Conceptualizing a future of liberation for queer folk results in a cruelly optimistic attachment of progress that is scripted by heteronormative temporalities.

The relationship between Berlant’s investment in the idea of the normal as a utopian desire mediated through and reflected in popular culture (which can be traced back to ‘Sex in public’),21 and her later reflection on the rise of an economic precarity that cuts across different identity markers in Cruel Optimism, deserves further, more nuanced attention. As Sianne Ngai observes in her incisive reading of the latter book, Berlant’s critique of the normative fantasy of the good life is deeply informed by her earlier work on sexuality, exemplifying ‘how queer theory, still regarded by many as a minoritizing-only discourse whose “proper object” must be limited to sex and issues related to sexual object choice, can directly contribute to debates about the universalizing concept of “precarity”’ (2013). Berlant’s reflection on the painful, injurious or, one could say, ‘negative’ attachments in contemporary social, cultural and political life aligns her work with the antisocial paradigm in queer studies, and the exploration of negativity that followed, as illustrated by Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman and, in more recent discussions of negative affect (though with a number of notable differences), by Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Heather Love and Sianne Ngai, among many others.22 More specifically, one could relate Berlant’s cruelly optimistic orientation toward the future, in a time when the fantasies of ‘upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy’ are fraying, to the heteronormative temporal regimes in Western cultures examined by these scholars. Writing in the context of the 1980s at the peak of the AIDS crisis in the United States, Bersani scrutinizes how the disease was discursively constructed as a threat to the (white, heterosexual, middle-class) family unit at the heart of capitalist society, the ‘homosexual body’ having been opposed to marriage, parenthood and property. Rather than actively countering this stigmatization, and the identification of queerness with social failure, Bersani embraces the politics of negativity as a form of resistance to the heteronormative social order. Following Bersani, Edelman draws on the antisocial thesis to rethink the questions of queer temporality and futurity. In his influential No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Edelman shows how the symbolic figure of ‘the Child’, standing in for the future horizon and the promise of a better tomorrow, is deeply rooted in the heterosexual nuclear family ideal and its temporal regime, ‘rendering unthinkable [ … ] the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations’. 26 Edelman celebrates queerness as invested in ‘no future’ – that is, as the threat to the ‘reproductive futurism’ 27 – refocusing, as Berlant also does, on the critical presentness and, in the process, challenging everyday notions of temporality (including linear narrative, teleology, progress, history, and so on).28 While coinciding with Edelman’s argument that we should focus on pathologized modes of living and the politics of negativity to undermine a normative future, Halberstam turns to ‘the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child-rearing’. 29 Drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘way of life’, Halberstam suggests that queerness can be detached from sexual identity when it is thought of as ‘an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices’. 30 Queer subjects are also those who live outside the logic of capitalist accumulation (crucially, not only deliberately, but also accidentally or of necessity): ‘those [ … ] who live without financial safety nets, without homes, without steady jobs, outside the organizations of time and space that have been established for the purposes of protecting the rich few from everyone else’. 31 Thus, Halberstam’s work, like Berlant’s, allows us to trace the connections between queerness, ‘strange temporalities’ and the scenarios of survival in the 21st-century landscape of precarity.