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The idea that economics creates the world rather than describes it has been the subject of several debates (Aspers,2007; Felin & Foss,2009a, 2009b; Hodgson,2010; Miller,2002; Mirowski & Nik-Khah,2007). Indeed, claiming that a theory, even if wrong at first, can shape the world and become right seems too strong for many economists, especially if they consider themselves heterodox economists. This affirmation seems too radical because then any theory could be true if it becomes a social norm. From its conceptual point of view, ANT assumes that people act in the markets in accordance with their expectations of other agents’ behavior. These expectations are based on a stock of information and economic theories associated with this stock. Therefore, agents’ expectations can be similar to the concept of expectations used in economic theory: ‘I believe that others act according to a specific theory and I believe that others believe the same thing as I do. ’Thus, the theory gradually becomes a coordinating device (Callon,2007, p. 322), and there would be no wrong theory per se. Two kinds of criticism follow:

(1) Firstly, Mirowski and Nik-Khah (2007) but also Miller (2002) emphasize the conservative way in which performativity theory is engaged when it claims, in opposition to most critics of rationality assumptions, that homo oeconomicus does exist, because of the embeddedness of the economy in economics. To argue that economic theories shape the world is to stop any critics of dominant theo-ries that effectively influence the world.

The groundbreaking Emmy-nominated FX series has recently faced a moderate amount of criticism from some fans. Viewers have pointed out the supposed villainous attitudes and harsh treatment of darker-skinned characters like Elektra Abundance and Candy Ferocity, who [spoiler alert] was brutally murdered earlier this season. "Pose has spent all of the second season fictionalizing Paris Is Burning by giving shocking storylines—ones that happened to fair-skinned people in real life—to the dark-skinned characters," points out Court Danee in their essay, 'Pose' Has an Increasingly Obvious Colorism Problem.

During the Televised Revolution: The Beings of Pose panel, Angel Curiel, Dyllón Burnside, Hailie Sahar, Indya Moore, and MJ Rodriguez sat down with moderator Jayce Baron, where he asked the cast to address the criticism from fans, specifically mentioning a line Lulu said during Candy's funeral where she believed Candy treated her poorly because she was "light skin and thick." 

This is the space where Murphy’s Pose first encounters issues. The “quality” discourse that surrounds it  always already intimates that the imagined audience is white, middle class and financially well off (or at least stable), and not one that is, what I have called elsewhere a BLAMP, or black, liberal, affluent, metropolitan professional audience. In this way, then, it is free to engage with pathologizing discourses about race. In the pilot episode, one of the series’ leading characters, Damon Richards, a young black gay man with a passion for dance, is thrown out of his home by his father, a move that is endorsed by his mother. There are, sadly, many young LGBT youth who are rejected by their families and are either forcibly removed from the familial home or choose to leave it because of the conditions therein. However, in Murphy’s hands, this trope seems to only play out when there are characters of color involved. On Glee, while Kurt’s father almost immediately grabs a rainbow flag and heads down to PFLAG, Santana’s abuela is fiercely anti-lesbian. I am aware that such action serves as a narrative catalyst, but given the ways people of color generally, and black people specifically, are stereotyped as anti-gay, that Pose is largely imagined as a show for white, cisgender folks is problematic. White folks (largely) hold the belief that black folks (as a monolithic group) are anti-gay (forgetting that anti-gay legislation, which often gets codified into law, is spearheaded by white, often male, politicians).  Because of this belief, the beginning of the episode is understood as a narrative catalyst. Pose uses the mythology that people of color are anti-gay to re-tether and reify such a pathology that can be observed across news and entertainment media. Part of the ease with which Murphy can engage with such discursive treatment of queers of color is via casting. While Murphy seemed to eschew verisimilitude when casting wheelchair-bound Artie on Glee with an able-bodied actor, or his choice to cast heterosexual actor Justin Bartha as one half of a gay couple on The New Normal, Pose was approached differently. Instead of falling back on what Kristen Warner calls the “best actor discourse”—the entertainment industry’s insistence that when casting any role, the best actor is sought, regardless of race, gender, sexuality or ability—Ryan Murphy thought the politics of representing queer and trans people of color was too great to be handed to heterosexual actors of color donning gayface and transface. Murphy’s interest in casting queer and trans actors of color can be read as merely satisfying demands for inclusion without actually challenging the larger structural and systemic labor issues. As I have documented elsewhere, casting directors who are engaged to cast gay roles (wrongly) insist that they cannot ask an actor’s sexual orientation or gender identity. However, even if that were true, it seems queer that casting director Alexa L. Fogel would “just happen to” be able to find queer and trans actors who both identify as such and happen to be deemed “best” by whatever nebulous criteria the best actor is judged. I argue here, as I have elsewhere, that such casting decisions, while wonderful, financially and professionally, for out LGBT actors of color who might not otherwise find work within a big-budget productions, are subterfuge. These gay and trans actors of color function as a shield for Pose’s problematic representational politics. Jeremy Butler has argued that actors, the characters they play and their “star texts” become inextricably linked within audience reception practices. As such, if one expresses disapproval of any of Pose’s LGBT characters, it could be construed as a critique of actors. Such a set of discursive practices functions to quiet criticism of such characterizations in a media environment in which representation of LGBT bodies (not to mention raced LGBT bodies) remains precarious. A second way Pose attempts to shield itself from criticism is via the involvement of trans activist Janet Mock as a writer and producer for the series. Fascinatingly, Pose is Mock’s first credit as a writer and only her second as producer, the first being 2016’s The Trans List. My aim in calling attention to Mock’s involvement with the series and her relatively slight resume is not to belittle her talent; Rather I argue that her involvement functions to deflect critique about the ways the show represents trans people of color. It is important to note that Ryan Murphy is a white cisgender gay man who ultimately profits (like Jennie Livingston, director of Paris is Burning, and a consultin/g producer on Pose) from telling (and exploiting?) the lives of queer and trans people of color. While he certainly has opened doors for these queer and trans actors, the fact remains that it is his white capital within a fundamentally racist industry that allows Pose to be made. And by focusing on employing trans folks, like Mock, Pose deflects the problematic narrative by trotting out the (secondary) trans and queer folks who are involved in its production.  In fact, Mock was the only producer to appear alongside Murphy and co-executive producer Brad Falchuk and the cast at the 2018 Television Critics Association (TCA) winter press tour. At TCA, Mock spoke about trans representation and that the characters in Pose were being written as “beyond the struggle with their bodies, with people calling them by their right name. These are people who are creating new ways of having family — chosen family through the ballroom networks.” Mock’s comments are important for two reasons. First, she centers a post-transness that suggests that the trans characters within the series are “beyond” the concerns of gender dysmorphia gesturing toward the notion that the “transition story” is one of the most frequent tropes within mainstream media when engaging with trans people’s stories. However, despite Mock’s suggestion, the series does, in fact, feature a story line in which Elektra Abundance struggles with her body, and has to weigh whether her gender dysmorphia is more important than keeping her boyfriend who does not want her to undergo gender re-assignment surgery (spoiler alert: she goes through with the surgery and loses her boyfriend as a result).   Concomitantly, in exploring dating and trans women of color, the series positions white men as the “prize” for these down-on-their-luck women. When Elektra “disobeys” her white boyfriend’s wishes and undergoes gender re-assignment surgery, she is evicted from the apartment that serves as her home and the headquarters of the House of Abundance that she leads. In addition, Latina trans woman Angel also seeks a relationship with a married white man who initially engages her services as a prostitute. When their relationship moves beyond that of a prostitute and her John, he rents her an apartment, becoming a literal white savior who “rescues” her from life living in a small apartment that is called the House of Evangelista. Because whiteness has capital in what Dwight A. McBride calls “queer marketplaces of desire,” the “obvious” choice for these trans women of color is to desire white men.  McBride forwards that “Much like capital, whiteness is a valuable commodity in a fundamentally racist culture.  Its value is so compelling, so complete, that it reaches even the most intimate parts of our lives as sexual, desiring and loving subjects.” In this way, Pose gestures toward its SLUMPY audience by serving up and centering whiteness as cultural capital within queer marketplaces of desire even as the series ostensibly revolves around the lives of queer and trans people of color in 1980s New York City.

It is easy enough to identify the constituent factors in the reputed subversiveness of ball culture. Jim Farber's own formulation makes it quite clear that it is the demonstration of the "mutability of identity"-effected in particular through ball contestants' achievement of Realness-that provides the requisite "edge" to the culture's sociopolitical significance. According to John Howell, that demonstration inevitably raises the questions:" [W]hat is authentic in social roles? Who does our culture reward and who does it exclude, and how different are they? What is male, what is female? Can our chromosomal hard-wiring be reprogrammed?"[11]. Howell's identification of these as "bottom-line questions" implies that the mere posing of them is a radical political act; and since, according to Howell, it is "voguing" itself that thus "leads us to deep issues," ball practice emerges, in his rendering, as the clear agent of subversive critique. But, of course, however critically efficacious it may be, Realness styling itself appears as the effect of a motivated regimen undertaken by specific identifiable agents, namely, the "voguers" who, in Farber's terms, achieve "personality overhauls" by actively" construct[ing] their identities." These formulations manifest a curious conflation. By way of indicating the intentionality of their efforts to make themselves over as recognizable types-to "overhaul" their attitudes and appearances, as they indisputably do-Farber concomitantly suggests that the ball contestants enact an equally voluntaristic transformation in their very selves, figured here as their" personalities" and "identities." The positing of such an accomplishment is potentially appealing for at least two closely related reasons: (1) it imputes to denizens of the ball milieu an expanded agency whereby they seem able to alter apparently fundamental elements of social experience; and (2) it thus recuperates those same personages as active producers not only of political critique but of significant social-structural change. Thus the attractiveness of this scenario is easy to understand. After all, a (if not the) primary challenge of contemporary culture is the achievement of some degree of resistant political agency that isn't immediately undercut by any of the various infrastructural mechanisms through which it is registered and disseminated; and for such agency to be achieved by persons who are profoundly socially and politically marginalized as poor gay blacks and latino/as would be particularly heartening. Whatever the desirability of that achievement, though, it is by no means clear that it actually occurs in the drag-ball context-that, in other words, the effective subjectivity exercised by the ball queens in the overhauling of their appearances constitutes such sociopolitical agency as would be entailed in the "constructing of their identities." For this latter agency implies a capacity not only to style one's aspect but to exercise some control over the conditions of its general reception. However much they might enjoy such a capacity in the ballroom, the subjects of Paris Is Burning were definitively shown to lack it beyond the ball context when they attempted to redefine the terms of the film's success.

For erotic agency, then, to be effective as a practice of freedom, it cannot merely situate itself in the present and seek to indefinitely accommodate its sense of place in current regimes of biopolitics and sexual citizenship. As Lorde insists, one cannot destroy the master’s house with the master’s tools.26 Fracturing the present (or penises) through affirming one’s erotic agency “bottom(s) up” is clearly insufficient to create the necessary freedoms that would have a transformative effect on our lives. Valorizing the diverse sorts of erotic agency may be a necessary and indispensable act of affirmation for sustaining a life of the self-in-the-world against the odds, but it is still an insufficient condition for the effort of refashioning citizenship and unsettling the violence of erasures in the past and present; unless one can show that of itself, erotic agency is capable of engendering a politics that is aimed at bringing about something new, breaking with the old and obsolete structures of power and place. How does a recognition of erotic agency enable such a mo(ve)ment beyond a certain immersion in the present politics of citizenship in postcolonial states? Erotic agents may well be able to expand the notion of citizenship for themselves. But, if the ontologies of modern power remain reproduced by exclusion, one may ask, at what price Sheller’s “citizenship from below”? What is the sacrifice being contemplated and bargained for here? What type of communities may be gestated by it? [End Page 155]

The urge to refashion sexual citizenship notwithstanding, perhaps there is a more sinister or cynical context and story to be disclosed here—a tale that undoubtedly insinuates itself into the ways in which these erotic agents seek a “power of place” through dancehall cultural practices. And even if representing an erotic agency, these artistes may thus still be reproducing in their tactics for survival or freedom a sameness of market society’s fictions, fetishes, violence, and disavowal but at hitherto unforeseen scales. The gender-bending or queer activities champion an individual freedom—challenging a dehumanizing past and present but perhaps still deeply wedded to the promises that sustain neoliberal futures. What is undoubtedly consistent with the past is the continuous exercise of a struggle to overcome. Yet it appears as if futures remain shaped by the mantras of a neoliberal regime in a country where state presences and competitive and violent sovereignties coexist, reflecting and refracting an unholy politics that speeds up social and political processes of abject life. Might we be witnessing the first and deepest cut so far against “ancestral histories,” of silenced agencies that makes this idea of the inherent empowering potential of erotic agency a fading hope? This may be more sadly the case, if dancehall and its associated forms of embodied performances can be read also as the thinking and enacting of freedoms within the terms provided by neo-liberal regimes with their stress on self-responsibilization, distrust of (or weakened trust of) the more productive forms of national state governance,27 and a general drift to an alienating “cut throat market morality.”28

In the ballroom scene, “realness” is a form of theatrics wherein performers mimic the look and demeanor of, for example, a business executive or Ivy League student. Ballroom is a performance arena developed by queer people of Color in response to pervasive racism in the 1960s and 1970s drag queen pageants in the US (Street 2016). Documentary texts Paris is Burning (1990) and My House (2018) illustrate how ballroom members linguistically use realness as an identifier for when a queer person is performatively presenting “as much as possible like your straight counterpart” and “display[ing] how I blend in with other heterosexual people.” Thus, realness names a specific theatrical gender-bending methodology performers deploy at a ball to unmark their bodies as sexually queer and/or “gender nonconforming or as transgender” and visually present themselves within a racially and socioeconomically specific form of heteronormativity they do not personally embody (Bailey 2013, 59; 55). While realness is primarily used to name this specific form of ballroom performance, it also operates as a larger in-community discourse about how marginalization is effected via what Wiegman calls “economies of visibility,” or the rendering of stratification through visual observation of difference (1995, 4). In this regard, realness is an ideological outline for how marginalized people can performatively manipulate public perceptions that mark them as different. But outside the ballroom scene, mainstream entertainment and social media deploy realness with a starkly different connotation. For example, on the drag queen contest show RuPaul’s Drag Race, realness is linguistically used to denote an unusually creative or unique gender-bending look (e.g. “leprechaun realness” or “X-men weird angel devil realness”) (March 23, 2015; April 14, 2017). In fact, in an argument between Drag Race judges over the elimination of contestant Courtney Act, RuPaul identifies Act’s realistic looking heterosexual and cisgender drag character as “doing this realness thing” and Michelle Visage retorts “I don’t want real; I want a drag queen” (April 7, 2014). This article investigates the semiotic phenomenon of “realness,” specifically the difference between how ballroom members use the term and how it is engaged across popular English-language media texts. Over the last decade, realness has entered mainstream vernacular via television, entertainment news and literature, and social media. In these forums, realness takes on very different connotations than it does in the ballroom. Rookie Magazine (2012) says realness means “staying true to your roots and refusing to soften or change yourself for the dominant culture” and Redefining Realness author Janet Mock deploys it as a synonym for being “authentic, meaning who I actually am” and “proclaiming who you [are] to others” (2014, 249; 77). In these contexts, realness is not telegraphing the benefits of mimicking heteronormative identity but rather conveying the neoliberal ideology that publicly embracing one’s identity differences is economically and culturally beneficial. Certainly the meaning and application of linguistic signs shift and, in fact, some feminist theorists see term resignification projects as a critical means of altering power interests (Butler 1993; Enke 2012). But, as I will demonstrate, realness’ significant semiotic shift is neither affirmative nor neutral. Feminist resignification projects work to transform signs that are currently serving the hegemony into vehicles that enable oppressed groups to articulate power structures and form coalitions. Conversely, what I am calling “RuPaul realness” limits how marginalized populations can articulate their own modes of success, thus transforming their own cultural product into a tool that reifies the hegemonic structures that oppress them. I propose that a major reason for the multimodality of RuPaul realness stems from frequent usage on RuPaul’s Drag Race – Logo TV’s most successful show and now VH1 ratings powerhouse – and its extension to social media by the show’s producers and active fan base (Wortham 2018). Hasinoff (2008) and Thompson (2010) argue that US-based “televised talent/job search” contest shows model neoliberalism by framing successful contestants as those that understand how valuable their embodied differences are (Ouellette and Hay 2008, 127). Neoliberal identity politics contextualizes certain capacities of self as valuable “cards” in a commercial market. Thus, contestants’ successes serve as evidence that they were “self-enterprising” and did what was necessary to advance, including fashioning parts of themselves into marketable commodities (Ouellette and Hay 2008, 127). Brown refers to this as “human capital,” or the “economization” of subjects as their own “entrepreneurial and investment capital” (2015, 35, 33, 36). Many aspects of individual embodiment such as skin color were conceptually formulated as key human differences for the purpose of maintaining power and stratification. However, neoliberal identity politics frames oppressed differences as unique and authentic aspects of the self, and posits them as having a special capital advantage in a free market. Contestants often model neoliberal identity politics by making pride-based statements about their non-white racial or other marginalized identity designations (Hasinoff 2008, 335). I add to the literature on neoliberalism and contest television by demonstrating how this politics is communicated through the deployment of particular loaded buzzwords. On Drag Race, it happens when judges or contestants use realness as an adjective for an unusually fierce drag look or winning performance. The high frequency of realness usage on Drag Race may be due to the show’s “structured reality” format where producers shape narrative and flow (Hill 2014, 116). However, I argue that any realness statements are coproduced with contestants who desire to present themselves as likable or memorable characters. For the majority of queens that will not win Drag Race, building this notoriety directly feeds into their future career opportunities and successes. In this regard, realness is not merely a descriptor for fabulous drag but also a coded message about the commercial power of putting one’s fabulously queer self to work. In this article, I trace the semiotic shift of realness by first outlining how the term is deployed in the ballroom scene to delineate an innovative drag practice, convey cultural commentary, and articulate a minoritarian strategy of survival. I then explore how contest shows like Drag Race reflect neoliberal identity politics when they commodify minority cultural products for mass commercial consumption. To document the neoliberal context and deployment of RuPaul realness, I conduct a content and textual analysis of season 4 (the noted launch point for Drag Race’s popularity) through its most recently completed season 10 (Framke 2017). I then compare this to how realness is used in various mass media texts, including in user-generated English-language Twitter posts where keywords and hashtags are critical shorthand communication devices. My study reveals that the widespread circulation of this resignified term maintains hegemonic power practices: realness has become a polemical discourse that delegitimizes the lived realities and success methods of the very individuals that created the term.

Just like Michel Foucault, queer theory has always regarded identity with deep suspicion and it upholds this aversion as an antidote that redresses the constraints posed by the subject, ones that various feminist, critical race, and lesbian and gay identity politics are said to leave intact (Ryan 2001, 325-326; Ford 2007, 479-482).2 Queer theory enlists Foucault’s politics of non-identity, and variations thereof, to ferret out and undo the limits of the subject so that you might “cease to be imprisoned in your own face, in your own past, in your own identity” (Miller 1993, 264). The distrust of identity that drives queer theory is so ingrained that it often turns its suspicion back in on itself in that even “queer anti-identity narratives” are now located, for instance by Jasbir Puar (2007), on the same “continuum that privileges the pole of identity as the evolved form of Western modernity” (222). Queer practices of non-identity, it turns out, are just as vulnerable to (re) presenting the subject through homonationalist re-territorializations that institute queer non-identity as an identity politic after all.3 Turned back on itself, queer theory’s mistrust of identity politics has lead it to take up the politics of assemblage and to pursue identity’s collapse: with a “cacophony of informational flows, energetic intensities, bodies, and practices that undermine coherent identity and even queer anti-identity narratives” (222), “to conceive the pure experience, event and dramatization of many sexes without falling back onto the ontological constitution of queer sexuality” (Parisi 2009, 72), by “opening up to the fantastical wonders of futurity” and affect to resist forces that rationalize identities into finite and narrow existence (Puar 2007, 222), and to evade “singularity” in favour of “collectivity, imagination and a kind of situationist commitment to surprise and shock” (Halberstam 2011, 29).4 As a result, queer Deluezean approaches also demonstrate the deep suspicion of identity that reverberates throughout queer theory and Foucauldian approaches; as Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (2009) explain, Deleuzean approaches set out to “queer the queer” by circumventing the question of (non-)identity, because they are “not just against this or that particular identity as not being politically useful, but against the very concept of identity and the thinking it engenders” (5).5

Where queer theory more recently engages Gilles Delueze to undercut the influence of Foucault’s politics of non-identity, as an identity politic, the similarity of purpose to which both philosophers have been put is uncanny, because it was always with “flows,” “intensities,” “bodies,” “practices,” and new “pleasures,” or affect, that queer theories set out, originally with Foucault, to disrupt the trap of identity. To this extent, the suspicion of identity with which queer theory, like a reflex, turns on itself again and again, must also demand, if it hasn’t already, this inevitable conclusion: the queer politics of assemblage recreates the same problems of (non-)identity that Deleuze is used to dodge, for instance, via the claim that queer non-identity is penetrated by the pole of identity.

Because of its recent academic high profile, queer theory has been subjected to extensive criticism. Included in these criticisms is that queer theorists, in their radical nominalism, ignore the material world of actual persons and relationships, preferring instead to focus on grammatical and semantic analysis of texts and on conditions of reception-consumption, thereby drawing attention away from economic inequity and actual relations of exploitation. Critics charge, moreover, that, despite or because of its historicism, queer theory transforms changes in fashion into major shifts in epistemology, thereby obscuring continuity in human experience across time and cultures, thus denying gay men and lesbians the benefit of a history and a universality arguably well grounded in reality. Further, by ignoring politics for other aspects of culture, queer theorists may elevate cross-dressing heavy metal performances, for example, to the same importance as Supreme Court decisions. Queer theory is also criticized for avoiding the reality of core identities by transforming them into mere subjectivities, thereby departing from human experience and intuition. Presentation of queer theory, so another indictment runs, is incestuous in citation, dogmatic in thought, and impenetrable in style and vocabulary. Canonical texts of queer studies by Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Butler, and Sedgwick are repetitively redescribed with increasing obscurity not required for works already remarkably obscure. Major lacunae in thought are papered over by repetitive assertion of formulary phrases advanced as dogma. Incredibly convoluted sentences are often studded with recondite words, neologisms, and familiar words used unfamiliarly. In the view of some critics, queer theory has produced a series of adverse effects on gay politics, redirecting attention from the materiality of actual social conditions to language, from the disruption of bodies through violence to the disruption of homophobic performance. The claim is made that interest is drawn away from perennial questions in gay politics which truly matter, e.g., assimilation vs. minority group, insider politics vs. confrontation, and contention over issue selection, to questions which have only rarely been asked. More specifically, queer theory erases gay identity, thereby weakening social justice and civil rights movements, creating a sense of futility about achieving amelioration of conditions for sexual minorities and strengthening the sense of division already endemic among gay advocates. In the view of some critics, queer theory enhances misunderstanding between the ivory tower and the street, between academics, who should be among the spokespersons for gay interests, and gay activists and their constituencies. Queer theory is also faulted for failing to recognize that politics is a part of culture, even popular culture, just as much as performance art and sit-coms. Finally, by its emphasis on individualism and on the creation of self through consumption practices, queer theory drains the pool of those who might become committed to achieving a common good.

In certain ways, Schudson’s initial reluctance to dismiss public conversation echoes my own early reservations, given the ideals of egalitarianism, empowerment, and mutual respect conversational advocates champion. Still, in the spirit of the dialectic ostensibly underlying dialogic premises, this essay argues that various negative consequences can result from transporting conversational and therapeutic paradigms into public problem solving. In what follows, I extend Schudson’s critique of a conversational model for democracy in two ways: First, whereas Schudson primarily offers a theoretical analysis, I interrogate public conversation as a praxis in a variety of venues, illustrating how public “conversation” and “dialogue” have been coopted to silence rather than empower marginalized or dissenting voices. In practice, public conversation easily can emulate what feminist political scientist Jo Freeman termed “the tyranny of structurelessness” in her classic 1970 critique of consciousness-raising groups in the women’s liberation movement,15 as well as the key traits Irving L. Janis ascribes to “groupthink.”16 Thus, contrary to its promotion as a means to neutralize hierarchy and exclusion in the public sphere, public conversation can and has accomplished the reverse. When such moves are rendered transparent, public conversation and dialogue, I contend, risk increasing rather than diminishing political cynicism and alienation.

Second, whereas Schudson focuses largely on ways a conversational model for democracy may mute an individual’s voice in crafting a resolution on a given question at a given time, I draw upon insights of Dana L. Cloud and others to consider ways in which a therapeutic, conversational approach to public problems can stymie productive, collective action in two respects.17 First, because conversation has no clearly defined goal, a public conversation may engender inertia as participants become mired in repeated airings of personal experiences without a mechanism to lend such expressions direction and closure. As Freeman aptly notes, although “[u]nstructured groups may be very effective in getting [people] to talk about their lives[,] they aren’t very good for getting things done. Unless their mode of operation changes, groups flounder at the point where people tire of ‘just talking.’”18 Second, because the therapeutic bent of much public conversation locates social ills and remedies within individuals or dynamics of interpersonal relationships, public conversations and dialogues risk becoming substitutes for policy formation necessary to correct structural dimensions of social problems. In mimicking the emphasis on the individual in therapy, Cloud warns, the therapeutic rhetoric of “healing, consolation, and adaptation or adjustment” tends to “encourage citizens to perceive political issues, conflicts, and inequities as personal failures subject to personal amelioration.”19

I begin with this general sense of queer youth and the complicated relationship they have to queer adults to draw attention to the everyday complexities that go into being and becoming queer in the twenty-first century. It is, to put it simply, not a straightforward process or experience. I forgo specificity to think broadly about the diverse ways in which queer youth, in varied contexts and realities, are generally going about their day and becoming in relationship to the broader worlds they inhabit. They are, by means of being youth, going about their days thinking less about many of the issues queer scholars engage—including myself in the coming pages—and more about the possibilities and limitations that lie before them. They, with their youthful zest, see a world filled with potential and possibility. It is not a perfect world, as queer youth inching toward an explicit queer relation to the world are far from ignorant of the issues queerness raises in and for their lives. However, it is a world that they are increasingly sure they have a right to inhabit, engage, and transform. They are, unlike other generations, asserting themselves earlier in life and, as such, could benefit from queer opportunities that connect them with queer generations (a topic for the next chapter).

This is, for me, a hopeful image of queer youth and an image that I try to hold with me in my own daily engagements where conversations, by and large, focus on queer youth as victims. It is also the image that propels the purpose of this book—a book that as you will read builds upon decades of queer scholarship that has pushed and prodded the world to become kinder to queers (to put it quite simply). After decades of generating queer scholarship that honors (often perversely) queerness, emerging generations have expanded opportunities to come into presence. To be clear, while I hold this image of queer youth with me, this book is not about queer youth, but about the histories and futures of queer realities that were once youthful and a push for recognizing unseen queer potentials in the youth of the future. This may, for some, sound a bit wishy-washy. The lack of specificity might read unsure or unaware of the specific challenges and realities queer youth and adults face in the present. And this may be the case—I am not an expert in specific realities beyond my own and those within my vicinity. My refusal to specify here is a recognition that queerness—at its heart—is ever shifting and difficult to pin down. Any specific mention of a queer youth, for instance, one who became prom king (or queen) or one who recently committed suicide, would already begin to foreclose other queer possibilities and the complexities therein. For me, the move to specify also feels like a move to use a queer youth to make an argument. I sense queer youth—particularly queer youth who are victimized, bullied, or commit suicide—are taken up in the grind of the media and academy to become a “cause,” often simplified or reduced to a particular talking point. There is, to be sure, a political salience to this and one I myself will take up on several occasions. However, I begin with and honor the general because for me it is helpful in allowing readers to read in their own specifics, in their own contexts, given the diversity of experiences and intersectional realities of our lives. Additionally, I am a “generalist” in education, so I tend toward the general “big picture,” leaving specificity to those more suited to such work. For now, as readers, hopeful queers might see their optimism reflected back at them, but with a recognition that there is work to be done; while pessimistic queers might scoff at such optimism while secretly realizing the world can (and should) be different. Bored queers may simply remain bored, bored by the incessant academizing of queer experiences. But, back to the issues at hand—childhood, children, and queerness. When I was a child, Whitney Houston taught me that it was her belief “the children are our future.”1 It was an important lesson for me as a child, because I was allowed to imagine the future. I was the future and it was important to teach me well so that I, and other children, could lead the way in that, what seemed then, rather distant future. The future is, to be sure, a rather complicated concept. I am here in the future of my then-imagined childhood, although it is both more and less fabulous than I could have imagined. The future is always there, in the distance, and there are always more children for whom that future is. However, which children are allowed to be children and have a future is, as significant scholarship has shown, quite narrow (Greteman & Wojcikiewicz, 2014; Letts & Sears, 1999; Meiners, 2017; Pritchard, 2013; Weems, 1999). Children, particularly queer children, and the future have been something educational scholars and queer theorists have contemplated for some time. In this chapter, I assemble some of the ways in which queer children and the future have been contemplated to build upon such work in further elucidating what I am calling “queer thrival.” If children are our future—and in some sense, they always are—the ways in which we imagine or are allowed to imagine both “children” and the “future” greatly impact the ways in which those very concepts come to function in our daily work, particularly in education. In assembling previous work addressing children, the future, and queerness, I attend closely to such work that exposed—through their paranoia—the violence, the limits, and challenges faced by queerness in education. Such paranoia has been central in recognizing the challenges queer youth face, yet changes have happened that would do well to be engaged to not only push for the safety of queer youth, but their ability to thrive. We need, to harken back to the last chapter, heterogeneous reading practices that recognize the contributions of paranoid readings while opening space for contingently, reparative readings and their possibilities. Queerness and Challenges to Liberalism The challenge of children “growing up” is central to the work of schools where children are presumably taught well to lead the way when they become “grownups.” We know for sure, however, that many students are not taught well and are never able to lead the way due to any number of cultural, institutional, interpersonal, and disciplinary barriers (Collins, 2010). Students that are in such a marginalized position are, at the same time, more often than not, the students that push the limits, demanding recognition and access through various means—be that walk-outs, protests, or other forms of resistance. It is in fact, as we have seen since desegregation, children who lead the way into hostile environments so that the future has the possibility of being different. While there are demands to protect children and arguments made “for their own good,” I suspect history shows us that children, when faced with adversity, are able to survive and thrive, leading the way not there in some imagined future but in their present, as they demand they have a future. This is not meant to romanticize children or childhood, but to call attention to the material lives of children who we have historically seen push the limits of democratic liberalism. Cris Mayo (2006) recognized the need to push the limits of liberalism in education because, “liberalism has been suspiciously unwilling to extend its analysis of freedom to sexual freedom, its embrace of autonomy to queer critique, its sense of progression toward new possibilities to queer futurities” (p. 471). Liberalism, to put it bluntly, has been uninterested in queerness. In liberal discourses, as Mayo noted, There is a tension between discussing how people, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (lgbt) people, might be recognized by law and given (or denied) certain legal rights on the basis of their identity and how queer people, not always fully recognizable as inhabiting particular identity categories, might also live their potentials. (p. 469) Liberalism requires recognizable identities by which to protect. Recent gains in LGBT rights illustrate this requirement as LGBT persons have gained rights and recognitions, be it to marriage, the military, or anti-discrimination. Yet, queer—as a political stance—is tasked with pushing against such recognitions and norms (Ford, 2007). LGBT people are a voting block more and more recognized through LGBT advocacy groups. Queer people, on the other hand, fall outside and beyond such recognitions to illustrate the persistence of exclusion and the possibility for alternatives. Or, as Puar (2007) illustrated, LGBT rights can be used as a cudgel against other queer forms of being.

Secondly, governments must begin to treat domestic and care work as work, to recognise that work within the economy and back that recognition up with cash. The infrastructure of education, healthcare, social security, elder care and childcare that has been privatised and defunded over the past forty years must be revitalised and properly funded, so that the burden of reproducing life is no longer foisted onto Black, brown, immigrant and working-class women. The work of care, the work of common survival, has never been more critical than it is now. And like all monumental tasks, the work of keeping the species alive through the coming century will be more manageable if we can find a way, finally, to share it.

While the LGBT movement has been on the cutting edge of pushing for more equitably distributed health care in the above areas, however, it has neglected others. For example, since effective treatments made HIV a diagnosis Americans could live with instead of die from, queer activists haven’t challenged drug-company profiteering at home and abroad as much as they once did in the 1980s and ’90s. (Some activists, such as those of Black Lives Matter, on the other hand, have recently opposed antiquated statutes that criminalize HIV transmission.) Second, the movement ought now to turn to our most vulnerable: the young, the elderly, and other groups—especially transgender women of color—who face poverty and endemic violence. The movement has productively drawn attention to the bullying teens face when they come out while still in school and living with their families. It is less clear whether or how we will tackle the problems senior citizens face. As queer baby boomers retire, many lack children to care for them and/or find that moving to a nursing home means they cannot be as out as safely as before. But the LGBT movement could ally with others in calling for expanding Social Security and other safety-net programs, which would benefit both gay and straight senior citizens. The third and final policy area to which U.S. activists must attend is the trickiest: LGBT equality abroad. The suffering of so many queer people around the world cries out for international solidarity: as Hillary Clinton rightly said, LGBT rights are human rights. And there are concrete things U.S. policy can do to help. But Clinton also more recently bragged of her “tough conversations with foreign leaders who did not accept that human rights applied to everyone, gay and straight.” Our policy and rhetoric should be calibrated by the fact that we—like Clinton herself—are ourselves latecomers to this cause. LGBT activists should therefore resist such clash-of-civilizations rhetoric, or what queer theorist Jasbir Puar has called “homonationalism”: the use of gay rights as a symbol of our civilizational modernity and superiority. The examples of far-right Dutch and German politicians, who invoke gay rights as a cudgel to demonize Muslim immigrants, point to the dangers that accompany such an arrogant posture. Let us not be enlisted in militarism and Islamophobia, but rather—as Barack Obama, the gay rights president, said in his second inaugural—in being part of the legacy of “Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.”

2. Punk Negativity Lee Edelman’s book, No Future, makes perhaps the most powerful and controversial recent contribution to anti-social queer theory (Edelman, 2005). Edelman’s polemic describes the rejection of futurity as the meaning of queer critique and links queer theory to the death drive in order to propose a relentless form of negativity in place of the forward looking, reproductive and heteronormative politics of hope that animates all too many political projects. The queer subject, he argues, has been bound epistemologically, to negativity, to nonsense, to anti-production, to unintelligibility and, instead of fighting this characterization by dragging queerness into recognition, he proposes that we embrace the negativity that we anyway structurally represent. Edelman’s polemic about futurity ascribes to queerness the function of the limit; while the heteronormative political imagination propels itself forward in time and space through the indisputably positive image of the child, and while it projects itself back on the past through the dignified image of the parent, the queer subject stands between heterosexual optimism and its realization. At this political moment, Edelman’s book constitutes a compelling argument against a US imperialist project of hope, and one of the most powerful statements of queer studies’ contribution to an anti-imperialist, queer counter-hegemonic imaginary and yet, I want to engage critically with Edelman’s project here in order to argue for a more explicitly political framing of the anti-social project. While Edelman frames his polemic against futurity with epigraphs by Jacques Lacan and Virginia Woolf, he omits the more obvious reference that his title conjures up and that echoes through recent queer anti-social aesthetic production, namely “God Save the Queen” as sung by The Sex Pistols. While The Sex Pistols used the refrain “no future” to reject a formulaic union of nation, monarchy and fantasy, Edelman tends to cast material political concerns as crude and pedestrian, as already a part of the conjuring of futurity that his project must foreclose. Indeed, Edelman turns to the unnervingly tidy and precise theoretical contractions of futurity in Lacan because, like Lacan and Woolf, and unlike the punks, he strives to exert a kind of obsessive control over the reception of his own discourse. Twisting and turning back on itself, reveling in the power of inversion, Edelman’s syntax itself closes down the anarchy of signification. In footnotes and in chiasmic formulations alike he shuts down critique and withholds the future and fantasies of it from the reader. One footnote predicts critiques of his work based upon its “elitism,” “pretension,” whiteness and style and the footnote projects other objections on the grounds of “apolitical formalism” (Edelman, 2005). He professes himself unsympathetic to all such responses and having foreclosed the future, continues on his way in a self-enclosed world of cleverness and chiasmus. Edelman’s polemic opens the door to a ferocious articulation of negativity (“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” [29]) but, ultimately, he does not fuck the law, big or little L, he succumbs to the law of grammar, the law of logic, the law of abstraction, the law of apolitical formalism, the law of genres.

Reconnecting the Dots The old ecological adage is right: everything is connected. The planet and its atmosphere are the material base on which all other human activity rests. Today, capitalism drives most of that activity. At every turn, carbon emissions are entangled with the drive for profit and filtered through the lived realities of race, class, gender, and place. Yet policy discussions tend to divide climate change into silos, offering analyses sector by sector—buildings, transportation, power plants, agriculture—and targeted solutions for addressing them one at a time. But each issue intersects with others in countless ways. Climate change, the economy, social inequalities—they’re all tied up together. So we break the problem down in a way that emphasizes the connections between politics, economics, and carbon, using a holistic, political economy approach that could be applied to any number of issues. A Planet to Win devotes a chapter each to four strategic battlegrounds: fossil fuels and private utilities; labor; the built environment; and the global supply chains of a renewable transition. In each, we explore our vision of what a Green New Deal could do and how to dig into the struggles ahead. For a stable climate and a more equal world, we have to simultaneously unmake our fossil-fueled lifestyles and build infrastructures that equitably distribute renewable energy. We have to dismantle the most powerful industry on earth incredibly fast, or the things we build to replace it won’t matter. That means tackling fossil capital head on. To do that, we’ll need the power that comes with a renewed labor movement—which means overcoming longstanding tensions between labor and environmental politics. There’s a lot of work to do to build a world that runs on sunshine. But all the work we’ll need to retrofit homes and erect wind turbines, solar arrays, and transmission lines doesn’t exhaust the category of “green jobs.” Far from it. In our vision, care work—construed broadly to encompass reproducing our communities and restoring the planet’s ecosystems—is just as essential to a green economy. Even the energy transition itself isn’t just about swapping out one energy source for another. Energy systems are embedded in everyday life: they shape everything from transit to housing to the landscapes traversed by power lines. We dig into the guts of all these systems to show how at every turn, remaking our built environment is wrapped up with politics—and opportunities for liberation. Finally, we have to track the implications of an energy transition beyond US borders. A transition in the United States can’t come at the cost of more devastation elsewhere. Basic solidarity means respecting the democratic will of communities who supply the lithium, cobalt, copper, and other resources needed to produce renewable energy and who bear the brunt of extraction’s effects. Building solidarity across borders is the best way to strengthen global climate cooperation rooted in justice. Coda: The Next Crisis At the time of writing, in summer 2019, the Trumpian nightmare feels ghoulishly routine. But change comes in volcanic bursts, and the magma beneath us is boiling. Over the last two centuries, organized movements have repeatedly built enough strength to make vast social change, transforming worldviews and material conditions: the abolitionists of the nineteenth century, the movement for women’s suffrage, the radical labor movement, the civil rights movement, queer liberation. Broad majorities for radical change always start as militant minorities. Today, militant organizing is everywhere, from the explosive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America to the teachers’ strike wave to the migrants’ rights movement, and increased mobilization around racial justice, housing justice, reproductive justice, and Indigenous rights. Even scientists are marching on Washington. There’s also the matter of crisis. President Obama wasted his, but more are on the horizon. A global economic slump looms; climate disasters are unfolding faster than ever. Ecological and economic crises are sure to coincide and mutually reinforce. At the time of writing, Americans are struggling to make their car loan payments, and student debt is obliterating the bank accounts of millions of millennials. There are billions of dollars in real estate value in housing markets that are literally about to go underwater —forever—in places like Miami Beach. Oil majors, some of the world’s biggest companies, are valued based on their reserves—which contain roughly five times as much carbon as we can burn without destroying civilization. The Bank of England is warning all who will listen about these “stranded assets.” In 2008, we saw what a few million bad mortgages could do to a hyperfinancialized, overleveraged, and interconnected global economy. Worse is coming. We don’t celebrate or romanticize brutal breakdowns of social, economic, and political stability. But as Naomi Klein showed to such devastating effect in her book The Shock Doctrine, the Right plans for crises meticulously. We should, too. If we can organize in advance, we can use the openings created by the next crises to directly attack their root causes. No more crises wasted. Whenever they strike, those coming crises will be chances to charge forward with our organizing. And when market crashes coincide with progressives and leftists holding state power, militant organizing proliferating, and millions marching in the streets, our leverage will be huge. Each win that cuts carbon and betters everyday life lays the groundwork for more. The premise of a radical Green New Deal is that we’re entering a new era for politics—a whole new terrain, material and imaginative, for deciding how to channel our collective energies. The future is coming at us fast—but we still have the chance to shape it. We have nothing to lose, and a planet to win.

In this vein, Rosemary Hennessy (2000) pinpoints the co-optation of lesbian and gay communities and argues that capitalism does not need heteronormativity to function. Rather, she affirms, neoliberal capitalism mobilizes desire in order to obtain compliance from individuals. At the same time, the neoliberal precarization of workforce undermines traditional gender identities (Völker 2011) as much as precarization builds upon the feminization of labour and the continuity of coloniality, for example in domestic care work (cf. Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2011). Acknowledging the danger of co-optation, yet turning it into a case for an anti-capitalist queer politics, Lisa Duggan (2003) demands that a queer politics of rights and cultural representations be thoroughly intertwined with a politics of economic justice, in order to halt the politics of upward redistribution enforced by neoliberal politicians. Thus, the increasing socio-cultural integration of diversified genders and sexualities cannot simply be celebrated, but has to be analysed in its double-edged role (Engel 2013). Nonetheless, neoliberal policies can equally rely on the neo-traditionalization of heteronormative and patriarchal family structures, on nationalist and racist identity constructions, and on an intensification of the exploitative global division of labour. Accordingly, other authors address the contradictory effects of capitalism as simultaneously liberatory and exploitative of precarious bodies and subjects, arguing that resistance and anti-capitalist politics have to be developed from within neoliberal subjectivation (Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan 2002; Pühl 2003; Engel 2009; Kolářová 2011; Woltersdorff 2011).

While they vary in form and focus, the contributions to this issue of Critical Analysis of Law invite reflection on what I take to be one of the animating ambitions of queer legal teaching and writing on sex and sexuality law: to radically reimagine and rethink the relationship between legal theory and legal practice (a relationship, it should be noted, which in the U.S. common law system and legal academy has always accorded priority and primacy to the latter). If the central object of mainstream sex law scholarship is the theory of legal practice, the field-defining feature of queer legal studies is a preoccupation with the practice of legal theory or, more precisely, a reflexive understanding that the practice of legal theory is a kind of legal practice and not just a second-order theory about law practice. Put another way, queer legal studies involves a commitment by those who do it to active and ongoing mindfulness of the ways in which legal theorizing about sex, gender and sexuality, like all legal theory, is a practice that takes place “in the world, as well as in the academy.” 3

“Queer legal methods” (and we must speak here in the plural) thus reject the traditional and (at least in the U.S.) still dominant view that positions legal scholars and the practice of legal scholarship in a domain which—at least aspirationally or “in theory”—is separate and distinct from, and only contingently connected to, the legal actors, ideologies and institutions law studies. Queer legal inquiry understands itself to be immanently located, embedded and invested in the field of sex and gender law that it investigates.

Over the past decade, the “cult of irrelevance” in political science scholarship has been lamented by a growing chorus (Putnam 2003; Nye 2009; Walt 2009). Prominent scholars of international affairs have diagnosed the roots of the gap between academia and policymaking, made the case for why political science research is valuable for policymaking, and offered a number of ideas for enhancing the policy relevance of scholarship in international relations and comparative politics (Walt 2005,2011; Mead 2010; Van Evera 2010; Jentleson and Ratner 2011; Gallucci 2012; Avey and Desch 2014). Building on these insights, several initiatives have been formed in the attempt to “bridge the gap.”2 Many of the specific efforts put in place by these projects focus on providing scholars with the skills, platforms, and networks to better communicate the findings and implications of their research to the policymaking community, a necessary and worthwhile objective for a field in which theoretical debates, methodological training, and publishing norms tend more and more toward the abstract and esoteric. Yet enhancing communication between scholars and policymakers is only one component of bridging the gap between international affairs theory and practice. Another crucial component of this bridge is the generation of substantive research programs that are actually policy relevant—a challenge to which less concerted attention has been paid. The dual challenges of bridging the gap are especially acute for graduate students, a particular irony since many enter the discipline with the explicit hope of informing policy. In a field that has an admirable devotion to pedagogical self-reflection, strikingly little attention is paid to techniques for generating policy-relevant ideas for dissertation and other research topics. Although numerous articles and conference workshops are devoted to the importance of experiential and problem-based learning, especially through techniques of simulation that emulate policymaking processes (Loggins 2009; Butcher 2012; Glasgow 2012; Rothman 2012; DiCicco 2014), little has been written about the use of such techniques for generating and developing innovative research ideas. This article outlines an experiential and problem-based approach to developing a political science research program using scenario analysis. It focuses especially on illuminating the research generation and pedagogical benefits of this technique by describing the use of scenarios in the annual New Era Foreign Policy Conference (NEFPC), which brings together doctoral students of international and comparative affairs who share a demonstrated interest in policy-relevant scholarship.3 In the introductory section, the article outlines the practice of scenario analysis and considers the utility of the technique in political science. We argue that scenario analysis should be viewed as a tool to stimulate problem-based learning for doctoral students and discuss the broader scholarly benefits of using scenarios to help generate research ideas. The second section details the manner in which NEFPC deploys scenario analysis. The third section reflects upon some of the concrete scholarly benefits that have been realized from the scenario format. The fourth section offers insights on the pedagogical potential associated with using scenarios in the classroom across levels of study. A brief conclusion reflects on the importance of developing specific techniques to aid those who wish to generate political science scholarship of relevance to the policy world. What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science? Scenario analysis is perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision makers in future states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as serving the purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses. This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures, often referred to as “alternative worlds.” Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions. Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world, offered together with a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures. Good scenarios thus rely on explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013). Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental, economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges. Yet the ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-known cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate discontinuities in narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something altogether different from the known present. Designing Scenarios for Political Science Inquiry The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate and develop policy-relevant research programs. Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine how the future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats, scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic trends and dynamics. The notion of “exogeneity”—so prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself. Very simply, scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing questions in international affairs that demand focused investigation. Scenarios thus offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science research agenda. In practice, achieving this objective requires careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the scenario discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases.8 An explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around them—that of case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005). The use of scenarios is similar to counterfactual analysis in that it modifies certain variables in a given situation in order to analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore potential futures that could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the “funnel of choices” available to political actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while forward-looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual constraints imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge. We see scenarios as a complementary resource for exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces” which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario analysis process itself employs templates (discussed further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research agendas. The scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles” in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—in the absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance. The scenario approach to generating research ideas is grounded in the belief that these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to be of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and are designed to tease out issues scholars and policymakers may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin thinking critically about them now. This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the present as to avoid falling into current events analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction. In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass, participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for overturning the assumptions that prevent scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that arise in international affairs.

I want to attend to the reading practices that inform my own work here to be transparent to my readers, but also provide lessons on the different ways in which “theory” informs reading as a practice. I first came to think about reading practices through pragmatism—not queer theory. For some this might seem rather unqueer. There has been little written looking at the ways in which pragmatism and queer theory could be productive together, although I’ve tried (Greteman & Wojcikiewicz, 2014). Nor have pragmatists in general taken up a queer project, despite pragmatism being a little queer. That’s neither here nor there. What is of interest to me in this chapter are reading practices. As Cleo Cherryholmes (1999) illustrated, reading is more than meets the eye. Pragmatism itself is, as well, more than meets the eye. Pragmatism presents a particular form of reading that attends to action. I dwell on pragmatism here to reveal my own pragmatic leanings. I like pragmatism. I also tend to read things I like as I sense, as argued elsewhere, there are pedagogies and politics tied to liking (Greteman & Burke, 2017). Cherryholmes (1999) began Reading Pragmatism, noting that the reason to engage pragmatism was “that pragmatism looks to the consequences that we endlessly bump up against” (p. 3). And we bump up against consequences all day, every day. Those consequences are the results of things we—ourselves and others—have done as well as things far outside of our control. “Pragmatists conceptualize the world where we, all of us,” Cherryholmes argued, “are constantly thrown forward as the present approaches but never quite reaches the future” (p. 3). It is, in his estimation, “a discourse that attempts to bridge where we are with where we might end up” (p. 3). A key word, of course, being “might,” as pragmatism cannot predict what will come, but attends to contemplating conceivably what might come. We don’t know what will come, but we suspect we will come in some way to a future. Pragmatism is less a theory. Instead, it is a way of doing things in the world attending to the conceivable consequences of our actions. Queers come in the world, and in coming they encounter consequences, and not just theoretically.

I sense pragmatism’s attention to consequences is important decades into the existence of various queer theories that have offered readings of various types of objects—films, performances, novels, policies, experiences, and more. Those readings—once scandalous in the academy—have now become part of the academy. They have in infiltrating the institutions they once critiqued or parodied or subverted become practices that can inform work that more, now than ever, has the backing of the institution . And, with such institutionalization we can more, now than ever, contemplate the conceivable consequences of queer theory and its attendant practices. We might now be able to think about if and how queer theories have had and could continue to have consequences for the worlds we inhabit—through discourse, material practices, and more. What are the conceivable consequences of various types of queer readings? What do such readings do for readers as those readers encounter the daily work of living? This is a question I will hopefully provide responses to throughout the remainder of this book as I contemplate how queer theory—as I have read and encountered it—has allowed me to contemplate queer thriving.

Consider any government that decides to run a deficit by increasing spending. When it goes into deficit, it must sell government bonds to borrow the funds. Imagine those who buy these bonds are the richest in society. However, the burden of the debt financing falls on the whole population—everyone pays taxes. In such a case, the debt redistributes resources from the entire population to the wealthy holders of government debt. When (or if) the government decides to buy back those bonds to reduce the debt, it will also have to use tax revenues to do so. As a result, a transfer will occur towards the richest in society. In essence, it’s thus a regressive policy bound to increase inequality as long as those who buy the bonds are the richest.

We have a strong historical example of this—England during the 18th and 19th centuries. From the early 18th century until 1815, England is intermittently at war with the rest of Europe and wars are costly. England finances these wars mostly by borrowing on financial markets. By 1815, when they defeat Napoleon at Waterloo, the public debt is two-and-a-half times larger than the whole British economy. That proportion is larger than the one observed with the two World Wars. This was a massive debt – largely funded by wealthier British households.

There is only one true superpower. Since the end of the Second World War, we’ve seen the United States bestride the world like a colossus.

What makes the US such a potent ally and formidable adversary? Its nuclear arsenal? This helps. As does its incomparable navy and huge, hi-tech army. The soft power from its ubiquitous contributions to culture is clearly important. But none of these really explains America’s unique ability to project power globally. This is conferred by the mighty US dollar.