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A drive, as described by Freud, ‘differs from a stimulus in that it originates from sources of stimulation within the body, acts as a constant force, and the individual can’t flee from it in the way that he can from an external stimulus’ (2003/1933, 88). For him, drives ‘represent the physical demands of the psyche’ (2003/1940, 178). Drives signify ‘need’ and thus crave satisfaction which leads Freud to formulate the pleasure-unpleasure principle (2005/1915, 15). The pleasure-ego strives for wish-fulfilment, ‘to pursue pleasure and avoid unpleasure’. The reality-ego, on the other hand, strives for what is ‘useful’ while protecting itself from harm. The reality-ego safeguards the individual from the overweening demands of the pleasure-ego but protects rather than opposes it, in a sense ‘safeguarding it, not deposing it’ (2005/1911, 6). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle however, Freud, a self-confessed rigorous revisionist, conceded that ‘the pleasure principle exists as a strong tendency within the psyche, but is opposed by certain other forces or circumstances, so that the final outcome cannot possibly always accord with the said tendency in favour of pleasure’ (2003/1920, 47). Through observing patients undergoing psychoanalysis, Freud noticed that people regularly return to unpleasurable experiences and memories, what he termed the ‘compulsion to repeat’, which ‘pays no heed to the pleasure principle’ (57, 61). Developing on from this compulsion to return again and again to what has gone before, Freud proposed the existence of what he termed ‘der Todestrieb’ – the death drive sometimes translated as the death instinct – to explain what he saw as ‘the drive to return to the inanimate’ because ‘the inanimate existed before the animate’ (78). Freud propounded the view that there were two drives – the death drive and Eros – the interaction of which produces the vibrancy of life, a constant struggle or working-through of resistance, each one to the other. In Jean Laplanche’s view, this ongoing struggle between the death and life drives manifests ‘not as a difference between sexuality and a non-sexual aggressivity, but in the heart of sexuality itself ’ (1999, 40). In his critique of No Future and as part of his intention to reframe the death drive for ‘a different – one might say queerer – vision of futurity’, Tim Hird, M. J. (2008). Queering the non/human. Taylor & Francis Group. Dean remarks that ‘Edelman advocates our embracing – even identifying with – something that is not of the order of representation, namely, the death drive’, to which Dean asserts he is ‘not convinced that it is possible, even were it deemed politically desirable, to embrace or identify with a drive’ (2008). This statement needs unpacking, namely Dean’s representation of Edelman’s remarks on the death drive, politics, possibility and queerness. This section introduces my interpretation of Edelman’s formulation of queerness as it relates to the death drive before I argue that No Future is not about considering possibilities but rather is a meditation on a range of impossibilities. First, the impossibility of exercising agency if one partakes of a system steeped in reproductive futurism which permeates all social, political and cultural structures. Secondly, the intolerable living conditions created for those figured as sinthomosexuals through heteronormativity’s employment of reproductive futurism as a fantasy/ phantasy (Segal 2000) against the death drive through the inauguration of a series of defence mechanisms, namely denial, splitting, idealisation and projective identification (Klein 1997/1946; 1997/1948; 1997/1955; 1997/1957). Third, the impossibility of launching a queer political resistance to heteronormativity without its being recuperated and neutralised by reproductive futurism in the process and put into the service of heteronormativity. Fourth, the Queer’s figuration as the death drive and how that both facilitates while ultimately preventing heteronormativity’s desired fulfilment of itself in the figure of the Child. Edelman’s ‘impossible project’, which he claims stakes ‘its fortunes on a truly hopeless wager’, presents us with an interpretation of queerness that promises ‘absolutely nothing’ (2004, 4, 5). It promises nothing, in my view, precisely because the death drive is already within us. To accept that – the what ‘is’ – is to accede to this book’s argument.5 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 authenticor substantive identity’ (24) because it ‘is never a matter of being or becoming’ (25), the 5 This puts me in mind of Eckhart Tolle’s promulgation of ‘the Now’ in which he urges readers to ‘End the delusion of time … To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation … The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, fulfilment in whatever forms. Both are illusions’. 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)

When the question of organization is brought up with respect to the revolution, Marxists often return to the idea of the party. The party is often approached as if the word itself has power, as if the term “party building” on its own implies all the structural and strategic information necessary for the conversation. This is a problem, because while the left does distinguish between a mass party and a Leninist party (though even this distinction is contested), there is quite a bit of diversity within these forms that are both shaped by the strategies of the trends they are born out of and the political terrain of countries they operate in. The Bolsheviks, the Communist Party of the Philippines, and the Socialist Workers Party (US) were all Leninist parties that operated on nominal democratic centralism, but the specific forms and ways they operate are all quite different. AROC in their original critique of Marxist Center gives a preliminary definition of what a party is, contending that “political parties are the institution of unitary political leadership for a class or fraction of a class.” This is still a broad enough definition that it could theoretically encompass any variety of organizational types. With all this lack of clarity over what a call to party build means, is party building desirable? In her contribution to the debate in the aftermath of Marxist Center’s founding, Alyson Escalante makes an argument for its benefit. She points out that, despite the Marxist Center’s commitment to mass work and institution building, it hasn’t committed to a strategy for revolution, and this is a major weakness. Party building provides a next step beyond building new working class institutions, and can provide a context for MC’s mass work and a basis for the development of a revolutionary strategy. While Marxist Center may fail to build the party as in past movements, this isn’t an argument against trying. Alyson’s argument isn’t completely disagreeable. In fact, this document agrees with her fundamental point: Marxist Center’s lack of a strategy for revolution is a major weakness. From here, she errs; by placing party building at the foundation of our strategy, we lose sight of the fact that the organizational forms are determined in large part by the strategy and struggles with which we engage. Elevating the ‘party’ form to the level of strategy presents the possibility of conflating utterly different visions which fall under the category of “party building”. A party that leads a guerilla war is different from a party that operates mostly in electoral politics. If we don’t have our strategy, we don’t know what type of party to build. Furthermore, by making party building a goal, we have to ask the question:at what point does a party building project become the party? A quote from the Union of French Communists Marxist-Leninists tries to answer this: …the party must be constructed in the fire of struggles, step by step, under the control of the mass political movement. In France today, this party does not exist. It is not a question of self proclaiming it. This is why we declare that we are not the Party. We are a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist political group FOR the foundation of a communist Union. This Union, having proven itself, and gathering a significant fraction of the vanguard workers, will itself have to determine the conditions and stages for the foundation of the Party. When has a party proven itself? What constitutes a significant fraction of vanguard workers? How do we distinguish between premature self-declarations and genuine foundations of the party? If a political organization has already clearly successfully accomplished all these things before founding the party, what benefit is there to founding a new organization? The pre-party formation has already accomplished the tasks that define a party in this sense. Just like the problems facing dual power theories where revolution becomes this far point in the future with no clear path from where we currently are, party building also provides little in the way of a clear path from the ‘pre-party’ to the party. If organizational forms are determined by strategy and the conditions under which we organize, then what are the organizational forms for revolutionaries that flow from the ruptural strategy for socialism? To start, one reality that needs to be confronted is that, despite the aspirations of vanguardist tendencies, the idea that we will have unitary leadership of the working class is unrealistic for the near term and might very well be completely impossible. Revolutions, while they might have a dominant organization, are often carried out by blocs of revolutionary political organizations and mass organizations (as seen in the Russian Revolution). This isn’t a weakness necessarily and, in fact, we can use this to our benefit even in the near term.

We know that, just by existing, historically subordinated populations are deemed inconvenient to the privileged who made them so; the subordinated who are cast as a problem experience themselves as both necessary for and inconvenient to the general supremacist happiness. All politics involves at least one group becoming inconvenient to the reproduction of power; that power might be material or fantasmatic, in the convoluted paranoid way endemic to the intimacy of enemies. The biopolitical politics of inconvenience increases the ordinary pressure of getting in each other’s way, magnifying the shaping duration of social friction within the mind’s echo chambers and the structuring dynamics of the world. As an affect, inconvenience can thus encompass all kinds of intensity but still be cast as a mode of impersonal contact that has an impact, opening itself to becoming personal, creating images of what feels like a looming social totality, and making a countervailing social organization imaginable. Think about Cheryl Harris’s staging of Blackness as “trespassing” on white consciousness as it strolls and scrolls through the world expecting not to feel impeded; think of the pervasive sexual violence women imagine concretely when they’re walking somewhere alone.7 These sensations of threat are ordinary to the people moving through in the lifeworlds of a supremacist society and its entitlement hierarchies.8 They can confirm or disconfirm the erotophobia or specific mistrust we have been schooled to live with. The expectation of inconvenience can pull you into a zone where the impersonal opens to genres of viscerally strong yet abstract encounter. It can be an effect of speculation prior to movement that creates hypervigilance, tableaux Introduction 5 or scenarios in prefigurative response to potential encounters. It can get people talking to each other about how to change what’s deemed structural, even when the only evidence is a sense of things that permeates the social field and is central to the reproduction of its norms of concentrated value. But the threat posed by politicized inconvenience doesn’t have to be immediately theatrical or traumatic: a sense of apprehension can arise in any moment, seemingly happening and passing as an irritation. One never knows about effects until this kind of contact becomes materialized in a series. The inconveniences of managing one’s own putative inconvenience to the sense of freedom demanded by the structurally dominant is a completely predictable experience, both draining and animating, in intimate and political settings. It forces a constant reassessment of what kinds of impact constitute an event. In this book, “inconvenience” draws a membrane across radically private experiences of world-receptivity at the periphery of attention and anything people have to face every day—an ongoing labor situation, a family, a politicized infrastructure they may have been born into, the population they’ve been assigned to, or other people’s projected fantasies.9 When is a body an event because of the kind of thing it is deemed to be, as when they walk into a room or cross a state line? What price and what kinds of price are being paid in order to live a life as other people’s inconvenient object? These questions tap into the ordinary of biopower at the same time as they tap into the encounter with being as such. However dramatic the situation of power, it is at its most powerful when it is distributed across the structural, the casual, and the shadowy, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Achille Mbembe, and Jasbir Puar have documented in their work on necropolitical protocols of the state and related apparatuses.10 As Puar argues, to maim rather than kill in order to maintain political power is to enjoy enforcing the ongoing theater of the inconvenience of certain other people. But it’s not just bullets that disable living. It’s inconvenient to bear the burden of a naming you didn’t ask for: there is no getting beyond it, only dealing with it as a form of life you live with. To a structurally and/or fantasmatically dominant class, though, the experience of inconvenience produces dramas of unfairness. Take, for example, the paranoid reversals of “incels” and other entitled persons who experience their vulnerability as an injury of unjustly denied deference.11 It is predictable that the structurally dominant feel vulnerable about their status and insist that if the historically subordinated deserve repair, so do the entitled. It is as though there is a democracy in vulnerability, as though the details do not matter. From both perspectives, the exhaustion from incessant abrasive contact can produce numbed or intense self-subtraction and the elaboration of massive rage. At whatever intensity or scale, then, in whatever scenario of power, the sense of the inconvenience of other people in general, and often some other particular kinds of people, is constantly being renewed and reevaluated. Mainly the hit of it surfaces and dives in the ordinary life of being in the world, shifting atmospheres and coordinating stresses without much being memorable. But the ordinary includes the casual reproduction of hatreds and aversions, creating subjectivities powerfully shaped by navigating its entailments, excitements, and tolls.

Differing emphases upon racism’s moral valences and economic function have similarly shaped different strategic and political conceptions of “race” and “community” versus “labor” and “class” organization. Emigrating to the United States in the s, James agreed with those who thought Black self-organization was “backward,” even “reactionary,” in a context of industrial working-class struggle. The politics of the New Deal, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) labor upsurge, and communist party influence led a rising cohort of Black activists and intellectuals to reject middle-class presumptions of older race leadership. To them, Du Bois’s politics, even as he grew more radical during the s, continued to rest on an outmoded racial premise. Abram Harris summed up their views: “[Du Bois] is a racialist whose discovery of Marxism as a critical instrument has been too recent and sudden for it to discipline his mental processes or basically to change his social outlook” (quoted in Singh, Black Is a Country, ). E. Franklin Frazier argued “the status of the Negro is losing its purely racial character and becoming tied up with the struggle of white and Black workers against the white landlords and capitalists” (quoted in Black Is a Country, ). Black socialist George Streator was unsparing: defense of “Negro racialism” was “reactionary,” obscuring the fact that “the Negro is nine-tenths a laborer” (quoted in Black Is a Country, ). Du Bois was unyielding: “So long as we are fighting a color-line, we must strive by color organization.” “Science alone could not settle this matter;” nor would the “color bar ... be broken by a series of brilliant, immediate assaults.” Rather, a “long siege was indicated,” with “organization in boycott, propaganda and mob frenzy,” alongside “careful planning and subtle campaign with the education of coming generations” (quoted in Black Is a Country, ). Independent Black political activity, in this view, was intrinsically valuable and as important as labor organization. “[We] thought it was, the day of Internationalism, Humanity and the disappearance of ‘race’ from our vocabulary,” Du Bois admitted (quoted in Black Is a Country, ). But he was skeptical Black incorporation into workingclass politics would eliminate racial antagonism as a dimension of national life and international relations and saw movements of the racially excluded as the cutting edge of democratic politics: a means to reorganizing the state, through legal reform and normative influence. These debates at the onset of the long civil rights movement and the birth of the Keynesian welfare state seem distant, but they illuminate puzzles that have been central to the problematic of racial capitalism going forward. Robinson aligns with Du Bois, emphasizing the precedence of racial ordering as an inheritance of European feudalism presaging the rise of capitalism in the English countryside in the sixteenth century. “Capitalism was less a catastrophic revolution (negation) of feudalist social orders than the extension of these social relations into the larger tapestry of the modern world’s political and economic relationships,” Robinson writes. “[F]rom its very beginnings, European civilization ... was constructed on antagonistic differences.” The conquests and uneven development of European peoples, exemplified by the colonization of Ireland, seeded the “uneven development of national capitalisms” and secreted racialism as “an enduring principle of European social order” and its settler colonial offshoots (Black Marxism, ). “The universality of capitalism is less an historical reality, than the construct of this language of error,” Robinson concludes (). The “error” has led to consequential erasures, but also, it should be added, to stabilizing reforms, in which overcoming capitalism’s particularistic, violent precedents, and ascriptive hierarchies associated with them, became a means by which bourgeois discourse represented capitalism’s historical progress and purported moral development. Focusing on demystifying this ideological procedure, Western Marxists have tended to redouble the progressive error by emphasizing economically determined stages of history and derogating democratic rights and struggles. What Robinson calls Black Marxism, by contrast, pursues a recursive, iterative path, delineating persistent (racial/national) exclusions of Western emancipatory discourses, while at the same time laying claim to an insurgent universality deriving from a stubborn resistance and failure to incorporate Black life into legal and normative capitalist circuitries of wage and contract

For my dissertation, I intend to unearth a genealogy of white same-sex sexual violence against Black men, specifically focusing on queer men or those engaging in sex acts with other men, from the late eighteenth century to the present within literary, legal, and historical archives. Scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Sharon Holland, and E. Patrick Johnson have written on how the racial quotidian, particularly within the study of sexuality, localizes expressions of racially charged modes of sexual abuse within an economy of enjoyment. However, disentangling the ways that queer sex acts have actively created paradigms that continue to develop Antebellum scripts generates insights into the evolution of such practices in ways that not only connect these to plantation life but that also track how they transformed to better serve white supremacist economies of enjoyment since slavery. I’m developing a theory to make legible the existence of Black enslaved people whose lives are obscured in an attempt to protect queer American life from knowledge of its genealogy in the practices of antebellum slavery. My methodology incorporates practices of close reading, contextual analysis, and cultural analysis informed by approaches found in texts such as Scenes of Subjection by Saidiya Hartman, Rethinking Rufus by Thomas A. Foster, and The Delectable Negro by Vincent Woodard. The materials obscured within archives of American chattel slavery highlight a gap in the humanities and social sciences that underscores the socio-political response to the sexual abuse of black queer men from the Antebellum period to the present. The proprietorial bindings of enslavement contribute to the petri dish of queer sexual discourse the necessary ideological fragments needed to buttress functioning economies that hold stock in clandestine racialized corporeal markets. I use “clandestine” to note the illegibility of existing archival materials holding these non-normative sexual economies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to highlight ways in which failing to identify these moments plainly undermines efforts to fully understand the history of contemporary queer sexual discourses. Whether to maintain the sense of injury of white queerness or to securitize the perimeters of Queer Studies, debates on the “appropriate” use of the term queer in relation to the 19th-century contexts disavow this form of sexual abuse found in the archive and (despite evidence of its occurrence) renders it illegible. White queer forms of sexual abuse practiced by white slaveholding men instilled into queer sexual discourses a metric of pleasure that is directly linked to the economies of enjoyment within plantation life. These sexual gestures make up the enterprises within these economies of enjoyment that depend on the consumption and circulation of sexualized black bodies to be the lifeblood of, as Edward Baptist writes, “a complex of inseparable fetishes.” In an effort to build a scaffolding for my research, I have spent the last few years compiling primary sources with several faculty research mentors who specialize in physical and digital archives spanning from the early American period to the late twentieth century. In order to examine the racialized corporeal markets that are driving these white queer sexual economies, I have to contend with an Antebellum rubric of pleasure and enjoyment. This portion of the historical work of my project is informed by the theoretical guidance of Saidiya Hartman. In Scenes of Subjection (1997), Hartman writes: Antebellum formations of pleasure, even those of the North, need to be considered in relation to the affective dimensions of chattel slavery since enjoyment is virtually unimaginable without recourse to the black body and the subjection of the captive, the diversions engendered by the dispossession of the enslaved, or the fantasies launched by the myriad uses of the black body. (26) In my work, I understand the conditions of pleasure and enjoyment as multifaceted expressions of mastery that seek to recreate the homoerotic possibilities of slave performance (Hartman 43). The texts that I’ve compiled in the field of history explore the erotic life of white mastery. The African American historiographies that I’ve read examine how the forced display of sexual submission, the performative gestures of white sexual ownership, and the demand placed upon the enslaved for submission to forced sexual acts are established and built into the ontology of white homoerotic desire. The field of African American History allows me to ground this charge in archival texts and historiographies through which I analyze the social (and sexual) nuances of mastery. I ground the social and affective dynamics of sexual ownership in the historicization of mastery theorized in Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul (1999). Johnson writes: These slaves, then, embodied a type of public recognition--a type of honor--that could be beaten out of their backs. In buying them, slave-holders boasted that their own mastery would inhabit their slaves’ every action. Their slaves would be extensions of themselves, the actions of the enslaved indistinguishable from the will of the enslavers. Slave breaking was a technology of the soul. Buying slaves to break them represented a fantasy of mastery embodied in the public subjugation of another or private omnipotence transmuted into public reputation. (107) The “technology” of slave-breaking as a method to underscore the extent of access to and ownership over the enslaved body not only emphasizes the present nature of the “fantasy of mastery” (Johnson 107) but is also inextricably linked to the sexual charge of racialized corporeal markets. In a psychoanalytic turn, a better understanding of the emphasis on the melding of these inner and outer worlds, or “private omnipotence transmuted into public reputation” (Johnson 107), allows for a deeper historical analysis of the sexually charged affective stakes of ownership. Stakes that, for the sake of both social and sexual economies, blur the delineations made between what it meant publicly to have complete bodily access to enslaved bodies of the same gender versus the opposite, suggesting that mastery is not devoid of homoeroticism. I invoke Vincent Woodard’s definition of homoerotic in The Delectable Negro--- “[implying] same-sex arousal and draw[ing] attention to those political, social and libidinal forces that shape desire ...” (14)---to specify and delineate a separate set of internal negotiations during the same-sex sexual abuse (or the erogenous mapping) of Black male bodies. Since enslaved Black bodies “embodied registers of the indomitability of [their owner’s] will” (Johnson 107), the sexual charge of the public displays of mastery (including ones of a homoerotic nature) is inevitably bound to the history of white queer sexual discourse. This will be the groundwork that informs my readings of the nineteenth and twentieth-century texts. Using my historical analysis as a foundation, I will be critically examining erotogenic spectacles of blackness that share aesthetic and affective components of the public displays of mastery under slavery. This section of my project looks at the social and literary evolution of homoerotic forms of white mastery through the late twentieth century. The growing presence of a more widely recognized queer literary canon and its production of affective language and sexual literacies still remain connected to an understanding of pleasure that cannot be severed from the ontological life of American chattel slavery. Thus, despite the emerging critiques of a strictly heteronormative regime within American literature, homoerotic renderings of blackness within the white literary imaginary are mined for an understanding of pleasure that is directly linked to Hartman’s notion of an economy of enjoyment (Hartman 26). In an effort to continue developing Hartman’s theory of the economies of pleasure and enjoyment, I will be interrogating these economies not as interchangeable affective establishments but as a single economy of enjoyment that, in an Althusserian sense, is deeply invested in the production of pleasure (Althusser 86). The investments that American literature makes in this economy of enjoyment allow it to monetize the pornotropic black spectacle yielding pleasurable dividends (Spillers 206). The literary investments of this economy of enjoyment and its reproduction of erotogenic black spectacles for pleasure leave a paper trail that is connected to American chattel slavery based on its defining proprietorial characteristics. Since the reproduction of erotogenic spectacles of blackness is needed to attain pleasure, this economic model can be examined over several literary periods. Additionally, tracking the queer appraisal of these erotogenic black spectacles allows me to make legible the Antebellum value attributed to pleasure within white queer sexual economies down to the present. My work seeks to make interventions in literary and cultural studies around blackness and sexuality. Additionally, the intention of this project is to also reconsider the colonial historicization of American queer life and pleasure within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The second half of the twentieth century saw a major upsurge in radical and revolutionary organizing in oppressed communities in the United States and around the world. This powerful organizing posed a significant threat to the legitimacy of US power and capitalist empire more broadly, and therefore needed to be contained. These movements were undermined by two main strategies: First, the radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s were criminalized, with the US government using tactics of imprisonment, torture, sabotage, and assassination to target and destroy groups like the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, and Young Lords, among others. Second, the growth of the nonprofit sector has seen social movements professionalizing, chasing philanthropic dollars, separating into “issue areas,” and moving toward social services and legal reform projects rather than radical projects aimed at the underlying causes of poverty and injustice.17 These developments left significant sections of the radical left traumatized and decimated, wiping out a generation of revolutionaries and shifting the terms of resistance from revolution and transformation to inclusion and reform, prioritizing state- and foundation-sanctioned legal reforms and social services over mass organizing and direct action.

EXAMPLE: The FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) is a notorious example of the US government’s use of infiltration, surveillance, and violence to overtly target dissent and resistance. COINTELPRO was exposed when internal government documents were revealed that detailed the outrageous work undertaken by the federal government to dismantle resistance groups in the 1960s and ’70s. Although the program was dissolved under that name, the tactics continued and can be seen today in current controversies about wiretapping and torture as well as in the USA PATRIOT Act. Overt action to eliminate resistance and dissent here is as old as the European colonization of North America

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

Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 2, Duke University Press]//owen

This conclusion makes a certain sense if we understand character as a form of reification that forces us to mistake characters for real people with psychological interiority. If we take characters as real, we miss how they are effects of linguistic and narrative conventions. By extension, if we take queer characters as real, the argument goes, we overlook how queerness is an effect of cultural norms, discursive structures, and social power. Rather than a force of antinormative potential, queerness becomes an ahistorical core of the self, an identity to be represented like any other without threatening dominant structures of gender and sexuality. Queer characters seem to contain queerness by reifying sexuality as subjectivity. Hence queer theory treats character and other representational forms, such as narrative, with great skepticism.2 For example, Teresa de Lauretis (2011: 244) defines queer texts as those that “pointedly [disrupt] the referentiality of language and the referentiality of images.” To find queerness in a text, queer theory looks to the cracks in representation. This is why queer readings tend to privilege nonmimetic elements of style such as syntax, enjambment, and rhythm, which seem to elude representation, or rhetorical tropes such as irony, catachresis, and zeugma, which destabilize representation by proliferating meaning. These forms are “queer,” on this account, because they rupture the structures of signification that buttress the heteronormative symbolic order.

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

Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 2, Duke University Press]//owen **includes brief descriptions of sexual violence

--ideally, the 1AC would be defending some form of abstraction for this card to really apply, but that shouldn’t be an issue given how I understand the thesis of the AFF.

Getsy ‘19 [David J. Getsy, art historian, curator, and art writer focusing on modern and contemporary art; 2019; “TEN QUEER THESES ON ABSTRACTION”; in Jared Ledesma, ed., Queer Abstraction, Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 2019); online version available at: ; accessed 07-13-2024] dliang

A lot of oppressed people are hyper-sexualized in dominant culture as a way to create them as a threat, a fetish, or a caricature—transgender women, black men, Asian and Pacific Islander women, to name a few. Despite often good intentions to raise awareness about the treatment of transgender and gender-non-conforming people in prisons, we recognize that much of the “public education” work around these issues often relies on sexualization, voyeurism, sensationalism, and fetishization to get its point across. In general there is a focus on graphic descriptions of people’s bodies (specifically their genitals), sexual violence, and the humiliation they have faced. Imprisoned people (who are usually represented as black) and transgender people (who are usually represented as transgender women of color in this “have long been the target of voyeuristic representation —from porn movies that glorify rape in prison to fetishizing “human rights” research distributed to majority white, middle-class audiences. As transgender people who often have our bodies on display for non-transgender people who feel empowered to question, display, and discuss us, we know that this is a dangerous trend that seriously undercuts the integrity of our work and the types of relationships that can be formed. Unless we address these exploitative power dynamics in our work, even our most “well-intentioned” strategies and movements will reproduce the prison industrial complex’s norms of transphobic, misogynist, and racist sexualized violence. Research, media, cultural work, and activism on this issue needs to be accountable to and directed by low-income transgender people and transgender people of color and our organizations.

[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.