REPRODUCTIVE FUTURISM, LEE EDELMAN, AND REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
A queer theorist, driving down a highway, finds himself addressed by the abortion wars: “Not long ago, on a much traveled corner in Cambridge, Massachussetts, opponents of the legal right to abortion plastered an image of a full-term fetus, larger in size than a full-grown man, on a rented billboard that bore the phrase: ‘It’s not a choice, it’s a child.’”1 This is one of the encounters framing Lee Edelman’s critique of reproductive futurism. So Edelman begins to attune us to the imaginary figure of the Child, a heteronormative fixation, a conservatism (and conservationism) of the ego, a Ponzi scheme promoted at the expense of those who do not seem to serve its interests. Edelman queried the terms with which (for example) Republican senator Rick Santorum’s case against gay marriage was refuted by gay activist Dan Savage’s family values: “we’re moms and dads, too.’”2 Edelman promoted the alternative possibility of occupying the space of queer negativity—and the very extensive debate to which the work gave rise has concentrated on this proposal.
No Future opened with reflections on the political profit accrued when Bill Clinton campaigned for the “children.” By its third page, these reflections on public and political profiting from the (imaginary) Child were formulated as a challenge not only to the reproductive futurism of gay rights activism, and also of reproductive rights politics. Was Edelman broaching a timely coalition between the contemporary reflections of queer and abortion politics?3
True, he defended a queer politics capable of the declaration “we are the advocates of abortion” (NF 31). Arguing for an understanding of negativity as an ineluctable part of psychic and social life, he proposes a reclaiming of negativity by those to whom its antisociality is, in any case, attributed. Yet, temporarily, the framing, trenchant question, who would come out “against futurity and so against life?” (NF 16), was conjoined with another, “who would, after all, come out for abortion or stand against reproduction?”4 A proposal was extended also to abortion rights activists: to rethink the strategy that, “while promoting the freedom of women to control their own bodies through reproductive choice, recurrently frame[s] their political struggle, mirroring their anti-abortion foes, as” (Edelman cited Donna Shalala) a “‘fight for our children—for our daughters and our sons,’ and thus as a fight for our future”? (NF 3).
There is, he argued, a “common stake in the militant right’s opposition to abortion and to the practice of queer sexualities” (NF 15). In the name of the imaginary Child, both queer politics and feminists have been depicted as threatening the interests of reproductive futurism. Both have been denied rights on this pretext. But there was another affinity. Both gay rights activists and abortion rights activists have sometimes promoted rights by means of espousing a reproductive futurism shared with their opponents. Gay, feminist, liberal, or conservative, all parties would accept, overtly or tacitly, the “meaning of politics [as] … a fantasy frame intended to secure the survival of the social in the Imaginary form of the Child” (NF 14).
No Future is not widely considered to be engaging feminism. Certainly not positively,5 and it is hardly the book’s main concern. But its provocations extend in multiple directions. Among these, one can amplify the proposal to direct attention to the costs (I will discuss this term later) of the tacit or overt reproductive futurism of reproductive politics and the telos of reproductive rights. This would prompt closer scrutiny of the abjected figures produced by their projected futures and the Ponzi schemes taking place at someone’s expense.
FARING EVEN BETTER
No Future responds to the representation of gay men and abortion rights activists as “embrac[ing] a culture of death” (NF 40).6 But contemporary gay politics have also included rights claims to raise children under legally and socially equal conditions, including the right to adopt; the right to recognition of the joint parental status of same-sex couples; the right to health care benefits for one’s partner and children; the right to equal access to assisted reproduction technologies; equal taxation, financial, and inheritance rights; the right to equal legal recognition of parental unions. There has also been a rhetorical and legal blurring of these aims with those of gay marriage rights. Public and political discussion of gay marriage in 2013 in France and America saw considerable citation by public commentators and politicians of the views of putative experts and studies assessing the “psychological impact” on children raised by gay couples.7
So Justice Antonin Scalia could include among his arguments against the federal recognition of state legalized gay marriage: “there’s considerable disagreement among—among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a—in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child.” The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein could answer: “We should be begging gay couples to adopt children.”8 These, too, are instances of how idealized forms of parenting attach to Edelman’s imaginary Child. Just as the emblem for striking down DOMA was the gay couples who had been together for twenty years,9 the accompanying discussions of gay parenting were not disinclined to promise two loving parents, sharing child-raising work equally,10 willing to parent the otherwise unadopted, producing particularly happy and successful children. This was to hold the bar of marriage and reproduction well above the average to low standards long set by heterosexuality: both rejection and legitimization of claims to gay and reproductive rights ramp up unreal fantasies of perfect, idealized parenting, relationship stability, children who might fare “even better.”11
Like the planned parenthoods of abortion rights, the imaginary Child of gay parenting is the thoroughly chosen and willed Child—sometimes the result of elaborate planning and negotiations with surrogates, technologies, and greater legal and bureaucratic restrictions, including access to adoption, assisted reproduction, and the latter’s transnational markets. So we are brought to another of the overlaps between the reproductive futurisms attributed by Edelman and the imaginaries of abortion rights and gay rights: the delivery of hyperwilled, optimally raised children by maximally attuned parents.
However, perhaps the central question arising from No Future’s case for negativity still lingers: what, in fact, is so wrong with reproductive futurism?
THE FIGURAL BURDEN OF QUEERNESS
When some are represented, as in homophobic contexts, as the “gravediggers of society” (NF 74), they are considered an obstacle not just to society and to its reproductive interests, but also, Edelman argues, to the interests of an imaginary ego. Because a vilified other (the gay man, the woman who will not reproduce) appears to threaten continuity into the future, one could imagine such continuity to be possible—absent the forces impeding it. A psychoanalytic account of this threatened phantasmatic continuity leads Edelman to remind that neither inert fixity, self-presence, nor perpetuation of that self-presence into the future is available to any of us.
This leaves open the question whether Edelman could affirm an unpredictable, unanticipatable future (a future that by definition could not be “our future”).12 Edelman identifies in the conservative hope for persistence the defensive ramparts of the ego, attached to an always already lost, illusory image of stasis and unity in which we misrecognize ourselves and that we retain as an ideal. It is projected forward as the survival of a fictional self-presence.13 To those accused of endangering the welfare of imaginary Children attributed with the characteristics of “Tiny Tim,” we must respond, he argues, by insisting that “Tiny Tim is always already dead” (NF 48–49). But Audre Lorde’s words, “we were never meant to survive,”14 can also be engaged by Edelman’s seemingly echoing “we’re destined all to vanish” (NF 33). His declaration puts into question not just the cost of forward projection but also the presupposition of the “we” in question. We could imagine him answering: yet “we” have already not survived. We have never been “us.” This gives a first answer to “what is so wrong with the future”: one variation of the futurism repudiated by Edelman is a future whose imaginary is the persistence of the same.
Second, this imaginary continuity of impossible self-presence is peopled by card carriers for its preservation (hence the ideal of protecting the imaginary Child’s “Future”). More important, it is peopled by card carriers for its obstruction (thus the “Child” must be defended against those representing the death of its interests). Here Edelman identifies the interconnection between the fantasy of a continuous future as conservation of a continuous “us” which cannot survive (for we have never been fixed and so have never survived) and the vilification of others considered obstacles to the future, to survival, and thus to the social. This vilification is premised on the supposition that the future and the social could be accomplished absent those obstacles.
In short, Edelman is opposed not to “children” but to the use of sentimentalized representations of the imaginary Child justifying the abjection of those who seem not to favor its interests, particularly where a) that abjection serves to reinforce the phantasmatic, countering possibility of conservative continuity and persistence, and b) manifests, according to the concluding lines of No Future, in brutal outbreaks of violence. This is one of the simplest answers Edelman offers to the question what could be wrong with the future? It leads him to another redefinition of queer: to be queered is to have the death drive projected onto you (NF 30), sometimes with murderous consequences.
WHY NOT US?
According to Edelman’s argument, those long vilified as impeding social futures might prefer to embrace that association, if the alternative is an alignment with the interests of social futures that redistribute burdens of queerness onto others. Why shouldn’t the fantasy beneficiary of one’s politics be “us” rather than the (imaginary) Child? But this is not in question: let’s take a moment to think about what that formulation would mean. Edelman is challenging a conservatism he associates with ego attachment to a fixity that appears to have been lost in the past, never was present, and becomes a projection of an impossible preservation and endurance.
Thus this is not a matter of “us” versus “them” or of “present” versus “future” any more than it is a matter of “queer politics” versus the interests of “children.” This clarifies a version of the argument touching on abortion politics. In the latter context, the interests and rights of the woman and the imaginary fetus or “potential Child” are sometimes considered to be competing. Again, one would oppose the very opposition. When imaginary Children become idealized figures of continuation, in a vilification of those who seem to thwart such ends, idealized “Mothers” are similarly stimulated. The latter are associated with societal aims of preservation, continuity, futurity, growth, flourishing. The question would be: how do these aims, and their imaginary Mothers, similarly “shif[t] the figural burden of queerness to someone else?” (NF 27). This is to extend the argument further than does No Future. But it does bring us to another liminal problem in its pages: the female “sinthomosexual.”
SINTHOMOSEXUALS AND FEMALE SINTHOMOSEXUALS
Edelman defines the sinthomosexual as the queer figure of antisociality and “anti-meaning,” those on whom the death drive is projected. They are figures of impediment to, or annihilation of, the socially legible pursuits of others (NF 113). They may refuse attachment or their attachments may be strangely incomprehensible. Thus No Future considers a number of media, literary, and film representations of the childless and child-hating, cruel, or impervious “machine-like men.” They are indifferent to the “natural” order of human reproduction (NF 165n10). Randomly callous, they thwart the aims of the future, the hero, the heterosexual union, the happy ending, the teleological narrative, the hope of children. These are the figures either coldly or cruelly or willfully opposing the winsomeness of Tiny Tim or the emerging aims of North by Northwest’s Roger to unite with Eve Kendall or Bladerunner’s Deckard to unite with Rachel. Thus among Edelman’s examples of the sinthomosexual are Bladerunner’s Roy, A Christmas Tale’s Scrooge, and North by Northwest’s henchman Leonard. Their sometimes intense alternative attachments— whether to profit, subterfuge, employers, or the available time—comprise an inscrutability and absence of sense in their drive to impede, harm, or terminate.
As a figure of “resistance to the viability of the social” (NF 3),15 exemplars of this sinthomosexual are also to be found in Hitchcock’s Birds, whose malevolent entities attack children without cause and obstruct the trajectory of Melanie and Mitch. And, in a note, Edelman includes the possible contours of the female sinthomosexual as well (NF 165n10). Who, then, are the childless, callous, or sexually ambiguous women, unmotivated, or motivated by incomprehensible attachments, blocking the aims of protagonists and their heterosexual unions with their own aims to spoil, impede, and harm? Briefly, he proposes the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers from Du Maurier’s,16 and Hitchcock’s, versions of Rebecca and Leave Her to Heaven’s strangely jealous and murderous Ellen Berent, who causes two deaths and her own miscarriage before taking the step of killing herself so she can machinate the prosecution of a hated rival for her death. Perhaps, he speculates, we could add the initial, “untamed” Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew, striking her sister and her suitor, breaking the lute she might otherwise learn, seemingly obstructing the marital and familial ends of all. As queer figures of femininity, they are antimaternal while lacking a coherent expression of alternative aims. Ellen has murdered her husband’s adolescent brother, but indirectly, in a vague and passive reverie, without formulating the intent. These women will neither reproduce nor marry; nor do they espouse a legible alternative. Compare to the feminist who has also, historically, been accused of antisociality, yet lays claim to greater intelligibility in the form of organized political claims or claims to realize personal aims: they embody legibly alternative routes (albeit those of social resistance or transformation) into public or political life.17
Thus it comes as no surprise that when Edelman turns to a discussion of Antigone as a possible candidate for female sinthomosexuality, he does not decipher in her, as many have, a motivated and intelligible challenge to authority.
REREADING ANTIGONE
For Judith Butler, by contrast, Antigone is almost if “not quite a queer heroine.”18 Insofar as Antigone defends the claims of kinship against the state, she is an emblem of kinship trouble and a possible, but unpredictable, transformation of kinship relationships. She defends their claims, but she has departed from the norms of kinship. She is described as “manly,” she is sister to her father and pursues the suicidal ends of burying her brother in lieu of marriage, children, and, finally, life.19 In response, Edelman suggests that Butler nonetheless returns Antigone to a counterteleology, to the promise of the future. She represents to Butler, positively, the possibility of transgression rather than its incalculability. According to Edelman’s repudiation: “Butler’s reading … buries in [Antigone] the sinthomosexual who refuses intelligibility’s mandate” (NF 105). So where she is, for Butler, “almost queer,” for Edelman, she is almost the sinthomosexual. She is neither machinic nor automatic nor birdlike;20 she is not vengeful, but she does obstruct the interests of reproduction and of the social order. Her actions can appear to be giving pointless trouble to all.
Also (to build on Edelman’s argument), consider the memorable speech in which Antigone explains the rationale for her devotion to accomplishing the funeral rites in defiance of the laws of the city. It is an intriguing passage if we are asked to look for the sinthomosexual. Less interestingly, she names her childlessness a tragic fate.21 More strangely, she offers some calculations. She has flaunted the rules of the city, and Creon’s edict, in burying her brother, though she would not have done so for a child of her own. If she lost a child she could always have another. A husband would also be replaceable. But her parents are dead, and so it is her brother who cannot be replaced:
For never, had children of whom I was the mother or had my husband perished and been mouldering there would I have taken on myself this task, in defiance of the citizens. In virtue of what law do I say this? If my husband had died, I could have another, and a child by another man, if I had lost the first, but with my mother and father in Hades below, I could never have another brother. Such was the law for whose sake I did you special honor, but to Creon I seemed to do wrong and to show shocking recklessness, O my brother. And now he leads me thus by the hands, without marriage, without bridal, having no share in wedlock or in the rearing of children.22
That is her algorithm as she compares attachments and kinship relations: “never, had children of whom I was the mother … perished … would I have taken on myself this task.” To die for a child would be a poor economy for, according to this ranking of the significance of her family members, it could always be replaced.
Antigone adds to Edelman’s emphasis on the unintelligibility of the sinthomosexual by reminding us of the strangeness of their calculations. Investing in their personal and national futures, the reproductive futurists are the great calculators. But the sinthomosexuals also—in their own way—may commit to calculation. Preoccupied with their mysterious attachments (Ellen to her dead father, Mrs. Danvers to the “first Mrs de Winter”), sinthomosexuals function according to their own incomprehensible algorithms—obstruction, profit, replaceability or irreplaceability, revenge, self-interest, refusal, resistance, or a revenge to be delivered by arranging their own death. Scrooge calculates on the rewards of financial profit. Mrs. Danvers’s principle is that “Rebecca” cannot be replaced and that those who try should die. Roy is calculating the time remaining.23 Some of these figures go to their death. Some find themselves converted to the meaning of Christmas or to spousal obedience. But, converted or not, and with different outcomes, they calculate (“I could have another”) while also bearing witness to the opaqueness of their own efforts.
THE COST
So the figure of the sinthomosexual also serves as a reminder of how often even a figure standing for unintelligibility or negativity will return, or be returned, to logics of calculation. This is not an indication that such calculations are possible, but rather that they are a compelling draw. The sinthomosexual reminds us to look again at the recurrence of their algorithms, in all their incalculable madnesses, no less than the equally mad investments by the reproductive futurists in calculability. In a small way No Future bears witness to this also.
This brings us back to implications of Edelman’s suggestion: “make no mistake, then: Tiny Tim survives at our expense” (NF 48). Edelman’s challenge is communicated with the metaphorics of cost and benefit. Economic metaphors are present in his assessments of the negatives of reproductive futurism: it is too expensive.24 Also, it “shifts a burden” as a bad form of finance: “the figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are allowed” (NF 11). Reproductive futurism is, above all, the Ponzi scheme. But even the costs of a Ponzi scheme can resist calculation. Eventually it self-destructs, but, for as long as incoming investors sustain the seeming profits, it is uncertain exactly which of them will finally prove to have been robbed.
The two elements I have so far characterized as liminal in No Future have been, first, the female sinthomosexual and second, an intermittent language of cost and expense. A third concerns the relationship between the pregnant woman and the fetishized child, given No Future’s discussion of P. D. James’s novel The Children of Men. It opens the door to an exploration of the relationship between the reproductive futurism of interest to Edelman (the negativity that ends up attached to “non-productive,” illegible sexual agents) and reproductive futurism as it attaches to the politics of reproduction.
REREADING P. D. JAMES
In James’s novel the human race, having become nonfecund, is threatened with imminent extinction. There is neither human biological posterity nor more generally human teleology. Without reproduction, sex has become meaningless gymnastics. Global salvation could be offered only by procreation.25 A caustic feminist and queer reaction to Children of Men’s pronatalism was only to be expected.
While they blur, let’s consider the pregnancy and the pregnant woman separable, though connected, fetishes. Both fetishes—the miraculous Child and Julian, the last Pregnant Woman—are present in the novel, but the latter is amplified in the movie adaptation. Here the pregnant woman is the refugee Kee, a figure of wonder whom a number of protagonists covet or struggle to protect. Edelman does not direct our attention to the difference between these fetishes, nor consider fetishizations of the pregnant woman. In his response to the reproductive futurism of Children of Men, he slips between this figure and that of the fetishized imaginary Child as if they need no distinguishing.
Similarly, he notes that the “parent” is very often depicted as an intrinsic social and political good. He expostulates, in response to one rallying cry for a “parent’s bill of rights,” “what ‘greater electoral clout’ could fathers and mothers have?”(NF 111). But some degree of differentiation could make sense here also. There have been different trajectories in the politics of “mother’s” and “father’s” rights. In historical context, these have also been taken to conflict with each other.26 Also, the overvaluation of the “parent,” and of “parent’s rights,” is not the same project, nor the same kind of reproductive futurism, as the overvaluation of the pregnant woman. And the overvaluation of the pregnant woman is itself a principle of division: some pregnant women are overvalued, while others (figures of surplus pregnancy, of welfare benefit abuse or other kinds of irresponsibility) may be under- or devalued, and some pregnancies (such as the pregnancy of the illegal immigrant) are entirely debased. The pregnant woman may be a figure of superabundance or of abuse of the “system” or a figure of undisciplined reproductive excess. Despised or sentimentalized, she bifurcates easily between her status as guaranteeing or threatening the future, as does the potential child she bears.27 In short, the making and disparagement of the queer negativity that interconnects with fetishes of the anticipated Child also interconnects with that of the Pregnant Woman in expressions of national, familial, and individualized reproductive futurism.28 And that last also interconnects with the making and disparagement of some pregnant women against others. This point does not conflict with Edelman’s analysis, but, in No Future, it is not factored by him.
To focus on this phenomenon might bring us back to his discussion of the giant image of a fetus on a billboard. As he says, the billboard extends an invitation to consider this an image of a “future Child.” Here too, we might add to the discussion a long trajectory of feminist arguments that criticize the visual elimination of the woman carrying this fetus, so that it can appear an autonomous entity making its own rights claims.29
To fetishize the figure of the imaginary Child can also be to indirectly produce, presuppose, and render invisible the role of the woman as subordinated to the ends of reproduction and collective futures.30 For, embedded in the billboard image of a fetus’s miraculous, apparent autonomy is the concurrent invitation to challenge reproductive rights attributed to the pregnant woman carrying the future Child. Considered a possible threat to the claims of the imaginary Child, the pregnant woman can certainly be added to the account of those held hostage (no less may she hold herself hostage) to reproductive futurism.
Reproductive futurism involves a) a phantasmatic “we” (to which one may respond, “we” have never been “us”; b) the casting of an imaginary Child extending the continuity of that we; c) the casting of “antisocial” figures deemed to obstruct the interests of the imaginary Child and “our” future; as well as d) a division between the imaginary forms of reproduction, also understood to serve or obstruct that future; and e) an infusing of the woman’s phantasmatic pregnant body in terms of the reproductive futurism she either is taken to serve or, alternatively, obstruct.
If one extended this reflection, one could explore the contours of the imaginary Mother who is complement to the imaginary Child. This imaginary Mother is an unselfish, responsibilized moral agent, conduit of individual and social hopes. Primarily facilitating the latter, her independent demands and needs are not excessive. She is a social factor maximizing health and well-being (of children and communities—thus she is also a biopolitical figure, both individualized and understood as a factor in the health and future of populations). She is not selfish, indifferent, cruel, or incomprehensibly harmful. The Child of the Future is associated with this concurrent imaginary pregnant mother, whether her role is highly visible, fetishized, or invisible in the teleology of the Child’s value. What Edelman sees, in considering Children of Men’s pregnant mother, is a representation of the redemptive Child. This is to look through the associated making of women’s imaginary pregnancies to the ends of the former. Yet his own point is that reproductive futurism also manifests in reproductive politics. This is not to reduce his analysis of the former to an interest in the latter. But, when these overlap, imaginary Mothers of all kinds (idealized and obstructive) may intertwine with the imaginary Child of reproductive futurism.
This raises the question of how reproductive futurism conjoins with the politics of reproduction. This is not to confuse the latter with the former. It is to ask how we can repudiate the former while also paying attention to its making (and bifurcating) of a phantasmatic Mother as well as a phantasmatic Child. Can we add to the point that “we” have never existed, and that “Tiny Tim” has never existed, the further point that the “Mother” (as morally or practically oriented material conduit to the future; hyperresponsible unselfish carrier; life-, family-, and nation-optimizing child raiser, devoid of the death drive) has never existed? Are variants of sinthomosexuals generated by the politics of reproductive futurism and even by feminism’s rights claims more generally? Does the latter’s elaboration of reproductive rights generate disturbing figures of political and futural impediment, antisociality, and an absence of meaning and purpose?
ILLEGIBILITY AND REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
In an argument not unsupportive of reproductive rights, the philosopher Ronald Dworkin has described decisions about abortion as a “a dramatic and intensely lit example of choices people must make throughout their lives, all of which express convictions about the value of life and the meaning of death.” He ups the ante: abortion involves a “terrible conflict,” this decision can be for any woman an “awful” one. He discusses the subjects confronting abortion in Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice. Each woman had to weigh up (as Dworkin saw it), the value of her own life and “a new life,” and, as he claims “each was trying, above all, to take the measure of her responsibility for the intrinsic value of her own life … to see the decisions about whether to cut off a new life as part of a larger challenge to show respect for all life by living well and responsibly herself.”31
Let’s stipulate that these are some of the imaginary women peopling the reproductive futurism of reproductive choice. Their choices are oriented toward their own future and the future of those for whom they do, or might, care. If so, perhaps, we’d say of this context that its own sinthomosexual is sitting in a number of medical offices, waiting rooms, and other spaces, offering a conundrum to counselors, friends, ethicists, and moral philosophers. She is the woman who seems to be having too many abortions, who seems to choose irresponsibly or to be indifferent to the consequential narratives expected of her reproductive decisions. Perhaps she seems feckless, has an insufficient or inappropriate account of her reproductive life (or, more generally, her life decisions). Perhaps she does not seem to care sufficiently how and why she got pregnant or under what circumstances she might again. Perhaps she presents a certain recalcitrance or illegibility in this regard. Or she may be unconcerned about her own decisions, or incoherently reckless, or accused of abusing the health system or of refusing reproductive responsibility. Perhaps, when it comes to her pregnancy, or her abortion, she is not a good storyteller.32 The reproductive futurism of much reproductive rights discourse can be seen in an uneasy response to those on whose behalf rights are claimed, if the latter’s aims seem to be antiaims: indifferent, destructive, disorganized, or perversely obstructive. Such figures do not accord with the imaginary contours of the responsible decision makers associated with the hopes of reproductive choice.
Extending this line of inquiry out still further, one could diagnose a related form of reproductive futurism in some prominent historical feminist claims.
CALCULATING WITH FEMINISM
The complex rhetorical history of women’s rights claims includes, as Joan Scott has argued, the tensions between asserting sameness and difference.33 Both variants have attached rights claims to forms of reproductive futurism. The most obvious versions can be identified in historical feminisms that affirmed women’s maternal role as vital to social and political futures.34 Sometimes such claims have been attached to those of an imaginary Child.
To be sure, many prominent feminist thinkers rejected the view of women as primarily maternal. But, to pinpoint the reproductive futurism in question, take one of the nineteenth-century feminists best known for her outright rejection of maternity: Claire Démar. Author of the aptly named Ma loi d’avenir, Démar’s vehement declaration is “No more motherhood, no more law of blood. I say: no more motherhood.”35 But this does not amount to the declaration “The future stops here!” To the contrary, her reclamations concerned how social life could be reoriented toward an ideal future offering new roles for sexual difference.
Démar’s is not the only declaration of women’s rights whose politics included the question of how children might best be brought up. A number of historical feminists have offered images of young children dangerously exposed to harm or death and linked those images specifically to the vindication of women’s rights. In Ma loi d’avenir Démar identified this threat as coming from two quarters—first, from selfish fathers regretting the pregnancies resulting from their sexual activity. Such fathers, she argued, warm only temporarily to their children. Once their interest tired, they gave regular beatings and lessons in injustice, with the child emerging as “un monstre hideux.”36 Here were the evils of a long-standing patriarchal power associated with bloodright, dating back at least to the Roman law which recognized paternal authority over the life of offspring.37 Because women are themselves prone to egoism and not necessarily good mothers,38 Démar calls for children to be raised by professional nurses. Thus her claim “no more motherhood,” is not a feminist antifuturism.39 Women’s rights will be in everybody’s collective interest, including those of their children. For women to undertake paid work according to their abilities, and be liberated from exploitation and “le loi du sang,”40 was also to ensure that the children were best raised by those most competent to do so. The future thereby ushered in would be one of “concorde et harmonie.”41
Or consider how Mary Wollstonecraft’s claims to women’s rights in 1792 also concerned their impact on children and the future. An improvement in education for women would enable them to better raise children, endowed with the qualities and capacities best ensuring responsible social life. Women’s rights were presented as serving women’s interests, to be sure, but they were also affirmed as serving children’s interests, national interest, and, above all, futural interest. Wollstonecraft proposed an algorithm for the claims of women: “Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship, instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers—in a word, better citizens.”42 This might have been the strategic calculation of the feminist reproductive futurist, but how reliable was that outcome?
This brings us back to the question: what could be wrong with the future? In this case, reproductive futurisms produces a conditional feminism pegged to promises—for example, for better-raised children and societies, whose interests would not be obstructed by bad mothers and antisocial women. Perhaps an alternative feminism defended in terms of unpredictable ends and uncertain futures seems a bridge too far, yet consider the extent to which Wollstonecraft’s feminism is peopled by the imaginary, rights-endowed Woman with very specific characteristics: she will be observant, affectionate, faithful, reasonable, better. Condorcet might have identified these claims as too circumscribed. Claims to education, voting, and workers rights tended not to be conditional in this sense.43 Those understood to have the right to enjoy them certainly included the negligent, the distracted, the unfeeling, the faithless, and the foolish.
THE SINTHOMOSEXUAL OF FEMINISM?
Feminism has sometimes manifested this tendency to overpromise, given that many will exercise reproductive rights, just as many exercise voting rights, vaguely and incomprehensibly. Some of the canonical texts of the history of feminism have a frequently noted tendency to depreciate many of the women on behalf of whom they speak, particularly those considered to undermine social aims.44 A vindication of women’s rights might promise, for example, the emergence of improved human character. The texts of Wollstonecraft, Anna Wheeler, John Stuart Mill, or Simone de Beauvoir defended universal rights and principles of justice and recognition. But they also described contemporary women as trivial, superficial, stupid, vain, pretentious, and mannered, preoccupied with seduction, unproductive, pleasing, careless, unjust, immoral, selfish, competitive, jealous, negligent, narcissistic, cruel, or vicious. Condorcet found it not untrue that women lacked the sentiment of justice. Wollstonecraft saw the undereducated, bougeois women of her day as vain, superficial, and dangerously lacking in principles.45 Beauvoir describes the irrational jealousies and obstructive hostility of many disappointed, thwarted middle-aged women and mothers. Such arguments are not incoherent: they make the case that women’s rights (education, work, independent income, meaningful occupations, franchise, equal status, reciprocal recognition) would improve women’s qualities, among the positive transformations. Eighteenth-century arguments for women’s education had promised that women would be more socially useful, wise, judicious, improved, principled. Even allowing for the emphasis on the distorting role of environment described by writers from Wollstonecraft through Condorcet, Taylor, Mill, and Beauvoir, some of these texts give a striking characterization of women’s destructive capacities, ranging from manipulativeness to trivial interests occupying extremes of libido, even to the detriment of their children. A memorable image from Mary Wollstonecraft is the lady who takes her dogs “to bed, and nurses them with a parade of sensibility, when sick,” taking her lapdog “to her bosom instead of her child.”46 She argues that an appropriately structured education is necessary to the development in women of regulated sentiments less driven by antisocial neglectfulness. One could say that their queer (in Edelman’s sense) and even their antiteleological animal devotions are emblematic of their irresponsible, ill-distributed interests. Conjoined with arguments that women’s inequality is harmful to children, such negative representations have played a role in the history of women’s rights vindications.47 These are also calculating arguments; attached to the promise of alternative outcomes (if they would “but generously snap our chains … ”). Their vindications would deliver better outcomes for nations and peoples (“they would find us … more reasonable mothers—in a word, better citizens”).48 In short, a rich dialogue is available by considering feminism’s archive from the perspective of the recent critiques of reproductive futurism.
The vindications of No Future are not antichild, but anti-Child. Edelman opposes the sentimentalized images of future generations as continuing the hopes of the present and the vilification of those cast as impediments to the former. But its liminal elements also brought queer and abortion debates into proximity. In chapter 4 I further explore the problematic figures generated by the reproductive futurism of reproductive rights, arguing for a detachment of the latter from the former.
Perhaps such analyses could lead to more differentiating typologies of reproductive futurism. How can a politics of reproductive choice be dissociated from overpromising the advent of responsible individuals, better parents, producing the wanted children? Martha Shane and Lana Wilson’s documentary After Tiller (2013) depicts the desperation of those—many very poor—who have needed third-term abortions. It also includes, and has been surrounded by, debate emphasizing the extensive moral reflection brought to such decisions. Given the extreme difficulty of access to abortion services for many in the United States, the bureaucratic obstructionism and absence of clinics which in some cases has made late-term abortions necessary, and the accompanying blame, hardship, and expense, does it alleviate or add to those burdens to emphasize the extent to which many of these women morally reflect? The legitimacy of abortion services should not be subordinated to the thickness of the moral life of those who turn to them,49 not least because this can only stimulate contrasting images of antisocial feminine irresponsibility.
STRANGE COALITIONS: QUEER NEGATIVITY AND REPRODUCTIVE POLITICS. AND WHAT IS SO WRONG?
In reiterating the question “what is so wrong with reproductive futurism?” I have explored a number of answers. Edelman is widely considered an advocate of a pure political negativity,50 but, as he clarifies in his dialogue with Halberstam, it is very different from the targeted antiestablishment “No Future” of, say, a punk sensibility. Edelman explores a queer negativity without meaning, aim, and targeted good: “dare we trace … the untraversable path that leads to no good and has no other end than an end to the good as such?”51 This is not a matter of smashing specific idols or figures of authority—certainly, not in the name of alternative idols, political positions, or competing principles.52
However, a number of different renditions have been given of this case for antisociality, and I turn now to mention one version suggested by Jack Halberstam, another from Heather Love, and a third from Tim Dean.
Recognizing the argument that the “queer subject stands between heterosexual optimism and its realization,”53 Halberstam takes this to be the argument that the queer subject “has been bound epistemologically to negativity, to nonsense, to nonproduction, and to unintelligibility, and instead of fighting this characterization … [Edelman] proposes that we embrace the negativity that we anyway structurally represent.”54 Heather Love, by contrast, has proposed a different inflection, one I emphasized earlier: “Edelman argues that rather than trying to deny [queer] associations with the antisocial (or the death drive), queers should take up the ‘figural burden of queerness’55—the burden of representing the dissolution of the social—and not shuffle it off to someone else.”56 And as a means of clarifying this interpretation, compare both these versions (from Halberstam and Love) to the characterization by Tim Dean. In the face of: “the viciously homophobic representation of homosexuality as sterile, unproductive, antifamily, and death-driven, Edelman insists that ‘we should listen to, and even perhaps be instructed by, the readings of queer sexualities produced by the forces of reaction’ (16). If there is a germ of truth in homophobic stereotypes of queerness as destructive, then we might heroically identify with those negative stereotypes in order to short-circuit the social in its present form.”57
While Edelman would specifically repudiate a heroic identification with negative stereotypes, it is easy to see how Dean could arrive at that wording. Doesn’t this seem just one further increment to the view mentioned by Love—that embracing queer negativity avoids shuffling the burden of queerness off onto someone else? If converted either to heroism or to ethics, the project would be prone to generate new, contrasting figures, the unheroic who deflect a burden. Carrying a load of queer negativity in a stance of heroism isn’t Edelman’s style: too principled, too teleological for one thing. Notwithstanding one reference in No Future to an alternative route for queer ethical value,58 Edelman does not speak to a queer ethics so much as the sheer appeal of siding with the birds.
What if these variants on No Future’s antisocial thesis also offered a number of means to reconsider queer’s twin: abortion? According to the first version: the queer subject has been bound to negativity, to nonproduction, to unintelligibility, to the grave: instead of fighting this characterization, the subject of abortion might embrace of the negativity she “anyway represents.” There is good reason to resist the attachment of reproductive rights to productivity and intelligibility, and an abortion politics could endorse the absence of the moral field, and the role of the intermittently incoherent, unresolved, irresponsible, selfish, terminal, “instead of fighting this characterization.” On this variant the stress would fall on the latter: anyway, reproductive rights are going to take place around this specter.
According to variation two, upping the ante of accountability and moral subjectivity produces an unreal fantasy about reproductive choice, whose claims are thereby subordinated to an excessive onus on an appropriately narrativized phantasmatic reponsibility, delegitimating subjects who do not conform to its contours. Here the point would be that in reproductive rights contexts, also, reproductive futurism shuffles the burden to someone else.
Reproductive futurism makes and renders its figures of impediment, the antisocial others lurking in the frames of heteronormativity and in the canon of feminism’s history. But a methodological orientation alert to this making of figures of expense—abject and illegible figures—must also forgo the assumption we can calculate that one subject’s pursuit of the normal of reproductive futurism is directly connected to another subject’s consequent role as the impediment to reproductive futurism. We can identify the relation between the normal of reproductive futurism and the production of its antisocial other while also exercising caution about that calculation: “make no mistake, Tiny Tim survives at our expense.”
Edelman notes that the putative agents of death sometimes undertake what he sees as a reactive, answering project, proclaiming themselves the agents of life. Doing so contributes, indirectly, to the scapegoating of abject and attacked representatives of the obstruction of social interest. But we can recognize this expense, without assuming it can be computed exactly. We can look for the production of abject, unintelligable, and queer figures, while also allowing that we cannot always calculate exactly where their cost falls.
CALCULATING, STILL DRIVING: MORE BILLBOARDS
In fact, an important resistance to calculability is also shared by queer politics and the politics of abortion. Think of Wendy Brown, reflecting on the complexities she encountered in her engagements with reproductive rights: “in the clamour for the right to abortion … we were missing out on the extent to which reproductive freedom takes different forms for different populations. The constraints on reproductive freedom are different for different classes, castes, races, geographical locations and sexualities.”59 We could add, in different ways, to Edelman’s confrontation with that giant roadside invitation to consider a fetus as not a “choice” but a “child.” We could turn to another series of billboards he might also have encountered in a number of American cities. Here a reproductive futurism addressed African American women in particular with the charge that the implications of their abortions were negative for racial equality.
In November 2011, as the Republican primary debates continued, all leading Republican candidates were aggressively antichoice. The American organization Planned Parenthood was targeted by several candidates, including Herman Cain, who agreed with claims that abortion disproportionally impacted the future of African Americans and could be likened to genocide.60 In the same year billboards were to be seen in Atlanta, Oakland, and New York City declaring “The Most Dangerous Place for Black People Is the Womb.”61 The campaign attributed to women a procreative responsibility not just toward their potential offspring but to population and racial futures they could preserve or betray.62
Brown included reproductive rights in her well-known essay on paradoxical rights, an essay which reminds that the rights achieved by some may be accomplished at the expense of others. They may submerge differences or they may conceal, or generate, power differentials between those who can and can’t enjoy them.63 The paradoxes she highlights are also an important reminder to hesitate before simple calculations of impact. It is not just that the reproductive rights of women of color have also been held hostage to a race-conscious reproductive futurism. For some, reproductive rights claims have included the right not to undergo forced, coerced, or unduly encouraged sterilization, and the calculations of pro- and antiabortion politics (“at whose expense?”) have been complicated by inequalities of race, poverty, and class. Moreover, reproductive rights offer a good example of forms of agency, freedom, and responsibility considered to be threatened by, but only arising in the wake of, the biopolitical interest in reproduction they often resist. Chapter 4 will consider several accounts of the intersections of reproductive futurism with visions of national and population futures in relation to which women’s bodies may be figured as thresholds of risk and defense, erosions and growth.
This brings me to an intuition very briefly shared, albeit differently, by Heather Love, Jack Halberstam, and by Jasbir Puar64—that No Future might also be brought into proximity, indirectly, with a theorist rigorously absent from its pages: Michel Foucault.65 Arguably, Foucault was interested in the conditions and costs of reproductive futurism, from its responsibilizations to its tolerable thresholds. He resisted identifying a direct relationship between profits and expenses (such as a profit for family values or expense incurred by delegitimized abnormals). But there is another reason, also—not an obvious one—for a turn to Foucault amidst this discussion.
If there is one major theorist to whom one might best turn for an account of the circumstances in which queer politics and the formation of reproductive rights could strangely connect, it was Foucault. This intersection was one of the most curious and opaque aspects of a work with an ambiguous status in the emergence of queer theory: Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, volume 1. The work proposed an intersection with which many readers never quite made their peace: between, on the one hand, the formation of sexualities, abnormalities, perversions, confessions, models of psychic depth and sexual truth and, on the other hand, the broader formation of the biopolitical—its preoccupation with matters such as hygiene, the relation of birthrate to death rate, harmful and healthy pregnancies, child raising, urban planning, alimentary trends, the interests of populations. This intersection is the navel of The History of Sexuality, volume 1.
Edelman has claimed that reproductive futurism is also a kind of disciplinary Panoptimism.66 With an important exception, the concerns of biopower have not, for the most part, been brought into dialogue with Edelman’s work. But there is a possible biopolitical aspect to No Future, despite the absence of the corresponding language and problematics in his work. Opening this chapter, I speculated about a possible model allowing the tension to better abide,67 between (for example) No Future’s psychoanalytic orientation, and its possible dialogue with other explorations of reproductive futurism: those of reproductive politics, even reproductive rights, feminism, and biopolitics. How could these push well at each other as a more transformative provocation?
Situating Edelman on a biopolitical terrain leads Puar to argue that he means to oppose but ends up presupposing a reduction of sexuality to a “thin biopolitical frame of reproduction.”68 The argument, I think, is that futurity for Edelman ends up being reproductive in a narrow sense: as if the futurists put the interests of children first, giving preference to reproduction and normative kinship. Attributing to Edelman a preoccupation with the costs of privileging the literal children (and so, in that sense, with a reproductive biopolitics), Puar suggests that Edelman misses the mark. On her reading: “he ironically recenters the very child-privileging, future-oriented politics he seeks to refuse.”69 If Puar’s reading, in turn, misses a mark, this is only because one can imagine the arguments of Puar and Edelman, on their marks, containing far more interesting suspended reserves for the other. Given the psychoanalytic inflections of Edelman’s argument, the point cannot be the child but the structure: conservationism, projection of the death drive. His argument targets whatever stands in for the Child and the associated (redistributive) projection of its “obstruction.” Is No Future really at odds with what Puar presents as an alternative view? “The biopolitics of regenerative capacity already demarcate[s] racialized and sexualized statistical population aggregates as those in decay, destined for no future, based not upon whether they can or cannot reproduce children but on what capacities they can and cannot regenerate and what kinds of assemblages they compel, repel, spur, deflate.”70
Both Puar and Edelman invite us to consider the highly flexible possibilities for all that can stand in for the Child. Those possibilities can certainly be seen in governmental and often nationalist calculations relating to populations, their futures and logics of conservation, their flourishing and tacit and overt “expenditure.” Puar and Edelman might agree on the remark that “the child is just one such figure in a spectrum of statistical chances that suggest health, vitality, capacity, fertility, ‘market virility’, and so on.”71 Because Edelman’s argument was not pursued in a biopolitical register, we might seem to have traveled far from his concerns and the phenomena to which he directs an acute eye. But, from the outset of No Future, the specter of the child-refusing sinthomosexual, associated with the negation of life, is said to represent a negative impact on “community” and “nation.”72 As he notes, reproductive futurism (and we are going to add—not to confuse them but to consider their points of contiguity—biopolitics) names agents of death and pursues, indirectly or directly, strategies of death.
In the next chapter I take up the possibility that reproductive futurism includes the aims and by-products of the biopolitical. In arguing that Foucault’s work encompasses some biopolitical variants of reproductive futurism, I will expand some largely unexplored figures in Foucault’s work: the child (and concurrently the nation) at risk of harm or death from poor parenting practice, the Malthusian couple, contraception, masturbation, marsupial mothers shadowing their children to avert risk. This will bring us to the biopolitical “children” who emerge as the threshold figures of national and population flourishing.