Their attempts at economic reconstruction re-entrenches loopholes that fortify imperial violence on queer black bodies that reifies only as “becoming”.

The call to protect the queer from Africans by ‘the West’ in Clinton’s speech and the queer from the savage Muslim in the Human Rights Report, then, is a violence that orders the world, constituting competing formations of value in these projects, while sublimating the empire’s ineluctable terrorization of blackness by analogizing (a major strategy of the redistribution of global and sexual power) the suffering of slaves with that of queers, the colonized subjects and queers, the US and Africa. In the normalizing discourse of this double move, the pursuit of desire in the present must be postponed for the sake of a putative future expressed in the institution of reproduction. A queer futurity, predicated on choice, must necessarily undermine the symbolic order of civil society. Edelman urges us to accept queerness as inauthentic, insubstantive, a ‘structural position’ working to undermine identities promised through the advancement of futurism. As such, ‘queerness can never be described in the language of progression – of "being or becoming" – but must be elucidated in the materiality of the body: queerness embodies’ (Edelman 2004 cited in Pak 2012: 172). In this view, queerness is ‘the site outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism ... queerness ... figures outside and beyond its political symptoms, the place of the social order’s death drive’ (Edelman 2004: 3 emphasis mine).

Yet, the psychic space of queerness that Edelman imagines is constituted by the conditions of a sovereign power and the displacement of violence onto queers of colour, people of colour, queer blacks and blacks, who are not one and the same in the unfolding of global power and capital formation. Therefore, while Edelman’s view escapes the rights discourse that plagues Clinton’s speech and the Human Rights Report, it is challenged by Afro-pessimists and others who suggest that such formations and understandings of queer subjectivity are a key condition of possibility of queerness in the neoliberal social order (Keeling 2009: 568).

In this view, queer futurity remains imbued with the condition of subjectivity as a source of speculation and the accumulation of value. The ontology of Africa and blackness is such that the world pivots on the order of antiblackness penetrating with impunity. By this I mean that the non-existence of blackness (understood as inert matter) is precisely what makes the rest of the world legible; the non-radicalness of Africans (‘proved’ by ‘gay rights’ failures or some other way) is the foil against which ‘the West’ and whites measure their legitimacy and value. Mbembe comments: ‘It is in relation to Africa that the notion of absolute "otherness" has been taken farthest’ (Mbembe 2001: 2). Africa not only ‘stands out as the supreme receptacle of the West’s obsession with, and circular discourse about, the facts of “absence”, “lack” and “non-being” of identity and difference’ (Mbembe 2001: 4); it has also been consigned: To a special unreality such that the continent becomes the very figure of what is null, abolished, and, in its essence, in opposition to what is: the very expression of that nothing whose special feature is to be nothing at all. (Mbembe 2001: 4)

Against this order of compulsive value, I contend that a queer future, no matter how despondent, is one which is still possible, perhaps not equitable, but available nonetheless, to ‘the queer’. In this theorization the speculative encounter is the symbolic creation of the subject marked by gender and sexualized difference. This interpretation stretches dominant understandings of moribund neoliberal capitalism and ‘radical’ theories of queerness to argue that the slave, disfigured in the world order, is the inert matter that relays the emergence of a subject with different kinds of properties and legal capacities including gay/lesbian/queer sexuality (see Ferguson 2004).

Moribund capitalist white colonial and slave supremacy formation draws on queerness to stake out its possibility and generate profits for the new emerging imperial markets. The bodies and consequently, the sexual organs of the racial other are the sites of exchange and other ventures making possible the betting on the future price of difference and desire in markets; these could be gay marriage and transgressive intimacies, to pick two speculative assets centralized in the current US debates, but blackness still only amounts to no signs of relationality either in the form of reproduction or property. To borrow from Sexton, ‘racial difference issues from direct relations of force – the scales of coercion – and it is only elaborated or institutionalised within relations of power – the scales of consent’ (Sexton 2008: 9). Both libidinal and global economies’ sexual expression is ordered as a form of value. Sexuality’s function as a site of conflict, as it becomes animated by value, is to establish borders between different kinds of sexualities and the order and hierarchy of their relations. Importantly, it acts as a site of antagonism, an elaborately crafted dispositif of displacement and terror in which Africa and anti-blackness is the inert matter that sutures and orders sexual intimacies, trade, reproduction of social value, and makes possible a flight away from the anarchic plurality of erotic expression towards the higher realm of the universal, the eternal one, the always shifting socius seeking flesh to source the jouissance of having slaughtered the other instead of having been slaughtered.

This configuration of value as privilege sutures the international order in the form of multiple-world-value projects. For instance, within (Western) foreign policy, queerness maintains a futurity in the global social order that blackness cannot. It is simultaneously a futurity that invests in motherhood (the relationality of a child and a mother; empathic labour by taking care of one’s kin; same-sex marriage) and one whose bases are the regenerative capacity procured through transactional relations and risky ventures. The futurity of this new speculative economy is predicated not only on loss and segregation of queerness as speculation from other sexualities, but also on the suturing of economies of blackness and terror perpetrated on black flesh. In Edelman’s work, queerness and not wanting to procreate is connected to a non-futurism (2004: 58) that presumes a split between motherhood as subject position (Gumbs 2010) and forced mothering ‘to arrive at queer definitions of mothering ... not linked to the reproduction of an heteropatriarchal family unit’ (Gumbs 2010: 56). While Edelman forces us to think of the relation as one of temporality, his analogy shows that the reproduction of the global order still depends on conflict to alter and structurally adjust the racialized other (i.e., a profitable lack), and on terror and antagonism to disfigure Africa, the black, the inert matter, flesh which does not register in the order of the ontologically living and, yet, is captured, or eaten by the other in order to regenerate power, capital and ‘free’ ‘radical’ life.

CONCLUSION

In saving the queer from the ‘African’ and the slave, the leadership of imperialism engages in a reconstruction of the new neoliberal entrepreneurial self that requires more than biopolitics: the US and certain European states turn against the populations that rupture their attempts to reconstruct a necroeconomic-political order whose foundations depend on sustaining a material and metaphorical matrix and mobilizing militias to eliminate ‘white but not quite’ (Agathangelou 2004) queer corporealities.

A conjunction and tracing of the tensions in the debates of queer theory and theories of necropolitics and blackness highlight that ‘queer subjects [are] intelligible from within different systems of valuation’, punctuating ‘[a] temporality of a present sense of political possibility’ (Keeling 2009: 569). In Clinton’s speech and the Human Rights Report, queerness is the secret possessor of a commitment to a capacity, whose suturing and forms of futurity depend on experimentation and slaughtering as modes of surplus value (i.e., profits) generation: queer sexuality finds itself transcending towards the higher realm of a universal subject by colluding in the erection and reconstruction of terror structures. Such a reconstruction is ultimately death.

It is only possible to see this relationship between queerness and death, this anatomization of the violence and terror, by recognizing the interplay between race and sex as productive of (and a product of) market activity, financial speculation and liquidity as well as the changing vision of the future around which leaders speculate and plan. The importance of queerness is not that it enters at the limits of race, as Foucault has claimed, or the death drive as Edelman argues. Rather, the way queers are constituted through the US leadership as flexible corporeality makes them simultaneously a commodity and a technology, whose value lies in imperial aims that draw on the queer as the entrepreneurial self to mark the US as the most progressive site of legal progress and human rights facilitating the structural adjustment of racialized gays and lesbians into an entrepreneurial matrix of capital in Iraq and continents like Africa.

Both the restructuring of ‘homo’ sexuality as a radical queer subjectivity of value and queerness as a speculative economy may enable the incorporation and leverage of some in the struggle for human rights and equal citizenship. This move though is an ontological turn away from democracy that happens in a specific way. It is a move that depends on the fungibility of racialized and queer subjects while necessitating violence against racialized subjects and fungibility as terror and slaughtering of the slave. Furthermore, using the queer as the proxy for a racially adjusted forward subsidy carries forward slavery’s chattel’s events, discussions and practices into the ‘now’ and the future. In conversations with diverse archives of world-value-making-projects the displacement of racialized gays and lesbians (beyond the visible transgression of queerness) becomes visible. These archives erase fungibility as terror. Conjuncting this fungibility with the one that erects value as form highlights how the particular and all-encompassing ethico-political and economic character of capital is value, ‘[an] explanan of all other entities’ (Bryant 2011: 131). This erasure is a dominant fallacy, a ‘difference that makes all the difference’ (Bryant 2011: 131).

In the end, the only means of object relations – of entry into civil society, history and temporality – still depends on fungibility as slaughter enacted within structures of violence that hold Africa, blackness and queer blackness at bay. The new call for ‘queer legal protections’, ‘human rights norms’ and ‘gay rights’ is an example of speculation in freedom, whereby bodies and states are turned into experiments and literally made to die in the name of a queer freedom, even as this process of experimenting and dying constitutes value-added capacity. In sum, in a fungible order, queerness as freedom is a fantasia of and a strategy of bodily and spatial capture. This techno-neo-imperial and military fantasia demands a deterritorialization and reterritorialization of bodies, states, matters, inert matters and energies; this catalyzes massive bodily productions, both living and dead, out of which flexible sustainable topographies, bodies and intimacies may emerge.