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 affs 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, Omiseeke 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 Oce an. 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 sexsegregated 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 long-flowing 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
imagina- tions 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 physi- cal 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, historicalcontemporary 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

the message is that of

compulsory reproduction as inscribed on the anti-abortion billboard I mentioned in chapter I:
choose 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 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 would
item for gay men." The messenger here may be a gay man, but

opt for the voiding of meaning over Savage's "something more meaningful"? What might Leonard teach us

turning 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
about

figure, one 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 WorldMaking, muse)
In this passage, Simmons vividly describes the devastating pervasiveness of hatred and violence in her daily life
based on being seen, perceived, labeled, and treated as an Other. This process of othering creates

individuals, groups, and communities that are deemed to be less important , less
worthwhile, less consequential, less authorized, and less human based on

historically situated markers of social formation such as race, class, gender,

sexuality, ability, and nationality. Othering and marginalization are results of an
invisible center (Ferguson, 1990, p. 3). The authority, position, and power of such a
center are attained through normalization in an ongoing circular movement.
Normalization is the process of constructing, establishing, producing, and reproducing a taken-for-granted and allencompassing 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 antiqueerness- 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

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.'
only in the stubborn particularity that voids every notion of a 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 nineteenthcentury transatlanticism: Felicia Hemanss long narrative poem The Forest Sanctuary, first
published in 1825, and Herman Melvilles 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
Hemanss and Melvilles 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 IndoEuropean 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 theorys deconstruction of
borders between genders and between sexualities holds much in common with
Julia Kristevas advocacy for a transnational or international position situated at
the crossing of boundaries and Paul Gilroys 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 Butlers 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 texts 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, Hemanss 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 Hemanss poems undercut, even while [they] reinforce, conventional
views of women. Few critics, however, have spoken to Hemanss 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, Hemanss 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 Melvilles work have been vitally interested in questions of sexuality. In
1986, Robert K. Martins groundbreaking Hero, Captain, and Stranger spoke to the politically critical potential of
Melvilles 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 Melvilles texts. In reading Melvilles work as cutting across a spectrum of sexual desire, I wish to draw attention
to important queer conjunctions between Melvilles 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, Melvilles 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 texts compulsive
pairings of English bachelors and American maids Absorption, in Melvilles 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
selfs 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 narrators queer textualattraction 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 narrators homoerotic soaking up of
his male comrades climaxes with the dinner partys closing act of a communal taking of snuff from an enormous
powder horn; in The Tartarus of Maids, the narrators filled state moves without blinking from his mystical
response to the reproduction of Cupids 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 machines 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 narrators 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. Melvilles 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 Wolfsons 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

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 nations unconscious
assumptions, boundaries, and proscribed areas. While neither Hemans nor Melville wrote their
narrated journey in Hemanss poem and a sudden narrative switch in Melvilles tale

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 male-male 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 museums 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
storymothers 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 Motens 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 qualitiesanatomy,
gender, and sexualitypredict 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 Shepards 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 Shepards murder is the spectacular way that he was mutilated and displayeda fate usually reserved
for Black men. James Byrds 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 Byrds 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 Brandons 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 ShepardByrd 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 dont 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, t he

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 bearsand 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
Shanges classic For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf

listening to the archives laments the desire to hear a Black girls song. In these instances
the content of a Black girls 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 dont have to defend
all of queer theory- make them prove a link to the 1nc
We need a card