QREE

https://escholarship.org/content/qt6c14j4fw/qt6c14j4fw_noSplash_1cf44456a31d06c8005a24b1a3188ce5.pdf

"According to (Queer Theorist) Leo Bersani’s own argument, blackness—unlike queerness—is not contingently but necessarily and irrationally excluded from ontology. We are beginning to ask why blackness, for example, would not be a better signifier for the liminal beyond of identitarianism (instead of using Queerness for it)

"Bersani’s impersonalism tends to a contradictory or ambivalent position about its self-destruction

because impersonalism has obsessive, melancholic, paranoid, or fetishistic attachments to

identity positions that it also wants to let go. Bersani does not want to give up sex’s centrality in

antisocial theory, but his own impersonalism suggests that he should."

Lee Edelman’s queer theory has strongly white overtones that

resist its non-identitarian ambitions. In No Future (2006), Edelman martials antisocial theory

against the figure of the Child as a “humanizing” norm. In a rebuff of Lee Edelman in Sexual

Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (2014), Juana María Rodríguez warns,

“Today, norms, taboos, conventions, or protections designed to assert a protected status to

children and their families, including LGBT families, may appear to be color-blind, but they are

never race-neutral” (36). Rodríguez responds to Edelman, 

137

But by ignoring race, Edelman fails to consider how children of color function as the coconstitutive symbolic nightmare of our nation’s future. Rather than signifying

reproductive futurity, African American male children represent racialized fears of criminality, violence, and sexual danger. (35)

Lee Edelman has responded to his critics at both the level of queer of color critique and

Afropessimism. At the level of queer of color critique, when Ralph Poole asks Lee Edelman if

Edelman, “relied too much on white, elite archives,” Edelman responds, “those critiques are

identitarian critiques” (Edelman and Poole 2018). With respect to queer of color critiques of the

race-neutral child, Edelman argues in “Learning Nothing: Bad Education” (2017),

many critics have written about the presumed “whiteness” of the Child in Western

culture. 

While the figure of meaning and cultural promise in a racist and antiblack order

will disproportionately find representation in images of the dominant racial class, the

Child itself does not have any intrinsic relation to whiteness and can, where useful, be

embodied, even by that dominant order, in (the image of) children of color as well.

Antiabortion activists, for example, have used representations of black and Hispanic

children to demonize abortion as a form of genocide and thereby to mobilize antiliberal

agendas in communities of color. […] The Child, therefore, has no qualities in itself, but

will assume those qualities as needed in the context of a dominant social order. (166-

167n1)

Edelman is saying that the Child’s “representation in images” might be white, but the Child in

itself is race neutral, and so the Child itself can be a norm even when represented by non-white

children. 

The example undermines the claim, though. Let me break it down. Antiabortion activists

argue that because we disproportionately abort children of color, the abortion industry de facto

promotes the genocide of children of color. Therefore, abortion is racist, and we should save

children of color by outlawing abortion. Edelman seems to infer from this that even children of

color are the future (at the same time that he considers whiteness to be “the dominant racial

class”). 

I disagree. Rather, should not we infer that there is a different logic of relation between

these figures: the Child itself, actual children, and the image of children? 

Lee Edelman’s racial neutrality and queer impersonality depend upon a dual placement of the Child with respect to

representation, hence his parenthetical treatment of “(the image of) children of color.” The

evidence for the anti-abortion activists’ claim is that actual children of color are being

disproportionately killed or prevented from living, which seriously undermines the inference

that, because the Child itself can be represented with the image of children of color, actual

children of color therefore “are the future” as much as white children. 

What I am establishing here is a parallel in the way race forms a stumbling block for queer neutrality: Bersani’s and

Edelman’s impersonality runs into a representational tokenism.