Futurism is necessary for liberation of intersectional subjects

Let me put some of my cards on the table right away: I think that this critique misses its mark quite drastically in the sense that, whatever faith Munoz and Dean might have in new social collectivities, they do not, as Edelman implies, support liberal humanism's dreams of redemption through greater inclusion; they do not believe that simply allowing previously marginalized subjects to enter the existing system would miraculously conjure away the system's problems. Quite the contrary, both are deeply critical of the homonormative quest for social respectability that characterizes much of liberal gay and lesbian politics. In Cruising Utopia (2009), Munoz in fact explicitly condemns homonormative gays and lesbians who allow themselves to be seduced by the material and symbolic rewards of neoliberal capitalism. One could of course point out that Edelman could not have known in 2006 what Munoz was going to say in a book that was published three years later. But this does not change the fact that Edelman's accusation rings false for the simple reason that it is aimed at two progressive critics who are so well versed in the basics of posthumanist theory that they in many ways take the demise of the humanist self for granted.

I cannot think of a single critic within queer theory who naively endorses the sovereign subject of liberal humanism. If anything-as I have already noted and will discuss in greater detail in the next chapter-the field, like the rest of American progressive theory, seems to be caught up in a compulsive cycle of needing to repeatedly expunge this subject even when very little of it remains. Furthermore, the idea that utopian thinking is by definition liberal, that there is no room for utopianism within posthumanist paradigms, is an indication of the extent to which certain strands of posthumanist theory have solidified into lifeless patterns that no longer serve a critical function; in such instances, the monotonous repetition of poststructuralist dogmas-in Edelman's case, "hopefulness bad, negativity good" (which, notably, has the same starkly binaristic structure as Butler's "autonomy bad, relationality good")-serves to bar alternative perspectives that might revitalize contemporary theory by allowing us to think beyond bad-good archetypes. In this sense, Munoz's statement regarding Edelman's "well-worn war chest of poststructuralist pieties" (2009, 10) is right on target, as is his rebuke of the "various romances of negativity" that have, within queer theory, become so predictable as to be "resoundingly anticritical" (12).

If Edelman's accusations against Munoz are relatively easy to dismiss, the reverse is not the case, for Munoz's indicts Edelman for perpetuating a clandestine-and therefore all the more insidious-form of white gay male identity politics: a politics that flees from the (supposedly) contaminating impact that a consideration of gender, racial, economic, and global inequalities might have on queer theory and that refuses to recognize that the white gay male subject is just as "identitarian" as any other subject. Munoz asserts that the only reason Edelman is able to dodge the specter of identity politics is that, in Edelman's work, white masculinity falsely configures-as it has always done-the "universal;' "neutral" subject position that (seemingly) resides beyond identitarian concern. More generally speaking, Munoz believes that antisocial queer theories "reproduce a crypto-universal white gay subject that is weirdly atemporal" (2009, 94). Hiram Perez makes an analogous point when he criticizes not only the ways in which whiteness, in the work of many white gay men, "makes itself transparent" (2005, 187) but also the ways in which poststructuralist rhetoric is used to level charges of essentialism against anyone who dares to call attention to this problem. Along the same lines, Halberstam rails against the "invisible identity politics of white gay men," adding that when "white men (gay or straight) pursue the interests of white men (gay or straight), there's a heap of trouble for everyone else" (2006, 231). Munoz adds a final blow when he concludes that "imagining a queer subject who is abstracted from the sensuous intersectionalities that mark our experience . . . is a ticket whose price most cannot afford" (2009, 96).

The battle lines are thus clearly drawn between those-(some) white gay men-for whom sexuality is the sole axis of theoretical investigation and those for whom sexuality is just one among many such axes. Munoz does not pull his punches, notoriously calling-in the course of the PMLA exchange-the antisocial thesis "the gay white man's last stand" (2006, 825). In Cruising Utopia, he in turn argues that Edelman "anticipates and bristles against his future critics with a precognitive paranoia'' by predicting that some identitarian critics might contest his polemic by arguing that it is "determined by his middle-class white male positionality" (2009, 95). Munoz's candid assessment of Edelman's efforts to inoculate himself against this critique is that it "does not do the job'' (95).

The stakes of Munoz's accusation are high, revolving around the question of who can afford to relinquish all hope of a better future in the way that Edelman's rendering of queer negativity-with includes the derisive critique of the child as a sentimental emblem of reproductive futurity that I mentioned in chapter 1-calls for. Munoz suggests that only those who "have" a future in the first place have the luxury of flirting with the idea of rejecting it; conversely, those whose futures are concretely (empirically) threatened are unlikely to advocate the annihilation of these futures. More specifically, Munoz contends that it would be disastrous to "hand over futurity to normative white reproductive futurity," arguing that the fact that this version of futurity is currently winning "is all the more reason to call on a utopian political imagination that will enable us to glimpse another time and place: a 'not-yet' where queer youths of color actually get to grow up" (2009, 95-96). In this manner, Munoz alerts us to the fact that while Edelman elevates the child to an icon of reproductive futurity, "the future" has never been the province of all children; that is, though Munoz agrees with the broad outlines of Edelman's critique of reproductive futurity, he reminds us that this critique does not apply to the vast majority of the world's children, that "racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity'' (95).

Like Edelman, Munoz admits that the world as it stands is "not enough" (2009, 96), not able to offer adequate resources for subjective flourishing. But in his view, the way to deal with the world's insufficiency and messiness is not to reject the future wholesale but rather to reconfigure its parameters. This, Munoz asserts, can only be done by resurrecting "various principles of hope that are, by their very nature, relational" (94). As he elaborates, relationality may not always be "pretty," "but the option of simply opting out of it, or describing it as something that has never been available to us, is imaginable only if one can frame queerness as a singular abstraction that can be subtracted and isolated from a larger social matrix" (94).