Futurity
Children are the future, right?
- The future of what?
The future of our society.
Here, in the West, children are not just any future, but a very specific one: The conflict-free continuation of the current heteropatriarchal status quo. The purity and innocence that is projected on the child leads to often nationalist ideas of protection at all costs and in turn renders it “a locus of anxiety for homophobic culture because on it rests the reproduction of a heteronormative future.”[1] The child is the ideal Western citizen, even though it cannot yet fully act as a citizen.[2]
Children as metaphors are a centerpiece to right wing and conservative politics. Conspiracy theorists such as proponents of QAnon rage about ‘pedophile-rings’ and try to protect white kids from ‘child murdering elites.’ Next to their ties to antisemitic blood accusation, these conspiracy theories are informed by and inform conservative political strategies such as banning birth control, demanding or maintaining capital punishment for people who have engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with minors and prohibiting trans children from access to medical treatment.
Liberal politics often gather around the figure of the child as well, albeit with slightly different hopes of the futures it will realize; though, the idea of the child as a still innocent subject is widespread here, too. These normative understandings of childhood development reduce the child to a figure without any complexity, while, at the same time, putting contradicting “assumptions of the child’s a-sexuality and proto-heterosexuality”[3] on actual children.
The problem is less what kind of futurities children embody, but rather, that they have to.
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Queerness “is understood as bringing children and childhood to an end”,[4] Lee Edelman writes. For many, therefore, there is no such thing as a queer child. But if we admit that children have possibilities, abilities and wishes for bodily pleasure, that children do sometimes hold a longing for difference from the societal status quo, be it in regard to expectated gendered performance or their age-related developmental stages, this certainly can’t be true. There are trans-children, of course, and there are children who do not wish to grow up and become adults.
For Edelman, the futurity that comes with children is excluding queers, in that it only allows them to participate, if they too reproduce in normative fashion. Queerness, Edelman argues “can never define an identity, it can only disturb one”[5] and queers should therefore reject to participate in the idea of a future in which our identities are already predetermined as heteronormative ones.[6] He argues, consequently, that queers should find joy in non-reproductive relation rather than fight for the children.[7]
Whilst getting praise for pointing at the problems that arise with the futurity that rests on children’s shoulders, Edelman’s No Future is criticized by many authors to such a degree, that nobody really ever speaks about this book as something other than a polemic. Andrea Smith, amongst others, stresses that Edelman forgets about the children that already have no future, for example – in the American context – the native child, which for Smith, “is not a guarantor of the reproductive future of white supremacy; it is the nit that undoes it.”[8]
More generally though, critics seem to agree that Edelman is wrong in keeping the distinction between the actual child and the child as a theoretical concept, a figuration, a metaphor up for too long, whilst imagining actual children as irrelevant to the broader argument. “No Future does fail in not anticipating the return of the real child and its real future in its arguments.”[9]
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Looking at children in Western societies, there are always two. The actual child and the metaphorical one. You’re always having twins.
The list of disciplinary methods and institutions that arise from the treatment of children as carriers of the heteronormative future is long. Indeed, they condition us long after we have left primary and high schools and its traces can be found almost everywhere we go, from doctor's offices to multiplex movie theaters. That is to say, children as metaphors affect everyone – disproportionally, though.
The general usage of metaphors is not the issue here. In fact, metaphors can’t be avoided in a world of abstract knowledge. They help to make things graspable by giving coherence to abstract thought.
When the sense object – here: the child – faces real consequences by being deployed as an image to make an abstract thought – here: futurity – graspable, in short, when the sense object and image are too close to each other, we have to rework the image, not the sense object. Coming up with different images and better metaphors is an aesthetic practice that has implications on the political, is how we do writing.[10]
- ^ Hannah Dyer: Queer futurity and childhood innocence: Beyond the injury of development. In: Global Studies of Childhood 2017, Vol. 7(3) 290–302, p. 291
- ^ Cf. Lauren Berlant: The Queen of America goes to Washington City – Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham/London 1997, p. 5
- ^ Hannah Dyer: Queer futurity and childhood innocence: Beyond the injury of development. In: Global Studies of Childhood 2017, Vol. 7(3) 290–302, p. 292
- ^ Lee Edelman: No Future – Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham/ London 2004, p. 19
- ^ Ibid, p. 17
- ^ Cf. Ibid
- ^ Cf. Ibid, p. 3
- ^ Andrea Smith: Queer theory and native studies: The heteronormativity of settler colonialism. 2010 GLQ 16: 1–2, p. 48. qtd. in Hannah Dyer: Queer futurity and childhood innocence: Beyond the injury of development. In: Global Studies of Childhood 2017, Vol. 7(3) 290–302, p. 296
- ^ Karín Lesnik-Oberstein: Childhood, queer theory, and feminism. In: Feminist Theory 2010, Vol. 11(3), 309–321, p. 312
- ^ Donna J. Haraway: Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors that Shape Embryos. Berkley 2004, p.10. qtd. in Jules Gill-Peterson: Histories of the Transgender Child. Minneapolis 2018, p. 37