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Alex Tsakiris: Before we talk past that too much, give people a sense for this criticism. There are layers of criticism and the way you’re saying it I think people might get the impression that there’s a little tussle over how this should be interpreted or that should be interpreted when in fact the real historical touch-points that we have paint just a horrible picture of Freud—of someone who’s really a complete fraud. Who manufactures evidence in order to support his theories, that copies without attribution other people’s work or at least he promotes himself as being this original great genius when he’s really stood on the shoulders of all these other people.¶ I mean, the history of it beyond just critiquing theory is just stunning for people who haven’t fully encountered it. The other side of that that I really want you to get into to support that is how we know this information was really held under lock and key and protected under the tightest controls for so long. Then it’s gradually pried loose. So give people a sense for that.¶ Dr. Todd Dufresne: There’s so much to say I hardly know where to begin. In some ways, from my perspective, what really happened was Ernest Jones came out with this three-volume biography in 1953, 1955, 1957, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work. Then he died. Basically you have everything after the Jones biography, which is an official biography of psychoanalysis, as kind of a response to this official biography. What happens is that people start becoming more and more critical of psychoanalysis.¶ For me, Rosen is one of the first figures in this regard and it’s around 1967 when he publishes a book called, Brother Animal, in which he reveals that one of Freud’s earlier followers committed suicide. I guess the radical side of this is that Freud was very unmoved by this follower’s plight. He was a sycophant like half the people surrounding Freud, and Freud rebuffed him in various ways and the guy committed suicide.¶ Okay, that’s horrible but not entirely surprising in some ways. But deeper and more radical than that, Rosen exposed that during two periods in the 1920s Freud analyzed his own daughter, Anna, and that’s what really got him into trouble. That’s kind of the beginning of this movement to reassess the fundamental myths of psychoanalysis or the things we didn’t know were myths but certainly we now know are myths.¶ I call it really the beginning of critical Freud studies. I take it to be a post-Jones movement, roughly from the mid-‘60s through to the late 1990s and maybe going on today, as well. I see it as like the whole purpose of scholarship and Freud studies is to move to critical Freud studies.¶ Now how did it happen? It’s really amazing. One of the untold stories of psychoanalytic studies or Freud studies, as it’s usually called, is that one of the reasons there’s so much misinformation is that the vast majority of books published and that appear under the library heading of BF173 to BF175 roughly—go to any library and you’ll find all the Freud books there.¶ Most of this work is vanity publishing. So much of the field is run by psychoanalysts who have positions of authority. They start their own book publishers. They start their own journals. Pretty soon they have an authority in the marketplace of ideas so it’s very, very hard to actually find in the thousands of books published on Freud anything that actually tells the truth. It’s a hard thing for somebody to free themselves from many, many misconceptions about Freud.¶ You mentioned a couple of them. Freud manufactured evidence. One of the things that’s not well-appreciated is how Freud went out of his way to manipulate the reception of his own work, right? He wrote his own histories, first of all. Many times he revised his own histories and sometimes there are discrepancies with his own histories. He was always trying to spin his history in advance because Freud always perceived himself as an historically important person, so he proceeded accordingly.¶ He destroyed some of his correspondence. He would destroy some of his process notes that he used to create his famous case studies, of which there really is only four that he wrote, all of which are failures, by the way. He destroyed the notes and these were important cases. You’d think you’d keep them but he destroyed them. He tried to get his famous letters with Wilhelm Fliess destroyed but Marie Bonaparte preserved them against his wishes.¶ So Freud was always interested in manipulating the reception of his work and he was largely successful in many ways. People have generally believed what he said.¶ Alex Tsakiris: Can we stop right there? One of the things I always like to do when we get into these discussions with people and I have just a very superficial understanding of this stuff—you could get into it in much greater detail. I always stop at this point and say, “What would that look like in modern academic standards?” Just what we already know there. What would that look like if any intellectual, academic figure of our time was known to have done those things? I can’t imagine but that they would be completely ostracized as just the beginning of it. They’d be a complete joke.¶ Dr. Todd Dufresne: The problem is, Alex, that’s there’s hardly any modern equivalent to Freud. What Freud got away with for so long, which is essentially passing off incomplete results or fraudulent results as the truth—I can give you some examples as we get into it later. He did all of the things you said he did. He manufactured evidence and even the evidence that he had, he may have felt legitimately and honestly is so shot-through with epistemological problems because there’s the contamination of results by the expectations he had on the patients. We know this is called “suggestion,” right? And undue influence.¶ One of the things that’s interesting about Freud is that he was a scientist and as a scientist he had followers. These followers routinely referred to his major works like The Interpretation of Dreams as their “bibles.” So we’re already in Freud’s life in the presence of a kind of cult or church or something that’s not scientific. This guy was a trained neurologist, right? He asked some legitimate questions. He explored these questions but at some point ambition took over and he fudged the results in many ways like you’re saying.¶ What should happen with Freud is the minute people see that he fudged the results in a number of ways that are absolutely clear—there’s no question—well, anybody that has any fair-mindedness would say that everything that follows from these results is therefore questionable. But that’s not what happens with Freud, and that’s because we’re in the presence of a belief system, like a religion, so people don’t want to question it. Anything like this today, you’d lose tenure. You’d lose your job. You’d be fired. When this happens people fall into disgrace. But Freud has never really seriously fallen into disgrace.¶ One of the things that’s happened which is amazing to me because I’m somebody who works in the humanities is that part of the blame belongs to people in the humanities and social sciences that don’t really care about science, or in some ways truth, not to be too general about it. They don’t care that maybe he fudged the results; they’re just interested in this as a hermeneutic system, a way of interpreting the world. So this is the place we get, where people are really non-skeptical about Freud and they don’t want to hear it, you know? They do not want to hear it. And that’s my colleagues, I’m afraid.

Let me put some of my cards on the table right away: I think that this critique misses its mark quite drastically in the sense that, whatever faith Munoz and Dean might have in new social collectivities, they do not, as Edelman implies, support liberal humanism's dreams of redemption through greater inclusion; they do not believe that simply allowing previously marginalized subjects to enter the existing system would miraculously conjure away the system's problems. Quite the contrary, both are deeply critical of the homonormative quest for social respectability that characterizes much of liberal gay and lesbian politics. In Cruising Utopia (2009), Munoz in fact explicitly condemns homonormative gays and lesbians who allow themselves to be seduced by the material and symbolic rewards of neoliberal capitalism. One could of course point out that Edelman could not have known in 2006 what Munoz was going to say in a book that was published three years later. But this does not change the fact that Edelman's accusation rings false for the simple reason that it is aimed at two progressive critics who are so well versed in the basics of posthumanist theory that they in many ways take the demise of the humanist self for granted.

I cannot think of a single critic within queer theory who naively endorses the sovereign subject of liberal humanism. If anything-as I have already noted and will discuss in greater detail in the next chapter-the field, like the rest of American progressive theory, seems to be caught up in a compulsive cycle of needing to repeatedly expunge this subject even when very little of it remains. Furthermore, the idea that utopian thinking is by definition liberal, that there is no room for utopianism within posthumanist paradigms, is an indication of the extent to which certain strands of posthumanist theory have solidified into lifeless patterns that no longer serve a critical function; in such instances, the monotonous repetition of poststructuralist dogmas-in Edelman's case, "hopefulness bad, negativity good" (which, notably, has the same starkly binaristic structure as Butler's "autonomy bad, relationality good")-serves to bar alternative perspectives that might revitalize contemporary theory by allowing us to think beyond bad-good archetypes. In this sense, Munoz's statement regarding Edelman's "well-worn war chest of poststructuralist pieties" (2009, 10) is right on target, as is his rebuke of the "various romances of negativity" that have, within queer theory, become so predictable as to be "resoundingly anticritical" (12).

]ETang

By the 1990s, though—as queer theory began to emerge from a heady concatenation of poststructuralist philosophy, the history of sexuality and literary studies—rumblings of discontent could be heard. In 1994, Lisa Duggan, a prominent scholar who later coined the term “homonormativity,” warned against the political quietism of queer critique. In a short essay on “queering the state,” she skewered faux radicals who “presented as the progressive cutting edge of politics as well as theory,” but who in truth were guilty of “avoiding (if not outright despising) lesbian/gay/queer activism,” and argued that politics could make use of the strategic insights queer theory had to offer. It’s a frustration I think many of us share, wedged between queer theory’s utopian aspirations and the mucky reality of day-to-day politics.

In this paper we argue that a psychosocial approach is a useful framework for theorizing how cultural and institutional factors shape transgender experiences in their local contexts. This approach attempts to avoid explaining trans experiences via either psychological or sociological accounts that can lead to polarized assumptions. Instead it explores subjective experiences as inseparable from the social conditions in which they emerge and gain meaning (Johnson, 2015). This might include attention to gender identity and expression, mental health conditions and the psychosocial conditions typical of the geopolitical context, such as precarity, violence or misogyny. Reisner et al. (2016a) also notes that multiple determinants affect transgender health, including biological, behavioral, social, legal, and structural factors associated with health risks and living conditions in general and the relevance of regional contexts. However, a strength of the psychosocial approach is that it focuses on understanding how shared elements of transgender experiences become entwined in the social life of specific cultural and geographical contexts, where psychosocial intersections create unique subjectivities for trans individuals that are shaped by, but not reducible to, individual or social factors.

*need for cognitive closure (NFCC) refers to one’s tendency to impose fixed meanings on situations and to feel an aversion toward ambiguous information and experiences.

Beyond these descriptive findings, the results offered support for—and illuminate the limitations of—several broader theories of public opinion. Broad values helped explain opinions about specific groups and issues. In particular, moral traditionalism predicted negative views of transgender people and opposition toward transgender rights. These results echo earlier studies showing moral traditionalism’s relationship with attitudes toward LGB rights (Brewer 2008). The other values studied (egalitarianism, religiosity, ideology, and party) had similarly expected relationships with support for transgender rights (but not with views of transgender people). As hypothesized, more egalitarian, more liberal, less religious, and more Democratic respondents expressed greater support for transgender rights.

http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol8no2_2009/power_futurism.pdf

Edelman could of course protest that his is not an empirical point, but a symbolic one, and there is certainly something enlightening about being able to ‘spot,’ in the wake of Edelman’s analysis, reproductive futurism whenever it rears its smiling, big-eyed, irresistible head. But in the light of the relative empirical paucity of this normative notion of the family, and of the child taken care of by the father’s wage and the mother’s domestic care, a question arises as to how far Edelman’s notion of the ‘queer’ extends. If ‘queerness names the side of those not “fighting for the children”’ (Edelman, 2004: 3) it must by definition exclude any family arrangement, however non-child oriented. Can you have family arrangements of those who take care of children but nonetheless are not ‘fighting for the children’? Can one have a generic attitude towards children, or has the logic of reproductive futurism filtered all the way down such that it is impossible to think of children as anything other than ‘special,’ as ‘little angels’? There are, however, plenty of children being raised in situations where very little was staked on their future, and plenty of family structures in which caring for young people is far more a question of pragmatics than of ideology. Edelman makes clear that he is not talking about really existing families and actual children, but it must be noted that Edelman sometimes slips from the figural to the literal, or at least certainly seems to position the woman on the side of the children in a rather dubious way. As Fraiman puts it in her reading of Edelman: ‘Figurations of women’s bodies … are subtly de-eroticised and assimilated to the figurative child’ (Fraiman, 2003: 131). Does Edelman fall too far into the rhetoric of the Christian Right by associating women too quickly with childbirth and some sort of supposedly natural maternal desire that in turn is supposed to characterise reproductive futurism? Edelman seems to assimilate all notions of the family with notions of the future, and to reify families as solid, reactionary entities to be opposed by identity-shaking queer negativity. But what is the ‘identity’ of the family as such? It’s not a real one in the sense of being the majority composition of living arrangements (at least in the British case, as noted above). It’s not a seamlessly ideological one either, seeing as the image of the family presented by (primarily right-wing) politicians is, in practice, rife with contradiction. It seems more likely the case that the ideology must be so extreme in order to cover over the real truth of the family as the economic support for an increasingly precarious labour market. In the 1950s, a male breadwinner’s wage was enough to support an entire ‘classical’ family, now both partners must (in most cases) work to earn anywhere near the same amount. If women are now fully included in the workforce it is because men’s wages have been depressed, even as women still fail to earn as much as their male counterparts. Who looks after the children is an increasingly complicated question, and neither the state nor the classical family seem able to do it effectively and affordably. Politics is so pro-child in theory because it is so anti-child (and anti-woman) in practice. The supposed futural ‘reason’ of representative politics is in effect profoundly fractured and contradictory, not in the least bit reconciled to either its image of the child, or to its image of itself. Edelman’s notion of the queer nevertheless seems to depend on an overly homogenous picture of the social world. To write, as Edelman claims to, from ‘the space outside the framework within which politics as we know it appears and so outside the conflict of visions that share as their presupposition that the body politic must survive’ (Edelman, 2004: 3) involves deliberately superimposing various ‘political’ categories onto various non-political categories. Thus, Edelman conflates democracy with the child, rationality with a naïve concept of progress and heterosexuality with reproduction, sweeping away the possibility of collective organisation and action. As John Brenkman puts it: ‘Edelman compounds his reductive concept of the political realm by in turn postulating an ironclad intermeshing of social reproduction and sexual reproduction’ (Brenkman, 2002: 176). By neglecting the contradictory economic imperatives at work in political conceptions of the family and fusing politics with reason Edelman leaves no room at all for what we could call a ‘queer reason’– queer from the standpoint of representational politics, and neither committed to the child nor to sexual essentialism. It is here that Rancière’s ideas are relevant. If a ‘queer reason’ is to make any sense, it is important to separate out two different kinds of rationalism, which Edelman refuses to do. In a section in Disagreement entitled ‘The Rationality of Disagreement,’ Rancière states the following: Political rationality is only thinkable precisely on the condition that it be freed from the alternative in which a certain rationalism would like to keep it reined in, either as exchange between partners putting their interests or standards up for discussion, or else the violence of the irrational (Rancière, 1999: 43).

https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-abstract/32/2%20(119)/1/33775/There-s-Nothing-Revolutionary-about-a-Blowjob?redirectedFrom=fulltext]

Edelman’s refusal of politics postulates what he takes to be the radical negativity of jouissance as an “unnamable remainder,” which when harnessed through an identification with the death drive, whatever that means, can actually unravel the social. The problem, if we can be a little technical here, is the unpsychoanalytic way in which Edelman mobilizes Lacanian concepts. 6 5 As practicing Lacanian analyst Judith Feher Guerwich points out, “Jouissance is a legal term — in Latin usufructus — referring to the right to enjoy the use of a thing as opposed to owning it.” Thus, jouissance is not a disruptive remainder; it is instead “the subject’s experience of being for the Other as an object of enjoyment, of use or abuse, in contrast to being the object of the Other’s desire.” What happens when one is captured by the jouissance of the Other is that the Other becomes a frightening mystery, so that the subject is constantly caught in an unanswerable question: What does the Other want from me? The jouissance of the Other then has the special quality of being both real and mythical. The subject attributes qualities to the Other that do not really exist (indeed Lacan goes so far as to argue that the “big” Other does not exist) precisely because the subject remains clueless about who, or even what, this Other actually is. One of the goals of Lacanian psychoanalysis is thus to demystify the Other, and as such, the Oedipal fantasy needs to be exposed as fantasy. When Lacan writes that “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other,” he means that our desires and fantasies come to us from the place of the Other rather than our own conscious ego. These unconscious fantasies, particularly the Oedipal myth, are developed in order to fend off our fear of being encompassed by the jouissance of our primary Other(s) (especially the mother) who leave us helpless before the ultimate question: what does the Other want of us? This fear becomes a wish, including a wish for a law that could keep us from being obliterated by or collapsed into the jouissance of the Other. And this is why, as Feher Guerwich argues, the Oedipal myth in Lacan is an effect rather than a cause of subjectivity. In Freud, acceptance of the threat of castration is what allows the boy to renounce his primary Oedipal desires for the (m)Other and is thus a cause of subjectivity. For Lacan, however, castration names the recognition of the incompleteness of the Other, which is precisely what allows the subject to escape from capture by the Other’s jouissance. Yet , in order to defend against this traumatic recognition, the subject develops the myth of the paternal law that enables the subject to believe that he could fulfill the (m)Other if only it weren’t prohibited. As Lacan puts it, “Castration means that jouissance has to be refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the Law of desire.” 10 11 Because no one’s fantasy is completely correlated with that of another subject, no one can ever be completely reduced to someone else’s object of use (jouissance). Our uniqueness resides in our fantasy life, so from that point of view, our subjectivity is never completely extinguished even in madness. For Lacan, the subject of desire is the subject of the unconscious in a unique sense. Through Lacanian analysis we lose the fantasy of being completely plugged into the Other, but through that loss we gain awareness of ourselves of having our own psychic life. On the other side, however, is psychic death, or the wish to extinguish the subjectivity that is born with our desire and remain instead an object for the Other. The ethical goal is thus to reach the point where the patient can see that jouissance is actually within us and not an all powerful entity who can obliterate us. The fantasy that we are subjected to the Other is a difficult one to release precisely because the unconscious needs to fend off capture by the jouissance of the Other. Paradoxically, we need the fantasy of the symbolic law to feel safe from being consumed by the Other insofar as this Law purports to prohibit certain threatening desires. Rightwing women, for example, develop an unconscious wish for a law that can protect them from the jouissance of the Other, which they identify with the fantasy figure of the homosexual. Thus, antigay politics can be seen as a defensive reaction formation in the classic sense: the jouissance of the Other is outlawed by outlawing gay and lesbian marriage, and therefore the subject is safe. It is this unrealizable unconscious wish that Edelman interprets as a “a tear in the social fabric.” But an unrealizable wish is not “an impossible Real,” as Edelman seems to think. To quote Edelman himself on this misunderstanding in his attempt to salvage jouissance for the acting out of impossible queerness: 12 But to the extent that jouissance as a tear in the social fabric of symbolic reality as we know it unravels the solidity of every object, including the object as which the subject necessarily takes itself, it evokes the death drive that always insists on the void both in and of the subject beyond its fantasy of selfrealization in the domain of the pleasure principle. 13 He then goes on to claim that queerness “marks . . . the place of a jouissance from which [the symbolic] can never escape.” For Edelman, then, queerness is a kind of radically negative and unnamable Real, a site of disruptive jouissance, the death drive within the social order. Here, Edelman concedes to capture in the jouissance of the Other by clinging to the symbolic law that purportedly prohibits queerness, which can therefore only reappear as a self and socially destructive tear from within. Edelman, in other words, takes the fantasy of the symbolic law as reality, appearing to forget that for Lacan “the Other doesn’t exist.” As we have pointed out, the all encompassing Other (or symbolic) who has the power to completely determine the subject is ultimately only a fantasy, which is why Lacan frequently refers to it as the “barred Other.” 14 There is no “beyond accommodation” to a self encircled symbolic order, as it is described in Edelman’s work. 15 He is the subject who knows what is impossible as opposed to the subject that is constituted through the disruption of a Real that is unknowable but that affects us by throwing time out of joint, as Jacques Derrida reminds us again and again. The beyond of the Real that disjoins temporality or the narrative of historicism is precisely what keeps the future open as a promise of the indetermination that itself disrupts the self enclosure of the symbolic order. We need to underscore this point: the Real is not something. The Real is not “there.” It is, instead, precisely only thinkable as that which disrupts the self enclosure of the symbolic order, but that is not to say that the Real is nothing. Instead, the Real is what remains as “it” effects the disruption of the self enclosure of the symbolic. It is there only in its effects, one of which Derrida emphasizes in Specters of Marx as the disjoining of time that keeps open the future. Indeed, Edelman’s mistake is to frame the real as “impossible,” because the very notion of the impossible is a symbolic one and the Real remains forever other to the symbolic. In other words, if the Real is beyond the knowable then we can never know what is impossible. The future is a promise and not a narrative precisely because the other remains other to all historical attempts to capture what is beyond. To quote Derrida: It was then a matter of thinking another historicity — not a new history and still less a “new historicism,” but another opening of eventness as historicity that permitted one not to renounce, but on the contrary to open up access to an affirmative thinking of the messianic and emancipatory promise as promise: as promise and not as onto-theological or teleo-eschatological program or design. Not only must one not renounce the emancipatory desire, it is necessary to insist on it more than ever, it seems and insist on it, moreover, as the very indestructibility of the “it is necessary.” This is the condition of a repoliticization, perhaps of another concept of the political. This future, as promise to come, is exactly what cannot be narrated because there can be no end that encloses the story. And, moreover, this future has nothing to do with heteronormativity, fantasies of imaginary children, or narcissistic self projection. Or, in other words, since the future is not “there” any more than the Real, it cannot be “fucked.” 18 Edelman’s relentless struggle to keep us safe from the emancipatory desire ironically keeps us captured in the jouissance of the Other, here positioned as the inevitability of capitalism, which hangs onto us even as we buy our next sex toy. The future to come remains forever other because the dead can never be put in their place, and they incessantly return to issue demands upon us in the present. For Derrida, the heterogeneity of the Real, or of any event, is precisely that it is an ineffaceable trace. This is why deconstruction, for Derrida, is justice, precisely in that it endlessly moves through the disjoining of time to keep open a place for the other to come. Again to quote Derrida: This necessary disjointure, the de-totalizing condition of justice, is indeed here that of the present — and by the same token the very condition of the present and of the presence of the present. This is where deconstruction would always begin to take shape as the thinking of the gift and of undeconstructible justice, the undeconstructible condition of any deconstruction, to be sure, but a condition that is itself in deconstruction and remains, and must remain (that is the injunction) in the disjointure of the UnFug. Edelman would be wise to remember why the future to come matters to us. Indeed as Derrida urgently reminds us, “Without the opening of this possibility, there remains, perhaps, beyond good and evil, only the necessity of the worst. A necessity that would not (even) be a fated one.” And for Edelman, it seems that queer theory is indeed fated by the necessity of the worst in its purported identification with the death drive. The dead, or more specifically, the specter, is for Derrida the thing that is no-thing in this world. And yet it is there as a spectral asymmetry, which as Derrida writes, “desynchronizes,” in the sense that it confronts us with what is other and remains an unmasterable disproportion. What Derrida names a “hauntology” is precisely what forces us to be turned toward the dead as the other who calls to us and at the same time disjoins the present so that what we inherit is also a promise to the future, not of the Child, but of the ghost. Thus the future, for Derrida, is our inheritance, not our children’s. And it is what always turns us to the other, and in that sense, the nonnarratable. This is a completely different understanding of death, the future, and inheritance than the one offered by Edelman in his insistence that queerness demands an identification with the death drive as that which rejects futurity in a destructive embrace of jouissance in the present. Indeed, even Lacan asserted that any “will to destruction” in the death drive fundamentally coexists with a “will for an Otherthing [Autrechose].” It is by recognizing that both the symbolic and the narrative structures of history are fantasies that we might open ourselves to a future beyond — one that is indeed unknowable, but one that is ours to inherit.

And convergence is what most attracts me to Edelman. It is also what most exasperates me. Traditional Christian analyses of sin (or “nothing”) teach us to respond to it with some remedial deprivation: separate yourself from “this present evil age” (Gal 1:4) by pursuing poverty, chastity, martyrdom. This lesson seems to me unbalanced, so I hope for a better education somewhere else. Edelman seems to understand the problem in the same way as me, but his only remedy is an ironic disposition. Speaking of the BLM protests in 2020, he writes,

The events of this June exemplify the imperative of affording the shelter of meaningful being to those living negated identities. But they also remind us that meaningful being occasions those negations in the first place. That is the structural lesson that Bad Education attempts to unfold: the lesson that, as lesson, can only ironize what it teaches.

I see this maternalizing of the female, biologizing of the maternal, and demonizing of both occurring in Lee Edelman’s challenging essay, “The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive” (1998). In a mode I would describe as incantatory poststructuralism, Edelman analyzes the child as a figure of futurity in political discourse. His target is not simply the conservative uses of sentimentalized innocence and regeneration but the child’s indispensability to political thought per se, its deployment as the image of a future on which the very symbolic as well as social order depends. There is much to admire about this bold critique, and certainly I ag]ree that children are typically invoked to legitimate the dominant culture. Yet Edelman’s discussion of the trope of the child can’t help but offer its own set of tropes, and these not only reflect but also actively reproduce the gender logic above, by which men are tied to a “positive” deconstructive force, women to a “negative” conservative one. 16

To begin with, Edelman’s examples of children are accompanied by other examples, though unremarked as such, of adult females— as if images of children naturally conjure, as an extension of themselves, images of women to care for them. These women are, indeed, so consistently depicted as to give them too an iconic function within the essay. Thus in addition to AIDS poster child Ryan White (25); the waif of the Broadway hit Les Miz (21); and Annie, star of her own megamusical (24); we have novelist P. D. James (21); T. S. Eliot’s wife, Vivienne (21); the Statue of Liberty (21); and the pregnant women at the wake of Tom Hanks’s character, an AIDS-infected lawyer, in the movie Philadelphia (24– 25). Like the sentimentalized children, all of these women are cited accusingly to illustrate the imperatives of sexual/social reproduction whose effect, indeed whose purpose, is to discipline queerness. Edelman does name several men (Donald Wilmon and Cardinal Bernard Law) who speechify on the importance of “family values” (23, 28– 29). But P. D. James’s and Vivienne Eliot’s poetic utterances (whether as novelist or “character”) do not polemically refer to so much as they imaginatively embody the ideology of enforced childbearing, supporting my sense that women bear most of the weight, in this piece, of representing heteronormativity. Thus James is mentioned for her dystopian novel, The Children of Men , in which social ruin is equated with the failure to reproduce (“less and less in the West we made love and bred children” [21]); Vivienne Eliot is credited with “The Waste Land” line, “What you get married for if you don’t want children?” (21); and Delacroix’s bare-breasted Liberty is invoked because it hails us (with its promise of freedom) as suckling children (21). Liberty is, in fact, Edelman’s very first example of this discourse: “her bare breast making each spectator the unweaned child to whom [a brave new world] belongs.” Notice here how the simple fact of the bared female breast “makes” a child, and though topless women are never really simple but always fraught in our cultural imaginary, I do think that Edelman’s rhetoric actively works to maternalize this breast, so that it not only nurses but even magically produces a child. The result is that, here and elsewhere, figurations of women’s bodies, however islanded, are subtly de-eroticized and assimilated to the figurative child that is this essay’s explicit target.

Queer theory, like any intellectual enterprise, has its blind spots. It’s why Lee Edelman’s celebration of the death drive for queer subjects, as enticing as it might seem, runs into trouble for centering on white gay men, for whom there is less at stake in claiming negativity than queer people of color and queer women. Perhaps because of Ruti’s largely Lacanian frame, her analysis has some limits. To be sure, Ruti substantially engages with Sara Ahmed, Jasbir Puar, David L. Eng, and others who have been critical of the subject-centered whiteness of some strands of queer theory that embrace Lacan in particular. And yet, her book does not really focus onthe shape of the structural oppressions that are at the core of what has come to be called queer of color critique; her point is to note the contributions of queer approaches to oppression along the lines of race, sex, gender, and class, not to unpack specific observations about overlap or intersection between marginal identities and experiences. Sometimes, that feels like a disappointment. Nonetheless, a reader will learn how the relational critiques they offer can be reconciled with a Lacanian motivation to identify what is lacking and think beyond it. In that sense, I think Ruti recovers some insights from white scholars aware of their critical and empathic limitations: she observes from critics like Tim Dean and Leo Bersani that there are modes of ethical thinking that do not require total identification with different points of view in order to function. It’s possible, as Dean suggests in his study of the ethics of barebacking subculture, to call for “an impersonal ethics in which one cares about others even when one cannot see anything of oneself in them.” That impersonal ethics — one in which the limits of the imagination prompt one to learn by extending sympathy before fear — is a call for learning from and listening to one’s critics; it’s a call for an imagination beyond the frameworks that elicit sympathy in the here and now.

There are, then, three senses in which queer theory may be problematic from a feminist point of view. First, it is sometimes a study of men to which women are appended as an afterthought. In this mode, it may slip from seemingly neutral uses of the terms “queer” or “homosexual” to what is then revealed to be male sexuality in particular, only to move back out to ostensibly universal claims, which remain underwritten by masculinity. Second, it favors a poststructuralism so thorough and enthusiastic that the hardening of gender over time, the way its masquerades tend to calcify and continue to matter even in queer contexts, is effectively wished away. Third and most subtly, it tends unconsciously to position women, gender, femininity, and feminism as normative “other” to its antinormative project— and this may occur even when its project centers on female subjectivity— with the result that its own gender codings may be quite conventional.

A central goal of this chapter is to press further on Martin’s suggestion that the feminine and feminist are at moments relegated by queer theory to an ensnared and ensnaring “swamp,” and that this swamp is somehow “maternal.” In fact, I argue that when women occupy the place of “other” within queer discourse it is frequently because they occupy the place of “mother”; and because “mother,” in turn, is reduced to biology, heterosexuality, traditional family, coercive normativity. Cherrié Moraga’s book claiming queer motherhood is one of several recent challenges to just this set of assumptions. 15 It is nevertheless more often the case that a particular construction of the maternal functions as the means by which women and feminism become negatively charged from a queer point of view. This antagonism toward the maternal contrasts strongly with— indeed, quite pointedly reverses— lesbian feminist paradigms cherishing the mother’s body and taking early mother-daughter ties as a trope for lesbian love. De Lauretis, for one, is glad to abandon the “homosexual-maternal metaphor” (see note 183– 84 n 5). As we have seen, however, another effect of the new antimaternalism has been a tendency to disown queer theory’s feminist antecedents both for valuing and for being, intellectually speaking, the mother. Given cultural views of mothers and older women generally, it follows easily from such an equation that feminism should be seen as negative about sex and antithetical to sexiness. As for the “feminine,” it too is readily conflated with a female embodiment most fully expressed by pregnancy and lactation. Like a textbook illustration of naturalized gender difference, the blissfully pregnant or postpartum woman, whose chromosomes neatly match cultural expectations, is put up against queer theory’s transgressive hero, who happens to be biologically male but whose body doesn’t line up with either his gender presentation or his sexual practices.

Since Walters there have been, indeed, two entire collections devoted to the tensions between lesbian-feminist and queer paradigms, both published in 1997. Cross-Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of Alliance , edited by Dana Heller and sympathetic to the former perspective, featured essays by old-guard lesbian feminists Bonnie Zimmerman and Lillian Faderman, who angrily defended their work from queer charges of “essentialism, ethnocentrism, separatism, puritanism, political correctness, and so forth” (157– 58). Even Sue-Ellen Case, no fan of mainstream lesbian feminism, complained in this volume that “the privileging of gay male culture by queer dykes, along with the . . . mis-remembering of lesbian feminism, has produced the dwindling away of lesbian cultural resources” (211). Ironizing the “new queer dyke” who impersonates gay male styles, Case noted that, if “testosterone is better in the hands of women, appropriating the masculine is not, obviously, beyond gender” (210). Feminism Meets Queer Theory (edited by Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor), though more balanced overall, reprinted one of the aforementioned articles by Martin (“Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary”) and opened with an essay by Butler herself (“Against Proper Objects”) conceding that queer theory had been guilty of mischaracterizing work on gender— erasing radical feminism, antiracist feminism, pro-sex feminism, antiessentialist feminism, and feminist sex radicalism (18– 19). Noting that Gender Trouble (1990) was written to contest feminist frameworks fixated on the male/female binary, here Butler would temper that challenge by doubting that queer theory’s inquiry into sexuality could “ever fully be divorced from questions of gender” (2– 3).

Such moments in Butler point to the fact that questions about gender within queer theory have been raised not only by those invested in older feminist paradigms but also by those identified with recent queer ones. Another striking example is de Lauretis, credited with actually coining the term “queer theory” in her 1991 introduction to differences . Arguing that so-called “lesbian and gay studies” had frequently elided lesbian difference while seeming to include it, her introduction called on queer theory to address “the enduring silence on the specificity of lesbianism in the contemporary ‘gay and lesbian’ discourse” (vii). Three years later, however, de Lauretis would criticize Sedgwick along with a general state of queer affairs continuing to prioritize gay men and often dismissive of earlier feminist scholarship. In a paper given at the 1994 MLA and published in Cross Purposes (“Fem/Les Scramble”), de Lauretis declared that “queer theory,” in failing to differentiate and historicize female as well as male sexualities, had had in practice “the opposite of the effect I had hoped for” (46). 7 All of which is to say that, since 1991, we have seen both the elaboration of an exciting left political practice and body of theory under the rubric of “queer” and the voicing of a complaint from queer as well as lesbian feminists to the effect that queer erotics and politics are made available primarily through masculinity. Among their many charges: as gay male sexualities are glamorized and radicalized, women are left out of major queer texts (which are no less influential for that); “women” is dismissed as a homogenizing identity category (leaving “men” to function as such); lesbianism is untheorized as a discrete desire or theorized in terms derived from models of male sexuality; “masculinity” is fetishized while “femininity” and “maternity” are disparaged, often by queer women as well as men; lesbian scholarship is caricatured, lesbian histories are oversimplified, and lesbian cultures are allowed to dwindle away. 8

June is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) pride month, which is celebrated each year to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan. Pride Month, for short, is an opportunity to recognize and celebrate the impact that this community has had on our nation’s culture and history. One example is the art of drag performance, which is one of the many creative contributions to come out of the queer community. The history of drag within the copyright record runs deep, and many aspects of it are protected by copyright.

The origins of drag performances can be traced back to 1869 when Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge began hosting secret “drag balls,” which served as a safe place for the queer community to congregate without fear for decades. In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Langston Hughes described Hamilton Lodge as “a queerly assorted throng on the dance floor” where men dressed as women and women dressed as men.[1] Although the balls catered primarily to the queer community, straight artists and writers were also attracted to the celebratory atmosphere. Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, coauthors of The Young and Evil, described the scene as “a […] celestial flavor and cerulean coloring no angelic painter or nectarish poet has ever conceived . . . lit up like high mass.”[2]

Occupy aside, the most successful effort so far to translate academic postmodernism into a usable language of praxis ironically seems to have been initiated not by the political Left at all, but by the Right. In 2006, Eyal Weizman reported that elite military research institutions on urban warfare around the world had been assigning their students "Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Guy Debord . . . as well as more contem- porary writings on urbanism, psychology, cybernetics, post-colonial and post-Structuralist theory."88 The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), in particu- lar, had been bullish on Deleuze and Guattari. As the director of the IDF Operational Theory Research Institute explained, "We employ crit- ical theory" because it helps the IDF rethink its conceptual foundations: "Several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaux became instrumental for us allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise." Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, sounding rather like Foucault or Georges Bataille—another IDF favorite—in fact describes a 2002 military campaign he waged against Palestinian militants in Nablus as "the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions." Though one doesn't "need Deleuze to attack Nablus," Weizman comments, "theory helped the military reorganize by providing a new language in which to speak to itself and others." "In no uncertain terms," he writes, "education in the humanities—often believed to be the most powerful weapon against imperialism—is being appropri- ated as a powerful vehicle for imperialism."89 While it would be unfair to draw too many conclusions from this bizarre effort to enlist post-structuralist theory for state repression, the episode does raise the question of whether postmodernism is really a friend to the Left after all. The trouble with Nietzscheanism ultimately is that it is an unreliable basis for a progressive politics. Post-structuralism's Nietzschean-inflected skepticism toward "metanarratives" like freedom and justice; its Foucauldian metaphysics of the spatial indeterminacy of power; its rejection of a diachronic historical vision in favor of a col- lapsed temporality ("the now"); its refusal of longer-term visions of col- lective action and institution-building; and its refusal too of an older, more worthy language of solidarity, mutual aid, unity, and collective consciousness, tell heavily against it. Worse still, a strain of authoritari- anism has long haunted the project, from Nietzsche' hatred of social- ism and feminism to Martin Heidegger's Nazism and Louis Althusser's mechanistic Stalinism. Even the otherwise libertarian Foucault flirted with authoritarianism at times. During the Iranian Revolution in 1978, Foucault's first response to the paroxysm was not to side with the left- ists and feminists who participated in the upheaval, but to side with the radical Islamist followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Nor was this some oversight on Foucault's part, but a stance that flowed organically from his deep skepticism toward modern institutions and norms—including those of representative democracy. As Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson remind us: Scholars often assume that Foucault's suspicion of utopianism ... hostility to grand narratives and universals . . . and his stress on difference and singularity rather than totality would make him less likely than his prede- cessors on the Left to romanticize an authoritarian politics that promised radically to refashion from above the lives and thought of a people . However, his Iran's writings showed that Foucault was not immune to the (same) type of illusions that so many Western leftists had held with regard to (the USSR and China) .90 This is not to say that post-structuralism is necessarily undemocratic; only that its attitude toward democracy and to human rights has at best been ambivalent.

The dialogue is intended to illustrate the impotence of postmodernism in international affairs. Postmodernism makes mutual understanding across cultural divides difficult, if not impossible. In so doing, it destroys inter- national dialogue and diplomacy. The postmodern rejection of universal moral principles robs us of a common humanity that may be the basis of mutual forbearance. It leaves us with no common ground, as if there is nothing that human beings from different cultural backgrounds and traditions could share. Asserting the existence of universal moral prin- ciples is not asserting anything fancy or complicated. Universal moral principles have been called "thin" as opposed to "thick." I am inclined to call them negative in the sense that they involve a universal rejection of obvious evils, iniquities, and injustices that human beings universally abhor—torture, cruelty, arbitrary power, domination, exploitation, and genocide. Without these shared principles, there can be no negotiations, compromises, or peaceful settlements of disputes. In short, there can be no diplomacy. The latter requires argument; and argument in turn means appealing to principles the legitimacy of which opponents will recognize. In the absence of these principles—I am tempted to call them sentiments—there is no common denominator that would serve as the basis for diplomacy. Where diplomacy, compromise, and mutual under- standing are impossible, the result is war. This has indeed become the normal way in which America deals with her enemies. In this way, post- modernism mimics religious sensibilities that dismiss the enemy as so evil as to be unfit for dialogue, but only for destruction, In many ways the postmodern approach to international relations is more heartless and inhumane than the most strident realpolitik. The latter tells us that international politics is a state of nature, as nasty as it is brutish, as cold as it is cruel. Every nation has as much right as it has power. So, do not expect justice where international affairs are concerned. But the realpolitik approach does not tell us that there is no such thing as justice, or that might makes right, or that those who triumph create truth and justice by their success. It does not rob us of the language we need to express the magnitude of our loss and suffering. But postmodern- ism does just that—it makes launching credible objections to the triumphant forces—be they cultural or military—futile if not impossible. This explains Said's intellectual impotence in the face of Rory's triumphant ethnocentrism.

The first is that American policymakers think that because neither side wants nuclear war, then such a war is very unlikely to occur. Russia would be foolish, we reason, to cross swords with the powerful U.S. military and risk its own self-destruction, and many Americans find it hard to imagine that modern cyber duels, proxy battles, information operations and economic warfare might somehow erupt into direct nuclear attacks. If the Cold War ended peacefully, the thinking goes, why should America worry that a new shadow war with a much less formidable Russia will end any differently?

But wars do not always begin by design. Just as they did in 1914, a vicious circle of clashing geopolitical ambitions, distorted perceptions of each other’s intent, new and poorly understood technologies, and disappearing rules of the game could combine to produce a disaster that neither side wants nor expects.

What are these darker forms? They go by many names: cognitive warfare, information warfare, information operations, political warfare, memetic warfare, epistemic warfare, neocortical warfare, perception management, strategic deception, along with such older terms as the war of ideas and the battle for hearts and minds, and newer expressions about weaponized social networks and weaponized narratives. What these terms have in common is that they all represent ways to work on the mind — sometimes for good, other times for ill. By way of contrast, we view noopolitik as a way to work with the mind.

For a while, our non-state adversaries — notably Al Qaeda and ISIS — seemed to have the lead in mastering the arts and techniques of cognitive warfare. But they no longer pose the threats of a few years ago. Now our state adversaries have the lead in using dark varieties of noopolitik against us.

Our earlier work warned that, while some state and non-state actors might find noöpolitik attractive, they might care less about the emergence and construction of the noosphere. In the hands of a democratic leader, noöpolitik might then amount to little more than airy, idealistic rhetoric with little or no structural basis; whereas in the hands of a dictator or demagogue, noopolitik could be reduced to manipulative propaganda and perception-management. Narrower versions of noöpolitik might be also attempted for private gain — in the commercial worlds of advertising and public relations, this already occurs when companies field media blitzes and plant testimonials to “spin” public opinion. These were among the risks that may have to be faced, we warned long ago.

Unfortunately, that warning has been borne out, for noopolitik has been largely co-opted by dark actors. Today, despite its promise, noopolitik is not alive and well in the environment in which it should be most thriving: the United States, where now even “soft power” is ailing as a strategic concept. Instead, America’s state and non-state adversaries — notably Russia, and until lately, al Qaeda and ISIS — have developed their own versions of noopolitik, albeit by other names, and they’ve applied it effectively against the United States and its allies and friends. As noted earlier, these new circumstances mean we are now living not only in the worst of times for noopolitik, but also in the most pertinent — and urgent — of times for revisiting the promise of the noosphere and the prospects for noospolitik.

The large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine now underway could quite plausibly precipitate a wider conflict in Europe. The United States is focused primarily on raising the costs to Russia with punishing sanctions and reassuring North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies neighboring Russia of its commitment to collective defense. Less attention has been given to containing the war to Ukraine and preventing its escalation into a broader European conflict.

The stakes are enormous. The ripple effects of a wider conflict in Europe would spread across the globe, stressing the geopolitical, economic, and institutional foundations of the international order the United States has fashioned and underwritten since the end of the Second World War. It would test the resilience of the U.S. global system of alliances, the international financial system, global energy markets, arms control regimes, and global institutions in the face of ever more violent great power competition. No region of the world would be spared, although developments on the Eurasian supercontinent, the other locus of world power and economic might outside North America, would bear the gravest consequences for U.S. interests.

Even if the war in Ukraine were to end soon, events to date have already transformed the European security environment. Among the main questions that must now be addressed is this: How should the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies strengthen their military postures on eastern NATO territory in the future? I believe there is now a need for a permanent forward defense posture of modest size and scale, going beyond the tripwire approach NATO has employed in the Baltic states and Poland since roughly 2017.

American strategists anxious to prioritize China as the “pacing challenge” for U.S. defense strategy may object to any increase in the resources devoted to European security. That would be a mistake. Ensuring that Russia does not further destabilize Europe will have to be just as high a priority in the years to come as the China threat. That is because any scenarios that could involve hostile threats to NATO territory could raise terrifying questions about possible escalation, even eventually to the use of nuclear weapons, and could have existential implications. Moreover, despite the ongoing emphasis on Asia as the most dynamic region on Earth, Europe remains the region where America’s preponderance of democratic, advanced, prosperous allies is found — and also the region where the world wars originated in earlier eras. Its strategic significance should never be doubted. What is more, Europe’s role in addressing the rise of China will be central to any successful effort. Finally, to the extent China is seen as a major challenge, it is all the more reason that European security must be stabilized as an anchor of the future global order. The United States and allies do not have the military, economic, or diplomatic bandwidth to address escalating crises and conflict in both Europe and Asia at the same time. New crises and conflicts in Europe must be prevented before they begin, to the maximum extent possible.