Off

1
Politics of tomorrow engender futurism. When this utopia of the future fails to
materialize, those who endanger reproduction are scapegoated
Edelman 4 (Lee, professor and chair of the English Department at Tufts University, No Future: Queer
Theory and Death Drive. 2004, p. 112-3 MH)

Ignore for a moment what demands to be called the transparency of this appeal. Ignore, that is, how
quickly the spiritualizing vision of
parents "nourishing and growing . . . small bodies and . . . small souls" gives way to a rhetoric affirming
instead the far more pragmatic (and politically imperative) investment in the "human capital . . . essential to the
health and wealth of our nation." Ignore, by so doing, how the passage renominates those human "souls" as "capital" without yielding the fillip
of Dickensian pathos that prompts us to "cherish" these "capital"- ized humans ("small" but, like the economy in current usage, capable of being grown) precisely
insofar as they come to embody this thereby humanized "capital." Ignore
all this and one's eyes might still pop to discover that
only political intervention will "allow," and the verb is crucial here, "parents to cherish their children" so
as to "ensure our collective future - or ensure, which comes to the same in the faith that properly fathers us
all, that our present will always be mortgaged to a fantasmatic future in the name of the political
"capital" that those children will thus have become. Near enough to the surface to challenge its status as
merely implicit, but sufficiently buried to protect it from every attempt at explicitation, a globally
destructive, child-hating force is posited in these lines—a force so strong as to disallow parents the
occasion to cherish their children, so profound in its virulence to the species as to put into doubt "our
collective future"—and posited the better to animate a familial unit so cheerfully mom-ified as to distract us from ever noticing how
destructively it's been mummified. No need to trick out that force in the flamboyant garments of the pedophile, whose fault, as "everyone"
knows, defaults, faute de mieux, to a fear of grown women—and thus, whatever the sex of his object, condemns him for, and to, his failure to penetrate into the
circle of heterosexual desire. No
need to call it names, with the vulgar bluntness of the homophobe, whose
language all too often is not the bluntest object at hand. Unnamed, it still carries the signature, whatever Hewlett and West may
intend, of the crime that was named as not to be named ("inter christianos non nominandum") while maintaining the plausible deniability allowing disavowal of
such a signature, should anyone try to decipher it, as having been forged by someone else. To be sure,
the stigmatized other in general can
endanger our idea of the future, conjuring the intolerable image of its spoliation or pollution, the
specter of its being appropriated for unendurable ends; but one in particular is stigmatized as
threatening an end to the future itself. That one remains always at hand to embody the force, which
need never be specified, that prohibits America's parents, for example, from being able to cherish their
children, since that one, as we know, intrudes on the collective reproduction of familialism by stealing,
seducing, proselytizing, in short, by adulterating those children and putting in doubt the structuring
fantasy that ensures "our collective future."

The figure of the “perverse homosexual” which exists in opposition to the “sovereign”
man is a dichotomy which undergrids all IR practices – Their theory of the world is
incomprehensible absent the figure of the perverse homosexual
Weber 16 Cynthia Weber, Cynthia Weber is a Professor of International Relations at Sussex University,
Queer International Relations – Sovereignty, Sexuality, and the Will to Knowledge, Chapter 3 – “The
‘Perverse Homosexual’ in International Relations”, Oxford University Press, 2016, /MegLak.

This chapter and the next argue that four figures that consistently appear in the discourse of ‘Western’ /
global ‘Northern’ ‘developed’ states as perverse—the ‘underdeveloped’, the ‘undevelopable’, the
‘unwanted im/migrant’, and the ‘terrorist’—are among the specific (if surprising) articulations of the
‘perverse homosexual’ in international relations. These particular figurations of the ‘perverse
homosexual’ matter for transnational/ global queer studies and international relation because they
make possible (by being opposed to) specific figurations of ‘sovereign man’ as ‘(neo) imperial man’ and
as ‘(civilizationally) developed man’. All of these figurations of or against ‘sovereign man’ appear to arise
out of and in turn produce what Berlant and Warner call heteronormativity, ‘the institutions, structures
of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent ... but
also privileged’ (1998, 548 n. 2). By tracing where, when, and how these ‘perverse homosexuals’ are
spoken of in past and ongoing colonial, imperial, and developmental heteronormative discourses that
incite them as a concern, stabilize them as a problem, and regulate solutions to the problems they raise
through specific policies, these chapters analyze how figurations of the ‘perverse homosexual’ are made
to function as instances of ‘statecraft as mancraft’ (Ashley 1989). In these discourses, the ‘perverse
homosexual’ is figured as that threat to ‘sovereign man’ who enables the production of (and is produced
through) specific order-versus-anarchy binaries. These either/or binaries participate in the regulation of
international politics because they establish sexualized orders of international relations. To be clear, I
am not arguing that the figure of the ‘homosexual’ as the ‘underdeveloped’, the ‘undevelopable’, the
‘unwanted im/migrant’, and the ‘terrorist’ alone explains all sovereign statecraft as sovereign mancraft.
Rather, I am suggesting that if we dig down into the evolutionary theories that produce figurations of
and opposed to ‘sovereign man’, what we find is that these theories depend upon understandings of
civilization and its relationships to evolutionary time and geopolitical space that are deeply racialized,
(dis)ableized, classed, sexed, gendered, and sexualized. This is by no means a new proposition, either
empirically or theoretically. For example, even a cursory reading of (neo)imperial discourses and their
supporting discourses of racialization makes it explicit that various precursors to and variations of the
‘underdeveloped’ owe their temporal and spatial figurations as perverse in part to how they are coded
as perversely sexed, gendered, and sexualized. Institutions and cultural understandings of encumbered
versus unencumbered sexuality (Mead 1928), whiteness versus blackness (Fanon 1967), orientalism
(Said 1978), savagery and coloniality (Stoler 1995 and 2002), and postcoloniality and imperialism (Spivak
1988) have fueled imaginaries of what came to be known as the ‘underdeveloped’. We see this in
figures such as the ‘noble savage’ unencumbered by sexual prohibition in modern Western anthro-
pology (Mead 1928), the ‘barbaric savage’ and the ‘colonial’ in Victorian discourse (Stoler 1995 and
2002), the ‘blackman’ marked by race in white colonialism and psychoanalysis (Fanon 1967), ‘the black
female body’ (hooks 1982; Hammonds 1999; Spillers 2003), ‘the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the
lowest strata of the urban sub-proletariat’ called the ‘subaltern’ in imperial discourse (Spivak 1988, 283),
and ‘the timeless oriental who does not advance with modernity’ in Western discourse (Said 1978), for
example. While international relation scholars are increasingly aware of how these figures are produced
through complex networks of racialization, (dis) ablization, gender, class, indigeneity, and empire
(beginning with Roxanne Doty’s [1996] seminal international relation study of ‘imperial encounters’),
they are just beginning to grasp how these figures are also implicated in and produced by complex
networks of power/knowledge/pleasure in relation to the figure of the ‘homosexual’. Yet as V. Spike
Peterson has long argued (1992, 1999, 2010, 2013, 2014a, 2014b) in her groundbreaking international
relation analyses of gender and sexuality, figures like the ‘heterosexual’ and the ‘homosexual’ are
foundational to international relation conceptualizations of states, nations, and international politics
more widely. My conten- tion in this set of chapters is that figurations of the ‘homosexual’ in Western
discourses of statecraft as mancraft and the sexualized organizations of international relations to which
they give rise are among those modalities of power/knowledge/pleasure that are the least examined
such networks that in part underwrite international relation theories to this day. My sug- gestion is that
to ignore these moves is to not fully understand how interna- tional relation theories and practices
function, how they can be improved, and how they can be resisted.

The spectacle of nuclear apocalypse is emblematic of a reproductive futurism that

results in the dehumanization of queer people
Saint-Amour, PhD, ’13 (Paul K., English@Stanford, AssocProfEnglish@UPenn, “Queer Temporalities of the Nuclear Condition,”
The Silence of Fallout, ed. Blouin, Shipley and Taylor, p. 59-64) BW

When Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth first appeared in 1982, its most talked-about passage was a graphic description of what would
happen if a twenty-megaton bomb were detonated over the center of Manhattan. The ensuing account of how a full-scale nuclear
change would likely extinguish humankind along with the majority of earth’s species, leaving a “republic of insects and grass,”
completed the book’s infernal vision. Largely owing to this vivid thought-experiment, Schell’s book helped reenergize the anti-
nuclear movement in the U.S., and its cautionary portrait of a dead, irradiated planet was absorbed into mass-culture such that, read now, it
chastens but does not stun. But there is a still-astonishing moment in The Fate of the Earth. This occurs in a section called “The Second Death,”
where Schell adopts “the view of our children and grandchildren, and of all the future generations of mankind, stretching ahead of us in time.”
A nuclear extinction event, he argues, would wipe out not only the living but all of the unborn as well;
this “second death” would be the death of a longitudinal, progenerative human future, the death of the
supersession of generations and thus, as he puts it, “the death of death.”2 That we live in the shadow of the death of death,
says Schell, is nowhere more apparent than in our growing ambivalence toward—and here is the surprise—
marriage, an institution that consecrates a personal relationship by connecting it to the biological continuity of the species. “[By] swearing
their love in public,” he writes, “the lovers also let it be known that their union will be a fit one for bringing children into the world.” In a
world overshadowed by extinction, the biological future that endows love with social meaning begins to
dematerialize, and love becomes, in response, “an ever more solitary affair: impersonal, detached, pornographic. It means something that
we call both pornography and nuclear destruction ‘obscene.’” Although Schell is not explicit about what forms of sexual detachment he laments
here, “The Second Death” clearly implies that any sex decoupled from biological continuity and seeking refuge in licentious,
solitary, distant, or momentary enjoyment—any sex that deviates from a reproductive notion of the future—is a
symptom of our nuclear extinction syndrome. Thus when Schell, oddly quoting Auden, says that the peril of extinction thwarts
“Eros, builder of cities,” he doesn’t need to invoke “sodomy, destroyer of cities” for a link between queerness and extinction to be forged.3 By
installing a reproductive futurism at the heart of his admonitory project, Schell implicitly stigmatizes as futureless anyone who
stands beyond reproductivism’s pale: not just the homosexual but also the unmarried, the divorced, the impotent, the childless,
the masturbator, the hedonist, the celibate. Schell’s book did not, of course, invent the use of reproduction as a metonym for human futurity
tout court or the figuration of the biological child as the chief beneficiary of future-oriented actions in the present. But it contributed to these
figures’ prominent standing in the anti-nuclear imaginary. “Believe me when I say to you / I hope the Russians love their children too” went the
absurd refrain of Sting’s 1985 single, “Russians,” which placed the (implicitly reproductive) body at a level more fundamental than political
difference: “We share the same biology / Regardless of ideology.” One could go on to compile a long list of 1980s movies,novels,
speeches, and tracts that made the nuclear family stand in for humanity’s beset future or invoked the
child as the figure in whose name apocalypse must be averted or at least survived. These conventions would
outlast the Cold War and the waning or reimagining of the nuclear referent. Think of P. D. James’s 1992 thriller The Children of Men,
whose protagonist must safeguard a miraculous pregnancy in a future where fertility has declined globally to zero.4 Or of how Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road (2006) pares the matter of survival in a post-apocalyptic, ambiguously nuked landscape down to a father’s efforts to
protect his son from rape and cannibalism. In both cases, the future is hanging either literally or allegorically by the thread of a single imperiled
child. My aim in this essay is not to trace the reproductivist energies of Cold War anti-nuclear works or of more recent post-apocalyptic fiction.
Instead, I chart an alternate path through the nuclear condition,5 one that diverges from—and in places dissents from—
the portrait of a future secured primarily for the sake of the biological child and reached along the
straight lines of reproductive heterosexual coupling, familial property heritage, and linear time. This
alternate path is one on which Nuclear Criticism today might keep company with recent work on queer
temporalities, a body of scholarship that places dissident sexuality in a critical relation to normative models of time and history. One of my
broader aims, in fact, is to indicate some of the ways Nuclear Criticism might be reenergized by an encounter with queer temporalities
scholarship. At the same time, I’ll argue that some of the key theoretical and literary works associated with Nuclear Criticism in its early years
were themselves engaged in queering temporality and history. In doing so I don’t wish to claim Nuclear Criticism as the occulted or lost “origin”
of queer temporalities work; in addition to straining credibility, such a privileging of origin in a narrative of linear development would install
queer temporalities scholarship in just the sort of historical narrative it seeks to vex by its devotion to non-linear modes—the recursive, the
discontinuous, the counterfactual. My point is, rather, that reexamining Nuclear Criticism through the aperture of queer theoretical writings on
time allows us to see a muted or latent critique in the former—a critique whose object was not so much the existence of nuclear weapons as
the straitened portraits of desire, culture, kinship, history, and futurity that were often appealed to in calling for both those weapons’ abolition
and their necessity. What emerges is a redrawn Nuclear Criticism that both deplores the existence of nuclear weapons and declines to embrace
sexually normative and historically reductive grounds for their elimination. “Queer temporalities” as a theoretical rubric covers a broad range of
scholarship by queer theorists and activists working, at least to date, predominantly in the U.S.6 More specific than a turn toward time as
theme, this scholarship considers how heternormative cultures perceive queer subjects in relation to history and futurity; how queer subjects
experience and enact particular relations to history and futurity; and how queerness itself might be rethought as having less (or less exclusively)
to do with sex and sexual typology than with dissident ways of being in relation to time. I have already referred to one of the chief temporalities
from which queer subjects are variously excluded and dissenting: the
“reproductive futurism” that conscripts the child as
mascot for a heternormative politics of hope and a linear conception of history as both powered and figured
by biological reproduction and the modes of inheritance and political succession it undergirds.7 Such a conception
of history militates against certain kinds of transgenerational affect, not least against the notion that the living
could invest affectively in or form communities with the dead. In response, some scholars working on queer temporalities
advocate just such a queer desire for history or “touch of the queer,” the kind of unpunctual, affective approach that could permit one to ask,
as Carolyn Dinshaw does, “How does it feel to be an anachronism?”8 While acknowledging that the feeling of being out of step with one’s
contemporaries can be exploited to repressive ends, Dinshaw remains optimistic that transtemporal communities—living anachronisms in
league with the dead—might produce politically salutary effects in a present whose dense multiplicity they help to restore.9 Others,
contrastingly, refuse a politics of hope they see as irreducibly heternormative, urging queer subjects to embrace the negative position assigned
them by reproductivism. Embracing this negativity can take many forms: an insistence on the destructive, anti-communitarian, at once selfish
and self-shattering dimensions of sex and particularly homo-sex; an identification of the queer subject with destrudo (i.e., the Freudian death
drive) in its relentless opposition to a procreative understanding of libido; or a refusal of queer triumphalism and an embrace of the shame-
laced backward look. 10 Still others look to fuse the negativity of these anti-social, arguably apolitical positions to a radical anti-racist and anti-
capitalist stance, calling for a “punk negativity” whose oppositional politics declines the language of hope, redemption, and
futurity and turns instead to vandalism, masochism, pessimism, and despair.11 Real differences inhere among these approaches. But they
share a core conviction: that temporality—and perhaps futurity even more intensively than historicity—cannot be thought
apart from the sexual norms through which it is figured, licensed, and imbued with or emptied of affect. Owing to its
semi-dormancy since the early 1990s, Nuclear Criticism has largely missed the chance to think through queer theory, a field whose principal
interventions have happened in the interim. You occasionally see comparisons between queer coming-out narratives and a nation’s coming out
as a nuclear power or a military person’s coming out as an anti-nuclear activist. But the more suggestive commonalities between Nuclear
Criticism and queer theoretical writing—most of them under the sign of temporality—remain unexplored. These include an intimate
acquaintance with and even an embrace of the death drive; a related acquaintance with portraits of the future as negated or foreclosed; a
commitment not to reopen the future under repressive terms; and the alternative, in the face of a seemingly barred future, of soliciting the
queer touch of the dead whom for various reasons we suddenly apprehend as our contemporaries. Exploring these commonalities seems the
more urgent, given that queer temporalities scholarship could provoke debate about what nuclear abolitionists and their opponents have most
in common: a practically automated recourse to reproductive futurism in arguing for their respective positions. Schell’s equation of low marital
indices with a general sense of species futurelessness is an extreme but not an exceptional case of antinuclear rhetoric, which continues today
to invoke “a world safe for our children” in terms nearly indistinguishable from the pro-nuclear side of the aisle.12 The radical negativity
exhibited by some queer temporalities scholars might also expose the limits of a politics of (procreative) optimism on both sides of the nuclear
debate—the limits of acting as if the world could be made safe for “our children” or anyone else by either retaining or abolishing our nuclear
deterrents. Queer theorists, for their part, have turned occasionally during the last twenty years to Nuclear Criticism, although usually to jump-
start an argument headed away from the nuclear referent. Peter Coviello’s essay “Apocalypse from Now On” (2000) nods in its title to both
Jacques Derrida’s inaugural work of Nuclear Criticism, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)” (1984) and
Susan Sontag’s 1989 AIDS and Its Metaphors (Sontag: “Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not ‘Apocalypse Now’ but ‘Apocalypse from
Now On’”).13 But Coviello’s essay invokes the nuclear condition principally in order to set up what he sees as its succession, after 1989, by AIDS
as the apocalypse du jour. “Du jour” in the way a daily special marks the everyday’s domestication of the exceptional: for Coviello, AIDS differs
from the nuclear condition in quotidienizing apocalypse, making it a condition rather than a threatened event and thus particularly useful to the
day-to-day biopolitical operations of the state. Coviello, in other words, sets sail from Port Derrida for Port Sontag—from Nuclear Criticism to a
critique of AIDS and governmentality—without, understandably enough, booking return passage. Before leaving the nuclear behind, however,
he notes “how intimately bonded the nuclear and the sexual actually were, before the advent of AIDS gave to such bonding a ghastly quality of
inevitability.”14 Coviello’s emphasis is not on the usual string of references to the heteronormative sexualization of nuclear weapons (e.g.,
“Little Boy,” Bikini atoll, the population bomb, and the nuclear family, although he mentions these in passing). Instead, he reads nuclear
discourse as having limned, before AIDS, a “gay death drive” that figured queerness as incarnating (and
more rarely as rebuking) the extravagant sovereignty of nuclear weapons. Glossing Martin Amis’s characterization of the
nuclear arsenal as a cocked gun in the mouths of the procreative, Coviello writes that “power in the nuclear age is horrifying and unlivable
because it makes me—or wants to make me—thoroughly, irremediably queer.” 15 Thus the homophobia of certain anti-nuclear discourses
anticipated homophobic responses to AIDS as an apocalyptic threat emanating from queer subjects. What’s more, Coviello hazards, the
apocalypticism that pervaded debates around both nuclear weapons and AIDS made for strong continuities between Nuclear Criticism and
queer theory, both bodies of work responding to high concentrations of state power in the management of populations, bilateral depictions of
the biological family as under siege, and the pervasive rhetoric of the death wish.16

State policy naturalizes heteropatriarchy- it relegates femininity to the private sphere,

regulates sexual activity in the name of a healthy state, and invokes gendered
metaphors of security that naturalize women as objects to be both manipulated and
protected
Spike Peterson in 2013 (Prof of IR @ University of Arizona, The Intended and Unintended Queering of
States/Nations, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 13, No. 1, 2013)

While patriarchal dominance and gendered ideology were contested and only eventually took shape in early state formation,
they were largely taken for granted in European state-making processes and their colonizing practices. In the intervening
centuries, patriarchal authority was routinized in monotheistic belief systems and patriarchal kinship reproduced and extended
(unequal) divisions of authority, power, labour, and resources. The modern era’s celebration of rationalist/objectivist science
did complicate how authority was legitimated, but not how it was gendered masculine. By definition,
European state-making replicated earlier processes: centralization of resources and authority, organization of
military capacity, and ideological consolidation under elite control. But state-making in the modern era was shaped by both the
legacy of earlier states and the emergence of new techniques, modalities, and operations of power. Whether described as the penetrating
‘infrastructural power’ of states (Giddens 1987; Mann 1984) or new mechanisms of ‘disciplinary power’ and biopolitics (Foucault 1980), the
key insight is a shift from more to less direct operations of power and new understandings of
‘government’. Modern states required far more knowledge about their subjects. Hence, their interest in and
cultivation of the social and human ‘life’ sciences (to provide ‘expertise’) and development of ‘bio-political’ strategies (censuses,
statistics, programmes to enhance the health, education, etc. of expanding populations) – all in support of producing ‘civilized’
subjects who will govern and care for themselves and ‘exercise their citizenship responsibly’ (Rose 1996:45). In complex and varying ways,
the emerging ‘art of government’ (re)configured categories and relations of sex/gender, sexuality, and ethnicity/race.5 But while there are
many critiques of sexism, of heteronormativity, and of nationalism, how these overlap and interact has only recently become a focus of inquiry
(e.g. Morgensen 2010; Puar 2007). I turn then to briefly consider how pervasively nationalism presumes and tends to reproduce
sexist and heteronormative assumptions and practices.6 First, nationalist policies involve regulating under
what conditions, when, how many, and whose children women will bear. The forms taken are historically specific – shaped
by socio-religious norms, technological developments, economic pressures, and political priorities. But states often seek to increase
– or replenish – their numbers, and in the context of pronatalist policies, nonreproductive sexual activities are deemed
threatening to national interests. States may restrict access to contraception, criminalize abortion, reward
childbearing, demonize homosexuality, and/or represent the primary purpose of ‘family life’ as sexual
reproduction. In general, potentially reproductive women will be encouraged (pressured?) to bear children ‘for the nation’ while non-
reproductive sexual activities will be discouraged (punished?) for undermining national objectives. Second, states have an interest
in whether children are ‘appropriately’ socialized, and therefore in the constitution of
families/households as primary sites of social reproduction. In particular, states sustain sexist and
heteronormative principles through legislation regarding marriage, child adoption and custody, and
transmission of property and citizenship claims. Exclusively heteropatriarchal family life ensures that heterosexual coupling and
gendered divisions of labour/ power/authority are the only apparent options, which reproduces sexist and heter- onormative expectations.
Worldwide, male parenting and care-giving take many forms, but ‘homosexual’ families/households are rare and nowhere are men expected to
parent and care for dependents to the same extent and in the same way that women are. Hence, some men who want to parent are denied
this option, and most men who have the option do not engage it fully. Of course this leaves women over-burdened, but it has other important
effects. Men’s
systemic exclusion from primary parenting and care-giving surely affects their subjectivities and
worldviews – for instance, by constraining their emotional experience and circumscribing forms of bonding
available to them. Finally, heteropatriarchal marriage and citizenship rules exclude non-heterosexuals from a variety of benefits, rights, and
privileges, not least with respect to immigration options. Third, the symbolic coding of the nation carries gender as well as
sexuality. The metaphors of nation-as-woman and woman-as-nation suggest how women – as bodies and cultural repositories –
become the battleground of group struggles. Nation-as-woman expresses a spatial, embodied femaleness: the land’s
fecundity must be protected against invasion and violation. It is also a temporal metaphor: the rape of
the body/nation not only violates frontiers but disrupts – by planting alien seed or destroying reproductive viability – the
maintenance of the community through time. Rape has been practiced in countless wars and has
become a metaphor of national humiliation. But consider two assumptions in place before rape can
‘makes sense’ as a nationalist strategy: that men are willing (eager?) to violate women/the feminine in this
way, and that the ‘target’ is a (heterosexually) fertile woman/body. Imagining the ‘beloved country’ as a
female child, a lesbian, a prostitute, or a post-menopausal wise woman generates quite different pictures and suggests
quite different understandings of community. Woman-as-nation marks the boundaries of (insider) group identity, and as
symbols of cultural authenticity women face a variety of pressures to conform to idealized models of behaviour. This suggests the political
significance often attached to women’s outward attire and/or public behaviour, as women – but not men –
are held ‘responsible for the transmission of culture’ and at the same time presumed ‘those most
vulnerable to [heterosexual] abuse, violation or seduction by “other” men’ (Pettman 1992:5–6). This heterosexist ideology
features powerfully in nationalist projects – exemplified when European colonizers used notions of bourgeois
‘respectability’ (read: heteronormative, well-bred) to legitimate their domination of ‘Others’ (whose sexual practices were
deemed ‘backward’), and when any state power justifies foreign interventions as ‘rescue/civilizing missions’,
ostensibly to ‘save’ women from oppression by their ‘own’ men.7 Fourth, these points suggest the historical – and continuing –
fusion of nationalism, militarism, and (heterosexist) masculinism (e.g. Puar 2007). Recall that state-making in Europe
was spurred primarily by military objectives: political conditions propelled centralizing processes of accumulation to pay for
men and equipment to fight ongoing wars, and one effect of state centralization was political-economic imperialist
expansion that required a reliable supply of males willing to secure (as soldiers) and administer (as civil/public servants) local and colonial
governments. Male bonding within and allegiance to the ‘fraternal’ state/nation became crucial.And while masculinist privilege is not
homogeneously shared, in theory all men (compared to women) can identify with the cultural valorization of men and (hegemonic) masculinity
and men’s favoured access to public sphere activities, authority, and power. And in practice, militarization as a male-dominated activity
encourages men to bond politically and militarily as they play out the ‘us vs. them’ script of protecting ‘their own’women and violating the
enemy’s men/women. In effect, modern states cultivate male homosocial politics – celebrating masculinity’s cultural valorization and (abstract)
male bonding across (actual) differences – while decisively proscribing homosexual practices.8 Indeed, in
modern states – and in
most countries today – ‘homosexuals’ (and women) were excluded from military service. Recent
challenges to this exclusion expose how deeply heterosexist premises underpin hegemonic masculinity.
As a site of celebrated (because non-sexual) homosocial bonding, the military affords men a relatively unique opportunity to experience
intimacy and interdependence, especially with men, in ways that heterosexist identities and divisions of labour otherwise constrain. Cohn
(1998:145) argues that for many, the military is effectively a guarantee of heterosexual masculinity, affording a rare situation where men are
allowed to experience erotic, sexual, and emotional impulses that they would otherwise have to censor . . . for fear of being seen . . . as
homosexual and therefore not real men. They are not only escaping a negative – imputations of homosexuality – but gaining a positive, the
ability to be with other men in ways that transcend the limitations on male relationships that most men live under in civilian life. Finally, the
heterosexist state/nation denies homosexual bonding to both men and women. But whereas men are
expected to bond politically (homosocially) with other men of the state/nation, the dichotomy of public and private
spheres denies women’s homosocial bonding as well. Rather, as an effect of heteropatriarchal
households and inheritance rules, women are linked to the state through their fathers/husbands and are
expected to bond only through and with ‘their men’.9 Women then are not merely symbols or victims
within nationalist struggles. They are also agents: supporting their men/nation, participating in militarization, and
increasingly, taking up arms. To be effective, however, in hyper-masculinized arenas, women are pressured to
appear and reinforce heteronormative/masculinist strategies, including the cultural devalorization
and physical destruction of ‘Others’.

Arms control programs are a product of hegemonic masculinity – the assumption of

irrational, violent states in the East props up America as the “Just Warrior” who saves
the day, reproducing gendered violence while sanitizing the conscience of the Western
Man
Wright 09 (Susan, PhD in history of science and research scientist in the Institute for Research on
Women and Gender in the University of Michigan, Routledge Critical Studies, Gender and International
Security Feminist Perspectives, 10/16/2009, Feminist Theory and Arms Control,
http://booksdescr.org/ads.php?md5=9D1A07F25F38BBDACB498C1C26A71EAC)///AG

Bull and Schelling justify the use of “power over” states that are treated as adversaries, or potential
adversaries, in several ways. First, violence in the state system, and therefore the need to defend against it,
are taken as given. As Bull wrote: It is true that strategists take the fact of military force as their starting point … The capacity for
organized violence between states is inherent in the nature of man and the environment. The most that can be expected from
a total disarmament agreement is that it might make armaments and armed forces fewer and more primitive.75 This claim of the
inevitability of violence and the consequent need for military protection have been extensively analyzed
by feminist theorists. If violence is inevitable, then someone or something is required to defend against
it. Jean 206 Susan Wright Elshtain, Laura Sjoberg, and other feminist theorists have demonstrated the pervasive
tradition of western political thought that claims that the inevitability of violence calls for the services of
a Just Warrior (representing variously the state military apparatus or the soldier) who is “engaged in the
regrettable but sometimes necessary task of collective violence in order to prevent some greater
wrong” to the Beautiful Soul, representing variously patria or the homeland or innocent civilians.76 Bull’s
political philosophy falls completely within this tradition. A second feature that legitimates a state’s exercise of “power over” another is
the focus in both strategy and arms control on ends rather than means. Schelling and Bull are silent
about the nature of the means used to exercise power over other states. The horrific effects of nuclear,
chemical, biological, or of war in any form receive no attention except to dismiss those who focus on them. The
ends, on the other hand—the security and survival of the state— are all important. As Bull commented: There is a
sense in which strategic thinking does and should leave morality out of the account … if what is being said is that
strategic judgments should be coloured by moral considerations or that strategic inquiry should be restricted by moral taboos, this is something
that the strategist is bound to reject.77 This moral silence is related to a further major feature of Bull and Schelling’s work:
the “psychic numbing” concerning the weapons assumed to guarantee the state’s security. As Robert Jay Lifton and Richard
Falk argue, human beings develop powerful psychic walls to protect them from contemplating the effects
of extreme violence.78 “Psychic numbing” is a defense mechanism that represses, denies and excludes contemplation of massive death
and destruction. In their analysis of nuclear strategy and arms control, Bull and Schelling enlist this psychological
mechanism by focusing on reassuring ends rather than on the weapons providing the means to get
there. As Lifton, Falk and Carol Cohn have described in detail, the nuclear strategists’ focus on ends is powerfully reinforced
by their “domestication” of the weaponry through the use of abstract, familial, religious, or sexual
language—radically different metaphors that have a single function: distracting the user and the listener
from the reality of the subject matter.79 Bull used this type of legitimation in his Foreign Office report through an exclusive focus
on the strategic features of chemical and biological weapons and complete silence on their effects. A third feature of Bull and
Schelling’s view of arms control is the distancing of states from each other, with the primary
relationship being an adversarial one. Schelling might have argued that his model of strategy in International Relations was
politically neutral, that he was concerned only with achieving strategic balance. Bull, on the other hand, explicitly identified with
“strategists’ greater sense of the moral stature of American and Western political objectives for which
war and the risk of war must be undertaken.” A fourth feature that justifies the Bull–Schelling approach to
arms control is the claim that the approach is rational and undistorted by emotion. The
rational/emotional dualism figures powerfully in The Control of the Arms Race. In the chapter on nuclear
disarmament, for example, Bull wrote that the idea that measures for nuclear disarmament should be pressed as far
as possible and that the more the better, “stems from a Luddite approach to the problem of security.”81
Thus, Bull dismissed the British campaign for nuclear disarmament led by people like Bertrand Russell (no mean logician) and the historian E.P.
Thompson (no mean analyst of history). Using
nuclear weapons as deterrents, Bull was implying, was rational;
destroying them was an irrational, “Luddite” act. Again, this position draws on Bull’s firm belief that “the
physical capacity for organized violence is inherent in human society” and thus “the idea of absolute security from
war emerging from [disarmament] is an illusion.”82

Heteronormativity results in omnicide. The combination of the universal suspicion of

Queerness and the genocidal impulse to eradicate it motivates a larger apocalyptic
movement to rescue hetero-culture with extinction.
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 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,
In the second place, though, there is the inveterate topos of
naturalized minority identity in the nineteenth century.

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 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 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 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. 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 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 be
opened and opened and opened?

Our kritik is a pre-requisite to understanding the affirmatives scenario planning.

Epistemology is the lynchpin of policymaking.
Mercer 2005 (Jonathan, Prof of Poli Sci at University of Washington, “Rationality and Psychology in
International Politics”, International Organization, Volume 59, Issue 1, pp. 77-106, Jstor,)

Behaviorists thought they eliminated the mind from their explanations, for they focused on what they
imagined to be law-like relationships between stimulus and effect. Animals respond to incentives, such as corn pellets or cash
rewards, and this allows analysts to explain and predict behavior without reference to mental processes.

However, as Chomsky observed, analysts cannot identify a stimulus without first identifying a response, in which
case a stimulus is not a property of the environment but of the individual's beliefs and desires. This
observation makes clear, as Chomsky notes, "that the talk of 'stimulus control' simply disguises a complete retreat to

mentalistic psychology." 30 Rather than help analysts escape from psychology, stimulus-and-response approaches depend
on understanding an actor's mental state. Even if researchers control the environment and provide only one stimulus, how subjects
respond to that stimulus depends not on its physical attributes but on the subjective understanding (or
construal) of the stimulus.31 Researchers can reliably predict that a food-deprived chicken will respond to a lever that gives it food, or that a person
will respond to a $10 bill on the ground by picking it up, but prediction becomes unreliable in slightly more complex settings.

How students respond to very low (but passing) grades differs dramatically: some students work harder, some blame the
exam, and some pump their fist and say "Yes!" Despite behaviorists' attempts to rely only on behavior, they nonetheless relied on folk psychology.
Behaviorists eliminated from their explanations neither desires (I want that corn pellet) nor beliefs (at
the end of the third maze on the left is food). Without knowing desires and beliefs, one cannot know
what "works" as an incentive.

The nexus question of this debate is which team has the best methodological strategy
for resolving impacts - Doing nothing in the face of a call for the future is the only way
out. We should model politics on queer pessimism. This strategy rejects shared social
value just for the sake of rejecting them.
Edelman 4 (Lee, professor and chair of the English Department at Tufts University, No Future: Queer
Theory and Death Drive. 2004 pp. 4-6, MH)

Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might, as I
argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing it. Not in the hope of forging thereby
some more perfect social order—such a hope, after all, would only reproduce the 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 the "good," can ever have any assurance at all in the
order of the Symbolic. Abjuring fidelity to a futurism that's always purchased at our expense,
though bound, as Symbolic subjects consigned to figure the Symbolic's 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 law's foundational act, its self constituting negation. The structuring
optimism of politics to which the order of meaning commits us, installing as it does the perpetual hope of reaching meaning through signification, is
always, I would argue, a negation of this primal, constitutive, and negative act. And the
various 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 Symbolic's 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 puissance 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. In contrast to
what Theodor Adorno describes as the "grimness with which a man clings to himself, as to the
immediately sure and substantial," the queerness of which I speak would deliberately sever us
from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves and hence of knowing our
"good."4 Such queerness proposes, in place of the good, something I want to call "better," though it
promises, in more than one sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing. I connect this something better with Lacan's characterization of what he calls
"truth," where truth does not assure happiness, or even, as Lacan makes clear, the good.5 Instead, it names only the insistent particularity of the
subject, impossible fully to articulate and "tending] toward the real."6 Lacan, therefore, can write of this truth: The quality that best characterizes it is
that of being the true Wunsch, which was at the origin of an aberrant or atypical behavior. We encounter this Wunsch with its particular, irreducible
character as a modification that presupposes no other form of normalization than that of an experience of pleasure or of pain, but of a final experience
from whence it springs and is subsequently preserved in the depths of the subject in anirreducible form. The
Wunsch does not have
the character of a universal law but, on the contrary, of the most particular of laws—even if it is
universal that this particularity is to be found in every human being.7 Truth, like queerness,
irreducibly linked to the "aberrant or atypical," to what chafes against "normalization," finds its
value not in a good susceptible to generalization, but only in the stubborn particularity that
voids every notion of a general good. The embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no
justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead,
resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the
very value of the social itself.
This is a debate about positive action vs pure pessimism - Queer positivity and
utopianism fails – only negativity shocks the system into realizing heteronormativity
and symbolic oppression exist and reveals the system for what it is – a charade.
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
666
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 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 sberates
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).

The future will never be safe for queer life and your reform claims only maintain the
psychic structure that enables the systematic eradication of difference – we refuse the
possibility of your politics ever existing and we will not negotiate.
Edelman 4 (Lee, Professor of English @ Tufts University, “No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
Drive,” Edited by Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Page
29-31)

We might like to believe that with patience, with work, with generous contributions to lobbying groups
or generous participation in activist groups or generous doses of legal savvy and electoral sophistication,
the future will hold a place for us—a place at the political table that won't 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 queers, chosen as they are to bear the bad tidings that there can be no future at alI:
that the future, as Annie's hymn to the hope of "Tomorrow" understands, is "always/ A day/ Away." Like
the lovers on Keats's Grecian urn, forever "near the goal" of a union they'll never in fact achieve, we're
held in thrall by a future continually deferred by time itself, constrained to pursue the dream of a day
when today and tomorrow 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
imducibility 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 maintain- ; ing the future for the figural Child), are what queerness, again as figure, 1
necessarily destroys—necessarily insofar as this "self" 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 ji 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 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 we 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 intransitively—to insist that the future stop here.
 On
1. Turn – withdrawl of armsales gurantees Chinese invasion of Taiwan – creates
war scenarios and turns case
2. We control uniqueness for conflict and stability – the status quo will prevail,
but arms sales are key
Hutchins 18 (Reid Hutchins completed a Master of Strategic Studies at the Australian National
University and is currently a Ministerial Liaison Officer at the ACT Government, “High Stakes Strategy in
Taiwan,” 1-1, https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/taiwan-arms-sales/)

Is change on the cards? As

a new US administration seeks to reassure China that its policies remain largely
unchanged, the importance of forging strong bilateral relations between the two great powers is
paramount. Yet, it is still within US interests to sell arms to Taiwan. The US is caught between honouring its Taiwanese
alliance and also quelling rising Chinese anxiety over its territorial claims. As a way of countering China’s own salami, ‘divide-and conquer’
tactics, the suggestion has been made that the US could incrementally sell defensive arms to Taiwan over a period of time. Continually
delivering large arms packages has already spurred rapid Chinese military modernisation over a number of years. A meeting of the annual
National People’s Congress confirmed this anxiety, when it announced a 7 per cent rise in the military budget. While
China, Taiwan
and the US have shifted their foreign policy to a varying extent, these shifts have not fundamentally
altered the strategic interests of each state vis-à-vis the other. There should never be any certainty that
trilateral relations will remain as they are, especially given new reformist US and Taiwanese administrations, but each
state has not yet demonstrated any signs of changing their strategic objectives. What are the motivations? China
has taken great interest in the domestic politics of Taiwan in recent years, as the island nation has gone through a transitional government.
Whilst there is always an element of the unknown, President Tsai Ing-wen’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) will look to neutralise hostile
territorial claims from China. Given Taiwan’s long record of arms deals with the US, China’s President Xi Jinping would likely have assumed that
Trump’s arms deal would go ahead. Xi will now continue a policy of incremental coercion in an effort to influence
Taiwan’s political establishment and derail future arms sales in the long term. Whilst China’s primary
goal is to politically unify Taiwan with the mainland, Chinese policy-makers are pragmatic and realistic
enough to know that the feasibility of this goal can only be achieved in the long term. Taiwan will
continue to rely on US extended deterrence for its national security. It will therefore continue to pursue
arms sales agreements with the US and do whatever possible to preserve the alliance. Based on previous
condemnations, China’s negative response to the new deal was predictable. Tsai knew that beyond strong condemnation,
China will not escalate its rhetoric into a significant hostile action. Despite espousing unpredictable foreign policy
views, Trump was successfully convinced by Tsai and his advisors to honour an important bilateral arms arrangement, knowing a negative
backlash for Sino-US relations would be inevitable. As such, Trump will look to build trust and rapport with Xi—a greater foreign policy priority
than arms sales with Taiwan. Tsai will look for any opportunity to reaffirm the necessity of future US arms sales
to boost Taiwan’s defensive military capability. Trump has shown an adherence to the ‘One China’ policy in an effort to
appease China that it’s business as usual. He has so far maintained the status quo regarding American commitments
to Taiwan. Senior military advisors will likely recommend that Trump maintain bilateral military relations as a show of relevance and
superiority in the region. However, a US naval presence in Taiwan would be an undue provocation to an already sensitive situation. To avoid
alarming China and disrupting Sino-US relations, the salami tactic of incremental arms packages is a viable option that the US could consider.
Large US military transfers to Taiwan such as the sale of 150 fighter jets in 1992 drew strong condemnation from China, raising tensions
throughout the region. By making smaller but more regular arms sales to Taiwan, the US is honouring its security arrangement and limiting
Chinese anxieties. China’s perspective China views US arms sales to Taiwan as a threat to its national and strategic interests. This threat is
driven by a deep sense of national humiliation suffered under foreign rulers during its imperial past. This narrative has been espoused by
Chinese foreign policy-makers to promote nationalistic sentiment at home. For China, national pride is at stake with regard to Taiwan in its
pursuit for national rejuvenation. The US presence in Taiwan threatens the source of this national pride and revives painful historical memories
of foreign encroachment and occupation. Given that China believes Taiwan to be indivisible from the PRC, US arms deals to a secessionist
Taiwan is viewed by China as hostile anti-Chinese behaviour. Taiwanese prospects Taiwan is at the centre of a great power contest as it
struggles to achieve sovereignty from its powerful mainland neighbour, whilst having the freedom to pursue greater relations with the West. As
an island nation that has forged a distinct political and social identity from the mainland, Taiwan’s foreign policy towards China has consistently
been one of self-determination. In an effort to achieve independence, successive Taiwanese leaders have sought greater defensive military
capabilities to deter a potential Chinese assault. In December 2016, President Tsai Ing-wen angered China by calling President Trump to
congratulate his win and reaffirm the alliance. With Trump’s recent arms sales approval, Taiwanese defence policy-makers have been appeased
after months of uncertainty. Taiwanese efforts to boost its military capability has become a national priority as it looks to counterbalance a
more assertive China. Whilst
Taiwan does not have the capability to defeat a conventional Chinese assault, it
could inflict enough damage for the cost to be too great to warrant attempting. President Tsai is faced with
Taiwan’s usual foreign policy dilemma—appeasing China whilst still relying on US security commitments.
Through decades of careful diplomatic manoeuvring, Taiwan has been able to strike an uneasy balance
between the US and China which Tsai will want to preserve. So far, she has kept satisfactory cross-strait
relations by keeping to the status quo. However challenges will always remain for any Taiwanese leader who must play off two
competing great powers.

Existing US posture deters initiation of conflict by both sides – accommodation

ensures fast escalation
Wang 18 --- PhD in poli sci from U of Chicago (Yuan-kang Wang is Professor in the Department of
Political Science at Western Michigan University, former International Security Fellow at Harvard
University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings
Institution's Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies, and a visiting scholar at the Institute of Politcal
Science, Academia Sinica, “Rethinking US Security Commitment to Taiwan,” book chapter in: “Taiwan’s
Political Re-Alignment and Diplomatic Challenges, Politics and Development of Contemporary China,”
google books)

Deterrence and Reassurance Last but not least, abandoning Taiwan would destroy the delicate balance between
deterrence and reassurance, a balance that is critical to regional stability. Current US policy toward Taiwan aims to achieve
dual deterrence. Aside from deterring China from attacking Taiwan, Washington also seeks to deter Taiwan
from taking political initiatives that could destabilize the situation.52 Deterrence alone, however, is not sufficient to
maintain the peace. Effective deterrence requires both coercive threats and credible reassurances. In addition to
issuing the threats, the deterring state also needs to reassure the target state that if it does not alter the status
quo, its core interests would not be deprived. Otherwise, the target will have no incentives to heed the threats. As Thomas
Schelling points out, “any coercive threat requires corresponding assurances.”53 Thomas Christensen notes that successful deterrence
requires “a mix of credible threats and credible reassurances” about the conditions under which those
threats would be carried out.54 The same logic applies to dual deterrence. In such a situation, the deterring state needs to deter not
one but two states from destabilizing the status quo. On the one hand, the deterring state communicates coercive threats
to both target states about not changing the status quo. On the other hand, it needs to reassure the target
states that their interests will not be sacrificed if they do not take steps to change the status quo. Without
reassurance that their interests would not be jeopardized, the target states would have no incentives to abide by the deterrent threats. The
1995–1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis demonstrates the imperatives of maintaining a delicate balance between deterrence and reassurance. When
Washington decided to issue a visa to Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui to visit his alma mater, Cornell University, in 1995, it deassured Beijing
about the US commitment to the one-China policy. Beijing responded to “creeping Taiwan independence” by launching missiles off Taiwan’s
ports, prompting Washington to dispatch two aircraft carriers to the region. In the aftermath of the crisis, President Bill Clinton
attempted to calm Beijing’s fear while visiting Shanghai in 1998 by publicly announcing the “Three Noes” (no
support of Taiwan independence; no support of “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan”; and no support of Taiwan’s membership
in any international organization that requires statehood). But he overcorrected. As Andrew Nathan points out, this “intentional
tilt toward Beijing” was counterproductive. It led President Lee to harden Taiwan’s position by declaring that
cross-Strait relations were akin to “special state-to- state relationship.” Tensions quickly escalated, with Beijing freezing all
contacts with Taiwan. Nathan concludes, “The United States’ policy of reassuring Beijing has also deassured Taiwan, thus worsening
rather than easing tensions.”55 Thus, accommodating China on Taiwan would have the similar effect of deassuring
Taiwan and raising tensions. It would destroy the delicate balance between deterrence and reassurance.
Accommodation would force Taiwan into taking risky political initiatives that could further destabilize
the Taiwan Strait, as it did after President Clinton’s “three noes” announcement in 1998. The current US policy of strategic
ambiguity has kept the peace in the region, and there is no sound strategic rationale to change a
successful policy.

3. China war good - A) Multiple hotspots

Keck, 2014:
(U.S.-China Rivalry More Dangerous Than Cold War? January 28 2014. Zachary Keck, Journalist For The
Diplomat. Note: Keck is summarizing the viewpoint of John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison
Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science At The University Of Chicago)

The U.S.-China strategic rivalry lacks this singular center of gravity. Instead, Mearsheimer
identified four potential hotspots
over which he believes the U.S. and China might find themselves at war: the Korean Peninsula, the
Taiwan Strait and the South and East China Seas. Besides featuring more hotspots than the U.S.-Soviet conflict, Mearsheimer
implied that he felt that decision-makers in Beijing and Washington might be more confident that they could
engage in a shooting war over one of these areas without it escalating to the nuclear threshold. For
instance, he singled out the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, of which he said
there was a very real possibility that Japan and China could find themselves in a shooting war sometime in
the next five years. Should a shooting war break out between China and Japan in the East China Sea,
Mearsheimer said he believes the U.S. will have two options: first, to act as an umpire in trying to
separate the two sides and return to the status quo ante; second, to enter the conflict on the side of
Japan. Mearsheimer said that he thinks it’s more likely the U.S. would opt for the second option because
a failure to do so would weaken U.S. credibility in the eyes of its Asian allies. In particular, he believes that America
trying to act as a mediator would badly undermine Japanese and South Korean policymakers’ faith in America’s extended deterrence. Since
the U.S. does not want Japan or South Korea to build their own nuclear weapons, Washington would be
hesitant to not come out decisively on the side of the Japanese in any war between Tokyo and Beijing

B) Now is key – waiting only benefits China

Mearsheimer, 2014:
(John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science At The
University Of Chicago. October 25, 2014. Can China Rise Peacefully? Excerpt From The Tragedy Of The
Great Power Politics, Published By The National Interest)

Starting a war now, or even engaging in serious security competition, makes little sense for Beijing. Conflict runs the risk of
damaging the Chinese economy; moreover, China’s military would not fare well against the United States and its
current allies. It is better for China to wait until its power has increased and it is in a better position to
take on the American military. Simply put, time is on China’s side, which means it should pursue a
low-key foreign policy so as not to raise suspicion among its neighbors.

C) Absent China being put in its place now, China will MIRV their ICBMs – causes Indo-
Pak and Russia-China war
Keck, 2015
(August 19, 2015. China Tests Its Most Dangerous Nuclear Weapon Of All Time.. Zachary Keck, Journalist
For The Diplomat.)
China conducted a flight test of its new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) this month. This week, Bill Gertz reported that earlier this
month, China conducted the fourth flight test of its DF-41 road-mobile ICBM. “The DF-41, with a range of
between 6,835 miles and 7,456 miles, is viewed by the Pentagon as Beijing’s most potent nuclear missile and one
of several new long-range missiles in development or being deployed,” Gertz reports. He goes on to note that this is
the fourth time in the past three years that China has tested the DF-41, indicating that the missile is nearing deployment. Notably, according to
Gertz, in the latest test China shot two independently targetable warheads from the DF-41, further confirming that the DF-41 will hold multiple
independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRV). As I’ve noted before, China’s acquisition of a MIRVed capability is one of
the most dangerous nuclear weapons developments that no one is talking about. MIRVed missiles carry
payloads of several nuclear warheads each capable of being directed at a different set of targets. They are considered extremely
destabilizing

to the strategic balance primarily because they place a premium on striking first and create a “use em
or lose em” nuclear mentality. Along with being less vulnerable to anti-ballistic missile systems, this is true for two primary reasons.
First, and most obviously, a single MIRVed missile can be used to eliminate numerous enemy nuclear sites
simultaneously. Thus, theoretically at least, only a small portion of an adversary’s missile force would be
necessary to completely eliminate one’s strategic deterrent. Secondly, MIRVed missiles enable countries
to use cross-targeting techniques of employing two or more missiles against a single target, which increases the kill
probability. In other words, MIRVs are extremely destabilizing because they make adversary’s nuclear
arsenals vulnerable to being wiped out in a surprise first strike. In the case of China, Beijing’s acquisition of a
MIRVed capability is likely to force India to greatly increase the size of its nuclear arsenal, as well as
force it to disperse its nuclear weapons across a greater sway of land to prevent China from being able to conduct a successful
decapitation strike. Such a development in Delhi would upset the Indo-Pakistani nuclear balance, likely prompting
Islamabad to take corresponding actions of its own. China’s acquisition of a MIRVed capability is also likely to upset the
strategic balance with Russia. As Moscow’s conventional military capabilities have eroded since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia
has leaned more heavily on nuclear weapons for its national defense. It therefore seeks to maintain a clear nuclear advantage over potential
adversaries like China. Beijing’s acquisition of MIRVed missiles threatens to erode this advantage. As Gertz’s notes, the U.S. intelligence
community believes that the DF-41 will ultimately be able to carry up to 10 nuclear warheads. Such a development would likely force China to
increase the size of its nuclear arsenal. To date, China and India (as well as the world’s other nuclear powers) have maintained relatively small
nuclear arsenals compared with Russia and the United States. The introduction of MIRVed technologies into the Asian nuclear balance may
render this no longer true. For this reason— along with its long-range and solid fuel—the DF-41 is the most dangerous nuclear weapon in
China’s arsenal.

D.) It’s the most destabilizing factor---magnifies use it or lose it pressure

Keck, 14 - Zachary Keck is the current managing editor of The National Interest and was formerly
Managing Editor of The Diplomat where he authored The Pacific Realist blog. Previously, he worked as
Deputy Editor of e-International Relations and has interned at the Center for a New American Security
and in the U.S. Congress, where he worked on defense issues. ("The Most Dangerous Nuclear Threat No
One Is Talking About" on December 19, 2014 from nationalinterest.org/blog/the-most-dangerous-
nuclear-threat-no-one-talking-about-11899)

Namely, China and India are both on the cusp of deploying multiple independently targetable reentry
(MIRV) vehicles on their ballistic missiles, a development that is likely to have profound, far-reaching
consequences for the region and beyond.

MIRVed missiles carry payloads of several nuclear warheads each capable of being directed at a
different set of targets. They are considered extremely destabilizing to the strategic balance primarily
because they place a premium on striking first and create a “use em or lose em” nuclear mentality.
Along with being less vulnerable to anti-ballistic missile systems, this is true for two primary reasons.
First, and most obviously, a single MIRVed missile can be used to eliminate numerous enemy nuclear
sites simultaneously. Thus, theoretically at least, only a small portion of an adversary’s missile force
would be necessary to completely eliminate one’s strategic deterrent. Secondly, MIRVed missiles enable
countries to use cross-targeting techniques of employing two or more missiles against a single target,
which increases the kill probability.

In other words, MIRVs are extremely destabilizing because they make adversary’s nuclear arsenals
vulnerable to being wiped out in a surprise first strike. To compensate for this fact, states must come up
with innovative ways to secure their deterrent from an enemy first strike. This usually entails increasing
the size of one’s arsenal, and further dispersing to make it more difficult for an enemy to conduct a
successful first strike. For example, when the U.S. first deployed MIRVed missiles in 1968, the Soviet
Union had less than 10,000 nuclear warheads. A decade later, however, it had over 25,000 (of course,
the Soviet Union deploying its own MIRVed missiles incentivized expanding the size of its arsenal since
more warheads were needed per missile).

With regards to China and India, then, the introduction of MIRVed missiles could have profound
consequences of both of their nuclear postures. One of the most remarkable aspects of every nuclear
state not named Russia or the United States is they have relied on an extremely small nuclear arsenal to
meet their deterrent needs. This is especially true of India and China who have generally maintained
minimum deterrence and no-first use doctrines. With the introduction of countervailing MIRVed
missiles, however, there will be strong incentives on both sides to vastly increase the size of their
arsenals if any to guard against the threat of a first strike by the other side.

Of course, the consequences of China and India acquiring MIRVed missiles would not be limited to those
states alone. Most obviously, India’s acquisition of MIRVed missiles would immediately threaten the
survivability of Pakistan’s nuclear forces. In the short-term, this will probably result in Islamabad further
dispersing its nuclear arsenal, which in general will leave it more vulnerable to Islamist terrorist groups
in the country. Over the long-term, Pakistan will feel pressure to expand the size of its arsenal as well as
acquire MIRVed capabilities of its own.

The same pressures will be felt in Moscow. Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russia has relied
on its vast nuclear arsenal to compensate for its relative conventional weakness. In the eyes of Russian
leaders, this will only grow more necessary as China continues to modernize its conventional military
forces. Currently, Russia holds vastly more nuclear warheads than China, which is a source of relief for
Moscow. As China MIRVs its missiles, however, as well as likely builds up the size of its arsenal, Moscow
will see its nuclear superiority over Beijing rapidly erode. It can be counted on to respond by abrogating
its arms control treaties with the United States, and expanding its own arsenal as well. In such a
situation, a U.S. president would come under enormous domestic pressure to meet Russia’s buildup
warhead for warhead.
Thus, while the prospect of North Korea and Iran acquiring operationalized nuclear
arsenals may be concerning, China and India’s MIRVed missiles present far greater threats to the
world
4. The plan doesn’t solve US-China relations AND independently sparks massive
political backlash that turns the advantage
Rigger 11 (Shelley Rigger, Brown Professor and chair of political science at Davidson College, November 29, 2011. “Why giving up Taiwan
will not help us with China.” http://www.aei.org/publication/why-giving-up-taiwan-will-not-help-us-with-china/)
No Silver Bullet for US-China Woes Even if it were true that Sino-American tensions could be melted away with a
single policy change in Washington, the United States should still continue to support Taiwan to maintain the credibility of its
alliances and uphold its commitment to democracy as a desirable and feasible goal for developing nations. But, in reality, ending US
defense assistance to Taipei is unlikely to produce the salutary effects the critics of current US policy anticipate. Such
a change would indeed delight Beijing; however, it would create new problems just as intractable as the old ones
but less familiar and potentially even more challenging. The point of departure for critics of America’s
existing Taiwan policy is their shared belief that ending security assistance to Taiwan would improve US-
China relations. As Freeman puts it, “The kind of long-term relationship of friendship and cooperation China
and America want with each other is incompatible with our emotionally fraught differences over the Taiwan issue. These
differences propel mutual hostility and the sort of ruinous military rivalry between the two countries that has already begun. We are coming to
a point at which we can no longer finesse our differences over Taiwan. We must either resolve them or live with the increasingly adverse
consequences of our failure to do so.”[10] As a syllogism, this argument makes sense: Beijing believes Taiwan should be unified with the
mainland, and it views US security assistance to Taiwan as the primary reason it is not. Because unification is a core issue for the PRC, leaders in
Beijing cannot ignore or overlook US intervention; they must constantly challenge it. Thus,
if the United States ended its
security assistance to Taiwan, the biggest irritant in US-China relations would disappear. In practice,
unfortunately, there is no guarantee that a change in US policy toward Taiwan would instantly or automatically
end, or even significantly reduce, the tensions the Taiwan issue creates in Sino-American relations. Ending security
assistance to Taiwan would raise expectations in China without removing the existing obstacles to peaceful unification. It likely would provoke
panic in Taiwan, but it would not make the Taiwanese people any more enthusiastic about unification. On the contrary, the more vulnerable
and threatened the Taiwanese people felt, the harder it would be for them to consider China’s overtures rationally. For decades, the United
States has justified arms sales to Taiwan on the grounds that Taipei can negotiate with Beijing more effectively from a position of strength than
of weakness. It is easy to dismiss this logic as a rationalization, but as Randall Schriver said, “In what other instance involving a negotiation is the
weaker party better off? . . . Historically, what you find is where there is equal power—or, at least, credible deterrent power—you get better
outcomes.” Neither Beijing nor Taipei is well served by a negotiating process that leads to a bad deal, including one Taiwanese citizens cannot
accept. Successfully pressuring Taiwan’s negotiators into accepting a deal might seem like a victory for Beijing, but if Taiwan’s domestic politics
make it impossible to implement the deal, the long-term result might be worse than no deal at all. Ending US
defense assistance to
Taiwan—whether by repealing the Taiwan Relations Act or by simply declining to provide defensive equipment to Taiwan’s armed forces—
would not “ripen” Taiwan for peaceful unification or obviate the rationale the United States has historically followed regarding Taiwan. It
would, however, intensify the debate over Taiwan policy within the United States. Taiwan still has many US
friends and supporters, and many foreign policy experts would question a decision to change course. The
policy changes Gilley, Glaser, Freeman, and Owens recommend would stimulate a debate over China policy at a time when negative attitudes
toward the PRC already are on the rise. The
last thing Sino-American relations need is an acrimonious, politically
charged debate in Washington over policy toward China and Taiwan. In sum, changing America’s Taiwan
policy could easily induce a poisonous turn in the domestic politics of US China policy without making peaceful
unification easier.

5. The fear of nuclear war and nuclear waste is a fear of mutation, a fear of
difference, a fear that our definition of normal and natural will explode. We
need to embrace the symbolic simulated nuclear war/disaster brought to us by
the 1AC to get over this fear of difference and find liberation.
Rebekah Sheldon received her PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2010. Her first book is Future Harm: The Figure of the Child in Contemporary
American Discourses of Catastrophe. She is currently researching a second book-length project on the influence of the hermetic tradition on 20th-century queer
Anglo-American writers, filmmakers and artists.¶ , http://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-sheldon/, 2013
“The force of life is fertility,” Arendt notes. And yet
the example of nuclear waste makes clear that biological
reproduction is hardly the only source of liveliness. For this reason, queer theorist Mel Chen prefers the term
“animacy,” which she describes as designating the rich fields that inhere in the interstices of molar
binaries like “life and death, positivity and negativity, impulse and substance” (4). In this context,
reproductive futurism promises to consolidate the explosion of other-than-human liveliness under the
figure of the child at the same time that it suggests an accelerating horizon of unrecuperable vitality.
Through the figure of the shredder child, the mutant child, The Handmaid’s Tale shows us the reproductive future
behind the sacred child of reproductive futurism. Indeed the only child born in the space of the novel in a collective ritual of
sympathetic identification so powerful it causes phantom pains and false milk in the bodies of the women who attend is an Unbaby. While
this may seem less like liveliness than death and despair (a conjunction that resonates with the mandate
“breed or die”), a lyric description of an egg, which directly precedes both Offred’s explanation of Unbabies and the birth scene that
brings another Unbaby into the world, gives us another combination of deathliness and liveliness. I quote from it in full: ¶ The shell of the
egg is smooth but also grained; small pebbles of calcium are defined by the sunlight, like craters on the
moon. It’s a barren landscape, yet perfect; it’s the sort of desert the saints went into, so their minds
would not be distracted by profusion. I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the
moon may not be on the surface, but inside.¶ The egg is glowing now, as if it had an energy of its own.
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