Queer Pessimism K
1NC
Criticism 1NC
Their understanding of the Middle Passage and the story of the Drexciyans is problematic and
exclusive for queer bodies- two links:
First- the aff’s ignorance of queerness and its intricate relation to the Middle Passage is not
neutral- it originates in a desire to structurally remove discussions of queer bodies from
historical interrogations- this is not a link of omission, but rather a complete relegation of
erotic desire to the margins of our discourse
Tinsley 8 [2008, Omise’eke Tinsley is Professor of English and African American and African Studies at the
University of Minnesota. She has a Ph.D. in Comparitive Literature from the University of California, Berkeley
“Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies 2008 Volume 14, Number 2]
And water, ocean water is the first thing in the unstable confluence of race. nationality. sexuality. and gender I want
to imagine here. This wateriness is meta- phor, and history too. The brown-skinned, fluid-bodied experiences now
called blackness and queerness surfaced in intercontinental. maritime contacts hundreds of years ago: in the
seventeenth century, in the Atlantic Ocean. You see, the black Atlantic has always been the queer Atlantic. What Paul
Gilroy never told us is how queer relationships were forged on merchant and pirate ships, where Europeans and
Africans slept with fellow--and I mean same-sex--sailors. And, more powerfully and silently, how queer relationships
emerged in the holds of slave ships that crossed between West Africa and the Caribbean archipelago . I began to
learn this black Atlantic when l was studying relationships between women in Suriname and delved into the etymology of the word mati. This is
the word Creole women use for their female lovers: figuratively mi mati is "my girl," but literally it means mate, as in shipmate-she who
survived the Middle Passage with me. Sed- imented layers of experience lodge in this small word. During the Middle Passage, as colonial
chronicles, oral tradition, and anthropological studies tell us, captive African women created erotic bonds with other women
in the sex-segregated holds, and captive African men created bonds with other men. In so doing, they resisted
the commodification of their bought and sold bodies by feeling and feeling for their co-occupants on these ships.
l evoke this history now not to claim the slave ship as the origin of the black queer Atlantic. The ocean obscures
all origins, and neither ship nor Atlantic: can be a place of origin . Not of blackness, though perhaps Africans first became
negro: and negers during involuntary sea transport; not of queerness, though per- haps some Africans were first intimate with same-sex
shipmates then. Instead, in relationship to blackness, queerness, and black queerness, the Atlantic is the site of what
the anthropologist Kale Fajardo calls "crosscurrents." Oceans and are important sites for differently situated
people. Indig- enous Peoples, fisherpeople, seafarers, sailors, tourists, workers, and ath- letes. Oceans and seas are sites of
inequality and exploitation-resource extraction, pollution, militarization, atomic testing, and genocide. At the
same time, oceans and seas are sites of beauty and pleasure--solitude, sensuality, desire, and resistance.
Oceanic and maritime realms are also spaces of transnational and diasporic communities, heterogeneous
trajectories of globalizations, and other racial, gender, class, and sexual formations.' Conceptualizing the complex
possibilities and power dynamics of the maritime, Fajardo posits the necessity of thinking through transoceanic cross-currents.
are theoretical and ethnographic borderlands at sea, where elements or currents of historical, conceptual, and
embodied maritime experience come together to transform racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized selves.
The queer black Atlantic I discuss here navigates these cross-currents as it brings together enslaved and African,
brutality and desire, genocide and resistance. Here, fluidity is not an easy metaphor for queer and racially hybrid identities but for
concrete, painful, and liberatory experience. It is the kind of queer of color space that Roderick Fer- guson calls for in Aberration: in Black. one
that reflects the materiality of black queer experience while refusing its transparency.' If the black queer Atlantic brings together such longflowing history. why is black queer studies situated as a dazzlingly new "discovery" in academia-a hybrid, mermaidlike imagination that has yet
to find its land legs? In the last five years, black queer and queer of color critiques have navigated innovative direc- tions in African diaspora
studies as scholars like Ferguson and E. Patrick Johnson push the discipline to map intersections between racialized and sexualized bod- ies.
Unfortunately, Eurocentric queer theorists and heterocentric race theorists have engaged their discourses of
resistant black queerness as a new fashion-- a glitzy, postmodern invention borrowed and adapted from Euro-American queer
theory. In contrast, as interventions like the New-York Historical Society's exhibit Slavery in New York demonstrate, the Middle Passage
and slave experience con- tinue to be evoked as authentic originary sites of African diaspora identities and
discourses.3 This stark split the "newest" and "oldest" sites of blackness reflects larger political trends that
polarize queer versus diasporic and immigrant issues by moralizing and domesticating sexuality as an
undermining of tradition, on the one hand, while racializing and publicizing global southern diasporas as threats
to the integrity of a nation of (fictively) European immigrants, on the other. My discussion here purposes to
intervene in this polarization by bridging imagina- tions of the "choice" of black queerness and the forced
migration of the Middle Passage. What would it mean for both queer and African diaspora studies to take seriously the possibility that.
as forcefully as the Atlantic and Caribbean flow together. so too do the turbulent fluidities of blackness and queerness? What new geography -or as Fajardo proposes, oceanography--of sexual, gendered. trans- national, and racial identities might through reading for black queer his- tory
aml theory in the traumatic dislocation of the Middle Passage?' u..- ln what follows, I explore such queer Atlantic oceanographies
by comparing two narrative spaces. One is a site where an imagination of this Atlan- tic struggles to emerge: in
academic theorizing, specifically in water metaphors of African diaspora and queer theory. The second is a site where such imaginations emerge through struggle: in Caribbean creative writing, specifically in Ana- Maurine Lara's tale of queer migration in Erzulie's Skirt
(2006) and Dionne Brand's reflections on the Middle Passage in A Map to the Door of No Return (2(l0l). I turn to these literary texts as a queer,
unconventional, and imaginative archive of the black Atlantic.5 And the literary texts turn to ocean waters themselves as an archive, an everpresent, ever-reformulating record of the unimaginable. Lara and Brand plumb the archival ocean materially, as space that churns with physical remnants. dis(re)membered bodies of the Middle Passage, and they plumb it metaphorically, as opaque space to convey the drowned,
disremembered, ebbing and flowing histories of violence and healing in the African diaspora. "Water over- flows with memory," writes M.
Jacqui Alexander, delving into the Middle Passage in Pedagogies of Crossing. "Emotional memory. Bodily memory. Sacred memory.""
Developing a black feminist epistemology to uncover submerged historic-s- particularly those stories of Africans'
forced ocean crossings that traditional his- toriography cannot validate-AIexander eloquently argues that searchers must
explore outside narrow conceptions of the "factual" to get there. Such explorations would involve muddying divisions
between documented and intuited, material and metaphoric, past and present so that "who is remembered-and
how-is contin- ually being transformed through a web of interpretive systems . . . collapsing. ulti- mately, the
demarcation of the prescriptive past, present. and future of linear time."7 While Alexander searches out such crossings in
Afro-Atlantic ceremony. Lara and Brand explore similarly fluid embodied-imaginary, historical-contemporary spaces through the literal and
figurative passages of their historical fictions. The subaltern can in submarine space, but it is hard to hear her or his underwa- ter voice,
whispering (as Brand writes) a thousand secrets that at once wash closer and remain opaque, resisting closure.
Second- the obsession with fetuses and motherhood in the Drexciyan story creates a world
that destroys any form of relation other than heterosexual sex
Edelman 2004 (Lee, Professor of English Literature, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, pp. 74-76)
This conflation of homosexuality with the radical negativity of sinthomosexuality continues to shape our
social reality despite the well intentioned efforts of many, gay and straight alike, to normalize queer
sexualities within a logic of meaning that finds realization only in and as the future. When the New York
Times Magazine, for example, published in 1998 an issue devoted to the status items specific to various demographic groups, Dan Savage
found in a baby's gurgle the music to soothe the gay male beast: "Gay parents," he wrote, "are not only making a commitment to our
political future, but to the future, period.... And many of us have decided that we want to fill our time with something more meaningful
than sit-ups, circuit parties and designer drugs. For me and my boyfriend, bringing up a child is a commitment to having a future. And
considering what the last I5 years were like, perhaps that future is the ultimate status item for gay men." The messenger here may be a gay
the message is that of compulsory reproduction as inscribed on the anti-abortion billboard I mentioned in
life, for life and the baby and meaning hang together in the balance, confronting the
lethal counterweight of narcissism, AIDS, and death, all of which spring from commitment to the
meaningless eruptions of jouissance associated with the "circuit parties" that gesture toward the
circuit of the drive. This fascism of the baby's face, which encourages parents, whether gay or straight, to join in a
rousing chorus of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," suggests that if few can bring up a child without constantly
bringing it up-as if the future secured by the Child, the one true access to social security, could only be claimed for the other's sake,
and never for one's own- then that future can only belong to those who purport to feel for the other (with all
the appropriative implications that such a "feeling far" suggests). It can only belong to those who accede to the
fantasy of a compassion by which they shelter the infant future from sinthomosexuals, who offer it
man, but
chapter I: choose
none, seeming, instead, to literalize one of Blake's queerest Proverbs of Hell: "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted
desires." 13 Who
would side with such "gravediggers of society" over the guardians of its future? Who
our
back on what hangs in the balance and deciding-despite the rhetoric of compassion, futurity, and life-to topple the
scales that are always skewed, to put one's foot down at last, even if doing so costs us the ground on which
we, like all others, must stand? To figure out how we might answer that question, let's think about Leonard as a figure, one
would opt for the voiding of meaning over Savage's "something more meaningful"? What might Leonard teach us about turning
metonymically figured in North by Northwest by the terra-cotta figurine ("a pre-Columbian figure ofa Tarascan warrior" [90], according to
the screenplay, that is referred to throughout the Mount Rushmore episode simply as "the figure" [e.g., 138]), which contains, like a secret
meaning, the secrets on the microfilm hidden inside it. In Leonard, to be sure, the figure of the sinthomosexual is writ large-screen, never
more so than during what constitutes his anti-Sermon on the Mount, when by lowering the sole of his shoe he manages to show that he
has no soul, thus showing as well that the shoe of sinthomosexualiry fits him and that he's wearing it-insofar as he scorns the injunction to
put himself in the other's shoes. But the gesture by which he puts his stamp on sinthomosexuality-by stamping on the fingers with which
Thornhill holds fast to the monument's ledge with one hand while he holds fast to Eve with the other-constitutes, as the film makes clear, a
response to an appeal, even if his mode of response is intended to strike us as unappealing.
The impact is genocide
Yep 03 (Gust A, Prof of Sexuality Studies @ San Francisco State, The Violence of Heteronormativity in
Communication Studies: Notes on Injury, Healing, and Queer World-Making, muse)
In this passage, Simmons vividly describes the devastating pervasiveness of hatred and violence in her daily life based on being seen, perceived,
This process of othering creates individuals, groups, and communities that are
deemed to be less important, less worthwhile, less consequential, less authorized, and less human based on
historically situated markers of social formation such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and nationality.
Othering and marginalization are results of an “invisible center” (Ferguson, 1990, p. 3). The authority, position,
and power of such a center are attained through normalization in an ongoing circular movement. Normalization is
labeled, and treated as an “Other.”
the process of constructing, establishing, producing, and reproducing a taken-for-granted and all-encompassing standard used to measure
goodness, desirability, morality, rationality, superiority, and a host of other dominant cultural values. As such, normalization becomes
one of the primary instruments of power in modern society (Foucault, 1978/1990). Normalization is a
symbolically, discursively, psychically, psychologically, and materially violent form of social regulation and
control, or as Warner (1993) more simply puts it, normalization is “the site of violence” (p. xxvi). Perhaps one of
the most powerful forms of normalization in Western social systems is heteronormativity. Through
heteronormative discourses, abject and abominable bodies, souls, persons, and life forms are created,
examined, and disciplined through current regimes of knowledge and power (Foucault, 1978/1990).
Heteronormativity, as the invisible center and the presumed bedrock of society, is the quintessential force
creating, sustaining, and perpetuating the erasure, marginalization, disempowerment, and oppression of sexual
others.
The social order will always attempt to translate negativity into a position that can be
negated by the existing paradigm of anti-queerness- Our alternative is to vote not aff as a
refusal to engage in any idea of “progress”
Edelman 4 (Lee, Professor of English Literature, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, pp. 5-8)
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 jouissance that at once defines and negates us. Or better: can expose the
constancy, the inescapability, of such access to jouissance in the social order itself, even if that order can access its constant access to jouissance only in the
process of abjecting that constancy of access onto the queer. 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. Instead, it names only the insistent particularity of the subject, impossible fully to articulate and
Intend[ing] 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 an irreducible form. The Wunsch does not have the character of a universal law but, on the contrary, of the most particular of lawseven if it is universal that this particularity is to be found in every human being.' 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
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.'
general good.
Links
Middle Passage Link
Destruction of transatlantic studies from the perspective of queerness is key to understand
identity, desire structures, and heterosexual forms of national belonging – poetic mapping
overcomes heteronormative narratives
Hannah 11 (Daniel Hannah, author of 'How we Invented Freedom, 2011, Transatlantic Exchanges, 1783-1863. Ed.
Julia M. Wright & Kevin Hutchings, “Felicia Hemans, Herman Melville and the Queer Atlantic,” 61-74.
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409409533)//CS
Over fifteen years have passed since Paul Gilroy advocated an approach to “the Atlantic as one single, complex
unit of analysis” in order “to produce an explicitly transactional and intercultural perspective”. In that time, the
emergent field of transatlantic studies has sought to highlight the ways in which European-American textual
exchanges reflect back upon nationalist paradigms, complicate national literatures and unsettle the often isolated
accounts of British and American print-circulations in the nineteenth century. Little of this scholarship, however,
has sought to address the ways in which narratives that cross the Atlantic frequently involve crossings over and
blurrings of the borderlines between genders and sexualities. This paper examines, through what I wish to term a
“queer Atlantic” lens, two distinct moments in nineteenth-century transatlanticism: Felicia Hemans’s long
narrative poem The Forest Sanctuary, first published in 1825, and Herman Melville’s two-part short story “The
Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”, first published in 1855. While these two authors – the first only
recently canonized though rarely read as queer, the second deeply canonical and more recently queered – have
seldom been placed alongside each other, a parallel reading of Hemans’s and Melville’s works can offer important
windows onto the complicated interrelations of desire and displacement that sometimes structured the
nineteenth-century transatlantic imaginary. Tracing the etymology of the word “queer” to its Indo-European root
–twerkw meaning “across”, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues for an understanding of this critical term as “a
continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying, troublant” (xii). Indeed, queer theory’s
deconstruction of borders between genders and between sexualities holds much in common with Julia
Kristeva’s advocacy for a “transnational or international position situated at the crossing of boundaries” and
Paul Gilroy’s emphasis on “the relationship of identity” to “routes” rather than “roots”. My “queer Atlantic”
reading of Hemans and Melville seeks then to cut “across” these theoretical approaches, to map out, in Judith
Butler’s terms, the means by which discourses of transnationalism, gender and sexuality engage in “overlapping,
mutually determining, and convergent fields of politicization”. Each of these texts deploys movements across
the Atlantic as tropes for the text’s unstable approach to gender and desire. At the same time, subversive
treatments of non-normative narratives of gender and desire structure these texts’ transnational projects,
evoking and challenging dominant heterosexual forms of national belonging. Recent critical responses to Felicia
Hemans have been increasingly concerned with the ways in which her poetry participates in a destabilization of
the very themes of feminine sensibility, sacrifice and domesticity for which her work was venerated in the
Victorian period. For Susan Wolfson, “Hemans’s poetry of ‘Woman’ traces its ‘feminine’ ideal on a fabric of dark
contradictions”. It suggests “an oppositional sensibility and a willingness to expose it”. Paula Feldman argues that
Hemans’s poems “undercut, even while [they] reinforce, conventional views of women”. Few critics, however,
have spoken to Hemans’s veiled explorations of militaristic male homosocial and homoerotic intimacy in the
European family, explorations tied to her imaginings of America as a space of feminized colonial benevolence
and alienating exile. In The Forest Sanctuary, Hemans’s poetic mapping of both North and South America and the
Atlantic as zones of displacement destabilizes the prominent heterosexual narratives on the surface of this
poem of emigration
A queer model is a productive starting point – it estranges dominant forms of knowledge
production by restructuring national borderlines
Hannah 11 (Daniel Hannah, author of 'How we Invented Freedom, 2011, Transatlantic Exchanges, 1783-1863. Ed.
Julia M. Wright & Kevin Hutchings, “Felicia Hemans, Herman Melville and the Queer Atlantic,” 61-74.
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409409533)//CS
Unlike scholarship on Hemans, studies of Melville’s work have been vitally interested in questions of sexuality. In 1986, Robert K. Martin’s
groundbreaking Hero, Captain, and Stranger spoke to the politically critical potential of Melville’s deployment of homosexuality, tying it to his
enduring interest in the sea (sometimes the Atlantic, as in Redburn) as a space of international exchange. More recently, in terms that point to
a redirection of his earlier primary interest in male companionship, Martin has suggested that the “adoption of a queer model that
proposes contingency instead of certainty” when it comes to questions of sexual preference, “seems likely to
offer the best future for the study of sexuality in Melville’s texts”. In reading Melville’s work as cutting across a spectrum of sexual
desire, I wish to draw attention to important queer conjunctions between Melville’s erotic and transnational politics. While, in longer works like
Redburn, Moby Dick and Billy Budd, the sea might, as Martin suggests, open out international space for pursuing
homoerotic intimacies normally policed by the nation-state, in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”,
Melville’s sexualized transatlantic analogies depend upon sudden juxtapositions, on the absence of that liminal
sea-space. These juxtapositions draw the reader into the queer drama of the text’s compulsive pairings of English “bachelors” and American
“maids”… Absorption, in Melville’s tale, moves from representing a process of hospitable assimilation to staging a
mystical response to the mechanistic – to be absorbed is both to find a space for the self and the self’s
unsanctioned desires and to find oneself arrested, taken out of oneself, by a display of power, of “punctuality
and precision”. These processes, the tale suggests, are not alien to each other. Both of these scenes of absorption foreground
the narrator’s queer textual-attraction to the name of a male host – in each scene, the narrator is drawn to the possibility of leaving a “mark”
on this name, to an imagining of that name bearing a silent trace of his own presence. And both scenes frame the process of absorption as
erotically charged – in “The Paradise of Bachelors”, the narrator’s homoerotic soaking up of his male comrades climaxes with the dinner party’s
closing act of a communal taking of snuff from an enormous powder horn; in “The Tartarus of Maids”, the narrator’s “filled” state moves
without blinking from his mystical response to the reproduction of Cupid’s name to his attentive gaze on the body of the “sad-looking woman”.
Like the woman who “absorb[s]” his attention in the wake of the machine’s allure and the rest of her “pallid” workmates, the narrator stands in
danger of giving into his “curious emotion”, becoming pulp-like, “march[ing] on in unvarying docility to the autocratic cunning of the machine”
(285). And yet that same “curious emotion”, the compulsive sway toward the “wheels and the cylinders” that seems to threaten the narrator’s
ability to distinguish between the divine and the “mere machine”, is the same spontaneous drift that, as we have seen, structures the entire
diptych with its intermittent comparisons of the “Bachelors” and the “Maids”. Melville’s narrative depends, then, upon an
eroticized series of transatlantic switchings, a train of compulsive analogies, that the absorbed narrator,
unsuccessfully, seeks to stand outside. Rather than lamenting an absence of eros in modern capitalism , as Robert
Martin suggests, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” complicates a hegemonic erotics that insists
on binary separations of hetero- and homo-sexual desire, an erotics whose structure replicates the sometimes
glaring division between producer and consumer in modern transnational capitalism. Susan Wolfson has recently
argued for a remapping of gender in the Romantic period along “borderlines of mutual negotiation”: “On these
medial lines, senses (and sensations) of gender shape and are shaped by sign systems that prove to be arbitrary,
fluid, susceptible of transformation”. What I wish to suggest, through my readings of The Forest Sanctuary and “The Paradise of
Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”, is that Wolfson’s model of “borderlines” can and should be productively paired with readings of the
imagined borderlines between Britain and America throughout the nineteenth century. In many ways, the figurative and formal work done by
each of these texts demands to be read as queer. In the second halves of both texts, movements across the Atlantic – a narrated journey in
Hemans’s poem and a sudden narrative switch in Melville’s tale – formally suggest both distancing and proximate relations
between seemingly disparate scenes of homo- and hetero-erotic gazing and shame-laden aversion – these
movements cut across the patriarchal models of national economy that each text, on the surface, seems to rely
upon. Arguing for the centrality of the exile to transnational explorations of Britain and America, Paul Giles suggests that writers
“reconsidering national formations from a position of estrangement” are well placed “to illuminate the nation’s
unconscious assumptions, boundaries, and proscribed areas”. While neither Hemans nor Melville wrote their transatlantic
texts from a position of geographical dislocation, The Forest Sanctuary and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” reveal how
estrangements from dominant forms of desire could prove equally productive starting points for probing the
imaginary borderlines of the nation, for exploring mobilities of longing and belonging.
The foregrounding of the child within politics ensures the marginalization of queer relationships – it gets
redeployed in order to secure a heteronormative society
Edelman 04
Lee Edelman. 2004. “No future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive” Duke scholarly Collection. Accessed through
Dartmouth Library. Edelman is a professor in the English Department at Tufts University.
But what helped him most in these public appeals on behalf of America's children was the social
consensus that such an appeal is impossible to refuse. Indeed, though these public service
announcements concluded with the sort of rhetorical flourish associated with hard-fought political
campaigns ("We're fighting for the children. Whose side are you on?"), that rhetoric was intended
to avow that this issue, like an ideological Mobius strip, only permitted one side. Such "self-evident"
one-sidedness - the affirmation of a value so unquestioned, because so obviously unquestionable, as
that of the Child whose innocence solicits our defense- is precisely, of course, what distinguishes
public service announcements from the partisan discourse of political argumentation. But it is also, I
suggest, what makes such announcements so oppressively political - political not in the partisan
terms implied by the media consultant, but political in a far more insidious way: political insofar as
the fantasy subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political
itself must be thought. That logic compels us, to the extent that we would register as politically
responsible, to submit to the framing of political debate-and, indeed, of the political field -as
defined by the terms of what this book describes as reproductive futurism: terms that impose an
ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of
heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility
of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations. For politics, however
radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social
order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate
social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner the children"?
How could one take the other "side," when taking any side at all necessarily constrains one to take
the side of, by virtue of taking a side within, a political order that returns to the Child as Child. That
Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of
every political intervention. Even proponents of abortion rights, while promoting the freedom of
women to control their own bodies through reproductive choice, recurrently frame their political
struggle, mirroring their anti-abortion foes, as a "fight for our children-for our daughters and our
sons," and thus as a fight for the future.' What, in that case, would it signify not to be "fighting for
the image of the future it intends? Impossibly, against all reason, my project stakes its claim to the
very space that "politics" makes unthinkable: the space outside the framework within which politics
as we know it appears and so outside the conflict of visions that share as their pre-supposition that
the body politic must survive. Indeed, at the heart of my polemical engagement with the cultural
text of politics and the politics of cultural texts lies a simple provocation: that queerness names the
side of those not "fighting for the children," the side outside the consensus by which all politics
confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism. The ups and downs of political fortune may
measure the social order's pulse, but queerness, by contrast, figures, outside and beyond its political
symptoms, the place of the social order's death drive: a place, to be sure, of abjection expressed in
the stigma, sometimes fatal, that follows from reading that figure literally, and hence a place from
which liberal politics strives-and strives quite reasonably, given its unlimited faith in reason - to
disassociate the queer. More radically, though, as I argue here, queerness attains its ethical value
precisely insofar as it accedes to that place, accepting its figural status as resistance to the viability
of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure.
Their Valorizing of the Child can only end in the oppression of all queer identities
Edelman 04
Lee Edelman. 2004. “No future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive” Duke scholarly Collection. Accessed through
Dartmouth Library. Edelman is a professor in the English Department at Tufts University.
The Child, in the historical epoch of our current epistemological regime, is the figure for this compulsory
investment in the misrecognition of figure. It takes its place on the social stage like every adorable Annie
gathering her limitless funds of pluck to "stick out [her] chin! And grin! And say: 'Tomorrow!! Tomorrow!! I love ya!
Tomorrow! You're always! A day! Away.' "And lo and behold, as viewed through the prism of the tears that it
always calls forth, the figure of this Child seems to shimmer with the iridescent promise of Noah's rainbow,
serving like the rainbow as the pledge of a covenant that shields us against the persistent threat of apocalypse
now- or later. Recall, for example, the end of Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia (1993), his filmic act of contrition for
the homophobia some attributed to The Silence of the Lambs (199r). After Andrew Beckett (a man for all seasons,
as portrayed by the saintly Tom Hanks), last seen on his deathbed in an oxygen mask that seems to allude to, or
trope on, Hannibal Lecter's more memorable muzzle (see figures I and 2), has shuffled off this mortal coil to stand,
as we are led to suppose, before a higher law, we find ourselves in, if not at, his wake surveying a room in his
family home, now crowded with children and pregnant women whose reassuringly bulging bellies (see figure 3)
displace the bulging basket (unseen) of the HIV-positive gay man (unseen) from whom, the filmic text suggests, in a
cinema (unlike the one in which we sit watching philadelphia) not phobic about graphic representations of malemale sexual acts, Saint Thomas, a.k.a. Beckett, contracted the virus that cost him his life. When we witness, in the
film's final sequence, therefore, the videotaped representation of Andrew playing on the beach as a boy (see
figure 4), the tears that these moving pictures solicit burn with an indignation directed not only against the
intolerant world that sought to crush the honorable man this boy would later become, but also against the
homosexual world in which boys like this eventually grow up to have crushes on other men. For the cult of the
Child permits no shrines to the queerness of boys and girls, since queerness, for contemporary culture at large as
for Philadelphia in particular, is understood as bringing children and childhood to an end. Thus, the occasion of a
gay man's death gives the film the excuse to unleash once more the disciplinary image of the "innocent" Child
performing its mandatory cultural labor of social reproduction. We encounter this image on every side as the
lives, the speech, and the freedoms of adults face constant threat of legal curtailment out of deference to
imaginary Children whose futures, as if they were permitted to have them except as they consist in the prospect of
passing them on to Children of their own, are construed as endangered by the social disease as which queer
sexualities register. Nor should we forget how pervasively AIDs-for which to this day the most effective name
associated with the congressional appropriation of funds is that of a child, Ryan White-reinforces an older
connection, as old as the antigay reading imposed on the biblical narrative of Sodom's destruction, between
practices of gay sexuality and the undoing of futurity. This, of course, is the connection on which Anita Bryant
played so cannily when she campaigned in Florida against gay civil rights under the banner of "Save Our
Children," and it remains the connection on which the national crusade against gay marriage rests its case. Thus,
while lesbians and gay men by the thousands work for the right to marry, to serve in the military, to adopt and
raise children of their own, the political right, refusing to acknowledge these comrades in reproductive futurism,
counters their efforts by inviting us to kneel at the shrine of the sacred Child: the Child who might witness lewd
or inappropriately intimate behavior; the Child who might find information about dangerous "lifestyles" on the
Internet; the Child who might choose a provocative book from the shelves of the public library; the Child, in short,
who might find an enjoyment that would nullify the figural value, itself imposed by adult desire, of the Child as
unmarked by the adult's adulterating implication in desire itself; the Child, that is, made to image, for the
satisfaction of adults, an Imaginary fullness that's considered to want, and therefore to want for, nothing. As
Lauren Berlant argues forcefully at the outset of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, "a nation made
for adult citizens has been replaced by one imagined for fetuses and children." On every side, our enjoyment of
liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening shadow of a Child whose freedom to develop undisturbed by encounters, or
even by the threat of potential encounters, with an "otherness" of which its parents, its church, or the state do not
approve, uncompromised by any possible access to what is painted as alien desire, terroristically holds us all in
check and determines that political discourse conform to the logic of a narrative wherein history unfolds as the
future envisioned for a Child who must never grow up. Not for nothing, after all, does the historical construction of
the homosexual as distinctive social type overlap with the appearance of such literary creations as Tiny Tim, David
Balfour, and Peter Pan, who enact, in an imperative most evident today in the uncannily intimate connection
between Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort, a Symbolic resistance to the unmarried men (Scrooge, Uncle Ebenezer,
Captain Hook) who embody, as Voldemort's name makes clear, a wish, a will, or a drive toward death that entails
the destruction of the Child. That Child, immured in an innocence seen as continuously under siege, condenses a
fantasy of vulnerability to the queerness of queer sexualities precisely insofar as that Child enshrines, in its form
as sublimation, the very value for which queerness regularly finds itself condemned: an insistence on sameness
that intends to restore an Imaginary past. The Child, that is, marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity:
an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of
reproductive futurism. And so, as the radical right maintains, the battle against queers is a life-and-death struggle
for the future of a Child whose ruin is pursued by feminists, queers, and those who support the legal availability of
abortion. Indeed, as the Army of God made clear in the bomb making guide it produced for the assistance of its
militantly "pro-life" members, its purpose was wholly congruent with the logic of reproductive futurism: to
"disrupt and ultimately destroy Satan's power to kill our children, God's children.
Zong/counter-memorial Links
Attempts to restructure historical memory around instances of black suffering can never
account for queerness and only perpetuate heteronormativity.
Richardson 13
Matt Richardson “The Queer Limit of Black Memory¶ Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution”
2013.Richardson has a PhD in English from Ohio State.The Ohio State university Press.
https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Book%20PDFs/Richardson%20Queer.pdf
The museum’s permanent collection is a set of exhibits that puts African ¶ dispersal into a global context. It
sets the tone for the museum itself, situating its priorities in relation to remembering the story of slavery and
colonialism from the perspective of four themes: origins, movement, adaptation, ¶ and transformation. The
front wall of the building is a glass window that ¶ allows one to see outside from the staircase, which leads to
all the floors of ¶ the museum. Next to the staircase is a three-story photograph of the face of ¶ Africa, or more
precisely, the face of a little African girl. This photograph is ¶ the literal face of the museum; because of the
glass wall, it is visible from the ¶ street and transforms the front of the building into an impressive tableau. ¶
The original photograph was taken by Chester Higgins Jr. and incorporated ¶ into a photomosaic titled
“Photographs from the African Diaspora,” a composite of over two thousand individual photographs. The
mosaic is a significant archive of Black memory and is a permanent part of the museum.¶ 2¶ The pictures line
the staircases between the museum floors. They are beautiful; they move me with their sheer force of
evidence in numbers. Each one ¶ touches an affective punctum that is temporally situated through the setting,
listening to the archives ¶ clothes, hairstyles, and other visual aspects of the subjects. ¶ Each photograph ¶ tells
a story—mothers and daughters, men in military uniform, weddings, ¶ funerals, spiritual ceremonies, Black
men with children, men and women ¶ dancing, children at play, men and women at work. They tell me a
story ¶ that I already know, one of pride and joy, resistance and endurance, family and love. The photographs
also talk back to the ever-present narrative ¶ of the broken Black family, which is challenged and
reconstituted in many ¶ forms on the museum wall. There is a phonic materiality to the visual. I ¶ think of Fred
Moten’s insistence on the photograph that screams as part of a ¶ mournful/political practice.¶ 4¶ I am
reminded that the purpose of the project ¶ is to provide what Hirsch and Spitzer call “points of memory” or
“points of ¶ intersection between past and present, memory and postmemory, personal ¶ memory and cultural
recall.”¶ 5 They are included in the infrastructure of the ¶ museum in order to make an argument or a point
about Black memory.¶ 6¶ The photographs argue for closure on the enduring questions regarding the ¶
inherent pathology of the Black family; they yell that the accusations are ¶ untrue, that Black families do exist.
Representation of a normative resolution to the question of Black familial pathology requires the suppression
¶ of any echo of queerness. In this context queerness would be unmelodic, ¶ improvisational, unpredictable,
and irresolute.¶ On the second floor, there are several sections that make up the permanent exhibit at MoAD.
There are more objects in the permanent collection ¶ that speak to me, to all the visitors, about the normative
Black subject. At ¶ the top of the steps, leading into the second floor, is an installation on adornment. It has
three figures: a man, a child, and a woman. The placards next ¶ to the figures describe the role of adornment
in culture, but to me the story ¶ they tell is about gender. In the installation, the faces of the figures separate
from the torsos and morph into different ones. The torsos also change ¶ every few seconds, mixing the
traditional with the contemporary, the urban ¶ with the rural. This fragmented Black body is put back
together in gender appropriate terms. Difference, multiculturalism, and diversity are celebrated ¶ in the
facial morphing. Asian, African, and white European faces join those ¶ of African descent, celebrating a
mixed-racial heritage, clearly eschewing ¶ racial purity. However, there is no male face with lipstick, for
example, or ¶ faces that challenge gender binaries at all. Apparently, there is no place for ¶ gender variance in
this diasporic social imagining. There is a queer limit to ¶ how we understand our history and ourselves.¶ In
MoAD the photographs and the figures together tell a narrative that ¶ binds the body to normative genders
and to heterosexuality. The heterosexual matrix, as Judith Butler has explained, is the logic that links biology ¶
to gender presentation/expression and sexual object choice. The expectation is that these qualities—anatomy,
gender, and sexuality—predict each other ¶ through a linear progression.¶ 7¶ The visitor experiences this logic
first by way ¶ of the images on display in the photomosaic. Then, figures at the top of ¶ the stairs remind us of
the proscribed biological basis of the familial and ¶ communal representations and again offer us a resolution
to the accusations ¶ of Black familial pathology and gender aberrance in the biologically based ¶ nuclear
family.
Remembrance of only black history causes laws like the Hate crime prevention act, which
isolate anti-queer and anti-black violence from one another. The result is a black queer
body that can be excluded without remorse
Richardson 13
Matt Richardson “The Queer Limit of Black Memory¶ Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution”
2013.Richardson has a PhD in English from Ohio State.The Ohio State university Press.
https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Book%20PDFs/Richardson%20Queer.pdf
In 2009, President Obama signed the The Matthew Shepard and James ¶ Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention
Act, which gives federal support to state ¶ and local jurisdictions that want to prosecute hate crimes.¶ 4¶ In the
naming and representation of this legislation, anti-Black violence and anti-gay ¶ violence are separate. The law
itself reinforces the separateness of these two ¶ spheres, identifying “offenses involving actual or perceived race, color, religion, or
national origin” distinct from “offenses involving actual or perceived ¶ religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender
identity, or disability.”¶ 5¶ In the language of the law it is assumed that “certain hate crime ¶ acts” are clustered such
that race and color are coextensive with religion and ¶ national origin in ways that sexual orientation, gender,
and gender identity ¶ are not. Entire communities are implicated in these processes in that the ¶ individual and “the community
sharing the traits that caused the victim to ¶ be selected” are “savaged” by the hate crime.¶ 6¶ The law takes for granted that ¶ collectives
based on race and color may also share religion and national origin, but gender and sexual orientation and gender identity
are disassociated ¶ from race. In the bill, race itself is defined in relation to the history of slavery and involuntary
labor, thereby concretizing the decoupling of Blackness ¶ from gender and sexuality, belying the histories of
Black queers as integral ¶ to Black communities that the Black lesbian fictional archive here asserts.¶ 7¶ Matthew
Shepard is the symbol of victims of anti-gay violence, and ¶ James Byrd is the symbol of anti-Black violence.
This split is indicative ¶ of how the nation has come to understand these histories as distinct and ¶ separate
spheres. In 1998 Byrd was dragged behind a car, his body violently ¶ mangled on an east-Texas road. Later that same year, Shepard was
found ¶ beaten, tortured, and bound to a fence where he was left to die. As Eric Stanley states, “[T]he queer inhabits the place of
compromised personhood and ¶ the zone of death.”¶ 8¶ However, not all queers are the same. The story of Mat thew
Shepard’s murder has become a national symbol of the consequences ¶ of homophobia in ways that the murders of Black queers cannot
because ¶ of the banality of Black death. Part of the shock of Shepard’s murder is the ¶ spectacular way that he was mutilated and
displayed—a fate usually reserved ¶ for Black men. James Byrd’s horrifying murder is recognizable as part of a ¶ history of lynching in the
United States that goes back to the nineteenth ¶ century.¶ 9¶ In 2008, ten years after Byrd’s death, Brandon McClelland was murdered
under similar circumstances in east Texas. In 2009 the district attorney ¶ dropped the murder charges, citing lack of evidence.¶ 10¶
Brandon’s murder ¶ shares the context of state-sanctioned anti-Black violence with that of an ¶ endless litany of others who were killed
by police, a list I merely touch ¶ on here. In fact, the list of the murdered is too long for this epilogue and ¶ would indeed fill the pages of
this book. The following accounting of well known deaths of Black people at the hands of police actually stands in for a ¶ much longer list
and symbolizes how Black people across the United States ¶ collectively grieve anti-Black violence. My intention here is to do
what the ¶ language of the Shepard–Byrd Act implicitly denies is possible: to place the ¶ relatively unknown
deaths and beatings of Black queer people in relation to ¶ general trends of anti-Black violence and premature
death. The following is ¶ a calling of the names of the dead, but it is by no means a comprehensive ¶ list. There are just too many names.
The sheer number of cases of murder ¶ and Black state-sanctioned premature death physically and emotionally overwhelms me, even as
I cite cases that made it into local or national mainstream news. And citation is key in the recognition of their deaths. Which ¶ ones do I
name? Even as I write this epilogue, more Black queer people die ¶ transphobic and homophobic deaths, and often at the hands of other
Black ¶ people. Here I hope to spark a continuation of the dialogue started in this ¶ volume through Black lesbian literature. Whom do
we remember as part of ¶ Black collective memory, and how does disremembering the queer make that ¶
person a constitutive outsider to Blackness, and thus someone who can be ¶ excised from the world without
collective grieving?
2NC
AT: Perm do both
You just don’t get a perm- there is no future for the queer body- the combination of our
advocacy and your narrative of positive change destroys both
Edelman 4 (Lee, Professor of English Literature, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, pp. 8)
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.' For by figuring a refusal of the coercive belief in the paramount
value of futurity, while refusing as well any backdoor hope for dialectical access to meaning, the queer dispossesses the social
order of the ground on which it rests: a faith in the consistent reality of the social- and by extension, of the social subject; a faith that
politics, whether of the left or of the right, implicitly affirms. Divesting such politics of its thematic trappings, bracketing the
particularity of its various proposals for social organization, the queer insists that politics is always a politics of the signifier , or
even of what Lacan will often refer to as "the letter." It serves to shore up a reality always unmoored by signification and lacking any guarantee.
To say as much is not, of course, to deny the experiential violence that frequently troubles social reality or the apparent consistency with which
it bears-and thereby bears down on-us all. It is, rather, to suggest that queerness exposes the obliquity of our relation to
what we experience in and as social reality, alerting us to the fantasies structurally necessary in order to sustain
it and engaging those fantasies through the figural logics, the linguistic structures, that shape them. If it aims effectively to intervene in the
reproduction of such a reality-an intervention that may well take the form of figuring that reality's abortion, then queer theory must always
insist on its connection to the vicissitudes of the sign, to the tension between the signifier's collapse into
the letter's
cadaverous materiality and its participation in a system of reference wherein it generates meaning itself. As a
particular story, in other words, of why storytelling fails, one that takes both the value and the burden of that failure upon itself, queer theory,
as I construe it, marks the "other" side of politics: the "side" where narrative realization and derealization overlap, where the energies
ofvitalization ceaselessly turn against themselves; the "side" outside all political sides, committed as they are, on every side, to futurism's
unquestioned good.
Queerness can never be assimilated into the larger narrative of black suffering – it requires
an un-writing of the traditional way of understanding history
Richardson 13
Matt Richardson “The Queer Limit of Black Memory¶ Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution”
2013.Richardson has a PhD in English from Ohio State.The Ohio State university Press.
https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Book%20PDFs/Richardson%20Queer.pdf
The Black queer ancestor is an unimaginable figure in mainstream diasporic memory. That she does not
exist is a fiction of domination, an effect ¶ ¶ of trauma that has made her illegible even in alternative archives.
To speak ¶ ¶ of her, one has to be creative and seize the means of archival production ¶ ¶ while pointing to her
absence in written history and in memory. Black lesbian writing, then, is a practice of historical commentary,
a trespass against ¶ ¶ demands of evidence, finding recourse and voice through the creation of ¶ ¶ imaginative
counternarratives and embodied practices. The Queer Limit of ¶ ¶ Black Memory tunes into the complicated
way that novels and short stories ¶ ¶ by Black lesbian writers take up the trope of voice and engage with Black
vernacular written performance and phonic cultures, amplifying their voices ¶ ¶ to resonate with and trouble
the established heterosexuality and gender normativity of Black memory. Black feminist writer Ntozake
Shange’s classic ¶ ¶ For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf listening to the
archives laments the desire to hear a “Black girl’s song.” In these instances the content of a Black girl’s song
expands to explore the lives of transgender women, ¶ ¶ femme gay men, butch lesbians, and so on. In other
words, Black lesbians ¶ ¶ remix what is expected from a Black female voice and sing a decidedly queer ¶ ¶
song. The practice of remixing is a task that requires new epistemes. As Sylvia Wynter argues: “the re-writing”
of the subject “must necessarily entail ¶ ¶ the un/writing of our present normative defining of the secular
mode of the ¶ ¶ Subject.”¶ ¶ 79¶ ¶ This book considers Black lesbian deployment and development ¶ ¶ of
¶
vernacular practices and discourses as a basis of knowledge for the revision ¶ ¶ or “un/writing” of the
normative Black memory, which has been especially ¶ ¶ challenged in these texts through the representation
of gender-variant or ¶ ¶ transgender characters. As Karin Knorr-Cetina says in Epistemic Cultures,¶ ¶ there are
cultures that “create and warrant knowledge.”¶ ¶ 80¶ ¶ I identify the slave ¶ ¶ narrative, blues, jazz,
performance, the erotic, and the spiritual to be Black ¶ ¶ vernacular sources of knowledge that are critical tools
for re-remembering ¶ ¶ the past
AT: You ignore race
Key distinction- we have links to their specific method and history that say their
understanding of the Middle Passage structurally excludes the queer- their link arguments
are about queer theory in general- you should prefer specificity- we also don’t have to defend
all of queer theory- make them prove a link to the 1nc
We need a card