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[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education

Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 1, Duke University Press]//owen

Besides, the careful division of writing into genres, and particularly into the meta-genres of literature, criticism and reportage (inter alia) comes out of a long history in the west of splitting writing between 'inspired' (creative) and 'rational' (critical) forms. Despite the obvious association with the taxonomical principles applied by the natural sciences, this is not just a nominological or typological exercise, but in fact produces a 'landscape' of linguistic value. Genres can therefore act as 'agents of ideological closure' (O'Sullivan et al. 1994: 128), requiring work to be read in a particular frame of mind, and to produce particular meanings - and, of course, to be published in particular settings. If as academic writers we allow the inspired form to intermingle with the rational, we are effectively countenancing a kind of writerly immorality, the promiscuous mixing of genres. The work I'm interested in discussing here, the work that started me off on this train of thought, is precisely that - promiscuous writing - because of its catachrestic nature. Catachresis is defined as 'the incorrect use of words', but I prefer to use it in the traditional rhetorical sense of transference. That is, I define catachresis not as 'the incorrect use of words', but the 'incorrect' use of words, the extravagant application of words to craft implied metaphors that, by virtue of their unconventional nature, convey images and ideas with great effect. In Max Black's terms, we use metaphor-as-catachresis because it allows 'the use of a word in some new sense in order to remedy a gap in the vocabulary … [it] is the putting of new senses into old words' (Black 1962: 33). DuPlessis' work is characterised by this 'incorrect' use of words and sets of words to put new sense into old words (or, in this case, into an old genre). In its unexpectedly figurative style, in its reliance on the kind of tropal logic that isn't privileged in academic writing, it flaunts itself as language, rather than as transparent, objective communication. In its mishmash of movement and word, it gives the lie to the fantasy that we write first as trained minds and not as human beings juggling what are often messy, overlapping and confused lives. But what her writing most particularly flaunts is metaphor. This, the stuff of poetry that first lures us in and then directs us somewhere else, is not a privileged style in academic writing. Why don't academics like to (be seen to) use explicitly metaphorical language? Because metaphors are not clear statements of ideas or empirical evidence; nor do they focus on the construction of a coherent argument. Rather, they are transformative. We use metaphor - and its subform, catachresis - not for transparent communication, but to direct attention away from the 'vehicle' toward a topic, and thereby redirect, or transform, our readers' understanding of that topic. Unlike conventional academic writing which is meant to keep attention on reason and logic, the sort of writing I'm concerned with here is closer to the principle of liminality. It carves out a transitional space between language as meaning and language as a 'thing in itself'. And it offers the possibility of transformation by the use of metaphoric and/or catachrestic language.

Combining international law’s notions of cultural property—as, for instance, articulated by UNESCO—and patent law’s notion of patentable inventions, the term “cultural property” is a productive malapropism, a confusion of related but different legal concepts in the context of intellectual property that helps to envision the legal intersections through which cultural property can be protected. The subsequent embrace of the term “yoga piracy” and the creation of the TKDL are arguably an outgrowth of such productive malapropisms, which gave rise to linguistic play as rhetorical resistance within intellectual property discourses. Such forms of discursive reworking facilitate definitional evolutions that Halbert argues are necessary for resisting intellectual property maximalism.58 They also confront rhetorical maneuvers that Endres contends use strategic definitions to render minoritarian groups invisible in legal contexts.59 Misuse prompts redefinition, which implicitly critiques the (neo)colonial processes through which intellectual property law emerged. The eventual affirmation in both the United States and India of the non-copyrightability and non-patentability of yoga, as well as the embrace of the TKDL as prior art, demonstrates the efficacy of such definitional challenges. Legal misuse, then, is not simply dismissible; it is discursively reconstitutive, a productive rhetorical move that aids in eroding the power of racial capitalism and propertization. “

What characterises queer apocal(o)ptic/ism? It is queer’s relentless questioning of all categorical imperatives, including the ontology Queer itself. The unremitting desire to undo, disrupt and make trouble for norms. The recognition that queer is transitory and momentary and thus might be superseded or become defunct as an interpretative tool at some future date, as well as the dedication to examining the notion of utility itself. It is queer’s commitment to the here and now, the present, not putting faith in the always postponed future but in making an immediate intervention. It is the anti-assimilationist bent in queer theory, the activist strain with its refusal to be defined by or in terms set down by the dominant culture in any given situation. It points to the fact that queer is brought into being through acts of resistance, the recognition of the potential futility of resistance because of the norm’s propensity for cooption and reinvention, but the drive towards resistance all the same. It is the trace of queer’s investments in deconstruction and psychoanalysis, the refusal to normative coherence as fantasy and the making visible of the instability that constitutes any one thing. It characterises queer’s dedication to end things and traumatic events, its commitment to death – whether it is the mournful rage of activists in response to queer deaths arising from suicide, HIV/AIDS or queer bashings; the theorist’s inventiveness to the point of unintelligibility in an attempt to cast off the psychical death wrought by the identitarian strai(gh)tjacket (Haver 1997) , or the anarchic proclamations of death to the compulsions of heteronormativity. It is the queer embodiment of ‘the death-drive, always present in any vital process’), or the anarchic proclamations of death to the compulsions of heteronormativity. It is the queer embodiment of ‘the death-drive, always present in any vital process’ Hird, M. J. (2008). Queer itself is haunted by the death drive, driven both towards its own ‘death’ and by the knowledge that it will – must – end; towards a time when it will be either superseded or no longer useful, needed, required, or desired (Butler 1993, 228). Queer apocal(o)ptic/ism also encapsulates the apocalyptic moments at which the death drive becomes the destruction drive in the service of shattering an imposing illusion produced as a shifting signifier of heteronormative hegemony. In this, queer apocal(o)ptic/ism begins at the level of the self. It refers to an unremitting self-interrogation, the constant production of unease at the level of identification – unsettling the very desire for social recognition as an identifiable subject – in the realisation that ‘queer must insist … on disturbing … and on queering ourselves and our investment in [social] organization. For queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one’ (Edelman 2004, 17).

While Edelman taps into the same feelings of indignation that prompted Gutter Dyke Collective and Queer Nation by targeting the Child where they attack Men and Straights, No Future advocates neither collectivism nor acting out. Although Edelman’s text also constitutes a polemic, which includes a variety of statements that have been met both by offence and defensive hostility from readers,13 he professes the belief that speaking about queerness will not change how the dominant culture views it. In other words, proliferating discourses of queerness makes no difference as they will be condensed into a limited repertoire of statements by heteronormativity. An oft-quoted passage from No Future shows the reason why the book has garnered such acerbic commentary in some quarters: ‘Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital Ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop’ (2004, 29). These remarks have inflamed respondents to ask where the figure of the Child ends and the real child begins. A significant prefatory comment is often absented from reproductions of the above quotation, that is, Edelman’s observation that no matter what individuals or groups marked out as Queer say, those driven by reproductive futurism will always hear the above proclamations as having been said anyway. By way of further illustration, Edelman writes elsewhere that ‘It is we who must bury the subject in the tomb-like hollow of the signifier, pronouncing at last the words for which we’re condemned should we speak them or not: that we are the advocates of abortion; that the Child as futurity’s emblem must die’ (31). This of course points to the way in which pro-life movements often link an anti-abortion stance with an anti-homosexual position. While identity categories – however fluid and contingent – are important strategies of resistance for Gutter Dyke Collective and Queer Nation, Edelman argues that those figured as Queer, harbingers of the death drive, should, instead of wasting their breath in espousing indignant rebuttals, accede to that position because they will continue to be flung back there by right-wing pundits, not to mention the fact that the position exercises an enormous power to jam the cogs in the machinery of heteronormativity should the occupants refuse to play the ‘game’ of the dominant culture. Edelman’s work is a continuation of that carried out by other scholar-activists, such as Leo Bersani (1995), Michael Warner (1999), Lisa Duggan (2003) and Alexandra Chasin (2000), all of whom have anatomised a growing homonormativity invested in neoliberalism, consumerism and assimilation through being seen as ‘normal’ by heteronormativity. In this, while Queer Nation berates lesbians and gays for not fighting back while queer bashings go on around them (1997/1990, 778), Edelman criticises lesbians and gays, ‘these comrades in reproductive futurism’ who seek to make reforms to the system while in the process becoming assimilated and put to work in it by being turned into sinthomosexuals (2004, 19). In their introduction to Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley respond to what they see as Edelman’s setting-up of the Child as ‘the anti-queer’ with the view that ‘queerness inheres instead in innocence run amok’ (2004, xiv). Edelman’s treatment of the Child has been denounced by those who see him as flattening out the category and universalising one such usage of its figural status, without taking account of the fluctuating contours of that category over time. Edelman’s analysis is not a historical one, but a genealogical meditation on how the Child has come to be signified as natural and the marker of the future to which everyone must bow, ‘the prop of the secular theology on which our social reality rests’ (2004, 12). Edelman follows the lead of others such as Michel Foucault (1978/1976) and Judith Butler (1990) in interrogating how the Child, politics and the future have become entangled to such an extent that ‘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’ (Edelman 2004, 11). No Future works to denaturalise this myth. In his work on sexuality, Foucault traces the ways in which power works through technique and normalisation rather than repression or interdiction (1978/76, 89). Edelman shows that a similar thing is in place with respect to the future in which ‘a notional freedom’ stands in for ‘the actuality of freedom’ (2004, 11) in the heterocycloptic gaze unblinkingly directed towards the chimera of the future. Reproductive futurism fixates on the future as fetish so the Child becomes but a means to an end; a prosthetic conduit through which access to the future can be achieved. Among the many definitions for posthumanism is Neil Badmington’s description of it as ‘a critical practice that occurs inside humanism, consisting not of the wake but the working-through of humanist discourse’ (2003, 22; see also Badmington 2000). The Queer thus serves as an uncanny reminder of the death drive nestling within heteronormativity, the trace of the impossibility of hermetically sealing ontological categories such as the Human. In this, LGBT/Q. activism has always been posthumanist in continuously challenging and redefining what the terms ‘Human’, ‘Humanism’ and ‘Humaneness’ mean, by rejecting the heteronormativity that pervades those categories and their discursive effects. Edelman goes further by rejecting catachresis as a strategy of resistance. His project is decidedly anti-humanist, one might say ‘post·hum·an·ous’: ‘Occurring or continuing after the death of the human’ (Smith, Klock and Gallardo-C. 2004). The desire for the Human therefore signifies an ‘archive desire’ (Derrida 1996/1995, 19), a desire not for the archivisation of the past but for the inscription of the future. Heteronormativity thus works in the shadow of its own finitude, striving retroactively to reproduce the present in the future, which is always the past futurally imagined. ‘Human beings’, The Posthuman Manifesto reminds us, ‘only exist as we believe them to exist’ (2003, 177). Queer apocal(o)ptic/ism involves suspending this belief in favour of tracing the normative technologies through which this category operates within different historical and cultural contexts. It is not about the desire for ‘Human Rights’ – which would be a humanising of the Queer – but rather examines our desire for the Human, for the social and political recognition that the figuration of such a term conveys. Judith Butler links ‘a liveable life’ and ‘a grievable death’ to the instantiation of what is understood by the ‘normatively human’ (2004, xv). That is, the ability to invoke feelings of compassion. In No Future, Lee Edelman queers the Human by cutting into its very heart, the figure of the Child, that image which is the personification of compassion’s evocation. Queering the Human demands a withholding of such mechanistic displays of compassion, the empty compulsions of heteronormativity. Such an act rejects, not the child, but those who make use of the child for their own ends.

Discursive violence refers to words, gestures, tones, images, presentations, and omissions used to differentially treat, degrade, pathologize, and represent lesbian and gay subjectivity and experience (Yep, 2002). In everyday discourse, lesbian and gay people are not only treated differently, but also talked about differently. From everyday conversation to media images, lesbian and gay experiences are represented differently from the heteronormative standard. In everyday conversations, for example, it is not considered socially peculiar for people to closely scrutinize and make the most intimate, intrusive, and personal inquiries about the lives of people living outside of the boundaries of compulsory heterosexuality. Comments and questions such as “what do lesbians do in bed anyway?” or “how does a male-to-female (MTF) transgender (before her gender confirmation surgery) have sex?” directed at lesbians and MTFs, respectively, are not unusual. While these invasive inquiries into the lives of lesbian, gay, or transgendered people are deemed as demonstrations of interest in “their lifestyle,” such scrutiny of sexually unmarked individuals is often considered inappropriate, offensive, and in bad taste. Similarly, references to a lesbian or gay partner as a “friend” when their heterosexual counterparts are routinely referred to as “spouses,” although not necessarily ill intentioned, are symbolically violent acts that reaffirm and reproduce the lower status of the lesbian and gay person in current social and sexual hierarchies. In the media, individuals and groups living outside of the heteronormative order are also represented differently. Such individuals have gone from complete invisibility to greater national visibility (Fejes & Petrich, 1993). At the present time, Gross (2001) observes, Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people have all become reasonably familiar presences on the various stages of America’s media-dominated culture. News professionals–editors, reporters, talk show hosts, columnists, and members of the punditocracy–now include gay-related issues and events as a regular category of news, and we make the front pages and the network evening news with regularity. (p. 252) But such visibility is not necessarily unproblematic, as Gross is quick to add: “yet those appearances are almost invariably in the context of some controversy centering on our right to pursue our lives in ways that heterosexuals take for granted” (2001, p. 252). In a sense, individuals inside the heteronormative borders “just are” while those outside of them are “social issues.” Or worse yet, they become freaks, perverts, misfits, and public spectacles as they are packaged to titillate, captivate, and revolt national talk show audiences as on The Jerry Springer Show (Gamson, 1998) These are systematic and socially accepted injuries inflicted upon individuals outside of the heteronormative mandate. Institutional violence is widespread for LGBTQ individuals and communities. Undergirding all social institutions is heteronormative ideology (Berlant & Warner, 1998; Richardson, 1996). Hegemonic heterosexuality permeates the family (VanEvery, 1996a, b), domestic and intimate life (Croghan, 1993; Holland, Ramazanoglu, & Thomson, 1996; VanEvery, 1996b), education (Kumashiro, 2002; Pinar, 1998; Talburt & Steinberg, 2000), social policy (Carabine, 1996; Eskridge, 2002; Kaplan, 1997), the mass media and popular culture (Fejes & Petrich, 1993; Gross, 2001; Gross & Woods, 1999; Ingraham, 1999), among others. In short, heteronormative thinking is deeply ingrained, and strategically invisible, in our social institutions. The process of normalization of heterosexuality in our social system actively and methodically subordinates, disempowers, denies, and rejects individuals who do not conform to the heterosexual mandate by criminalizing them, denying them protection against discrimination, refusing them basic rights and recognition, or all of the above (Kaplan, 1997; Rubin, 1984/1993). More simply stated, the regulatory power of heteronormativity denies LGBTQ individuals and couples their citizenship. There are numerous “positive rights” (Stein, 1999, p. 286) that heterosexual individuals take for granted but LGBTQ persons are categorically denied. They include being able to marry a person of the same sex, gain custody of their children, become foster and adoptive parents, visit one’s same-sex partner in the hospital, being able to obtain bereavement leave when one’s partner passes away, being able to file joint income tax returns with one’s partner, among many others. Although the issue of same-sex marriage is highly contested on ideological grounds within LGBTQ communities in the U.S. (Yep, Lovaas, & Elia, 2003), LGBTQ couples are deprived of the numerous rights and privileges accorded to heterosexually married dyads (Kaplan, 1997; Stein, 1999). In sum, heteronormativity is a site of unrelenting, harsh, unforgiving, and continuous violence for LGBTQ individuals. Such violence is everywhere: in the individual psyche and in collective consciousness, in the individual perceptions and experiences and in the social system and institutions.

Queerness described in language is unattainable that commits us to the ontology of being, queerness is not a condition of being but a condition of dismantling of identities, speaking in catachrestic terms allows us to dispel the structural limitation in how we view nothing, and so queerness

For the white subject to enter into the possibilities of language and judgement, blackness thus has to be discarded, thrown away. If lalangue is the result of a struggle between language and representation, and whiteness a struggle between logic and sophism, then what appears to link them is the advent into a decisionism that consists in the conclusion of a white community. First, the unconcealing-appearing of whiteness must be different from what is concealed as black to the point that the concealment consists in this difference and is a direct consequence of it. In section 3 of the logical time essay, “Discussion of the sophism,” Lacan distinguishes the imaginary mastery of knowledge from what the subject is led to deduce therefrom: that which is outside of the logical order of hesitation and revelation. Nevertheless, it seems to me that such a difference is posited only when the originary truth of analysis—not as a technique of decipherment but as an art of interpreting—is understood to no longer doubt itself in the world of signifiers. Second, because the very exclusion of blackness is what passes into the service of whiteness, what is unveiled as the judgement of exception is the discovery of a generalized logic of distrust that has race as its condition. Monstration reappears here but always in the form of a knowing in its relation to a non- me, and a black “is not” (n’est pas) that is the inseparable consequence of an in-difference to blackness in the freedom not to choose it. Sovereign mastery is thus inseparable from the ability of dispensing the value of judgement indifferently upon every blackened being—it is only the subject that is black “that gives their hesitation its definite import.”²⁸ Third, the definiteness of the appearance of the subject to the others who see [them] him as white refers to a still more decisive situation: to the incapacity of blackness to posit the subjection uncovered in, or by, it. From the instructions given by the prison warden, we readily deduce a choice based on equivalence. But in the subsequent narration no one has the option to choose the black disc, because the choice of the black disc consequently gives no one the authority or right to judgement. All authority belongs to the one who rightly chooses the white disc, for now he has the right to interpret, to exercise judgement; on the other hand, those who possess the black disc by right have no power of judgement. The equivalence of thought and negation in relation to blackness is here formulated by Lacan in a direct manner. This incapacity, according to Lacan’s explicit assertion, does not create this definiteness; it is limited to unconcealing it (the hesitation—which is more than a hesitation—by which being unconceals itself qua whiteness). It is impossible not to see here a paradox that strikes at the heart of psychoanalysis’s very principle: that it is psychoanalysis which provides definiteness to black non-being in its contingency, by which I mean the psychic import of not being black. By analyzing, and only in as much as the unconscious is shown to appear, is that import susceptible to being. And yet, here it has been conceded that what appears owes its existence not to the power of witnessing, since the power of witnessing is limited to recovering a phenomenality that preexists its seeing and that would not be able, therefore, to go beyond perception in a genuine ontological sense. No, here (and throughout Lacan’s corpus) it is the destiny of the signifier to both open and foreclose the very possibility of destination as judgement and/or meaning. Now, these three characteristics of the destining of the signifier—here briefly sketched but obviously decisive—are precisely those of the language that is founded upon the white concluding of the signifier and that, for this reason, we will call from now on the white logic of the unconscious. First, each word constitutive of this logic is different from the negative reality—different from the being (l’étoff e)—of the signifier each time it is invoked. Therefore, just as the defining conclusion- appearance reveals itself as indifferent to all that hesitates precisely because it differs from representation, this difference that separates itself from all that it designates (or sees itself as) black is the reason why each word of the language of the white world turns out to be hurrying on from this hesitant black referent. In an astonishing conclusion (to this essay on the necessity of a white conclusion), Lacan denounces classical syllogistic logic when he says that “it posits itself as assimilative of a barbarism” even in its universality.²⁹ In fact, by means of its hesitation to the sophism so designated, the logic of the signifier could just as well name something else, the word “white” being applied in this way to a confusing logic of difference that nothing (besides a racial convention, a racial nominalism) is able to dispel. Conversely, and always by virtue of the hesitation that is established between logic (signifier) and being (white), two different hesitations- conclusions are able to qualify such negativity. This is the situation that Lacan denounces as the universal barbarism of the syllogism by which man is assumed to know who he is and who he is not (i.e., not man, not white). But why, we must ask, does this knowledge and the image conserving it have to take on the form of an assurance to defend itself against the anguish and precariousness of not knowing—which Lacan refers to as the danger of being exposed as black? Solely because language cannot decide that which is not me—the black and he who is not human—solely because the signifier cannot itself penetrate into what each subject claims to say and about which—decisively or indecisively—it can only slander, imprison, delude, judge; accordingly language does not contain within itself the reality of which it speaks. Difference and conclusion are here only the consequence of this primary ontological insufficiency. But then, does not this third characteristic of the language of the unconscious obviously carry within itself the characteristic of the logic of the world—that is, the original and definitive incapacity of blackness to posit the reality that the unconscious unconceals but never creates? The most decisive characteristic of the language of the unconscious that humans speak, and that defines the not- all that cannot be said and is contained in this impotence, is also seemingly the sign of the impotence of lalangue (on which language depends).

Sociologists of race have argued that the dominant “social contract” of society can be contextualized within the notion of a Black/white binary (). Their analysis of racism and racial oppression and inequality has largely examined Black people in relation to whites. This racial paradigm has been widely critiqued for how it invisiblizes other racial and ethnic groups, such as Latinos/Latinas and Asian Americans. For example, legal scholar Juan Perea () observes that binary thinking excludes the histories and experiences of Latinx peoples and works to sustain negative stereotypes. Perea points out that a focus on Black and white negates the ways that other groups have experienced racism in America. Further, he defines the Black/white binary as “the conception that race in America consists, either exclusively or primarily, of only two constituent racial groups, the Black and the White” (p. 1219). Additionally, education scholars have warned against binary thinking as it relates to schools. Howard () identifies problems with the Black/white binary, which has overtaken the analysis of various types of racism that impact school experiences. He explains that educational equity “cannot be fully understood in only Black and White terms.” Criticisms of the Black/white binary follow at least three themes. The first theme suggests that the binary is an overly simplistic, one-dimensional analysis of race. Second, scholars argue that the Black/white binary links racism exclusively to skin color and denies the structural aspects of racism. Finally, another set of criticisms recognize how binary thinking on race misrepresents history while also obscuring the experiences of non-Black people of color. Further the Black/white binary does not account for how Latinos/as, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Native, and other racialized groups practice discrimination. It is the latter theme that has most utility for this article. Afro-Pessimism is less interested in the Black/white binary, per se, but rather a Black/non-Black divide. They suggest that all non-Blacks can have antagonisms against Black people. Instead of regarding race-based systems as primarily and solely an extension of white supremacy, Afro-Pessimism contends that anti-Blackness is upheld by its own set of logics that intersects with white supremacy, but is also operates separately in service to the dehumanization of Blacks. Lipsitz’s notions of the Black spatial imaginary and the white spatial imaginary does not fully account for the centrality and specificity of anti-Blackness. The white spatial imaginary does not explicitly explicate how non-Blacks and non-whites come to make sense of space and how those spatial logics work to subject and dehumanize Black people. The experience of slavery and its afterlives give Blacks a particular ontological position—that is, a grammar of suffering that has no analogy to any event endured by other racial groups. Thus, the plight of Black people cannot and should not be understood through a Black/white paradigm. (; ). Instead, what is needed is a specific spatial imaginary that centers on the specificity of anti-Blackness. Given the significance of anti-Blackness in the U.S., as a separate but related form of racism, attention to anti-Blackness is a critical component in unmasking how spatial imaginaries function as an unspoken grammar in society. Anti-Blackness is spatialized in bodies, buildings, memories, minds, and social ecologies that extirpate the potential of Black people to reach full humanity and thus be consigned to “a paradigmatic impossibility” (p. 9), as  posits. As a spatial imaginary, anti-Blackness is circulated through discourses, images, and texts that tell a story of Blackness as a problem, non-human, and placeless. Subsequently, the stories materialize into geographies and spatial practices that people act in relation to, and through, this spatial imaginary. These practices work to reify the imaginary. The anti-Black spatial imaginary promotes policies and practices that structure the social death of Black individuals and groups. It produces the destruction of social identity and social networks through modes of displacement, exclusion and estrangement. It endorses natal alienation—the disassociation of community, kinship, and familial bonds. The anti-Black spatial imaginary inflicts gratuitous and wanton spatial violence upon Black people’s flesh, spirit, and psyche. It attacks, wounds, and breaks the connections that bind Black populations together. Black communities witness their neighborhoods, schools, and classrooms dislodged from their places as anchors in Black communities. The anti-Black spatial imaginary marks Black bodies as undesirable and therefore extractable from spaces and places that have been envisioned for their exclusion. The careless removal, displacement, and dispossession of Black bodies is anchored in spatialized anti-Blackness; it is anchored by the assumption that Black populations are spatially illegitimate and, moreover, part of a larger anti-Black project to exterminate Afrocultural traditions, values, and ways of being and celebrating Blackness. The visible presence of Blackness and Black people is seen by non-Blacks as a credible threat poised to unsettle normative and “pure” white spaces (). As the dominant social warrant of society, the anti-Black spatial imaginary views Blacks as captives, unfree subjects lodged in the nowheres of Black life. Anti-Blackness remains a powerful way of reading and interpreting the painful relationship of the Black condition within a context of disregard, disdain, and dismissal of Black people, particularly within environments that champion colorblind and anti-racist discourses. The architecture of education policy has “spatialized Blackness” by restricting movement and constructing Black bodies as needing to be surveilled, monitored, and policed. The anti-Black spatial imaginary is riddled with fear and presupposes that Black people are aspatial. Spatial imaginaries are effective vehicles for the transmission of social anxieties and/or hopes about the future. In conceptualizing an anti-Black spatial imaginary, it is not my intention to provide an articulation that is inflexible or intractable. Spatial imaginaries are not secure or unwavering. We produce narratives and ideas about spaces, and we produce their embedded meanings. Instead, I consider the spatiality of anti-Blackness not as a clearly demarcated thing or a unified imaginary of causes and consequences, but as a pliable framework that explores the violent conditions that seek to debilitate the persistence of Black people.

Bioessentialism, or suggesting that social constructions are inherently biological, has contributed to stigma and discrimination of the queer community (Llorin & Zayhowski, 2023). This perpetuates the narrative that people who do not fit binary categories are “disordered.” Homosexuality was in the DSM-II until 1973 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) and in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) until 1990 (Cochran et al., 2014). The way that homosexuality has been treated as a “disorder” parallels the way race has been inappropriately pathologized. Racism, not race, leads to the different medical outcomes seen (Newman, 2022; Roberts, 2011), yet race continues to inappropriately guide various aspects of medical care leading to medical mistreatment (Vyas et al., 2020). Similar to the larger medical field, the genetics field has explored queerness as a pathological trait. Research studies looking for genetic associations with homosexuality by Hamer et al. (1993) have been heavily criticized as a tool for pathologization (Petersen, 1999; Schüklenk et al., 1997). Yet, we see an increase in this research (Bentz et al., 2008; Foreman et al., 2019; Ganna et al., 2019; Hamer, 2011; Polderman et al., 2018; Theisen et al., 2019), such as large genome-wide association studies being published to study genes associated with sexual orientations and transgender identities (Ganna et al., 2019; Theisen et al., 2019). While some LGBTQ+ people have expressed that this type of genetic testing could be validating or increase societal acceptance of queer identities, others have expressed concerns about how the testing has serious ethical concerns and could be used with malicious intent, including pathologizing queer identities, undermining reproductive rights, gatekeeping healthcare, and informing eugenic practices (Hammack-Aviran et al., 2022; Rajkovic et al., 2022). Anti-queer bias permeates clinical genetics and the larger medical field. We posit that providing just care for the queer community requires us to examine the anti-queer foundations endemic in genetics practices. Throughout this piece, we will explore how genetics contributes to the perpetuation of pathologization of queer identities and call for systemic changes in the genetics field. 1.1 Cisheteronormative norms embedded into the genetic counseling field Anti-queer biases have been integrated into the genetic counseling field since its inception. The first genetic counseling program was founded by Melissa Richter at Sarah Lawrence College in 1969. Sarah Lawrence College, an all-women's school until 1968, was chosen in order to “appeal to its core constituency, married women in their 30s with two to four children living at home” (Stern, 2009). Over half a century later, the demographic makeup of the field continues to be predominantly white, heterosexual, cisgender women (National Society of Genetic Counselors, 2022). In general, queer communities are underrepresented in the medical field and experience microaggressions and isolation similar to students of racial and ethnic minorities (Marcelin et al., 2019). Queer genetic counseling students have reported cisheteronormative training environments and admissions practices, and a hesitancy to discuss their queer identities with program faculty and peers (Chu et al., 2023; O'Sullivan et al., 2023). One study demonstrated genetic counselors' and genetic counseling students' have an implicit preference for heterosexual over homosexual people (Nathan et al., 2019). Queer patients have reported experiencing discrimination in genetics clinics, despite genetic counselors reporting comfort in working with them (Valentine et al., 2023). Eugenic sentiments were embedded into the conception of genetic counseling. Melissa Richter articulated that the creation of genetic counseling was needed to address “the increase of illnesses by inherited diseases; the sizable proportion of our population suffering from mental or emotional disturbances; and the problems created by overpopulation” (Richter, 1968). These justifications mirror eugenic ideologies which propagandized the need for sterilizations to mitigate overcrowding in institutions, targeting immigrants, Black people, Indigenous people, poor people, and disabled people (Lombardo, 2011). Eugenicists weaponized biology to deem homosexuality and gender nonconformity as traits needing to be fixed. In a speech given in 1970, renowned geneticist H.B. Glass noted the need to end congenital defects including “sex deviation” (Ordover, 2003). Medical practices have attempted to eliminate homosexuality through castration, conversion therapies, brain implants, and lobotomies (Ordover, 2003). The eugenic roots of genetic counseling must be understood in order to examine how practices are still perpetuated within the field today through its focus on eradicating disease.

Through the book we trace the legacy of pathologizing black corporeality in the United States, which singles out black bodies as a site of threat, danger, inferiority, criminality and excessive or aberrant sexuality. It seems to be the case that pathology is one of the concepts that accompanied the development of modern medicine and sociology, and as such is deeply imbedded in the modern discourse on health, race and society. Associated with newly discovered pathogens and denoting a serious disease or a medical condition, pathology was perceived at the beginning of the twentieth century as a thoroughly scientific notion, and came to replace the older terms “illness” in medicine and “social problem” in sociology. Indeed, the beginning of the previous century witnessed an unprecedented rise in the popularity of the term “pathology” in the US academy, in part due to a fascination within social sciences for the language of medicine. Pathology framed the discussion of sociological and racial problems in terms of medical eugenics, invoked “absolutistic connotations” (Sutherland 431, qtd. in Best 535) and saw any problem as a form of social disease (Best 534) that needed to be eradicated. However, after the Second World War the term was a subject to new scrutiny, this probably due to a great extent to its disturbing association with the radical Nazi remedy for what had been said to be social “racial” illnesses. In the American context, the harbinger of change and a marker of a period of transition was Edwin Lemert’s 1952 work Social Pathology (Best 533). As Best argues, even though the book’s title promised the study of social pathology, it in fact examined “social deviation”—the book’s purpose was indeed made clear in Lemert’s posthumously published essay (Best 534). The move away from the study of social pathology—a field well established in the late 1940s—toward the study of more ethically neutral “deviation” signaled an unavoidable shift away from thinking about social disorganization and other problems in medical terms that hence required far-reaching measures to cure such social diseases. Whereas the concept of pathology was approached with ambivalence in Lemert’s work, the verb “to pathologize” and its related nouns “pathologization” and “pathologizing” continued to circulate in academic idiom throughout the 1960s. Given their association with disease and aberration, on the one hand, and the aura of scientific authority, on the other, they have Introduction 3 become catchphrases to describe in a denigrating way those identified as constituting an alien presence in the fabric of the nation. As such, the terms have testified to the longevity of the tendency to turn “others” into a form of a social malady—a habit well entrenched in a racially divided US society. As Piotrowski argues, the ruling majority (“those in power”) decides, through the process of pathologization, what and who are socially acceptable and/or undesirable. The prevailing political, social and/or cultural authority of these actors gives legitimacy to their claims as to what can be considered social failures or wrongs, since “social pathology embraces social problems [… which] are perceived as detrimental and destructive to individuals, groups, or the entire society” (Piotrowski x, italics in original). Since “deviance is the invention of a group that uses its own standards as the ideal by which others are to be judged” (Ladner 75, italics in original), social pathology is an arbitrary concept, resting as it does on the values held and cherished by those who define reality. By contrast, those who are different are seen as lacking desirable qualities (that is, they do not share one’s own characteristics), and thus they are stigmatized by those who represent the established “norm.” As such, the process of pathologization is “normative” and reductive in nature. This assignment of “a mono-role or a uni-dimensional identity” through which people were regarded as “either deviant or normal” (Sawyer 362) served as a means of affirming the superior status of the planter class while legitimizing the need to monitor and punish their human chattel. Given that “white supremacy is rooted in pathological responses to difference” (hooks 27), the historical origins of the discourse of black pathology themselves go back to the times of slavery, when black bodies within the plantocracy were regarded as deficient and deviant,1 while white bodies were normalized. The legacy of this ideological position can still be seen in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the ongoing “conscious refusal of whites to accept blacks as equal human beings and their willful, systematic effort to deny blacks equal opportunity” (Gershman 33). As such, racial oppression draws on the process of pathologization, and indeed this is why, according to Clark, “the racial dehumanization Americans permit is a symptom of the deep-seated, systematic and most dangerous social disease of racism” (“The Role of Race,” qtd. in Wilson 10). Modern racial policy in the United States was founded on the widespread belief in black cultural pathology (White 27). Well into the 1940s, at a time when some sociologists, such as Lemert, were expressing their newly awakened ambivalence to the discourse of pathology, others were clinging to the concept. Gunnar Myrdal, for example, in voicing the opinions of many Americans, summarized the racial inferiority of African Americans with these words: “In practically all its divergences, American Negro culture is not something independent of general American culture. It is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture” (928, italics in original). Myrdal follows with a list of factors contributing to black social pathology: 4 Constante González Groba et al. The instability of the Negro family, the inadequacy of educational facilities for Negroes, the emotionalism in the Negro church, the insufficiency and unwholesomeness of Negro recreational activity, the plethora of Negro sociable organizations, the narrowness of interests of the average Negro, the provincialism of his political speculation, the high Negro crime rate, the cultivation of the arts to the neglect of other fields, superstition, personality difficulties, and other characteristic traits are mainly forms of social pathology which, for the most part, are created by the caste pressures. (928–29) Such a stance (captured in the title of Myrdal’s chapter “The Negro Community as a Pathological Form of an American Community”) was, paradoxically, seconded by leading black scholars such as E. Franklin Frazier and Kenneth Clark, and also by politicians (e.g., Daniel Patrick Moynihan), as late as the 1950s and 1960s. Referring to Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United States (1939), Ibram Kendi points out how, even though well intentioned, the book perpetuated the association of problems in black communities with a form of pathology. Frazier’s diagnosis of the ills in the African American community as being “caused by racial discrimination, poverty, cultural pathology, and the introduction of the matriarchal Black family during slavery” was, in Kendi’s eyes, deeply harmful to the cultural perception of the black man (Stamped 343). As Kendi argues, “Completely ‘stripped of his cultural heritage,’ the slave became a brute [… and thus] the slave’s emergence ‘as a human being was facilitated by his assimilation’ of his master’s culture” (Stamped 343). Frazier’s analysis of black pathology inspired Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who in his report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), written in his capacity as Assistant Secretary for Labor, saw “a tangle of pathology” in black poverty and gender imbalance in black families. Moynihan’s report, which influenced the rhetoric of President Lyndon Johnson’s commencement address delivered at Howard University, and which was later adopted by the “post-racial” narrative, identified family breakdown as a self-sabotaging factor in the black community. Rather than acknowledging the systemic forces that operated beyond the control of the black community (racism, segregation and discrimination), Moynihan believed that the vicious circle of alleged irresponsibility and a dependency on the welfare estate, as well as unhealthy gender relations in black families, posed a challenge to many black families themselves (Moynihan; Aja). On similar lines to Moynihan, Kenneth Clark, in his Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (1967), identified the pathology of black life in ghetto communities in female-headed, welfare-dependent households, with high rates of children born out of wedlock, unemployment, delinquency and crime. However, what sets Moynihan and Clark apart is the approach to the object of study: While Moynihan’s infamous report blamed the black community for its “self-perpetuating pathology”2 (“At this point, the Introduction 5 present tangle of pathology is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world”), Clark’s study is written from the perspective of somebody who is trying to understand the prevailing systemic injustice and offers suggestions for alleviating the situation of blacks in America. Assimilationists believed that one such way of breaking the circle of pathology was black integration, which, according to Ibram Kendi, “encourages Black adoption of White cultural traits and/or physical ideals” (Stamped 3). Prior to Clark, others had also believed in assimilation as the only choice for blacks; for instance, Gunnar Myrdal claimed that “it is to the advantage of American Negroes as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into American culture, to acquire the traits held in esteem by the dominant white Americans” (929, italics in original). However, there were others, like W.E.B. Du Bois, who encouraged scholars and African Americans in general to “regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race” and that they should not “support a prejudice or buttress a lie” (647–48). Du Bois’s appeal to state the truth, which he had voiced as early as 1935, well illustrates the longevity of the process of pathologization. The lies about black lives that Du Bois mentions will later be referred to by Albert Murray as “fakelore of black pathology.”3 Murray explains that whites build their identity through “a folklore of white supremacy” which is contingent on fakelore, which involves inauthentic, manufactured and degrading assumptions about blacks.4 Echoing these assumptions, Joyce Ladner provides a counternarrative of black experiences in Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman (1971).5 Contrary to the majority of research into the black community, which deems African Americans responsible for the creation and perpetuation of alleged pathology (Ladner 76), Ladner reconceptualizes pathology and shifts the blame from individuals to systemic inequalities and institutional racism: “There has never been an admission that the Black community is a product of American social policy, not the cause of it – the structure of the American social system, through its practices of institutional racism, is designated to create the alleged ‘pathology’ of the community, to perpetuate ‘the social disorganization’ model of Black life” (77, italics in the original). Her research essentially (re)constructs black identity; thus, in praising black women’s adaptation skills, which allow them to survive,6 Ladner writes: they are able to exercise control over their futures, whereas writers have tended to view this low-income Black community as an all-pervasive force which is so devastating as to compel its powerless residents to succumb to its pressures. Their power to cope and adapt to a set of unhealthy conditions – not as stereotyped sick people but as normal ones – is a factor which few people seem to accept or even realize. (76)

[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 5, Duke University Press]//owen

Mari Ruti, for example, in maintaining that “the real can alter (rather than merely devastate) the symbolic,” supports her claim by pointing to the creativity with which we “generate fresh forms of signification.”27 On this ground, she declares, “we can participate in an ongoing and endlessly renewed process of becoming. The future, in other words, is never determined but inherently open ended; far from a predetermined fantasy, it is a manner of remaining alive to the utter unpredictability of existence.”28 This notion, however appealing, ignores that “generat[ing] fresh forms of signification” is the Symbolic’s normative function. Moreover, if “becoming” is an “ongoing and endlessly renewed process,” then its insistent productivity is, by definition, “predetermined” (what else could “endlessly renewed” denote?), though its specific forms are not. To that extent, it is far removed from the “unpredictability” that Ruti affirms. The bond between futurism and the order of meaning is procured by the predictable necessity of generating “fresh forms of signification.” Nothing in this process “alter[s]” the Symbolic; it merely enacts its law.29 Pursuing an argument akin to Ruti’s, Coffman also seeks to rebut what she, like Ruti, finds in No Future: an “excessively negative interpretation of Lacan.” Expanding on the notion that “an act in the Real can prompt changes in the symbolic,” Coffman proposes that unlike Edelman’s politics, “[Slavoj] Žižek’s politics of the Real offers queer theory not a release from the symbolic order but rather the possibility of changing its coordinates.”30 Her example of “changing [the Symbolic’s] coordinates”? The wedding scene from In and Out (Frank Oz, 1977, Paramount) where Howard Brackett (Kevin Kline) surprises himself and those around him by coming out as gay. Coffman credits Žižek as the source of this example, but even Žižek, when he adduces it, notes that it’s “not quite appropriate” since it fails to demonstrate “the ‘crazy,’ impossible choice of . . . striking at [one]self, at what is most precious to [one]self,” that marks the Lacanian act.31 Coming out can alter many things, but neither in nor out of In and Out is Symbolic law among them. To the contrary, by assimilating the subject to a legible identity in the signifying system, it reaffirms the subject’s defining subjection to the Symbolic law. As for genuine acts, those that “accomplish what, in a given symbolic universe, appears to be ‘impossible,’” Žižek maintains that they “change the coordinates of the situation in which the subject finds himself ” (emphasis mine), not the coordinates of “the symbolic order.”32 Such acts, as discussed in previous chapters, are not expressions of will or desire but rather of the acephalic drive whose relation to enjoyment disturbs the “the political preaching based on the good form of satisfaction” for the sake of which Ruti, Coffman, and Cole require a less “negative” Lacan.33 Ruti frames that politics plainly: “Those of us advancing this newer version of posthumanist theory tend to possess a strong commitment to matters of social survival, justice, and responsibility.”34 Wholly honorable, wholly admirable, such commitments command assent. Refusal to sign on to such a project, in Alenka Zupančič’s phrase, “would be impossible, inhuman.”35 Zupančič, however, introduces this phrase precisely to ventriloquize ideology’s resistance to “the gap opened up by an act.”36 A genuine act, as Zupančič makes clear, never registers as honorable or respectable; far from praise for its “responsibility,” it earns, Lacan tells us, “infamy” for threatening the fundamental fantasy that consolidates a world. Ruti may refer to “posthumanist theory,” but her argument repurposes liberal humanism, vaunting “social survival, justice, and responsibility” without recognizing that the split in the subject, the fracture at the core of posthumanist thought, makes those three things incompatible. How can we be responsible to the subject of desire and the subject of the drive at once? How can we do justice to a divided subject in tension not only with itself but also with the order that produced it? How can we reconcile “social survival” with the assault on the social order that condemns the authentic act to “infamy”? The answer, for Ruti, Coffman, and Cole, is to displace the constitutive division of the subject into external divisions among social subjects, thus allowing for the hope of political repair through an “endlessly renewed process of becoming.” To suggest that this process is endless because the void is incapable of repair would challenge such political hope and provoke a political rebuke. Thus, Cole waves off the Lacanian account of politics as a governing fantasy by associating defense of that argument with a “privileged social position,” and Ruti similarly describes the negativity implicit in endless “becoming”: “The kind of radical negativity and self-dissolution that Edelman (following Žižek) advocates can only be undertaken from a position of relative security,” she writes.37 But Ruti misreads No Future here in a symptomatic way. Though it repeatedly insists on the figural relation between jouissance and those viewed as queer, and though it repeatedly urges such persons to embrace their figural embodiment of the death drive, No Future never “advocates” for psychic “self-dissolution,” as if such a thing were a question of will or could constitute a political program.38 Ruti takes this misreading further: “Deprivileged subjects—some women, racially and ethnically marked individuals, and those who lead economically precarious lives (that is, subjects whose claim to symbolic identity is shaky to begin with)—simply cannot afford to abandon themselves to the jouissance of the death drive in the way that more secure subjects might be tempted (or even compelled) to do.”39 The confusions of psychic and social here are multiple and instructive. No subject, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, sex, or sexuality, can “afford to abandon [itself ] to the jouissance of the death drive”—not if “afford” suggests it can do so voluntarily and with impunity. The drive, itself unconscious, pushes toward an emptying of the subject that has nothing to do with “temptation”; it affords that subject nothing more than an opening onto nonbeing (“dèsêtre”) that neither liberates nor redeems it but only subtracts it from sense. Just as claims to Symbolic identity are no less “secure” for “deprivileged subjects” than they are for their privileged counterparts—indeed, the very fixity of those Symbolic identities is what proves destructive to “deprivileged subjects,” making their claims to social viability, not to Symbolic identity, “shak[ier]”—so the insistence of the death drive “compel[s]” those subjects no less than it does any others. Denying those marked by oppression the psychic structures that shape us as subjects may bespeak a political belief that the “deprivileged” simply cannot “afford” them; but it might also reflect, to return to Cole’s phrase, a “privileged social position” that flattens “deprivileged subjects” into empty figures for their lack of privilege, reducing them to the status of furniture—useful objects, perhaps even chattel—in liberal humanism’s performance of its own exemplary moral conscience.

Intuitively, truth should be self-evident and One. Yet the tensions aroused by truth as a question were already evident in ancient Greek philosophy, with Plato’s eternal and objective ‘idea’ (Plato 380 bc/1871) – I call this ‘Ideal truth’ – pitted against the subjectivism implied in Protagoras’s dictum that “man is the measure of all things”.1 Aristotle’s ‘substances’ (Aristotle 350 bc/1953) in the framework of realistic epistemology offered an alternative, sense-based, anchorage for objective truth that came to be called ‘Correspondent truth’. Kant and Hegel, introducing the ideas of phenomena and ongoing dialectic, challenged the possibility of an absolute truth. They paved the way to the linguistic turn, which positioned meaning, conceptual and symbolic schemes as prior to fact (Habermas 2003), thus further challenging our ability to know objective reality or even define its basic characteristics (Russell 1961). 282 The Anxieties of Truth And yet, the linguistic turn did not end in a stoic relinquishing of ‘truth’ as a basic constituent of the mind’s work. Indeed, latter-day thinkers, for whom the linguistic turn was pivotal, also continued to debate the concept of truth and show its complex nature in novel ways (Rorty 1989). Even in the face of the wide range of epistemological, logical and ethical arguments, the quest for truth continued, defining and re-defining its status and method, taking into account its problematic nature and criticizing earlier arguments. The vital continuing search for truth begs the question of its intractability. What drives this search? What are its origins? The history of philosophical thought suggests that the answer to this question is clearly of a psychological nature: human beings have a need for certainty, security, control and the elimination of doubt. Nietzsche’s (1886/2009) critique of metaphysics is accepted as a prime modern origin of the line of thought that led to the dismantling of our naïve belief in metaphysics inasmuch as it aspires for absolute truth on the one hand and explores the immense human attachment to absolute truth on the other. In Nietzsche’s view, the quest for truth is driven by our fears. When we aim for objectivity, we buy ourselves stability and direction, but we sacrifce our integrity and the vitality of our thought (Nietzsche 1886/2009, cl. 10). The ‘Will to Truth’ is characteristic of a more general psychological tendency for self-deception. Man lacks the courage and integrity needed to contain his natural curiosity (ibid., cl. 227). Humanity, ever attached to a thoroughly flawed idea called ‘truth’, actively represses its creativity and life forces. The American Pragmatic view, influenced by Nietzsche’s thought, posited that the concern of truth was to advance the welfare of the individual. Thinkers such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey and Richard Rorty saw truth as a means to an end of improving humanity’s lot (James 1907/2004; Rorty 1989). On the other side of the ocean, Heidegger (1996) saw truth as reflecting man’s need to control the world in general and death in particular. Levinas (1969) and Derrida (1978) both associated metaphysics with violence, seeing truth as a result and paradigmatic example of an illusory purity that man tried to place as a guarantee of his identity and superiority, with the result of a looming xenophobia. The postmodern critique was formulated: generalization, categorization and truth are forms of symbolic violence the subject imposes on the objects of her thought. Notwithstanding the diferences in content, all of the above views suggest that the pertinence of truth is of a psychological nature: Human beings have a need for certainty, constancy and mental control. Contrary to naïve intuition, and many philosophical positions, this implies that what truth satisfies are not states of affairs, but rather states of mind. If until now the search for truth involved three orders – reality, propositions and the constraints of human consciousness – we now add a fourth order: that of the psychological needs of the subject-as-thinker. These needs preserve the concept of truth, allowing it to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of discarded modern thought, retaining its traditional definitions and granting it contemporary meanings. Alongside the two essentialist truths – the ‘Ideal’ truth and the truth of correspondence with reality (‘Correspondent’ truth), both of which claim the existence of an order independent of consciousness – four additional conceptions of truth, which, in Hempel’s words, entailed an “essential softening of the truth” (Hempel 1935/1994), remain vital in philosophic thought. I refer to these conceptions as Coherent, Intersubjective, Pragmatic and Subjective-Existential truths. I present here brief these paradigmatic notions of truth, for clarity denoting them with capital letters (Ideal, Correspondent, etc.).2 The Correspondent conception of truth, introduced by Aristotle (Aristotle 350 bc/1953), maintains that truth values are established by correspondence between a proposition and an external mind-independent fact. Correspondent truth is anchored in a realistic epistemology, 283 Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot which maintains that the world has a mind-independent existence that the subject is able to know by means of his senses (Hetherington 2012). The Coherent conception of truth as, for example, in Spinoza’s thinking (Spinoza 1677/1989), determines truth values by examining the compatibility of a belief with a whole system of beliefs. This truth is often associated with ‘idealistic’ epistemology that posits a single, abstract and unconditional principle, unknown in itself, yet determining the unity of the world (Hetherington 2012). The Ideal conception of truth, as in Plato’s thought (Plato 380 bc/1871), determines truth values by the compatibility between particular beliefs or empirically perceived cases and their corresponding eternal decrees or forms. It is situated in the realm of ‘objective idealism’ that claims the existence of a mind-independent order inaccessible to the senses and partially known by means of laborious mental processes (Russell 1961). Subjective Idealism shares the premise of absolute and objective idealism, that all known reality resides within the mind. But whereas the latter assumes a principle external to the system that creates and unifes it, the former assumes the ‘I’ or the Ego as the constituting source of reality. Subjective and Intersubjective truths are embedded in the assumptions of subjective idealism (Orange et al. 1998). The Subjective-Existential conception of truth, seeds of which can be found in the work of Kierkegaard, perceives truth as highly personal, embodying the subject’s experienced authenticity. Here, experience is prior to any essence or generalization (Elleray 2007). The Intersubjective conception of truth regards objectivity as established by interpersonal agreement, sometimes explicit, often implicit. This truth refects the logic of intersubjective epistemologies, whereby the world achieves its true transcendence through the presence of a foreign subjectivity (Husserl 1983). Pragmatic truth concerns the usefulness and practicality of an idea in the context of the believer’s life. A true belief is one that has been proven valid by the compatibility between its predictions and its results. Here, truth is process based and tomorrow, today’s truth may be no more than an opinion (James 1912/2010, 1907/2004).

9. Capacity and openness are not the same as ambiguity. Refuse ambiguity.30 Abstract art is often considered “ambiguous” due to its openness and capaciousness. Even though this sometimes sounds like a compliment, it is not. More often, it is used to avoid confronting the particularities and complexities proposed by an abstract form and others’ investments in it. The same intransigent form can and does mean differently for different viewers. To call this situation “ambiguous” is to fall back into hopeless subjectivism and avoidance. Instead, let’s call this situation “competing” to show how much it is in the viewer’s incomplete attempt to classify that differences emerge and that supposedly stable taxonomies unravel amidst contestations and divergences of reception. Nominations of ambiguity are nothing more than declarations of resignation. We call something ambiguous when we give up on it and when we avoid committing to learning about all that does not fit into our categories. Objects, people, texts, events, and acts are not themselves ambiguous. They are particular, inassimilable, unorthodox, unprecedented, or recalcitrant. To invoke “ambiguity” is to flee from the confrontation with something that does not easily fall into one’s patterns of knowing. This act of exhausted reading disrespects the particularity of that which is before us and instead writes it off as being at fault—as being unknowable, indiscernible, and incompletely categorizable. “Ambiguity” is safe to invoke, because it places blame for our own limitations elsewhere. It is a method of deflection and scapegoating. It enables us to throw up our hands and beat a hasty retreat from confronting how limited our categories and systems are. After all, what do we really mean when we say something or someone is ambiguous? We mean that we cannot read, cannot identify, and cannot classify. Instead, I want to uphold the particularity and inscrutability that the backhanded slur “ambiguous” attempts to manage. I want to see that particularity as a challenge to systems of knowing. “Ambiguous” as an invocation or description merely signals the limitations of the one who would deploy that term. This does not mean I want everything clear and in its place. Quite the opposite: I want to embrace the radical particularity that always exceeds and undermines taxonomies. This is a queer stance, for it denies the applicability or the neutrality of those taxonomies as adequate representations of the world’s complexity. Rather, they are artificial impositions of normativity more concerned with policing boundaries than with engagement. To take this term to task is to demand that we see the greater structural limitations that its invocations hope to mask. “Ambiguity” as a description is not just lazy. It’s chauvinistic. More to the point, its deployment keeps us from recognizing and embracing the chance to see beyond the categories that are nothing more than blinders forcing us to stay on a narrow path. Especially today, we cannot afford ambiguity. We must attempt to embrace inscrutability and particularity, and we can defiantly exceed or jam the taxonomic protocols that seek to delimit and define us. The undertow of ambiguity is complacency and surrender, and it is misapplied to acts of refusal and self-definition.

My concern with this movement centers around an issue that Sloop and Ono seem to take as a given, namely, the role of the critic. On one hand, calling for the systematic investigation of existing marginalized discourses is a natural extension both of critical rhetoric (see McKerrow 1989, 1991) and of the general ideological turn in criticism (see Wander 1983). On the other hand, the ease of transition from criticism in the service of resistance to criticism of resistance may obscure the need to address some fundamental issues regarding the general function of rhetorical criticism in an uncertain and contentious world. Beyond licensing the critic to engage in political struggle, Sloop and Ono advocate the pursuit of covert resistant discourses.

Such a move not only stretches our understanding of rhetoric and criticism, but also alters significantly the relationship between critic and outlaw. Critical interrogation of dominant discursive practices in the service of political/cultural reform is supplanted in favor of positioning covert outlaw communities as objects of investigation. Invited to seek out subversive discourses, the critic is positioned as the active agent of change and the out-law discourse becomes merely instrumental. Rather than academic criticism acting in service of everyday acts of resistance, everyday acts of resistance are put into the service of academic criticism.

[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education

Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 3, Duke University Press]//owen

Intuitively, truth should be self-evident and One. Yet the tensions aroused by truth as a question were already evident in ancient Greek philosophy, with Plato’s eternal and objective ‘idea’ (Plato 380 bc/1871) – I call this ‘Ideal truth’ – pitted against the subjectivism implied in Protagoras’s dictum that “man is the measure of all things”.1 Aristotle’s ‘substances’ (Aristotle 350 bc/1953) in the framework of realistic epistemology offered an alternative, sense-based, anchorage for objective truth that came to be called ‘Correspondent truth’. Kant and Hegel, introducing the ideas of phenomena and ongoing dialectic, challenged the possibility of an absolute truth. They paved the way to the linguistic turn, which positioned meaning, conceptual and symbolic schemes as prior to fact (Habermas 2003), thus further challenging our ability to know objective reality or even define its basic characteristics (Russell 1961). 282 The Anxieties of Truth And yet, the linguistic turn did not end in a stoic relinquishing of ‘truth’ as a basic constituent of the mind’s work. Indeed, latter-day thinkers, for whom the linguistic turn was pivotal, also continued to debate the concept of truth and show its complex nature in novel ways (Rorty 1989). Even in the face of the wide range of epistemological, logical and ethical arguments, the quest for truth continued, defining and re-defining its status and method, taking into account its problematic nature and criticizing earlier arguments. The vital continuing search for truth begs the question of its intractability. What drives this search? What are its origins? The history of philosophical thought suggests that the answer to this question is clearly of a psychological nature: human beings have a need for certainty, security, control and the elimination of doubt. Nietzsche’s (1886/2009) critique of metaphysics is accepted as a prime modern origin of the line of thought that led to the dismantling of our naïve belief in metaphysics inasmuch as it aspires for absolute truth on the one hand and explores the immense human attachment to absolute truth on the other. In Nietzsche’s view, the quest for truth is driven by our fears. When we aim for objectivity, we buy ourselves stability and direction, but we sacrifce our integrity and the vitality of our thought (Nietzsche 1886/2009, cl. 10). The ‘Will to Truth’ is characteristic of a more general psychological tendency for self-deception. Man lacks the courage and integrity needed to contain his natural curiosity (ibid., cl. 227). Humanity, ever attached to a thoroughly flawed idea called ‘truth’, actively represses its creativity and life forces. The American Pragmatic view, influenced by Nietzsche’s thought, posited that the concern of truth was to advance the welfare of the individual. Thinkers such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey and Richard Rorty saw truth as a means to an end of improving humanity’s lot (James 1907/2004; Rorty 1989). On the other side of the ocean, Heidegger (1996) saw truth as reflecting man’s need to control the world in general and death in particular. Levinas (1969) and Derrida (1978) both associated metaphysics with violence, seeing truth as a result and paradigmatic example of an illusory purity that man tried to place as a guarantee of his identity and superiority, with the result of a looming xenophobia. The postmodern critique was formulated: generalization, categorization and truth are forms of symbolic violence the subject imposes on the objects of her thought. Notwithstanding the diferences in content, all of the above views suggest that the pertinence of truth is of a psychological nature: Human beings have a need for certainty, constancy and mental control. Contrary to naïve intuition, and many philosophical positions, this implies that what truth satisfies are not states of affairs, but rather states of mind. If until now the search for truth involved three orders – reality, propositions and the constraints of human consciousness – we now add a fourth order: that of the psychological needs of the subject-as-thinker. These needs preserve the concept of truth, allowing it to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of discarded modern thought, retaining its traditional definitions and granting it contemporary meanings. Alongside the two essentialist truths – the ‘Ideal’ truth and the truth of correspondence with reality (‘Correspondent’ truth), both of which claim the existence of an order independent of consciousness – four additional conceptions of truth, which, in Hempel’s words, entailed an “essential softening of the truth” (Hempel 1935/1994), remain vital in philosophic thought. I refer to these conceptions as Coherent, Intersubjective, Pragmatic and Subjective-Existential truths. I present here brief these paradigmatic notions of truth, for clarity denoting them with capital letters (Ideal, Correspondent, etc.).2 The Correspondent conception of truth, introduced by Aristotle (Aristotle 350 bc/1953), maintains that truth values are established by correspondence between a proposition and an external mind-independent fact. Correspondent truth is anchored in a realistic epistemology, 283 Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot which maintains that the world has a mind-independent existence that the subject is able to know by means of his senses (Hetherington 2012). The Coherent conception of truth as, for example, in Spinoza’s thinking (Spinoza 1677/1989), determines truth values by examining the compatibility of a belief with a whole system of beliefs. This truth is often associated with ‘idealistic’ epistemology that posits a single, abstract and unconditional principle, unknown in itself, yet determining the unity of the world (Hetherington 2012). The Ideal conception of truth, as in Plato’s thought (Plato 380 bc/1871), determines truth values by the compatibility between particular beliefs or empirically perceived cases and their corresponding eternal decrees or forms. It is situated in the realm of ‘objective idealism’ that claims the existence of a mind-independent order inaccessible to the senses and partially known by means of laborious mental processes (Russell 1961). Subjective Idealism shares the premise of absolute and objective idealism, that all known reality resides within the mind. But whereas the latter assumes a principle external to the system that creates and unifes it, the former assumes the ‘I’ or the Ego as the constituting source of reality. Subjective and Intersubjective truths are embedded in the assumptions of subjective idealism (Orange et al. 1998). The Subjective-Existential conception of truth, seeds of which can be found in the work of Kierkegaard, perceives truth as highly personal, embodying the subject’s experienced authenticity. Here, experience is prior to any essence or generalization (Elleray 2007). The Intersubjective conception of truth regards objectivity as established by interpersonal agreement, sometimes explicit, often implicit. This truth refects the logic of intersubjective epistemologies, whereby the world achieves its true transcendence through the presence of a foreign subjectivity (Husserl 1983). Pragmatic truth concerns the usefulness and practicality of an idea in the context of the believer’s life. A true belief is one that has been proven valid by the compatibility between its predictions and its results. Here, truth is process based and tomorrow, today’s truth may be no more than an opinion (James 1912/2010, 1907/2004).

The death drive is beyond linguistic expression, it is ‘the inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within’ (9). Queerness, for Edelman, is inextricably linked to the death drive. Let me return to the epigraph that frames this chapter in which Edelman proclaims that ‘the death drive names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability’ (9). Although queerness is not reducible to homosexuality and in fact ‘could never constitute an authentic or substantive identity’ (24) because it ‘is never a matter of being or becoming’ (25), the Queer as a category configured by homophobic and heterosexist discourses is invariably aligned with same-sex desire (Bersani 1987; Dollimore 1995; Hanson 1991; Coviello 2000). While the Child is understood as the apotheosis of life, the Queer is set up as the epitome of death. Indeed, same-sex desire has become synonymous with death in the homophobic imagination: death understood as the foreclosure of reproduction in sexual acts performed by same-sex couples, the death of civilisation as a consequence of the ‘ills’ of ‘the homosexual lifestyle’, or same-sex desire leading to actual physical death with references to HIV/AIDS as ‘the gay plague’. So while heteronormativity is caught up in a continuous cycle of refusing to acknowledge its own internal lack by forever desiring the ‘realization of the subject’s authentic presence’ (Edelman 2004, 10) through the ‘sacralization of the Child’ (28), the Queer is feared as a threat to the completion of this compulsive practice. Thus, the death drive signifies both the position that is conferred on the Queer by the social as well as the trace of the anxious social’s projections of the death drive and everything it signifies onto the Queer, who becomes a repository of negativity. In a sense, queerness is a creation of the social, its abject Other, a constant reminder of the social’s incompleteness and vulnerability. Reproductive futurism imposes, according to Edelman, ‘an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations’ (2). Reproductive futurism absorbs all challenges and translates them into more of the same. It operates in a similar way to Monique Wittig’s concept of the straight mind in that ‘when thought of by the straight mind, homosexuality is nothing but heterosexuality’ (1992, 28). Reproductive futurism is a more specific term than heteronormativity in that it describes the process through which heterosexuality becomes heteronormative. Heteronormativity is thus a term to describe a conglomerate of effects while reproductive futurism signifies the process through which such effects are wrought. It is all-encompassing, operating at the level of ideology so that it sets limits on, not just what we think or do, but also on what and how we desire. Desire itself becomes reproductive futurism in its ‘translation into a narrative’, ‘its teleological determination’ through politics which ‘conforms to the temporality of desire’, ‘the inevitable historicity of desire’ (Edelman 2004, 9). Reproductive futurism is, what I call, ‘heterocycloptic’, bound up with the desiring gaze and the setting-out of a developmental trajectory of ‘progress’ moving endlessly towards a ‘better’ future, in the process imposing a panopticonlike self-surveillance: ‘It’s a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised’ (Foucault 1980, 156). It is apocaloptic in the sense that desire itself becomes a trap, a disciplining device in which the norm becomes inextricable from the natural. This technology of power – a ‘coercive universalization’ (Edelman 2004, 11) – operates at the level of fantasy and through the figure of the Child: ‘the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust’ (11). In this, the Child becomes inextricably linked to the future and in turn to politics, and is thus reduced to a trope delimiting what will get to count as the future in advance. Reproductive futurism I believe exercises power contradictorily through a web, a net, a grid. It encourages, perhaps contradictorily, the proliferation of desires – a looking-out as opposed to a gazing-within – in the service of repressing any conscious self-awareness of the death drive. Reproductive futurism is therefore, what I term, ‘hetero-prophetic’ in that it tries to set out programmatically what will transpire in the future; a future ‘endlessly postponed’ (13), thus holding the present to ransom. If it is invested in eschatology, it is only as a veneer to discipline those into enslavement to its ideals. For Edelman, reproductive futurism presents ‘an always impossible future’ (11), ‘a fantasmatic future’ (31) which translates queerness, I think, into heteronormativity’s aggressor – the Queer – a repository for displaced feelings of anxiety. This anxiety arises because of the existence of the death drive within (Klein 1997/1946, 4) and the subject’s resultant fear of death (Klein 1997/1948, 28, 29); the fear that the future will never arrive or that the subject will not be alive to experience in it. Thus anxiety arising from the presence of an internal threat (that is, the death drive) is deflected outwards to become the fear of an external threat (that is, the Queer). This internal object of fear is displaced onto the Queer who then ‘becomes the external representative of the death instinct’ (Klein 1997/1948, 31). Through a denial both of the existence of the death drive and the social’s narcissistic investment in the Child as the wish fulfilment of its desired immortality, heteronormativity projects the death drive onto the figure of the Queer who comes to stand in for everything that is considered to be dangerous to the Child and thus the future. It is my contention that reproductive futurism operates by first denying the presence of the death drive through the inauguration of a fantasy of self-fulfilment at the same time that the anxiety of heteronormativity’s own internal shortcomings and disciplining mechanisms are displaced onto the Queer (A. Freud 2000/1937, 69–82). The instantiation of this fantasy arises, in the words of Anna Freud, because ‘the mere struggle of conflicting impulses suffices to set the defence mechanisms in motion’ (69). idealised, the Queer is marked out as the persecutory Other (Klein 1997/1946, 1–24; Klein 1997/1955, 141–75).6 I argue that this idealisation of the Child is a direct corollary of the fear of the Queer which itself is in response to the outward projection of the death drive. Klein’s thoughts are instructive in this regard: ‘Excessive idealization denotes that persecution is the main driving force … idealization is a corollary of persecutory anxiety – a defence against it – and the ideal breast [that is, the Child] is the counterpart of the devouring breast [that is, the Queer]’ (1997/1957, 193; see also 1997/1960, 273; 1997/1963, 311). Queerness, Edelman insists, pits itself against reproductive futurism in the refusal to deny the presence of the death drive or accede to social respectability by projecting that queerness onto someone else: ‘To figure … the death drive of the dominant order, is neither to be nor to become that drive … Rather, acceding to that figural position means recognizing and refusing the consequences of grounding reality in denial of the drive’ (2004, 17). This process of projective identification (1997/1959, 252) leaves heteronormativity in a weakened state, dependent for succour on its idealisation of the Child and its demonisation of the Queer (1997/1946, 9). Whole parts of the heteronormative subject are split off and invested in its fantasmatic relationship with its objects (1997/1955, 143). Excessive splitting can, in Klein’s view, conclude in feelings of disintegration and loss (1997/1946, 9–10). In this, heteronormativity needs its abjected queerness because without it there would be nothing against which it could define itself as the normal. Edelman recognises the power in this heteronormative reliance, thus his insistence that queerness must oppose the very ‘logic of opposition’ (2004, 4). In other words, those relegated to the category of the Queer need to cease playing the role of the persecutory Other for heteronormativity by refusing to engage in such heteronormative object relations, the stakes of which are always set out in advance. Edelman’s proposal, far from securing the end of queerness in a nihilistic act of self-destruction, urges queers to stop facilitating the system of heteronormativity and watch it unravel. The death drive is, after all, referred to by Freud as carrying out its business quietly.7

[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 5, Duke University Press]//owen

Consider, as a minor—and far from disinterested—example of such distrust, a response to No Future by Merrill Cole, a critic whose his essay’s title announces what he purports to expose and resist: “The Queer Repression of Jacques Lacan.” After describing No Future as “the most controversial attempt to bring Lacan into queer theory” since Tim Dean’s Beyond Sexuality, Cole writes, “Queerness, for Edelman, should involve not ‘an oppositional political identity,’ but ‘opposition to politics as the governing fantasy’ of imaginary closure. It is perhaps only from a privileged social position that one could dismiss politics as fantasy for however unreal politics may seem, it directly affects people’s lives and well-being. Rather than holding itself aloof, I argue that queerness should engage in the struggle to change people’s lives for the better.”9 Leaving aside the vacuity of that final “political” appeal—“changing people’s lives for the better,” after all, is the radically empty program that everyone from Adolf Hitler to Mahatma Gandhi, from Maximilien Robespierre to Martin Luther King Jr., can readily get behind—I would note Cole’s strange response to Edelman’s characterization of politics. For it requires no “privileged social position” to identify (which is hardly the same as to “dismiss”) the structure of politics as a fantasy, only a Lacanian one. “Fantasy dominates the whole reality of desire, which is to say, the Law,” Lacan observes in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. 10 Rather than something “unreal,” as Cole puts it, fantasy, Lacan maintains, “gives reality its frame.”11 Lacan lays out, moreover, the specific shape this political fantasy takes, evoking it as the Imaginarization of what refuses Imaginary totality: It’s an idea . . . that knowledge could produce a totality, which, if I can put it this way, is immanent, immanent in politics as such. The Imaginary idea of the whole, such as it is given by the body, is part of the political preaching based on the good form of satisfaction, on that which makes a sphere; taken to its limit, what is more beautiful, but also what is less open, what more closely resembles the self-enclosure of satisfaction? The collusion of this image with the idea of satisfaction: that’s the thing we run into every time we encounter something knotted in this work [i.e., psychoanalysis] that entails bringing something to light by the paths of the unconscious.12 This “political” idea, associated with the coherence of a totalized enclosure that expresses “the good form of satisfaction”—where “good” is no simple term of praise but rather an acknowledgment of the complicity between moral discourse and Imaginarization—impedes the analytic labor that undoes such fantasmatic consistency.13 The resistance to analysis, like the resistance to negativity, springs from the “satisfaction” afforded by the image “of the whole,” which Lacan identifies, or—to borrow Cole’s term—dismisses, as political “preaching.”14 Cole’s argument, directly correlated with his own indulgence in such preaching (“queerness should engage in the struggle to change people’s lives for the better”), becomes more interesting and more telling when he concedes, after correlating politics with a reality not to be confused with fantasy (“however unreal politics may seem”), that fantasy, in Lacanian theory, structures reality after all. Referring to an essay by Chris Coffman, he writes, “Traversing the final fantasy is the endpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis, where we dispossess ourselves of the unconscious fantasies structuring our reality, an evacuation that, as Coffman argues, ‘clears the ground for a future that could be lived otherwise.’ Clinical Lacanian analysis aims at radical change: ‘traversing the fantasy’ is futurally oriented” (emphasis mine).15 Attempting to make “traversing the fantasy,” a concept popular in Lacanian circles though barely theorized by Lacan, coincide with the sort of “satisfaction” Lacan mocks as “immanent” in politics (the satisfaction promised by some “radical change” toward “a future that could be lived otherwise”), Cole turns traversing the fantasy into the very fantasy it’s supposed to traverse. He imbues it with the heroism of a “struggle to change people’s lives for the better” without interrogating whose desire is at stake or who determines what makes those lives “better.”16 So fully “Americanized” a version of Lacan, in which analysis secures a “better” future by traversing a fantasy that Lacan invokes as “radical” (le fantasme radical) or “fundamental” (cette expérience du fantasme fondamental) and not, as Cole says, “final” (as if it were the ultimate veil beneath which, at last, we encounter the truth), bears little relation to Lacan’s own texts.17 Coffman, on whose work Cole’s essay leans, may identify “traversing the fantasy” with an opening onto “a future that could be lived otherwise,” but Lacan says no such thing. In his seminar of June 24, 1964, the only time he refers to (and even then only once) traversing the radical fantasy (or, more precisely, to having traversed it), he does so by questioning how one lives, or how one lives on, in its aftermath. “What becomes of someone who has passed [or who has undergone the pass] by way of this experience concerning the relation, utterly opaque at its origin, to the drive? How can it be lived, by a subject who has traversed the radical fantasy, how, from that point on, is the drive lived?”18 Instead of a futural orientation or an assurance of change for the better, Lacan lingers here in uncertainty before the question of survival: “This is the beyond of analysis, and it has never been approached. It has only, to the present moment, been approachable at the level of the analyst, insofar as it would be required of the analyst precisely to have traversed in its totality the cycle of the analytic experience.”19 The claim that this beyond has been approachable only “at the level of the analyst” refers to the moment in the training analysis (“la psychanalyse didactique”) when analysts-in-training, no longer mistaking the analyst for the subject supposed to know, still desire to occupy the analyst’s place, now perceived as “the place of nonbeing” (la place du dèsêtre).20 If the fantasy of the subject supposed to know, of the one who has what the analysand seeks, makes “the logic of the analyst . . . the agalma which integrates itself into the radical fantasy that the analysand constructs,” then the dissolving of that fantasy reduces the analyst to the status of any signifier whatsoever (“au signifiant quelconque”).21 Far from producing the promise of “a future that could be lived otherwise,” this divestiture of the analyst’s agalma coincides with the analysand’s “subjective destitution,” an emptying-out sufficient, Lacan maintains, “to sow panic, horror, curses, even attacks.”22Lacan goes further. Whoever, at the end of the training analysis, would assume the analyst’s nonbeing (“dèsêtre”) “roots himself in what most radically opposes everything by which it is necessary and sufficient to be recognized in order to ‘be’: respectability, for example.”23 Having confronted the lack in the Other and no longer pursuing, therefore, the Other’s recognition or good opinion, such a person embraces, according to Lacan, “the true import of the constitutive negation that infamy signifies.”24 By linking this “constitutive negation” to “infamy,” the opposite of those communal values (i.e., respectability or honor) that earn recognition in the realm of being, Lacan implicitly opposes it to pedag-archivalization and posits its centrality to the movement into the “beyond of psychoanalysis.”25 Underscoring its importance, he calls this negation bound up with infamy “a connotation it is very much necessary to restore to psychoanalysis.”26 No one could fault Cole or Coffman for refusing the negativity of this negation or for trying to keep themselves far removed from the infamy it bestows. But for just that reason no one should confuse their arguments with Lacan’s. Their refusal coincides with the fantasy of achieving the unity, the aesthetic coherence, inseparable from the subject of desire and inseparable, therefore, from the fantasy in which everyone believes, whether they know they believe it or not. But Cole and Coffman align their refusal with a progressive political engagement founded on a diluted version of Deleuze’s positivization of nonbeing, taking every variation in the status quo as indexical of “becoming.” In doing so they mistake transformations in the contingent expressions of Symbolic law for fundamental transformations of Symbolic law as such. Nor are they alone in this regard.

“Onticide,” for all its conceptual power, positions the “black queer” as uniquely the catachresis of this “nothing.” Warren supports this claim by noting that the “black queer” doubles “the black’s” exclusion from being while also facing exclusion from “the queer’s” “incorpor[ation] . . . into the fold of humanity.”114 He develops this argument through Eric Stanley’s observation that “the overwhelming numbers of trans/queer people who are murdered in the United States are of color.”115 This prompts him to reflect on the “differential relationship to violence” of “people of color” and “non-people of color” among “those who might identify as ‘queer.’ ”116 Based on the disproportionate representation of the former among “trans/queer people” killed in the United States, Warren argues that the Blackness of “black queers” denies them “symbolic placement, differentiating flesh, and a grammar of suffering”—all of which remain possibilities, if only marginally, for “queers” not “of color.”117 Construing “the black,” through reference to Fanon, as outside “symbolic placement,” Warren asserts that “black suffering” is unintelligible in any “grammar of suffering” (which he now associates with “queer theory”), precisely to the extent that Black suffering “lacks a proper grammar of enunciation.”118 As heir to “the violence of captivity [that] expelled the African from Difference, or the Symbolic,” “the black-as- object,” for Warren, “is situated outside of space, time, and the world,” which is also to say, outside of the human as “the order of differentiating subjects.”119 Blackness and queerness, in other words, have not only different relations to violence but also, as Warren puts it, “a differential relationship to ‘nothingness,’ where ‘nothingness’ is the symbolic designator of the incomprehensible remainder or exclusion. The fact that the overwhelming majority of those murdered are ‘of color’ and the position of blackness in the antagonism is one of non-ontology (negative existence) is no mere coincidence.”120 Underlying this analysis, though, is the conflation of ontological impossibility with entities represented as ontologizing this very impossibility. If, that is, the overrepresentation of people of color among trans/queer murder victims and the “position of blackness . . . [as] one of non-ontology” is, indeed, “no mere coincidence,” then either “the black” must essentially coincide with Blackness as nonontology or the “the black” must be understood as one of its highly charged catachreses. But what could it mean, and how could we know it, if “the black” were essentially bound to the “blackness” that remains, not like but as the Real, excluded from representation? Can an experience historically correlated with African captivity in the Atlantic slave trade uniquely define “the Real of ontology” that, in Warren’s own phrasing, “ruptures and preconditions symbolization”?121 “The black,” no less than “the queer” or “the woman,” is subjectified through language, but what Warren rightly characterizes as the “unresolvable problem for blackness”—the fact that it remains “the ‘unthought’ and the incommunicable,” “outside of life and its customary lexis”—leads him, despite his own warning against it, to slide “between identity and structure” by conflating the ontological exclusion that is “blackness” with the social exclusion of Blacks.122 He thus presents as noncontingent, nonhistorical, and a priori—in other words, as ontological—“ the black’s” relation to the structural position of ontological impossibility.123 Warren himself sounds a warning about the dangers of such a conflation when responding to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s analysis of David Marriott’s On Black Men.124 Jackson, he argues, errs in her effort to “think race and sexuality together”: It is here that we seem to slide between blackness as a structural position of non-ontology and the sociology of race (as an identity). In this analysis, blackness becomes a “type” much like sexologist [sic] created the “homosexual” as a type. Instead of thinking about blackness as the ontological horizon that fractures epistemology, we locate blackness within the Symbolic Order of scientific discourse and sexology. Blackness, then, oscillates between an identity, a marker of the Symbolic order, and an ontological position, the “Real” that ruptures and preconditions symbolization. This sliding between identity and structure is a symptom of what Wilderson would call “the ruse of analogy.” Whenever we equate an ontological position with an identity formation, we perform the very violence that sustains the antagonism.125 Notwithstanding the care with which he makes these distinctions, Warren himself, I have argued, identifies Blackness (as the ontologically excluded Real) with “the black” (as the sociological identity of particular Symbolic subjects). He reads “the black” not only as a “being fallen off the map of conceivability,” as one who “ ‘does not exist’ in the world because lacking symbolic placement,” but also as a social identity whose visibility enables the statistical analysis of murdered trans/queer persons of color.126 This conflation seems to spring from his resistance (rooted in solid political ground) to viewing “the black” and “the queer” as equivalent in their social or historical positions—a resistance reinforced by the preponderance of violence against “trans/queer” people of color. But it results in a less sustainable resistance to the “equivalence” of “blackness and queerness.”127 As “ontological position[s]” that gesture toward what the order of being leaves out, Blackness and queerness would name catachrestically the unnameable void in reality and the enjiety aroused whenever a subject comes too close to the Real. Though certainly inflected by unconscious motivations and by my own position as a subject, my focus on queerness as an organizing term wagers that its indeterminacy of reference (in contrast to the fungible “black-objects” to which Blackness for Warren is essentially fixed) might slow, if not prevent, the slide from ontological position to fixed social identity, thus permitting the negativity of queerness to supplement—rather than to supersede—the ongoing historical and political efforts to read “the queer” and “the black.”128 The work of queer theory thus coincides with interrogations of woman, Blackness, or trans* as ontological exclusions, a point reinforced by David Marriott’s insight “that blackness has no locatable referent or unequivocal name, but is something that escapes all attributes, including the unity of an ontic-ontological fugitivity or again the hypostatized name of ‘absolute dereliction.’ ”

Bioessentialism, or suggesting that social constructions are inherently biological, has contributed to stigma and discrimination of the queer community (Llorin & Zayhowski, 2023). This perpetuates the narrative that people who do not fit binary categories are “disordered.” Homosexuality was in the DSM-II until 1973 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) and in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) until 1990 (Cochran et al., 2014). The way that homosexuality has been treated as a “disorder” parallels the way race has been inappropriately pathologized. Racism, not race, leads to the different medical outcomes seen (Newman, 2022; Roberts, 2011), yet race continues to inappropriately guide various aspects of medical care leading to medical mistreatment (Vyas et al., 2020). Similar to the larger medical field, the genetics field has explored queerness as a pathological trait. Research studies looking for genetic associations with homosexuality by Hamer et al. (1993) have been heavily criticized as a tool for pathologization (Petersen, 1999; Schüklenk et al., 1997). Yet, we see an increase in this research (Bentz et al., 2008; Foreman et al., 2019; Ganna et al., 2019; Hamer, 2011; Polderman et al., 2018; Theisen et al., 2019), such as large genome-wide association studies being published to study genes associated with sexual orientations and transgender identities (Ganna et al., 2019; Theisen et al., 2019). While some LGBTQ+ people have expressed that this type of genetic testing could be validating or increase societal acceptance of queer identities, others have expressed concerns about how the testing has serious ethical concerns and could be used with malicious intent, including pathologizing queer identities, undermining reproductive rights, gatekeeping healthcare, and informing eugenic practices (Hammack-Aviran et al., 2022; Rajkovic et al., 2022). Anti-queer bias permeates clinical genetics and the larger medical field. We posit that providing just care for the queer community requires us to examine the anti-queer foundations endemic in genetics practices. Throughout this piece, we will explore how genetics contributes to the perpetuation of pathologization of queer identities and call for systemic changes in the genetics field. 1.1 Cisheteronormative norms embedded into the genetic counseling field Anti-queer biases have been integrated into the genetic counseling field since its inception. The first genetic counseling program was founded by Melissa Richter at Sarah Lawrence College in 1969. Sarah Lawrence College, an all-women's school until 1968, was chosen in order to “appeal to its core constituency, married women in their 30s with two to four children living at home” (Stern, 2009). Over half a century later, the demographic makeup of the field continues to be predominantly white, heterosexual, cisgender women (National Society of Genetic Counselors, 2022). In general, queer communities are underrepresented in the medical field and experience microaggressions and isolation similar to students of racial and ethnic minorities (Marcelin et al., 2019). Queer genetic counseling students have reported cisheteronormative training environments and admissions practices, and a hesitancy to discuss their queer identities with program faculty and peers (Chu et al., 2023; O'Sullivan et al., 2023). One study demonstrated genetic counselors' and genetic counseling students' have an implicit preference for heterosexual over homosexual people (Nathan et al., 2019). Queer patients have reported experiencing discrimination in genetics clinics, despite genetic counselors reporting comfort in working with them (Valentine et al., 2023). Eugenic sentiments were embedded into the conception of genetic counseling. Melissa Richter articulated that the creation of genetic counseling was needed to address “the increase of illnesses by inherited diseases; the sizable proportion of our population suffering from mental or emotional disturbances; and the problems created by overpopulation” (Richter, 1968). These justifications mirror eugenic ideologies which propagandized the need for sterilizations to mitigate overcrowding in institutions, targeting immigrants, Black people, Indigenous people, poor people, and disabled people (Lombardo, 2011). Eugenicists weaponized biology to deem homosexuality and gender nonconformity as traits needing to be fixed. In a speech given in 1970, renowned geneticist H.B. Glass noted the need to end congenital defects including “sex deviation” (Ordover, 2003). Medical practices have attempted to eliminate homosexuality through castration, conversion therapies, brain implants, and lobotomies (Ordover, 2003). The eugenic roots of genetic counseling must be understood in order to examine how practices are still perpetuated within the field today through its focus on eradicating disease.