Editors' Introduction: Queer Futurities in Youth Literature, Media, and Culture (original) (raw)

2019, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain." -José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia The future, a time on the horizon, a projected becoming of the not-yet-here, is quite a contentious temporal mode in the study of youth literatures, cultures, and media. The stakes and cultural significance of futurity increase drastically when examining youth texts that focus on queer thought, experience, aesthetics, and politics. These amplified stakes manifest mostly 1 because it is debatable whether certain models and frameworks of futurity are applicable to the real and imagined lives of queer folk and queer youth. We can further identify more tensions and difficulties when examining approaches to futurity vis-à-vis children and the figure of the Child , especially since they often reify both conservative and progressive attitudes toward temporality and activism. But in order to examine how this temporal mode operates in contemporary youth texts, we first need to develop an understanding of the specific politics of futurity that inform youth literature and media, the diverging ethical perspectives toward queer futurism, and the real-world issues that pressure longings for a utopian, queerer future (and that simultaneously highlight the need for these utopian longings).