Fuck The Kids!

Abstract

Lee Eldeman’s “No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive” develops and expands Lacan’s concept of the sinthome in order to examine and polemicize the adversarial relationship between sinthomosexuality and reproductive futurity.  Edelman’s concept of sinthomosexuality combines the Lacanian term sinthome, with homosexuality, understood as a cultural figure opposed to both life and futurity. The focus of Edelman’s polemic is reproductive futurism, in which the child is the focal point, symbolizing the negation of the past and the fulfillment of the future.  Reproductive futurism is the belief that “the child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledge politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention” (Edelman 2). This belief is embedded within political discourse, and motivated by the desire to create purposeful futures for our children. Reproductive futurism preserves the absolute privileges of heteronormativity, by casting out the possibility of queer resistance, and rendering any alternative unthinkable (Edelman 2). Within the core of reproductive futurism, the child emblemizes the future by “inscribing the faith that temporal duration will result in the realization of meaning by way of a ‘final signifier’ that will make meaning whole at last” (Edelman 37).