Tournament: Valley | Round: 4 | Opponent: Joey Antonelli | Judge: Brixz Gonzaba
Politics and society centers around the image of the child this is a reinvestment into a reproductive future inaccessible to the queer body. Thus, queer identities are pushed outside of politics into an ontological deviancy in which we always are framed against society and the future they hope to create.
Baedan 12 “Not for the children” https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/baedan-baedan#toc3
Edelman’s critique of politics begins with the figure of the Child. All political positions, he argues, represent themselves as doing what is best for the children. Politicians, whatever their parties or leanings, universally frame their debates around the question of what policies are best for the children, who keeps the Child safest, or what type of world we want to be building for our children. The centrality of the Child in the field of the political is not limited to electoral politics or political parties. Nationalist groups organize themselves around a necessity to preserve a future for their children, while anarchist and communist revolutionaries concern themselves with revolutionary organizing meant to create a better world for future generations. Politicians concern themselves with different children depending on their varying from ideologies, but the Child stays constant as a universal Möbius strip, inverting itself and flipping so as to be the unquestioned and untouchable universal value of all politics. Politics, however supposedly radical, is simply the universal movement of submission to the ideal of the future—to preserve, maintain and upgrade the structures of society and to proliferate them through time all for the sake of the children. The Child must always name the horizon and the beneficiary of every political project. It is for this reason that Edelman contends that queerness finds itself missing from all political discourse: For the liberal’s view of society, which seems to accord the queer a place, endorses no more than the conservative right’s the queerness of resistance to futurism and thus the queerness of the queer. While the right wing imagines the elimination of queers (or of the need to confront their existence), the left would eliminate queerness by shining the cool light of reason upon it, hoping thereby to expose it as merely a mode of sexual expression free of the all-pervasive coloring, the determining fantasy formation, by means of which it can seem to portend, and not for the right alone, the undoing of the social order and its cynosure, the Child. Queerness thus comes to mean nothing for both: for the right wing, the nothingness always at war with the positivity of civil society; for the left, nothing more than a sexual practice in need of demystification. The Child, of course, has very little to do with real children. Like all people, children are enslaved under the political order of the state and capital, expected to bear the burden of being the innocent beneficiaries of political initiatives. No, rather the Child is the fantastic symbol for the eternal proliferation of class society. The Child represents the succession of generations and the continuation of this society beyond the lifespans of its living members. All politics, being concerned primarily with the Child, then reveal themselves to be only ever a process by which to manage and secure the continued existence of society. As enemies of society, we are also enemies of politics. To quote Edelman: 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 the extent that we would register as politically responsible, to submit to the framing of political debate—and, indeed of the political field—as defined by the terms of what this book describes 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 this organizing principle of communal relations. If the varying discourses of politics are only ever about the Child (as society’s future), queerness must be anti-political because it marks a fundamental interruption of the societal norms and apparatuses that exist to mandate the reproduction the Child. Yes, queer sex can be non-reproductive sex, but we cannot define queerness through such overly-simple and naturalistic logics. Queerness, beyond being the negation of the heteronormative family matrix, must also be practiced as a willful refusal of the political imperative to reproduce class society. In a world where all social relations are enchanted by our obligation to the Child as the future of the social order, we must break those communal relations and break the stranglehold of politics over our daily lives. Queerness must be an outside to politics, an antagonism against the political, or it isn’t queer at all. By Edelman’s account: Queerness names the side of those “not fighting for the children.” The side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism. The ups and downs of political fortune may measure the social order’s pulse, but queerness, by contrast figures outside and beyond its political symptoms, the place of the social order’s death drive: a place, to be sure, of abjection expressed in the stigma, sometimes fatal that follows from reading that figure literally
The impact is overkill – sustaining the category of human and the erasure of the queer body, which necessitates the destruction of the queer flesh. Overkill turns and outweighs the case – it is a violence that goes beyond just physical and attempts to erase the body from existence.
Stanley 11 (Eric Stanley, “Near Life, Queer Death”, 2011, file:///C:/Users/ninja/Downloads/Stanley20Article.pdf)
To this end, the law is made possible through the reproduction of both material and discursive formation of antiqueer, along with many other forms of violence. I too quickly rehearse this argument in the hope that it might foreclose the singular reliance on the law as the ground, and rights as the technology, of safety. 23 “He was my son—my daughter. It didn’t matter which. He was a sweet kid,” Lauryn Paige’s mother, trying to reconcile at once her child’s murder and her child’s gender, stated outside an Austin, Texas, courthouse. 24 Lauryn was an eighteen-year-old transwoman who was brutally stabbed to death. According to Dixie, Lauryn’s best friend, it was a “regular night.” The two women had spent the beginning of the evening “working it” as sex workers. After Dixie and Lauryn had made about $200 each they decided to call it quits and return to Dixie’s house, where both lived. On the walk home, Gamaliel Mireles Coria and Frank Santos picked them up in their white conversion van. “Before we got into the van the very first thing I told them was that we were transsexuals,” said Dixie in an interview. 25 After a night of driving around, partying in the van, Dixie got dropped off at her house. She pleaded for Lauryn to come in with her, but Lauryn said, “Girl, let me finish him,” so the van took off with Lauryn still inside. 26 Santos was then dropped off, leaving Lauryn and Coria alone in the van. According to the autopsy report, Travis County medical examiner Dr. Roberto Bayardo cataloged at least fourteen blows to Lauryn’s head and more than sixty knife wounds to her body. The knife wounds were so deep that they almost decapitated her—a clear sign of overkill. Overkill is a term used to indicate such excessive violence that it pushes a body beyond death. Overkill is often determined by the postmortem removal of body parts, as with the partial decapitation in the case of Lauryn Paige and the dissection of Rashawn Brazell. The temporality of violence, the biological time when the heart stops pushing and pulling blood, yet the killing is not finished, suggests the aim is not simply the end of a specific life, but the ending of all queer life. This is the time of queer death, when the utility of violence gives way to the pleasure in the other’s mortality. If queers, along with others, approximate nothing, then the task of ending, of killing, that which is nothing must go beyond normative times of life and death. In other words, if Lauryn was dead after the first few stab wounds to the throat, then what do the remaining fifty wounds signify? The legal theory that is offered to nullify the practice of overkill often functions under the name of the trans- or gay-panic defense. Both of these defense strategies argue that the murderer became so enraged after the “discovery” of either genitalia or someone’s sexuality they were forced to protect themselves from the threat of queerness. Estanislao Martinez of Fresno, California, used the trans-panic defense and received a four-year prison sentence after admittedly stabbing J. Robles, a Latina transwoman, at least twenty times with a pair of scissors. Importantly, this defense is often used, as in the cases of Robles and Paige, after the murderer has engaged in some kind of sex with the victim. The logic of the trans-panic defense as an explanation for overkill, in its gory semiotics, offers us a way of understanding queers as the nothing of Mbembe’s query. Overkill names the technologies necessary to do away with that which is already gone. Queers then are the specters of life whose threat is so unimaginable that one is “forced,” not simply to murder, but to push them backward out of time, out of History, and into that which comes before. 27 In thinking the overkill of Paige and Brazell, I return to Mbembe’s query, “But what does it mean to do violence to what is nothing?”28 This question in its elegant brutality repeats with each case I offer. By resituating this question in the positive, the “something” that is more often than not translated as the human is made to appear. Of interest here, the category of the human assumes generality, yet can only be activated through the specificity of historical and politically located intersection. To this end, the human, the “something” of this query, within the context of the liberal democracy, names rights-bearing subjects, or those who can stand as subjects before the law. The human, then, makes the nothing not only possible but necessary. Following this logic, the work of death, of the death that is already nothing, not quite human, binds the categorical (mis)recognition of humanity. The human, then, resides in the space of life and under the domain of rights, whereas the queer inhabits the place of compromised personhood and the zone of death. As perpetual and axiomatic threat to the human, the queer is the negated double of the subject of liberal democracy. Understanding the nothing as the unavoidable shadow of the human serves to counter the arguments that suggest overkill and antiqueer violence at large are a pathological break and that the severe nature of these killings signals something extreme. In contrast, overkill is precisely not outside of, but is that which constitutes liberal democracy as such. Overkill then is the proper expression to the riddle of the queer nothingness. Put another way, the spectacular material-semiotics of overkill should not be read as (only) individual pathology; these vicious acts must indict the very social worlds of which they are ambassadors. Overkill is what it means, what it must mean, to do violence to what is nothing
The ROB is to vote for the debater who best challenges antiqueer violence –
Communicative activities like debate are entrenched in heteronormativity, as a communication practitioner you can help solve this. Challenge within the debate space is key. Additionally this means there is a pre-fiat uniqueness claim on the impacts of K.
Yep 03, Gust A. "The violence of heteronormativity in communication studies: Notes on injury, healing, and queer world-making." Journal of homosexuality 45.2-4 (2003): 11-59. file:///C:/Users/ryans/Downloads/The_Violence_of_Heteronormativity_in_Com.pdf
Communication scholars, like researchers in other areas of academic study, are profoundly involved and deeply implicated in current systems of power as they produce and disseminate knowledge. In his power/knowledge matrix, Foucault reminds us that knowledge and truth are closely interconnected. He writes, Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault, 1980, p. 131) In other words, communication scholars are inextricably involved in current regimes of power and knowledge. As such, communication scholars are pro- foundly implicated in the maintenance of the homo/heterosexual binary, the fundamental conceptual pair that organizes modern Western discourses of sex- uality. In the academy and elsewhere, institutional heterosexuality, through I. Research and Interventions 47 Downloaded by University of Florida at 17:40 05 November 2015 the process of normalization, becomes heteronormative. Heteronormativity produces “the equation ‘heterosexual experience = human experience’” and “renders all other forms of human sexual expression pathological, deviant, in- visible, unintelligible, or written out of existence” (Yep, 2002, p. 167). More simply put, heteronormativity is violent and harmful to a range of people across the spectrum of sexualities, including those who live within its borders. Aware of the mobility of power relations, queer/quare theorists from a vari- ety of disciplines have provided analytical tools to create new openings and possibilities of change and transformation. Such scholars are not interested in speaking for others, providing definitive solutions, proclaiming transhistorical generalizations, declaring transcultural knowledge, or making universal pro- nouncements. These queer/quare theorists and activists are invested in “de- taching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time” (Foucault, 1980, p. 133). Committed to the celebration of human differences and dedicated to the inter- rogation of the normalizing technologies of power, these interdisciplinary scholars and community activists scrutinize the homo/heterosexual binary as the foundation of current discourses of sexuality, and critically examine heteronormativity. As a communication teacher and scholar who travels across academic disciplinary boundaries, I invite communication scholars across the spectrum of social locations to join these theorists and practitioners in this radical project to expand, stretch, reorient, and re-map the conceptual landscape of the field of communication. I urge communication teachers and scholars to interrogate and unpack the homo/heterosexual binary, disentangle and demystify the power of heteronormativity in our scholarship, pedagogy, and cultural politics, and to create and produce historically specific and em- bodied racialized knowledges of the human sexual subject.
The Alt is to use debate to embrace the Death Drive – Every society produces its own collapse: The death drive is an unintelligible recognition of the inability of society to contain the fluidity of queerness.
Baedan (2):
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/baedan-baedan#toc7 baedan. Journal of queer nihilism issue one. Accessed 11/04/18.
In No Future, Edelman appropriates and privileges a particular psychoanalytic concept: the death drive. In elaborating the relationship of “queer theory and the death drive” (the subtitle of No Future), he deploys the concept in order to name a force that isn’t specifically tied to queer identity. He argues that the death drive is a constant eruption of disorder from within the symbolic order itself. It is an unnameable and inarticulable tendency for any society to produce the contradictions and forces which can tear that society apart. To avoid getting trapped in Lacanian ideology, we should quickly depart from a purely psychoanalytic framework for understanding this drive. Marxism, to imagine it another way, assures us that a fundamental crisis within the capitalist mode of production guarantees that it will produce its own negation from within itself. Messianic traditions, likewise, hold fast to a faith that the messiah must emerge in the course of daily life to overthrow the horror of history. The most romantic elaborations of anarchism describe the inevitability that individuals will revolt against the banality and alienation of modern life. Cybernetic government operates on the understanding that the illusions of social peace contain a complex and unpredictable series of risks, catastrophes, contagions, events and upheavals to be managed. Each of these contains a kernel of truth, if perhaps in spite of their ideologies. The death drive names that permanent and irreducible element which has and will always produce revolt. Species being, queerness, chaos, willful revolt, the commune, rupture, the Idea, the wild, oppositional defiance disorder—we can give innumerable names to what escapes our ability to describe it. Each of these attempts to term the erratic negation intrinsic to society. Each comes close to theorizing the universal tendency that any civilization will produce its own undoing. Explosions of urban rioting, the prevalence of methods of piracy and expropriation, the hatred of work, gender dysphoria, the inexplicable rise in violent attacks against police officers, self-immolation, non-reproductive sexual practices, irrational sabotage, nihilistic hacker culture, lawless encampments which exist simply for themselves—the death drive is evidenced in each moment that exceeds the social order and begins to rip at its fabric. The symbolic deployment of queerness by the social order is always an attempt to identify the negativity of the death drive, to lock this chaotic potential up in the confines of this or that subjectivity. Foucault’s work is foundational to queer theory in part because of his argument that power must create and then classify antagonistic subjectivities so as to then annihilate any subversive potential within a social body. Homosexuals, gangsters, criminals, immigrants, welfare mothers, transsexuals, women, youth, terrorists, the black bloc, communists, extremists: power is always constructing and defining these antagonistic subjects which must be managed. When the smoke clears after a riot, the state and media apparatuses universally begin to locate such events within the logic of identity, freezing the fluidity of revolt into a handful of subject positions to be imprisoned, or, more sinisterly, organized. Progressivism, with its drive toward inclusion and assimilation, stakes its hope on the social viability of these subjects, on their ability to participate in the daily reproduction of society. In doing so, the ideology of progress functions to trap subversive potential within a particular subject, and then to solicit that subject’s self-repudiation of the danger which they’ve been constructed to represent. This move for social peace fails to eliminate the drive, because despite a whole range of determinisms, there is no subject which can solely and perfectly contain the potential for revolt. The simultaneous attempt at justice must also fail, because the integration of each successive subject position into normative relations necessitates the construction of the next Other to be disciplined or destroyed. Rather than a progressive project which aims to steadily eradicate an emergent chaos over time, our project, located at the threshold of Edelman’s work, bases itself upon the persistent negativity of the death drive. We choose not to establish a place for queers, thereby shifting the structural position of queerness to some other population. We identify with the negativity of the drive, and thereby perform a disidentification away from any identity to be represented or which can beg for rights. Following Edelman further: To figure the undoing of civil society, the death drive of the dominant order, is neither to be nor to become that drive; such a being is not the point. Rather, acceding to that figural position means recognizing and refusing the consequences of grounding reality in denial of that drive. As the death drive dissolves those congealments of identity that permit us to know and survive as ourselves, so the queer must insist on disturbing, on queering, social organization as such—on disturbing, and therefore on queering ourselves and our investment in such organization. For queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one. And so, when I argue, as I aim to do here, that the burden of queerness is to be located less in the assertion of an oppositional political identity than in opposition to politics as the governing fantasy of realizing identities, I am proposing no platform or position from which queer sexuality or any queer subject might finally and truly become itself, as if it could somehow manage thereby to achieve an essential queerness. I am suggesting instead that the efficacy of queerness, its real strategic value, lies in its resistance to a symbolic reality that only ever invests us as subjects insofar as we invest ourselves in it, clinging to its governing fictions, its persistent sublimations, as reality itself. This negative queerness severs us from any simple understanding of ourselves. More so, it severs us from any formulaic or easily-represented notions of what we need, what we desire, or what is to be done. Our queerness does not imagine a coherent self, and thus cannot agitate for any selves to find their place within civilization. The only queerness that queer sexuality could ever hope to achieve would exist in a total refusal of attempts at the symbolic integration of our sexuality into governing and market structures. This refusal of representation forecloses on any hope that we ever have in identity politics or positive identity projects. We decline the progressive faith in the ability for our bodies to be figured into the symbolic order. We decline the liberal assurance that everything will turn out right, if we just have