The judge has an anti-pedagogical responsibility to reject reproductive futurism

[Alexandra Lakind, PhD in environment and resources from University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2022, “Children in Absentia: Reproductive Futurism in the Era of Climate Change”, University of Wisconsin-Madison https://asset.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/2D6I6F4OXVMPR8B/R/file-5b76a.pdf]//owen

You have reached the beginning of the end of the end, or, again, is this only the beginning? In this dissertation, I argue that how scholars, activists, and educators respond to the climate crisis can enable the opportunity to dismantle the figuration of “the child,” which is fundamental to disrupting the categorical oppression of children and untangling the extractive and developmental logics fueling the crisis. In my first case, I examine how activists who abstain from childbirth rely on problematic narratives of reproductive futurism that preserve the sanctity of the bionormative family and uphold distinct forms of petro-futurity.55 In my second case, I explore how youth activists both deploy and challenge societal myths projected on children. As prevailing discourses too often rely on idealizations of “the child” to advance the structures and politics of reproductive futurism, I content that further and ongoing focus on the intersection between children and the climate crisis can help us see past the logics that prop up late-carbon liberalism. Here, I revisit the chapters of my dissertation to refresh the connections between them and share what I’ve learned in the research and writing process. That said, before I reenter the chapters, I am going to explore the title to frame how my dissertation serves as a ‘beginning,’ even at its end. The title, Children in Absentia: Reproductive Futurism in the Era of Climate Change, served as a guide for me to consider Lee Edelman’s concept of “reproductive futurism” alongside the role of “the child” in confronting the climate crisis. Thus, I begin with a recap of Edelman’s theory to foreground some of the theoretical background of this dissertation to demonstrate how it guided this exploration. Overarchingly, this study takes inspiration from Edelman’s (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. As I point out across the dissertation, Environmental Studies and Education are particularly invested in futurity and the preservation of the Child. Emerging from these spaces, this dissertation asks: what does it look like to politicize “the Child” in climate activism? Since Edelman’s provocation paved the way for scholars to antagonize “the child,” he is a useful theorist to think with as this dissertation confronts the jarring collisions between realities and fantasies built around reproductive futurism. Across these case studies, activists’ identities, discourses, and political horizons are inscribed by their positions in the idealized reproductive order. Children and would-be-parents, aligned with the imperative of the Child, make claims from their presumed, almost messianic role; they can bring about the future, continuing the project of humanity. To conclude this project, I offer a reorientation inspired by this study. This reorientation ricochets off reproductive futurism to offer a revaluation of failure and impossibility, not as obstacles to overcome on the path towards progress, but something to live in and with. In Edelman’s provoking work of queer theory, he argues that the figure of the Child has been the primary symbol shaping contemporary U.S. politics, an embodiment of futurity representing the purpose of the social order. Edelman’s conceptualization of the Child, not to be confused with any historical children, delineates the bounds of the political; the queer disturbs those bounds. Via the Child as the imaginary beneficiary of every political intervention, an unquestionable good, the terms of political debate have been narrowly defined by the ideological limits of reproductive futurism. Edelman is often critiqued for a lack of specificity regarding time and place. These critiques gave rise to a new body of literature on queer futures that center the experiences of People of Color, Indigenous people, and those who live outside the Global North’s current sociopolitical sphere (e.g., Muñoz, 2009; Puar, 2007). Edelman set the stage for these powerful critiques by demonstrating the foundational role “the Child” plays in myriad relationships to self and society. No Future incited people to try the impossible: to contemplate contemporary society without “the Child.” To borrow from Edelman, “we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child” (2004, p. 11). Responding to this, Edelman explores the potential of situating oneself on the “other side.” When the Child shapes collective narratives and “collective narratives of meaning” (p. 12), what might it look like to refuse the Child that stands in for the normative fantasy of futurity that organizes communal relations? Reproductive futurism ties heteronormative reproduction to the promise of self realization. It temporalizes desire—a void or absence one hopes to fill by attaining a future fantasy around which identity often congeals. Heteronormative romance produces (or has the possibility of producing) offspring, and therefore a future. The figuration of the queer pierces this fantasy. For Edelman, this is drawn from longstanding associations between gay sex and the undoing of futurity wherein the queer stands in for the negation of the future. Simply put, if meaning is a future promise, achieved via the Child, then a drive for non-procreative anal sex is futureless and therefore meaningless. Queerness figures the senselessness of sexuality and, in so doing, threatens to expose the arbitrary rules of moral rectitude sustaining reproductive futurism. Within these figural relations, the queer undoes the meaning upon which social organization and collective reality rest. For this study, we can gain from Edelman’s provocation: what can it mean to destroy the Child? Akin to the ways that gay sex shatters egos and norms, in the face of climate change, almost everyone must undergo an unbearable unmaking of their identity that will be shocking and scary due to a compromised sense of futurity. The Child—not yet agential, political, sexual—clings to whiteness, as whiteness clings to innocence. This racialized innocent figure is without sin; thus, children are believed to be unmarked and desireless and seen to subsume only the desires projected upon them. Yet, children’s actual desires are rebellious and cannot be confined to the assumptions of predictability. While children are themselves capable of disturbing our norms, there are myriad institutions to keep children undisturbed, or safe from potential encounters with “otherness.” Importantly, these institutions keep society safe from being disturbed by desiring children. Keeping children in check keeps the figure of the Child intact. In response to imagined threats of alien desire, we endorse efforts to Save the Child at the cost of actual children harmed in the process. Thus, to join Edelman is to be on the other side of the Child, which is to be on the side of children. The social order of reproductive futurism seals the fate of humans and non-humans alike, preserving extractive, petro-dependent transactions. As such, in the political project of climate change, there is an urgent need to break with the Child as an emblem of futurity, to unbuild the settler-colonial heteropatriarchal regime that has indeed catalyzed the crisis. Thus, to conclude, I ask: what can we make in the absence of “the child”?The alternative is refusal, a generative absence that reveals the precarity of our situations and destroys the symbol of the child