Queer and Disabled Time: Past, Present, and Future
In “Time for Disability Studies and a Future for Quips”, Alison Kafer posits her arguments as drawing upon queer temporality, but disagreeing at a fundamental level with one of its most significant proponents, Lee Edelman, and his book No Future. As others have noted, Edelman’s Child as distinct from “historical children” renders problematic many of the claims of the treatise, which suggests that queers abandon the future in place of immediate jouissance, opposition to the rhetoric of mandatory social order. While reproduction is rendered mandatory by reproductive futurism for the white and able-bodied, the historical record shows the ways in which the future has never been a domain to reject for other classes of people, from black, homeless, and poor people to disabled people. Yet much of Kafer’s argument follows the familiar (if difficult) line of Edelman’s Lacanian critique, which suggests the deployment of the future as a way to restore some imagined ideal that supposedly existed in the past, in which the alienation between sign and signified was not present. Thus, the problems with Edelman’s analysis lie not in his analysis of the discourse of politics, but instead his solution: “fuck the future”. It is instead politics (viewed, as analyzed by Berlant and Warner, through the lens of the private/public division) that assumes the continuation of social order, and not futurism. Politics is a discourse that operates through and with time, not as an inherent quality but as a function of a productive, capitalist, heteronormative, and ableist conception of the past, the present, and the future.
Kafer discusses how “‘the future’ has been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness”, and how disabled people are constructed as “outside of time”, only accepted into the narrative when they are “needing to be cured” or “moving towards a cure” (29). Narratives of reproduction, generation, and inheritance that proliferate in dominant discourses on disability, combined with the historical presences of eugenics and coerced or forced sterilization have historically removed disability entirely from the narrative (32). In contrast to the case of queerness, for which mainstreaming practices have attempted to adopt queerness into a reproductive futurism, to make it “kneel at the shrine of the Child”, disability remains completely unimaginable as a thread of the social fabric that might be reproduced (Edelman 293). Kafer later more blatantly suggests this with her consideration of “how to help your kids turn out disabled” in comparison with Sedgwick’s suggestion of “how to help your kids turn out gay” (45). This note is not to imply a fundamental integration of queerness into the social fabric (as Edelman is right to suggest that any actual accommodation of queerness by the state is illusory at best), but rather to suggest levels of comparative marginalization for assemblages afforded still less social capital, not yet even offered the deceptive olive branch of inclusion.
Kafer’s specific word use is important in these arguments to determine the exact point of departure from Edelman. Her suggestion, with which my previous paragraph begins, that the future is deployed “in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness”, suggests alternative deployments of the future or of alternative times. Instead of abandoning the future, the necessity becomes, as she notes, quoting Puar, “not to repudiate reproductive futurities but to trace ‘how the biopolitics of regenerative capacity already demarcate racialized and sexualized statistical population aggregates as those in decay, destined for no future, based not on whether they can or cannot reproduce children but on what capacities they can and cannot regenerate” (33). Politics, capitalism, compulsory heterosexuality, and compulsory able-bodiedness are specific deployments of time, but to imagine that a focus on the future is the problem with strategies of non-normative resistance is to declare the past and present as somehow escaped from the tyranny of the sign. This tyranny is the real villain of Edelman’s analysis, and his strongest point, and thus Kafer’s observation that “past, present, and future each become vexed, fraught: we lost what we had in the past, we exist in a present consumed by nostalgia for that loss, and we face futures far unlike the ones we had previously imagined” entails a more complete analysis of the deployment of capitalist, ableist, heteronormative time.
