Published Spring 2006
 
The Future of Queer Theory
(on Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
[Duke UP, 2004])
Since its inception, queer theory has provoked readers with its
radical negativity—its hostility to identity politics, to all essentialist
accounts of gender and sexuality and to anything smacking of heteronormativity.
Michel Foucault problematized the homosexual subject of gay and
lesbian politics by showing its indebtedness to disciplinary discourses
inherited from nineteenth century sexology and eugenics. Judith
Butler, whose Gender Trouble galvanized queer theory, alleged that
sex and not simply gender is socially constructed and that political
appeals to the category "woman" entrench an exclusionary essentialism.
And Leo Bersani argued that queer culture models anti-communalism
through its sadomasochistic and frequently anonymous sexual practices.
Gaining credibility as a queer theorist, it appears, necessitates
the assumption of increasingly radical, and at times counterintuitive,
political positions.
Such extremity finds full expression in Lee Edelman's polemic,
No Future. Subtitled Queer Theory and the Death Drive, the book
argues that politics as we know it relies upon a future-oriented
logic that is indissociably intertwined with heterosexuality and
with what Edelman terms "reproductive futurism." On Edelman's reading,
the face of the child, epitomized by Dickens's Tiny Tim, coerces
us—through conjuring our compassion—into subordinating our present
wants and enjoyments to the always-deferred, future needs of "innocent"
children. Tim's vulnerability turns vindictive, Edelman proceeds,
when conservatives use 'protecting children' as a pretext for discriminating
against gays and lesbians. Nowhere is this disguised homophobia
more apparent than in recent 'arguments' against gay marriage. But
when gays and lesbians respond by insisting that they value marriage,
children, and their society's future—and not simply the ephemeral
delights of sex and drugs, as conservatives would have it—they abandon
the subversive force of queer sexuality. Instead of pleading for
seats at heteronormativity's table, Edelman argues, queers should
consent to their figuration as parasites upon the social order and
embody the death drive for which they have come to stand.
Reading No Future, one is reminded of Michael Warner's polemic,
The Trouble with Normal, which argued that queers should contest
all sexual norms and defend everything heterosexuals find detestable
in queer culture—promiscuous sex, bathhouses, pornography, drugs,
and so on. But where that book occupied queer culture as a site
from which to imagine a more ethical future, Edelman's project,
due to its anti-futurism, imagines very little. Edelman is at his
best and most hilarious when exposing the hypocrisy, false piety
and pseudo-morality of religious conservatives and of "reformed"
homosexuals like Larry Kramer. He is also at his best when demonstrating
how, in an impressive range of literary classics, movies, and contemporary
political examples, heterosexual culture deploys the child, disingenuously,
as a weapon against queer sexuality.
But his book falters as it comes increasingly to rely upon arcane
appeals to Lacanian psychoanalysis (conspicuously absent from this
book is a single reference to Foucault). Edelman's argument runs
something like this: a stubborn kernel of non-meaning resides at
the core of language, forcing each signifier to find its meaning
in the next ad infinitum, thus preventing signification from ever
completing itself or establishing meaning once and for all. This
internal limit subtends and makes possible all meaning-making while
simultaneously disrupting it. An unbridgeable gap, it marks the
place of a recalcitrant, functionless, and socially corrosive jouissance—an
excessive enjoyment over which language, society, and the future
stumble. Heterosexual culture, anxious to name and contain this
minatory abyss, casts homosexuals as it and into it. They are "…the
violent undoing of meaning, the loss of identity and coherence,
the unnatural access to jouissance…"(132).
One might fault Edelman, as John Brenkman has, for transposing
a rule of language onto the order of being. But even if one takes
his equation seriously, one must ask what is gained by actively
occupying a structurally necessary role. In other words, if the
Real must exist for the Symbolic to function, then the abyss will
remain whether homosexuals agree to inhabit it or not. Edelman acknowledges
this reality but argues that if homosexuals exit the abyss a new
subaltern will be compelled to enter it. Better, then, to remain
inside and mirror back to heterosexuality what troubles it most—meaninglessness,
death and antisocial desire. Unfortunately, Edelman provides few
details as to how we might accomplish this task, and his insistence
elsewhere that the powers-that-be will clamp down with unmitigated
force to repress and disavow the encroaching Real renders such a
strategy less than appealing. At one point he encourages queers
to pursue a more traditional politics alongside his radical recommendation
(29), but he fails to acknowledge that if the former succeeds—and
the dominant culture brings queers and/or their practices into its
fold—then the latter's intended audience will no longer be listening.
The most telling moment in Edelman's book, and the most important
for grasping the current state of queer theory, comes in its discussion
of Judith Butler's recent work, Antigone's Claim. Antigone's plea,
according to Butler, is that the life she lives and the love she
harbors (for her brother) become intelligible in and through the
Symbolic order. In other words, Antigone functions for Butler as
something of a queer avant la lettre, insisting, even from beyond
the grave, that society acknowledge and accommodate her stigmatized
desire and refusal of heterosexual reproduction, that queers like
her be spared a "social death" (Edelman 102). Butler's politics,
Edelman complains, is one of liberal-humanist inclusiveness. Against
Butler, Edelman argues that the Symbolic will always be exclusionary
and that Antigone represents a radical rejection of intelligibility,
a refusal to become recognizable on society's terms. Butler and
Edelman thus give two strikingly different faces to queer theory.
The former advocates working in the social to achieve recognition
for marginalized groups and to making norms inhabitable and livable
for queer sexualities; the latter insists that queer must remain
radically "other" to the dominant order, perpetually disruptive
and parasitic upon its smooth functioning.
Certain readers might chafe at Edelman's suggestion that Butler's
politics is insufficiently radical. After all, Butler has been criticized,
like Edelman, for trafficking in recondite theories and postmodern
argot and for failing to offer a viable model of political agency.
To be sure, Butler's post-structuralist and Foucaultian commitments
constrain her ability to posit a stable political agent and to conceive
a politics that would radically oppose, rather than merely reinforce
or marginally reinflect, a dominant cultural order. But in her recent
work, perhaps most strikingly in 2004's Undoing Gender, Butler has
turned to the "question of social transformation" (the title of
UG's tenth chapter), arguing, quite programmatically, that social
transformation "…is a question of developing, within law, within
psychiatry, within social and literary theory, a new legitimating
lexicon for the gender complexity that we have always been living"
(219). Lest she be accused of nominalism, Butler stresses the importance
of real bodies in forging such a vocabulary: "…the body is that
which can occupy the norm in myriad ways, exceed the norm, rework
the norm, and expose realities to which we thought we were confined
as open to transformation" (217). While Edelman rejects the future
as a site of social reproduction, Butler prizes it as a space of
uncertainty, an ambiguous terrain upon which competing and perhaps
unforeseeable claims will be made and new social orders elaborated.
Butler's model offers queer theory a brighter future than Edelman's,
not simply because it confers agency upon social actors and highlights
the social's capacity for transformation, but because it supersedes
the liberal inclusiveness for which Edelman faults it. Butler's
queer world is not one in which the dominant order remains stable
as it incorporates, or ingests, peripheral sexualities into its
fold. Rather, it is one in which the periphery remakes the center,
rearticulating what it means to be "normal" or "American" or "queer."
Thus, queers do not simply enter society on heterosexuality's terms;
they recast such terms, seizing upon instabilities in signification
to elaborate previously unarticulated and perhaps unanticipatable
ways of life. Edelman's point that 'queer' names "the resistance
of the social to itself" (2002) combats the very anti-futurism he
endorses; in this formulation, queerness functions as the force
that prevents a particular social order from coinciding with itself,
from congealing into a futureless nightmare. Queer, then, might
denote the instability of all norms and social orders, their intrinsic
capacity for change.
Queer theorists more politically programmatic than Edelman frequently
neglect this point. Michael Warner, for example, accuses gays and
lesbians who aspire to marriage of caving, in assimilationist fashion,
to heterosexual norms perceived as demands. But queers never exist
completely outside such norms—and thus cannot, logically, succumb
to them—and marriage and childrearing might not look the same with
gays on board. After all, gays who have been traumatized by their
parents' homophobia and lessons of compulsory heterosexuality are
probably less likely than their heterosexual counterparts to repeat
such mistakes. Insofar as married gays retain connections to less
traditional elements of queer culture, we cannot assume that they
will abandon their fights for sexual freedom, conform entirely to
all matrimonial traditions, or turn their backs upon their promiscuous
peers. Some might, but many will not.
Edelman's book works well as an intensely academic polemic but
as a political resource it proves insufficient. If queer theory
is to have a social impact, it must interpellate the gay and lesbian
audience to whom, after all, it is primarily addressed. Few of these
people, we can safely assume, want to live in a void or die Antigone's
death. Queer culture should keep insisting that we not sacrifice
present, pressing needs to heterosexual fantasies, but to secure
its future it must imagine a political order in which the needs
of children are not inimical to the interests of queers, and it
must celebrate—as Eve Sedgwick does so passionately in "How to Grow
Your Kids Up Gay" – that which is most queer, and queer-able, in
children.
Note: Thanks to Rita Felski for her suggestions. All opinions
and errors, of course, are my own.
* * *
Works Cited
Bersani, Leo. Homos. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.
Brenkman, John. "Queer Post Politics." Narrative 10:2 (2002): 174-180.
Butler, Judith. Antigone's Claim. New York: Columbia UP, 2002.
---. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1999.
---. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Edelman, Lee. No Future. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.
---. "Post Partum." Narrative 10:2 (2002): 181-185.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans.
Robert Hurley.
New York: Vintage, 1990.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "How to Grow Your Kids Up Gay." Fear of
a Queer Planet.
Ed. Michael Warner. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
Warner, Michael. The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics and the
Ethics of Queer Life.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.
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