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The Black subject in Lee Edelman's queer negativity is explored here as both absent from and productive of its most radical critiques of futurity. The essay attempts to read a different queer negativity within the tradition of Black feminist theorizing.
There must be some way to integrate death into living, neither ignoring it nor giving in to it.
-Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
The polemical thrust of the interventions called queer negativity has opened a debate on hope and hopelessness that has left little room for middle ground, much less an altogether different terrain. This essay tries to find a different place(lessness) from which to theorize queer negativity and, or as, Black feminist theorizing. That is, to find in the interventions called queer negativity-the critique of reproductive futurity, of the family, of the politics of hope-their prefigurations and alter-articulations within Black feminist theory. This is not to say that queer negativity simply reproduces Black feminism in whiteface, but that Black feminist theorizing anticipates or, rather, haunts the political imaginary articulated in queer negativity. Returning to Black feminist theorizing opens onto yet another political imaginary, one different from both the queer pessimists and their queer futurist critics. Black feminist theorizing offers a way of short-circuiting the dialectic of hope and hopelessness and allows for different theorizations of reproduction, futurity, and their coalescence at the site of the family.
I want to begin, then, with some reflections on the project of queer negativity. In the hands of literary theorist Lee Edelman, the antirelational position developed across the oeuvre of Leo Bersani has shifted from a critique of the sanitization of sexuality into a position against the reproduction of society-futurity-itself. Edelman's 2004 monograph, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, offers an iconoclastic revision and re-envisioning of the antirelational project. Edelman's text positions itself against "reproductive futurity," or "the dominant ideology of the social [. . . that] represents futurity in the image of the innocent child" (Dean, "Antisocial" 827). This image of the Child is central to Edelman's work, insofar as the force of its presence polices queerness and queer politics. For Edelman, the Child "remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, [and] the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention" (3). Thus, Edelman offers...