symbolic, the
Imaginary, and the Real together, along with the body of the queer, figured under
heteronormativity. Sinthomosexuality lays bare reproductive futurism through the
continual projection and ascription of the negativity associated with the queer as the
death knell of the future.
The sinthomosexual represents, according to Edelman, 'the wholly impossible ethical act'
(2004,101) to which queerness is called forth to occupy, 'the place of meaninglessness ...
unregenerate, and unregenerating, sexuality' (47). A fusion of Jacques Lacan's idea of the
sinthome, 'which ... is meant to take place at the very spot where, say, the trace of the knot goes
wrong' (Lacan; quoted in Ettinger 2006, 60) and the figuration of the Homosexual within
heteronormativity, sinthomosexuality represents both the failure of heteronormativity while
also facilitating its continuation - however imperfectly and incomplete. As Bracha L. Ettinger
writes in relation to the sinthdme-. it is 'a kind of trace of a failure in the knot that holds the
Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real together' (59). While heteronormativity claims that
queerness is stagnant and useless, I contend it is anything but: queerness is profoundly useful to
heteronormativity because in order to function, heteronormativity needs its Queers to project
negativity onto while relying on its reformed sinthomosexual Other, homonormativity to facilitate
its smooth operation.
Edelman's appeal to forgo meaning, to scorn utility and occupy a space of unassimilable
jouissancen is, I maintain, in line with the thinking of Georges Bataille who rejects the notion of
transgression because it often simply reifies the norm against which it acts: 'There exists no
prohibition that cannot be transgressed. Often the transgression is permitted, often it is even
prescribed' (1986/1957, 63). Instead, Bataille locates his analysis at the level of utility and thus
productivity, what Shannon Winnubst calls 'this fundamental logic of utility at the heart of
sexuality' (2007, 85). Bataille's work concentrates on the way in which eroticism has been
reduced through normalisation to sexualitv in a similar way that Edelman, I propose, comments
on the disciplining of sexuality by turning it into reproductive futurism. By figuring the death
drive, queerness makes visible the uselessness of all sexualities, lays bare reproductive futurism as
fantasy and while embodying the negativity that the social has conferred on it, refuses to facilitate
its continuation. Winnubst writes of 'the horror of uselessness' which comes to signify what it
means to be 'properlv human' (85), setting out how queering should engage in 'activities that ate.
going nowhere', 'acts or pleasures that offer no clear or useful meaning' (90, 91), in an effort to
reconfigure the societal obsession with teleology. Edelman writes of the 'inhumanity' of the
sinthomosexual (2004, 109) as a way of challenging the normalising strictures of the Human.
Describing the sinthomosexual as 'anti- Promethean' (108) devoid of the desire for self-
actualisation through object choice, Edelman offers, I believe, one way in which this 'word
without a future (33) queers the Human. This apocalyptic gesture - read here as a cathartic
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letting-go of the rules governing self-actualisation - puts pressure on the desire for
recognition,12 on the very teleology of desire itself in the acceptance of the fact that
recognition depends on the desire of another, one who in the case of reproductive futurism,
may withhold at any time the 'Humanising' gaze from those marked out as Queer.
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Alternative = Unintelligibility
Our alternative is queer unintelligibility: This is an enforced invisibility that resists the
catachresis of the Symbolic that imposes identity on lack in a neurotic attempt to map
out the blind spots in the social order.
Drive, 2004, pp. 106-109)
And since nothing is ever less "aberrant, [or] unprecedented" than the "future," which functions
as the literal end toward which Antigone's Claim proceeds, we should not be surprised that the
phrase itself reiterates, rather than rearticulates, an earlier use of the term. In the course of
responding to Lacan's account of Antigone's "death-driven movement" across the barrier of the
Symbolic, Butler identifies exactly what the "duty imposed by the symbolic is," and she does so by
quoting Lacan: " 'to transmit the chain of discourse in aberrant form to someone else'" (52). With
this Antigone's "aberrant... future" proves orthodox after all. Undermining its claim to be aberrant
and unprecedented at once, it transmits, in the requisite aberrant form, as futurity always
demandsin the form, that is, whose aberrant quality is therefore anything but and whose future
repeats its precedents precisely by virtue of being "unprecedented" the Symbolic chain of
discourse, in which, as everyone knows (and this, of course, is precisely what everyone knows),
intelligibility must always take place. But what if it didn't? What if Antigone, along with all those
doomed to ontological suspension on account of their unrecognizable and, in consequence,
"unlivable" loves, declined intelligibility, declined to bring herself, catachrestically, into the ambit
of future meaningor declined, more exactly, to cast off the meaning that clings to those social
identities that intelligibility abjects: their meaning as names for the meaning-lessness the
Symbolic order requires as a result of the catachresis that posits meaning to begin with. Those
figures, sinthomosexuals, could not bring the Symbolic order to crisis since they only emerge, in
abjection, to support the emergence of Symbolic form, to metaphorize and enact the traumatic
violence of signification whose meaning-effacing energies , released by the cut that articulates
meaning, the Symbolic order constantly must exert itself to bind. Unlike Butler's Anti gone,
though, suck sinthomosexuals would insist on the unintelligible's unintelligibility, on the internal
limit to signification and the impossibility of turning Real loss to meaningful profit in the
Symbolic without its persistent remainder the inescapable Real of the drive. As embodiments of
unintelligibility, of course, they must veil what they expose, becoming, as figures for it, the
means of its apparent subjection to meaning. But where Butler's Antigone conduces to futurism's
logic of intelligibility by seeking no more than to widen the reach of what it allows us to grasp,
where she moves, by way of the future, toward the ongoing legitimation of social form through
the recognition that is said to afford "ontological certainty and durability," sinthomosexuality,
though destined, of course, to be claimed for intelligibility, consents to the logic that makes it a
figure for what meaning can never grasp. Demeaned, it embraces de-meaning as the endless
insistence of the Real that the Symbolic can never master for meaning now or in the "future."
That "never," Butler would argue, performs the law's instantiation, which always attempts to
impose, as she puts it, "a limit to the social, the subversive, the possibility of agency and change,
a limit that we cling to, symptomatically, as the final defeat of our own power" (21). Committed
as she is to intelligibility as the expanding horizon of social justice, Butler would affirm "our own
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power" to rearticulate, by means of catachresis, the laws responsible for what she aptly calls
our "moralized sexual horror" (71). Such a rearticulation, she claims, would proceed through "the
repeated scandal by which the unspeakable nevertheless makes itself heard through borrowing
and exploiting the very terms that are meant to enforce its silence" (78). This, of course, assumes
that "the unspeakable" intends, above all else, to speak, whereas Lacan maintains, as Copjec
reminds us, something radically different: that sex, as "the structural incompleteness of language"
is "that which does not communicate itself, that which marks the subject as unknowable."53 No
doubt, as Butler helps us to see, the norms of the social order do, in fact, change through
catachresis, and those who once were persecuted as figures of "moralized sexual horror" may
trade their chill and silent tombs for a place on the public stage. But that redistribution of social
roles doesn't stop the cultural production of figures, sinthomosexuals all, to bear the burden of
embodying such a "moralized sexual horror." For that horror itself survives the fungible figures
that flesh it out insofar as it responds to something in sex that's inherently unspeakable: the
Real of sexual difference, the lack that launches the living being into the empty arms of futurity.
This, to quote from Copjec again, "is the meaning, when all is said and done, of Lacan's notorious
assertion that 'there is no sexual relation': sex, in opposing itself to sense, is also, by definition,
opposed to relation, to communication."54 From that limit of intelligibility, from that lack in
communication, there flows, like blood from an open wound, a steady stream of figures that
mean to embodyand thus to fillthat lack, that would stanch intelligibility's wound, like the
clotting factor in blood, by binding it to, encrusting it in, Imaginary form. Though bound therefore
to be, on the model of Whitman, the binder of wounds, the sinthomosexual, anti-Promethean,
unbound, unbinds us all. Or rather, persists as the figure for such a generalized unbinding by which
the death drive expresses at once the impossible excess and the absolute limit both of and within
the Symbolic. On the face of Mount Rushmore, as he faces the void to which he himself offers a
face, Leonard gestures toward such an unbinding by committing himself to the sinthomosexuaPs
impossible ethical act: by standing resolutely at, and on, and/or that absolute limit. Alenka
Zupancic, in Ethics of the Real, notes that what Kant called the ethical act "is denounced as
'radically evil' in every ideology," and then describes how ideology typically manages to defend
against it: "The gap opened by an act (i.e., the unfamiliar, 'out-of-place' effect of an act) is
immediately linked in this ideological gesture to an image. As a rule this is an image of suffering,
which is then displayed to the public alongside this question: Is this what you want? And this
question already implies the answer: It would be impossible, inhuman, for you to want this!"55
The image of suffering adduced here is always the threatened suffering of an image: an image
onto which the face of the human has coercively been projected such that we, by virtue of
losing it, must also lose the face by which we (think we) know ourselves. For "we are, in effect,"
as Lacan ventriloquizes the normative understanding of the self, "at one with everything that
depends on the image of the other as our fellow man, on the similarity we have to our ego and
to everything that situates us in the imaginary register."56 To be anything elseto refuse the
constraint, the inertia, of the ego as form would be, as Zupancic rightly says, "impossible,
inhuman." As impossible and inhuman as a shivering beggar who asks that we kill him or fuck him;
as impossible and inhuman as Leonard, who responds to Thornhill by crushing his hand; as
impossible and inhuman as the sinthomosexual, who shatters the lure of the future and, for
refusing the call to compassion, finally merits none himself. To embrace the impossibility, the
inhumanity of the sinthomosexual: that, I suggest, is the ethical task for which queers are singled
out. Leonard affords us no lesson in how to follow in his footsteps, but calls us, beyond desire, to a
sinthomosexuality of our ownone we assume at the price of the very identity named by "our
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own." To those on whom his ethical stance, his act, exerts a compulsion, Leonard bequeaths the
irony of trying to read him as an allegory, as one from whom we could learn how to act and in
whom we could find the sinthomosexual's essential concretization: the formalization of a
resistance to the constant conservation of forms, the substantialization of a negativity that
dismantles every substance. He leaves us, in short, the impossible task of trying to fill his shoes
shoes that were empty of anything human even while he was wearing them, but that lead us,
against our own self-interest and in spite of our own desire, toward a jouissance from which
everything "human," to have one, must turn its face.
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Alt Solvency
Apocal(o)ptic/ism posthuman-ously dissolves the violence of the past and present so
as to obliterate the social orders vision of the future.
Among the many definitions for posthumanism is Neil Badmington's description of it as 'a critical
practice that occurs inside humanism, consisting not of the wake but the working-through of
humanist discourse' (2003, 22; see also Badmington 2000). The Queer thus serves as an uncanny
reminder of the death drive nestling within heteronormativity, the trace of the impossibility of
hermetically sealing ontological categories such as the Human. In this, LGBT/Q activism has
always been posthumanist in continuously challenging and redefining what the terms 'Human',
'Humanism' and 'Humaneness' mean, by rejecting the heteronormativity that pervades those
categories and their discursive effects. Edelman goes further by rejecting catachresis as a
strategy of resistance. His project is decidedly anti-humanist, one might say posthuman-ous':
'Occurring or continuing after the death of the human' (Smith, Klock and Gallardo-C. 2004). The
desire for the Human therefore signifies an 'archive desire' (Derrida 1996/1995, 19), a desire not
for the archivisation of the past but for the inscription of the future. Heteronormativity thus works
in the shadow of its own finitude, striving retroactively to reproduce the present in the future,
which is always the past futurally imagined. 'Human beings', The Posthuman Manifesto reminds
us, 'only exist as we believe them to exist' (2003, 177). Queer apocal(o)ptic/ism involves
suspending this belief in favour of tracing the normative technologies through which this
category operates within different historical and cultural contexts. It is not about the desire for
'Human Rights'which would be a humanising of the Queer but rather examines our desire
for the Human, for the social and political recognition that the figuration of such a term conveys.
Judith Butler links 'a liveable life' and 'a grievable death' to the instantiation of what is understood
by the 'normatively human' (2004, xv). That is, the ability to invoke feelings of compassion. In No
Future, Lee Edelman queers the Human by cutting into its very heart, the figure of the Child, that
image which is the personification of compassion's evocation. Queering the Human demands a
withholding of such mechanistic displays of compassion, the empty compulsions of
heteronormativity. Such an act rejects, not the child, but those who make use of the child for their
own ends.
Accession to the negativity projected on the queer has the jarring effect of depriving
heteronormativity of its symbolic opposition, this reveals the incoherence of the
system and problematizes it as a whole.
While Edelman taps into the same feelings of indignation that prompted Gutter Dyke Collective
and Queer Nation by targeting the Child where they attack Men and Straights, No Future
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advocates neither collectivism nor acting out. Although Edelman's text also constitutes a polemic,
which includes a variety of statements that have been met both by offence and defensive hostility
from readers,13 he professes the belief that speaking about queerness will not change how the
dominant culture views it. In other words, proliferating discourses of queerness makes no
difference as they will be condensed into a limited repertoire of statements by heteronormativity.
An oft-quoted passage from No Future shows the reason why the book has garnered such acerbic
commentary in some quarters: 'Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're
collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis-, fuck the poor, innocent kid on the
Net; fuck Laws both with capital Ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations
and the future that serves as its prop' (2004, 29). These remarks have inflamed respondents to ask
where the figure of the Child ends and the real child begins. A significant prefatory comment is
often absented from reproductions of the above quotation, that is, Edelman's observation that no
matter what individuals or groups marked out as Queer say, those driven by reproductive
futurism will always hear the above proclamations as having been said anyway. By way of
further illustration, Edelman writes elsewhere that 'It is we who must bury the subject in the
tomb-like hollow of the signifier, pronouncing at last the words for which we're condemned
should we speak them or not: that we are the advocates of abortion; that the Child as futurity's
emblem must die' (31). This of course points to the way in which pro-life movements often link
an anti-abortion stance with an anti-homosexual position. While identity categories - however
fluid and contingent - are important strategies of resistance for Gutter Dyke Collective and Queer
Nation, Edelman argues that those figured as Queer, harbingers of the death drive, should,
instead of wasting their breath in espousing indignant rebuttals, accede to that position because
they will continue to be flung back there by right-wing pundits, not to mention the fact that the
position exercises an enormous power to jam the cogs in the machinery of heteronormativity
should the occupants refuse to play the 'game' of the dominant culture. Edelman's work is a
continuation of that carried out by other scholar-activists, such as Leo Bersani (1995), Michael
Warner (1999), Lisa Duggan (2003) and Alexandra Chasin (2000), all of whom have anatomised a
growing homonormativity invested in neoliberalism, consumerism and assimilation through being
seen as 'normal' by heteronormativity. In this, while Queer Nation berates lesbians and gays for
not fighting back while queer bashings go on around them (1997/1990, 778), Edelman criticises
lesbians and gays, 'these comrades in reproductive futurism' who seek to make reforms to the
system while in the process becoming assimilated and put to work in it by being turned into
sinthomsexuals (2004,19).
Our alternative escapes the oedipal restraints of the 1ac by deregulating desire,
queerness becomes a continual process of opening up a space where sexuality
becomes the primary concern.
Morton 1995(Donald Morton, Professor of English Syracuse University, Birth of the Cyberqueer, May
1995 PMLA, Volume 110, No. 3, pp. 369-381, jstor)
Gay liberation, envisioning a "gender-free communitarian world," did not promote the
separation of which Browning speaks. The explanation for the shift from gay and lesbian studies,
based on the category gender, to queer theory, which fetishizes desire by rendering it
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autonomous, is not self-evident. It is commonly assumed that (post)modern queer studies has
made a decisive and radical advance over modernism (and its precursors), which assigned
questions of sexuality and desire to secondary social and intellectual status. Even while giving
sexuality and desire central importance in his theory, Freud, as a modernist thinker still committed
to Enlightenment assumptions, stressed that the rational regulation of sexuality and desire was
necessary to civilized life, despite the inevitable "discontents" that accompany civilization as a
result. Against such supposedly outmoded modernist assumptions, ludic (post)modern theory
produces an atmosphere of sexual deregulation. As a-if not the-leading element in this
development, queer theory is seen as opening up a new space for the subject of desire, a space
in which sexuality becomes primary. As Eve Sedgwick puts it, "[A]n understanding of virtually any
aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central
substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern
homo/heterosexual definition" (Epistemology 1). In this new space, desire is regarded as
autonomous- unregulated and unencumbered. The shift is evident in the contrast between the
model of necessary sexual regulation promoted by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents and
the notion of sexual deregulation proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Deleuze and
Guattari represent the deregulating process-in which desire becomes a space of "pure
intensities" (A Thousand Plateaus 4)-as a breakthrough beyond the Oedipus complex (that
"grotesque triangle" [Anti- Oedipus 171]), which colonizes the subject and restricts desire.
Reading this argument in a debate introduces queered perceptions of reality to local,

material institutions where change can be reliably facilitated on a micropolitical level.
Morton 1995 (Donald Morton, Professor of English Syracuse University, Birth of the Cyberqueer, May
Queer theory departs from traditional humanist literary and aesthetic studies (and from gay and
lesbian studies) by virtue of its absorption of ludic (post)modern theoretical developments along
their two main axes. Aside from the overtly ludic Derridean-Deleuzean axis, in which "liberated"
desire subverts the official relations of signifieds (conceptuality) and signifiers (textuality), there is
the historicist Foucauldian strand, which insists that outside the text are material institutions,
enabled by discourses but not textualist in the Derridean sense.5 These institutions (as against
historical materialism's global account of them) are disconnected and autonomous, and they
can be sites of liberation where marginal groups seize power (which is voluntarily reversible).
For these historicists, social inequality is a measure of the inequality of power among groups and
is not, as conceived by Marx, produced by exploitation during capitalism's extraction of surplus
value. On the political plane, Foucault's work converges finally with Derrida's and diverges from
Marx's. It is undoubtedly some seeming agreements between Marx and Foucault (for instance, in
the view that desire is not so much repressed as produced) that results in the use of such
misledingp hrasesa s "Foucauldian Marxism" (Kernan 207), an expression that blurs the
differences between the forms of materialism in Marx and Foucault and creates the impression
that Foucauldian materialism is a better (because more upto- date) Marxism. While indeed
rejecting Derrida's pantextualism, Foucault's work nevertheless coincides in crucial ways with ludic
theory. The desire or sexuality Foucault writes about in The History of Sexuality is discursive: sex is
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"produced" in those interminable discourses early in church confessionals and later on the
psychiatrist's couch. Of course, Foucault extends the notion of materiality (beyond textualism) by
tying the generation of discourses to specific historically developed institutions such as the
church, the prison, and the asylum. But at the same time, he theorizes these institutions as
purely local sites that emerge islandlike on the surface of a culture and, like Lyotard's language
games, have no common measure ("Nietzsche" 148-52). While Foucault's localization of the
material has provided theoretical support for localist political actions, by groups like Act Up and
Queer Nation, it has also blocked the possibility of theorizing, as Marx does, systematic global
exploitation in relation to the mode of production.
Queerness is representative of the death drive, the pulsive force blindly hurtling the
Symbolic through an unthinkable jouissance that would guarantee its collapse. Our
methodology is one that forgoes traditional notions of futurity and instead embraces
the negativity ascribed to queerness as a means of interrogating the very structures
that enforce this negativity.
Freccero 2006(Carla Freccero, Proffessor of Feminist Studies UCSC, Fuck the Future, 2006, A Journal
of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Volume 12, Number 2, pp 332-334, jstor.)
Edelman wants to argue that in our social order and the question of whose social order and
which figural child inevitably poses itself homosexuality comes to stand in for the antisocial
force of the (death) drive that threatens the fantasy of futurity and meaningfulness, figuring, as
he puts it, the availability of an unthinkable jouissance that would put an end to fantasy and,
with it, to futurity by reducing the assurance of meaning in fantasys promise of continuity to
the meaningless circulations and repetitions of the drive (39). Thus sinthomosexuality is the
cultural fantasy that puts the homosexual in the place of the sinthome. I did wonder, reading this,
how something as singular and specific to a given subject as the sinthome could take the form of a
collective cultural fantasy. It would thus be interesting to put Edelmans argument in dialogue with
Teresa de Lauretiss work on cultural representations of the death drive or, in another vein, with
David Marriotts work allocating sinthomatic status to blackness (not his terms) in the cultural
fantasies of racialist social orders. But Edelmans readings, which include film (Hitchcock), political
speeches, advertisements, news stories, literary texts (Dickens and Eliot), and even musicals
(Annie, Les Miz), produce concrete and imaginative examples of the cultural fantasy of futurity
located in the figure of the child and the threat to that fantasy figured by a homosexuality that is
imagined to represent death. The observation that in a homophobic culture, homosexuality or
queerness, as Edelman says it should more appropriately be named (39) is made to stand in for
the antisocial, for death, for a refusal of productive futurism, is not new. But what distinguishes
Edelmans analysis from other similar diagnostics is his recommendations for the ways queers
and queer politics ought to respond, that is, not only by claiming for ourselves competing
reproductive futurisms, holding the very same child up in our two-mommy, two-daddy arms as
we proudly declaim its rightful inheritance of future benefits, but also by taking on and taking
up the accusation that we represent the end of the future as we (they?) know it, by refusing
liberal politics and saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order
for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer
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sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name were collectively terrorized; fuck
Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with
capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves
as its prop. (29)
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Link
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Link Generic
Their idolization of a future necessarily dependent on heterogenital reproduction
reproduces fascism through the sacralization of the Child.
The Child is, in Edelman's view, the ultimate symbol of what it means to be Human so his
extricating of himself from 'our current captivity to futurism's logic' (153) through his insistence
that 'the future stop here' (31) also entails a rejection of the Child. The face, the identifier of the
physicality of the Human (MacNeill 1998), comes in for criticism from Edelman who argues that
it is through 'the fascism of the baby's face' that politics always the manifestation of
reproductive futurism in his estimation - submits us to heteronormativity's 'sovereign authority'
(2004, 151). The maltreatment of children, especially by clerical members of homophobic
organisations such as the Catholic Church, illustrates the fact that the figure of the Child is more
often than not employed as a cynical strategy a shifting homophobic signifier to give the
orator a 'moral' advantage in condemnations of homosexuality. Like Wittig's formulation of the
straight mind, reproductive futurism cannot 'conceive of a culture, a society where heterosexuality
would not order not only all human relationships but also its very production of concepts and all
the processes which escape consciousness ... "you-will-be-straight-or-you-will-not-be"' (Wittig
1992, 28). Edelman's response is to refuse to play the game of the dominant culture by
championing 'the impossible project of a queer oppositionality' that 'would oppose itself to the
logic of opposition' itself (2004, 4).
The rhetoric of survival or fighting against the future implicitly valorizes the Child
and subsequently reproductive sex. This kind of heteronormative discourse constructs
a temporal operation to which queerness is inherently antagonistic.
Lippert - University Assistant in American Studies @ the University of Vienna 2008 (Leopold, Utopian
Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis, November. [PDF Online @]
othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf) Accessed 07.02.11 jfs
Edelman opens his book with what he modestly terms a simple provocation (Future, 3), and
what encapsulates the futility of an affirmative and assimilationist queer politics. He argues that
queerness names [...] the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute
value of reproductive futurism (Future, 3), and reveals the implicitly homophobic discourse of
all the Obamas and OSullivans who are fighting for the future of our children and our
grandchildren. The futurist bias towards heteronormativity has been fueled, as Judith Butler
points out, by fears about reproductive relations (Kinship, 21), by uncanny anxieties over the
prospect that queer citizenship may interfere with a nation imagined for fetuses and children
(Berlant, Queen, 1), and by the fundamental antithesis that the queer and the child embody. The
principal concern of futurist America, then, is the fate of its offspring, expressed in a fearful
inquiry: What happens to the child, the child, the poor child, the martyred figure of an
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ostensibly selfish or dogged social progressivism? (Butler, Kinship, 21). Edelman recognizes that
the mythical child as the epitome of a heteronormative future-oriented social can only be
saved by a marriage of identity to futurity in order to realize the social subject (Future, 14),
which leads him to the ensuing claim that only the linear temporal process of ever aftering
(After, 476, emphasis in the original) can keep society alive (After, 476). Heteronormative
America, accordingly, is constituted through its own posterity, through a temporal operation to
which queerness is inherently antagonistic. In an imagined community that relies on futurism as
its life-giving engine, then, the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity,
the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form (Edelman, Future, 4).
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Link Sex Education
Sex Ed necessitates a re-entrenching of normative distinctions- even their critical
approach
Greteman 13 [Adam J., Department of Art Education, School of the Art Institute of Chicago|
Fashioning a bareback pedagogy: towards a theory of risky (sex) education, Sex education add page]
Sex education be it normal or critical (to use Britzmans distinctions) cannot exceed the
moralism and the eugenic categories of the normal (1998a, 66). Yet, a third version of sex education
Britzman offered is the polymorphously perverse, which conceptualises sexuality as movement and as
otherness and, as such, as a part of the imaginary domain that means to refuse to stabilise sexuality
(66). It is this not yet tolerated form of sex education that Britzman explores and that I take up here
placing the obvious (e.g. barebackers as irresponsible) at risk to illuminate how risky-sex education (as
opposed to safer-sex education) challenges certain ethical and aesthetic demands contesting the
normal. This is not to propose a curriculum of barebacking, but to investigate what new or
fashionable sexual practices and subcultures offer education to think through. Teaching about sex is in
constant crisis as what is proper is always in flux, dependent on various social, political and religious
views. While there may be no true way to teach about sex despite the constant battles seeking to do so,
as Britzmans work has constantly shown, there is a need to investigate the unthinkable in (sex)
education. To follow the work of Silin, there is a need to challenge our passion for ignorance in the age
of AIDS (1995, 3). This, I will argue, requires a move away from talking about sex to talking and thinking
through sex. McCallum (1999) offers an exploration of such an approach writing about ways to think
(and teach) through fetishism. The change from thinking about fetishism to thinking through fetishism,
McCallum writes, calls for a change in attention, from fetish objects to the use subjects make of fetishes
and fetishism. This change in thinking has an aim, to show how thinking as a fetishist leads us to a more
complicated and nuanced view about sexual and ontological differences and ... more creative and
productive interpretations of subjects and objects can emerge (xvi). I am not engaging fetishism, but
using McCallums distinction between thinking about versus thinking through to assist in my aims here
regarding barebacking. What might we learn if we think as a barebacker and the ways we make use of
HIV to do something? Barebackers, while potentially viewed as subjects who fethishise HIV by turning
the virus into an erotic object, are for my purposes the most challenging ethical and aesthetic sexual
figure within contemporary sexuality studies. While it might be more palatable to take a psychological
approach an approach Halperin (2007) has already adequately contested alternative approaches are
necessary. Britzmans adventures into a queer pedagogy already offered groundwork for such an
approach wherein one of the stakes of queer pedagogy was the need for thinking ethically about what
discourses of difference, choice, and visibility mean in classrooms, in pedagogy, and in how education
can be thought about (1995, 152). If this is the case that barebacking offers us insights further into
queer pedagogy then thinking through barebacking allows sex education to move beyond simple
epistemological questions (what students should know or think about sex?) to also think about how
subjects emerge in relationship to other subjects. Or, in this case, how sex education edits out particular
types of sexual subjects and practices in the name of the normal and certainty. There is no certainty
regarding HIV transmission and the consequences of acquiring HIV. No advanced screening, no test, no
curriculum can, for certain, teach what needs to be taught and establish safe education one reason
why the rhetoric around sex education has moved to talk of safer sex implicating the reality that sex
can only ever be safer but never completely safe. The challenges that sex brings to education then,
particularly in the age of AIDS, demand a queer pedagogy; a pedagogy that requires reading practices
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that disrupt the straight fashions of education to make lives livable or allows lives to think through the
possibilities.
The affirmatives impact framing fails to challenge Eurocentric gender identities and
perpetuates stereotypes of queer children as victims
Jones 13 (Tiffany Jones is Associate Professor, Contextual Studies in Education at UNE. How sex education research
methodologies frame GLBTIQ students. Sex Education, 2013 Vol. 13, No. 6 p.692-3 //cl
A large portion of the research reviewed (seven studies) comprised descriptive, correlational or mixed (both descriptive and correlational)
studies based on GLBTIQ-specific surveys, interviews and focus groups. Such methodologies
often identified links between
GLBTIQ students experiences of homophobic bullying and problematic mental and sexual health, well-
being and educational outcomes (Hillier et al. 2010; Jones and Hillier 2012; Kosciw et al. 2009; Hunt and Jensen 2009). Commonly
stated study objectives behind these studies included responding to anecdotal evidence of connections between GLBTIQ identities and
increased risks. The research thus operated within a critical/gay liberationist discourse highlighting the specific identities used in GLBTIQ identity
politics and the ways in which they were associated with marginalisation to promote the visibility of these identities and associated problems
(Jones 2011, 379). The studies were often
linked to GLBTIQ education networks interested in humanising the
GLBTIQ student as a victim of schools. Research tools frequently asked whether participants had experienced verbal and
physical homophobic bullying, depression, suicidal intentions and self-harm in a way that created a kind of expected narrative for the GLBTIQ
student. Thesestudies provided a space that acknowledged various types of GLBTIQ identities (although
this was less the case for gender Queer and intersex identities, non-Euro-centric identities or even
indigenous identities which were indirectly explored at best). They also acknowledged the suffering of young people,
suggesting that this could be ameliorated or deterred. They often offered clear policy implications for government, political and educational
leadership. Their dramatic findings garnered media coverage with their detailed descriptions of violence and easy to understand statistics, and
some reports from Western countries showed how the accumulation and dissemination of data on student well-being had over time assisted
activists to obtain funding for GLBTIQ-specific educational interventions (Jones and Hillier 2012; Kosciw et al. 2009; Hunt and Jensen 2009). But
these studies almost constructed GLBTIQ students within an emancipatory paradigm, highlighting their
marginalisation. Monk (2011) has critiqued the antihomophobic bullying movement for replacing old constructions of GLBTIQ students as
the tragic victims of pathological sexuality with a construction of them as tragic victims of violence. He argues that this limits the opportunity for
representation of more radical and sexualised aspects of GLBTIQ identity. Harwood and Rasmussen (2004) argued that the focus on
GLBTIQ youth discrimination and suicide encouraged students to express GLBTIQ identity using a
conflated woundedness through risky behaviours, neediness or creating appropriate adolescence
horror stories. The seven studies did not require a performative pathology of identification by GLBTIQ students students could report a
lack of bullying or suicidal feelings. However, they privileged the bullied, depressed and suicidal position by repeatedly enquiring, and ultimately
reporting on, this aspect of GLBTIQ life. For example, an Australian surveys list of impacts for a question on how homophobia impacted GLBTIQ
692 T. Jones students
schooling did offer participants the opportunity to say it had no impact, or had
inspired activism, but 10 of 13 impacts offered were educational deficits: In what ways, if at all, has homophobia
impacted on your schooling? (Please tick all boxes that apply). 1. I couldnt concentrate in class. 2. My marks dropped. 3. I moved schools. 4. I
left school altogether. 5. I missed classes. 6. I missed days. 7. I hid at recess/lunch. 8. I couldnt go to the toilet. 9. I couldnt use the change-
rooms. 10. I dropped out of a sport/extra-curricular activity. 11. I became involved in activism. 12. It hasnt affected me at all. 13. Other (please
specify) (Hillier et al. 2010, 116) A stress on victimhood and endangered well-being can also be supported by research participation processes,
whereby students may be repeatedly asked to select, to describe and express their feelings about experiences of bullying and thoughts of
suicide or to repeatedly describe their moods (particularly if repetitive depression index question sets are used). Research can further
emphasise at-risk GLBTIQ identities through recruitment processes privileging support groups and services for struggling youth, through
selective reporting of results or through research-into-practice dissemination programmes, which
train education staff to see
GLBTIQ students as potential victims. Indeed, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD 2011)
warned staff against perpetuating suicide contagion among GLBTIQ youth. They argued for a stress on
help-seeking, support and acceptance among youth instead all topics warranting research. Research could also consider
what GLBTIQ students want to discuss. Given the option of write-in narratives at the end of an Australian survey, when provided with the
opportunity to do so, GLBTIQ students tellingly discussed activism and their goals for marriage equality (Hillier and Jones 2011) not just the
victimhood that other questions emphasised.
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Link Space Exploration
The Affirmative represents an obsession with space exploration which employs myths
of Manifest Destiny and the Final Frontier to fashion America in the mold of
reproductive futurism.
Lippert - University Assistant in American Studies @ the University of Vienna 2008 (Leopold, Utopian
Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis, November. [PDF Online @]
othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf) Accessed 07.02.11 jfs
Perpetuating the futurist regime, Star Trek explicitly draws on the vocabulary of American
myths. Myth, Lincoln Geraghty claims in a reading of the legendary qualities of American
science fiction, serves as a mode of national identity-making (192). In his argument, he
acknowledges the hegemonic capital of myth and concludes that [c]ountries thrive on myths to
create, substantiate, and preserve their national identity (192). In the case of Star Trek, most
scholars agree that the American myths evoked most frequently and most notably are the
doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the idea of the frontier.22 Both cultural concepts, which I
already discussed in greater detail in the first chapter of this thesis, fashion America as a nation of
futurity, and they install an ideological framework that makes reproductive expansion its central
objective. Indeed, each episode of the original series begins with the assertion that space is the
final frontier (qtd. In Alexander, 253), and that the imperative of the starship Enterprise and its
crew is to seek out new life and new civilizations (qtd. In Alexander, 253). The famous aspiration
to boldly go where no man has gone before (qtd. In Alexander, 253), then, locates the series at
the heart of the mythical futurist regime and endows, as Geraghty points out, Star Trek with
numerous inherent culturally sanctioned meanings and ideological interpretations linked to
westward expansion (192). The Enterprise itself, Daniel Bernardi maintains, is drawn from and
extends the history of the American wagon train (77). In the futurist recapitulation of the
expansionist settler spirit, the Enterprise becomes the paramount vessel of the reproductive
venture into the unknown. Reifying the bold claims of Manifest Destiny, both the wagon train and
the Enterprise enable, as Bernardi argues, their occupants to dominate and domesticate the
frontier (77). Both serve as vehicles that expand a particularly American vision of communal
relations, on the one hand, and of specific temporal formations, on the other, as both secure, in
the form of the future, as Edelman would put it, the order of the same (Future, 151). Star
Treks original outlook is also heavily indebted to John F. Kennedys idea of the New Frontier, a
rhetorical amalgamation that includes activist foreign policy aimed at challenging Communism in
the Third World, and [...] a massive effort to advance national prestige through the manned
space program (Worland, 20). A virtual reincarnation of Jack Kennedy, Jim Kirk capitalizes on
the 1960s obsession with the technological exploration of outer space which at the same
represented a violent compulsion to contain the influence of the Soviet Union and positions his
crew at the center of the American futurist project. Just like John F. Kennedy, Star Trek displayed
great expertise in, as Rick Worland argues, re-conceptualiz[ing] traditional frontier symbolism in
ways meaningful to modern people (22). In Star Trek, the New Frontier and the Final Frontier
coincide: the common project they engage in is reproductive futurism.
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Link Temporality
Notions of temporality, and the finitude of existence, like birth, marriage, the
necessity to reproduce and death all clash with queered understandings of the passage
of time. Normative temporalities that privilege futurism implicitly deny the possibility
for queer existence.
Lippert - University Assistant in English and American Studies @ the University of Vienna 2008
Leopold, Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis, November. [PDF Online @]
othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf) Accessed Accessed 07.02.11 jfs
I will return to the negativist and antagonistic claims that No Future makes, but, having described
the contemporary an eponymous notion of this thesis as queer temporality, I find it
indispensable to survey recent intellectual debates on this issue. Over the last five years, queer
temporality has gained enormous academic currency. Despite heated arguments over its exact
typology, queer temporality seems to be set apart by its repudiation of straight linear,
sequential, and reproductive time frames and its resistance to teleological cultural narratives.
Elizabeth Freeman, for instance, suggests that the sensation of asynchrony (Introduction, 159)
may be reminiscent of queer time, while Carla Freccero creates an alternative temporal model
(489), which she outlines as [q]ueer spectrality ghostly returns suffused with affective
materiality (489). For Nguyen Tan Hoang, a sense of belatedness (Dinshaw et al., 183) is a
crucial attribute of queer temporality, while Kate Thomas finds her sociotemporal solution in the
prepositional quality of queer (619, emphasis in the original), which is, as she reminds us,
relational rather than teleological (619). Tom Boellstorff, in his analysis of the United States,
where millenarianism has a particular historical and contemporary reference (228), postulates
that queer temporality is coincidental, a time in which time falls rather than passes, a queer
meantime that embraces contamination and imbrication (228). Judith Halberstam, in a more
political argument that will be prominent later in this thesis, claims that queer subcultures
produce alternative temporalities [...] that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life
experience namely birth, marriage, reproduction, and death (2) and finds queer temporality
in opposition to these temporal paradigms, in what she calls a stretched-out adolescence
(153). Elizabeth Freeman, in yet another article, strikes a similar chord. She also analyzes the
normative powers of everyday temporal organization and argues that [n]eoliberalism
describes the needs of everyone else, everyone it exploits, as simply, generically, deferred
(Binds, 58). Queer temporality, all these theoreticians assert, resists a dramatic conception of
time. Instead, it is contemporary: coincidental, asynchronous, belated, or deferred, hopelessly
lagging behind an aggressive futurism that denies any possibility for queer existence.
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Link Identity Categories
Notions of static identity do not accurately describe queerness. Labels like gay or
lesbian are only useful insofar as they are determined to be ludic signs with no
discernable textual coherence.
Morton 1995(Donald Morton, Professor of English Syracuse University, Birth of the Cyberqueer, May
The queer subject is deprived of the possibility not only of speaking for (others or even itself) but
also of speaking in the name of: it cannot speak in the name of any principle, such as social
justice (an up-to-date position articulated in Stanley Fish's declaration "I don't have any principles"
[298]). As a social construct that can only act self reflexively, by deconstructing itself, the (post)-
modern subject can only perform, not practice. In the terms made familiar by Judith Butler, whose
work deconstructs the notion of (gender) identity, the subject's actions are "not expressive but
performative" (Gender Trouble 141). In other words, they do not express the subject's inner
essence (soul, spirit, psyche, etc.), as the modernist tradition proposes, or even some constructed
and existing identity, as the (post)modernist position might imply. Just as Baudrillard understands
the simulacrum to be a copy that has no original and that renders all representations copy effects
(see Simulations), Butler understands gender as a gender effect, a simulation or mimicry of
nothing that is prior to it, a nonreferential repetition." There is," Butler argues, "no gender
identity behind expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very
'expressions' that are said to be its results" (Gender Trouble 25). The subject becomes what
Deleuze and Guattari call an "asignifying particle" (A Thousand Plateaus 4). Such a position leads
Butler to declare that although she will use "the sign of lesbian," she will do so only on
condition that it is "permanently unclear what precisely that sign signifies"( "Imitation"1 4). To
be gay is to have a mere identity; to be queer is to enter and celebrate the ludic space of textual
indeterminacy. As Gregory Bredbeck declares in the queer mode, "Homosexuality is textuality in
its most potent and postmodern form" (255).
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Link Queer Alliance / Incorporation
Notions of queer alliance are nothing more than attempts to incorporate the queer
into an existing social order that will only domesticate difference.
Drive, 2004, pp. 4-5)
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 such a hope, after all, would only reproduce the constraining
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 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, is
installing as it does the perpetual hope of reaching meaning through as it does the perpetual hope
of reaching meaning through signification, is always, I would argue a negation of this primal,
constitutive, negative act. And the various positivities produced in its wake by the logic of
political hope depend on the mathematical illusion that negated negations might somehow
escape, and not redouble, such negativity. My polemic thus stakes its fortunes 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.
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Link Filling the lack
Queerness is Lack the queer represents certain particularities of the Real that the
limited vocabulary of the Symbolic order is capable of describing, providing necessary
reassurance to the fixed normative identities existing within the Symbolic. Attempts to
paper over this inherent gap of signification are generated by and generative of
structural violence against queerness.
Drive, 2004, pp. 25-27)
Bound up with the first of these death drives is the figure of the Child, enacting a logic of
repetition that fixes identity through identification with the future of the social order. Bound up
with the second is the figure of the queer, embodying that orders traumatic encounter with its
own inescapable failure, its encounter with the illusion of the future as suture to bind the
constitutive wound of the subjects subjection to the signifier, which divides it, paradoxically,
both from and into itself. In the preface to Homgraphesis I wrote that the signifier gay,
understood as a figure for the textuality, the rhetoricity, of the sexual designates the gap or
incoherence that every discourse of sexuality or sexual identity would master. Extending that
claim, I now suggest that queer sexualities, inextricable from the emergence of the subject in the
Symbolic, mark the place of the gap in which the Symbolic confronts what its discourse is
incapable of knowing, which is also the place of a jouissance from which it can never escape. As
a figure for what It can neither fully articulate nor acknowledge, the queer may provide the
Symbolic with a sort of necessary reassurance by seeming to give a name to what, as Real,
remains unnamable. But repudiations of that figural identity, reflecting a liberal faith in the
abstract universality of the subject, though better enabling the extension of rights to those who
are still denied them, must similarly reassure by attesting to the seamless coherence of the
Symbolic whose dominant narrative would thus supersede the corrosive force of queer irony. If
the queers abjectified difference, that is, secures normativitys identity, the queers disavowal of
that difference affirms normativitys singular truth. For every refusal of the figural status to which
queers are distinctively called reproduces the triumph of narrative as the allegorization of irony
as the logic of a temporality that always serves to straighten it out, and thus proclaims the
universality of reproductive futurism. Such refusal perform, despite themselves, subservience to
the law that effectively imposes politics as the only game in town, exacting as the price of
admission the subjects (hetero)normalization, which is accomplished, regardless of sexual
practice or sexual orientation, through compulsory abjuration of the future-negating queer.
63
K Lab Adam Pease
64

Edelman Kritik

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KNDI 2011 Edelman Kritik

K Lab Adam Pease

1NC Shell 1/5...........................................................................................................................................2

1NC Shell 2/5...........................................................................................................................................3

1NC Shell 3/5...........................................................................................................................................4

1NC Shell 4/5...........................................................................................................................................5

1NC Shell 5/5...........................................................................................................................................6

2NC Impact Framing / Root Cause...........................................................................................................7

Link Space Exploration........................................................................................................................26

Link Identity Categories.......................................................................................................................28

Link Queer Alliance / Incorporation....................................................................................................29

Link Filling the lack..............................................................................................................................30

Aff: Alt Solvency (or lack thereof)..........................................................................................................35

Aff: Pedophilia Turn................................................................................................................................37

Aff: Natality Turn....................................................................................................................................38

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K Lab Adam Pease

The affs figuration of education as production of human capital facilitates a post-

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K Lab Adam Pease

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Reproductive futurism culminates in a homonationalist consolidation of empire where

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Heteronormative overkill seeks to wash queer bodies out of history. Gratuitous

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Heteronormativity instills a fundamental fear of impurity in society; this amplifies

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The sacralization of the Child as an idol of reproductive futurism depends on the

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The alternative is radical negativity. We perform an analysis of the 1ac

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What characterises queer apocal(o)ptic/ism? It is queer's relentless questioning of all categorical

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Heteronormativity is the all-encompassing standard of normalization used to discipline

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In Edelmans critique of culture, queerness occupies a temporality that extends no future. On

Queerness is the fundamental difference repressed by the Symbolic, the permutation

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Incorporation of queerness into prescribed economies of signification is an act of

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K Lab Adam Pease