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Lee Edelman No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) - Coggle…
Lee Edelman
No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
(2004)
What is the problem Edelman is thinking through?
"reproductive futurism: terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving as the process the absolute privilege of heteronormavity" (2) -- a future based on reproduction's central place
The Child: "In its coercive universalization, however, the image of the Child, not to be confused wuth the lived experiences of any historical children" (11) the idea of the Child as a coercive, political AND SOCIAL tool
"constant thrat of legal curtailment out of defence to imaginary Children whose futures" (19) all sides use the Child as
"conservatism preemtively imagines the wholesale rupturing og the social fabric, whereas liberalism conservatively clings to a faith in limitless elasticity" (14) -- shows how liberalims is still
a way to unthink the social order
the problem is the "future"
it obfuscates the problems of the here and now; the Child misses lived experiences of children; "to prescribe what will
count
as political discourse--by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to the reality of a collective future" (11);
Methodology: Lacan, psychoanalysis,
we might update Edelman to point to "think of the children" arguments around drag story hour and children's lit/book banning
"Queerness"
"the
queerness
names the side of those
not
'fighting for the child,' the side
"in taking a side outside the logic of reproductive futurism and arguing that queer might embrace their figural assosciations with its end" (17)
"figurality that is always essential
to
identity" (17).
death drive: (see 27)
"Queerness, therefore, is never a matter of being or becoming but rather of
embodying
the remained of Real internal to the Symbolic order" (25)
Complications: who might be left out?
Some folks don't have the opportunity or luxury/privilege to opt out of society (see mingus "interdependence")
wild assumptions about Child as not being a child of color with precarious futurity (liveable) (see "Unspeakable Offenses" by Erevelles and Minear)
"Queerness, therefore, is never a matter of being or becoming but rather of
embodying
the remained of Real internal to the Symbolic order" (25) -- maybe misses the point with intraactivity and cripistemologies