Queer Post-Politics

Abstract

When I originally heard Lee Edelman give his lecture Future is Kid Stuff, I found it so compelling in its passion and coherence and so disturbing in its conclu sions that I had to look back at its argument and ask whether perhaps what was wrong with the argument was its very coherence?its seamless synthesis of political theory and cultural criticism through a psychoanalytic conception of the subject and the signifier, jouissance and the death drive. The horizon of my commentary will be to question whether psychoanalytic concepts can provide the building blocks of political theory, whether they can sustain a viable theory or analysis of the body politic. My view is that they cannot. The view that they can is central to Edelman and other queer theorists, especially Judith Butler, as it is to the quite different projects of Slavoj Zizek and Ernesto Laclau. First, though, I want to acknowledge the unassailable insight and compelling protest at the heart of Edelman's lecture, published since in Narrative and titled Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive. As cultural criticism, Edelman's commentary deconstructs a ubiquitous icon in contemporary American politics and culture: the figure of the child, innocence incar nate, full of promise, and destined to fulfillment through whatever norms the prevail ing order cherishes and enforces: heterosexuality, homogeneity, affluence. Edelman tracks down this figure through everything from public service announcements of the liberal Coalition for America's Children to anti-abortion billboards announcing, It's not a choice; it's a child; from Anita Bryant's anti-gay campaign Save Our Children to the Army of God, a group that claimed responsibility for attacks on an abortion