The everyday iteration of speech acts and communication in debate are not neutral occurrences but an embodied practice of linguistic violence that directs institutional policymaking to enact material violence on queer and non normative bodies.

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

Edelman ’22 (Edelman, Lee. PhD from Yale University, Bacholer of Arts from Northwestern University Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing. Duke University Press, 2022., .)//mrs

Queerness, even when transvalued by those who assume it as an identity, implies a disturbance of order, a nonconformity to prevailing logic or law, a glitch in the function of meaning. It retains the pejorative force it confers when it nominates some- thing unusual or out of place: something not meant to appear where it does or not legible in its appearance. The negative associations of queerness speak to the subject’s investment in the system of differences that called it into being in the first place and its intolerance of anything that puts its investment in the stability of those differences at risk. Our constitution through the language of sens-absexe conscripts our thought—our conscious thought—to that differential logic and commits us to its preservation in and as that thought. By fracturing the ontological consistency of what “is,” queerness refutes the education in being—an inherently aesthetic education—that totalizes the empire of sens-absexe as a comprehensive and comprehensible unity. It insists on the outside of signification that make sens-absexe not all. Whatever asserts that incompletion by representing or embodying ab- sens, whatever appears to instantiate queerness in a given order by doing so, will be charged with promoting a bad education: one inimical to the survival and transmission of meaning required by what this book will call the pedag-archival imperative. Despite the claims advanced in support of liberationist pedagogies, education is inherently conservative. Even in countering a dominant narrative or advancing a progressive position, it enshrines, preserves, and passes on a construction of “what is.” Above all, it conjures the subject as an archive of sens- absexe. Whatever the content of an education, the pedagarchival law affirms the ontology of difference, ceaselessly imposing the conjoined imperatives of knowing, meaning, and being. For just that reason, as this book shows, queerness teaches us nothing in two distinct senses of that phrase. On the one hand, queerness adverts us to what ontology leaves out, if only by figuring—within that ontology—what that ontology excludes. It confronts us with a representation of what the Symbolic posits as nothing, as external to being or sense, lest ab-sens as the absence of differentiation make ontology nothing itself. The events that prompted this preface respond to an anxiety about human ontology induced by those figures whose presence insists that the world as it “is” is not all. After the Supreme Court announced its ruling in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County, for example, Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, lamented that the court, by altering “the legal meaning of ‘sex’ in our nation’s civil rights law,” was “redefining human nature.” It did so, as he saw it, “by erasing the beautiful differences and complementary relationship between man and woman,” which is to say, by undoing the sexual difference that ab- sents ab-sens to establish meaning and, in the process, “human” being.17 Sim- ilarly, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, when municipalities across the country authorized murals and street art meant to affirm that “Black Lives Matter,” white Americans in places as heterogeneous as New York, Cincin- nati, and Fresno defaced or attempted to deface them, often justifying their acts, when caught, with the counterclaim that “all lives matter.”18 For them, the “mattering” of Blackness seemed to violate “human nature”; they could register ontological totality only through the (literal) erasure of Blackness. Like queerness, that is, the Blackness that asserts a claim to human mattering can never enter the “all” that comes into being by excluding it. That explains why Calvin Warren, with whose thought my own work resonates, notwith- standing our serious differences, can write that “#Blacklivesmatter is only fac- tual if it can reunite black life with a valuable form, a valuation determined by political calculus. But what if reuniting black life and form is impossible? What if blackness is always already dead, the ‘perfection of death’ as David Marriott would call it, so black life-form is but a fantasy? Can we think of blackness as incontrovertibly formless?”19 If my claim that queerness teaches us nothing gestures toward such a formlessness, toward the nondifferentiation that incest, sex, and ab-sens at- tempt to name, then it also acknowledges that queerness can teach us nothing of the sort. The same necessity that condemns us to designate the Real, the beyond of signification, only in catachrestic terms compels us to think nondifferentiation through the Symbolic logic of difference and merely to imagine that we can imagine the nothing that is foreclosed as such from thought. Bad Education takes seriously the structural limit of language on thought, a limit that keeps us from thinking nothing, and so from thinking queerness—or, for that matter, Blackness, woman, trans*, incest, “sex,” or any of the catachreses of ab-sens—except as posited and positivized in those made to embody nothing. To that extent, the beyond of meaning that these catachreses nominate functions in relation to the subject as irony functions in relation to language, undoing the legibility that is responsible for its produc-tion and evading every effort either to pin it down or to know it. Queerness can no more present us with nothing than the order of meaning can escape it

Discourse of the normative paradigm fosters a form of incompleteness that attributes to the unconscious, this form of “ab-sens” allows us to view “sense” outside the binaries of “sense” and “nonsense”

Edelman ’22 (Edelman, Lee. PhD from Yale University, Bacholer of Arts from Northwestern University Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing. Duke University Press, 2022., .)//mrs

Yet even as deconstructive, feminist, psychoanalytic, queer, and race- centered theories have entered the university, they’ve engendered violently negative reactions to their institutionalization, fueling the ongoing culture wars in the United States and abroad.10 By addressing nothing’s (non)place in any constituted order of thought, and thereby seeming to disturb meta- physics and social value alike, these, like the fields that house them (most often the humanities and social sciences), find themselves reduced by their opponents to the figural status of the nothing they engage. Excoriated for debasing reality and truth (a charge leveled by the right-wing Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik as well as by the “liberal” American cultural journalist Michiko Kakutani), these discourses refuse the normative paradigm of education as world transmission—as the preservation, mutatis mutandis, of reality as it “is.”11 They focus, instead, on what thought and edu- cation register as the unthinkable, as foreign to logic or sense. They promulgate a “bad education” by attesting to what Slavoj Žižek calls, in the course of a reading of Immanuel Kant, “the ontological incompleteness of reality itself.”12 Lacan attributes that incompleteness to the Symbolic formation of the subject and the structure of the unconscious. In Seminar XI he remarks that “discontinuity . . . is the essential form in which the unconscious appears to us” and then wonders whether the “absolute, inaugural character” of that dis- continuity can manifest itself only against “the background of a totality.”13 “Is the one anterior to discontinuity?” he asks; is there a unity, in other words, be- fore the negativity that introduces the division, the “discontinuity” that char- acterizes the unconscious? He follows with this response: “I do not think so, and everything I have taught in recent years has tended to exclude the need for this closed one. . . . You will grant me that the one that is introduced by the unconscious is the one of the split, of the stroke, of rupture.”14 This inaugural rupture, prior to the “being” of the “one” that it would split, presupposes for Lacan no unified “background,” no whole that precedes its division. He thus argues that “the first emergence of the unconscious . . . does not lend itself to ontology.”15 Indeed, the unconscious, as he puts it, “is neither being nor non-being” precisely because “what is ontic in [its] function . . . is the split.”16 That split, which makes possible all that appears, can never appear “in itself ”; it possesses no “in itself ” to appear but produces the appearance of the “in itself ” through its primal division or negativity. Escaping containment by the either-or logic of “to be, or not to be,” it opens an absence that Lacan rewrites as “ab-sens” in L’Étourdit. As the absenting of meaning from being, as the insistence of what can never be counted as part of any world, ab-sens has no place in the order of sense that assumes “the background of a totality” wherein being and meaning both depend on each other and prop each other up.17 Whatever disrupts that interdependence undoes, along with the world as we know it, the very possibility of a world by undoing the totalizing compre- hension, the “closed one” that a world implies. But this occasions a seeming contradiction: construing the world as unknowable still gives the world a knowable shape; the predicate adjective affirms the world in our “knowing” it as unknowable. This torsion inheres in any attempt to sidestep the fusion of world and sense and results in the problem that this book discusses as inseparable from “bad education.” If the world induces a pedagogy that excludes what subtracts itself from sense—that excludes, therefore, what its structuring as a world makes unthinkable—then what sort of teaching could broach ab-sens, the negativity of subtraction, without recurring to the logic of sense and affirming a world once more? What education could ever break from the reproduction of meaning by which the world appears as self- evident and self-evidence appears as truth? The very effort to think ab-sens, to conceive it as something outside the binary couple of sense and non-sense (where non-sense is always already trapped in the gravitational field of sense), denies its negativity so it can enter the house of sense, though that house that can never be its home. Lodged therein, it functions like any other signifier in the marketplace of meaning de- spite the fact that it gestures toward what that marketplace excludes. And the same thing happens to the ontological negations implicit in “woman” or in “Blackness.” Despite their figural capacity to signal what being and meaning foreclose, both get substantialized as catachrestic names for identi- ties shaped by and legible within the logics of being and meaning. The same necessity inheres in “queerness,” which oscillates between its contemporary reference to nonnormative sexualities, sexual acts, or sexual identities and a nonidentitarian reference to any person or thing delegitimated for its associ- ation with nonnormativity.18 All of these terms, and countless others, stand in for a violent break with the governing constructs of a world, a break with its (onto)logic. To that extent we might think of these terms as “nonsynonymous substitutions,” the phrase by which Derrida describes the multiple fig- ures to which différance gives rise.19 Each attempts, like différance, to signal the intolerable rupture, the primal negativity, that permits the “being” of entities only through the cut of differentiation. But each, at the same time, sutures that break by figuring it in the form of an entity conjured in order to be excluded. If the knowledge value these terms accrue as names for social positions reinforces the order of sense, the terms themselves are placeholders for what has no place in that order at all: the ab-sens we encounter unawares and always at our own risk. Such encounters take shape as obtrusions of the Real, temporary breaches in the structure of reality that flood the subject with anxiety.20 No teaching could ever master this eruption or allow us to comprehend this Real; com- prehension, after all, as the word makes clear, conflates the constitutive sei- zure, containment, or enclosure of a world with an act of understanding, of intellectual domination, that wrests it into shape. Comprehension affirms the enclosure of a world to preclude the threat of ab-sens. The Real—necessarily divided between its status as a concept permitted by language (the concept of something inaccessible to language) and its status as a psychic encounter that undoes conceptual thought (by confronting the subject with the be- yond of language that it literally cannot conceive)—provokes both the defensive fantasy of intellectual comprehension (which lets us produce a theory of the Real as a subset of theory in general) and the anxiety that voids comprehension, incompletes the world, and makes one “not-all.” The ab-sens inseparable from the Real, therefore, partakes of the negativity associated by Guy Le Gaufey with the Lacanian objet a, especially in “its incapacity to receive any imposition of unity whatsoever, something in itself heavy with consequences for its being, if only from a Leibnizian point of view where every single being is, in the first place, a single being [one being].”21 Ab-sens makes impossible both the oneness of being and the oneness of any being by incising in every entity the cut of a subtraction. With castration, primal re- pression, and the Lacanian formulae of sexuation lurking in the background as figures for this cut that frames being as always not-all, ab-sens leads us back to the confluence of sex and the unbearable, the terms with which Lau- ren Berlant and I broached negativity and relationality.22 If embodiments determined by such categories as woman, Blackness, and queerness (among others) threaten to derealize a given order by exposing it as not-all, that not- all is always implicated in the Lacanian interpretation of sex, where sex, as in Lacan’s well-known formula, “there is no sexual relation,” names the radical negativity, the gap, that makes Symbolic comprehension impossible: the site where sex coincides with the primal subtraction of ab-sens.23