The impact is cruel optimism --- placing any form of hope into the state is uniquely bad for queer folk and divorces queerness from radical movements. The aff doesn’t address the root cause of queer inequality which is the untenable logics of capitalist accumulation.

The relationship between Berlant’s investment in the idea of the normal as a utopian desire mediated through and reflected in popular culture (which can be traced back to ‘Sex in public’),Footnote21 and her later reflection on the rise of an economic precarity that cuts across different identity markers in Cruel Optimism, deserves further, more nuanced attention. As Sianne Ngai observes in her incisive reading of the latter book, Berlant’s critique of the normative fantasy of the good life is deeply informed by her earlier work on sexuality, exemplifying ‘how queer theory, still regarded by many as a minoritizing-only discourse whose “proper object” must be limited to sex and issues related to sexual object choice, can directly contribute to debates about the universalizing concept of “precarity”’ (2013). Berlant’s reflection on the painful, injurious or, one could say, ‘negative’ attachments in contemporary social, cultural and political life aligns her work with the antisocial paradigm in queer studies, and the exploration of negativity that followed, as illustrated by Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman and, in more recent discussions of negative affect (though with a number of notable differences), by Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Heather Love and Sianne Ngai, among many others.Footnote22 More specifically, one could relate Berlant’s cruelly optimistic orientation toward the future, in a time when the fantasies of ‘upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy’Footnote23 are fraying, to the heteronormative temporal regimes in Western cultures examined by these scholars. Writing in the context of the 1980s at the peak of the AIDS crisis in the United States, BersaniFootnote24 scrutinizes how the disease was discursively constructed as a threat to the (white, heterosexual, middle-class) family unit at the heart of capitalist society, the ‘homosexual body’ having been opposed to marriage, parenthood and property. Rather than actively countering this stigmatization, and the identification of queerness with social failure, Bersani embraces the politics of negativity as a form of resistance to the heteronormative social order. Following Bersani, Edelman draws on the antisocial thesis to rethink the questions of queer temporality and futurity. In his influential No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, EdelmanFootnote25 shows how the symbolic figure of ‘the Child’, standing in for the future horizon and the promise of a better tomorrow, is deeply rooted in the heterosexual nuclear family ideal and its temporal regime, ‘rendering unthinkable […] the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations’.Footnote26 Edelman celebrates queerness as invested in ‘no future’ – that is, as the threat to the ‘reproductive futurism’Footnote27 – refocusing, as Berlant also does, on the critical presentness and, in the process, challenging everyday notions of temporality (including linear narrative, teleology, progress, history, and so on).Footnote28 While coinciding with Edelman’s argument that we should focus on pathologized modes of living and the politics of negativity to undermine a normative future, Halberstam turns to ‘the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child-rearing’.Footnote29 Drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘way of life’, Halberstam suggests that queerness can be detached from sexual identity when it is thought of as ‘an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices’.Footnote30 Queer subjects are also those who live outside the logic of capitalist accumulation (crucially, not only deliberately, but also accidentally or of necessity): ‘those […] who live without financial safety nets, without homes, without steady jobs, outside the organizations of time and space that have been established for the purposes of protecting the rich few from everyone else’.Footnote31 Thus, Halberstam’s work, like Berlant’s, allows us to trace the connections between queerness, ‘strange temporalities’ and the scenarios of survival in the 21st-century landscape of precarity. Significantly, in his later work on failure, HalberstamFootnote32 challenges Edelman’s rejection of the child figure, criticized as part and parcel of a heterologic of futurity, and conceptualizes childhood and childishness, especially as they circulate in teen comedies and children’s animated features, as queer experiences: ‘mainstream films marketed to children produce, almost accidentally, plenty of perverse narratives of belonging, relating, and evolving’,Footnote33 often replacing heterosexual coupling with friendship, or individuation with collectivity. While it is true that many of the Disney cartoons display gender-normative characterizations and traditional narrative resolutions, children’s filmsFootnote34 like Babe, Chicken Run, Finding Nemo, and Shrek foreground nonlinear temporality – privileging repetition over sequence, celebrating ‘fairy tale time (long, long ago) and mythic space (far, far away)’Footnote35 – which is often paired with childish or queer ways of life that open new imaginings of community: ‘The beauty of these films is that they do not fear failure, they do not favor success, and they picture children not as preadults figuring the future but as anarchic beings who partake in strange and inconsistent temporal logics’.Footnote36 This latter point is a particularly important one in relation to my argument on queer temporalities and childhood as represented in The Florida Project, and I return to it in due course. To be sure, The Florida Project is quite different from the films featured by Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure, and, at first sight, it aligns more readily with the esthetics of the cinema of precarity as discussed by Berlant. However, the film’s focus on the children’s fantasies articulated through the Disney imaginary provides additional folds of meaning and potentiality as contemplated by Halberstam. On the other hand, it is important to recognize the affective differences in Berlant’s and Halberstam’s respective projects: Berlant uncovers optimism’s cruelty, while Halberstam re-narrates negativity as the politics of anti-achievement. As Robyn Wiegman astutely observes in her examination of the current queer feminist criticism: Halberstam’s practice of converting loss into heroic loserdom requires vigilance and a willingness to forfeit ambiguity in favor of assuring one’s object that being undone is a way of overcoming, even when life still feels bad. […] Berlant rejects redemption in favor of interpretative endurance by conferring meticulous attention on the psychic and social environments in which her objects of study struggle to live. Her critical practice keeps pace with the suffering of her objects by offering them (and us) an interpretative sensorium of the intimate detail.Footnote37 By holding on to Berlant’s ‘interpretative sensorium of the intimate detail’, in what follows I show that The Florida Project recodes optimism’s cruelty in potentially political ways, while simultaneously embracing the ambiguity of the endeavor. As the article proceeds, I focus on how Baker utilizes the realist esthetics of the cinema of precarity to create both the sense of stuckness and the sensory overload and temporalities associated with ‘the wondrous anarchy of childhood’,Footnote38 which is highly mediated by Disney’s utopian universe, thus significantly complicating the film’s meditation on the cruelty of normative temporality in the capitalist scene.