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While acknowledging the ability of such actors to affect policy at the federal level, one must also acknowledge the barriers and obstacles that intergovernmental lobbying organizations face. First, in relation to their private counterparts that are much better funded, intergovernmental lobbying organizations do not have the ability to contribute financially to those they are attempting to lobby. In this, traditional privately funded interest groups have an advantage in that they can attempt to gain access to the decision-making process through financial contributions. Without providing monetary contributions, intergovernmental lobbying organizations must rely upon their policy expertise and access to large amounts of reliable information to make their preferences known.

Another disadvantage that intergovernmental lobbying organizations face is the need to reach consensus. According to Sabato (1983), “when an association hosts 50 prima donnas the inevitable frictions, conflicting ambitions, and jealousies can make it a laborious task to operate the group harmoniously or to develop a consensus on a policy issue” (p. 174). Interest groups, as they are traditionally thought of, do not face the high hurdle of reaching consensus among their members. Of course, other interest groups must also adopt policy positions through means such as formal meetings, yearly meetings, surveys of members, and other methods. But in the end, most members of interest groups delegate decision making activities to the leadership. In the case of the NGA and other intergovernmental lobbies consisting of elected officials, it is not possible to adopt a policy position, formal or informal, without substantial support from its members. For this reason, the organization is reluctant to take strong stands on issues if it does not have the backing of most of its members—the governors’ failure at resisting the adoption of the ITFA is an example of what can happen if the organization loses support among even a few of its members.

This is not to suggest that the executive will always align itself with state interests; the executive ultimately operates in pursuit of its own interests. Thus, the executive can opt to disregard states' rights where it perceives the national interest outweighs matters of local concern. As both Missouri and U.S. practice demonstrate, treaty-making can and has occurred in ways that supplant areas traditionally regulated by state law or require action by state officials. What Executive Federalism demonstrates, however, is that the executive does not always do this. More often than not, it appears executive treaty-making incorporates an internal dialogue of national and state interests, which may actually adjust U.S. positions to accommodate state laws and powers. As such, whether or not there are, or should be, external judicial or legislative safeguards on federalism in the treaty context, there are undoubtedly internal executive safeguards of federalism.

2. State Self-Help. - Even if national political safeguards of state interests in foreign relations do not eclipse the new federalism, another political alternative - state self-help - may. States may, for example, adopt legislation or conduct activities in such a way as to diminish the need for federal intervention and, accordingly, for reliance on their constitutional immunities. But wholesale displacement is relatively rare. Such activities may also deter federal intervention by raising its political costs, but here too the effect is probably marginal and potentially even negative (state activities may, after all, inspire preemption), and the courts may nonetheless read state authority narrowly.

More dramatically, state conducted foreign relations might undermine the perceived federal monopoly on foreign affairs: to the extent that such activities create new sovereign identities, while avoiding the problems associated with state interference, they arguably undermine the justifications for federal exclusivity and for plenary federal power. If so, the treaty power might wither of its own accord, irrespective of whether states had more specific doctrinal defenses that they could assert. Alternatively, state activities might indirectly contribute to those defenses by decreasing the functional argument for preserving an unfettered treaty power.

All of this is simply to say that the federal government is well-positioned to aggressively challenge police misconduct at the sub-federal level even as local governments refuse to commit the administrative machinery of sub-federal government to controversial forms of federal criminal enforcement. The trouble with much of the current analysis of sub-federal resistance in pursuit of criminal justice reform is that it equates the withdrawal of support for federal criminal initiatives with the suspension of federal oversight of state and local police departments. The Obama administration's successful efforts to crack down on police misconduct in spite of the sub-federal resistance profiled in this Article offer another piece of evidence against this claim.

What the president does have is the significant resources of the federal government at his disposal—which could be used as leverage to force compliance from state governments or companies. During the pandemic the federal government has control over disaster-relief funds, some medical equipment for states and billions in aid to businesses and individuals.

Mr. Trump has hinted on Twitter that some of that future federal assistance may be conditioned on fealty to federal policy—though such a step would undoubtedly provoke litigation where there is very little case law to guide courts.

The threat of losing federal funding can make states reform-shy

Despite the autonomy states enjoy due to decentralized government, they’re not always immune to retaliation if they choose to go against the federal government. States’ refusal to comply with and direct challenges at federal law can have serious and lasting consequences for states. Sanctuary cities, for example, have been threatened with losing crucial federal funding if they don’t comply with immigration guidelines.

A critical ingredient in stabilizing international relations in a world of radical power disparities is the character of America itself. The United States is indeed a global hegemon, but because of its democratic institutions and political traditions it is--or can be--a relatively benign one. Joseph Nye's arguments on "soft power" of course come to mind here, and there is much to his point. But, in fact, there are other, more significant aspects of the American way in foreign policy that protect the United States from the consequences of its own greatness.

When other major states consider whether to work with the United States or resist it, the fact that it is an open, stable democracy matters. The outside world can see American policymaking at work and can even find opportunities to enter the process and help shape how the overall order operates. Paris, London, Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo and even Beijing--in each of these capitals officials can readily find reasons to conclude that an engagement policy toward the United States will be more effective than balancing against U.S. power.

We show that the cases in which the federal courts have evaluated the constitutionality of state antitakeover statutes raise serious questions about the validity of the state-law rules authorizing the use of the poison pill. The Essay presents a systematic analysis of the possibility that these rules are preempted by the Williams Act and provides a framework for assessing preemption challenges to those rules. Litigation over the validity of these rules, we show, could have profound implications for the governance of American corporations.

The literature on the constitutionality of state antitakeover laws is quite substantial. Indeed, more than one hundred law review articles have considered whether and how the Williams Act might preempt various state statutes that govern corporate takeovers. 4 Just four years ago, the Business Lawyer dedicated a symposium issue to analysis of whether the Williams Act preempts Delaware's business-combination statute. 5 Yet [*1552] this large literature has paid limited attention to the question whether the state-law rules with the most powerful antitakeover effect--the rules authorizing use of the poison pill-are preempted.

II. Can States Preempt Federal Preemption with Poison Pills?

Assume for now that the baseline question has been settled, and we are agreed that there is too much preemption. Let us turn instead to the heart of Mikos's proposal and ask whether the PPP would achieve his end of promoting a larger freedom for state regulation, which in turn would yield a more desirable regulatory regime "from a welfarist perspective." 64 As much as I admire the innovation and thought underwriting the PPP proposal, I will develop three grounds for concern. All three take up, in different ways, questions of where and how Coasean bargaining over regulatory entitlements occur. These concerns set the stage for a reconsideration of when institutional bargaining can or cannot succeed in Part III.

[Stephen M. Llano, Associate Professor in Communications at St. John’s University, 7-3-2022, "Three discourses of American debate (with a glimpse toward a fourth)," Argumentation and Advocacy, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10511431.2022.2136756?scroll=top&needAccess=true,]//owen *gender language modified with strikethrough

In American policy debate the reification of university discourse debating is seen through the disclosure of judging paradigms, which position the judge in relation to the knowledge of arguments. Instead of the debaters appealing to the judge’s convictions, attitudes, or cultural positionality, the debaters appeal to how the judge articulates knowledge on a variety of set argument types that can be offered in the debate. The judge writes up their relation to debate knowledge along the axis of performative argument, speed, procedural argument, evidence, and the like. This helps the debaters fold their speech into ways that can be seen as being appropriate. Since mastery is off the table, neither the judge nor the students participating in the debate can address whether or not this is the right way to know arguments or evaluate them; they are working hard to ensure that what they say fits into the organization of knowledge about debate. The discourse of the hysteric: debate as demand The hysteric’s discourse is one where the agent interrogates the master, asking what it is exactly and precisely they know. “The hysteric goes at the master and demands that he or she[they] show his or her [their] stuff, prove his or her[their] mettle by producing something serious by way of knowledge” (Fink 1997, 133). It is the production of knowledge here that is different than the conformity or relation to knowledge that the discourse of the university creates. Instead, the master, or the master signifier, is squeezed to produce articulation after articulation as to why it should be in charge or in control in the first place. The position of agent is occupied by the barred subject, who addresses the other as the master signifier, asking it for answers. The result of this confrontation is the production of knowledge – both old and new articulations of knowledge that justify the master’s position. What’s in the inaccessible position is desire. The agent gets pleasure from the production of knowledge, however it is impossible for this knowledge to ever satisfy the agent. Bruce Fink writes, “the best teaching discourse is the hysteric’s discourse, which Lacan associates with the best scientific activity. It is not always an easy discourse to sustain for those who do not adopt it spontaneously, nor for those in the publish or perish world of American academia” (Fink 1997, 149). This understanding of the hysteric’s discourse helps understand it as only aimed at the production of articulations of knowledge from mastery. One thinks of the Socratic method, or the teacher asking students to explain why they think a certain way after they have presented the textbook answer to a question in class. The teacher wants more and wants the student to be able to produce more, so keeps asking after them. This mode of debating has been identified by Bartanen and Littlefield as “forensics as play,” a phrase that means several things for them including social benefits and the entertainment that debate became for participants as it became more technical (Bartanen and Littlefield 2014, 211). Turning from society to a self-organizing expertise, this discourse of debate turns away again to the pleasure of the participants. This debate is characterized by intensive pressure on the rules and necessity of debate itself, where the conditions of winning are predicated on the ability of the participants not just to defend their overt position in relation to the debate topic, or their use of logic or reason, but to justify the rules and existence of debate itself. The hysteric’s discourse has crafted a model of debate that can be characterized as autophagic, a special kind of incompatibility “between one rule and the consequences resulting from the very fact that it has been affirmed” (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, 203). Most contemporary debate practices stem from questioning the use of master signifiers, a use that without the deployment there might not be the ability to debate at all. Autophagy works by “showing the incompatibilities which are brought out by reflection on conditions or consequences of its affirmation” (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, 205). This tradition of debating is highly localized, bringing the act of debate into question in order to ask why things have to be a particular way. A debate team reads evidence from a social scientific journal, prompting the opposing team to ask them why they favor that form of knowledge – that of published research – to another. The author recalls a debate where one team asked another why they bring so many files in boxes with them into the room if they really do believe their opening claim that they want to “learn and engage in dialogue” instead of try to beat the other team in a contest. In American policy debate during the 1990s to the early 2000s debaters raised such questions only to see if they could find the articulation of these concerns that would become subject to the master signifier of debating (two sides, turn taking, carded evidence, and a winner-take-all decision). In short, the boom of critique arguments in policy debate did not undermine or unseat the norms of policy debating but reinforced them. All “new” forms of knowledge produced by questioning the master signifiers, the ideology, and the organizing principles of debate led to the practices of rapidly reading “cards” – paragraphs copied from published material – about the effectiveness of humor or irony compared to ‘mere’ argument. Debate was made more comfortable for those participants but maintained it’s same organizing principle of authority. In short, all the radical attempts at autophagy are based on the pleasure of the game of trying to see if the other team can produce recognizable signs of mastery – not a new ordering. Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca support this view as well writing that “the argument is quasi-logical, because, in order to make the incompatibility evident, an interpretation must be made of the act by which the opponent opposes a rule” (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, 204). This means that any autophagic claim depends on interpretation. That is, one must be convincing through establishing a perspective and attitude toward the claim in order to claim it is this kind of incompatibility. This kind of pedagogy can only be conservative in the end. Students learn that no matter how many variations of the articulation of why they can produce, the master is always the end point. Where the creativity in competitive debate lies is finding the articulation of knowledge that is novel in the way that it falls in line with the master signifiers at play. That shocking moment that debaters have where they “learn” is when they reinforce the dominant signs of mastery that organize human and non-human life on earth without much question or critique. As Fink reminds us, “The discourse of the Hysteric remains in thrall to master signifiers (S1) and a system of knowledge/belief (S2) that it has not itself embodied and produced” (Fink 1997, 123). The pleasure from engaging in this kind of debate for playful or social reasons is the generation of varieties of knowledge organized and produced by a master signifier that is never challenged in position, but in justification. That is, the challenge of “why debate?” is offered in order to produce responses that can then be used to continue the debate. Perhaps the entire hysterical model of debating could be seen as autophagic.

We were disappointed by Mario Bunge’s piece on the scientific status of psychoanalysis (2 October, p 22). As a senior philosopher of science, he could have offered interesting arguments, but instead he founded his criticism of the discipline on factual errors.

Psychoanalysis has developed greatly since Freud’s time, producing substantial research and productive connections to other branches of science. Many basic psychoanalytic propositions have been widely accepted, such as the formative impact of early childhood relationships on adult personality. Some of Freud’s specific propositions have been eclipsed by later formulations – as you would expect for bodies of knowledge evolving for more than a century, and certainly for any science. The basic idea of a dynamic unconscious that actively shapes conscious experience and relations with others has made productive connections with disciplines such as neuroscience.

If the universe’s entropy “tends toward its maximum” then, according to Clausius, the more the universe draws close to that limit state, the more the opportunities for new changes disappear. When that state is reached, no further change would occur, and the universe finds itself in a “persistent state of death” (Clausius, 1865, In: Locqueneux, 2009, p. 249). These considerations make it possible to reread Freud’s hypothesis of the death drive in the light of the physics model, which had from the outset been the epistemological paradigm for his initial theoretical thinking. If we apply to living organisms this tendency of the universe toward a state of equilibrium, defined by the irreversible absence of all discernible motion and all difference in tendency – in other words equivalent to a definitive death – we can envisage a closed system consisting of the unit “organism-environment.” The second law implies that within this system the different levels of energy tend toward equaling out, in such a way that the final state would be a state of equilibrium. The state toward which the system would tend would therefore be equivalent to “the reduction of the organism’s internal energy that returns it to the inorganic state” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967a, p. 326). Now, let us recall that in 1920, Freud describes the conservative or “regressive” character of the death drives as originating in “the coming to life of inorganic substance” (Freud, 1920, p. 44) and that it “seek(s) to restore the inanimate state” (Freud, 1920, p. 44). If the definition of the death drive as the tendency of the living organism to return to an inorganic state can, in the first instance, “seem an aberration from the point of view of the life sciences – in so far as that it seeks to infer an organism with its vital aptitudes, its adaptative functions, its energy levels, from a principle that is the negation of all constant level of difference” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967a, p. 328) – it appears much more coherent within a physics model. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that the first ambition of the Helmholtz School, to which Freud was heir, had as specific objective the application of the physical laws of thermodynamics to the study of living organisms.

The thermodynamics that inspired Freud described how systems reached an equilibrium characterized by a maximum of entropy. In contrast1, as Prigogine (1978, 1981) pointed out, when systems are far from equilibrium and driven by a large energy current, entropy may decrease and ordered patterns form. Current research focuses precisely on the self-organization of systems far from equilibrium. The neuronal dynamics, with the discharges that Freud envisaged, find echo in the theory of self-organized criticality (Bak, 1996; Vespignani and Zapperi, 1998). Major advances were achieved by adapting the evolution equations of statistical physics (Fokker–Planck equations) to out-of-equilibrium, open systems (Seifert, 2005; Tomé, 2006; Esposito et al., 2009; Jeffery et al., 2019). It is quite remarkable, in view of Freud’s affinity for Helmholtz work, that a thermodynamic potential, the free energy, appears to be the quantity that best describes the steady state of a system driven out of equilibrium because of its strong interactions with its environment (Jarzynski, 1997; Evans and Searles, 2002; Friston, 2019). Based on these new ideas, the “death drive” might be recast as a natural tendency of certain out-of-equilibrium systems to reach a steady-state characterized by a minimization of free energy. Indeed, there have been attempts to connect Freudian notions of free (unbound) energy to the variational free energy that figures in theoretical neurobiology and statistical mechanics (Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010). If this is possible, it would mean that the death drive might now be cast in a way that is formally similar to the way Newtonian mechanics was recast in a “principle of least action.” This would constitute a major advance in Freud’s “Project for a Scientific Psychology.”

As Adrian Johnston (Johnston, 2011) argues, it is not necessary to go down into the world of quantum physics to give scientific status to the indeterminacy that is characteristic of human subjectivity. According to Johnston, a veritable avalanche of current research in genetics and neuroscience reveals that brains and human bodies are much less determined by preestablished rules than we previously thought. The biomateriality of nature establishes a relatively small number of limiting parameters for the living being. It hardly functions as something that determines all the details of life. The biologist Francisco Varela and his collaborators (Varela et al., 1991), for example, describe the ontogenetic and phylogenetic unfolding of living beings as satisfactory/sufficient processes that work only to achieve what is good enough to survive, for long enough to reproduce. Evolution doesn’t compel the production of what would be Ideal, allowing the arising of a great diversity at all levels of interaction with the environment, and may even permit the persistence of highly dysfunctional gaps in life: “The second step, then, is to analyze the evolutionary process as having a solution that is satisfactory rather than optimal: in this perspective [natural] selection functions as a broad survival filter that admits any structure that has enough integrity to persist. In this point of view, the focus of the analysis is no longer directed at the characteristic features, but rather at the patterns of organisms, via their life history. Another metaphor recently suggested for this post-Darwinian conception of the evolutionary process is evolution as bricolage, the joining of parts and elements into complex matrices, not because they fulfill some ideal project, but simply because they are possible. Here the evolutionary problem is no more like forcing a precise trajectory of the requirements of ideal aptitude; it is rather how to prune the multiplicity of viable paths that exist at any point” (Varela et al., 1991, p. 196).

The French philosopher Catherine Malabou (2008) develop the philosophical issues that arise with the discovery of neuroplasticity. For her, this discovery entails that we have to acknowledge that human brain is organized and reorganized “dialectically,” continually suffering multiple oscillations between its “malleable flexibility” and its “resistant fixity.” Catherine Malabou states that we have not yet fully assimilated the results of the revolutionary discoveries made by neurosciences in the last 50 years. In particular, we have not yet assimilated the importance of the constitutive historicity of the brain, which is implicated in the discovery of brain plasticity: “Our brain is plastic, and we do not know it. We are completely ignorant of this dynamic, this organization, and this structure. We continue to believe in the “stiffness” of a fully genetic brain” (Malabou, 2008. p. 4). For Malabou, the relatively recent discovery of brain neuroplasticity should change our conception of the brain as entirely predetermined by the laws of nature, allowing us to see the brain as something modifiable, “formable” and formative at the same time. Malabou identifies three levels in which cerebral neuroplasticity operates: (1) in the modeling of neural connections during embryonic and childhood development; (2) in the modification of the neuronal connections that occur through the plasticity of the synaptic modulation to lifelong learning; and (3) the ability to repair after some kind of injury.

[Alexandra Lakind, PhD in environment and resources from University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2022, “Children in Absentia: Reproductive Futurism in the Era of Climate Change”, University of Wisconsin-Madison https://asset.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/2D6I6F4OXVMPR8B/R/file-5b76a.pdf]//owen

You have reached the beginning of the end of the end, or, again, is this only the beginning? In this dissertation, I argue that how scholars, activists, and educators respond to the climate crisis can enable the opportunity to dismantle the figuration of “the child,” which is fundamental to disrupting the categorical oppression of children and untangling the extractive and developmental logics fueling the crisis. In my first case, I examine how activists who abstain from childbirth rely on problematic narratives of reproductive futurism that preserve the sanctity of the bionormative family and uphold distinct forms of petro-futurity.55 In my second case, I explore how youth activists both deploy and challenge societal myths projected on children. As prevailing discourses too often rely on idealizations of “the child” to advance the structures and politics of reproductive futurism, I content that further and ongoing focus on the intersection between children and the climate crisis can help us see past the logics that prop up late-carbon liberalism. Here, I revisit the chapters of my dissertation to refresh the connections between them and share what I’ve learned in the research and writing process. That said, before I reenter the chapters, I am going to explore the title to frame how my dissertation serves as a ‘beginning,’ even at its end. The title, Children in Absentia: Reproductive Futurism in the Era of Climate Change, served as a guide for me to consider Lee Edelman’s concept of “reproductive futurism” alongside the role of “the child” in confronting the climate crisis. Thus, I begin with a recap of Edelman’s theory to foreground some of the theoretical background of this dissertation to demonstrate how it guided this exploration. Overarchingly, this study takes inspiration from Edelman’s (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. As I point out across the dissertation, Environmental Studies and Education are particularly invested in futurity and the preservation of the Child. Emerging from these spaces, this dissertation asks: what does it look like to politicize “the Child” in climate activism? Since Edelman’s provocation paved the way for scholars to antagonize “the child,” he is a useful theorist to think with as this dissertation confronts the jarring collisions between realities and fantasies built around reproductive futurism. Across these case studies, activists’ identities, discourses, and political horizons are inscribed by their positions in the idealized reproductive order. Children and would-be-parents, aligned with the imperative of the Child, make claims from their presumed, almost messianic role; they can bring about the future, continuing the project of humanity. To conclude this project, I offer a reorientation inspired by this study. This reorientation ricochets off reproductive futurism to offer a revaluation of failure and impossibility, not as obstacles to overcome on the path towards progress, but something to live in and with. In Edelman’s provoking work of queer theory, he argues that the figure of the Child has been the primary symbol shaping contemporary U.S. politics, an embodiment of futurity representing the purpose of the social order. Edelman’s conceptualization of the Child, not to be confused with any historical children, delineates the bounds of the political; the queer disturbs those bounds. Via the Child as the imaginary beneficiary of every political intervention, an unquestionable good, the terms of political debate have been narrowly defined by the ideological limits of reproductive futurism. Edelman is often critiqued for a lack of specificity regarding time and place. These critiques gave rise to a new body of literature on queer futures that center the experiences of People of Color, Indigenous people, and those who live outside the Global North’s current sociopolitical sphere (e.g., Muñoz, 2009; Puar, 2007). Edelman set the stage for these powerful critiques by demonstrating the foundational role “the Child” plays in myriad relationships to self and society. No Future incited people to try the impossible: to contemplate contemporary society without “the Child.” To borrow from Edelman, “we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child” (2004, p. 11). Responding to this, Edelman explores the potential of situating oneself on the “other side.” When the Child shapes collective narratives and “collective narratives of meaning” (p. 12), what might it look like to refuse the Child that stands in for the normative fantasy of futurity that organizes communal relations? Reproductive futurism ties heteronormative reproduction to the promise of self realization. It temporalizes desire—a void or absence one hopes to fill by attaining a future fantasy around which identity often congeals. Heteronormative romance produces (or has the possibility of producing) offspring, and therefore a future. The figuration of the queer pierces this fantasy. For Edelman, this is drawn from longstanding associations between gay sex and the undoing of futurity wherein the queer stands in for the negation of the future. Simply put, if meaning is a future promise, achieved via the Child, then a drive for non-procreative anal sex is futureless and therefore meaningless. Queerness figures the senselessness of sexuality and, in so doing, threatens to expose the arbitrary rules of moral rectitude sustaining reproductive futurism. Within these figural relations, the queer undoes the meaning upon which social organization and collective reality rest. For this study, we can gain from Edelman’s provocation: what can it mean to destroy the Child? Akin to the ways that gay sex shatters egos and norms, in the face of climate change, almost everyone must undergo an unbearable unmaking of their identity that will be shocking and scary due to a compromised sense of futurity. The Child—not yet agential, political, sexual—clings to whiteness, as whiteness clings to innocence. This racialized innocent figure is without sin; thus, children are believed to be unmarked and desireless and seen to subsume only the desires projected upon them. Yet, children’s actual desires are rebellious and cannot be confined to the assumptions of predictability. While children are themselves capable of disturbing our norms, there are myriad institutions to keep children undisturbed, or safe from potential encounters with “otherness.” Importantly, these institutions keep society safe from being disturbed by desiring children. Keeping children in check keeps the figure of the Child intact. In response to imagined threats of alien desire, we endorse efforts to Save the Child at the cost of actual children harmed in the process. Thus, to join Edelman is to be on the other side of the Child, which is to be on the side of children. The social order of reproductive futurism seals the fate of humans and non-humans alike, preserving extractive, petro-dependent transactions. As such, in the political project of climate change, there is an urgent need to break with the Child as an emblem of futurity, to unbuild the settler-colonial heteropatriarchal regime that has indeed catalyzed the crisis. Thus, to conclude, I ask: what can we make in the absence of “the child”?The alternative is refusal, a generative absence that reveals the precarity of our situations and destroys the symbol of the child

With the horrific disasters our planet and this country have been confronted with this year, it is almost easy to forget that the world is supposed to be ending sometime soon due to climate change. According to the UN, we have 10 years to get our act together. 9 years. 8 years. 7 years. 6… How many years are even left? A few years for us to change everything about our society. Faced with a pandemic that has only helped to make time feel truly meaningless, I know I can't be the only person fearful that they have lost count. I can already feel the time left for us to right the ship escaping me, like sand falling between my fingers. I know that for many, when they think of the responsibility we have before us to "fix" what is so deeply broken, they are transfixed with terror, paralyzed by a fear of loss, or frozen by the enormity of the crisis. I am not here to tell you that it will be ok. If it was ever my job to console you, it certainly is especially not my job in this moment, as a Black man who just survived 2020. I am actually here to confirm that the apocalypse is coming. The world is ending. Nothing will ever be the same. But I am also here to question whether that is even a bad thing. If it is a bad thing, then who is this ending a bad thing for. Whose world is ending? Truly, on this planet, there are many people for whom the world is already over. Who have very little to lose. Some of them live a world away; some of them live a mile away; some of them live even closer. They will never see the nature that so many environmentalists are fighting to protect, they continue to have very little if any access to the resources that the climate change advocates are asking them to conserve, and they are not a respected part of the climate change conversation. [End Page 77] Our society fears a coming climate apocalypse, but so many people in our society have already faced their own personal apocalypse, and at the hands of the same reckless and greedy powers which have caused this current catastrophe. When will their suffering hold meaning for the rest of us? This is why climate change cannot be fixed with a simple chart depicting emissions reductions, creative blockchain carbon taxation, or other magical accounting that allows us to cancel out local emissions through trees planted (allegedly) entire continents away. There is no technology that can save us from ourselves, and If we can't see the incredible opportunity before us to change the problems that lead us to this very precipice in the first place, if we can't embrace that challenge then… who are we? If we don't want to face that reality of the billions of apocalypses both gone and current, and instead choose half measures that will take carbon from the air but leave the world a shattered and unequal place… then do we even deserve this precious planet? For many fearing climate change apocalypse, they fear their lives changing forever, their access to natural wonders canceled, their children's economic futures uncertain, their sacrifices of comfort and convenience in vain due to petty partisan politics. It is their world that is ending. For so many others, the Apocalypse has already happened. In fact, the world has already ended several times. It ended the moment Columbus landed on the islands of the Caribbean. It ended for the kidnapped villagers in Western Africa—my ancestors—when they were stuffed into the wicked belly of a slave ship and cast into slavery in a strange land with a strange new climate. It ended with the first blanket covered in smallpox. It ended on Thanksgiving Day. It ended with the Trail of Tears. Agent Orange. Hiroshima. The Holocaust. It ended with Hurricane Katrina, Maria, Kenneth, Harvey and Dorian. It ended for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. It ended in an ICE camp on the border. It ended for the 2 million, and counting, killed by COVID-19. So many people have already faced the ends of their own civilization. So many people have already faced the ending of their personal worlds. Most of these shattered worlds never truly recovered. None of them have ever been given what they, as sacrifice zones sanctioned to enable the perpetual motion of our economy, are owed. They have never even had a real slice of this world, to begin with. This was not their world. These people and their ancestors know better than any of us how to tackle what's coming, and what forces have allowed it to come, even as they face the new onslaught of climate change impacts which they have so little responsibility for causing. Our global civilization, the one that everyone reading this article is benefitting from, was built on the literal ashes of other civilizations. Meanwhile, a few white men from a few white nations have made nearly all of the decisions that have led us to this present point. To this present danger. Ending any inconvenient worlds that fell into their path along the way. Justifying their revolting actions with caste and class. In many ways, this looming chaos is nothing more than the culmination of those generations of recklessness. In many other ways, the terror of oncoming apocalypse only reminds those with broken worlds of how forgotten they are and [End Page 78] have always been. My family, and my colleagues in the BIPOC-led climate justice movement, have grown up out of these shattered post-apocalyptic worlds, they are our story, our burden, and our strength, and to be frank, the world that so many fear losing… is not a world that we have ever had full access to. This is not to mean I am hopeless or bitter. I find great strength in honoring the generations of pain and suffering that have allowed me to exist, and given me my own small chance to change the story. It is in fact these billions of broken worlds that allow me to access a stream of radical imagination and audacious hope, to see a future that many mainstream climate activists, academics, and policymakers could scarcely picture. One way or another Climate Change will end our world. But not all endings are bleak. Not every end carries with it tones of Ragnarök or Armageddon. The future could hold the end of human life as we know it… but are you really certain that would be a bad thing? Sure, this coming age could be the end of life on our planet. Alternatively, it could be the end of all the ugly things that caused our environmental problems in the first place. We are offered an unprecedented attempt to change the very worst things about our society. To redistribute the power which has been abused continually to lead us to this point. We are also offered an unprecedented attempt to see our doom looming before us and to do nothing in response but suck carbon out of the air and spray aerosols. Apolitical ahistorical solutions for a political problem that bleeds history. Like taking a mild decongestant when you have a critical case of pneumonia. In approaching climate change, we have a unique chance to change the scale of our society. To right centuries of wrongdoing. See, we have a choice: ignoring the social implications of climate change is also ignoring human suffering, the reckless extravagant greed, and the global inequality that allowed climate change to happen. Honoring that suffering, and centering it, abolishing it, may be our only hope. For so many of us, the world is already over! Protecting this spent shell, that a few live on prosperously, is not an inspiration for us. Imagine a world without inequality. A world that doesn't depend on resources reaped through modern-day imperialism. An economy that doesn't depend on environmental degradation, or take homelessness, illness, and starvation as givens. A world without first-worlds or third-worlds. Without poverty and endless war. A world where nature itself has indisputable rights, and people of all colors have indubitable entitlements to access that nature safely without harm from police violence, pollution, and corporate exploitation. A world where wealth distribution matters far more to us than GDP. A world where we don't even need vacations because we have redefined and reclaimed labor as a source of joy, fulfillment, and healing. Is it hard to imagine? Ok, that's fair. But how difficult? More difficult to imagine than a world-ending cataclysm like a megadrought? More difficult than the end of humanity itself? Perhaps that is a large part of the problem at hand: we need to learn how to radically reimagine the world that's possible. Yet those voices who could teach this radical envisioning of the future, those voices who have already survived apocalypses, are so often excluded from this conversation. Their pain, and suffering, and broken worlds are not a part of the [End Page 79] discussion. When you find yourself in rooms of privilege and power, with apolitical solutions to climate change that do not address its social responsibility being poured into your ear, ask yourself who is not sitting at the table, and who is missing? Call attention to whose voice is not being heard. Who is not a part of the climate change dialog? So let me also ask: Who has the most to teach our society about triumphing over unbelievable odds and hardship? Who is already faced with apocalyptic conditions on a daily basis? Who has witnessed the end of the world? When do we let them speak? When do we honor their pain?

[Alexandra Lakind, PhD in environment and resources from University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2022, “Children in Absentia: Reproductive Futurism in the Era of Climate Change”, University of Wisconsin-Madison https://asset.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/2D6I6F4OXVMPR8B/R/file-5b76a.pdf]//owen

Absence is an invitation to start in the ruins of the imagined loss of a predictable future. The figuration of “the child” is marked by absence, what it is not rather than what it is. “The child” is predicated on concepts like innocence, inexperience, and ignorance, an absence or lack of knowledge. “The child” is imagined without race, gender identity, and sexual desire (that is, until they develop through a pre-scripted coming of age story). “The child” is seen as free from sin and, therefore, able to move into a future adulthood of property, legal kinship, and familial succession. Thus, revisiting Edelman is a starting point in the work of unmaking “the child” upon which the present is enacted, and the future is imagined. This unmaking could be generative, allowing actual children to inform their surroundings and inspire new subjectivities. I began with Edelman because this work has become a focal point for many theorists invested in larger conversations around contemporary child figurations and their role in notions of the future. For instance, Julian Gill-Peterson’s work illustrates how “the child” in neoliberal capital differs from the idealized modern concept of (white) childhood that took root in the Progressive Era (see Macleod, 1998 cited in Gill-Peterson, 2015). Gill-Peterson demarcates how “the child” changed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis through examples that illuminate the pressures of entrepreneurship, particularly for Black and brown youth, to accrue futurity through the digital economy. For these children, the future requires investment in the present; the self a basic resource to be used in the absence of resources from society (2015). Here, “the child” is shown as a key player in the perpetuation of debt and expansion of wealth inequality. GillPeterson’s writing operates alongside scholars like Heather Davis (2015) and Rebekah Seldon (2016) who counter and expand Edelman’s proposition in relation to environmental catastrophe. Their work enabled me to think through the ways “the child” is simultaneously present and shifting in relation to the climate crisis in this dissertation. As I embarked on my research, the activists discussed across my case studies showcased how absence could strategically threaten reproductive futurism. Birthstrikers expressed concerns about children’s health and safety in a world destabilized by petrol-dependent lifestyles. In the affluent West, these lifestyles turn child-rearing into a site of carbon-heavy consumption and extractive and unjust relations. Birthsrikers were withholding their uterine and parenting labor to take power, to demand safer working and living conditions for them and the children they might bear. In the School Strikes for Climate, youth activists emphasized that the future will be so drastically different from the present that school was no longer adequate preparation. Their protests shined a light on the absurdity of homework, grades, and college readiness in the face of climate-induced disaster. School strikers also refused to engage in a predetermined adult/child divide. They abstained from school to stop adults from continuing business as usual, and thereby disrupting the daily mechanisms of capitalism. It was their lack of presence in school that instigated disruptions to the norm. As Andrew Marantz (2020) has written on Gene Sharp’s analysis of tactics like bureaucratic slow walking, boycotts, and strikes, “in the history of political change, the winning combination of tactics may look like an absence –or, to the untrained eye, like nothing at all.” In these cases, real and imagined absences brought attention to climate change as activists leveraged the under-questioned status of the institutions of the school and the family. By abstaining from their assumed roles in the school and the family, activists made the oftoverlooked work of learning and reproduction visible. Their absence was practical and conceptual, highlighting the way that capitalism relies on unpaid feminized, domestic labor to ensure the necessary work of childcare and reproduction. These activists asked people to try to imagine a world without children, a world where school and family—the lynchpins of capitalist society—unravel. Whether intending to or not, they raised the concern that climate change will destroy these institutions. By doing so, these activists challenged reproductive futurism and brought to light the precarity and social contingency of these institutions using the specter of a forlorn future that is absent of children.

[Alexandra Lakind, PhD in environment and resources from University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2022, “Children in Absentia: Reproductive Futurism in the Era of Climate Change”, University of Wisconsin-Madison https://asset.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/2D6I6F4OXVMPR8B/R/file-5b76a.pdf]//owen

In Melinda Cooper’s (2017) description of the economic histories that led to the current (over)reliance on familial solidarities and inherited status, she outlines how economists justified shifts from the welfare state to the family as the ultimate guarantor of economic security and care through moral arguments about ‘family values’ deployed to transfer responsibility. As Cooper demonstrates, contrary to the belief that neoliberalism affords individual self-sufficiency and liberation, vital to this economic order of privatized care are structures that marshal everyone, even queer people and people without children towards these “family style care relations” (Cooper, 2017, p. 213). Subjects are folded into this neoliberal rationality via abandonment of public good and interdependence. As Margaret Thatcher (1987) said, “there is no society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” Subjects are folded into this rationality, which can be easily seen in the capture of numerous activists’ movements that fight for the right to be included in these narrow care relations rather than extend care relations outward. This economic structure blocks redistributive justice using the normative nuclear family as an incontestable tactic to naturalize the hoarding of energy and resources within ‘private’ spaces. Concomitantly, the expansion of consumer credit and cuts to public spending in health and education have forced many into precarious family-reliant forms of care, and sites of intergenerational debt accumulation. Thus, as Sasser asserts (2019), a complete unraveling of the family as a unit of welfare is essential to actualize Haraway’s slogan as a vision of multi-species justice. The 21st century is a time of expanding wastelands. Contaminated waters carrying PFAS into our bodies, deforestation leading to pandemics, and agricultural impacts from the decline of honeybees are clear illustrations of interconnectedness and the porousness of boundaries. Unfortunately, as more people shift into the “category of the discarded and destined for death” (HoSang & Lowndes, 2019), there are increased attempts to hold onto mythical ideals aimed at “keeping out the riffraff”— often unsubtly framed as borders from surrounding “color, chaos, and communism” (Ebron & Tsing, 2017, p. 667). Threats are perceived as outside the domestic while the truth is fit for a horror movie: ‘the calls are coming from inside the house.’ Even crusaders against racism too often frame it as a problem of someone else’s bias or an issue relegated to the past. Likewise, climate change is often framed as a technical/scientific issue of future threats. These modes that externalize threats place the problems outside the here and now, which enables people and institutions to deny complicity and avoid addressing the very problems they purport to solve. Nowhere is this displacement more evident than in ‘family values’ discourse. Positioned towards an enormous range of political projects, concerns that the family is falling apart are harnessed via a view of the family-in-perpetual-crisis, which gives energy to policies aiming “to inject new life into that unit, always at the expense of others” (Lewis, 2019; Meiners, 2016; Renfro, 2020). Perceptible in the plight to save the children, contemporary moral panics centered on family values and imagined child safety have led to guiding legislation on topics as far ranging as victims’ rights, adoption, abortion, gestational surrogacy, genetic testing, human trafficking, and pedophilia (Cohen, 1973; Jenkins, 1998; Lepore, 2018). Meanwhile, in the shadow of the family, actual threats to children’s health and safety fall behind as mothers are blamed and children abandoned. As Lee Edelman’s (2004) polemic against the politics of reproductive futurism argues, the imaged child, symbolic of futurity, can organize and administer an “apparently self-regulating economy of sentimentality” (p. 134). In this arrangement, protecting the child (that binds the nuclear family) symbolically stands-in for preserving the nation, the status quo, and a gendered and racial hierarchy tied to present social structures, including those that merge sexual alliance to decent to create a given order of genealogy (Balibar and Wallerstein, 2011). As a political project, multispecies kin making can get disregarded in the face of these future-oriented goals centered on this vision of “the child.” Looking for issues over there, it is easy to get caught up in the spectacle of disaster elsewhere, and to ignore the urgent need to turn our attention to the here and now. It’s hard to avoid the dynamism of spectacle that holds our attention away from the ongoing and the ordinary. The biogenetic family, reliant on the procreative child as the most legitimate form of kin making, and contemporary environmental crises are mutually constitutive. As Marilyn Strathern (2019) posits, while kinship is widely viewed as the inescapable outcome of “procreating couples having babies,” a primary strength in Haraway’s slogan lies in the possibility that new conceptions of kin might “dislodge babies from the center for reproduction” (p. 160). Population and family frameworks both mystify present conditions and reproductive orders, providing rationale for political projects to “secure, in the form of the future, the order of the same” (Edelman, 2004, p. 151). In response, Make Kin Not Babies solicits alternative kinships and alternative demographies that require halting the reproductive orders that legitimize and maintain the divisions of labor and regimes of accumulation that undergird the climate crisis.

[Alexandra Lakind, PhD in environment and resources from University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2022, “Children in Absentia: Reproductive Futurism in the Era of Climate Change”, University of Wisconsin-Madison https://asset.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/2D6I6F4OXVMPR8B/R/file-5b76a.pdf]//owen

Children are enmeshed in our conceptions of time. Childhood (for adults) is at once future oriented and nostalgic, composed of imaginaries replete with underexamined assumptions, as adult anxieties—ontological insecurities—fixate on creating determinable pasts and futures. Childhood is already an always-incomplete state (Castañeda, 2000). Children are perceived as not fully formed (pre-adults) outside the normative (adult) subject, which is perceived as complete and fixed. Its indeterminacy and plasticity, as Cindi Katz (2008, p. 7) explains, “opens it as a tremendously fertile figuration.” To adults, children are repositories for adult fantasies (James et al., 1998; Steedman, 1985). Intensified via Anthropocene narratives of past, present, and future loss, adults cope with anxiety by “securing children’s futures and producing perfect childhoods” (Katz, 2008, p. 6). Adult desires to protect children (from adulthood) or prepare children (for adulthood) employ notions of childhood as it should be to protect authentic nature in the lives of real children (Taylor, 2011). Yet, notions of nature are historically situated and unsettled. By the end of the 18th century, Rousseau had inspired the notion that children were representatives of a nature that was true, neutral, and universal: “the locus of essential goodness” (Taylor, 2011, p. 422). While pagans saw nature and the divine as united with the human and not necessarily as purely or innately good, the rise of urban society sparked new moral concerns which justified the separation of nature and the divine from humans, and reimagined nature as good, absolute, and pure (Bell, 2018). In contrast to Puritanical notions of children as sinful, for the Romantics, children offered a way back to this version of nature. Importantly, these influential Aristotelian and neo-Aristotelian perspectives saw children as qualitatively different from adults. According to Andrew Stables, differentiating children from adults shifted the way child is included, excluded, and implicated in the all-encompassing categorical. Child came to mean not yet ready, or classified by an age when rights are not conferred. Within this distinction, as Stables (2008, p. 89) writes, child is understood to be “insufficiently developed for immersion in society, or (on the Romantic account, still popular among child-centred educators), as too good for it.” Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, children became an important political site submerged within the term natural (Baker, 2001; Fausto-Sterling, 2000). The presumed separation between nature and culture reconfigured childhood as something that could be influenced by the outside environment. As Carolyn Merchant asserts, capitalism wrought newfound hopes of controlling destiny. Nature became conceived of in mechanistic terms, as resources to assemble and dominate (Merchant, 1980). Children represented another natural resource: empty vessels waiting to be filled, resilient yet innocent, like virgin soil yet to be corrupted, polluted, or sexualized. They were no longer smaller versions of adults, but future adults (Baker, 2001). Contemporary scholarship across disciplines has challenged notions of the natural as absolute, ongoing, and sublime, elucidating ways in which humans perceive the natural environment to erode the categorical distinction of nature/culture (see Cronon, 1995; Denevan, 1992). Yet, the legacies of complex and often contradictory beliefs remain. As questions of modification, labour, and activity collide with materiality, so too does the nature/culture divide, yet the Wilderness Debate Rages On (2008), and 19th- and 20th-century notions of childhood linger in ideas of “human control over the future” (Baker, 2001, p. 64). In the 21st century, tethered to a future that we cannot predict, children are a resource to rescue us from the “future we (adults) threaten” by functioning as “the connection to nature we (adults) have corrupted” (Sheldon, 2016, p. 39). To envision (or make) an imagined future safe, children are figured as denizens of nature—and more so of naturalization—naturalizing futurism to provide an uncertain future with orderliness and meaning. Entangled with views of reproduction as the basis for life, children symbolize the natural order, normalizing (and regulating) the boundaries of personhood, as Judith Butler (2014, p. 426) reasons, “making persons according to abstract norms that at once condition and exceed the lives they make—and break.” Drawing on Lee Edelman’s (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive and Rebekah Sheldon’s (2016) The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe, this paper extends from Edelman’s critique of the universal politics of “reproductive futurism” and Sheldon’s analysis of child as a symbol (and tool) for humanity, framed as the answer to environmental catastrophe, the force that will “coordinate our safe passage into the future” (Sheldon, 2016, p. vii). Children, linked to species survival, might be conceived of as the mechanism to overcome planetary threat—a shift in perspective historically coincides with the Anthropocene’s first articulation, as Sheldon (2016) asserts. Edelman’s invective against heterofuturity highlights how imaginaries of the sacrosanct child disadvantage the queer, who are framed as antithetical to the essentialist assumptions upholding nature and children as natural and good. Edelman, as a queer person, situates himself outside such supposed social and biological norms upheld as “good,” occupying an athwart (Probyn, 2016) vantage point to perceive the political processes that beguile children into maintaining social norms. Thus, while Edelman rejects this figuration of child, he may see himself aligned with actual children who are also not able to choose for themselves what they represent. For Edelman, futurism itself—the drive to guarantee that our social reality will persist even after we’re gone—is the underlying culprit aiming to maintain civilization as is. Child (like “science” or “nature”) is widely understood as “race neutral,” concealing how contemporary configurations of childhood are highly racialized. As Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011) details, racialized childhood was central to the 16th- to 19th-century movements that shaped representational democracy in the United States. Child, defined as unable to consent in relation to the rational adult male, came to represent everything that should prohibit a subject from citizenship (Duane, 2010). During this time, child became the embodiment of innocence, distinctly envisioned as white: As Robin Bernstein (2011) writes, “The doctrine of original sin receded, replaced by a doctrine of original innocence” (p. 4). Innocence negates experience, while a figure free of a past undergirds educable heterofutures (Stockton, 2009). Likewise, to sustain a future predicated on the white, able-bodied man of humanism (Braidotti, 2013), environmental futurism often relies on imaginary pasts filled with pure and pristine conceptions of nature, displacing untidy or disordered histories that might conflict with maintaining (Western) civilization. Yet, the United States was not an untouched wilderness, but the result of a violent restructuring of indigenous ways of life (Rifkin, 2011). Natives were assessed as childlike (i.e., incapable and underdeveloped) to justify the United States as “parent” nation in order to normalize, naturalize, and enable claims on land, property, and inheritance (Smith, 2010; Zaborskis, 2016). Moreover, compulsory colonial models of kinship dismantled preexisting collective decision making and multispecies relationships to serve white settler communities. Indeed, the United States conceptualizes and partitions resources to maintain white heteronormative futures. As a white privilege, innocence is systemically denied to brown bodies (Meiners, 2016). This structure guarantees failure of nonwhite bodies to become part of a desired and/or imposed reproductive future and to transition into civic and economic personhood: to vote, own a home, etc. As Jose Munos (2009) notes, if childhood is countered by an adulthood of white futurity, many children of colour are never able to “grow up.” Goaded by increasing environmentalist calls to forestall catastrophe for the sake of the children, child in the Anthropocene relies on prescriptive, unsustainable, and unjust ways of relating to the future. Placed within white supremacist colonial ambitions, reproductive futurism preserves exclusionary ideologies alongside extractive and propriety relationships to the land and one another. Anchored to notions such as “generational shifts” (e.g., father to son), reproductive futurism maintains norms organized around historical (settler) conceptions of progress and change. Adults instill children with stability to carry them into the future through deep-rooted (hetero)normative and racialized logics. As Haraway (2016, p. 1) describes, the present and past are cleared to make futures for coming generations, drawing lines of flight through settler colonialisms’ temporal elimination tied to relations of erasure between the past and future, employing what Eve Tuck and Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez (2013, p. 73) call the “curriculum project of replacement.” Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez draw on Andrew Baldwin to illustrate how futurity relates to the ways that the “future is rendered knowable through specific practices (i.e., calculation, imagination, and performance) and, in turn, intervenes upon the present through three anticipatory logics (i.e., pre-caution, pre-emption and preparedness)” (Baldwin, 2012, as cited in Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2013, p. 80).

The ‘supplemental anti-blackness’ of the United States’ ‘junior partners’ – those whose grievances might be redressed, however incompletely, by ‘rights’, to which we might add non-black LGBTQ people – functions hand in hand with the systematic state and para-state violence targeted at black people. The tactics of ‘crowding out’ black claims (like we see in the poster) and the tactics of actively terrorizing black people are two wings of the same endeavour. Because ‘blackness’ and ‘criminality’ are wedded in the US lexicon, as Saidiya Hartman argues in her book Scenes of Subjection (Hartman 1997), any claims to not being a criminal – or on the flipside, to being a citizen – must literally be made on the backs of black people. When rights-seeking constituencies claim they are ‘not criminals’, they articulate their bid for inclusion through an implicit assertion that they are ‘not black’. Even if the articulation is made on behalf of a group that supposedly does not exclude black members, as Sexton and Wilderson argue, such an assertion enters a system of meaning that necessarily signifies the group as non-black and appeals for a chance to participate in anti-blackness. How might we bring these analyses to bear in our critiques of the ascendancy of neoliberal LGBT political and cultural practices? A growing number of critical thinkers such as Lisa Duggan and Jasbir Puar have worked to theorize ‘homonormativity’ and ‘homonationalism’ in the United States in an effort to disarticulate LGBT political claims from the absorptive thrall of late capital (Agathangelou, Bassichis and Spira 2008; Duggan 2004; Puar 2007). Simultaneously, we are witnessing the proliferation and expansion of visionary racial and economic justice-focused LGBT activist formations challenging the status quo of state violence and structural adjustment, both in terms of what issues and constituencies are centred within LGBT political work as well as the ways in which the process of organizing and movement building replicates racial norms and domination.3 These critiques and organizing efforts offer a vital intervention into the frightening alignment of gayness (and increasingly transgenderness) with capital. They also invite us to continue exploring the ways in which non-black LGBT political claims are produced by and reproduce anti-blackness as a foundational structure of US Americanness. This exploration helps us to situate contemporary LGBT anti-black racism – evidenced in, for example, the blaming of black voters for the passage of Proposition 8, the prioritization of sentence-enhancing hate crimes laws as a solution to anti-LGBT hate violence or the failure of the largest LGBT organizations to oppose the rapid expansion of the prison police state – as a logical extension of the constitutive and enduring antagonisms of slavery and its mobilization of racial–sexual norms and terror. In the vein of critics such as Cathy Cohen and M. Jacqui Alexander (Alexander 2005; Cohen 1997: 437–465) who have persuasively theorized the ways in which both the white gay and lesbian rights framework and many strands of more progressive queer politics participate in white supremacy’s tactics of pitting ‘good gays’ (white, middle class, gender normative, able bodied) against ‘bad queers’ (black, brown, poor, and disabled, which necessarily mean gender non-normative), we want to understand how the basic assumptions, tactics, and epistemologies underlying contemporary queer political claims often unwittingly reproduce and are productive of the fundamental structures of anti-blackness, settler colonialism, and permanent war undergirding the United States itself. In this chapter, we explore the implications of Sexton’s critique of anti-blackness within the domain of contemporary gay and lesbian rights politics within the US, as two white activist-scholars invested in advancing and centring anti-racism within queer and trans political work. Our work here is enabled in particular by Andy Smith’s foundational essay, ‘Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing’ (Smith: 2006) in which she suggests that white supremacy is not singular, but operates in differentiated ways to target different populations. She describes three pillars of white supremacy – the Orientalism/war pillar, the slavery/capitalism pillar and the genocide/colonialism pillar – arguing that white supremacy enacts different technologies of violence and produces different narratives and mythologies in each of these pillars. Her work encourages scholars and activists to analyse the specificity of particular forms of racism, and acknowledge that people targeted in one pillar can also be made complicit with another through promises of inclusion and recognition. In his article ‘People of Color Blindness’, Sexton (2010) argues that the failure to look at the specificity of anti-black racism in the United States, and the willingness of many movements and intellectuals to do two things – to analogize other struggles to anti-black racism generally and emancipation from slavery specifically, and to speak generally about ‘racism’ without attention to the specificities of anti-blackness – is anti-black. While there is a great deal to be said about how contemporary lesbian and gay rights advocacy participates in all three pillars Smith describes, as well as about how settler colonialism is indeed foundational along with slavery in the fabric of US Americanness, in this chapter we want to look at the specific ways that particular US anti-black logics, methods and institutional arrangements are mobilized by some recent campaigns and events that illustrate Sexton’s concerns about how movements that fail to contest anti-blackness participate in it. We look specifically at the focus on reproduction, legal redress, and analogy within gay and lesbian politics as three key sites that illustrate these investments. Critiques of anti-blackness, ultimately, are necessary to elucidate white supremacy’s ‘queer’ junior partnerships, the ‘contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves’ (Wilderson 2007: 33), the ghostly ‘continuities of slavery and freedom’ (Hartman 1997: 13), and the ways in which the unspeakable violences at the core of the US refuse to be subdued by the latest proclamation of their completion or replacement.

Dominant social norms with respect to gender, race, family, and sexuality are deeply embedded in cultural artifacts like Barbie, Mickey, and Gone with the Wind, and strong IP protections for those works keep the cultural associations with those works firmly established as the “official” configuration of sex, gender, and commerce. Queer theory recognizes that these configurations are constantly contested by the curious children, engaged fans, and artists who experiment with them. IP theorists recognize that the law can facilitate these contestations and accordingly help dislodge the social norms built into the propertied artifact. At the same time, a mere loosening of historic legal restrictions should not be equated with a revolutionary dislodging of social hierarchies. Queer theorists have repeatedly pushed back against the notion that expanding legal protections for LGBT people equates to sexual liberation. Just because those individuals typically associated with oppression are being less oppressed, for example, as a result of expanded access to marriage or the military, does not mean that the social values underlying those institutions have been fundamentally dislodged. Milestone LGBT rights decisions like Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell v. Hodges have been criticized for their domesticating impulse,71 and LGBT-friendly laws have been chastised for “pink-washing” human rights abuses against other minorities.72 A similar caution might be useful in the IP context. As much as reworking popular works can dislodge the norms embedded in those works, the same legal mechanisms that allow such reworking—most notably fair use—can be co-opted by wealthy, famous appropriators who build off the work of poorer, queerer, or otherwise marginalized creators.73 When Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Beyoncé, or Green Day relies on fair use to excuse nonpayment or non-recognition of appropriated work, the implications of these fixations may be quite different than when these artists’ work is recontextualized by lesser-known creators. Every “new” work may to some degree be a transformation of something that came before, but not all transformation is necessarily transformative in a politically meaningful way.74 The challenge for IP theory is to create space for the recoding of culture while at the same time remaining attuned to the slipperiness of power and the ability of social norms to persevere and adapt.