Queer Sociality After the Antisocial Thesis

No question has generated as much venom and vitriol in US-based sexuality studies, and its literary instantiation in particular, as "the antisocial thesis." The lost socialities portrayed in these two excellent books provide an occasion to recast and to take stock of this debate that has fueled the field since the millennium turned. With the understanding that "the antisocial thesis is not 'a' thesis," as Robyn Wiegman points out, but "an arena of interpretive battle" (220), I revisit its general contours to suggest how these books' visions of sociality move us beyond the debate's antitheses. As articulated by Leo Bersani, Guy Hocquenghem, and most prominently Lee Edelman, the antisocial thesis, broadly construed, argues that all social life and sociality—encompassing the good life, happiness, and citizenship—is organized by heterosexuality and reproductive futurism (emblematized by the figure of the child) and constitutively excludes queerness. Rather than representing an identity or a group, queerness for Edelman is a figural position, embodying an implacable negativity that "disturb[s]" civil society and the social order (17). While Bersani eschews art's redemptive power, Edelman seeks to dismantle the social order not to serve some more "viable political future," but to bar "every realization of futurity … [and] every social structure or form" (4). He thus calls for an abdication of the politics of hope altogether and an embrace of queer abjection in the name of destroying the social order.

The most prominent of Edelman's critics is undoubtedly José Esteban Muñoz, who argues that the figurality of Edelman's queerness—its inattention to "actual children" and their specificities of class and race—produces a "monolithic figure of the child that is indeed always already white" (Cruising 95). Muñoz imagines "sexuality as a singular trope of difference" (rather than constituted at the intersection of many categories of difference) ("Thinking" 825). For Muñoz, only some children have futures, while others are just trying to survive; abjuring the future and its politics of hope is a luxury that they can't afford. Or, as Muñoz powerfully puts it, "Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity" (Cruising 95). In place of Edelman's futurity, Muñoz offers the potentiality of the "not yet here" dreaming "new worlds … beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present" to make a new social order (1).

There are thus two broad categories of critique against Edelman: First, the framing of the antisocial thesis excludes or does not account for other modalities of difference that can lead to real harms. Consider, for example, feminist critics like Anca Parvulescu, who understand Edelman's attack on reproduction to function also as an attack on women, who "continue to carry the burden of reproduction" (90). Second, Edelman's account of reproductive futurism may be met with other strategic responses (Muñoz offers hope and the turn to utopic thinking rather than Edelman's turn to abjection). While the first of these critiques seems widely accepted, the question of what strategy to pursue or what our ethical obligation is in relation to the antisocial thesis's account of the social remains an open question. Moreover, it begins to suggest how the field of queer studies has begun to move past the "false choice" of being "'for' (a queer version of) the social" or being "'against' the social (as we know it)" (Weiner and Young 224).

Helping to break this deadlock, Heather Love astutely historicizes No Future, commenting that "it's at a moment when gay men, for instance, might be moving out of that queered position in certain ways and to have the insight that that's going to be passed somewhere else. And we have a kind of ethical obligation to accede to that, to share in that burden."¹ In her reading, gay men are shedding their relation...