The Straight Line: Sexuality, Futurity, and the Politics of Austerity

Abstract

After all is said and done, the prospects and of heterosexual culture still represent the optimism optimism, hope which people apparently have already pledged consent. Berlant and Warner HOW ARE THE POLITICS OF AUSTERITY related particular structures of feeling that are future-oriented and which assume certain measures of progress can function as markers of success and happiness under neoliberalism? How are these measures related temporal modes of belonging that are generational and heteronormative? And how might these modes of belonging demonstrate the cruel optimism, as Lauren Berlant puts it, with which we attach ourselves of future happiness via institutions and practices that diminish us? Berlant claims, a relation of cruel optimism exists when you desire is actually an obstacle your flourishing (1). It might involve food, or kind of love; it might be fantasy of the good life, or political project. It might rest on simpler, too, like new habit that induce in you an improved way of being (1). Our relationships these objects might not even feel like optimism, but according Berlant all attachments are optimistic in that they move us out of ourselves, offering a cluster of promises about what we imagine is possible in the world (23). Our relationships these objects become cruel when the object/scene that ignites the sense of possibility is the very thing that makes it impossible attain the expansive transformation which we are striving (2). For instance, we might hold on fantasy of the good life, or the life of upward mobility, job security, and political and social equality, despite overwhelming evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on provide opportunities individuals make their lives add up something (Berlant 2). We might do this even if it threatens our well being, because do so gives us sense of what it means look forward living in the world. The politics of austerity operate through similar affective structure. Like cruel optimism, austerity is future-oriented and relies on an attachment scene impossible attain. Austerity also relies on similar temporal structure. In focusing on saving the good life, if not oneself at least one's children, austerity requires psychic investment in particular narrative of progress. I want suggest that this narrative follows sequence of events--birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, reproduction, death--that is heteronormative. As Sara Ahmed explains, for life count as good life, it must return the debt of life by taking on the direction promised as social good, which means imagining one's futurity in terms of reaching certain points along life course (554). Such points accumulate, creating the impression of straight line. To follow such line might be way become straight, by not deviating at any point (554). To stay on this straight line is also inhabit kind of straight time, what Judith Halberstam describes as reproductive, biological, and generational. As Halberstam outlines, in straight time values, wealth, goods, and morals are imagined be passed through family ties from generation the next, so that the family is tied both to the historical past of the nation and to the future of both familial and national stability (5). Queer time, on the other hand, is non-normative, what Halberstam describes as those forms of belonging that emerge once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance (6)--the very keywords of austerity. I therefore want suggest that the politics of austerity rely on temporality that is generational and straight in the way that Ahmed and Halberstam outline and cruel in the manner that Berlant describes. …