Synopses & Reviews
In this searing polemic, Lee Edelman outlines a radically uncompromising new ethics of queer theory. His main target is the all-pervasive figure of the child, which he reads as the linchpin of our universal politics of andldquo;reproductive futurism.andrdquo; Edelman argues that the child, understood as innocence in need of protection, represents the possibility of the future against which the queer is positioned as the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive. He boldly insists that the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this refusal of the social and political order. In
No Future, Edelman urges queers to abandon the stance of accommodation and accede to their status as figures for the force of a negativity that he links with irony,
jouissance, and, ultimately, the death drive itself.
Closely engaging with literary texts, Edelman makes a compelling case for imagining Scrooge without Tiny Tim and Silas Marner without little Eppie. Looking to Alfred Hitchcockandrsquo;s films, he embraces two of the directorandrsquo;s most notorious creations: the sadistic Leonard of North by Northwest, who steps on the hand that holds the couple precariously above the abyss, and the terrifying title figures of The Birds, with their predilection for children. Edelman enlarges the reach of contemporary psychoanalytic theory as he brings it to bear not only on works of literature and film but also on such current political flashpoints as gay marriage and gay parenting. Throwing down the theoretical gauntlet, No Future reimagines queerness with a passion certain to spark an equally impassioned debate among its readers.
Review
andldquo;No Future is a highly imaginative, terrifically suggestive, and altogether powerful book. The question at its political heart is an arresting one, not least because it appears so counterintuitive: Must every political vision be a vision of the future? This is the first study I know that submits the rhetoric of futurity itself to close scrutiny. An intellectually thrilling book.andrdquo;andmdash;Diana Fuss, author of The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them
Review
andldquo;No Future is a nuanced polemic, both ringingly clear in its aesthetic and theoretical explications and simply thrilling to read. I learn so much from the way Lee Edelman grounds a queer ethics and politics outside kinship and reproductive circuits, those spaces of assimilation that use the bribe of futurity to distract us from the ongoing work of social violence and death.andrdquo;andmdash;Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship
Review
andldquo;In consistently brilliant theoretical discussions (for the most part, psychoanalytically inspired), as well as in strikingly original readings of Dickens, George Eliot, and Hitchcock, Lee Edelman argues that in a political culture dominated by the sentimental illusions and frequently murderous moral imperatives of andlsquo;reproductive futurism,andrsquo; homosexuality has been assignedandmdash;and should deliberately and defiantly take onandmdash;the burden of a negativity at once embedded within and violently disavowed by that culture. The paradoxical dignity of queerness would be its refusal to believe in a redemptive future, its embrace of the unintelligibility, even the inhumanity inherent in sexuality. Edelmanandrsquo;s extraordinary text is so powerful that we could perhaps reproach him only for not spelling out the mode in which we might survive our necessary assent to his argument.andrdquo;andmdash;Leo Bersani, author of The Culture of Redemption, Homos, and, with Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggioandrsquo;s Secrets
Review
andldquo;The book represents a rigorous attempt to think at once generatively and against tropes of generation, to work at once in irony and in earnest to demonstrate the politicalandrsquo;s material dependence on Symbolic homo-logy.andrdquo;Whether we decide to follow Edelmanandrsquo;s example of rejecting the future or vehemently react against his polemic, No Future leaves no doubt that we cannot get around thinking critically about the uses and abuses of futurity.andldquo;The book represents a rigorous attempt to think at once generatively and against tropes of generation, to work at once in irony and in earnest to demonstrate the politicalandrsquo;s material dependence on Symbolic homo-logy.andrdquo;
Review
andquot;One of the great virtues of Edelman's thesis is that it restores the distinction between queerness and homosexuality per se. Edelman goes some way to returning the uncanniness attached to queerness which has been dispelled by the very signifier 'gay' and the cosy, Kylie-loving, unthreatening cheeriness with which it has become associated.andquot;
Review
andquot;This is a book, I confess, that I would love to have written. Angry, eloquent, precise, beautifully composed, funny, over the top, and very smart, the four chapters . . . articulate a controversial and disturbingly persuasive figural and rhetorical diagnostic of a moment in U.S. political life.andquot;
Review
andldquo;Edelman has certainly articulated a new direction for queer theory, making No Future required reading both within the field and beyond.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;The book represents a rigorous attempt to think at once generatively and against tropes of generation, to work at once in irony and in earnest to demonstrate the politicalandrsquo;s material dependence on Symbolic homo-logy.andrdquo;
Review
“A smart, courageous, and at times unsettling indictment of LGBTQ complicity with xenophobic violence. If you care deeply about social justice, read this brilliant book.”
Review
“A brilliant analysis which shatters the singularity of the universal gay/trans subject to expose hir collusion in the production of the 'homophobic Muslim.' This highly engaging book is a must-read for all concerned with issues of justice, demilitarization, and radical transformation in global politics.”
Review
“This exciting book by one of the most brilliant emerging scholars today brings a novel approach to 'queer gentrification' and a host of new concepts pertaining to space, queer and trans subjects of color, race, sexuality, and violence.”
Review
“An original and highly impactful contribution to critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and urban studies. The quality of the research is impeccable, and the reach of the book’s pedagogical and intellectual contributions demonstrates the best potentials of critical interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholarship.”
Review
“Seamlessly synthesizes the relationships between Islamophobia, racism within Europe and the United States, and how the global war on terror serves to reinforce the politics of homo-nationalism. Brilliant and fierce, a must-read for all those interested in imagining new liberatory politics.”
Review
“Queer Lovers and Hateful Others is a trenchant and unrelenting critical gaze at the tensions between a nascent people-of-color consciousness and the swirling turbulence of homophobia and xenophobia in twenty-first century Germany. Haritaworn offers the promise and perils of encounters between activist practices, quotidian aspiration, legal statutes, and other forces that animate and bring to life alternative ways of inhabiting marginalized spaces and times. More than just a sensitive portrait of lives, sites, and energies, this book is an incitement to think queerly, to dream otherwise.”
Review
“In an exemplary intersectional cultural analysis, Haritaworn explores racial and sexual formations in contemporary and historical Berlin. Based on interviews with Queers and Trans of Color, Queer Lovers and Hateful Others is a timely intervention in many current debates, from the privileging of the memory of the Holocaust as the main architecture of German racism, via the genealogy of the ‘homophobic Muslim,’ to the loss of the memory of slavery and colonialism in white (gay) citizens, the author accomplishes an impressive, in-depth portrait of German homonationalism. A must-read!”
Synopsis
Prominent theorist rethinks the psychoanalytic assumptions underlying queer theory.
Synopsis
Can there be a queer imperialism? In Queer Lovers and Hateful Others, Jin Haritaworn engages with pressing political issues of sexual and gender politics in the neo-colonial world order and discusses how the sexual understanding of ‘terror has become increasingly prevalent across the globe.
As images of same-sex affection become co-opted into the Western mainstream, Islamophobic politicians and pundits have been able to offer a new discourse on 'Muslim homophobia' to promote social control at home and imperial expansion abroad. They show how the same ugly tropes that were previously mobilised around questions of gender - such as the veil and 'honour crimes' - have returned to the fore in new guises.
This innovative study argues that the figure of the ‘most homophobic country or community is but the newest kid on a block where colonised and racialised intimacies have been enmeshed and relational all along. A committed activist, Haritaworn asks not just how we should think about identity but also how we should enact it in political practice - what it would mean to really decolonise gender and sexuality.
Synopsis
In Queer Lovers and Hateful Others, Jin Haritaworn takes up pressing issues of sexual and gender politics in the neo-colonial world order and considers how the sexual understanding of “terror” has become increasingly prevalent worldwide in recent years. As images of same-sex intimacy have become an ordinary part of the Western mainstream and discourse, Haritaworn shows that politicians and pundits have used that acceptance as a weapon to attack “Muslim homophobia” to promote their Islamophobic agendas. Haritaworn argues that this is simply the newest wrinkle in a long history of the deliberate misuse of colonized and racialized intimacies, and he raises provocative questions about how we should think about identity and how we should enact it in political practice. What, he asks, would it mean to really decolonize gender and sexuality?
Synopsis
Berlin is once more capital of queer arts and tourism. Queerness is more visible today than it has been for decades, but at what cost? In
Queer Lovers and Hateful Others, Jin Haritaworn argues that queer subjects have become a lovely sight only through being cast in the shadow of the new folk devil, the 'homophobic migrant' who is rendered by society as hateful, homophobic, and disposable.
At the centre of this book is the concept of 'queer regeneration.' Haritaworn sees the queer lover as a transitional object which allows the present-day neoliberal regime to make punishment and neglect appear as signs of care and love for diversity. Alongside this shift, in the wake of older moral panics over crime, violence, patriarchy, integration, and segregation, the new Other, that is, the homophobic migrant appears. To understand this transition, Queer Lovers and Hateful Others looks at the environments in which queer bodies have become worthy of protection, and the everyday erasures that shape life in the inner city, and how queer activists actively seek out and dispel the myths of sites of nostalgia for the 'invented traditions' of women-and-gay-friendliness.
Haritaworn guides the reader through a rich archive of media, arts, policy, and activism, including posters, newspaper reports, hate crime action plans, urban projects, psychological studies, demonstrations, kiss-ins, political speeches, and films. In the process, queer lovers, drag kings, criminalised youth, homosexuals persecuted under National Socialism, and other figures of degeneracy and regeneration appear on a shared plane, where new ways of sharing space become imaginable.
About the Author
“No Future is a highly imaginative, terrifically suggestive, and altogether powerful book. The question at its political heart is an arresting one, not least because it appears so counterintuitive: Must every political vision be a vision of the future? This is the first study I know that submits the rhetoric of futurity itself to close scrutiny. An intellectually thrilling book.”—Diana Fuss, author of The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them“No Future is a nuanced polemic, both ringingly clear in its aesthetic and theoretical explications and simply thrilling to read. I learn so much from the way Lee Edelman grounds a queer ethics and politics outside kinship and reproductive circuits, those spaces of assimilation that use the bribe of futurity to distract us from the ongoing work of social violence and death.”—Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship“In consistently brilliant theoretical discussions (for the most part, psychoanalytically inspired), as well as in strikingly original readings of Dickens, George Eliot, and Hitchcock, Lee Edelman argues that in a political culture dominated by the sentimental illusions and frequently murderous moral imperatives of ‘reproductive futurism,’ homosexuality has been assigned—and should deliberately and defiantly take on—the burden of a negativity at once embedded within and violently disavowed by that culture. The paradoxical dignity of queerness would be its refusal to believe in a redemptive future, its embrace of the unintelligibility, even the inhumanity inherent in sexuality. Edelman’s extraordinary text is so powerful that we could perhaps reproach him only for not spelling out the mode in which we might survive our necessary assent to his argument.”—Leo Bersani, author of The Culture of Redemption, Homos, and, with Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets
Table of Contents
Introduction: Queer Regenerations
1 Setting the Scene
2 Love
3 Hate
4 Queer Nostalgia
5 Conclusion: Kiss good morning, kiss good night
6 Epilogue: Travels beyond the ‘most homophobic’
Bibliography
Index