Writing A New Master, Composing, 27/06/2017

So I took a break from my Doctor Who blogging, just for this one episode. Next Monday 3 July, I’ll post a review of the Epic Wicked Awesome Body Horror Master Team-Up, taking both episodes as a single story.

A separate essay on World Enough and Time will probably be part of the ebook I’ll publish later in 2018 on the Peter Capaldi years. Now that the Capaldi era is closing, I can actually get a pretty good idea of what that book would look like.

Right now, I have a general count of themes that I’m going to pursue through the Capaldi book. I’m not sure where any principle of unity would come from. I mostly just want to release a pleasantly stimulating book of essays about Doctor Who.

So what would it be about?

Sexual fluidity, for one. Russell T Davies introduced a universe of sexuality’s possibility into Doctor Who, but the TARDIS team itself was dominated by straightness throughout the Tennant and Smith years.

If the TARDIS team of the pansexual Captain Jack’s, the more open character of Rose’s first year, and the queerness of Eccleston’s Doctor had lasted more than three episodes, maybe things would have been different. As it is, we only got to explore a queer TARDIS crew in the Capaldi years.

Clara’s implicit queerness in her final season brought the idea openly into the TARDIS team again, and the main cast has doubled down on queerness through Bill.

But the regeneration of the Master into Michelle Gomez solidly slots 21st century Doctor Who into a queer narrative space. The Time Lords are now canonically and openly able to change genders casually. It’s become so taken for granted in the Capaldi era that there’s an expectation that the next Doctor will be a woman.

Even aesthetically, Gomez's Master dresses in a style that evokes
William Hartnell's Doctor, a science-fictional god in Victorian
inventor's garb.

I do want to explore the centrality of the Master in the Capaldi years. Her power as a narrative force, the new story ideas that Steven Moffat developed for her character. The Master in these years was a destructive anarchist. She no longer thinks of amassing power and conquest – she primarily loves to tear the world down.

Right there is the centre of her redemption arc. All previous versions of the Master were variations on power-hungry schemers. They were tinpot dictators and wannabe authoritarians.

Gomez was the first Master who fully gave in to the Master’s own impulses for destruction for its own sake. She was still a delightful sadist, but was content enough to leave a trail of chaos in her wake.

Just like the trails of chaos and revolution that the Doctor leaves behind him. At this critical point of the Master’s own embrace of the thrill of anarchism and destruction, she’s ripe for an intervention.

The Doctor can train her to channel her revolutionary energy into tearing down the world to provide it new life rather than simply tearing it to pieces. He can teach her that it’s more fun that way.

Just an idea for now.

Freedom Flattens Hate, A History Boy, 04/07/2016

I'm not going to make a big, overcomplicated analysis today. Philosophical ideas, ideas for novels or films, thoughts on assembling my workshops – those will come later.

I was thankful I had Saturday evening and Sunday off this weekend, because I feel like I finally got my most proper Toronto Pride experience. Just being able to soak in the celebratory, defiant, fierce atmosphere of the whole event, which I think I’ve never really been able to do before.

Pride and LBGT existence has always been a part of my life – it’s in my family, my circles of close and distant friends – that I’ve always taken that existence for granted, in a way. 

It’s not that I was ever blind to the existence of homophobia or hostility to queer people. I’ve certainly always been aware of the struggles that queer people have faced, and I’ve learned more about those struggles over time.

I may not be gay, but I know the style of a party.

My mother and many of her gay and straight friends lost people they loved in the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s. I’ve known men and women who’ve faced the awkwardness and fear of coming out to their families, friends, and peer groups. People who’ve risked losing everything – or even just risked an eventual surgical complication – to come out as trans.

Of course, I’ve only known them. My own sexuality, in itself, has never caused me a problem. I’m just a little socially awkward. I’m still straight. I made some pretty bad mistakes with sex and relationships. But I’ve had it pretty easy.

I’ve heard the repulsive language of insults, hate, and – worst of all, because it's most insidious – the respectability talk. “They have the right to do it, but they should keep it to themselves.” “It’s not proper to have that flag in City Hall. This is a place for representing everyone.” And when the time is right,* I’ve tried to lead people to recognize their words for what they really are.

* That is, when I feel like I can call out their homophobia in a way that’s still polite and won’t encourage more violence or hostility.

But I’ve lived in socially progressive communities – online and in real life – for so long that I’d come to take for granted the freedom to be and become whatever sexuality you want. Where we’d established it, it was here to stay.

The past couple of years, we’ve seen the growth of a powerful movement of open, aggressive racism, sexism, and homophobia. More than just the Pulse Massacre, which was only its most horrifying expression. 

People who hate blacks, immigrants, queer people, who want women silent and subservient – they defend their loud, proud expressions of hatred as their freedom. That is an insult to the very concept of freedom. 

Freedom isn't about being able to do and say whatever you want, damn whatever tightwads may get offended. Freedom is about being able to be whatever you want. To be accepted for whatever you are.

The only identity forbidden under that is the identity that would, by its essential nature, destroy that freedom to become whatever your desires lead you to be. That forbidden identity is the racist, the one who hates. 

Haters are going to hate. It’s what they do. Hate destroys freedom because it literally destroys people for freely expressing whatever their own nature is leading them to become.

We can mock it with the stereotype phrase all we want. But when we’re talking about real hate, its damage is real. Real hate let hundreds of thousands of people die in a massive HIV epidemic. Real hate opened fire with an AR-15 a couple of weeks ago.

Our society is progressive, practically endlessly. We’re so progressive that the biggest controversy about Toronto Pride has become how it feels overloaded with crass corporate sponsorship, and negotiating the balance of power and visibility among all the queer demographics.

In a lot of other parts of the world, the biggest problem of Pride parades and celebrations is whether the police will protect them from the hooligans with knives and baseball bats, or whether they’ll join in. We’re never secure against hate. We always have to push it back. Push at it until no one hates anymore.

Happy Pride, everyone.

No Future Epilogue: Figural Thoughts in The Real World, Research Time, 14/04/2014

It seems my initial trepidation about publicly admitting that I was engaging with queer theory for the first time has borne out at least a little social awkwardness, especially as I tried to work through what I think Lee Edelman’s political psychoanalytic method misses in reaction to his treatment of A Christmas Carol in No Future. Edelman himself doesn’t seem to be the most representative of queer theory either; many writers who contributed to the field following No Future’s publication paid its intellectual force tribute while distancing themselves from his conclusions. Its influence was notable, because it couldn’t be ignored. But the reaction was to run away.

Reading this book from beginning to end, No Future made a brilliant diagnosis of the cause of such nearly-ubiquitous horrifying violence and hostility toward non-hetero sexualities, the queer.* So many moral compasses throughout human societies, though Edelman focusses specifically on the West, place an idealized and pure image of the child in a zone of inviolability. Any indication that one’s life can be complete without taking part in the procreative activity of humanity becomes at least suspect, and at worst a threat. Hence, the concept of the queer as an inherently destructive figure, a force that would undo society and morality because such a way of living is indifferent to reproduction. All this even though reproduction simply continues humanity toward a future that, despite its value, remains obscure and essentially distant. 

* For anyone who might say that North America and other generally gay-friendly countries have made progress on this front and that such violence is over-estimated, you make too much of what is ultimately too little. Yes, our continent is focussed on concerns like gay marriage, and we no longer criminalize homosexuality, treat it as a disorder to be cured, or officially answer it with a state-administered death penalty. But Edelman opens his last chapter with an account of Matthew Shepard’s brutal 1998 murder. Most importantly, the public discourse around his death revolved around his mother having lost her son, not a young man having been murdered because of his identity. And I remember a lot of news media reports saying that Shepard had made a pass at the men who killed him, implying that his murder was his own fault. And although violence against queer people continues, few if any of these incidents appear on national news media anymore. So yes, enlightenment.

I am confronted with his argument, and I am impressed. It makes sense, and convinces me that it is at least part of the truth. The fear that those who hold traditional moralities have of deviations from family-centric heterosexuality is an existential terror of creatures who appear indifferent to whether their physical lineage continues. Such a moral perspective would feel horrifyingly threatened by the mere appearance of someone who doesn’t share the concern for humanity’s continuation, someone who is content with the present. In the Lacanian frameworks of his thinking, such a person is not even a person in his own right, but the embodiment of the death drive itself, the joy of self-destruction. This is the core of Edelman’s concept of reproductive futurist morality: the sacredness of procreative coupling and the children it creates determines the good.

A staple of psychoanalytic political analysis, as I see in
both Edelman and Slavoj Zizek, is interpreting cultural
products, like Hitchcock's The Birds, as expressions of
self-obscuring social pathologies.

But what unnerves me about Edelman’s thinking is that he doesn’t articulate an alternative to this good. He actually defines queer sexuality as an affront to this good, living articulations of the death drive. No Future carries through his initial statement that radical conservative opponents of queerness having a place in society are right about its nature: to be queer is to be a living social expression of the joy in self-annihilation. Edelman’s own illustrations of the meaning of queerness from the films of Hitchcock show this. Martin Landau’s Leonard from North by Northwest responds to Cary Grant’s pleas to help him save Eva Marie Saint for the sake of their forming a reproductive couple by forcing them to fall off Mount Rushmore. The cultural and social-psychoanalytic meaning of queerness is the embrace of death and the joy in it.

Even worse is his illustration of the meaning of queerness for children themselves: these cultural meanings, which are all but essential in their metaphorical structure, are Hitchcock’s Birds themselves as they mercilessly attack and terrorize small towns and schoolyards. There is no reason for this attack; it is an uncontrollable force of nature which destroys whatever sees good in the continuation of existence into the future.

I can argue, as I attempted in Sunday’s post, that psychoanalytic political theory, while useful for ideological understanding, is terrible at incorporating the complicating processes of actual historical development into its analyses. None of that complexifying critique will prevent this conclusion that sickens me. Understanding society and ideology with the tools of Lacanian psychoanalysis means accepting its central ordering concepts as dogma. Any opposition to Eros, the productive love that builds an amorphous futurity, is Thanatos, an incarnation of the death drive. Not wanting to develop significations that elide the emptiness of actual existence embraces the destruction of everything. On Edelman’s reading, queer sexualities actually are this destructive force. 

And I simply won’t have it. No argument, no critical thoughts, no witty jokes, no conceptual engagement. I understand Edelman’s perspective; it’s very clear in the book. And I don’t want any. 

I described at the end of yesterday’s post that psychoanalytic political theory could be useful in the analysis of ideologies. But it shouldn’t be anyone’s only tool. It ignores history as a social phenomenon, but also as individual material singularities — people. In concentrating so much on mapping worldly phenomena and cultural products to its framework of interpretive concepts, figurative meanings become more important than real life. Edelman himself admits that his interpretation is more about what phenomena represent than the phenomena themselves. You can find an amazing story, which is also meaningful, but you discover nothing of the world.

No Future 2: Entrancing Images Whose Truths Can Find No Fact to Prove Them, Research Time, 13/04/2014

Continued from last post. Lee Edelman’s book No Future has a fascinating reading of the wider cultural meaning of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, that ubiquitous storyline that is more frequently attended every holiday season by more people than go to Church. The story has become such a stereotype that everyone has done some version of it — every mediocre sitcom’s Christmas episode, Bill Murray, the Muppets, Doctor Who.* Edelman considers it, and the sentimentality that it wields for its power, to be an assault on queer sexualities and people, denouncing them as inherently evil and cruel creatures who must be converted to family values.

* The only reason I can think Doctor Who’s version of A Christmas Carol would be exempt from Edelman’s critique of the storyline is that it isn’t a child who saves that story’s Scrooge from his ethical wasteland. Instead, it’s his love for a terminally ill woman, a love that itself has no future, but lives only in its fleeting, indelible experiences. But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

As much as I love The Muppets, and the particular beauty
of their production of A Christmas Carol, Robin has always
been so cloyingly sentimental that it drives me mad.

The lynchpin of Edelman’s argument of what A Christmas Carol means in contemporary culture lies in the character of Tiny Tim. Now, what the story means today is distinct from what Dickens himself may have intended in its authorship, but something very important is lost from our understanding when we forget this historical continuity between the conditions and motives of authorship and a work’s contemporary significance. As for Tiny Tim, Dickens renders him with such over-the-top sentimentality that he is less a character in his own right than an injunction and plea for pity in literary form. He’s an entirely abstract plea for love, not for any particular child, but to all suffering children. The literary form makes Tiny Tim more remarkable an image, the kind of singularity in each of its forms (even the mawkish Robin Frog) whose evocation of sympathy is so much more powerful than the mere, “Think of the poor, suffering children!” But for Edelman, Tiny Tim is no more than the pure voice of the morality of reproductive futurism, the valorization of the child’s purity as unquestionably the primary social good.

Scrooge, in contrast, is a voice of pure death. Dickens even describes him freezing cold, making him resemble a walking corpse. Because Edelman is so Lacanian that it hurts sometimes, he understands Scrooge as a masochistic version of the Freudian death drive. So far, so Disney. But in the previous chapter, Edelman has walked us through Jacques Lacan’s argument that the death drive actually expresses a kind of joy. The technical term in Lacanian language is jouissance: the soul’s fiery exhilaration as you burn yourself away to ashes. Edelman has already identified this joyfulness with the life of the queer, because children and reproduction are not involved in this kind of love,** only enjoyment in the present. It only helps that it’s so easy to read Scrooge’s personal and professional partnership with Marley as a closeted gay relationship.

** This statement only applies to Edelman’s ideal concept of the queer, as many actual people of many sexualities are still interested in raising children in their households, and should receive all the social benefits and support for parenthood that straight people do. But Edelman introduces No Future as focussing only on what queerness and cultural products involving it figure, not what actual queer people think and believe.

So when Scrooge is finally overcome by the sentimental pleas for pity that echo from Tiny Tim, Edelman reads it as the norms of aggressive straight morality, reproductive futurism, overwriting his queer nature. In Dickens’ original words, Scrooge becomes a celibate second father to Tiny Tim. So this universally beloved story constitutes an act of violence and hostility to queer sexualities and people.

Removing A Christmas Carol from its original historical
and political context overwrites the lives of everyone who
suffered under the hideous conditions of 19th century
factory labour.

This is one analysis of the modern cultural meaning of A Christmas Carol. But the continuing phenomenon of A Christmas Carol in all its aspects is more complex than just its cultural meaning. Remember the conditions of its generation: It is essentially a political pamphlet in the form of a novella, one of the most successful such pamphlets. Charles Dickens wrote with an entirely different political consciousness than we have today. His primary political motivation was labour reform, particularly ending the prevalent practice in Britain of child factory labour. Tiny Tim, Scrooge, and A Christmas Carol constituted a touchstone in the political movement of emancipating children from tortuous factory labour. It required an immense philosophical transformation throughout European society to make people believe sincerely and wholeheartedly that children did not belong in factories. Insofar as he was a tireless political advocate for a marginalized people, the children of the poor, Dickens was an intellectual social liberator, a similar function Edelman can serve for the queer community. It’s just that Dickens chose sentimentality, not Lacanian psychoanalytic political theory, as his weapon. As such, he was much more effective.

Edelman, to me at least, seems more Lacanian than Jacques Lacan himself. So he thinks in a way that I suspect, porting frameworks of understanding from psychoanalysis to the entirety of society. But even if psychoanalysis is a useful such framework for individual people, societies operate according to entirely different mechanisms, and are constituted quite differently. Ecological and economic processes come to the forefront in the constitution of a society. So, to me, a solid framework to understand the cultural imaginary, where our cultural products develop personal meanings, requires a merger of frameworks for thinking appropriate to the individual and those for the social and ecological. The result would likely radically transform both. Lacanian social theory moves too simply in transferring its philosophical frameworks.

And I think the biggest mistake of Lacanian thinking is that the metaphorical aspect of thought, what a social phenomenon figures, becomes more important than its actual history. Just as psychoanalysis diagnoses people through metaphorical figuration, rational engagement with our most a-rational thoughts, psychoanalytic political theory diagnoses societies by analyzing cultural products as the expressions of unspoken social drives. 

It suffers from the same incompleteness as psychoanalysis: the analysis misses critical aspects of the world by ignoring the historical development of societies and the actual lives of people, each of whom are more singular than its metaphors. So the products of psychoanalytic political theory become generalities of which every real-world example is an exception. A diagnostic image that makes perfect sense, but has no practical instantiation.

No Future 1: The Challenge of Strangeness and Difference, Research Time, 12/04/2014

I’ve been posting about Graham Priest, the nature of philosophy’s history, cinema, and Kraftwerk a lot over the last couple of weeks, but I’ve also been working on a review for the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (which will be posted next week), and I’m still reading some old sociological philosophy to help synthesize ideas for the Utopias project. As well, I’m working through Lee Edelman’s No Future to expand my mind, because Phil Sandifer has never steered me wrong.

However, I remain a little hesitant to write critical thoughts, even though I do have issues in reaction to what Edelman says. If he can be taken as a reasonable representative of queer theory in general, then I’m hesitant to engage with this direction in philosophy at all. The fact is, when it comes to LBGT(etc) issues, politics, and ideas, I’ve become very hesitant to say anything at all. I’m hesitant to ask any critical questions about the methods and directions of the movement(s), especially online.

Reading Edelman, I see want to engage critically with his work, because I see it as philosophically and ethically challenging, complex, and valuable. But I still expect that if I were to go on a forum and ask the types of questions I will ask in this weekend’s posts, I would meet only hostility and aggression. Multiple sexualities exist in my immediate family and my circles of friends. And I’ve treasured those people in my life, as I treasure all my family and friends. But I’m hesitant to call myself an Ally, because I don’t know if, as a straight person, I would be allowed to ask critical philosophical questions, even though asking such questions is what philosophy does.

The popular message of modern Christian values is that the
most important human good is procreation, and the
stability of a family to produce people who will later raise
their own families of the same kind. Reproduce the past
indefinitely throughout the future.

As I discussed last Monday, Edelman creates a fascinating concept in his work, reproductive futurism. However, unlike other acts of philosophical creation, he has created this concept to identify and attack a profound opponent in thought. As I see it in No Future, reproductive futurism is how queer people experience the social pressure to conform to a common morality or social order, with regard to their sexuality and its expression. That common morality, in this context, lies in the unquestioned good of creating and raising children. Reproductive futurism is the moral principle that acting to maintain the organic continuation of humanity is a true, and obviously true, good. Any challenge to this, any life that does not include reproduction and care for children as a goal, would be an evil lifestyle. Queer sexualities are, for Edelman, in their very existence, such an evil for the reproductive futurist.

Those who would find comfort in the stability of society often associate that stability with cultural homogeneity.* It’s an ironic vocabulary, since what precisely provokes those people into hostility is how the open acceptance of queer sexualities makes our society more diverse. Associating cultural homogeneity with social and political stability and peace implies that you understand divergent moralities and lifestyles as sources of social conflict.

* A lovely coincidence that I’m reading this at the same time as I’m looking into the ideas of Karl Mannheim, who explained, confronted, and critiqued this very point in Ideology and Utopia in 1936. I’ve come to wonder how many other debates contemporary academia repeats that occurred in the past in almost the same form, simply because the key thinkers of those past debates weren’t canonized deeply enough that everyone has read them.

Indeed, they can be. But they need not be. Part of what I’ve written for Social Epistemology, which will be available open source next week, touches on how the philosophical and political developments of the modern epoch (urban cultural diversity, mass communication, the availability of media and cultural products from countries all over the world) has given us the tools to live in a heterogeneous culture peacefully. We can easily accept that there are many ways in morality and lifestyle to satisfy the general physical goods of humanity. Human nature underdetermines the moral principles and systems that can satisfy human needs and goods; that’s why humanity developed so many moralities in the first place. An attitude of curiosity and acceptance can accept these moralities peacefully, as different paths to achieve our needs and goods.

But the question of what those common human goods are may still be up for debate. And if you consider one of those goods the reproduction of the human species through creating and raising children, then the existence of people whose sexualities are queer is a rebuke to you. Even in a society as open as urban Canada (which has many problems, especially widespread ignorance of how queer people actually live, but includes not nearly the intensity and violence of oppression that queers face in many other parts of the world), Edelman maintains that queer sexualities are considered evil for their challenge to the status of creating and raising children as an obvious good.

This would rarely be explicit in our liberal society. But Edelman finds one troubling articulation of such hostility to the moral, social, and political implications of queer existence: the yearly presence of film adaptations of A Christmas Carol all over our televisions. To be continued. . .

The Future As a Means of Oppression, Research Time, 07/04/2014

The central notion of the Utopias project is exploring the injustice of prioritizing a political ideal over the lives of actual people. This is why so much of my research for it revolves around the nature of ideology: ideological thinking is itself the willingness to sacrifice those around you in the present to realize a future perfection. This was the justification of Stalinist purges: that millions needed to be sacrificed to preserve the integrity of social progress. 

This kind of justification of large-scale destruction for the sake of a larger ideal was also a key factor in Invisible Man. The narrator spends a healthy chunk of Ellison’s book involved with a communist (clearly they are, though the word itself is never said) organization that constantly promotes the brotherhood and equality of all people. But they neglect the black communities of Harlem, ignoring their concerns, and let an extremist black nationalist group spark a destructive, violent riot in the community for their own hazy purposes of motivating wider popular opposition to the capitalist regime.

Opposing such thinking is important to create a genuinely peaceful social order. But I’m not comfortable with all such oppositions. It might sound as if I’m doing some tourism of marginalized peoples, but the other day, I started reading Lee Edelman’s No Future, which is the first queer theory I’ve ever encountered as a researcher. Why I haven't encountered queer theory has a similar type of reason that I described the other day regarding Ralph Ellison, and a few months ago regarding Margaret Urban Walker; critical voices stereotypically associated with identity politics are marginalized out of philosophy departments. Even though I never limited the range of my reading to the specific course material of my programs, I did limit myself to the tradition. It’s quite a mistake, as by the time I felt like I should have done so, it was too late. I felt like coming to feminist or queer theory so late in my philosophical education stripped any legitimacy I could have had to speak about it, or even ask about it.

Regular readers might be growing tired of my continued expressions of my debt to Phil Sandifer and the TARDIS Eruditorum, but I’m going to thank him again for exposing me to Edelman and his concept of reproductive futurism. Edelman uses it to diagnose a prevalent notion in popular culture, that the well-being of children is an unequivocal good. From a perspective that makes heavy use of Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts for political purposes, he identifies how the uncritical acceptance that ensuring the continuation of the human race (through heterosexual reproduction) is a good can oppress people. Just think about all the socially conservative, oppressive measures that essentially marginalize and criminalize non-heterosexuals/ity in the name of ‘protecting the children.’ 

Phil Sandifer interprets Torchwood: Children of Earth in
terms of a critique of reproductive futurism, the most
profoundly aggressive statement of his ethical philosophy
that Russell T. Davies ever put on screen.

Take one of Edelman’s examples through popular culture: Philadelphia. At the time, this was interpreted as director Jonathan Demme’s response and attrition for the homophobic elements of Silence of the Lambs. Even though the film contains a positive and nuanced depiction of a gay man (Tom Hanks, whose public image Edelman sarcastically describes as saintly), and its narrative is how Denzel Washington’s character overcomes his homophobia, there is an oppressive undercurrent. Hanks is depicted as contracting HIV in a gay porn cinema, a seedy, immoral environment. The beatified conditions of his passing find him surrounded not only by his gay lover, but his straight and normal extended family, including children and pregnant women. The memorial montage that plays at the end of the film focusses on Hanks’ character as a child, contrasting his pure innocent state with his sinful adulthood that led to his death. Even in this redemptive arc, a gay man is only morally worthy as a child or an innocent. The morality of homosexuality as a lifestyle remains repugnant because it has no future, leading only to death.

If you have more time after reading my own brief, initial, and still inconclusive take on the concept of reproductive futurism (I’ve only finished about one-third of No Future), you should read Phil’s long, involved, detailed, provocative, and fascinating analysis of Torchwood: Children of Earth (in five parts) for a far better account of this concept and all the disturbing implications of it and its opposition. 

Oh yes, because I find Edelman’s opposition to reproductive futurism equally disturbing. No matter how sympathetic I am with the idea that idealizations of amorphous futurity can be a condition to oppress people, I’m hesitant to accept Edelman’s own ideas uncritically. He valorizes investment in the present moment in response to this oppressive idea of reproductive futurism, turning away from an investment in a future that you will never see to live in the now. I'm very much in favour of this notion, as it essentially is my position in the Utopias project. Phil’s essay communicates the social problems of Edelman’s perspective, but I want to concentrate on one particular conceptual alliance he makes.

Edelman considers, in terms of what queerness (non-heterosexuality in general) figures and signifies the end of the future: a society without reproduction, and so will have no future. The liberal consensus, which Edelman identifies, as an example, with the movement to legalize gay marriage, is actually a denial of the true nature of queerness. The marriage movement is an attempt to neuter the social challenge of queerness by assimilating it into the basic social norms of heterosexual life. In the words of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which Edelman also quotes in his first chapter, "What you get married for if you don't want children?" 

So he actually declares that radical social conservatives who consider the very existence of queerness to be an existential threat and a fundamental affront to their God are actually correct: because queerness signifies a society without necessary investment in the future, it actually is a threat to existing social orders that privilege reproduction and the maintenance of the future. 

This makes me uncomfortable. It’s a confrontational stance that is healthy and refreshing in its radicality, but dangerous in that it gives a remarkable amount of ground to devoted Christians who would prefer a society where homosexuality is punishable by death. Essentially, Edelman says the radical Christians are right in that queerness challenges the fundamental moral aspect of organizing society. It potentially opens up a fascinating new vision of progress, progress without a future. But Edelman also defines this vision in entirely negative terms, describing queerness and the queer as precisely the assault that the most violent Christians say it is. 

My interpretation is tentative, of course, because I haven’t finished the book. And I do want to clarify that this makes for my first steps into queer theory, so I’m thinking entirely in terms of questions that I want to ponder rather than tight declarations that I want to make. But I’m hesitant about the practical political effects of any philosophy of liberation and freedom that gives so much ground in its very premises to the thankfully deceased Fred Phelps.