Digital Innocence: Queer Virginity, Painful Histories, and the Critical Hope of Queer Futurity (original) (raw)
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Editors' Introduction: Queer Futurities in Youth Literature, Media, and Culture
Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, 2019
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).
The Future Is Queer Stuff: Critical Utopianism and Its Discontents
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2013
When José Esteban Muñoz begins Cruising Utopia with the polemical provocation that "queerness is not here yet" (1), he offers perhaps the most trenchant response to current critical inquiries about the end of queer theory. Debates about critical utopianism and the politics of queer futurity seem particularly apposite at a moment when a question mark seems to hang over the future of queer theory itself. (After sex? The end of queer theory? Queer and then? Postqueer?) 1 At their best, these questions are partly motivated by critical self-reflection and can offer a useful barometer of intellectual trajectories and academic terrains. For example, in After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory, the editors Janet Halley and Andrew Parker are more interested in the question "what has queer theory become now that it has a past?" than in declaring a premature end to the field. 2 The collection is, in fact, framed as a response to the perceived obsoleteness of queer critical paradigms. In this context, the pastness of queer theory becomes an occasion to foreground the elasticity of its futurity -a recognition of how it continues to morph
Both the category of gender and the category of faith are deeply imbued with the notion of 'essence’: what is gender, what is faith, what does it mean to be of a particular gender, what does it mean to practice a particular faith etc.? However, the way these questions are posed is revealing more about the particular regime of genealogical vectors of power relations than the categories themselves. In order to map this specific socio-political matrix of various meanings, we are going to delineate the workings of essentialisms in order to demonstrate that by the process of ‘essentializing’, a given dominant matrix of power creates its own genealogy that assigns subjectivity its ‘rightly’ oriented position within the performance of genealogy’s established boundaries, usually naturalizing through teleological narratives. However, following Angela Mitropoulos’s understanding of the concept of genealogy, we will try to expand and defend a non-genealogical approach, which however requires the proximity to genealogical order. In order to do so, we are interested in how queer is connected both to notions of becoming and transformation on the one hand and temporality on the other. Queer time's flow has little to do with socially shared normative temporalities and rhythms, reproductive time or linear narrative history, and more with the lack of proper temporal orientation (McCallum and Tuknanen 2011), arrested developments and asynchronies that designate queer subjects out of time, without a proper history and failing to embody the normative temporal markers of ‘proper’ life trajectories. Socially shared temporal markers of one’s life are closely related to reproductive futurism (Edelman 2004), and its strongest emblem of societal projections into the future, the Child. We conclude with how queer possibilities could open up new relations to time that would go against or around normative forms of socially organized time. Instead of progressive linearity and futurity we try to reconsider the other (queer) side of the “plastic ambiguity of time” (Malabou 2012, 54), one that talks about raptures, rapid bursts of life and the momentary.
Queer Teenagers and the Mediation of Utopian Catastrophe
Recent cover stories about queer teenagers mark a noticeable shift in the discourse surrounding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) publics. Contemporary media reports have repositioned the multifarious identities of queer teens as sites of unease for contemporary queer politics. Employing a framework that emphasizes the dialogical relationship among the tropes of utopia and apocalypse to scrutinize media coverage, this analysis explores the anxieties and possibilities generated by queer teens. Young queers are simultaneously understood as both political separatists from earlier movements, as well as disinterested assimilationists. The thematics of sexual fluidity and neoliberal individualism are highlights of this discourse, each being carefully tempered by the cultural force of assimilation.
Reflection on Queer Temporalities in the Context of Muñoz's and Love's Work
Reflection on Queer Temporalities in the Context of Muñoz's and Love's Work, 2018
The following essay is based on the two texts by the authors José Esteban Muñoz and Heather Love, both dealing with the notion of queerness in close interrelation to time and utopian visions of queerness in the future. Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism and circumstances that we live in. Treating the past and the future as two units that are still closely interrelated, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now is not enough and laments the lack of the queer political imagination. Love's text takes up quite similar views with the only difference that she mainly characterizes the here and now of the queer community as something that is strongly coined by the past and the tremendously high pain that was felt on multiple levels.
Hybrid Children, Queer Futures: The Subversive Power of the Symbolic Child in Popular Culture
In this thesis, I explore the extent to which the child can be a queering symbol of the human in contemporary culture and critical theory, and how it might further futurism without that futurism becoming exclusionary. In the examples I discuss from popular culture, the child is still representative of a future ‘held in perpetual trust,’ but by raising questions about the nature of humanity and our expectations for the future, the form and purpose of this perpetual trust are questioned. This narrative tactic transforms the child into a new kind of symbol: a site of otherness, uncanniness, and ‘queerness’.
Queer futurity and childhood innocence: Beyond the injury of development
Global Studies of Childhood, 2016
Because it is so often said that children are the future, queer theory’s attention to (and searing debates on) queer futurity offers something new and important to studies of childhood. Drawing on and deepening recent attempts to meld the fields of childhood studies and queer theory, I dwell on the contradiction that results from the synchronous assumptions of the child’s a-sexuality and proto-heterosexuality to show how emphasizing sexuality within a discussion of children’s education is constructive. In the service of my interest in the renewal of thought concerning children’s psychosexual development, I offer a critical reading of the It Gets Better social media campaign (particularly, its consequent critiques and revisions). I begin with engagement of Eve Sedgwick’s 1991 seminal essay on queer childhood “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” and then, from there, trace contemporary queer theory’s use of the figure of the child and consideration of the impact of “innocence” on childhood...
Queerness is many things, for example: an identity; a state of being; a characteristic; a mark of the unknown…The number of ways in which ‘queerness’ has been utilised is testament to not only the enigmatic properties of the term, but also the key thread that ties these utilisations together: politics. In every instance that the queer appears as a descriptive category, it represents an opposition to norms, discourses of truth and ways of doing. In this, queerness is inherently political. This essay seeks to explore the oppositional nature of queerness as explored in the first chapter of Lee Edelman’s forceful polemic ‘No Future’, which outlines his rationale for an embracing of the anti-normative attributes of queerness; with a critique informed by ‘Non-reproductive Futurism’ by Nina Powers, who considers the politics of Jacques Rancière to remedy what she sees as ‘Edelman’s body apolitic’. It is through a consideration of the call-and-response of these texts, alongside other readings, that will hopefully offer a way to simultaneously embrace the oppositional nature of queerness while forming a pragmatic politics that operates within current systems of power while also rejecting ‘cisheterorepronormative futurism’ (!)