Queer Polemic for Lunch, or, Portrait of the Artist as an Angry Young Queer

Cross-posted to my livejournal. Nothing to do with Moby Dick, but the sort of thing I blog about.

Quotes from No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive by Lee Edelman, which my prof brought into class [Here and Queer, Prof. Kate Thomas], used to discuss Maurice by Forster [Maurice being a classic gay novel, and unusual for having a happy ending for the main character instead of ending in death].
From Chapter 1 "The Future is Kid Stuff"

The quotes are about how politicians appealing to the religious right in all quite a lot of us will justify homophobic legislation on the grounds the it's 'for the children'. And how that kind of rhetoric is very difficult to argue again. And how - to Edelman's and my displeasure - some queers seek to, in effect, assimilate themselves. Hence the focus by the gay movement on marriage, having children, and the military. Of course people should be able to have public recognition of their (intended to be) monogamous-for-life sexual-romantic relationships, and raise children, and join the army, regardless of who they have sex with or what their gender presentation is or whatever. Obviously. But to me, the absence of bans on sex toys and the presence of plenty of queer theory and the ability to be a queer-as-fuck academic is much more important than marriage, children, and the military. Queers who don't want those things are excluded by the mainstream gay movement. And I'm not even going to go into trans people. And of course the queer movement has its race and class and gender issues. But onward! Quotes from someone who is already a prominent queer scholar!

"This Child [is] the emblem of futurity's unquestioned value ... the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form. Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might, as I argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing it ... to refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation". (pg 4)

"The fantasy subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought. That logic compels us ... to submit to the framing of political debate - and indeed, of the political field - as defined by the terms of what this books describe as reproductive futurism: terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to the organizing principle of communal relations." (pg 2, emphasis mine)

"Queers must respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order's prerogatives, not only by avowing our capacity to promote that order's coherence and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality [this is the part I like]: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively terrorized; fuck Annie, fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital l's and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop" (pg 29).

Mmm, delicious. That really hit the spot.

If politicians really cared about children, there would be free daycare and better public education, esp sex ed, and ample fully paid maternity and paternity leave, etc. And they would have some concern for the high rate of suicide among queer youth. Generally, in the US these days, the rhetoric is pro-family but the legislation isn't. And see, I am pro-family because raising kids is difficult and expensive, and how kids are raised is so vital to the future - to the world in which I will be living for quite a lot more decades, as well as all those who will outlive me whom I wish well. I'm just not pro-family like that.

And I'm not down on reproduction or on kids, in theory at least, not terribly interested in either myself, but if people want 'em and they'll be reasonably responsible parents, then I wish them luck. But the rhetoric.

In the Terminal Note at the end of Maurice, Forster writes of his conceiving the book at a specific moment - when Edward Carpenter*'s lover George Merrill "touched by backside - gently and just above the buttocks. I believe he touched most people's [lol] ... It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts ... at that precise moment I had conceived." Aside from the ickyness of male artists appropriating a female experience, there's the ickyness of a queer portraying his book as a kind of replacement for biological reproduction. So, fuck literary reproduction, too. (Speaking for myself.) I don't write in order to be immortal. I write in order to be heard now, I write to take part in conversations now, I write because I need to say things now. And speaking as a baby scholar, my highest ambition is not to write the definitive book on The Bacchai or on humor or on Greek religious imagery. Just, contribute to the discussion, put forth suggestions. Re-frame, re-lens the sight of my scholarly community. Give 'em conceptual whiplash. The goal is not to bring the conversation to an end. I prefer to think of the publication of Maurice - written in 1913-1914, but only published in 1970 after the death of Forster - as a coming out rather than some sort of birth. This metaphor won't even work for all gay/queer novels, much less all novels. But to my mind, it is very fitting for Maurice because the writer spent his life closeted and because so much of his life predated the gay rights movement.

Gonna wash all that down with some Achilles in Vietnam now.

*Eventually, I'll get into the habit of HTML coding this sort of thing, but for now, here's a link to the wiki about Carpenter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Carpenter