Edelman's conflation of family, futurity, and politics overlooks the complexity and contradictions of real-world social structures.

http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol8no2_2009/power_futurism.pdf

Edelman could of course protest that his is not an empirical point, but a symbolic one, and there is certainly something enlightening about being able to ‘spot,’ in the wake of Edelman’s analysis, reproductive futurism whenever it rears its smiling, big-eyed, irresistible head. But in the light of the relative empirical paucity of this normative notion of the family, and of the child taken care of by the father’s wage and the mother’s domestic care, a question arises as to how far Edelman’s notion of the ‘queer’ extends. If ‘queerness names the side of those not “fighting for the children”’ (Edelman, 2004: 3) it must by definition exclude any family arrangement, however non-child oriented. Can you have family arrangements of those who take care of children but nonetheless are not ‘fighting for the children’? Can one have a generic attitude towards children, or has the logic of reproductive futurism filtered all the way down such that it is impossible to think of children as anything other than ‘special,’ as ‘little angels’? There are, however, plenty of children being raised in situations where very little was staked on their future, and plenty of family structures in which caring for young people is far more a question of pragmatics than of ideology. Edelman makes clear that he is not talking about really existing families and actual children, but it must be noted that Edelman sometimes slips from the figural to the literal, or at least certainly seems to position the woman on the side of the children in a rather dubious way. As Fraiman puts it in her reading of Edelman: ‘Figurations of women’s bodies … are subtly de-eroticised and assimilated to the figurative child’ (Fraiman, 2003: 131). Does Edelman fall too far into the rhetoric of the Christian Right by associating women too quickly with childbirth and some sort of supposedly natural maternal desire that in turn is supposed to characterise reproductive futurism? Edelman seems to assimilate all notions of the family with notions of the future, and to reify families as solid, reactionary entities to be opposed by identity-shaking queer negativity. But what is the ‘identity’ of the family as such? It’s not a real one in the sense of being the majority composition of living arrangements (at least in the British case, as noted above). It’s not a seamlessly ideological one either, seeing as the image of the family presented by (primarily right-wing) politicians is, in practice, rife with contradiction. It seems more likely the case that the ideology must be so extreme in order to cover over the real truth of the family as the economic support for an increasingly precarious labour market. In the 1950s, a male breadwinner’s wage was enough to support an entire ‘classical’ family, now both partners must (in most cases) work to earn anywhere near the same amount. If women are now fully included in the workforce it is because men’s wages have been depressed, even as women still fail to earn as much as their male counterparts. Who looks after the children is an increasingly complicated question, and neither the state nor the classical family seem able to do it effectively and affordably. Politics is so pro-child in theory because it is so anti-child (and anti-woman) in practice. The supposed futural ‘reason’ of representative politics is in effect profoundly fractured and contradictory, not in the least bit reconciled to either its image of the child, or to its image of itself. Edelman’s notion of the queer nevertheless seems to depend on an overly homogenous picture of the social world. To write, as Edelman claims to, from ‘the space outside the framework within which politics as we know it appears and so outside the conflict of visions that share as their presupposition that the body politic must survive’ (Edelman, 2004: 3) involves deliberately superimposing various ‘political’ categories onto various non-political categories. Thus, Edelman conflates democracy with the child, rationality with a naïve concept of progress and heterosexuality with reproduction, sweeping away the possibility of collective organisation and action. As John Brenkman puts it: ‘Edelman compounds his reductive concept of the political realm by in turn postulating an ironclad intermeshing of social reproduction and sexual reproduction’ (Brenkman, 2002: 176). By neglecting the contradictory economic imperatives at work in political conceptions of the family and fusing politics with reason Edelman leaves no room at all for what we could call a ‘queer reason’– queer from the standpoint of representational politics, and neither committed to the child nor to sexual essentialism. It is here that Rancière’s ideas are relevant. If a ‘queer reason’ is to make any sense, it is important to separate out two different kinds of rationalism, which Edelman refuses to do. In a section in Disagreement entitled ‘The Rationality of Disagreement,’ Rancière states the following: Political rationality is only thinkable precisely on the condition that it be freed from the alternative in which a certain rationalism would like to keep it reined in, either as exchange between partners putting their interests or standards up for discussion, or else the violence of the irrational (Rancière, 1999: 43).