Edelman’s imagination of queer futurism reproduces biological binaries and prevents the possibility of progress for the queer community

I see this maternalizing of the female, biologizing of the maternal, and demonizing of both occurring in Lee Edelman’s challenging essay, “The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive” (1998). In a mode I would describe as incantatory poststructuralism, Edelman analyzes the child as a figure of futurity in political discourse. His target is not simply the conservative uses of sentimentalized innocence and regeneration but the child’s indispensability to political thought per se, its deployment as the image of a future on which the very symbolic as well as social order depends. There is much to admire about this bold critique, and certainly I ag]ree that children are typically invoked to legitimate the dominant culture. Yet Edelman’s discussion of the trope of the child can’t help but offer its own set of tropes, and these not only reflect but also actively reproduce the gender logic above, by which men are tied to a “positive” deconstructive force, women to a “negative” conservative one. 16

To begin with, Edelman’s examples of children are accompanied by other examples, though unremarked as such, of adult females— as if images of children naturally conjure, as an extension of themselves, images of women to care for them. These women are, indeed, so consistently depicted as to give them too an iconic function within the essay. Thus in addition to AIDS poster child Ryan White (25); the waif of the Broadway hit Les Miz (21); and Annie, star of her own megamusical (24); we have novelist P. D. James (21); T. S. Eliot’s wife, Vivienne (21); the Statue of Liberty (21); and the pregnant women at the wake of Tom Hanks’s character, an AIDS-infected lawyer, in the movie Philadelphia (24– 25). Like the sentimentalized children, all of these women are cited accusingly to illustrate the imperatives of sexual/social reproduction whose effect, indeed whose purpose, is to discipline queerness. Edelman does name several men (Donald Wilmon and Cardinal Bernard Law) who speechify on the importance of “family values” (23, 28– 29). But P. D. James’s and Vivienne Eliot’s poetic utterances (whether as novelist or “character”) do not polemically refer to so much as they imaginatively embody the ideology of enforced childbearing, supporting my sense that women bear most of the weight, in this piece, of representing heteronormativity. Thus James is mentioned for her dystopian novel, The Children of Men , in which social ruin is equated with the failure to reproduce (“less and less in the West we made love and bred children” [21]); Vivienne Eliot is credited with “The Waste Land” line, “What you get married for if you don’t want children?” (21); and Delacroix’s bare-breasted Liberty is invoked because it hails us (with its promise of freedom) as suckling children (21). Liberty is, in fact, Edelman’s very first example of this discourse: “her bare breast making each spectator the unweaned child to whom [a brave new world] belongs.” Notice here how the simple fact of the bared female breast “makes” a child, and though topless women are never really simple but always fraught in our cultural imaginary, I do think that Edelman’s rhetoric actively works to maternalize this breast, so that it not only nurses but even magically produces a child. The result is that, here and elsewhere, figurations of women’s bodies, however islanded, are subtly de-eroticized and assimilated to the figurative child that is this essay’s explicit target.

We see this as well in the more extended example of Philadelphia ’s expectant mothers. With their “reassuringly bulging bellies,” they are part of the compound “children and pregnant women,” which Edelman reads as an image of futurity working to displace the HIV-positive gay man and his threat to that futurity (24– 25). Edelman is undoubtedly right about the creepily consolatory function of multiple pregnancies at the end of Philadelphia ; nevertheless, within his own text the cinematic image he offers works alongside Liberty to represent women as lactating breasts and gestating bellies, prostheses to the children they nurse or carry. In an argument against naturalized reproduction— whether of citizens, futures, or meanings— women but not men are silently implicated along with children, just as they are in the culture at large. They are rendered, relative to men, at once closer to children, closer to procreative processes and ideologies, and closer to the policing of sexuality. This is accomplished in part by Edelman’s use of the swollen female belly to symbolize a compulsory heterosexuality for which the belly is not, in all fairness, primarily responsible. 17 The effect is that Philadelphia ’s opposition between dying gay men and pregnant heterosexual women gets redeployed within Edelman’s essay to claim death and deconstruction for a queerness coded as masculine in contrast to a straight symbolic order coded as feminine. 18

The problem with this is not only that it conflates the female body, maternity, and heteronormativity but also that it posits, on the other side, a queerness unpolluted by procreative femininity or, as Edelman says defiantly, “outside the cycles of reproduction” (29). Here Edelman makes use of parallel clauses to underscore the equation between those “choosing to stand” apart from reproduction and those “choosing to stand” by the side of AIDS sufferers (29). Elsewhere in “Kid Stuff” progeny-free queerness is represented by the Tom Hanks character in Philadelphia and by the autobiographical gay male “I” who steps forward, momentarily, to gloss a billboard against the grain of its pro-child message (22– 23). Observing that the child is tendered in opposition at once to abortion and to queer sexualities, the speaker would refuse “the compulsion to embrace our own futurity in the privileged form of the child and thereby to imagine the present as pregnant with the child of our identification” (23); instead, he challenges us to embrace abortion, to eradicate the poignant optimism of pregnancy. Within such a stark binary schema, what remains unthinkable is queer pregnancy, queerness within the cycles of reproduction, queer women with biological children whether from hooking, marriage, or artificial insemination— or, for that matter, queer men with kids genetically their own. 19 The elision of these figures whose depiction would flout the logic of AIDS-versus-pregnancy is evident at two moments in particular, when Edelman acknowledges gay liberal demands for the right to adopt children (in a different register from his own case against the figurative child). In the first instance, he mentions lesbians and gay men working for the right “to adopt and raise children of their own” (25); in the second he invokes “the children we’d as eagerly fly to China or Guatemala in order to adopt” (29). My interest here is not in the merits of campaigns for gay “normalization” and marriage rights but rather in Edelman’s suppression of procreative queerness even as he brings up lesbian and gay parenting. By tying this firmly and exclusively to adoption, Edelman keeps the category of queerness apart from the feminized, reproductive body, which is imagined as scarcely any closer or more familiar than China or Guatemala.

The split between a heroic gay male sexuality and a maternal body made over entirely to routinized reproduction is further evident in Edelman’s book Homographesis (1994). In a discussion of James Baldwin, for example, male homosociality is brought out seemingly at the expense of mothers. Here Edelman describes racial domination as a brutal synecdoche, reducing black men to their sexual parts in order to castrate them. 20 In both white and black imaginaries, he argues, race relations are imaged in terms of male homosocial desires and rivalries, bound up with homosexual panic. Citing Toni Morrison’s Beloved (53), Edelman elucidates the sexual domination of black men by white, completely ignoring the forms that racism might take— and does in this book— when women are involved. Yet surely the most strongly thematized form of racial violence in Beloved is the stealing of Sethe’s milk and the ghosting of her daughter. To explicate racism in a narrative centered on the black mother without mentioning her appropriated maternity is, in my view, to be guilty of a different synecdoche, the one we encountered in chapters 2 and 5, in which black and white men are taken to stand for the entirety of race relations in the United States.

The privileging of male parts (for the whole) is referenced early on in Homographesis by a parenthesis noting apologetically that selfhood is “paradigmatically male in a patriarchally organized social regime” (7). Yet this seems only to license Edelman throughout the book, more often than not, to accept rather than counter the subject’s presumed masculinity. Frequently this focus is explicit, and yet, recalling Andrew Ross and Henry Louis Gates Jr., there are also sporadic gestures of gender inclusion, which are then belied by readings either frankly or tacitly exclusive. It is not clear to me, in any case, why Homographesis should need, in its central thesis, to privilege the trope of male homosexuality as a means of deconstructing stable notions of gender and meaning generally (12), when female homosexuality might, according to his own logic, be said to do similar work.