Edelman theory bad – Edelman’s theory centers a white, male queer subject and operates through a monolithic viewpoint.

There are varied articulations of what I am referring to as queer pessimism, but perhaps the best known of these is Lee Edelman’s queer negativity, as formulated in his 2004 book, No Future. 2 I will narrow my discussion of queer pessimisms to Edelman’s work because it best demonstrates the conceptual move that I will critique (and offer an alternative to) in this article: Edelman frames hope and refusal as mutually exclusive options that negate one another’s potency. Political hope, in his view, is always complicit with reproductive futurity and its violence. Refusal, on the other hand, is the hallmark of queer negativity, which is rendered the unintelligible outside of political discourse and imagination. In the following section, I will briefly lay out his argument and take up existing critiques among queer and feminist theorists who argue that, first, Edelman’s work presumes a white, male queer subject and, second, it is not useful or relevant for women, nonbinary people, and trans people of color. I build upon these critiques by arguing that these limitations are linked to Edelman’s perpetuation of a misleading binary between hope and refusal, which forecloses the radical possibilities for queer feminist theory and practice 2 The title of this section borrows a phrase from page 5 of Edelman’s No Future (2004). that their co-constitution opens up—possibilities that I explore in my engagement with Hartman’s work. Edelman argues that every intelligibly political movement today is structured by the teleological valuation of the future (and especially future generations) as the foundation and aim of politics—epitomized by the figure of “the Child.” The Child does not refer to literal children but is rather a symbol of possibility, futurity, and innocence that affirms and authenticates a given social order. This merely symbolic status and function of the Child in political discourse is evidenced by the fact that actual children are so often sacrificed in the name of the Child (Edelman 2022b, 100). As I write in November 2023, we are bearing witness to this sacrificial logic, as the Israeli state (with support from the US government) slaughters Palestinian children in the name of the future of Israel and its children—justifications that have been augmented with falsified claims (corroborated and then disavowed by US President Joe Biden) about Hamas beheading Israeli infants (Al Jazeera 2023).3 As Edelman points out, the centrality of the figure of the Child is not limited to fascist or conservative politics but also structures so-called progressive politics of the Left. Highlighting the stubborn persistence of this figure, Edelman points out the irony of pro-abortion campaigns that mirror their anti-abortion opponents by advocating on behalf of “our children—for our daughters and our sons” (2004, 3). This example, a rare moment in No Future where reproductive futurism encounters the discourse of reproductive rights, is used as evidence for Eelman’s argument that no matter the specific content of one’s politics, the logic of reproductive futurism persists. This leads to the opening insight of No Future: our contemporary political imagination is constituted such that it is impossible to take up a position that negates the centrality of the Child without being rendered unintelligible as political at all.4 To refuse the logic of reproductive futurism, to refuse to be on the side fighting for the children, is to occupy a position radically outside the politically imaginable and intelligible—and it is this space, which politics renders unthinkable, that Edelman proposes queerness occupies (3). For him, queerness names the antisocial opposition to the mandate of reproductive futurism—it is the social order’s death drive (3). K of Edelman Though Muñoz’s critique focuses primarily on whiteness, it is important to note that Edelman’s queer subject is also implicitly male. Despite a potentially fruitful alliance between queer and feminist refusals of reproductive futurism and its weaponization of the figure of the Child as a means of social control (especially for those with the capacity for pregnancy and birth), the possibility of co-conspiring in No Future falls short. Edelman’s account of reproductive futurity is decidedly monolithic; focused on the abstract and structural level of analysis, he does not carefully parse the disparate forms it takes and the ways it is deployed when it comes to those deemed, by normative default, “would-be” fathers or mothers. Instead, he speaks broadly of “parents,” and in his discussion of parental love, they are always presumed to be heterosexual (53, 59). The conspicuous absence of race, sex, and gender is intentional, as indicated in an endnote that expresses Edelman’s “refusal” to engage in what he dismisses as “identity politics” and his insistence that, despite the fact that most of his examples in No Future are men, his figuration of the queer “has no privileged relation to any sex or sexuality” (2004, 165). My training in feminist philosophy has made me deeply suspicious of any claim to conceptual neutrality; it is far too often in my discipline that abstract universality quietly smuggles in particularity (read: masculine subjectivity). But perhaps most telling and relevant to the context of this article is that Edelman suggests that while it’s possible that there could be a female sinthomosexual, the female characters from the film and literary sources he engages “are determined by socially legible desires—typically in the form of obsessive ‘love’—rather than by the refusal of sociality and desire,” so they are less useful for his argument (165). In the same breath that he declares further consideration of gendered differences “valuable” (for someone else to consider), he dismisses the relevance of sex and gender for an analysis of reproductive futurism and, at the same time, uncritically circulates a stereotypical binary wherein women are associated with love (and reproduction) rather than refusal (and negation), which for Edelman is epitomized by the male queer (165). While Edelman dismisses considerations of race, sex, and gender as irrelevant or even counter to his project, any robust and actionable account of reproductive futurism needs to do the work of carefully attending to lived experience. Reproductive futurism is not homogenous in its application or its effects; understanding how to refuse it requires attending to its complexity with care. As Penelope Deutscher has pointed out, what Edelman presents as reproductive futurism’s overvaluation of parenthood is an overgeneralization; racialized women (often fetishized as “figures of surplus pregnancy, of welfare benefit abuse or other kinds of irresponsibility”) are routinely devalued as parents/mothers (Deutscher 2017, 50). The long and ongoing history of forced sterilization of Black, Indigenous, and Latina women in the United States plainly evidences this. While this may not be in conflict with the heart of Edelman’s analysis, his account lacks important nuance—nuance that can be (and has been) offered by decolonial feminist scholarship.5 In failing to attend to the complexities of reproductive futurism as it is experienced by flesh-and-blood people rather than merely fictive and fetishized characters, he forecloses careful thinking about the forms of refusal most able to counter its logic and effects.