Queer assemblage as queer futurity: Seeking a utopian solution beyond No Future

Abstract

Abstract Lee Edelman’s No Future proposes a disavowal of reproductive futurity as the only effective form of queer resistance. By contrast, in Cruising Utopia Jose Muñoz (2009) insists on the existence of a utopic queer future that is always, by default, not yet here. Although both authors recognize the Child as symbolic of heteronormative futurity, Muñoz’s writings allow room for hope and Edelman’s do not. Importantly, the version of reproductive futurity that each posits as operating at the structural level is always already normative reproductive futurity. This article will analyse the existing structural causes of normativity at the level of reproductive futurity and consider whether theorizing non-normative reproductive futurity in the form of assemblages makes space for the queer future that Edelman claims cannot exist. A comparison of Judith Butler’s Antigone and Octavia Butler’s Lilith will illustrate the possibilities that exist when queer assemblages are deployed in the creation of what Jasbir Puar calls ‘spatial, temporal and corporeal convergences, implosions and rearrangements’.