Queer K

Queer K
1NC
[Link]
Violence against queerness results in the annihilation of
identitythis is a form of soul murder
Yep, Lovaas, and Elia 03 Professors, San Francisco University (Gust, Karen, and John,
Journal of Homosexual Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4, pp. 18,)
Very early in life

children learn from interpersonal contacts and mediated messages
that deviations from the heteronormative standard, such as
homosexuality, are anxiety-ridden, guilt-producing, fear-inducing,
shame-invoking, hate-deserving, psychologically blemishing, and
physically threatening. Internalized homophobia, in the form of selfhatred and self-destructive thoughts and behavioral patterns,
becomes firmly implanted in the lives and psyches of individuals in
heteronormative society. Exemplifying the feelings and experiences of many people who do
These are the internal injuries that individuals inflict upon themselves.
not fit in the heteronormative mandate, Kevin Jennings (1994) tells us his personal story: I was born in
1963. . . . [I] realized in grade school that I was gay. I felt absolutely alone. I had no one to talk to, didnt
know any openly gay people, and saw few representations of gays in the media of the 1970s. I imagined
gay people were a tiny, tiny minority, who had been and would always be despised for their perversion.
Not once in high school did I ever learn a single thing about homosexuality or gay people. I couldnt
imagine a happy life as a gay man. So I withdrew from my peers and used alcohol and drugs to try to dull
the pain of my isolation. Eventually, at age seventeen I tried to kill myself, like one out of every three gay
teens. I saw nothing in my past, my present, or (it seemed) my future suggesting that things would ever
Heteronormativity is so powerful that its regulation

and enforcement are carried out by the individuals themselves
through socially endorsed and culturally accepted forms of soul
murder. Soul murder is a term that I borrow from the child abuse and
neglect literature to highlight the torment of heteronormativity (Yep,
2002). Shengold (1999) defines soul murder as the apparently willful abuse
and neglect of children by adults that are of sufficient intensity and
frequency to be traumatic . . . [so that] the childrens subsequent
emotional development has been profoundly and predominantly
negatively affected (p. 1). Further explaining this concept, Shengold (1989) writes, soul
murder is neither a diagnosis nor a condition. It is a dramatic term
for circumstances that eventuate in crimethe deliberate attempt to
eradicate or compromise the separate identity of another person (p.
2, my emphasis). Isnt the incessant policing and enforcement , either
deliberately or unconsciously, by self and others, of the
heteronormative mandate a widespread form of soul murder?
get any better. (pp. 13-14)
The alternative is to embrace failure as a radical means of

rejecting normative notions of success and productivity
Halberstam 11. J. J. Jack Halberstam, professor of English at the University of Southern
California, The Queer Art of Failure, pg. 2
In this book I range from childrens animation to avant-garde performance and queer art to think about
ways of being and knowing that stand outside of conventional understandings of success. I argue that
success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily
to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth

accumulation. But these measures of success have come under serious pressure recently, with the
collapse of financial markets on the one hand and the epic rise in divorce rates on the other. If the
boom and bust years of the late twentieth century and the early
twenty-first have taught us anything, we should at least have a
healthy critique of static models of success and failure. Rather than just
arguing for a reevaluation of these standards of passing and failing, The Queer Art of Failure
dismantles the logics of success and failure with which we currently
live. Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking,
undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative,
more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.
Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally
well; for queers failure can be a style, to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life,
to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of
success that depend upon trying and trying again. In fact if success
requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run
and offers different rewards. What kinds of reward can failure offer us? Perhaps most
obviously, failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that
discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal
of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable
adulthoods. Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of
childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between
adults and children, winners and losers. And while failure certainly
comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as
disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the
opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic
positivity of contemporary life. As Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us in Bright- sided,
positive thinking is a North American affliction, a mass delusion
that emerges out of a combination of American exceptionalism and
a desire to believe that success happens to good people and failure
is just a consequence of a bad attitude rather than structural
conditions (2009: 13). Positive thinking is offered up in the U.S. as a cure for cancer, a path to untold
believing that success

depends upon ones attitude is far preferable to Americans than
recognizing that their success is the outcome of the tilted scales
of race, class, and gender. As Ehrenreich puts it, If optimism is the key to material
riches, and a surefire way to engineer your own success. Indeed
success, and if you can achieve an optimistic outlook through the discipline of positive thinking, then there
is no excuse for failure. But, she continues,
the flip side of positivity is thus a
harsh insistence on personal responsibility, meaning that while
capitalism produces some peoples success through other

peoples failures, the ideology of positive thinking insists that
success depends only upon working hard and failure is always of
your own doing (8). We know better of course in an age when the banks that ripped off ordinary
people have been deemed too big to fail and the people who bought bad mortgages are simply too little
Ehrenreich uses the example of American

womens application of positive thinking to breast cancer to
demonstrate how -dangerous the belief in optimism can be and
how deeply Americans want to believe that health is a matter of
attitude rather than environmental degradation and that wealth is
a matter of visualizing success rather than having the cards
stacked in your favor. For the nonbelievers outside the cult of
positive thinking, however, the failures and losers, the grouchy,
irritable whiners who do not want to have a nice day and who
do not believe that getting cancer has made them better people,
politics offers a better explanatory framework than personal
disposition. For these negative thinkers, there are definite advantages to
failing. Relieved of the obligation to keep smiling through
chemotherapy or bankruptcy, the negative thinker can use the
experience of failure to confront the gross inequalities of everyday
life in the United States. From the perspective of feminism, failure
has often been a better bet than success. Where feminine success
is always measured by male standards, and gender failure often
means being relieved of the pressure to measure up to patriarchal
ideals, not succeeding at womanhood can offer unexpected
to care about. In Bright-sided
pleasures. In many ways this has been the message of many renegade feminists in the past. Monique
Wittig (1992) argued in the 1970s that if womanhood depends upon a
heterosexual framework, then lesbians are not women, and if
lesbians are not women, then they fall outside of patriarchal
norms and can re-create some of the meaning of their genders. Also
in the 1970s Valerie Solanas suggested that if woman takes on meaning only in relation to man, then
these kinds of
feminisms, what I call shadow feminisms in chapter 5, have long haunted the
more acceptable forms of feminism that are oriented to positivity,
reform, and accommodation rather than negativity, rejection, and
transformation. Shadow feminisms take the form not of becoming,
being, and doing but of shady, murky modes of undoing, unbecoming, and violating.
we need to cut up men (2004: 72). Perhaps that is a little drastic, but at any rate
Failure is a viable political strategy

Halberstam 11. J. J. Judith Halberstam, professor of English at the University of Southern
Illegibility, then, has been and remains, a reliable source for political
autonomy. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State Any book that begins with a quote from SpongeBob
SquarePants and is motored by wisdom gleaned from Fantastic Mr. Fox, Chicken Run, and Finding Nemo,
among other animated guides to life, runs the risk of not being taken seriously. Yet this is my goal.
Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be

frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken
seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and
true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to

map a few detours. Indeed terms like serious and rigorous tend to be
code words, in academia as well as other contexts, for disciplinary
correctness; they signal a form of training and learning that
confirms what is already known according to approved methods of
knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of
fancy. Training of any kind, in fact, is a way of refusing a kind of
Benjaminian relation to knowing, a stroll down uncharted streets in
the wrong direction (Benjamin 1996); it is precisely about staying in
well-lit territories and about knowing exactly which way to go
before you set out. Like many others before me, I propose that instead the goal is
to lose ones way, and indeed to be prepared to lose more than
ones way. Losing, we may agree with Elizabeth Bishop, is an art, and one that
is not too hard to master / Though it may look like a disaster (2008:
166167). In the sciences, particularly physics and mathematics, there are
many examples of rogue intellectuals, not all of whom are reclusive Unabomber
types (although more than a few are just that), who wander off into uncharted
territories and refuse the academy because the publish-or-perish
pressure of academic life keeps them tethered to conventional
knowledge production and its well-traveled byways. Popular
mathematics books, for example, revel in stories about unconventional
loners who are self- schooled and who make their own way
through the world of numbers. For some kooky minds, disciplines
actually get in the way of answers and theorems precisely because
they offer maps of thought where intuition and blind [unscripted]
fumbling might yield better results. In 2008, for example, The New Yorker featured a
story about an oddball physicist who, like many ambitious physicists and mathematicians, was in hot
pursuit of a grand theory, a theory of everything. This thinker, Garrett Lisi, had dropped out of academic
physics because string theory dominated the field at that time and he thought the answers lay elsewhere.
As an outsider to the discipline, writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Lisi built his

theory as an outsider might, relying on a grab bag of component
parts: a hand-built mathematical structure, an unconventional
way of describing gravity, and a mysterious mathematical entity
known as E8.1 In the end Lisis theory of everything fell short of expectations, but it
nonetheless yielded a whole terrain of new questions and methods .
Similarly the computer scientists who pioneered new programs to
produce computer-generated imagery (CGI), as many accounts of
the rise of Pixar have chronicled, were academic rejects or
dropouts who created independent institutes in order to explore
their dreams of animated worlds.2 These alternative cultural and
academic realms, the areas beside academia rather than within it,
the intellectual worlds conjured by losers, failures, dropouts, and
refuseniks, often serve as the launching pad for alternatives
precisely when the university cannot. This is not a bad time to

experiment with disciplinary transformation on behalf of the
project of generating new forms of knowing, since the fields that
were assembled over one hundred years ago to respond to new
market economies and the demand for narrow expertise, as
Foucault de- scribed them, are now losing relevance and failing to
respond either to real-world knowledge projects or student
interests. As the big disciplines begin to crumble like banks that
have invested in bad securities we might ask more broadly, Do we
really want to shore up the ragged boundaries of our shared
interests and intellectual commitments, or might we rather take
this opportunity to rethink the project of learning and thinking
altogether? Just as the standardized tests that the U.S. favors as a
guide to intellectual advancement in high schools tend to identify
people who are good at standardized exams (as opposed to, say,
intellectual visionaries), so in universities grades, exams, and
knowledge of canons identify scholars with an aptitude for
maintaining and conforming to the dictates of the discipline. This book,
a stroll out of the confines of conventional knowledge and into the unregulated territories of failure, loss,
and unbecoming, must make a long detour around disciplines and ordinary ways of thinking. Let me
universities (and by implication high schools) squash rather than

promote quirky and original thought. Disciplinarity, as defined by Foucault
(1995), is a technique of modern power: it depends upon and
deploys normalization, routines, convention, tradition, and
regularity, and it produces experts and administrative forms of
governance. The university structure that houses the disciplines
and jealously guards their boundaries now stands at a crossroads,
not of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, past and future,
national and transnational; the crossroads at which the rapidly
disintegrating bandwagon of disciplines, subfields, and
interdisciplines has arrived offer a choice between the university
as corporation and investment opportunity and the university as a
new kind of public sphere with a different investment in knowledge,
in ideas, and in thought and politics. A radical take on disciplinarity and the
explain how
university that presumes both the breakdown of the disciplines and the closing of gaps between fields
conventionally presumed to be separated can be found in a manifesto published by Fred Moten and
Stefano Harney in 2004 in Social Text titled The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses. Their
essay is a searing critique directed at the intellectual and the critical intellectual, the professional scholar
the critical academic is

not the answer to encroaching professionalization but an extension
of it, using the very same tools and legitimating strategies to
become an ally of professional education. Moten and Harney
prefer to pitch their tent with the subversive intellectuals, a
maroon community of outcast thinkers who refuse, resist, and
renege on the demands of rigor, excellence, and productivity.
and the critical academic professionals. For Moten and Harney,
They tell us to steal from the university, to steal the

enlightenment for others (112), and to act against what Foucault
called the Conquest, the unspoken war that founded, and with the
force of law refounds, society (113). And what does the
undercommons of the university want to be? It wants to
constitute an unprofessional force of fugitive knowers, with a set of
intellectual practices not bound by examination systems and test
scores. The goal for this unprofessionalization is not to abolish; in
fact Moten and Harney set the fugitive intellectual against the
elimination or abolition of this, the founding or refounding of that:
Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society
that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have
the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything
but abolition as the founding of a new society (113). Not the
elimination of anything but the founding of a new society. And why not?
Why not think in terms of a different kind of society than the one
that first created and then abolished slavery? The social worlds we
inhabit, after all, as so many thinkers have reminded us, are not
inevitable; they were not always bound to turn out this way, and
whats more, in the process of producing this reality, many other
realities, fields of knowledge, and ways of being have been
discarded and, to cite Fou- cault again, disqualified. A few visionary books, produced
alongside disciplinary knowledge, show us the paths not taken. For example, in a book that itself began as
a detour, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999),
the modern state has run roughshod over local,

customary, and undisciplined forms of knowledge in order to
rationalize and simplify social, agricultural, and political practices
that have profit as their primary motivation. In the process, says Scott,
certain ways of seeing the world are established as normal or
natural, as obvious and necessary, even though they are often
entirely counterintuitive and socially engineered. Seeing Like a
James C. Scott details the ways
State began as a study of why the state has always seemed to be the enemy of people who move
around, but quickly became a study of the demand by the state for
legibility through the imposition of methods of standardization and
uniformity (1). While Dean Spade (2008) and other queer scholars use Scotts book to think about
I
want to use his monumental study to pick up some of the
discarded local knowledges that are trampled underfoot in the rush
to bureaucratize and rationalize an economic order that privileges
profit over all kinds of other motivations for being and doing.
how we came to insist upon the documentation of gender identity on all govern- mental documentation,
Links
Apoc Rhetoric
Narratives of impending apocalypse rely on the notion of
reproductive futurity and the importance of securing a
futurethis notion emphasizes the importance of the
later rather than the now, which precludes the violence
happening in the current social and political worlds
Kouri-Towe 13 (Natalie; 6/16/13; Fuse, Queer Apocalypse: Survivalism and Queer Life at the
End http://fusemagazine.org/2013/06/36-3_kouri-owe)
Queer adjective Strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric. Also: ofquestionable character; suspicious, dubious.
noun informal colloq. (freq. derogatory). A homosexual; esp. a male homosexual. verb informal To put
out of order; to spoil. Also: to spoil the reputation or chances of (a person); to put (a person) out of favour
The
apocalypse is coming and queers are going to spoil it . As narratives
of impending apocalypse and postapocalyptic survival permeate
our cultural and political landscapes, it becomes increasingly easy to imagine our
end. Whether the end of a sustainable environment, the end of
culture, or the end of global capitalist economies, the end of life
as we know it is both a terrifying possibility and a promising
fantasy of a radically different form of life beyond the present .
Mainstream depictions of postapocalyptic survival largely centre
on the archetypical figure of the male saviour or hero, and
advance a familiar patriarchal instrumentalization of womens
bodies as vessels for the survival of the human species . But what
alternate stories might we tell about the end, and how might a
queer framework reshape our apocalyptic narratives? The
proposal to think queerly about the apocalypse is not an attempt
to rescue apocalypse stories from the insidious reproduction of
hegemonic relations; rather it is an opportunity to playfully
consider what queer approaches to survival at the end might
offer to our rethinking of the present. Apocalyptic narratives are
appealing because we find it hard to imagine a radically different
social and political world without the complete destruction of the
institutions and economies that were built and sustained through
colonial and imperial violence and exploitation. If we are already
thinking and talking about the apocalypse, then queer thinking
about the apocalypse serves as an opportunity for rethinking
narratives of politics in both the future and the present . As global,
structural, economic and political asymmetries accelerate, more
people live in conditions lacking basic resources like food and
water, and increasingly suffer from criminalization and
incarceration. It is clear that postapocalyptic survival is also not simply a
fiction but a daily reality for many people. From refugee camps to welfare
(with another). To cause (a person) to feel queer; to disconcert,perturb, unsettle. Now rare. [1]
reforms, survival is more than an exercise in imagining a different world. But, even for those who are not
We take
pleasure in imagining how we might prepare or attempt survival
in a shifted environment because to imagine how we might live
differently is to introduce new realms of possibility for living
differently in our present. So how can we reconcile both the demand for attending to the
crisis of survival in the present and the fantasy of postapocalypse? Here qu eerness might offer
us some considerations for rethinking the apocalypse and
narratives of survival. Queer Survivalism Survivalism noun A policy of trying to ensure ones
own survival or that of ones social or national group. The practicing of outdoor survival skills. [2] If
survivalism is wrapped up in the preservation of the nation state,
of race, of gender or of our social order in general, then the first
contribution of queerness to the apocalypse is its disruption to
the framing of who and what survives, and how. There can be no
nation in queer postapocalyptic survival, because the nation
presents a foundational problem to queer survival. The nation,
which regulates gender and reproduction, requires normalized
organizations of sexual and family life in order to reproduce or
preserve the national population. If we are already at the end,
then why not consider survival without the obligation of
reproduction and the heteronormative family? Masculinist
narratives of postapocalyptic survival deploy the male protagonist as the
extension of the nation. Here, the male hero stands in the place of the military, the police or
living through conditions of catastrophic loss, thinking about apocalypse is enticing.
the law by providing safety and security to his family and weak survivors like children and animals.
Queer survivalism, on the other hand, disrupts the normative

embodiments of survivalism by redirecting our desires to queer
bodies, opening up survival to those outside of the prototypes of
fitness and health. Because postapocalyptic narratives replicate
racist and ableist eugenic tropes of survival of the fittest, a
queering of survivalism opens up space for thinking about,
talking about and planning for more varied and accessible
frameworks for doing survival. Conversely, a queering of survival
might also open up the option of choosing not to survive, through
the refusal of reproduction or the refusal of life itself. The Queer
Apocalypse Apocalypse noun More generally: a disaster resulting in drastic, irreversible damage to
human society or the environment, esp. on a global scale; a cataclysm. [3] If we are going to imagine the
destruction of the world as we know it, then why not make these fictions meaningful to the present? Lee
If queerness
is a kind of end to the norms and structures of our world, then it
makes sense that queerness might say something meaningful
about imagining the end. Narratives of postapocalyptic survival
function primarily as stories of individual survival against a
hostile world, and often a hostile otherin the form of dangerous
strangers or zombies. These narratives privilege the individual as
the basic unit for survival, replicating the neoliberal values of
Edelman has argued that queerness is the place of the social orders death drive. [4]
individualism. At best, these narratives expand beyond the individual survivor when he is joined
by his immediate family or builds a new family. Queer models of kinship offer
alternate frameworks for imagining survival beyond the
individual, through collectivity and alternative kinships. If we are
going to imagine surviving either our present or our impending
futures, we need collectives to survive. This is old news to people who have long
survived through collective struggle and collective support. This is not to simply produce
a romantic fantasy of a utopian community, but rather to
acknowledge and recognize that strength comes from organizing
together. If capitalist, nationalist, patriarchal, heteronormative
and neoliberal logics tell us that were each responsible for our
own lives, then what better queering can we offer than to
reimagine stories of how we think about survival, or even to
refuse to survive? So what tools do we need for queer survival? First, we need
alternative models for building survival strategies. For instance,
learning how to repurpose everyday objects, everyday networks
and everyday resources. [5] Second, we need to consider models of
communalism, and to develop better ways of communicating and
working through conflict. Third, we need to strategize collectively,
share skills, build skills and foster collaboration. And lastly, we
need to mobilize what queers do bestspoiling, twisting and
perverting the normative narratives that dominate survivalism
and stories of apocalypse.
Feminism
The concept of feminism is tied to a notion of motherdaughter and is grounded in heteronormitivity, which
precludes queers and trans from the issue. This model
also turns the aff the mother-daughter system
resembles the patriarchal system that creates the
dynamic as a static concept that is either to be accepted
or rejected
California, The Queer Art of Failure, pgs. 124-125
Thetensionbetweenmemoryandforgettingasexploredinchapter3tendstobedistinctlyOedipal,familial,andgenerational.Are
thereothermodelsofgeneration,temporality,andpoliticsavailabletoqueercultureandfeminism?TheOedipalframehasstifledall
kindsofothermodelsforthinkingabouttheevolutionoffeministandqueerpolitics.
From womens studies

professors who think of their students as daughters to next wave feminists
who see earlier activists as dowdy and antiquated mothers, Oedipal dynamics
and their familial metaphors snuff out the potential future of new knowledge
formations. Many womens studies departments around the country currently
struggle with the messy and even ugly legacy of Oedipal models of
generationality.Insomeofthesedepartmentsthe Oedipal dynamics are also racialized and
sexualized, and so an older generation of mostly white women might be
simultaneously hiring and holding at bay a younger generation of (often
queer) women of color. The whole model of passing down knowledge from
mother to daughter is quite clearly invested in white, gendered, and hetero
nor- mativity; indeed the system inevitably stalls in the face of these racialized and heterosexualized scenes of difference .Andwhilethemothersbecomefrustratedwith
theapparentunwillingnessofthewomentheyhavehiredtocontinuetheirlineofinquiry,thedaughtersstruggletomaketheolder
womenseethatregulatorysystemsareembeddedintheparadigmstheysoinsistentlywanttopasson.The
pervasive
model of womens studies as a mother-daughter dynamic ironically resembles
patriarchal systems in that it casts the mother as the place of history, tradition, and memory and the daughter as the inheritor of a static system
which she must either accept without changing or reject completely .While
VirginiaWoolfsfamouslineaboutwomenfromARoomofOnesOwn,Wethinkbackthroughourmothersifwearewomen,has
beenwidelyinterpretedasthefoundingstatementofanewaestheticlineagethatpassesthroughthemotherandnotthefather,the
crucialpointoftheformulationistheconditionalphrase(1929:87).Infactif
we are women implies that if

we do not think back through our mothers, then we are not women, and this
broken line of thinking and unbeing of the woman unexpectedly offers a way
out of the reproduction of woman as the other to man from one generation to
the next.ThetextsthatIexamineinthischapterrefusetothinkbackthroughthemother;theyactivelyandpassivelylosethe
mother,abusethemother,love,hate,anddestroythemother,andintheprocesstheyproduceatheoreticalandimaginativespacethat
isnotwomanorthatcanbeoccupiedonlybyunbecomingwomen.Psychoanalysissituatesthefigureofthewomanasan
incomprehensible,irrational,andevenimpossibleidentity.FreudsfamousquestionWhatdowomenwant?isnotsimplyevidence
that,asSimonedeBeauvoirfamouslycommented,Freudnevershowedmuchinterestinthedestinyofwomen(1989:39);rather
itasksofwomenwhytheywouldwanttooccupytheplaceofcastration,lack,andothernessfromonegenerationtothenext(Jones
1957:421).Answeringthequestionofwhatmenmightwantisquitesimpleinasystemthatfavorsmalemasculinity;whatwomen
wantandgetfromthesamesystemisamuchmorecomplexquestion.If,asFreudasserts,thelittlegirlmustreconcileherselftothe
fateofafemininitydefinedasafailedmasculinity,thenthatfailuretobemasculinemustsurelyharboritsownproductivepotential.
Whatdowomenwant?Moreover,how
has the desire to be a woman come to be associated

definitively with masochism, sacrifice, self-subjugation, and unbecoming?
How might we read these avenues of desire and selfhood as something other
than failed masculinity and the end of desire?
Feminism creates gender oppression because it utilized

biological means to determine gender
Gayle Rubin 1993, cultural anthropoliticst, activist and theorist of sex and gender politics, Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical
Theory of the Politics of Sexuality, Social Perspective in Lesbian and Gay Studies
Whichever feminist position on sexuality right, left or center - eventually

attains dominance, the existence of such a rich discussion is evidence that
the feminist movement will always be a source of interesting thought about
sex. Nevertheless, I want to challenge the assumption that feminism is or should be the privileged site of
a theory of sexuality. Feminism is the theory of gender oppression. To assume
automatically that this makes it the theory of sexual oppression is to fail to
distinguish between gender, on the one hand, and erotic desire, on the other. In the English
language, the word "sex" has two very different meanings. It means gender and gender identity, as in "the
female sex" or "the male sex." But sex also refers to sexual activity, lust, intercourse, and arousal, as in "to
have sex." This semantic merging reflects a cultural assumption that sexuality is reducible to sexual
The cultural fusion

of gender with sexuality has given rise to the idea that a theory of sexuality
may be derived directly out of a theory of gender. In an earlier essay, "The Traffic in
intercourse and that it is a function of the relations between women and men.
Women," I used the concept of a sex/gender system, defined as a "set of arrangements by which a society
transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity. "94 I went onto argue that " Sex
as we
know it - gender identity, sexual desire and fantasy, concepts of childhood - is
itself a social product. "95 I did not distinguish between lust and gender, treating both as
modalities of the same underlying social process. "The Traffic in Women" was inspired by the literature on
kin-based systems of social organization. It appeared to me at the time that gender and desire were
systemically intertwined in such social formations. This mayor may not be an accurate assessment of the
relationship between sex and gender in tribal organizations. But it is surely not an adequate formulation for
a system of sexuality has

emerged out of earlier kinship forms and has acquired significant autonomy:
Particularly from the eighteenth century onward, Western societies created
and deployed a new apparatus which was superimposed on the previous one, and
which, without completely supplanting the latter, helped to reduce its importance. I am
speaking of the deployment of sexuality. For the first [kinship], what is pertinent is the link
sexuality in Western industrial societies. As Foucault has pointed out,
between partners and definite statutes; the second [sexuality] is concerned with the sensations of the
body, the quality of pleasures, and the nature of impressions. 96 The development of this sexual system
has taken place in the context of gender relations. Part of the modern ideology of sex is that lust is the
province of men, purity that of women. It is no accident that pornography and the perversions have been
considered part of the male domain. In the sex industry, women have been excluded from most production
and consumption, and allowed to participate primarily as workers. In order to participate in the
"perversions," women have had to overcome serious limitations on their social mobility, their economic
Gender affects the operation of the sexual

system, and the sexual system has had genderspecific manifestations. But
although sex and gender are related, they are not the same thing, and they
form the basis of two distinct arenas of social practice.
resources, and their sexual freedoms.
Futurism
Future orientation is grounded in current notions of what
family and future mean the Child is already queer but
our focus on the future pushes the child to know the
future as heterosexual. This kind of mindset prevents
change from happening
Queer interventions into kinship studies have taken many forms: some call
for new models of family(ButlersAntigoneasasubstituteforOedipus,Westonschosenfamiliesasasubstituteforblood
bonds);others call for the recognition of friendship ties as kinship; and still others
ask that we recognize the difference that gay and lesbian parents make to
the very meaning of family. But few scholars call for a de-emphasis on family
or a rejection of the family as the form of social organization par excellence .In
whatfollowsIexaminewhathappensinpopularnarrativewhencharacterslikeDorydoforgettheirfamiliesandintheprocessaccessothermodesof
relating,belonging,andcaring.What
family promises and what marriage-chasing gays and

lesbians desire is not simply acceptance and belonging but a form of
belonging that binds the past to the present and the present to the future by
secur- ingwhatLeeEdelmanhascalledheterofuturitythroughthefigureofthechild.AsEdelmanarguesinNoFutureandas
KathrynBondStocktondemonstratesinherbookonthequeerchild,GrowingSideways,the child is always already
queer and must therefore quickly be converted to a proto- heterosexual by
being pushed through a series of maturational models of growth that project
the child as the future and the future as heterosexual. Queer culture, with
its emphasis on repetition(Butler),horizon- tality(Muoz,Stockton),immaturity and a
refusal of adulthood(me),where adulthood rhymes with heterosexual parenting,
resists a develop- mental model of substitution and instead invests in what
Stockton calls sideways relations, relations that grow along parallel lines
rather than upward and onward. This queer form of antidevelopment requires
healthy doses of forgetting and disavowal and proceeds by way of a series of
sub- stitutions.Ofcourseallofculture,asJosephRoachargues,emergesfromthekineticandevenfranticprocessofwhathecalls
surrogation:formsconstantlysupplanteachotherwhileholdingontoavestigeoftheperformancetheyreplaceintheformofagesturehere,auseof
languagethere.RoachsworkinCitiesoftheDeadteachesustofindtheevidenceoflonggonesubterraneanculturesbyreadingthetracestheyleave
behindwithincanonicalculturalformstheotherisalwaysburiedinthedominant.Queer
culture enacts rupture as

substitution as the queer child steps out of the assembly line of heterosexual
production and turns toward a new project. This new project holds on to
vestiges of the old but distorts the old beyond recognition; forexample,arelationtothefather
dedicatedtosocialstabilityinstraightculturebecomesadaddyboyrelationshipinqueercontextsdedicatedtothesexualizationofgenerational
difference.The
stability of heteronormative models of time and transformation

impacts many different models of social change ;asJ.K.GibsonGrahampointoutinherfeministcritique
ofpoliticaleconomy,if we represent capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and racist economies
as totalizing and inevitable, as seamless and impermeable, then we have
little possibility of escape from those systems and few ways of accessing a
non-capitalist imaginary(1996:21).AndasRoderickFergusonarguesinhisbookAberrationsinBlack(2005),the
normativetemporalandspatialframesofhistoricalmaterialismhaveironicallyforcedacongruencebetweenMarxistandbourgeoisdefinitionsof
civilization,bothofwhichcastracializednonnormativesexualitiesasanteriorandassignsofdisorderandsocialchaoswithinanotherwisestablesocial
system.Thecontingencyofqueerrelations,theiruncertainty,irregularity,andevenperversity,disregardsthesocallednaturalbondsbetweenmemory
andfuturity,andintheprocessmakeanimplicitargumentforforgetfulness,albeitonethatisrarelyreflectedinmainstreamtextsaboutmemoryand
forgetting.
The use of future orientation creates a narrow spectrum

for what we may consider the future that queers have no
meaning and represent failure through our existence
FailureanimatesmuchoftheworkofanotherCaliforniaartist,JudieBamber.Forherthethematicsoflosingandfailureappearwithin
visualityitselfasalineorthresholdbeyondwhichyoucannotsee,ahorizonthatmarkstheplaceofthefailureofvisionand
visibilityitself.WhileJosE.Muozcastsqueernessasakindofhorizonforpoliticalaspiration(Muoz:2010),Bambers
horizons remind us that possibility and disappointment often live side by
side. Bambers seascapes, painted over a period of two years, make a record
of the subtle but finite shifts in mood, tone, and visuality that nature offers
to the gaze.Inherworkthelandscapebecomescinematic,notoneoverwhelmingpainterlywholebutaseriesoffragments
presentedmontagestylewithinaseriesthathasabeginningandadefiniteend.When we look at the paintings
we are under- whelmed by nature and begin to see nature as technology, as
an apparatus(seeplates7and8).Theviewerisdrawnoverandovertothehorizon,thelinebetweenskyandseathat
sometimesshockswithitsintensityandatothertimesdisappearsaltogether.The ebb and flow of the horizon
in and out of vision is in many ways the theme of the series as a whole. Bambers depiction of the horizon as limit speaks to a queer temporality and a
queer spatiality that resist a notion of art as capable of seeing beyond and in
fact makes art about limitation, about the narrowness of the future, the
weightiness of the past, and the urgency of the present .Thisnotionofalimitedhorizon
returnsustoEdelmansbookNoFuture(2005),inthatbothBamber and Edelman seem to be
inscribing queer failure into time and space .Whilefor Bamber the seascapes
drain nature of its romance and its sense of eternity, for Edelman the queer is
always and inevitably linked to the death drive; indeed death and finitude are
the very meaning of queerness, if it has meaning at all ,andEdelmanusesthissenseofthe
queerinordertoproposearelentlessformofnegativityinplaceoftheforwardlooking,reproductive,andheteronormativepolitics
ofhopethatanimatesalltoomanypoliticalprojects.Myattempttolinkqueernesstoanaestheticprojectorganizedaroundthelogicof
failureconverseswithEdelmansefforttodetachqueernessfromtheoptimisticandhumanisticactivityofmakingmeaning. The
queer subject,heargues,has been bound epistemologically to negativity, to

nonsense,toantiproduction,and to unintelligibility, and instead of fighting this characterization by dragging queerness into recognition, he proposes that we
embrace the negativity that we anyway structurally represent. Edelmanspolemicabout
futurityascribestoqueernessthefunctionofthelimit;whiletheheteronormativepoliticalimaginationpropelsitselfforwardintime
andspacethroughtheindisputablypositiveimageofthechild,andwhileitprojectsitselfbackonthepastthroughthedignifiedimage
oftheparent,thequeersubjectstandsbetweenheterosexualoptimismanditsrealization.
General (contextualize)
The queer is unable to move past the present and thus
suffers with the reading of the 1AC. The aff turns us into
slaves of the Child and creates error replication that
drives the need to create the fantasy of the continuation
of the Child
Lee Edelman 2004, professor of English at Tufts University, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
Drive, pg. 11
the image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived

experiences of any historical children, serves to regulate political discourse to prescribe
what will count as political discourse by compelling such discourse to accede in
advance to the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are
never permitted to acknowledge or address . From Delacroixs iconic image of Liberty
In its coercive universalization, however,
leading us into a brave new world of revolutionary possibility her bare breast making each spectator the
unweaned Child to whom its held out while the boy to her left, reproducing her posture, affirms the
absolute logic of reproduction itself to the revolutionary waif in the logo that miniaturizes the politics of
we are no more
able to conceive of a future without a fantasy of the future than we are able
to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child. That figural Child alone
embodies the citizens of the Ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future
share in the nations good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights
real citizens are allowed. For the social order exists to preserve for this
universal subject, this phantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly
valued than the actuality of freedom itself, which might, after all, put at risk
the Child to whom such a freedom falls due. Hence, whatever refuses this
mandate by which our political institutions compel the collective reproduction
of the Child must appear as a threat not only to the organization of a given
social order but also, and far more ominously, to social order as such, insofar
as it threatens the logic of futurism on which meaning always depends. So, for
Les Mis (summed up in its anthem to futurism, the inspirational One Day More),
example, when P. D. James, in her novel The Children of Men, imagines a future in which the human race
has suffered a seemingly absolute loss of the capacity to reproduce, her narrator, Theodore Faron, not only
attributes this reversal of biological fortune to the putative crisis of sexual values in late twentieth-century
democracies Pornography and sexual violence on film, on television, in books, in life had increased and
became more explicit but less and less in the West we made love and bred children, he declares but also
gives voice to the ideological truism that governs our investment in the Child as the obligatory token of
futurity: Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we
being dead yet live, he later observes, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no
more than pathetic and crumbling defenses shored up against our ruins. While this allusion to Elliots The
Waste Land may recall another of its well-known line, one for which we apparently have Elliots wife,
it also brings out the

function of the child as the prop of the secular theology that shapes at once
the meaning of our collective narratives and our collective narratives of
meaning. Charged, after all, with the task of assuring that we being dead yet
live, the Child, as if by nature (more precisely as the promise of a natural transcendence of the
limits of nature itself), exudes the very pathos from which the narrator of The
Children of Men recoils when he comes upon it in non-reproductive pleasures
of the mind and senses. For the pathetic quality he projectively locates in non-generative
Vivian, to thank What you get married for if you dont want children?
sexual enjoyment enjoyment that he views in the absence of futurity as empty, substitutive, pathological
exposes the fetishistic figurations of the Child that the narrator pits against it as legible in terms identical
to those for which enjoyment without hope for posterity is peremptorily dismissed; legible, that is, as
nothing more than pathetic and crumbling defenses shored up against our ruins. How better to
characterize the narrative project of The Children of Men itself, which ends, as anyone not born yesterday
surely expects from the start, with the renewal of our barren and dying race though the miracle of birth?
After all, as Walter Wangerin Jr., reviewing the book for the New York Times, approvingly noted in a
sentence delicately poised between description and performance of the novels pro-procreation ideology;
If, however, there is no being, and,

in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of
sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of
meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization,
collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself. Given that the author of The Children of Men,
If there is a baby, there is a future, there is redemption.
like the parents of mankinds children, succumbs so completely to the narcissism all-pervasive, selfcongratulatory, and strategically misrecognized that animates pro-natalism, why should we be the least
bit surprised when her narrator, facing his futureless future, laments, with what we must call a straight
face, that sex totally divorced from procreation has become almost meaninglessly acrobatic? Which is, of
course, to say no more than that sexual practice will continue to allegorize the vicissitudes of meaning so
long as the specifically heterosexual alibi of reproductive necessity obscures the drive beyond meaning
driving the machinery of sexual meaningfulness; so long, that is, as the biological fact of heterosexual
For the Child,

whose mere possibility is enough to spirit away the naked truth of
heterosexual sex impregnating heterosexuality, as it were, with the future
of signification by conferring upon it the cultural burden of signifying futurity
figures our identification with an always about-to-be-realized identity. It thus
denies the constant threat to the social order of meaning inherent to the
structure of Symbolic desire that commits us to pursuing fulfillment by way of
a meaning unable, as meaning, either to fulfill us or, in turn, to be fulfilled because,
unable to close the gap in identity, the division incised by the signifier, that
meaning, despite itself, means. The consequences of such an identification both of and with
procreation bestows the imprimatur of meaning-production on heterogenital relations.
the Child as the preeminent emblem of the motivating end, though endlessly postponed, of every political
the only
queerness that queer sexualities could ever hope to signify would spring from
their determined opposition to this underlying structure of the political their
opposition, that is, to the governing fantasy of achieving Symbolic closure
through the marriage of identity to futurity in order to realize the social
subject. Conservatives acknowledge this radical potential, which is to say, this radical threat, of
vision as a vision of futurity must weigh on any delineation of a queer oppositional politics. For
queerness more fully than liberals, for conservatism preemptively imagines the wholesale rupturing of the
The discourse
of the right thus tends toward a great awareness of, and insistence on, the
literalization of the figural logics that various social subjects are made to
inhabit and enact, the logics that, from a rational viewpoint, reduce
individual identity to stereotypical generality, while the discourse of the left
tends to understand better the Symbolics capacity to accommodate change
by displacing those logics onto history as the inevitable unfolding of narrative
sequence. The right, that is, better sees the inherently conflictual aspect of identities, the constant
social fabric, whereas liberalism conservatively clings to a faith in its limitless elasticity.
danger they face in alterity, the psychic anxiety with which they are lived; but the left better recognizes
historys persistent rewriting of those identities, finding hope in the fact that identitys borders are never
fully fixed.
The left in this is always right from the vantage point of reason, but
left in the shade by its reason is the darkness inseparable from its light : the
defensive structure of the ego, the rigidity of identity as experienced by the subject, and the fixity of the
This conservatism of the ego

compels the subject, whether liberal or conservative politically, to endorse as the
meaning of politics itself the reproductive futurism that perpetuates as reality
a fantasy frame intended to secure the survival of the social in the imaginary
form of the Child.
Imaginary relation through which we (re)produce ourselves.
State
The state is anti-queer. Violence becomes inevitable
because the world is founded on the abuse and
domination over queer bodies, which the affs use of the
state perpetuates
Mary Nardini gang 2009 (criminal queers from Milwaukee, Wisconsin
toward the queerest insurrection 2009)

A fag is bashed because his gender presentation is far too femme. A poor
transman cant afford his life-saving hormones. A sex worker is murdered by
their client. A genderqueer persyn is raped because ze just needed to be
fucked straight. Four black lesbians are sent to prison for daring to defend
themselves against a straight-male attacker.1 Cops beat us on the streets
and our bodies are being destroyed by pharmaceutical companies because
we cant give them a dime. Queers experience, directly with our bodies, the
violence and domination of this world. Class, Race, Gender, Sexuality, Ability; while often these
interrelated and overlapping categories of oppression are lost to abstraction,
queers are forced to physically understand each. Weve had our bodies and
desires stolen from us, mutilated and sold back to us as a model of living we
can never embody. 1 Free the New Jersey 4. And lets free everyone else while were at it. Foucault says
that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of
force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which
constitute their own organization; as the processes which, through ceaseless struggles and
confrontations, transforms, strengthens or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another,
thus forming a chain or system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one
another;
and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general
design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in
the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. We experience
the complexity of domination and social control amplified through
heterosexuality. When police kill us, we want them dead in turn. When prisons entrap our bodies and rape us
because our genders arent similarly contained, of course we want fire to them all. When borders are erected to construct
a national identity absent of people of color and queers, we see only one solution: every nation and border reduced to
The perspective of queers within the heteronormative world is a lens

through which we can critique and attack the apparatus of capitalism. We can
analyze the ways in which Medicine, the Prison System, the Church, the
State, Marriage, the Media, Borders, the Military and Police are used to
control and destroy us. More importantly, we can use these cases to articulate a cohesive criticism of every
way that we are alienated and dominated. Queer is a position from which to attack the
normative - more, a position from which to understand and attack the ways in
which normal is reproduced and reiterated. In destabilizing and
problematizing normalcy, we can destabilize and become a problem for the
Totality.
rubble. VII
War on Terror
The War on Terror is predicated on racialized,
heterosexualized, and classed violence
Melanie Richter-Montpetit 2007, political science department of York University, International
Feminist Journal of Politics, March 2007, Volume 9 issue 1, Empire, desire and violence: a queer transnational feminist
reading of the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib and the question of gender equality, pgs. 40-41
Moreover, the hegemonic discourses in the above-mentioned (themselves compartmentalized) fields of

study tend to compartmentalize the social world and to treat its fragments in isolation from one another.
Instead, I envi-sion social phenomena as an overdetermined amalgam of mutually constitu-tive social
the violences enacted on the bodies of detainees are not

reducible to discrete elements, but rather [are] a complex [and often
contradictory] phenomenon whose constituent parts have an organic unity , to
borrow from Akes observation on the nature of underdevelopment(1981: 6, my addition). The social
crises leading to the outbreak of these micro-level violations and violences
are deeply embedded in the larger social order . As long as this order, with its underlying
relations of inequality, is not transformed, the kinds of violences performed on the bodies
of Abu Ghraib prisoners cannot be overcome. Drawing on the insight of
Edward Said (1993) and other postcolonial scholars, that Empire is not only
about the accumulation of wealth, but also about a deeply held belief in the
need to and the right to dominate others for their own good , others who
are expected to be grateful (Razack 2004:10, emphasis in original), I argue that the torture
and murder of prisoners were acts of colonial violence, firmly rooted in a
continuum of racialized,(hetero)sexualized, classed violence. This continuum
of violence reaches back in time to the modern civilizing mission and
outward in space to link the imperial violence enacted on the bodies of
people of colour, Muslims, queers and women in the mother country
homeland, with the perceived moral righteousness or even duty of the US
Empire to bring (liberal) democracy to the dark corners of the earth (Bush 2002a)
in the war on terror,the war to save civilization itself (Bush 2001e). Making legible
processes. Hence,
some of the larger social relations at work in the events at Abu Ghraib is not intended to exonerate the
military prison guards, but rather to show how our desires are not just a question of individual preference
Impacts
Social Death/Exile
Being queer is social death and societal exile society is
normal while queer is the abnormal. Queer life becomes
queer death because it is always against society. This
turns the permutation the alternative does not fit with
the affs kind of violent inclusion
In the discourse of queer, we are talking about a space of struggle against this totality - against normalcy.
By queer, we mean social war. And when we speak of queer as a conflict

with all domination, we mean it. V See, weve always been the other, the alien,
the criminal. The story of queers in this civilization has always been the
narrative of the sexual deviant, the constitutional psychopathic inferior, the
traitor, the freak, the moral imbecile. Weve been excluded at the border,
from labor, from familial ties. Weve been forced into concentration camps,
into sex slavery, into prisons. The normal, the straight, the american family
has always constructed itself in opposition to the queer. Straight is not queer.
White is not of color. Healthy does not have HIV. Man is not woman. The
discourses of heterosexuality, whiteness and capitalism reproduce
themselves into a model of power. For the rest of us, there is death. In his work,
Jean Genet1 asserts that the life of a queer, is one of exile - that all of the
totality of this world is constructed to marginalize and exploit us. He posits
the queer as the criminal. He glorifies homosexuality 2 and criminality as the
most beautiful and lovely forms of conflict with the bourgeois world . He writes of
the secret worlds of rebellion and joy inhabited by criminals and queers. Quoth Genet, Excluded by
my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity.
Nothing in the world was irrelevant : the stars on a generals sleeve. the stock-market
quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing.
This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a
meaning: my exile.
Soul Murder
Violence against queerness results in the annihilation of
identitythis is a form of soul murder
Yep, Lovaas, and Elia 03 Professors, San Francisco University (Gust, Karen, and John,
Journal of Homosexual Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4, pp. 18,)
Very early in life

children learn from interpersonal contacts and mediated messages
that deviations from the heteronormative standard, such as
homosexuality, are anxiety-ridden, guilt-producing, fear-inducing,
shame-invoking, hate-deserving, psychologically blemishing, and
physically threatening. Internalized homophobia, in the form of selfhatred and self-destructive thoughts and behavioral patterns,
becomes firmly implanted in the lives and psyches of individuals in
heteronormative society. Exemplifying the feelings and experiences of many people who do
These are the internal injuries that individuals inflict upon themselves.
not fit in the heteronormative mandate, Kevin Jennings (1994) tells us his personal story: I was born in
1963. . . . [I] realized in grade school that I was gay. I felt absolutely alone. I had no one to talk to, didnt
know any openly gay people, and saw few representations of gays in the media of the 1970s. I imagined
gay people were a tiny, tiny minority, who had been and would always be despised for their perversion.
Not once in high school did I ever learn a single thing about homosexuality or gay people. I couldnt
imagine a happy life as a gay man. So I withdrew from my peers and used alcohol and drugs to try to dull
the pain of my isolation. Eventually, at age seventeen I tried to kill myself, like one out of every three gay
teens. I saw nothing in my past, my present, or (it seemed) my future suggesting that things would ever
Heteronormativity is so powerful that its regulation

and enforcement are carried out by the individuals themselves
through socially endorsed and culturally accepted forms of soul
murder. Soul murder is a term that I borrow from the child abuse and
neglect literature to highlight the torment of heteronormativity (Yep,
2002). Shengold (1999) defines soul murder as the apparently willful abuse
and neglect of children by adults that are of sufficient intensity and
frequency to be traumatic . . . [so that] the childrens subsequent
emotional development has been profoundly and predominantly
negatively affected (p. 1). Further explaining this concept, Shengold (1989) writes, soul
murder is neither a diagnosis nor a condition. It is a dramatic term
for circumstances that eventuate in crimethe deliberate attempt to
eradicate or compromise the separate identity of another person (p.
2, my emphasis). Isnt the incessant policing and enforcement , either
deliberately or unconsciously, by self and others, of the
heteronormative mandate a widespread form of soul murder?
get any better. (pp. 13-14)
Alt
Failure
Alt Solvency
Capitalism and Colonialism

Failure is the weapon of the weak a radical response
that queers use in the anticapitalist and anticolonial
struggles
California, The Queer Art of Failure, chapter 33, pg. 88
Failure, of course, goes hand in hand with capitalism. A market econ- omy
must have winners and losers, gamblers and risk takers, con men and dupes;
capitalism,asScottSandage arguesinhisbookBornLosers:AHistoryofFailureinAmerica(2005),requires that
everyone live in a system that equates success with profit and links failure to
the inability to accu- mulate wealth even as profit for some means certain
losses for others.AsSandagenarratesinhiscompellingstudy,losers leave no records, while
winners cannot stop talking about it, and so the record of failure is a hidden
history of pessimism in a culture of optimism(9).Thishiddenhistoryofpessimism,a history
moreover that lies quietly behind every story of success, can be told in a
number of different ways; while Sandage tells it as a shadow history of U.S.
capitalism, I tell it here as a tale of anticapitalist, queer struggle .I tell
it also as a narrative about anticolonial struggle, the refusal of legibility, and
an art of unbecoming. This is a story of art without markets, drama without a
script, narrative without progress.The queer art of failure turns on the
impossible, the improb- able, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It
quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art,
and for being. Failure can be counted within that set of oppositional tools
that James C. Scott called the weapons of the weak(1987:29).Describing
peasant resistance in Southeast Asia, Scott identified certain activities that
looked like indifference or acquiescence as hidden transcripts of resistance
to the dominant order.ManytheoristshaveusedScottsreadingofresistancetodescribedifferentpoliticalprojectsandtorethink
thedynamicsofpower;somescholars,suchasSaidiyaHartman(1997),haveusedScottsworktodescribesubtleresistancestoslaverylikeworking
slowlyorfeigningincompetence.The
concept of weapons of the weak can be used to

recategorize what looks like inaction, passivity, and lack of resistance in
terms of the practice of stalling the business of the dominant . We can also
recognize failure as a way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of
power and discipline and as a form of critique .As a practice, failure recognizes
that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant and that power is
never total or consistent;indeedfailure can exploit the unpredictability of
ideology and its indeterminate qualities.InhisrefusalofeconomicdeterminismGramsci
writes, Mechanical historical materialism does not allow for the possibility of
error, but as- sumes that every political act is determined, immediately, by
the structure, and therefore as a real and permanent (inthesenseofachieved)
modification of the structure(2000:191).ForGramsci,ideology has as much to do with
error or failure as with perfect predictability; therefore a radical political
response would have to deploy an improvisational mode to keep pace with
the constantly shifting relations between dominant and subordinate within
the chaotic flow of political life.Gramsciviewstheintellectualfunctionasamodeofselfawarenessandanappliedknowl
edgeofthestructuresthatconstrainmeaningtothedemandsofaclassboundunderstandingofcommonsense.
Political Strategy
Failure is a viable political strategy
Illegibility, then, has been and remains, a reliable source for political
autonomy. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State Any book that begins with a quote from SpongeBob
SquarePants and is motored by wisdom gleaned from Fantastic Mr. Fox, Chicken Run, and Finding Nemo,
among other animated guides to life, runs the risk of not being taken seriously. Yet this is my goal.
Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be

frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken
seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and
true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to
map a few detours. Indeed terms like serious and rigorous tend to be
code words, in academia as well as other contexts, for disciplinary
correctness; they signal a form of training and learning that
confirms what is already known according to approved methods of
knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of
fancy. Training of any kind, in fact, is a way of refusing a kind of
Benjaminian relation to knowing, a stroll down uncharted streets in
the wrong direction (Benjamin 1996); it is precisely about staying in
well-lit territories and about knowing exactly which way to go
before you set out. Like many others before me, I propose that instead the goal is
to lose ones way, and indeed to be prepared to lose more than
ones way. Losing, we may agree with Elizabeth Bishop, is an art, and one that
is not too hard to master / Though it may look like a disaster (2008:
166167). In the sciences, particularly physics and mathematics, there are
many examples of rogue intellectuals, not all of whom are reclusive Unabomber
types (although more than a few are just that), who wander off into uncharted
territories and refuse the academy because the publish-or-perish
pressure of academic life keeps them tethered to conventional
knowledge production and its well-traveled byways. Popular
mathematics books, for example, revel in stories about unconventional
loners who are self- schooled and who make their own way
through the world of numbers. For some kooky minds, disciplines
actually get in the way of answers and theorems precisely because
they offer maps of thought where intuition and blind [unscripted]
fumbling might yield better results. In 2008, for example, The New Yorker featured a
story about an oddball physicist who, like many ambitious physicists and mathematicians, was in hot
pursuit of a grand theory, a theory of everything. This thinker, Garrett Lisi, had dropped out of academic
physics because string theory dominated the field at that time and he thought the answers lay elsewhere.
As an outsider to the discipline, writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Lisi built his

theory as an outsider might, relying on a grab bag of component
parts: a hand-built mathematical structure, an unconventional
way of describing gravity, and a mysterious mathematical entity

known as E8.1 In the end Lisis theory of everything fell short of expectations, but it
nonetheless yielded a whole terrain of new questions and methods .
Similarly the computer scientists who pioneered new programs to
produce computer-generated imagery (CGI), as many accounts of
the rise of Pixar have chronicled, were academic rejects or
dropouts who created independent institutes in order to explore
their dreams of animated worlds.2 These alternative cultural and
academic realms, the areas beside academia rather than within it,
the intellectual worlds conjured by losers, failures, dropouts, and
refuseniks, often serve as the launching pad for alternatives
precisely when the university cannot. This is not a bad time to
experiment with disciplinary transformation on behalf of the
project of generating new forms of knowing, since the fields that
were assembled over one hundred years ago to respond to new
market economies and the demand for narrow expertise, as
Foucault de- scribed them, are now losing relevance and failing to
respond either to real-world knowledge projects or student
interests. As the big disciplines begin to crumble like banks that
have invested in bad securities we might ask more broadly, Do we
really want to shore up the ragged boundaries of our shared
interests and intellectual commitments, or might we rather take
this opportunity to rethink the project of learning and thinking
altogether? Just as the standardized tests that the U.S. favors as a
guide to intellectual advancement in high schools tend to identify
people who are good at standardized exams (as opposed to, say,
intellectual visionaries), so in universities grades, exams, and
knowledge of canons identify scholars with an aptitude for
maintaining and conforming to the dictates of the discipline. This book,
a stroll out of the confines of conventional knowledge and into the unregulated territories of failure, loss,
and unbecoming, must make a long detour around disciplines and ordinary ways of thinking. Let me
universities (and by implication high schools) squash rather than

promote quirky and original thought. Disciplinarity, as defined by Foucault
(1995), is a technique of modern power: it depends upon and
deploys normalization, routines, convention, tradition, and
regularity, and it produces experts and administrative forms of
governance. The university structure that houses the disciplines
and jealously guards their boundaries now stands at a crossroads,
not of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, past and future,
national and transnational; the crossroads at which the rapidly
disintegrating bandwagon of disciplines, subfields, and
interdisciplines has arrived offer a choice between the university
as corporation and investment opportunity and the university as a
explain how
new kind of public sphere with a different investment in knowledge,

in ideas, and in thought and politics. A radical take on disciplinarity and the
university that presumes both the breakdown of the disciplines and the closing of gaps between fields
conventionally presumed to be separated can be found in a manifesto published by Fred Moten and
Stefano Harney in 2004 in Social Text titled The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses. Their
essay is a searing critique directed at the intellectual and the critical intellectual, the professional scholar
the critical academic is

not the answer to encroaching professionalization but an extension
of it, using the very same tools and legitimating strategies to
become an ally of professional education. Moten and Harney
prefer to pitch their tent with the subversive intellectuals, a
maroon community of outcast thinkers who refuse, resist, and
renege on the demands of rigor, excellence, and productivity.
They tell us to steal from the university, to steal the
enlightenment for others (112), and to act against what Foucault
called the Conquest, the unspoken war that founded, and with the
force of law refounds, society (113). And what does the
undercommons of the university want to be? It wants to
constitute an unprofessional force of fugitive knowers, with a set of
intellectual practices not bound by examination systems and test
scores. The goal for this unprofessionalization is not to abolish; in
fact Moten and Harney set the fugitive intellectual against the
elimination or abolition of this, the founding or refounding of that:
Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society
that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have
the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything
but abolition as the founding of a new society (113). Not the
elimination of anything but the founding of a new society. And why not?
Why not think in terms of a different kind of society than the one
that first created and then abolished slavery? The social worlds we
inhabit, after all, as so many thinkers have reminded us, are not
inevitable; they were not always bound to turn out this way, and
whats more, in the process of producing this reality, many other
realities, fields of knowledge, and ways of being have been
discarded and, to cite Fou- cault again, disqualified. A few visionary books, produced
and the critical academic professionals. For Moten and Harney,
alongside disciplinary knowledge, show us the paths not taken. For example, in a book that itself began as
a detour, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999),
the modern state has run roughshod over local,

customary, and undisciplined forms of knowledge in order to
rationalize and simplify social, agricultural, and political practices
that have profit as their primary motivation. In the process, says Scott,
certain ways of seeing the world are established as normal or
natural, as obvious and necessary, even though they are often
entirely counterintuitive and socially engineered. Seeing Like a
State began as a study of why the state has always seemed to be the enemy of people who move
James C. Scott details the ways
quickly became a study of the demand by the state for

legibility through the imposition of methods of standardization and
uniformity (1). While Dean Spade (2008) and other queer scholars use Scotts book to think about
around, but
how we came to insist upon the documentation of gender identity on all govern- mental documentation,
want to use his monumental study to pick up some of the

discarded local knowledges that are trampled underfoot in the rush
to bureaucratize and rationalize an economic order that privileges
profit over all kinds of other motivations for being and doing.
2NC Topshelf
Overview
AT: Perm
History proves the perm fails the affs institutions
commodify queerness and attempt to normalize it

If history proves anything, it is that capitalism has a treacherous
recuperative tendency to pacify radical social movements. It works rather simply,
actually. A group gains privilege and power within a movement, and shortly
thereafter sell their comrades out. Within a couple years of stonewall,
affluent-gay-white-males had thoroughly marginalized everyone that had
made their movement possible and abandoned their revolution with them. It was
once that to be queer was to be in direct conflict with the forces of control and domination. Now, we
are faced with a condition of utter stagnation and sterility. As always, Capital
recuperated brick-throwing street queens into suited politicians and activists.
There are logcabin-Republicans and stonewall refers to gay Democrats.
There are gay energy drinks and a queer television station that wages war on the minds, bodies and
esteem of impressionable youth. The LGBT political establishment has become a force of assimilation,
Gay identity has become both a marketable

commodity and a device of withdrawal from struggle against domination.
gentrification, capital and state-power.
Now they dont critique marriage, military or the state. Rather we have campaigns for queer assimilation
into each. Their politics is advocacy for such grievous institutions, rather than the
annihilation of them all. Gays can kill poor people around the world as well as straight people! Gays
can hold the reigns of the state and capital as well straight people! We are just like you.
Assimilationists want nothing less than to construct the homosexual as

normal - white, monogamous, wealthy, 2.5 children, SUVs with a white
picket fence. This construction, of course, reproduces the stability of
heterosexuality, whiteness, patriarchy, the gender binary, and capitalism
itself.
AT: Framework
We need to accept the queer identity before we can
consider policy actions or education
Roger Mourad 2001, PhD, post-structural theorist of education, Teachers College Record volume 103
number 5, Education after Foucault: the question of civility, pgs. 739-759
The idea that the fundamental issue of the just civil state is to find the right balance between preserving
constraining individual threat has served as a tacit

foundation within which belief and debate about educational philosophy, policy,
and practice develop. This statement is not intended to suggest that there is some direct and
individual freedom and
specific historical connection that can be unequivocally demonstrated to exist between foundational
political theory and mainstream educational theories and practices. However, I want to propose that
there is a compatibility between them that has important consequences for a

new critique of organized formal education. In the remainder of this paper, my aim is to
argue that the tenor of the theories that I have summarized is endemic in the ordinary
ways that we think about and engage in organized education . How is the idea of the
basic human being that is posed as the fundamental social, political, and pedagogic problem for modern
civilization, this human being that must be managed in order to keep it from harming itself and others,
through education,
the human being must be made into something better than it was or would
be absent a formal education. There are all kinds of versions of this subject
and of what it should become: potential achiever, qualified professional, good citizen, leader,
independent actor, critical thinker, change agent, knowl- edgeable person. In all cases, the subject
before education is viewed to be, like the subject before civilization,
something in need of being made competentand safein the mind of the
educator. From this vantage point, the pedagogic relationship between teacher and student, between
played out in educational presuppositions? The tacit, unchallenged belief is that
competent adult and incompetent child ~or adult!, contains within it a possibility that it seeks to
overcome, namely, a rejection of the socialization program of the former by the latter. There is an implicit
conflict between individuals as soon as the student walks into the school or college classroom door from
outside the civility that the teacher would have that student become. It must be resolved, or contained in
some way; and this is done immediately by rendering the student a rule follower ~a follower of the social
the student must be rendered a challenger of

the social order, in favor of an order that overcomes oppressionto become a
competent comrade. The individual must be taught how to be an individual in
accordance with this balance. Being an individual means being freeit
means being self-determined, it means competing, and it means obeying the law.
order!both in and out of the classroom. Or
This is the case, even if the teaching is done with kindness and sensitivity. The responsibility for dealing
with suffering and limitation lies almost solely with this individual, not the state. In fact, if suffering is
viewed at all, it tends to be viewed as something that is good for the individual to endure or to fight in
order to overcome it. Limitation is not acknowl- edged, unless the individual is deemed disadvantaged in
some way, and the remedy tends to be to provide the person with an opportunity to become competent. Is
it any wonder that parents of children with disabilities, aided by many educators, often must fight for
educational and other services? This situa- tion simply reflects that the basic logic of organized formal
education and, more generally, the state, is not predicated upon a recognition that the human being is
susceptible to suffering or that the states reason for being should be to care for people. If caring for its
inhabitants were the basic purpose of the civil state, then there would be no need to fight for this
recognition. Is it any wonder that the education of the ordinary child is mainly training for a far-off, abstract
future that is destined to be better than life at present? Why must school be about overcoming anything?
We talk about equipping children and adults to solve problems. Yet, problems do not fall from the sky;
the concept of
contention suggests that the practical role of reason should be used to
understand the human being as subject to suffering and to act accordingly as
moral agents. That is very different from an educational philosophy, policy,
and practice that views reason as an instrument by which to overcome
obstacles and to conform to the social order. It may be argued that modern education is
they do not exist as such until a human being gives them a name. In contrast,
about reason, about how to think and live reasonably and, therefore, how to live well and to care for
oneself and for others. Yet it is commonly expressed that we live in a complex world and that children
and adults must learn how to learn, in order to succeed in a world of rapid change. The question that
education expects the human

being to have an unlimited ability to think and act with reason sufficient to
cope with increasingly complex situations that require individual intellect to
adequately recognize, evaluate, and prioritize alternative courses of action,
consider their consequences, and make good decisions. For the most part, the
needs to be asked is: Why should a person have to? In effect,
increasing complexity of civil society and the multiplicity of factors that intellect is expected to deal with
in different situations are not questioned in education. Is this what education is rightly about? Education is
as much about the use of intelligence to avoid suffering and feelings of limitation and about fending off
feelings of fear as it is about learning. It is about acting upon other people and upon the civil order to deal
The individual must be

acted upon and rendered into an entity that engages reality in the ways that
are deemed just by many educators, lawmakers, and others with a stake in
the perpetuation of the given social order. Thus, the individual is exhorted to do your
with perceived threats. One must be an active learner or else. Why?
best, make an effort, earn a grade, be motivated, work hard, overcome obstacles, achieve.
Why should education be about any of these things? Unfortunately, the culture of scholarship is thoroughly
When we question them, we challenge the ends that

they serve but not the ideas themselves. We believe that education is rightly
about improvement. This philosophy of improvement is not necessarily consistent with
consistent with these precepts.
enhancement of living. It often has the opposite effect. How is this result justified? Certainly, it can feel
good to accomplish something or to overcome obstacles. Does that mean that adversity should be a
positive value of the civil state? The modern idea, beginning with Descartes and established through
Lockean empiricism ~and made pedagogic by Rousseaus Emile!, that anyone can be rational leads quickly
to the idea that everyone is responsible for being wholly rational, as that word is understood according to
The perpetuation of the given social order in education as

elsewhere is about gaining advantage and retaining power . It is about cultural
the social order.
politics and about marginalization of various groups and about class and about socializing children to
believe in capitalism as if it is a natural law. Yet under the analysis that I have made here, these major
problems are symp- toms of something more basic. The more basic problem that I have empha- sized here
is inextricable from the problem of the just civil state. It is about the intense pressures on people to think
and act in ways that serve broader interests that are not at all concerned with their well-being in a variety
It is no answer to
ground pedagogy in the notion of building community. The idea that
something must be built implies that something must be made better in order
for it to be tolerated. Moreover, community carries with it the prerequisite
that one be made competent to be a member again, the presumption that
something must be done to the person to make it better in some way. I do not
mean to say that educators have bad intent. I do mean that this ethos of betterment through
competency will inevitably fail to fulfill the dreams of reformers and
revolutionaries. It does not consider the human being as an entity to care for
but rather as something to be equipped with skills and knowledge in order
to improve itself. This failure is not only because there are millions of children and adults that live in
poverty in the wealthiest countries in human history. It is because the state of mind that can
tolerate such suffering is the same state that advances and maintains the
ethos of civility as betterment, rather than civility as caring for people
because they are subject to suffering. The alternative that I have only introduced in a very
of contexts including psychological, social, economic, political, and cultural.
abbreviated way under the rubric that I called contention is intended to be pragmatic in the ways that
Foucault and Richard Rorty are pragmatic in their respective approaches to the subject of the state.49 It is
intended to address an unaccept- able state of contemporary Western civilization, namely, its repetitive
and even escalating incidence of disregard for suffering and harm in many forms, despite intellectual,
social, medical, legal, educational, scientific, and technological progress. We have had two hundred
years of modern educational principles, and two hundred years of profound suffering along with them.
The problem of the individual calls for a new formulation and for a proper
responseone that cares for the individual rather than makes it competent.
The modern project of betterment through competency and opportunity must be chal- lenged and
replaced by an emotionally intelligent ethos that expressly and fundamentally acknowledges suffering and
limitation in philosophy, policy, and practice.
Only queers access alt

Queers are the only ones able to access failure as a
method of imagining existing alternatives. Trainspotting
proves that when others use failure, they cling to the
status quo and use failure as an excuse for rage against
others
California, The Queer Art of Failure, chapter three, pgs. 90-92
Queer studies offer us one method for imagining , not some fantasy of an
elsewhere, but existing alternatives to hegemonic systems.WhatGramscitermscommon
sensedependsheavilyontheproductionofnorms,andsothe critique of dominant forms of common
sense is also, in some sense, a critique of norms. Heteronormative common
sense leads to the equation of success with advancement, capital
accumulation, family, ethical conduct, and hope. Othersubordinate, queer, or
counter- hegemonic modes of common sense lead to the association of
failure with nonconformity, anticapitalist practices, nonreproductive life
styles, negativity, and critique.Jos Muoz has produced the most elaborate
ac- count of queer failuretodateand he explains the connection between queers
and failure in terms of a utopian rejection of pragmatism ,ontheonehand,and an
equally utopian refusal of social norms on the other. Muoz,inCruisingUtopia,makessome
groundbreakingclaimsaboutsex,power,andutopianlonging.Sometimesgaymalecruisingpracticesandanonymoussextakecenter
stageinthisgenealogyofqueerutopianlongingbutatothermoments,sexisconjuredinmoresubtleways,asitwasin
Disidentifications(1999),asadesiringandmelancholicrelationbetweenthelivingandthedead.Often,Muozs
archive
takes center stage and at times he turns to the fabulous failure of queer
culture mavenslikeJackSmithorFredHerkobut at others he is quite openly working
with the success stories (OHara,Warhol)in order to propose a whole archaeological strata of forgotten subcultural producers who lie hidden beneath the
glittering surface of market valued success .WhileMuozmakesqueernessabsolutelycentralto
culturalnarrativesoffailure,there is a robust literature that marks failure, almost
heroically, as a narrative that runs alongside the mainstream .Andso,letsbeginby
lookingataspectacularnarrativeaboutfailurethatdoesnotmaketheconnectionbetweenfailureandqueernessandseewhat
happens.This
should foreclose questions about why failure must be located within

that range of political affects that we call queer. IrvineWelchsnotoriousclassicpunknovel,
Trainspotting(1996),is a de- cidedly unqueer novel about failure,
disappointment, addiction, and violence set in the slums of Edinburgh. The
novel is made up of obscene rants and violent outbursts from the Scottish
working class, but it also contains limpid moments of punk negativity that
point, in their own snarl- ing way, to the implicit politics of failure.
Trainspotting depicts the trials and tribulations of unemployed Scottish youth
seeking some escape from Thatchers Britain with ferocious humor and wit .
Renton, the novels anti- hero and one of about five narrators in the text,
refuses the usual develop- mental trajectory of narrative progression and
spends his time shuttling back and forth between the ecstasy of drugs and
the agony of boredom.Heundergoesnoperiodofmaturation,hemakesnoprogress,neitherhenorhismateslearn
anylessons,noonequitsthebadlife,andultimatelymanyofthemdiefromdrugs,HIV,violence,andneglect.Renton
explic- itly acknowledges his refusal of a normative model of selfdevelopment and turns this refusal into a bitter critique of the liberal concept
of choice: Supposethatahkenawtheprosandcons,knowthatahmgaunnaehuvashortlife,amaysoundmindetcetera,
etcetera,butstillwanttaeusesmack?Theywontletyedaeit.Theywontletyedaeit,becauseitsseenasasignofthirainfailure.
Thefactthatyejistsimplychoosetaerejectwhittheyhuvtaeoffer.Chooseus.Chooselife.Choosemortgagepayments;choose
washingmachines;choosecars;choosesittingoanacouchwatchingmindnumbingandspiritcrushinggameshows,stuffingfuckin
junkfoodintaeyirmooth.Chooserottingaway,pishingandshiteingyerselinahome,atotalfuckinembarrassmenttaetheselfish,
fuckedupbratsyeveproduced.Chooselife.Well,ahchoosenottaechooselife.Ifthecuntscannaehandlethat,itsthairfuckin
problem.AsHarryLaudersais,ahjistintendtaekeeprightontotheendoftheroad.(187)Rentons
choice to not
choose life situates him in radical opposition to modes of masculine
respectability but also gives him space to expose the contradictory logic of
health, happiness, and justice within the post- welfare state .Inthisbrilliantlywicked
speechhe justifies his choice of drugs over health as a choice not to choose
life, where life signifies mortgage payments . . . washing machines . . .
cars . . . sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game
shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth, andbasicallyrottingawayindomesSociety,
hetellsus,inventsaspuriousconvolutedlogictoabsorbpeoplewhosebehaviorisoutsideitsmainstream(187);withinthislogic
life,anumbingdomesticpassivity,constitutesabettermoralchoicethanalifeofdrugsanddrink.Thissamelogicoffersthe
armedforcestoyoungmenoverstreetgangsandmarriageoversexualpromiscuity.The
polemic extends also to

the structure of colonial rule within the United Kingdom . In a scathing diatribe
against the English for coloniz- ing Scotland and the Scots for letting them,
Renton rants in defense of his maniacal and violent friend, Begbie : Begbie
and the like are fucking failures in a country ay failures. Its no good blaming
it on the English for colonising us. Ah dont hate the English, theyre just
wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We cant even pick a decent, vibrant,
healthy culture to be colonised by. No. Were ruled by effete arseholes. What
does that make us? The lowest of the low, the scum of the earth. The most
wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat into cre- ation.
I dont hate the English. They just get on with the shit theyve got. I hate the
Scots (78).Rentonsdiatribemaynotwinpointsforitsinspirationalqualities,butitisameanandpotentcritiqueofBritish
colonialismontheonehandandofthefalselyoptimisticrhetoricofanticolonialnationalismontheother.Inaverydifferentcontext
LisaLowehasdescribedwritingthatrefusesthebinaryofcolonialismversusnationalismasdecolonizingwriting,whichshecalls
anongoingdisruptionofthecolonialmodeofproduction(1996:108).Trainspotting,
a Scottish decolonizing novel, envisions drugs, theft, and violence as the weapons of the
weak utilized by the colonized and working-class males of Edinburghs
slums. Rentons critique of the liberal rhetoric of choice and his rejection of
hetero-domesticity results in a spewing, foaming negativity that seeks out
numerous targets, both dominant and minoritarian. Sometimeshisnegativityslipseasilyinto
racism,sexism,anddeephomophobia,butatothertimesitseemstobeintunewithaprogressivepoliticsofcritique.Indeed
Rentons speech finds its echo in recent queer theory that associ- ates
negativity with queerness itself. Lee Edelmans book No Future recommends, Renton-like, that queers might want to choose, instead, not to
choose the Child, as disciplinary image of the Imaginary past or as a site of a
projective identification with an always impossible future (2005:31).While
Edelmans refusal of the choices offered folds the symbolic order back upon
itself in order to question the very construction of political relevance,
Trainspottings refusals cling fast to the status quo because they cannot
imagine the downfall of the white male as part of the emer- gence of a new
order. Trainspotting ultimately is far too hetero-masculine in its simple
reversals of masculine authority, its antifemale fraternity, and its
unpredictable bursts of violence .Withoutanelaboratevisionofalternativemodes,the novel
collapses into the angry and seething language of the male punk from
whom a legacy of patriarchal and racial privilege has been withheld. In this
example of unqueer failure, failure is the rage of the excluded white male, a
rage that promises and delivers punishments for women and people of color.
Howelsemightweimaginefailure,andintermsofwhatkindsofdesiredpoliticaloutcomes?Howhasfailurebeenwieldedfor
differentpoliticalprojects?Andwhat
kind of pedagogy, what kind of epistemology lurks

behind those activities that have been awarded the term failure in AngloAmerican culture?Therestofthischapterisanarchiveoffailure,onethatisindialoguewithSandageshiddenhistory
ofpessimismandMuozsqueerutopiaandthatexploresintheformofnotesandanecdotes,theoriesandexampleswhat
happenswhenfailureisproductivelylinkedtoracialawareness,anticolonialstruggle,gendervariance,anddifferentformulationsof
thetemporalityofsuccess.
AT: Optimism/Futurism/Munoz
ATs
AT: Capitalism
Class analysis cant do anything for us Marxism
oppresses those who are not heterosexual workers

When we speak of social war, we do so because purist class analysis is not
enough for us. What does a marxist economic worldview mean to a survivor of bashing? To a sex
worker? To a homeless, teenage runaway? How can class analysis, alone as paradigm
for a revolution, promise liberation to those of us journeying beyond our
assigned genders and sexualities? The Proletariat as revolutionary subject
marginalizes all whose lives dont fit in the model of heterosexual-worker.
Lenin and Marx have never fucked the ways we have. We need something a bit more
thorough - something equipped to come with teethgnashing to all the
intricacies of our misery. Simply put, we want to make ruins of domination in all of its varied and
interlacing forms. This struggle inhabiting every social relationship is what we
know as social war. It is both the process and the condition of a conflict with
this totality.
AT: Cede the political

Read: alt solvency card its a political strategy and does not cede the
political
The political is also already ceded for queers we are precluded from
discussions about politics because we are not normal
AT: Cooption
Read: queers are the only ones able to access failure as a political strategy
[in 2NC topshelf]
AT: Kills collective Politics
1. Alt queer solidarity a method for queers to envision a different future

from the status quo
2. Best method for queers to have political agency it is difficult for us to
access politics normally, but the alternative allows for queers to have access
to the political realm.

Queer K - DDI 2015 ST

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Very early in life

Heteronormativity is so powerful that its regulation

The alternative is to embrace failure as a radical means of

success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily

to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth

believing that success

the flip side of positivity is thus a

harsh insistence on personal responsibility, meaning that while

capitalism produces some peoples success through other

Ehrenreich uses the example of American

Failure is a viable political strategy

Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be

true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to

As an outsider to the discipline, writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Lisi built his

precisely when the university cannot. This is not a bad time to

universities (and by implication high schools) squash rather than

the critical academic is

They tell us to steal from the university, to steal the

the modern state has run roughshod over local,

Queer survivalism, on the other hand, disrupts the normative

From womens studies

we are women implies that if

has the desire to be a woman come to be associated

Feminism creates gender oppression because it utilized

Whichever feminist position on sexuality right, left or center - eventually

The cultural fusion

a system of sexuality has

Gender affects the operation of the sexual

family promises and what marriage-chasing gays and

culture enacts rupture as

stability of heteronormative models of time and transformation

The use of future orientation creates a narrow spectrum

queer subject,heargues,has been bound epistemologically to negativity, to

the image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived

it also brings out the

If, however, there is no being, and,

For the Child,

This conservatism of the ego

toward the queerest insurrection 2009)

The perspective of queers within the heteronormative world is a lens

Moreover, the hegemonic discourses in the above-mentioned (themselves compartmentalized) fields of

the violences enacted on the bodies of detainees are not

By queer, we mean social war. And when we speak of queer as a conflict

Very early in life

Heteronormativity is so powerful that its regulation

Capitalism and Colonialism

concept of weapons of the weak can be used to

Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be

As an outsider to the discipline, writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Lisi built his

way of describing gravity, and a mysterious mathematical entity

universities (and by implication high schools) squash rather than

new kind of public sphere with a different investment in knowledge,

the critical academic is

the modern state has run roughshod over local,

quickly became a study of the demand by the state for

want to use his monumental study to pick up some of the

toward the queerest insurrection 2009)

Gay identity has become both a marketable

Assimilationists want nothing less than to construct the homosexual as

constraining individual threat has served as a tacit

there is a compatibility between them that has important consequences for a

the student must be rendered a challenger of

education expects the human