no kids
In “The Future is Kid Stuff”, Lee Edelman outlines the impact of child-rearing as a concept and shared cultural experience on the world of politics. He interrogates the commonly used trope that politics is about making a ‘better world for our children,’ and tries to construct a queer politics that can be politically radical without binding itself to the heteronormative narrative of the cyclical family unit. If politics as usual is “fighting for children,” what would it look like to not be fighting for the children?
Once Edelman has established the fairly plausible idea that every political vision is making an argument about how the future should look, he looks for insights into alternatives by using Lacan’s concept of joissance, which I understand to be a sense of enjoyment or pleasure so keen that it is disruptive. That which gives us joissance puts us in contact with something we are not able to name, but which we have defined ourselves around the wanting of. Edelman uses joissance to develop the impossibility of the dream-futures based around children, a future which will never arrive. Living that way, he says, will lock you into a vicious cycle of wanting something you are continuously expecting to possess and failing to possess.
Judging by the end of his essay, Edelman’s solution is to say ‘fuck it’ — “fuck the social order and the figural children paraded before us as its terroristic emblem…fuck the waif from Les Miz, fuck the poor innocent kid on the Net.” He is resistant to enter into any kind of delusion or utopian thinking.
It was framing this essay as ‘anti-utopian’ that helped me understand it — if I do actually understand it. Edelman states at this end is that his credo is “to insist the future stops here.” I am reminded of a book I read once about the scientific management of forestry, and how the enterprising managers in the very early days thought that by clearing away the brush and bugs and chaotic bits and pieces they could have a clean, efficient forest that was very good at reproducing itself. This did not happen, and they were forced to re-introduce bugs and brush and whatever else, in the hopes that they could get the forest working properly again. However, they did not understand all the details of what made the original system tick, and these attempts at re-introduction also led to failure. Edelman similarly does not want to reintroduce the ‘queer variable’ into a heteronormative society that, seeing itself stumble, looks to queer community for salvation.
