The Unimaginable Possibilities of (Queer) Time
As we explore the question of queer time — what it means, how we realize its possibilities, and how to even imagine it to begin with — Lee Edelman’s “The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive” provides some answers and more questions. By focusing his analysis of temporality, political futurity, and reproductive futurism around the image of the child, he “interrogate[s] the politics that inform the pervasive trope of the child as figure for the universal value attributed to political futurity and to pose against it the impossible project of queer oppositionality,” a paradoxical pursuit, as Edelman acknowledges, that make queer temporalities possible.
For Edelman, queerness is only visible when posed against the collective social fantasy of a reproductive future in which political issues become “visions of futurity,” where the figurative children of tomorrow take precedent over the (queer) adults of today. Like most hegemonic ideals, the future reality embodied by the image of the child rests on unstable ground: “the vision it hopes to realize is rooted in an imaginary past,” (289). This futurity, then, is made possible by “continuous negotiation and reconstruction of reality itself,” where those who are privileged by heteronormative structures are able to dictate the conditions of temporality.
Queers, however, have no place in this reproductive future where childhood notions of innocence shape societal attitudes, relationships, and policy and “the vision it hopes to realize is rooted in an imaginary past,” (289). Our current temporal understandings are centered around this belief/collective idea, providing us with a false sense of future based in “achieving symbolic closure through the marriage of identity to futurity in order to reproduce the social subject,” (291). Edelman’s piece brings us to an important and necessary question: how are we to imagine queer time, queer temporality, and indeed, queer futures when the current approach holds no space for us and even understands queerness as “bringing children and childhood to an end?” (293). Perhaps positioning temporality as a monolithic, static concept — one where we think we can’t envision another kind of world / future / time — serves to uphold patriarchal reproductive futurity. It seems as though neoliberal politics exacerbates this system of temporal understanding through accommodating the needs of queers, disabled folks, people of color, and women instead of creating, fighting for, and envisioning spaces and times where we don’t need to be accommodated but instead can thrive on our own terms, in our own bodies, not restricted by the confines of reproductive futurism and political futurity.
Edelman takes on the lofty job of envisioning by proposing queer theory as a possible site of reimagining temporality and what futures are available to us. Instead of mere politics of inclusion, which Edelman critiques in the following passage (which gave me chills), queers should embrace a “negative politics” that disrupt these collective and, as he’s laid out, harmful approaches to time and futurity:
“Before the standard discourse of liberal pluralism spills from our lips, before we supply once more the assurance that ours is not another kind of love but a love like his nonetheless, before we piously invoke the litany of our glorious contributions to civilizations of East and West alike, dare we take a moment and concede that…the queerness of queer theory should tend precisely toward such a redefinition of civil order itself through a rupturing of our foundational faith in the reproduction of futurity” (292).
This imagined possibility of time and future, then, is embodied in the lives of those who choose to “stand outside the cycles of reproduction” and therefore exist “intransitively” in a uniquely queer way that allows/makes and holds space for/affirms/encourages/ depends on non-reproductive understandings that exist outside/despite dominant heteronormative, neoliberal, and white approaches.
