A Door Into The Ocean Affirmative - HSS 2014

Affirmative Essentials
1AC
Sharers envision a life force, a sort of living ether, that pervades every atom of their
universe. Each drop of water, each breath of air, holds a thousand bits of life in it,
growing and struggling... Why, even without breathmicrobes, the bacteria in your gut
outnumber your own body cells. And youd be very sick without them, even on
Valedon. On Shora, life builds everything, from raft to coral. Whereas Valedons ocean
breaks upon crustal rock, a thing never shaped by life - the granite that makes up the
foundation; this was born of fire, not water. In Sharer experience, only the dead ever
reach that foundation.

This passage from Joan Slonczewskis science fiction novel A Door Into Ocean shows
an alien resident from an ocean planet called Shora explaining the alien races
understanding of nature to a human boy. This ideology models a ecologically
concerned opinion in the real-world conflict between dominating vs balanced
approaches to the natural world. Our reading acts as an interrogation of our current
relationship with nature, specifically the ocean. Our method, which we will call
queering nature, serves to revolutionize the way we think about, discuss, and
perform sexuality.

Merrick 08, (1) PhD History (UWA), Senior lecturer at Curtin University, (Helen, Queering nature:
close encounters with the alien in feminist science fiction, in Pearson, Wendy G. and Hollinger, V. and
Gordon, J. (ed), Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, pp 216-232. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au/R?func=dbin-jump-full&local_base=gen01-
era02&object_id=20732)//ED
Queering nature seems an appropriate theme for enquiries into sexuality in science fiction, especially
from the perspective of feminist and queer theories. Whilst it may not immediately suggest an overt
comment on sexualities, it is inarguable that nature as well as culture is heavily implicated in our
understandings and performances of sexuality.1 Indeed, just as our constructions of sexuality (and the
strictures of normative heterosexism) infuse every aspect of our culture/s, so too do sexualized
assumptions underpin our constructions of nature. And further, the ways we think about nature
impact upon and constrain our notions of sexuality. Wendy Pearson observes that science fiction has the
potential to interrogate the ways in which sexual subjectivities are created as effects of the system that
sustains them (Alien Cryptographies 18). I want to further her argument to suggest that the variety of
discourses and knowledges that have come to stand for (or take the place of) nature are one such
system. Attention to nature is an important facet of critical considerations of sexuality, particularly
considering the pre-eminence of the biological sciences in (over)determining the category/ies of sex,
and the fact that for many people sexualityand particularly heterosexualitycan be envisioned
only within the category of the natural (Pearson, Science Fiction 149). I want to re-visit the loaded
space of the natural and consider how queering nature might further question normative notions of
sexuality and gender. Whilst queer theory obviously engages with nature on the level of regulatory
discourses around notions of biology, feminist science studies and ecofeminist theory have a particular
(and different) investment in the discursive positioning and uses of nature. Such theories are engaged in
critiquing a broad range of biological and life sciences in which the construction of human nature and
nature are implicated in often unstable and contradictory ways. Similarly, feminist SF texts may reflect
on the ways in which we constitute and reproduce human and nature, most strikingly through the
familiar SF figure of the alien. In this essay, I focus on SF stories which feature a central (and often
sexualized) female/alien encounter; I explore, in particular, how an othering of the human might
queer nature through a close reading of Amy Thomsons The Color of Distance (1995). In concluding, I
consider how certain notions of kinship (as recently deployed by Donna Haraway and Judith Butler)
might help advance the challenges to heteronormativity that are implicated in queering nature.
The naturalization of heterosexuality has been historically accompanied by the
heterosexualization of nature queering nature is an attempt to move beyond the
restrictive binaries of feminine/masculine and hetero/homosexual.

The notion of kinship is also a useful way of reconceptualizing the relations among the three theoretical
threads informing my reading of queered nature. Ecofeminism might appear unlikely kin to feminist
science studies and queer theory, not least because many within the academy continue to view
ecofeminism with some suspicion as being overly essentialist (Sandilands, Mother Earth; Soper). And
although ecofeminism and feminist science studies arguably both stem from Carolyn Merchants classic
The Death of Nature (1980), they have developed along divergent discursive and political paths.2 Yet,
partly in reaction to tensions between ecofeminisms cultural and constructivist trends, critics such as
Greta Gaard and Catriona Sandilands have argued the need for a queered ecofeminism. An important
driver for cross-fertilization between ecofeminism and queer theory has been the failure of much
ecofeminist and environmental politics to recognize its heterosexismnot least in its figuration of a
nature that is both actively de-eroticized and monolithically heterosexual (Sandilands, Unnatural
Passions 33). A queer ecofeminist perspective, in contrast, argues that the naturalization of
heterosexuality has been historically accompanied by the heterosexualization of nature (Sandilands,
Unnatural Passions 34); the very nature/culture relation itself, which is mapped as feminine/masculine,
becomes one of compulsory heterosexuality (Toward a Queer 131). When nature is feminized it is
also, Gaard notes, eroticized, an argument that appears to contradict Sandilands characterization of
nature as de-eroticized; this tension highlights the internal contradictions and instabilities of such
regulatory discursive regimes. That is, our knowing of nature is de-eroticized through the mediation of
the mechanized, objective, disembodied discourses of traditional western sciences, even as the
domination and subjugation of nature allowed (even encouraged) through such knowledge puts it in
the realm of the (eroticized) feminine half of the nature/culture binary. Not surprisingly, such tensions
are constantly evoked and expressed through SF, most famously in what many consider its founding
text, Frankenstein (1817): true to its Romantic influences, the text sets Victors pursuit of
technoscientific dominion against an ideological commitment to the natural sublime.3 The work of
Gaard and Sandilands (among others) suggests an ecofeminist approach that aligns with queer theory
on a number of levels, particularly in the need to move beyond the restrictive binaries of
feminine/masculine and hetero/homosexual. As with queer theory, gender is not situated in
ecofeminist theories as the privileged category of oppression. Rather, ecofeminism calls for a non-
reductionist, interdisciplinary, and synthesizing understanding of a whole series of interlocking relations,
from gender to race, sexuality, economics, globalism, and, of course, the environment. Both queer
theory and ecofeminism have as political goal and analytical method the assumption that (gender)
identity is not fixed, but is unstable, mutable, and fluid. Sandilands, for example, identifies the
importance of what she terms performative affinity for a political project such as ecofeminism, where
material ecological goals, and an emphasis on a multiplicity of political affinities with numerous others,
results in a recognition of the failure of the term woman to act as a content-filled subject position
(Sandilands, Mother Earth 29). A queered ecofeminist performative affinity relies, Sandilands argues,
on the insertion of a strongly parodic understanding of nature and its discourses (Mother Earth 33).
Such performative affinities between women and naturewhich allow*s+ for the possibility of each to
disrupt the other (Sandilands, Mother Earth 36)recall the kinds of subversive repetition that Butler
suggests might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself (Gender Trouble 32).
Subverting or disrupting gendered and sexed identity and the category woman thus requires, in a
queer ecofeminism, a disruptionor queeringof nature: To queer nature, in this context, is to
question its normative use, to interrogate relations of knowledge and power by which certain truths
about ourselves have been allowed to pass without question (Sandilands, Mother Earth 37). At the
heart of a queer-ecofeminist reading, then, is a sustained attention to the ongoing re/inscriptions of the
nature/culture binary in our understandings of sexed and gendered subjectivities (and embodiment),
particularly as regulated and constrained through the narratives of western scientific discourse.
Thus, _____ and I advocate that we should substantially increase exploration of our
relationship to Earths oceans through narration and discussion of Joan Slonczewskis
science fiction novel A Door Into Ocean.

We will emphasize three specific themes in A Door Into Ocean which
demonstrate/represent methods of breaking down heteronormative assumptions in
our understandings of sexuality and in our relationship to nature:

First is The Figuration Of The Alien - use of the Alien subject in ecofeminist science
fiction embraces the possibility of different ways of knowing this queer ecofeminist
disruption offers a rethinking of binaries within sex, gender, and nature.

What might these alien biologies and encounters suggest about the potential for undermining or
destabilizing the naturalized reinscription of heterosexual bio-social systems? Most of the texts I have
discussed do not seem to upset significantly the conventional sexualized binaries for their human
characters, who are ultimately reinscribed into the heterosexual code. However, the possibility of
different formsboth biological and culturalof sexed and gendered structures and societies are
developed through the figure/s of the alien. Thus, even if not entirely successful, the conjunction of
alien possibilities with human re-containment perhaps literalizes or figures the difficulty of escaping this
binary within our current human forms of thought, codes, social forms, and sciences. Science fiction has,
in a sense, always occupied the fault line between the two cultures. Its potential for queered
eco/feminist disruptions offers ways of telling new stories about nature, humans, and others that might
disrupt traditional and restrictive binaries of thought infecting our notions of nature/culture,
human/non-human, epistemology, and ontology. Feminist and SF stories of queer nature might, if
nothing else, help progress our difficult labor of forging a future from resources inevitably impure
(Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter 241).
Second is Alien Biologies -
Instead of attempting to combat forces of nature, the residents of Shora understand
that interactions with nature should be give-and-take rather than relationships of
dominance. A scene from page 54 demonstrates this ideology:

The storm died at last, but most of the outer tunnels were flooded It mattered
little, since all the silkhouses were gone. Where Merwen had lived, only a few
battered fragments of paneling still stood, jagged as a cracked eggshell. The surface of
the raft was torn and stripped to the gnarled wooden core, while many outlying
branches had been ripped off altogether. Some floated beyond, thudding when they
crashed. Spinel was stunned at the wreckage, but everyone else seemed too busy for
that, sweeping debris, and pumping out flooded tunnels, and hauling up the new silk
panels he and Lady Nisi had built and stored below.

Be easy, said Merwen, sensing his distress. It will be months till we get another
storm that big.

But everything is gone.

Only the outer shell. Were still here. What else do we need? Well build a new
house, and paint new designs in all the wall moss. It will make a lovely change.

The Alien residents of Shora represent an alternate understanding of being in and
knowing nature. This different way of knowing demands the construction of different
scientific discourses and the imagination of new biotechnologies represented through
the novels alien culture. This notion of alien biologies signifies not just biologically
different species, but also different practices, systems of knowledge, and the
intersections between physical being and socio cultural discourses.

Alien encounters are of course a very charged trope in SF history. As Istvan Csiscery- Ronay observes,
*a+nxiety over sexual power and purity underlies most articulations of alienhuman contacts;
significantly, the alien has always disturbed the deep-lying connection between biology and human
culture (228-29). Even if it is ultimately defused or recontained, the science fictional alien is immanently
disruptive: suggestive of the multiple sexualized and racialized binaries which inflect the category
human, inevitably invoking the other, even as it may be registered as undesirable. However, it is when
the alien is deployed as tool for thinking through both (human) nature/s and culture/s that such binaries
might be destabilized. If the alien differs from us only in terms of its biology, it potentially does little to
advance us beyond the realms of the metaphysical anti/pro-naturalist differentiation between human
and non-human. That is, to recall Csiscery-Ronay again, if the alien figures primarily as biologically rather
than ontologically Other, then (as when dealing with racial difference) it is often too easy to conflat*e+
cultural difference with putative natural difference (Csicsery-Ronay 229). I want to turn now to some SF
examples that are open to readings that queer nature. Of course many SF texts lend themselves to a
queered understanding of nature in one aspect or another, from Mary Shelleys Frankenstein to Ursula
K. Le Guins Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Samuel R. Delanys Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand
(1984) and Triton (1976), John Varleys GAEAN trilogy (1979-84), and more recently, Nalo Hopkinsons
Midnight Robber (2000) and The Salt Roads (2003). In this essay I have deliberately chosen to focus on a
number of lesser known authors, for two reasons. Firstly, I believe it is important to widen the scope of
our reading beyond the usual canon, to explore the different forms of feminism that might be
recognized or produced through ecofeminist and queered readings, and to recognize the potential for
queered readings of what might appear fairly traditional SF treatments. Secondly, I want to look
specifically at female-alien encounters, which are less easily mapped as masculinized culture versus
feminized nature, or as an (heterosexually) eroticized colonialist tourism. The texts discussed below
share a central concern with the environment and human relations to nature which encompass the
ways we represent nature. Concomitantly, these texts are concerned with alternate understandings of
being in and knowing nature, which demand the construction of different scientific discourses and
often imagine new biotechnologies, usually represented through an alien culture. One way of
encapsulating these themes is through the notion of alien biologies, which signify not just biologically
different species (and ontology), but also different practices and systems of knowledges (alien biological
technosciences), and finally the intersections (too easily dissolved in the human-nature/human-culture
split) between physical being/matter and sociocultural discourses. Unlike more traditional SF readings
which parallel the human/alien with a gendered dichotomy, in these texts the problematics of
difference and otherness are located around the dualism of human/non-human, thus suggesting the
possibility of escaping the heterosexual bind. For as Hollinger warns, An emphasis on gender risks the
continuous reinscription of sexual binarism, that is, the reinscription of an institutionalized
heterosexual binary (24). In these stories, gender is not the most significant marker of the human/alien
relation. Rather, the tensions in human-alien relations reflect the purifying practices of scientific (and
colonialist) discourses which contribute to the delineation of human from other. In Marti Steussys
Dreams of Dawn (1988), the survival of a sentient alien race, the Kargans, is threatened by human
colonization of their home planet. The crisis on Karg has been precipitated by the presence of a human
colony which has co-existed with the Kargans for years by ignoring their existence. However the
humans non-native husbandry, agriculture, and imported foods are poisoning the Kargan young.
Eventual resolution is brought about, primarily through the actions of the human girl Disa, who has
grown up with Kargans (as part of her survey-team family) and is both fluent in their language and at
home in their damp cave environs. Ultimately, the solution arrived at by Disa and the Kargans is to
change human biochemistry so they can survive on native Kargan proteins. Overturning the xenophobic
speciesism of humans thus effects a radical change in the human/nature relation, where instead of
changing the world to suit humans, human biological and environmental practices are altered to suit
their new environment. Such interventions into scientific and cultural discourses around nature and
human are intensified in texts where the boundaries between human and alien are destabilized through
a much more intimate encounter: where acting like the alien, performing an other subjectivity
equatesas in queer theorywith being the alien. Intimate and eroticized encounters with alien
others are a recurring motif in Naomi Mitchisons classic Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1976), which tells
of the space-faring communications expert and xenobiologist, Mary. The world of Memoirs is a tolerant
one, and acceptance of others encompasses race, species, fauna and animals. All life, even only
potentially sentient life, is routinely treated with respect (to the extent that scientists communicate with
and obtain permission from animals such as dogs who consent to cooperate in experiments) (31).
Memoirs may be read very productively through a queer/ecofeminist lens: not only does the
spacewoman Mary have a sexualized relation with a Martian, she also twice becomes pregnant
through alien encounters. As part of an experiment with self-generating alien tissue to test for potential
intelligence, Mary offers to host a graft of this particular alien. Her body responds as if she were
pregnant, and she perceives the graft (which she calls Ariel) in very intimate terms, as flesh of *her+
flesh; she receives sensual enjoyment from their interactions: It liked to be as close as possible over the
median line reaching now to my mouth and inserting a pseudopodium delicately between my lips and
elsewhere (54). Her second alien pregnancy is activated by the Martian, Vly, producing the haploid
not entirely human child Viola (67). Viola is a queer progeny indeed; fathered by a hermaphrodite
alien (who later becomes a mother itself [143]) through a primarily communicative actthe standard
sexed and gendered heteronormative system is certainly skewed in this particularly unfaithful re-
productive event.
Third is Queer Kinship - queer notions of kinship in A Door Into Ocean challenge the
contemporary heterosexual norms of family structure. Residents of the ocean moon
Shora in the novel demonstrate non-normative notions of kinship by reproducing
without men, practicing polyamory, and forming homogeneous family structures
independent of heredity.

A passage from page 50 of the novel demonstrates an example of this:

After generations of breeding without males, Sharer anatomy no longer enabled
heterosexual coupling. Sharer women conceived by fusion of ova, a process
requiring lifeshaper assistance and the consent of the Gathering.

Narration and discussion of the novel fosters acceptance of queer notions of kinship,
which is key to 1) destabilize the status quo heteronormative interactions between
nature and culture and 2) overturn the idolization of heterosexual kinship patterns.

In this final section, I want to consider briefly the idea of queered kinship, and how it might function as
a metaphor for thinking through a queered ecofeminist perspective on naturecultures (in Haraways
words *from Birth of the Kennel? give title, even if no page number). Certainly from both an
ecofeminist as well as a queer perspective it seems more appropriate to think in terms of the
translation mode of kinship, rather than the purifyin.g mode of oppositions, to recall Latours
distinction. Recently, spurred by heated and difficult debates over gay marriage and childrearing, Judith
Butler has argued that it is politically and theoretically necessary to attend to notions of kinship as we
negotiate contemporary changes in family structures away from the heterosexual norm toward what
she describes as post-Oedipal kinship (cited in Campbell 645 ). As Butler notes, debates on gay
marriage and kinship have become sites of intense displacement for other political fears ... fears that
feminism ... has effectively opened up kinship outside the family, opened it to strangers (Kinship21).
Indeed, drawing on Haraway and ecofeminist theorists [such as whom?], we might reflect that certain
feminists have indeed opened up kinship to include even non-human strangers. Butler traces the
radical changes in contemporary anthropological practice and resulting theories of kinship, which have
moved from the concept of a natural relation to the more performative notion that kinship is itself a
kind of doing, a practice of self-conscious assemblage: Debates about the distinction between nature
and culture, which are clearly heightened when the distinctions between animal, human, machine,
hybrid, and cyborg remain unsettled, become figured at the site of kinship, for even a theory of kinship
that is radically culturalist frames itself against a discredited nature and so remains in a constitutive
and definitional relation to that which it claims to transcend. (Butler, Kinship 37) There are obvious
resonances here with Haraways more recent approach to such questions, which she figures under the
rubric companion species; this is her replacement for the cyborg as figure for telling her story of co-
habitation, co-evolution, and embodied cross-species sociality (Companion Species 4).7 A narrative for
cross-species sociality which might result in queered kin seems a highly appropriate aid for re-reading
and potentially destabilzing the heteronormative surface of ecofeminist stories of alien-human
encounters. From this perspective, even those texts where the demands of reproduction produce
reinscriptions of heteronormativity might offer alternatives to, or a break in *in what sense a break?+,
oedipal heterosexual kinship patterns, especially where they cross species boundaries. For, as Butler
notes, the breakdown of traditional kinship not only displaces the central place of biological and sexual
relations from its definition, but gives sexuality a separate domain from that of kinship (Kinship 37).
Alternative kinship patterns are of course a familiar theme in SF, featuring in the wellknown work of Le
Guin, Delany, and Octavia Butler, among many others.8 In Color and Through Alien Eyes (1999),
extended kinship patterns amongst humans are evident: group marriages of at least six people (and
often more) are apparently the norm in Thomsons future and are not confined to internal monogamous
male/female partnerships. By the close of Through Alien Eyes, Junas daughter Mariam is emerging into
a very queer set of kin indeed. As well as numerous human parents, there are her alien brother Moki
and Tendu uncle Ukatonen, a kinship which is formalized when Juna, Mariam, and the Tendu are
accepted into a group marriage (that includes Junas brother). And while she is purely human born,
Mariam certainly does not recreate the image of her father; having been linked with the Tendu since
the womb, she is, if not some half-alien thing as her father fears (161), certainly not just human.
Group marriages blending different species are also a common feature of the society depicted in
Steussys Dreams of Dawn, which can include pairs and single humans of either sex, and in the specific
case of Dawn circle a non-gendered alien sheppie and two female Kargans plus their groundlings. In
Dawn, companionable and even loving relations between human and alien are seen as a normal
consequence of such queered families: such attachments werent unusual for children raised in the
multispecies kinship of a First-In circle (Steussy 2). Thinking about queered notions of kinship that
involve human and non-human others also provides different perspectives on Octavia Butlers
XENOGENESIS series. Not for nothing are the ooloi, the Oankali third sex, known as treasured strangers
(104). One crucial function of the Oankali third sex in the reproductive/genetic mixing of Oankali young
is to ensure that sufficient diversity emerges from the very close male/female dyad who are often
siblings. A strangely compounded two-sex system this may be, but even in this small fact it challenges
familial notions of kinship and sexuality; even more so when humans are added to form the five person,
three-sexed, two species construct family. Quite apart from the very different conjugal or reproductive
functioning of this queer family, traditional social and emotive relations are also disrupted. For the
human couples, as for the Oankali, the intense emotional and psychological male-female relation
enabled and mediated by the ooloi essentially disallows heterosexual intercourseor indeed any kind of
touching. In an interesting homosocial spin on human/Oankali kinship, the only people one can in fact
touch each other are children or samesex relatives. Pearsons reading of the figure of the hermaphrodite
as a Derridean supplement to the two-sex system in a number of SF texts is of interest here
(Sex/uality). Even when dealing with texts where the primacy of apparent reproductive need drives a
reinforcement of a biologically necessary heterosexuality, the introduction of supplementsin the
case of Butlers trilogy, the ooloias necessary to complete or bridge the reproductive heterosexual
system might, as Pearson notes, invite us to question whether the apparent plenitude of the twosex
system ... does not also need supplementation ... in the so-called real world (Sex/uality 118). Indeed,
when the relations that bind are no longer traced to heterosexual procreation, the very homology
between nature and culture ... tends to become undermined. (Butler, Kinship 39)
2AC Overview
(OUTLINE- NOT BLOCKS)
Our method = queering nature = to question its normative use, to interrogate relations of knowledge
and power by which certain truths about ourselves have been allowed to pass without question
How do we queer nature? through our narration because Its potential for queered eco/feminist
disruptions offers ways of telling new stories about nature, humans, and others that might disrupt
traditional and restrictive binaries of thought infecting our notions of nature/culture, human/non-
human, epistemology, and ontology. Feminist and SF stories of queer nature might, if nothing else,
help progress our difficult labor of forging a future from resources inevitably impure
ways our narration breaks down heteronormativity and binaries:
1) alien figuration
a. figure of the alien is disruptive because it is suggestive of the multiple sexualized and
racialized binaries which inflect the category human, inevitably invoking the other,
even as it may be registered as undesirable
b. alien is ontologically other, not just biologically other, meaning that it differs from us in
its non-conformity to binaries rather than its physical differences
c. that deconstructs sex, gender, and nature/culture binaries
2) alien biologies
a. parts of the story where instead of changing the world to suit humans, human
biological and environmental practices are altered to suit their new environment.
b. that deconstructs speciesism and fosters a better relationship with nature
c. kornfeld card
3) queered kinship
a. destabilizes the status quo heteronormative interactions between nature and culture
i. Debates about the distinction between nature and culture, which are clearly
heightened when the distinctions between animal, human, machine, hybrid,
and cyborg remain unsettled, become figured at the site of kinship, for even a
theory of kinship that is radically culturalist frames itself against a discredited
nature and so remains in a constitutive and definitional relation to that which
it claims to transcend.
ii. when the relations that bind are no longer traced to heterosexual procreation,
the very homology between nature and culture ... tends to become
undermined
b. overturns the idolization of heterosexual kinship patterns.
i. Two-sex system NEEDS supplements (i.e. trans people and hermaphrodite
people)
ii. Lots of examples in sci-fi of non-normative kinship
iii. the breakdown of traditional kinship not only displaces the central place of
biological and sexual relations from its definition, but gives sexuality a separate
domain from that of kinship
c. Solvency summary: A narrative for cross-species sociality which might result in
queered kin seems a highly appropriate aid for re-reading and potentially destabilizing
the heteronormative surface of ecofeminist stories of alien-human encounters
Heteronormativity is really bad
Sedgwick 8 (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 2008 The Epistemology of the Closet)//gingE
From at least the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, scenarios of same-sex desire would seem to
have had a privileged, though by no means an exclusive, relation in Western culture to scenarios of both
genocide and omnicide. That sodomy, the name by which homosexual acts are known even today to the
law of half of the United States and to the Supreme Court of all of them, should already be inscribed
with the name of a site of mass extermination is the appropriate trace of a double history. In the first
place there is a history of the mortal suppression, legal or subjudicial, of gay acts and gay people,
through burning, hounding, physical and chemical castration, concentration camps, bashing the array
of sanctioned fatalities that Louis Crompton records under the name of gay genocide, and whose
supposed eugenic motive becomes only the more colorable with the emergence of a distinct,
naturalized minority identity in the nineteenth century. In the second place, though, there is the
inveterate topos of associating gay acts or persons with fatalities vastly broader than their own extent: if
it is ambiguous whether every denizen of the obliterated Sodom was a sodomite, clearly not every
Roman of the late Empire can have been so, despite Gibbon's connecting the eclipse of the whole
people to the habits of a few. Following both Gibbon and the Bible, moreover, with an impetus
borrowed from Darwin, one of the few areas of agreement among modern Marxist, Nazi, and liberal
capitalist ideologies is that there is a peculiarly close, though never precisely defined, affinity between
same-sex desire and some historical condition of moribundity, called "decadence," to which not
individuals or minorities but whole civilizations are subject. Bloodletting on a scale more massive by
orders of magnitude than any gay minority presence in the culture is the "cure," if cure there be, to the
mortal illness of decadence. If a fantasy trajectory, Utopian in its own terms, toward gay genocide has
been endemic in Western culture from its origins, then, it may also have been true that the trajectory
toward gay genocide was never clearly distinguishable from a broader, apocalyptic trajectory toward
something approaching omnicide. The deadlock of the past century between minoritizing and
universalizing understandings of homo/heterosexual definition can only have deepened this fatal bond
in the heterosexist imaginaire. In our culture as in Billy Budd, the phobic narrative trajectory toward
imagining a time after the homosexual is finally inseparable from that toward imagining a time after the
human; in the wake of the homosexual, the wake incessantly produced since first there were
homosexuals, every human relation is pulled into its shining representational furrow. Fragments of
visions of a time after the homosexual are, of course, currently in dizzying circulation in our culture. One
of the many dangerous ways that AIDS discourse seems to ratify and amplify preinscribed homophobic
mythologies is in its pseudo-evolutionary presentation of male homosexuality as a stage doomed to
extinction (read, a phase the species is going through) on the enormous scale of whole populations. 26
The lineaments of openly genocidal malice behind this fantasy appear only occasionally in the
respectable media, though they can be glimpsed even there behind the poker-face mask of our national
experiment in laissez-faire medicine. A better, if still deodorized, whiff of that malice comes from the
famous pronouncement of Pat Robertson: "AIDS is God s way of weeding his garden." The saccharine
lustre this dictum gives to its vision of devastation, and the ruthless prurience with which it
misattributes its own agency, cover a more fundamental contradiction: that, to rationalize complacent
glee at a spectacle of what is imagined as genocide, a proto-Darwinian process of natural selection is
being invoked in the context of a Christian fundamentalism that is not only antievolutionist but
recklessly oriented toward universal apocalypse. A similar phenomenon, also too terrible to be noted as
a mere irony, is how evenly our cultures phobia ab Hit HIV-positive blood is kept pace with by its rage for
keeping that dangerous blood in broad, continuous circulation. This is evidenced in projects for universal
testing, and in the needle-sharing implicit in William Buckley's now ineradicable fantasy of tattooing
HIVpositive persons. But most immediately and pervasively it is evidenced in the literal bloodbaths that
seem to make the point of the AIDS-related resurgence in violent bashings of gays which, unlike the
gun violence otherwise ubiquitous in this culture, are characteristically done with twoby-fours, baseball
bats, and fists, in the most literal-minded conceivable form of body-fluid contact. It might be worth
making explicit that the use of evolutionary thinking in the current wave of Utopian/genocidal fantasy is,
whatever else it may be, crazy. Unless one believes, first of all, that same-sex object-choice across
history and across cultures is one thing with one cause, and, second, that its one cause is direct
transmission through a nonrecessive genetic pathwhich would be, to put it gently, counter-intuitive
there is no warrant for imagining that gay populations, even of men, in postAIDS generations will be in
the slightest degree diminished. Exactly to the degree that AIDS is a gay disease, its a tragedy confined
to our generation; the long-term demographic depredations of the disease will fall, to the contrary, on
groups, many themselves direly endangered, that are reproduced by direct heterosexual transmission.
Unlike genocide directed against Jews, Native Americans, Africans, or other groups, then, gay genocide,
the once-and-for-all eradication of gay populations, however potent and sustained as a project or
fantasy of modern Western culture, is not possible short of the eradication of the whole human species.
The impulse of the species toward its own eradication must not either, however, be underestimated.
Neither must the profundity with which that omnicidal impulse is entangled with the modern
problematic of the homosexual: the double bind of definition between the homosexual, say , as a
distinct risk group, and the homosexual as a potential of representation within the universal. 27 As gay
community and the solidarity and visibility of gays as a minority population are being consolidated and
tempered in the forge of this specularized terror and suffering, how can it fail to be all the more
necessary that the avenues of recognition, desire, and thought between minority potentials and
universalizing ones be opened and opened and opened?

2AC Solves Dualism
Dualisms bad/binaries/ecofeminism solves them
Gaard, 1997 (Greta Gaard, eco-feminist writer, scholar, activist, and filmmaker, she writes about
queer theory, vegetarianism, and animal liberation, Cofounder of the Minnesota Green Party, shes
written books about the politics of ecology, shes a Professor of English the University of Wi-River Falls,
and a community faculty member in Womens Students at Metropolitan State University, Toward a
Queer Ecofeminism, Winter of 1997, JSTOR, Accessed: 6/27/14, RH)
The first argument linking ecofeminism and queer theory is based on the observation that dominant
Western culture's devaluation of the erotic parallels its devaluations of women and of nature; in effect,
these devaluations are mutually reinforcing. This observation can be drawn from eco feminist cri-
tiques that describe the normative dualisms, value-hierarchical thinking, and logic of domination that
together characterize the ideological framework of Western culture. As Karen Warren explains, value
dualisms are ways of con- ceptually organizing the world in binary ,disjunctive terms, where in each side
of the dualism is "seen as exclusive (ratherhan inclusive) and oppositional (rather than
complementary),and where higher value or superiorityis attrib- uted to one disjunct (or, side of the
dualism)than the other" (1987, 6). Val Plumwood's 1993 critique of Western philosophy pulls together
the most salient features of these and other ecofeminist critiques in what she calls the "master model,
"the identity that is at the core of Western culture and that has initiated, perpetuated, and benefitted
from Western culture's alienation from and domination of nature. The master identity, according to
Plumwood, creates and depends on a "dualized structure of otherness and negation"(1993, 42). Key
elements in that structure are the following sets of dualized pairs: culture/nature reason/nature
male/female mind/body(nature) master/slave reason/matter(physicality) rationality/animality(nature)
reason/emotion(nature) mind, spirit/nature freedom/necessity(nature) universal/particular
human/nature(nonhuman) civilized/primitive(nature) production/reproduction(nature) public/private
subject/object (Plumwood 1994, 43) Plumwood does not claim completeness for the list. In the
argumentthat follows, I will offer a number of reasons that ecofeminists must specify the linked
dualismsof white/nonwhite, het-erosexual/queer financially empowered/impoverished, and
reason/theerotic.3 Ecofeminists have uncovered a number of characteristics about the interlocking
structure of dualism. First, ecofeminist philosophers have shown that the claim for the superiority of
the self is based on the difference between self andother, as manifested in the full humanity and
reason that the self possesses but the other supposedly lacks.This allegedsuperiorityof the self,
moreover, is usedto justifythe subordinationof the other (Warren1990, 129;Plumwood 1993, 42-47).
Next, ecofeministshave workedto show the linkageswithin the devaluedcategoryof the
other,demonstratinghow the associationof qualities fromone oppressedgroupwith anotherservesto
reinforcetheirsubordination. The conceptual linkagesbetween women and animals,women and the
body, or women and nature, for example, all serve to emphasizethe inferiorityof these categories
(Adams 1990; 1993). But while all categoriesof the other sharethese qualitiesof being
feminized,animalized,and naturalized,socialist ecofeministshave rejectedanyclaimsof primacyforone
formof oppressionor another,embracinginsteadthe understandingthat all formsof oppressionare
nowsoinextricablylinkedthatliberationeffortsmustbeaimedatdismantling the system itself.
The domination of women and the domination over nature are linked. We must
examine the relationship between the two to understand other forms of domination,
exploitation, and violence.
Thompson, 2006 (Charis Thompson, Professor of Gender and Womens Studies, the Associate
Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Center at UC Berkeley, read Philosophy, Psychology,
Physiology at Oxford, received her Ph.D. from the Science Studies program at UC San Diego, previously
taught at Science and Technology Studies Department at Cornell University, at U of I Urbana, and at the
History of Science Department at Harvard University, Back to Nature? Resurrecting Ecofeminism after
Poststructuralist and Third-Wave Feminisms, September 2006, PDF from JSTOR, Accessed: 6/25/14, RH)
In The Death of Nature Merchant argued persuasively for a view that subsequently became one of the
two core tenets of ecofeminism: that the domination of women and the domination of nature are
structurally linked. (As alluded to above, the second core tenet was a recognition and celebration of the
values and activities traditionally associated with women, including childbirth and various kinds of
nurturing.) She suggested that it was necessary to re-examine the formation of a world view and a
science that, by reconceptualizing reality as a machine rather than a living organism, sanctioned the
domination of both nature and women.9 Merchant was motivated by her recognition of an
isomorphism in critiques of capitalism in the womens movement and the ecological movement, noting
that both the womens movement and the ecology movement are sharply critical of the costs of
competition, aggression, and domination arising from the market economys modus operandi in nature
and society. In examining the Scientific Revolution, she made a historical argument that the rise of
modern science and its economies was the motor of these twin oppressions. The corollarythat
equality for women and care of the environment are two parts of a single remedy to modern
exploitationunited feminists and ecologists in an urgent call to action. In her detailed elaboration of
the historical interconnections between women and nature that developed as the modern scientific
and economic world took form in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Merchant provided an
empirical and theoretical ge- nealogy for the forms of oppression of women and of the environment so
characteristic of capitalism. Most important, she made the case that the oppression of women and of
the environment are linked, textually, ideologically, and empirically, in the same large historical
developmentnamely, what she termed the death of nature. Much as Robert K. Merton had done in
his work on the Puritan spur to capitalism and to science, Merchant tied science, technology, and the
economy to values and beliefs characteristic of modernity.10
2AC Coalitions
Coalitions solve-empirics prove
King, 1995 (Ynestra King, coeditor with Adrienne Harris of Rocking the Ship of State: Towards a
Feminist Peace Politics, writer, teacher, and activist living in NYC, founder of Women and Life on Earth
and the anti-militarist movement, and the Committee on Women, Pollution and Environment, she is
working on a Visiting Scholar at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, Engendering a Peaceful
Planet: Ecology, Economy, and Ecofeminism in Contemporary Context, Winter 1995, JSTOR, Accessed:
6/27/14, RH)
We also work in coalition with the "Northin the South" in which ecofeminism links up with the
environmental justice movement, which has emphasized the racial dimension of the ecological crisis and
demonstrated that communities of color are disproportionately impacted. Again, for us links between
ecology and peace require an analysis of the environmental impact of the military in its production of
weapons and waste and in the ecological devastation of war. Here in the United States eco feminists
were active in our opposition to the Gulf War and inl ending public visibility to the ever more
devastating environmental impact of the abstract war technologies that kill, poi-son, and destroy
indiscriminately, with long-term effects on both people and nature which cannot be anticipated. Here
"thinking like an ecofeminist "involves making abstract connections concrete, as when I discovered,
during the duration of my pregnancy with my son, that in the time it took me to grow and birth one
human being eighty thousand children in the Persian Gulf had starved to death or died of causes directly
attributableto the weapons used by U.S. forcesduring the war. The need for thinking that is inventive
and both personal and historical,in which our sense of time and of relationshipsbecomes appropriate to
understanding our own world,is part of the workof ecofeministartistsand visionaries,in whose work
diverse narratives and apparently unrelated phenomenon are relatedto one anotherin varyingmodesof
expressionandcommunication.

2AC Method
Metaphors Good
Metaphors effectively express ideas that would otherwise lose potency
Zheng and Song 10(Zheng Hong-bo and Song Wen-juan, Zhejiang Wanli University and Ningbo
Dahongying College, US-China Foreign Language, Volume 8, No.9, Metaphor analysis in the education
discourse: A critical review, http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED514704.pdf,PS)
2. Application of metaphor analysis in education Metaphor creation has been used in academic settings
to encourage learners insight and understanding. Metaphors are created to illuminate and solidify
their understandings. For example, in Tea ching Is Like... ?, a group of teachers report ed on the
effect of writing and talking about the metaphors they created to symbolize their views of themselves
as educators. They concluded, Writing a metaphor for their work can focus and energize educators (H
agstrom, et al., 2000, p. 24). The belief that an analysis of metaphor use is a reliable way of making
otherwise unvoiced assumptions explicit, which has informed the methodology of a number of recent
of educational research. It seems fair to say that research in this area has so far tended to fall into 3
categories: studies which deal with the interactions between learners and institutions (Hoffman &
Kretovics, 2004), studies which consider teachers attitudes towards or perceptions of teaching
(Oxford, et al., 1998) and studies about the learners beliefs of learning (Bozlk, 2002). 2.1 Education
model and metaphor During the past few decades, more and more educators and researchers have
succeeded in freeing their minds sufficiently to embrace or imagine many metaphors of teaching and
learning to live by. The existing literature mainly discusses the metaphors demonstrating the way in
which students relate to faculty and educational institutions, for example, concept depicted in the
student as client metaphor; expectations generated from the students as customers metaphor;
implications of the students as junior partners metaphor (Comesky, McCool, Byrnes & Weber, 1992).
Hence, many new metaphors describing the interaction between students and their institutions of
higher education have been proposed. Three frequently used metaphors are the student as a
customer (Comesky, et al., 1992; Schwartzman, 1995), the student as a product (Sirvanci,
1996) , and the student as employee ( Hoffman, & Kretovics, 2004). These 3 metaphors have
emerged from the quality movement in the for-profit sector of business and industry. More
significantly, teaching as persuasion metaphor has been offered as a new pedagogy for the new
millennium (e.g., Murphy, 2001; Alexander, Fives, Buehl & Mulhern, 2002). 2.2 Teaching with the aid of
metaphor Since metaphor functions as a cognitive instrument of observing the world and creating new
senses, it is significant to introduce metaphor into language teaching. According to Ortony (1975, p.
45), metaphors are necessary an d not just nice and he explain ed that there are various ways in
which metaphor can facilitate learning. Metaphor can impress a concept or idea through the powerful
image or vividness of the expression. Metaphor can also capture the inexpressible in formation that
what a metaphor conveys is virtually impossible to express in any other way without losing the potency
of the message. The cognitive turn in linguistics has shifted attention to problems of meaning,
idiomaticity and metaphoricity in language. For teachers of foreign languages, these insights may be
useful for traditional hurdles in language teaching and learning, and may provide more efficient and
creative ways of presenting English language data for learners from other cultures. The pedagogical
usefulness of metaphors as a teaching and memory device has a strong research literature. M any of
the early research es sought to demonstrate the role of vivid image-evoking metaphors in complex
memory tasks. For example, the awareness of cognitive metaphor would offer a more solid and
comprehensive tool for the teaching/learning of figurative expressions. The research of metaphors
applications in vocabulary teaching found that the introduction of metaphor in teaching does make
memorizing some senses of a word much easier. The research of its application can also be done into
idioms and proverbs. The comparative analysis of Chinese and English metaphorical uses can also be a
strand of current research. The application of metaphor in teaching foreign language can contribute to
the research on SLA (Second Language Acquisition), and deepen and broaden the research on
metaphor as well. Metaphor theory can help extend learners understanding of different senses of a
single word and enhance speakers or hearers ability of communication (CAI, 2003). Therefore, it is
periodically advocated that metaphors should be used in direct classroom instruction to aid learners
understanding of subject content through analogy between familiar experience and new concepts or to
raise learners awareness of specific everyday uses of language, for example , exploring metaphors in
science (Cortazzi & Jin, 1999, p.154).
Metaphors enable people to derive meaning from otherwise inscrutable realities
Jensen 06(Devon F.N. Jensen, PhD, Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the University of
Calgary, March 2006, da: July 1 2014, Metaphors as a Bridge to Understanding Educational and Social
Contexts, http://www.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/5_1/PDF/JENSEN.PDF,PS)
Looking at all the variables, it seemed as though the research path led scientists to the thoughts and
perceptions of the participants. With this assumption, educational scientists turned to language as a
cred - ible means for revealing the inner world of educational practitioners. Some of the early work in
this area (Beers & Bloomingdale, 1983; Byrd, 1977; Faunce & Wiener, 1967; Gallup Organization, 1969;
Lewis, 1973; Payne, 1970; Regan, 1967)T revealed that the research process could gain a greater
understanding of the educational world through accessing the thoughts and perceptions of teachers.
Teachers were taken at their word, because those words were seen to represent their thinking. In other
words, language provided the medium through which the external world could get a picture of the
educators internal world. Teachers and administrators could describe their perceptions in words to the
researcher and the researcher could then study and analyze those words for meaning. The researcher
now had an academic foundation on which they could make sense of the educators inner world
through language. A whole new door of educational analysis was opened up as researchers turned to
the language of teachers, administrators, and students better to understand the world of education.
Numerous qualitative methods appeared in a greater number of research projects and journal articles
as the nature of educa - tional research expanded and became more diversified. As well, this shift in
educational research also changed the nature of the relationship between the researcher and the
participant. In this paradigm of qualitative educational inquiry, reality was not definable and was not
something that could be hypothe - sized. Instead, the participant and researcher co-created reality
through reflective processes, of which narrative inquiry led the way in placing importance on voice and
language as a means of revealing the participants story and reality. Two influential researchers who
have furthered language and narrative as a valid means of educa - tional inquiry are Clandinin and
Connelly (Clandinin, 1985; Clandinin, Connelly, & Michael, 1986, 1989, 1996a, 1996b; Connelly &
Clandinin, 1990, 1993; Connelly, Clandinin, & Helen, 1997). Their work revealed that language is a
credible vehicle for collaboration between the researcher and partici - pants in opening up new
interpretations and understandings of education. Out of their work emerge co-constructed accounts of
the educators reality and working world. These narrative methods were able to shed greater light on
the educators inner landscape. Methodologically, narrative inquiry relies on lan - guage devices such
as image, metaphor, simile, and description as means of data analysis, as these are the language tools
most commonly used by participants to derive meaning from a complicated reality. This is how
metaphors begin to have epistemological and ontological validity as an educational research method.
One of the underlying assumptions of any research endeavor, whether qualitative or quantitative, is
that there is an attempt to understand better the environment being studied. In attempting to make
sense of the research context, the researcher has the desire to improve it, change it, or know it better
somehow. To achieve this, researchers and participants often draw on preexisting knowledge and
practice to account for current experiences. This is exactly what metaphors accomplish. Metaphors
enable the connection of information about a familiar concept to another familiar concept, leading to a
new understanding where the process of comparison between the two concepts acts as generators for
new meaning. Figure 1 provides an illustration of this idea.
SF Key
Science fiction is key to help us understand our modern relationship to dominating the
environment
Smits, 6 (Martijntje, professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, November 2
nd
, 2006,
Science Fiction: A Credible Resource for Critical Knowledge? Bulletin of Science Technology & Society
2006 26: 52, National Association for Science, Technology & Society
http://bst.sagepub.com/content/26/6/521.full.pdf)--CRG
However, in postulating the positive function of SF for informing us on future risks, Dinello neglects to
discuss the possibility that SF in general might contain as much myth as technologism does and that its
main significance might be more in reinforcing myth than in informing us about the more real and
prosaic dangers of new technologies. The prime significance of myth, like that of religious myth,
generally is in grasping human suffering and the relationships of man and world in a story that offers us
a sense of order and meaning. The storylines of salvation and doom are a vast constant in religious as
well as secular myth: In a world of continuous, often revolutionary social transformations, devastating
wars, and ecological hor- rors, there remains ample motivation to continue to assuage and explain
suffering through the construction of symbolic, highly charged, and cognitively simplified myths, even
when such religious ideologies are constructed in decidedly post-metaphysical ways. (Alexander &
Smith, 1996, p. 258) In this way, most SF seems captured as much in the quasi-religious discourse of
salvation and doom as technologism does. Both genres imagine either our dreams or our nightmares,
more than telling us anything about the actual state of affairs in our technological culture, about the
complex networks of humans and things and their ambivalences and changing values. Thus, SF and
technologism might be much more closely related than Dinello admits. Instead of the one being a solid
source of criticism for the other, they appear as two sides of the same kind of quasi-religious logic. Even
more so, because both build on at least three shared assumptions that have long been contested in STS:
Both technologism and SF stories gene. rally assume (a) that the relationship between technology and
social effects is linear (new technology automati- cally has benign or bad effects on humans, nature or
society), (b) that technology is an autonomous force that one cannot steer in alternative directions, and
(c) that nature and technology, or humans and technology, are mutually exclusive categories whose
offspring, often called cyborgs, are either embraced (utopism) or abhoned (dystopism). Instead, STS
scholars would state that actual relations between technology and society are complex and quite
unpredictable and that there are many possible outcomes, of which SFs worst-case scenarios are but
one. These insights could have inspired Dinello to develop his central questions in a more subtle way.
With much emphasis, Dinello promises a focused perspective on the most important question of the
twenty-first century: Is technology out of control ? Unfortunately, Dinello does not explain his
conviction that this is the most important question. Instead, he predictably refers to the classic plot
prevalent in SF since the publication of Frankenstein, Mary Shel1eys 1818 novel: technology, designed
by humans to master nature and get rid of necessity, dramatically turning into its opposite, taking over
power and enslaving humans by making them dependent on technology and taking away their freedom
once again.
Science fiction helps to destroy hierarchys- means SF is key to destroy patriarchy and
heteronormativity
Fekete, 1 (John, Professor Emeritus of Cultural Studies and English Literature at Trent University, as
well as a member of the Cultural Studies PhD Program and the Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture,
and Politics. Recognized as an international figure in the field of modern and postmodern theory and in
the antifoundational transformation of theory from the 1970s, March 2001, Doing the Time Warp
Again: Science Fiction as Adversarial Culture, Science Fiction Studies, #83 = Volume 28, Part
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/fek83.htm)--CRG
Science fiction commentary today largely presupposes the democratization and decentralization of the
modern system of Art, and the revaluation made possible by the loosening of the value hierarchy that
had authorized the exalted status of a centralized high Art canon and the correspondingly low status of
the popular or commercial literatures and paraliteratures (to which sf has tended to belong). The nuts
and bolts discourse on sf nowadays shows little anxiety about the genres non-canonical status. The
agendas of Science Fiction Studies, the pre-eminent regular home of academic sf scholarship, for
example, have shifted during the 1990s, as indeed the journal anticipated at the beginning of that
decade (Csicsery-Ronay Jr., "Editorial"). As a result, a variety of deconstructive and counter-canonical
readings have increased the theoretical density of the journal and given it a new-left intellectual face
that is double-coded, Janus-like, turning both to cultural critique and to a critique of the traditional
presuppositions of critique. It is interesting to note a continuing consensus in sf scholarship on
advancing the adversarial culture and producing an alternative discourse around creative writing of an
alternativist character. At the same time, critiques frequently "post" their own grounding, as happens
with other double-codings of postmodern culture, where the basic intellectual categories (certainties) of
modernity are called into question and recoded. Feminist and post-feminist, Marxist and post-marxist,
modernist and post-modernist, humanist and post-humanist, historicist and post-historicist, gendered
and post-gendered analytic and theoretic modes of discourse step by step refashion a dialogic space
that begins to appear post-critical. It is probably fair to say that the "posting" of the adversarial culture
foreseen in Baudrillards hypothesis of the hyperreal reduction of distance between the fictive and the
real, in Lyotards libidinal aesthetic, and in the assumptions of a number of postmodern
antifoundationalists, has not yet been robustly theorized or persuasively disseminated. Nevertheless,
the post-critical horizons of science fiction discourse have been announced, even if related agendas are
only slowly and cautiously emerging. Into this context arrives Carl Freedmans Critical Theory and
Science Fiction. In a science fiction milieu where dedicated works of theory reflecting on the nature of
science fiction itself are relatively rare, such a book is to be welcomed, especially as it makes a real
contribution by drawing attention to relationships between critical theory and sf. At the same time, the
book has a strong adversarial parti pris that seems emblematic of an earlier time, or perhaps of the
more traditional pole of an emerging debate. The books twin purposesto show that science fiction is
an intrinsically critical-theoretical generic mode, and to establish canonizing, critical-theoretical readings
of five best-of-type sf texts by Stanislaw Lem, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, and
Philip K. Dickdraw a line in the sand. The proposed generic definition and related critical canon will
select out much of known science fiction and select in a limited array of texts grounded on
historiosophical or philosophical premises that have much in common with the foundations of the
selective traditions of elite Literature. The bottom line is that a highly selective generic definition of the
kind that Freedman proposes would substantially narrow the legitimate membership of the sf genre and
dovetail at least in part with impulses toward the kind of legitimation that is neither in the interests of
the wide audiences that appreciate sf for its variety, nor any longer necessary as a strategy for drawing
academic attention to sf. On closer scrutiny, indeed, the exclusionary legitimating argument turns out to
be working the other side of the street, using the known and demonstrable appeals of sf to legitimate a
narrowly critical reading strategy.
Feminist science fiction theorists are key-instead of seeing women and nature as
objects to be mastered they counter this normative notion with an alternative
mindset of pressing on the importance of connection, not exploitation, of the Earth.
People would no longer seek to dominate the nature, but seek to understand their
entanglement and relationship with nature.
Donawerth, 1990 (Jane Donawerth, Professor at the University of Maryland, serves as Director of
Writing Programs, has had multiple books published, Utopian Science: Contemporary Feminist Science
Theory and Science Fiction, pp. 548-550, 1990, PDF from JSTOR, Accessed: 6/25/14, RH)
changing mindset?
-breaks down the hierarchies
-question our inter connectedness
-feminist epistemology is good
Feminist science theorists have shown that male scientists from the seventeenth century on have
conceived of nature as a potentially unruly woman to be mastered and penetrated for her secrets. "The
image of nature that became important in the early modern period was that of a disorderly and chaotic
realm to be subdued and controlled," argues Carolyn Merchant. Nature is conceived of by scientists as
associated with women, according to Sandra Harding, and "an immensely powerful threat that will rise
up and overwhelm culture unless [it] exerts severe controls."'9As an alternative to the destructive view
of nature in traditional male science, feminist science theorists posit a revision of nature and humanity's
relation to her. "Women's identification with earth and nature," argues Joan Rothschild, must form "the
basis for transforming our values and creating new ecological visions." Such a new science, according to
Haraway, would stress connection to, not domination over nature; according to Evelyn Fox Keller, it
would see nature not as passive but as resourceful; according to Merchant it would be as
"antihierarchical"; and according to Rose it would stress "the feminine value of harmony with nature"
(according to Rose). Such a science would seek "new and pacific relationships between humanity and
nature and among human beings themselves," argues Hilary Rose; and according to Keller, it would
seek "not the power to manipulate, but empowerment-the kind of power that results from an
understanding of the world around us, that simultaneously reflects and affirms our connection to that
world."20 Such a vision of nature has long been implicit, and more recently, explicit in women's science
fiction. In Andre Norton's Breed to Come (1972), for example, humans return to an earth their race had
almost destroyed and tell the intelligent felines who have risen to civilization, "Do not try to change
what lies about you; learn to live within its pattern, be a true part of it." The former Terrans are warning
the current ones not to produce a destructive technology but to develop a partnership with nature. The
view of nature of men and women in works by women is often sharply different. In Sargent's The Shore
of Women(1986), women's scriptures record "the spirit of Earth, in the form of the Goddess" speaking
to women: "You gave men power over Me, and they ravaged Me. You gave them power over yourselves,
and they made you slaves. They sought to wrest my secrets from Me instead of living in harmony with
Me." As a result, women assume political power, and enforce separation from men as well as limited
technology and limited reproduction that keep the ecology in balance. Even in the prototype of all
science fiction, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), the concept of harmony with nature is implicit, a
concept that Frankenstein violates with his science. Whereas Elizabeth's relation to nature-"the sublime
shapes of the mountains, the changes of the seasons, tempest and calm, the silence of winter, and the
life and turbulence of our Alpine summers"-was one of "admiration and delight," Frankenstein's view of
"the world was . . . a secret which I desired to divine." His obsession begins when he leaves for the all-
male society at the university where there "were men who had penetrated deeper" than those who
"had partially unveiled the face of Nature, but [to whom] her immortal lineaments were still a wonder
and a mystery." In utopian fictions by women science fiction writers, the most common metaphor for
the relation of humans to nature is "the web of nature." In Piercy's, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)
Luciente warns Connie, "We're part of the web of nature," when she urges putting immortality, or at
least longevity, as a major goal of science; and in Joan Slonczewski's Door into Ocean (1986), scientists
facilitate nature's own processes, "when the web stretches . . . to balance life and death." Thus feminist
science theorists and women science fiction writers share a utopian vision of nature and science in
partnership.2' As a result of the inclusion of women in science, feminist historians of science and science
theorists have argued that a revised science would be different because of the culturally different
qualities assigned to women. A feminist science will include acknowledgement of subjectivity in its
methods; it will look at problems not just analytically but also holistically; it will aim for the complex
answer as best and most honest; and it will be decentralized and organized cooperatively. In all these
ways, a feminist science is utopian, since these conditions, values, and goals do not describe
contemporary science. In feminist science theory, subjectivity as an ideal includes feelings, intuition, and
values. "A feminist epistemology [for the sciences]," writes Hilary Rose, "insists on the scientific validity
of the subject, on the need to unite cognitive and affective domains; it emphasizes holism, harmony,
and complexity rather than reductionism, domination, and linearity." In A Feeling for the Organism,
Evelyn Fox Keller reads Barbara Mc- Clintock's scientific career as an example of allowing "the objects of
. . . study [to] become subjects in their own right," thus "fostering a sense of the limitations of the
scientific method, and an appreciation of other ways of knowing." A study by scientist Jan Harding
suggests that girls in our society who choose scientific careers more often than boys who do so
recognize that "science has social implications," and choose science as a means of developing
"relatedness, capacity for concern, and an ability to see things from another's perspective." Subjectivity
in science must also encompass values and ethical context: science must be "context dependent"
according to Merchant, connected to "social implications" according to Jan Harding, based on "relational
thinking" according to Hein, grounded in women's experience and, so, a "labor of love" according to
Rose.22
A science fiction, feminist epistemology will make us question the interactions
between the human and nature to truly understand the complexity and entanglement
of the system.
-This evidence talks about A Door Into the ocean and how it saw tech as being able to create a yield
but not exploit the earth
-Solves exploitation?
For women science fiction writers, a science that incorporates subjectivity and sees humans in
partnership with nature would also emphasize relational thinking and acknowledge a responsibility to
understand the complexity of the whole. In Piercy's utopian future, Luciente explains that "We're
cautious about gross experiments. 'In biosystems, all factors are not knowable.' First rule we learn when
studying living beings in relation." Even physics is presented as based on relations, as aiming at
complexity. In Le Guin's The Dispossessed(1974), the physicist Shevek reaches for a theory of time that
relates the cyclical to the linear: "We don't want purity, but complexity," he urges; "A complexity that
includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry, but
ethics."26 Such a new science, not analytical and objectively distanced, but holistic and connected to
people and other living beings, would necessarily be organized differently from our current science.
According to Joan Roths- child, it would question our current "technological ideals": "that bigness equals
efficiency, that a high degree of specialization is always necessary, that value be placed on quantity
criteria, that specialist elites must be created." Such questioning is worked out at length in Mitchison's
second science fiction novel, Solution Three (1975), where a future earth that has bred specialized
plants finds its entire flora threatened by a virus and sends scientists back to nature to gather a larger
less specialized gene pool. And much women's science fiction from Herland (1915) to Woman on the
Edge of Time (1975) to A Door into Ocean (1986) imagines technology depending not on bigness but
on a sustained yield, one which does not deplete the earth and her resources. "Our technology did not
develop in a straight line from yours," says Luciente in Piercy's novel; "We have limited resources. We
plan cooperatively. We can afford to waste . . . nothing. You might say our-you'd say religion?-ideas
make us see ourselves as partners with water, air, birds, fish, trees." An emphasis on a science situated
in a decentralized, nonhierarchical society, and operated as a craft industry creates a special problem for
recent women novelists, who seem to traditional science fiction fans to be antiscience reactionaries. In
Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985), in the postholocaust Kest society, computer technology is used
mainly for aesthetic purposes, and other sciences and technologies are developed in homes and through
apprentice systems. In Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean (1986), the invaders from Valedon have trouble
recognizing the scientists and the laboratories, since scientists are not labelled by dress, and science is
practised as a craft industry with organic rather than mechanical tools. Perhaps the placing of science in
the homes of these peoples is important symbolically for the authors: the place of science indicates
communal responsibility for its outcomes.27
Feminist science fiction makes us reflect on the history of science and its impacts on
women
The concern for increased participation by women in science has an analogous utopian reflection in
science fiction by women. A crucial difference between the science depicted in men's science fiction and
women's science fiction is, quite simply, the participation of women. In Metamorphoses of Science
Fiction, Darko Suvin has rightfully pointed out the lack of women scientists in American science fiction
(but failed to add that he had read almost exclusively science fiction by men). Since at least the early
1960s, women writers have regularly characterized women as scientists; examples include Mary,
biologist and specialist in alien communication in Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962);
the biologist Takver and the physicist Mitis in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974); Kira, biologist,
M.D., and "the de facto head of her department at the university" in Pamela Sargent's Cloned Lives
(1972-76); Margaret, the black computer expert in Up the Walls of the World (1978) by James Tiptree,
Jr. (Alice Sheldon); Varian, vet- erinary xenobiologist and co-leader of the expedition in Anne Mc-
Caffrey's Dinosaur Planet Survivors (1984); and Jeanne Velory, black physicist and astronaut in Vonda
McIntyre's Barbary (1986). Even the earliest woman writer for the pulp magazines, Clare Winger Harris,
in a 1928 short story, includes a woman scientist: Hildreth, chemist and astronomer, assistant to her
father in his home laboratory and soon to be assistant to her new husband. This interest of women
science fiction writers in women scientists seems not only a result of changes in women's careers in the
1960s but also of the struggle to educate women in the sciences in the late nineteenth century.4
Women scientists as characters in women's science fiction, moreover, seem a legacy of the earlier
feminist utopias. In Mary Bradley Lane's Mizora (1880-81), for example, chemists and mechanical
engineers make the all-woman society a technological utopia. And in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland
(1915), female geneticists have bred crop-producing and disease-resistant trees, as well as quiet cats
that do not kill birds, while other women have developed sciences unknown to Gilman's con-
temporaries-language as a science, sanitation, nutrition, and a kind of psychology-history. The feminist
utopias, as well as contemporary wom-en's science fiction, make us see a history of women in science,
not just a few great women who seem to be historical anomalies. In one of the earliest feminist
utopias, ThreeHundred YearsHence (1836), written when most women were still denied college
educations, Mary Griffith shows a future historian relating a woman's invention of a new power that
replaces steam, as well as restoring proper credit to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "for introducing into
England the practice of inoculation for the small-pox." Such a vision of restoring women to the history of
science is shared by Naomi Mitchison in Memoirs of a Spacewoman;her hero Mary reflects: I may be out
of date, but I always feel that biology and, of course, communication are essentially women's work, and
glory. Yes, I know there have been physicists like Yin Ih and molecular astronomers-I remember old Jane
Rakadsalismyself, her wonderful black, ageless face opening into a great smile! But somehow the
disciplines of life seem more congenial to most of us women.5 In 1962, when many colleges were still
effectually segregated by race and want ads were still separated by gender into male and female
occupations, Mitchison presents, as a matter of course, the participation of women of color in science.
What these utopian and science fiction writers offer, more importantly than portraits of individual
women scientists, is a revision of past and future science history that includes women as rightful
participants. In this way, they share a goal with feminist historians of science.
Discourse Shapes Reality
Discourse shapes reality.
Mack-Canty, 2004 (Collen Mack-Canty, assistant professor in the Political Science Department at the
University of Idaho, Ph.D. in Political Science with an emphasis in feminist theory from University of
Oregon, she does research and publishes articles that discuss ecofeminism, third-wave feminism, and
feminist families, Third-wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the Nature/Culture Duality, Autumn
of 2004, Routledge Press, Accessed: 6/27/14, RH)
Some ecofeminists, who follow the Wittgenstein idea that concept formation is strongly influenced by
language, make linguistic interconnections to explain subjugation. They maintain that language is
pivotal in maintaining mutually reinforcing sexist, racist, and naturist views of women, people of
color, and nonhuman nature. They call our attention to the considerable extent that Euro-American
language contains illustrations of sexist-naturist language depicting women, animals, and nonhuman
nature as having less value than men. Related to this approachis the ecofeminist animal welfare
"analysis that the oppression of nonhuman animals, is based on a variety of women-animal connections:
for example, sexist-naturalist language, images of women and animals as consumable objects,
pornographic representations of women as meat, male-perpetuated violence against women and
nonhuman animals" (Brennan 1988, 176 quoted in Warren2000, 126). Another method-that of making
symbolic and literary interconnections-is seen in a new genre of literary analysis: ecofeminist literary
criticism. This genre has emerged as a way to appraiseliterature according to criteria of ecological and
feminist values. Ecofeminists using this approach,maintain that the literary canon needs to be
reconsideredto include a de-homocentric approach.

Not Our Feminism
Reject their generic feminism or ecofem bad- it doesnt apply to us
Gaard, 10 (Greta, professor at University of Wisconson, ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and
documentary filmmaker, New Directions for Ecofeminism:Toward a More Feminist Ecocriticism
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, volume 0, number 0, pp. 123doi:10.1093
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for theStudy of Literature and
Environment, file:///Users/gema/Downloads/isle.isq108.full-libre.pdf)--CRG
In sum, then, feminists and ecocritics utilizing feminism's wave metaphor will inadvertently erase the
history of ecological feminism and feminisms of color from both feminism and ecocriticism alike. Given
such inaccuracies, we would do well to find a different metaphor for describing the developments of
ecocritical history-one that includes the contributions of feminisms in its framework, not just as a
footnote or augmentation-so that the future of ecocriticism may rest on firmer ground, and the new
developments of ecocritical perspectives on sexuality, psychology and species may flourish by drawing
from deeper historical roots." Buell as well as Adamson and Slovic agree: an inclusive narrative of
ecocritical history will recognize tl1at each development contains, moves forward, augments, and
interrogates the developments that precede it. Ecocriticism is expanding beyond-but must not erase-its
origins and multiple, continued developments.

Topicality/Framework Answers

2AC A2 T Exploration
1. We meet
2. Counter-interpretation - Exploration includes discursive exploration of the ocean as
a concept
Earnest 10(Mary Kate Earnest, Professor of English at the University of Texas, Early English Studies,
Volume 3, 2010, da: July 1 2014, A Ecocritical Exploration of the Unique Nature of Oceans in The Blazing
World, https://www.uta.edu/english/ees/pdf/earnest3.pdf,PS)
The early modern period was a time of expansion, as scientific philosophy developed through pursuit
of new knowledge and understanding; great thinkers such as Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, and Francis
Bacon laid the foundations of the scientific revolution. This movement and its scientific achi evements
brought a new worldview, a mechanistic approach, which Robert Hooke describes in his Micrographia
: we may perhaps be inabled to discern all the secret workings of Nature, almost in the same manner
as we do those that are the productions of Art, a nd are managd by Wheels, and Engines, and Springs,
that we devised by human Wit. 3 This desire to know the secret workings of Nature inspired a new
conceptualization of the world and a new relationship between humankind and natural phenomena.
Carolyn Me rchant describes negative aspects of this new relationship: As the sixteenth century
organic cosmos was transformed into the seventeenth century mechanistic universe, its life and vitality
were sacrificed for a world filled with dead and passive matter. 4 Slowly, the world seemed more
machine than organism; therefore, with the advancement of science came a loss of intimacy with
nature, a loss of interconnection between and humans and their surroundings. At first glance, oceans
dwell within this broad concept of nature; however, I suggest further investigation reveals that oceans
resist such classification. To explore shifting paradigms of nature requires an understanding of past and
present environmentalism. Humans are part of nature and, therefore, inter related with their object of
study. Subjectivity is inevitable, and necessitates an awareness o f definitions of ecology as well as
humankinds role in constructioning those definitions . Neil Evernden contends that inter -
relatedness is the crux of ecology a nd a commonly misunderstood or over - simplified concept. The
inter - related essence of ecology is not merely a matrix of causal connections, but rather a genuine
intermingling of parts of the ecosystem. There are no discrete entities. 5 Subsequently, there exists
no single, dominant, correct perceived model of nature. Throughout history, different ways to interact
with and understand the environment emerge from scientific advancement, technological innovation,
and climate change. Describing the changing tren ds of today, Howarth contends, Science is evolving
beyond Cartesian dualism toward quantum mechanics and chaos theory, where volatile, ceaseless
exchange is the norm. While some forms of postmodern criticism are following this lead, many
humanists still c ling to a rationale bias that ignores recent science. 6 One sees evidence of the more
recent argument in modern social networking technology and Internet discourse. Organicism,
particularly its notions of interconnection and causation, will soon be essenti al to the survival of our
planet. Investigating this paradigm shift away from organicism within early modern discourse can
illuminate new approaches and solutions to contemporary environmental issues.
3. Reasons to prefer
A) Written in the context of Earths oceans, unlike arbitrary context-less definitions
B) Only internal link to portable skills learning about the ocean in the abstract is
hardly useful knowledge, but understanding our relationship and responsibility
to nature is an important life skill
C) NEG ground they dont have a right to the DAs they say they lose we force
them to do case specific research and prepare innovative arguments
4. Reasonability as long as they get links, you shouldnt vote against us competing
interpretations incentivizes a focus on trivial distinctions between out of context
definitions

1AR Extensions T Exploration

Exploration isnt only physical it includes relationships
Earnest 10(Mary Kate Earnest, Professor of English at the University of Texas, Early English Studies,
Volume 3, 2010, da: July 1 2014, A Ecocritical Exploration of the Unique Nature of Oceans in The Blazing
World, https://www.uta.edu/english/ees/pdf/earnest3.pdf,PS)
Early modern perceptions of oceanic space diverged from standard perceptions of nature on land (or
land - nature) because oceans presented a different type of wilderness. Because oceans defied early
modern definitions of nature, they refused to support the developing mechanistic approach in the
way that land - nature did. I examine Margaret Cavendishs The Blazing World to illustrate how the
liminal position of oceans within the humankind - nature paradigm necessitated a hybrid mechanistic -
organic relationsh ip and representation. This exploration demonstrates how oceans, as an
extraterrestrial space distanced from traditional, terrestrial nature, constituted a different kind of
natural phenomenon and contributed to a global mentality. Experimenting with human kinds
perceptions of, and approaches to, nature suggests that the organic/mechanistic dichotomy is an
overly - simplified paradigm, and that the human/nature partition is equally simplistic due to differing
natures of terrestrial verses oceanic space. Oce ans do not fit neatly under the paradigm of
nature, they deviate through resistance and idiosyncrasy. Charting oceans proves an effective step in
diversifying definitions, representations, and perceptions of nature.
2AC A2 State Key
The state has been horrible to the eco-fem movement
Kirk, 1997 (Gwyn Kirk, scholar-activist concerned with gender, racial, and environmental justice,
taught environmental studies, womens studies, political science, and sociology at Rutgers, the
University of Oregon, University of San Francisco, Antioch College, Colorado College, Hamilton College,
and Mills College, she has also published eight books, her articles regarding feminism, ecology, and
transnational feminism have been in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Berkeley Womens Law
Journal, Foreign Policy in Focus, Frontiers, Peace Review, and Social Justice, in 2002, she received a
Rockefeller Fellowship at the University of Hawaii, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Womens Leadership
Institute at Mills College, she is the founding member of International Womens Network Against
Militarism, Ph.D. in sociology from London School of Economics, Masters in Town Planning from Leeds
Polytechnic, 1997, Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice: Bridges across Gender, Race, and Class,
JSTOR, Accessed: 6/27/14, RH)
Women make up the majority of local activists in environmental justice organizations, sometimes
because they have a sick child or because they have become ill themselves. Illnesses caused by toxins
are often difficult to diagnose and treat because they affect internal organs and the balance of body
functioning.Women have been persistent in raising questions and searching for plausible explanations
for such illnesses, sometimes discovering that their communities have been built on contaminated land
or tracing probable sources of pollution affecting the neighborhood.14They have publicized their
findings and taken on governmental agencies and corporations responsible for contamination. In so
doing they are often ridiculed as "hysterical house wives" by officials and report-ers who have
trivialized their research as emotional and unscholarly. By contrast, Lin Nelson honors this works as
kitchen table science. In October 1991 women were 60 percent of the participants at the First National
People of Color Envi- ronmental Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C. Many urban gardenersin
northern cities are elderly women, while in rural areaswomen work on family garden plots, planting,
harvesting, and processing fruit and vegetables for home use.15As ethnobotanists, women know
backcountry areasin great detail because they go there at different seasons to gather herbs for
medicinal purposes. Among Mexican Americans, for example, curanderas-traditional healers-continue to
work with herbalremedies.16 This detailedknowledge is learnedfrom olderpeople, as is also the case
with some Native Americans and others who live in ruralareas. Gender is significant for women in the
environmental justice movement, but thisisnot aconcept of genderdivorcedfromraceandclass.Women
activistssee their identity as women integratedwith their racialand class identities, with race and/or class
often more of a place of empowerment for them than gender. Al- though they recognize their own
subordination based on gender, they are not interested in separatingthemselves from the men in their
communities and frame their perspectives, as women, in class- and race-conscious ways.
2AC Framework Frontline (One Off)
1. We meet USFG should be defined by the constitution and the preamble says
We the people I am an example of USFG action in the same way that an XO
or courts counterplan is an example of USFG action/
2. Counter interpretation: the aff should be allowed to have a discussion about
the topic rather than a topical discussion.
3. Resolved is to reduce by mental analysis, Random House 11
(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/resolve)
4. Should indicates desirability, OED 11
(http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/should?region=us)
5. Permutation do both interpretations they are not mutually exclusive
6. Definitions of words are arbitrary we assume words mean particular things
because we are accultured to think so, but really, meaning changes over time
this means that predictability is fundamentally arbitrary
7. The entire 1AC is an impact turn to framework
8. Policy debates are inevitable solves all their offense
9. Deliberation DA framework uses masculine claims of rationality to determine
what knowledge is legitimate for public debate pushing unproductive
knowledge to the private sphere There is only a risk that interruptions like the
affirmative are able to reclaim the public sphere
Peterson in 2000 V. Spike Peterson. Rereading Public and Private: The Dichotomy that is Not One1
SAIS Review. Vol 20, Num 2. Pp 11-29. Summer-Fall 2000. //ED
In Homer and Thucydides, the meanings of public and private are delineated in relation to the demands
of war and the moral dilemmas they pose. In this sense, their accounts link the states external affairs
to impossible internal dilemmas. In contrast, the most familiar account of public and private, provided
by Aristotle, avoids the question of war and external affairs. Instead of a tragic choice between
competing but parallel claims to loyalty, Aristotle resolves the dilemma by privileging the public
sphere over the private. Here, the public realm of politics constitutes the highest association, a realm
of freedom and equality, where citizens pursue the good life. This higher realm depends upon but
encompasses the private sphere, which is characterized not by freedom but necessity, and involves not
equal but naturally hierarchical relationships. In this account, the public sphere of free, equal, reasoning
citizens is masculinized by the exclusion of women and feminized characteristics, while the private
sphere of contingency, inequality, and emotional attachments is feminized by the relegation of women
and characteristics of femininity to it. This is the model of public and private most frequently assumed
in the Western tradition of social and political theory. Arguably its greatest significance is in defining the
boundary and elevating the status of politics: the dichotomy distinguishes what is deemed political
and therefore what is politicized. That which is associated with the private sphere is denied the status
of being political, hence, denied the important sense of being contingent (not given), contestable (not
fixed), and of collective interest (not simply personal). Not only do we inherit a bounded domain of
citizenship and political power, but we also inherit a subordinated sphere of naturalized inequality. Or
so we assume. What Aristotle intended is the subject of ongoing debate, but he is clear about the
interdependence of public and private, which is often lost in modern accounts.14 This interdependence
was both emotional and economic. The public sphere depended as much on the cultivation of virtue,
love, and emotional attachments15 as it did on the economic productivity of the oikos (household).
Hence, on the one hand, Aristotles account is more complex and less binary than conventionally
assumed. On the other, however, his characterization does establish the hierarchy of public over
private (and masculine over feminine), and his avoidance of war and external affairs and omission of
(non-oikos) market exchanges introduce differently problematic simplifications.
10. Privilege DA Fairness and predictability is not neutral or objective but rather
shot through with biases produced by dominant power relations. Their notion
of fairness glosses over issues of inequality.
Delgado 92, Law Prof at U. of Colorado, 1992 *Richard, Shadowboxing: An Essay On Power, In
Cornell Law Review, May]
We have cleverly built power's view of the appropriate standard of conduct into the
very term fair. Thus, the stronger party is able to have his [their] way and see himself
[themselves] as principled at the same time. Imagine, for example, a man's likely
reaction to the suggestion that subjective considerations -- a woman's mood, her sense of
pressure or intimidation, how she felt about the man, her unexpressed fear of reprisals if she did not go ahead -- ought to
play a part in determining whether the man is guilty of rape. Most men find this suggestion
offensive; it requires them to do something they are not accustomed to doing. "Why," they say, "I'd have to be a mind reader
before I could have sex with anybody?" "Who knows, anyway, what internal inhibitions the woman might have been
harboring?" And "what if the woman simply changed her mind later and charged me with rape? What we never notice is that
women can "read" men's minds perfectly well. The male perspective is right out there in the world,
plain as day, inscribed in culture, song, and myth -- in all the prevailing narratives.
These narratives tell us that men want and are entitled to sex, that it is a prime
function of women to give it to them, and that unless something unusual happens,
the act of sex is ordinary and blameless. We believe these things because that is the
way we have constructed women, men, and "normal" sexual intercourse. Notice what the
objective standard renders irrelevant: a downcast look;

ambivalence; the question, "Do you really think we should?"; slowness
in following the man's lead; a reputation for sexual selectivity; virginity; youth; and innocence. Indeed, only a loud firm
"no" counts, and probably only if it is repeated several times, overheard by others, and accompanied
by forceful body language such as pushing the man and walking away briskly. Yet society and law accept
only this latter message (or something like it), and not the former, more nuanced ones, to mean
refusal. Why? The "objective" approach is not inherently better or more fair. Rather, it is
accepted because it embodies the sense of the stronger party, who centuries ago found himself
in a position to dictate what permission meant. Allowing ourselves to be drawn into reflexive,
predictable arguments about administrability, fairness, stability, and ease of
determination points us away from what really counts: the way in which stronger
parties have managed to inscribe their views and interests into "external" culture, so
that we are now enamored with that way of judging action. First, we read our values and
preferences into the culture; then we pretend to consult that culture meekly and humbly in order to
judge our own acts. A nice trick if you can get away with it.
11. Stabilization DA Framework is an attempt to stabilize debate this excludes
non-heteronormative bodies and arguments from our discussions
12. Sequencing DA - Framework seeks to shift the focus back to male-centered
ideals by censoring the feminine. The aff is a perquisite to any productive form
of politics without breaking the bars on our cage we will always be censored
Mojab 02 (Shahrzad, director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute and an Associate Professor
in the Department of Adult Education and Psychology at University of Toronto, Canada; Information,
Censorship, and Gender Relations in Global Capitalism Information for Social Change 1)//ED
It is important to know more about the ties that bind censorship to gender. Even when one barrier is
removed, others emerge to ensure the reproduction of the status quo. For instance, after decades of
struggle, beginning in late nineteenth century, legal barriers to women's access to parliament and
political office were removed in the West and, later, in many non-Western states. This was achieved, not
simply through access to information, but rather due to women's determination to create knowledge
and consciousness, and engage in mobilizing and organizing (sit-ins, demonstrations, picketing,
leafleting, singing, etc.) in schools, homes, streets, churches, and university campuses. However, states
and state-centred politics continue to be male-centred. Even when women have a proportionate
participation in the parliament, there is no guarantee that they would all advocate feminist alternatives
to an androcentric agenda; and this is the case for the simple reason that women can be as patriarchal
in their politics as some men are.A more adequate approach to the understanding of censorship is, I
believe, to see it not as an irrational practice, as a mischievous attitude, or a technical problem of
obstructing channels of communication. Censorship is an integral part of the exercise of gender power,
class power, and the powers of the nation, ethnicity, religion and governance. Not only does it deny
women access to information, but also limits their participation in the creation of knowledge, and
denies them the power to utilize knowledge.If in pre-modern times the church was the major player in
creating knowledge, today the market produces, disseminates, and utilizes much of the knowledge,
which has achieved the status of a commodity. Knowledge is "intellectual property." Even the
knowledge created in public and semi-public institutions such as universities is increasingly geared to
the agenda of the market, and serves the promotion of market interests. Moreover, Western states
primarily entertain the market as the lifeline of economy, culture and society. They increasingly aim at
giving all the power to the market. In dictatorial regimes, however, the state still plays a prominent role
in censoring the creation and dissemination of knowledge. From Peru to Turkey, to Iran and to China,
states suppress activists, journalists, libraries, bookstores, print and broadcast media, satellite dishes
and the Internet. They often do so by committing violence against the citizens and the communication
systems they use.Although we may find much gender-based subtlety in the techniques of limiting
women's access to information, I believe that the subtlest censorship is denying feminist knowledge a
visible role in the exercise of power. The state, Western and non-Western, rules through privileging
androcentric knowledge as the basis for governance. The conduct of national censuses, for instance,
continues to be based on androcentric worldviews in spite of devastating feminist critique. To give
another example, women are now recruited into Western armies in combat functions, but states
continue to ignore feminist and pacifist knowledge that challenges the very phenomenon of war and
violence (Cynthia Enloe, 2000). Women themselves can be and, often, are part of the problem. In the
absence of feminist consciousness, they generally act as participants in the reproduction of patriarchal
gender relations. In Islamic societies, when men engage in the "honour" killing of their wives, daughters
or sisters, sometimes mothers participate in or tolerate the horrendous crime (Mojab, 2002). The
democratisation of gender relations is a conscious intervention in a power structure that is closely
interlocked with the powers of the state, class, race, ethnicity, religion and tradition. For both women
and men, challenging patriarchy means defying one's own values, worldviews, emotions, and traditions.
At the same time, it involves risk taking including, in some situations, loss of life. Women's full access to
androcentric knowledge will not disturb the status quo. I argue that, in the absence of feminist
consciousness, women may even act as ministers of propaganda and censorship. They will not be in a
position to exercise the democratic right to revolt against oppressive rule. In the West, feminist
knowledge cannot be suppressed through book-burning, jailing, torture, and assassination. Censorship is
conducted, much more effectively, by stigmatizing and marginalising feminist knowledge as "special
interest," while androcentrism is promoted as the norm, the canon, and "human nature." That is why, I
contend, that if we fill all the media institutions with female managers and staff, if we give all
educational institutions to women, or hand over all high-rank military positions to women, the
androcentric world order with its violence, war, poverty, and degenerating environment will continue to
function. Globalization, as it is understood in mainstream media and in state discourses, is nothing new;
it emerged with the rise of capitalism; the main engine of globalization is the capitalist market, and it is
promoted and planned by capitalist states through various organs such as the G8, World Bank, European
Union, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, etc. The impact of this globalization on
women has been largely negative, especially in the developing world. Millions of girls aged 5 to 15 are
recruited into the global prostitution market. Millions more leave their families and countries to raise
some income as maids. However, other forms of globalization or, rather, internationalization have been
in the making. For instance, feminism has evolved as an international movement in spite of the
opposition of conservatives in many parts of the world. It has been able to put women's demands on the
agenda of states and international organs such as the United Nations. Media are also important actors in
globalisation. Women have had more presence in the media both as producers and as targets or sources
of entertainment and information programming. There is considerable progress, for instance, in the
production of women and feminist press in many developing countries. The Internet and desktop
publishing present new opportunities for more media activism. Egypt has a women's television channel.
Focusing on the question of censorship, the crucial issue is freedom of speech not only for women but
also more significantly, for feminists and feminist knowledge. Feminist knowledge and consciousness is
the primary target of censorship. Do the globalizing media allow women of the developing countries to
learn about the achievements of Western women in fighting patriarchy? Do women of the West learn
from the struggles of women in India, Jamaica or Saudi Arabia? Do the global media allow women
everywhere to know about the Beijing Conference and its aftermath? Do they disseminate adequate
and accurate information about the World March of Women? My answers are rather in the negative.
The cyberspace is much like the realspace that creates it. The fact that many individual women or
groups can set up their websites does not change power relations in the realspace. The negative
stereotyping of women, for instance, cannot change without the dissemination of feminist
consciousness among both men and women. Even if stereotyping is eliminated, gender inequality will
persist. "Gender-based censorship" cannot be overcome as long as gender relations remain unequal and
oppressive. It can, however, be reduced or made less effective. While the concept "gender-based
censorship" is useful, it should be broadened to include "censorship of feminist knowledge." The
following are just a few ideas about what we may do:A) Creating theoretical and empirical knowledge
about gender-based censorship, and especially the censorship of feminist knowledge and feminist
movements. B) Disseminating this knowledge and awareness among citizens. Using this knowledge for
the purpose of dismantling patriarchal power. Knowledge makes a difference when it is put into
practice. C) Making this knowledge available to policy makers and integrating it into policy making in the
institutions of the market, the state, and non-state and non-market forces. These goals will not be
achieved in the absence of feminist and women's movements. If censorship is not a mistake, but rather
it is an organ for exercising gender and class power, resistance to it, too, should be a part of the struggle
for a democratic regime.
13. Rationalism DA assertions like You have to read a plan enforce a norm of
white masculinity and a political sphere governed exclusively by western
rationality and pragmatics this always leads to increased violence.
14. Grassroots DA - only grassroots movements OUTSIDE THE USFG solve.
Making political interconnections is integral to ecofeminism, which has always been a grassroots
political movement motivated by pressing pragmatic concerns (Warren2000, 35). In addition to
women's activism to sustain their families and communities, the relationship of environmental and
women's health to science and development projects, animal rights, and peace activism are examples of
issues that cause ecofeminists' concern and motivate their activism. Connections between grassroots
activism and ecofeminist theory are explained by Stephanie Laharas follows: Ecofeminist political goals
include the deconstruction of oppressive social economic and political systems and the reconstruction of
more viable social and political forms.No version of ecofeminist theory dictates exactly what people
should do in the face of situations encountered... [This]theory advocates a combined politics of
resistance and creative projects... [Ecofeminism] contributes an overall framework and conceptual
inks to the political understanding of the interplay between social and environmental issues and
routes to political empowerment through understanding the effects of one's actions
extendedthroughmultiplehumanandnonhumancommunities.(1996,15 quotedin Warren2000,35-6
15. Hierarchies DA - framework has historically be used to justify patriarchal
domination and oppression by controlling the lense through which we perceive
reality
A second approach some ecofeminists take to understand the ideology that perpetuates domination is
an analysis of conceptual frameworks that have functioned historically to perpetuate and justify the
dominations of interconnected subjugations. Conceptual frameworks function as socially constructed
lenses through which one perceives reality. These conceptual frameworks can be oppressive, as Val
Plumwood's (1996) explanation of the part played by rationalism in the domination of women and
nonhuman nature illustrates. Plumwood deconstructs the notion of rationalism to explain how
structures of domination are based "in hier- archically organizedvalue dualism (such as man/woman,
nature/culture, mind/body) and an exaggeratedfocus on reason and rationality divorced from the realm
of the body, nature, and the physical" (Warren2000, 24). Warren,herself, makes similar conceptual
connections. She locates these connections in an oppressive patriarchal conceptual framework,
mediated by what she calls "alogic of domination." This "logic"provides the moral premise for
domination/subordination relationships based on socially constructed dualistic notions of
superiority/inferiority.
16. Attaching a voter to framework is a voting issue because it implies that what
we have to say is invaluable, the aff should have never happened, and our
argument should be removed completely from the debate space that type of
offensive and exclusionary violence should be rejected on face nothing makes
kids quit the activity more than telling them we dont want you here
17. Link turn - we produce substantially better versions of citizenship and action by
questioning the implicit criteria that framework is built upon
18. Prefer reasonability competing interpretations cause a race to the bottom
that decimates substantive debate
2AC Framework-Topical Version
1) There is no topical version:
a. any movement that starts within the state will be co-opted.
b. changes we make in the debate space are important
2) Topical version would never solve need grassroots movements outside of the
government - thats the grassroots DA on case. (Fiat doesnt solve this because
its an issue of long-term implementation.)
3) A plan text would moot our entire 1AC. In the debate community, a topical plan
text defines an entire case when its present and allows the negative to segue
into a not-at-all-topical discussion of Keynesian economics or hegemony.
Having a plan text would destroy our affs ability to force a discussion about the
topic.

2AC Framework-Switch Side Debate Good

1) Personal Agency DA: Switch side debate is bad because when we refuse to take
a side, we never grasp a hold on the reality of how ocean policies are
implemented in the first place. Debating without grasping true knowledge in
one particular issue is what precludes debate agency, we never become
informed about how ocean policy in the status quo hurts feminine subjects
means at best their education is shallow.
2) Your notion of switching side is fundamentally exclusionary and small-
mindedjust because we talk about ecofem on the aff and neg doesnt mean
we arent switching sides. Our methodology on the neg is a direct answer to our
aff, so we are switching sides on how we should fight heteronormativity and
patriarchy.
3) Any topical development aff really is a case neg to our aff because we are a K of the
way we develop the ocean in the status quo if they are prepared to answer our
argument on the aff then they are also prepared to answer it on the neg if they say
we are wrong about this then this means we ARE excluded.
4) Objective Disconnect DA- Switch Side debate promotes distance from the
argument to the viewpoint of the debaters, which only produces shallow
debate education. SSD is a practice only privileged, white people can afford
because it leaves no room for true agency or morality.
Wise 2007 Wise, T. (2007). White Like Me. Berkeley: Soft Skull Press.
I say that this process is white because in my experience it appeals to the way
white folks, especially the affluent ones that can typically afford debate, view the
world, and equally seems repugnant to people of color for the same reasons.
White folks have the luxury of looking at life or death issues of war, peace,
famine, unemployment, or criminal justice as a game. So for me to get up and
actually debate, for example, whether or not full employment is a good idea or
racial profiling a bad one--as if there's really a debate about that or should be
one--is already a white-identified act. People of color, it seems, are not as likely to
want to argue the finer points of whether or not we should let poor people starve
in order to reduce overpopulation--an argument that gets made all the time by
competitive debaters because it wins rounds. The amoral and often racist cretins who believe
that shit and write books saying it make really good sources, and since indicting a source for
being a racist cretin has never won a single debate round anywhere, they'll keep on being cited
as if they were something other than modern-day Goebbels knock-offs. Although I never
heard a debater argue that we should implement Naziism as a national political
system, the unspoken rules of competitive debate pretty much say that if they
did, and if they did it well, and if the other team couldn't provide some
compelling reason why Naziism would be, um, bad--and believe it or not genocide
and racism wouldn't necessarily be enough for that purpose--the Nazis would
win.

5) Reading our advocacy on the aff is key to solve. The aff and neg serve different
roles in debate and the ballot is always a question of whether the aff is good or
bad. Reading our K on the neg makes it a form of reactionary politics to
whatever the aff is and forces us to never discuss the structural problems in the
status quo and the patterns represented by the resolution.
6) Its key to have our advocacy as the center of the debate so the neg can run Ks
and Disads against us to truly test our advocacythat cant happen when were
neg.
7) aying we can read it on the neg relegates our advocacy to half the rounds we
havewe need to be able to run our advocacy in every round, not just the ones
the dominant system decides are ok.
8) Switch Sides debate is a technology that fashions a liberal citizen subjectivity
that justifies the archetype of American exceptionalism
GREEN Dpt of Comm Studies, Univ of Minn & HICKS Assoc. Prof of Human Comm Studies, Univ of Denver
2k5
Day also demonstrated his commitment to free speech more radically than Schlesinger by abandoning Schlesingers
deployment of clear and present danger as an external value to regulate the reasonableness of speech. Yet, Days
defence of debating both sides elides the national particularity of how free speech was being put to work in the global
struggle between liberal democracy and totalitarianism. One way that Cold War liberalism helped to transform the
national particularity of the United States into a universal form of liberalism was through the constitution of free speech
as a democratic norm. As a cultural technology debating both sides contributed to
American exceptionalism by transforming students into the concrete embodied
performers of the universal norms of free speech. In other words, by instantiating a desire for full
and free expression, the pedagogical technique of debating both sides became a
mechanism by which the student-debater-citizen becomes an exceptional
American the bearer of universal norms of liberal democracy.

2AC Framework-Role Playing Good

1) Minority Participation DA- Role Playing only leads to exclusion in the debate
community, making debate relevant for people of color should be what we
strive for.
bell hooks 1990, black feminist and author, postmodern blackness
It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about
heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow
recognition of otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized
audience, one that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims
to challenge. If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact
then a critical break with the notion of "authority" as "mastery over" must not
simply be a rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of being, including
styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter. Third-world scholars, especially elites, and
white critics who passively absorb white supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or look at black people on the
streets, at their jobs, who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce liberatory
theory that will challenge racist domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and thinking about
reality, ways of constructing aesthetic theory and practice. From a different standpoint Robert Storr makes a similar
critique in the global issue of _Art in America_ when he asserts: To be sure, much postmodernist critical
inquiry has centered precisely on the issues of "difference" and "otherness." On the
purely theoretical plane the exploration of these concepts has produced some important results,
but in the absence of any sustained research into what artists of color and others outside the
mainstream might be up to, such discussions become rootless instead of radical.
Endless second guessing about the latent imperialism of intruding upon other cultures only compounded matters,
preventing or excusing these theorists from investigating what black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American artists were
actually doing. Without adequate concrete knowledge of and contact with the non-white
"other," white theorists may move in discursive theoretical directions that are
threatening to and potentially disruptive of that critical practice which would support
radical liberation struggle.
2) Moral Bankruptcy DA- Role Playing ensures that there is no intrinsic value to
debate in the first place. Role playing means that there is no pedagogical value
to debate which only leads to shallow debates.

2AC Framework- Ground
Groundyou get ground, F/W is ground, Pic out of something, read a K. They have
access to specific queer theory Ks with links. Make them prove a distinction between
ground and enough ground.

1AR FW (One Off)

Extend 2AC 10 - By reading framework they are asserting their privilege in debate in a
violent way. They find it unfair that because our 1AC has no plan text they suddenly
dont have access to the standards they feel entitled to. They think they have an
inherent right to things like fair ground and reasonable limits whereas in reality, every
other type of person in debate doesnt have those same rights because we are
systemically discriminated against in this activity. Rights of fairness and education are
denied to millions each and every day, used as a label of otherness, a tool of their
oppression. Only discussions and proposals like our affirmative are able to break down
this heteronormative thought process thats Delgado 92

Critique Answers
A2 K Generic
Generic Critique Response
Any scholarship other than those created through an ecofeminist lens is inherently
wrong- reject their K because of their refusal to incorporate the ecofeminist
Gaard, 10 (Greta, professor at University of Wisconson, ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and
documentary filmmaker, New Directions for Ecofeminism:Toward a More Feminist Ecocriticism
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, volume 0, number 0, pp. 123doi:10.1093
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for theStudy of Literature and
Environment, file:///Users/gema/Downloads/isle.isq108.full-libre.pdf)--CRG
'These omissions in ecocritical omissions are not merely a biblio graphic matter of failing to cite feminist
scholarship, but signify a more profound conceptual failure to grapple with the issues being raised by
that scholarship as feminist, a failure made more egregious when the same ideas are later celebrated
what presented via non- feminist sources. For example, the animal studies groundwork of vegan
feminists and ecofeminists is barely mentioned in the currently celebrated field of posthumanism, yet
feminist scholarship both pre- dates and helpfully complicates that work: consider, most recently; how
Adams (2010) augments Cary Wolfe's (2003) complication of the humanfanimal binary with categories
not just of Wolfe's humanized human,animalizedhuman,humanizedanima1,andanimalized animal, but
also animalized woman and femimied animal, terms that foreground the genderfspeciesfecology
connections that are so re]- evant to eoocriticism. Omissions and distortions of feminist ecocriticism are
one part of the problem; appropriation is another.
A2 Edelman
2AC Edelman K
( ) the role of the ballot is to vote for the team who best methodologically and
performativly reshapes the topic and the debate space in the vision of queer
ecofeminism
( ) The affirmative never declared a stance based on any future representations. The
purpose of the 1AC is to reshape and reform queer and nature politics as it is now
( ) The Queer Kinship contention solves the K. Representing a science fiction world
in which women no longer reproduce in the classic heterosexual way that we know
now. This means that we dont view reproductive futurism the way the negative
claims we do
( ) Edelmans concept of queer negativity is totalizing and is much too simple in its
view of queer optimism- Edelman leads to a form of queer nihilism where we are
forced to take absolutely no actions against queer oppression
Snediker, 6 (Michael, professor and philosopher at Mount Holyoke College, Queer Optimism,
Postmodern Culture, http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.506/16.3snediker.html)--CRG
Juxtaposed with Lee Edelman's 2004 book, No Future, the orchestratively powerful but nonetheless
opaque queer pessimism of the above theorists would seem like kid stuff (to invoke Edelman's own
charged turn to this formulation). The queer pessimism of Butler and Bersani, circuited from text to text
in a persuasiveness inseparable from its occludedness, brings to mind Jean Laplanche's enigmatic
signifier.[17] Edelman's queer pessimism, by contrast, insistent on its own absolute non-enigmatic
unequivocality, might suggest the draconian bravura of a superego were Edelman's project not so pitted
against the superego, pitted against all forms of stable identity except the "irreducible" (No Future 6)
identity of the death drive. Though moving beyond the strictures of psychoanalysis, it is difficult for me
not to hear in the sheer absoluteness of Edelman's dicta something like a superego's militancy. Edelman
insists that "the only oppositional status to which our queerness could ever lead would depend on our
taking seriously the place of the death drive we're called on to figure" (30). Edelman, as the passage I've
cited suggests, doesn't seem to leave queers a lot of options, even as the option he adjures hardly
seems self-evident. The egregious militancy of No Future presents an apogee of what I've been calling
queer pessimism. Or if not an apogee, then a sort of pessimism-drag. My own thinking differs from
Edelman's in many ways, and might often go without saying.[18] How, for instance, could a project
attached to queer optimism not bristle at a book that insists unilaterally that "the only oppositional
status" available to queers demands fealty to the death drive? Edelman's book certainly trounces
optimism, but the optimism he trounces is not the optimism for which my own project lobbies. Edelman
writes thus: The structuring optimism of politics to which the order of meaning commits us, installing as
it does the perpetual hope of reaching meaning through signification, is always, I would argue, a
negation of this primal, constitutive, and negative act. And the various positivities produced in its wake
by the logic of political hope depend on the mathematical illusion that negated negations might
somehow escape, and not redouble, such negativity. My polemic thus stakes its fortunes on a truly
hopeless wager: that taking the Symbolic's negativity to the very letter of the law . . . that turning the
force of queerness against all subjects, however queer, can afford an access to the jouissance that at
once defines us and negates us. Or better: can expose the constancy, the inescapability, of such access
to jouissance in the social order itself, even if that order can access its constant access to jouissance only
in the process of abjecting that constancy of access onto the queer. (5)
As I've made clear, and as this essay's final section will make clearer, queer optimism is no more
attached to "the logic of political hope" than No Future is. Even as I think there are some forms of hope
worth defending, I'm not interested, for present purposes, in demarcating good and bad hopes,
hegemonic and nonhegemonic attachments to futurity. To the extent that my own project seeks to
recuperate optimism's potential critical interest by arguing for its separability from the promissory, I'm
here insisting that there are ways of resisting a pernicious logic of "reproductive futurism" besides
embodying the death drive. If Edelman opines that all forms of optimism eventually lead to Little
Orphan Annie singing "Tomorrow," and therefore that all forms of optimism must be met with queer
death-driven irony's "always explosive force" (31), I oppositely insist that optimism's limited cultural and
theoretical intelligibility might not call for optimism's grandiose excoriation, but for optimism to be
rethought along non-futural lines. Edelman's hypostasization of optimism accepts optimism as at best
simplistic and at worst fascistic. This hypostasization leaves unthinkable queer optimism's own
proposition that the reduction of optimism to a diachronic, futurally bound axis is itself the outcome of a
machinery that spits out optimism as junk, and renders suspicious any form of "enjoyment" that isn't a
(mis)translation of jouissance, "a violent passage beyond the bounds of identity, meaning, and law" (25),
the production of "identity as mortification." Enjoyment, anyone?[19]
( ) Turn: Quality of Life caring about the future is good. Thinking constructively
about future possibilities improves our quality of life.
WFS 2 World Future Society, nonprofit, nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization founded in
1966, 2002 (A brief overview of the study of the future and the services of the World Future Society,
Available Online at http://www.wfs.org/ownermanual.htm, Accessed 04-10-2007)
To meet the challenges of the future, we need to find out about what we can plausibly expect in the
years ahead so we can understand what our options are. We can then set reasonable goals and develop
effective strategies for achieving them.
Many people believe it is impossible to know anything about the future, so the future can simply be
ignored. This is a very serious mistake. It's true, of course, that we can know only a little about the
future, but that little is extremely important, because a knowledge of the futureeven when it's very
uncertainis critical in making wise decisions, in both our professional and personal lives.
Learning what we can know about the future enables us to think constructively about it and do things
that will contribute to our achieving a desirable future, because preparation is needed to meet the
challenges of the future and take advantage of the new opportunities opening up.
We humans really do have the ability to think constructively about the future, anticipate many future
events, envision desirable goals, and develop effective strategies for realizing our purposes. By learning
about current trends and likely future developments, we can develop a mental data bank and set of
blueprints for improving our future life. These assets can help us to succeed in whatever we seek to
achieve.
Proactive, future-oriented thinking can lead to greater success in both work and private affairs. The
future will happen, no matter what we do, but if we want it to be a good future, we need to work at it.
As Adlai Stevenson put it, "Change is inevitable; change for the better is a full-time job."
( ) Not our optimism. Edelmans conception of optimism is only the concept of
premature decisions- the aff only focuses on reforming now
Snediker, 6 (Michael, professor and philosopher at Mount Holyoke College, Queer Optimism,
Postmodern Culture, http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.506/16.3snediker.html)--CRG
In the vernacular, optimism is often imagined epithetic-ally as "premature": as though if the optimist at
hand knew all that she could eventually know, she would retract her optimism altogether. Prematurity
would qualify optimism as a temporary state of insufficient information. The phrase "woefully
optimistic," on the other hand, implies that the knowledge that would warrant optimism's retraction
might never arrive. As an epithet, "woefully" (like "hegemonic," "dubious," or "premature") subjects
optimism to an outside judgment, the likes of which the optimist in question is presumed unable to
make. It is difficult to imagine an optimist, as conventionally understood, denominating her own
optimism as woeful or premature. Indeed, the moment at which a person is able to characterize her
optimism as such might well mark the moment at which being optimistic cedes, as a position, if not to
being pessimistic, then to something like being realistic. (I will return to the idea that being pessimistic
potentially is potentially equivalent to being realistic.) The epithets delineated, that is, do not describe
optimism so much as impose a diagnosis external to it that would make further characterizations of
optimism (and more to the point, attachments to optimism) unnecessary.
( ) Perm do the plan and reject reproductive futurism- while we attempt to make the
world better for women and queers now, we dont have to look towards a perfect
future
( ) No link- The plan doesnt put any value of heterosexual reproduction and makes no
claim about the future

( ) Queer negativity fails, 4 reasons: its essentialist, indebted to discourse,
exclusionary towards women, and its counterproductive to real social change
Bateman, 4 (R. Benjamin, a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Virginia. His dissertation,
currently underway, explores gay autobiographies from 1880 to the present. His research interests
include modernism, psychoanalysis, and queer theory, The Future of Queer Theory, on Lee Edelman,
No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Duke UP, ns 65-66, The Minnesota Review,
http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns6566/bateman_r_benjamin_ns6566_stf1.shtml)--CRG
Since its inception, queer theory has provoked readers with its radical negativityits hostility to
identity politics, to all essentialist accounts of gender and sexuality and to anything smacking of
heteronormativity. Michel Foucault problematized the homosexual subject of gay and lesbian politics by
showing its indebtedness to disciplinary discourses inherited from nineteenth century sexology and
eugenics. Judith Butler, whose Gender Trouble galvanized queer theory, alleged that sex and not simply
gender is socially constructed and that political appeals to the category "woman" entrench an
exclusionary essentialism. And Leo Bersani argued that queer culture models anti-communalism through
its sadomasochistic and frequently anonymous sexual practices. Gaining credibility as a queer theorist, it
appears, necessitates the assumption of increasingly radical, and at times counterintuitive, political
positions.

( ) Perm queer the alternative- negativity should be a queered consideration of the
positive and negative for a more nuanced solution
Selfhood Resignified, 10 (Blog written by an anonymous queer-identified, "academic, currently in
my second year of Ph.D. work in Feminist Studies, December 2, 2010, Optimistic? Well, Theoretically:
Found on Selfhood Resignified, http://selfhoodresignified.wordpress.com/tag/queer-theory/) --CRG
Albeit reductionist, queer optimism might be better understood as a new version, or close relative, to
curiosity or potentiality. Queer optimism Snediker writes, doesnt aspire toward happiness, but
instead find happiness interesting (3, emphasis his). Optimism is thus not the belief in something
positive or promissory, but rather an openness, an intrigue, with the idea of the positive or promissory.
For Snediker it is a meta-optimism in that it wants to think about feeling good, to make disparate
aspects of feeling good thinkable. (3, emphasis his). In direct resistance to Edelman, Snediker asks, why
does rejection of a primary attachment to futuritynecessarily require the embodiment of negativity?
(24). Despite its misleading name, queer optimism rejects and complicates this binary framework of
affect and temporality. It is not an acquiescence of the positive, but rather a queered consideration of
the positive, the negative, and that which has yet to be revealed from nuance.
( ) Edelman doesnt do anything for real queer individuals- in fact he only hurts them
as he renders them a parasite in our society
Bateman, 4 (R. Benjamin, a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Virginia. His dissertation,
currently underway, explores gay autobiographies from 1880 to the present. His research interests
include modernism, psychoanalysis, and queer theory, The Future of Queer Theory, on Lee Edelman,
No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Duke UP, ns 65-66, The Minnesota Review,
http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns6566/bateman_r_benjamin_ns6566_stf1.shtml)--CRG
Such extremity finds full expression in Lee Edelman's polemic, No Future. Subtitled Queer Theory and
the Death Drive, the book argues that politics as we know it relies upon a future-oriented logic that is
indissociably intertwined with heterosexuality and with what Edelman terms "reproductive futurism."
On Edelman's reading, the face of the child, epitomized by Dickens's Tiny Tim, coerces usthrough
conjuring our compassioninto subordinating our present wants and enjoyments to the always-
deferred, future needs of "innocent" children. Tim's vulnerability turns vindictive, Edelman proceeds,
when conservatives use 'protecting children' as a pretext for discriminating against gays and lesbians.
Nowhere is this disguised homophobia more apparent than in recent 'arguments' against gay marriage.
But when gays and lesbians respond by insisting that they value marriage, children, and their society's
futureand not simply the ephemeral delights of sex and drugs, as conservatives would have itthey
abandon the subversive force of queer sexuality. Instead of pleading for seats at heteronormativity's
table, Edelman argues, queers should consent to their figuration as parasites upon the social order and
embody the death drive for which they have come to stand.

( ) Perm do both: There is a great deal of pessimism and negativity that mixes with our
eco-optimism. An approach combining both solves
Sturgeon, 3 (Noel, York University, Dean, Professor, BA Political Studies - Bard College, Annandale, NY
1979, PhD History of Consciousness (Politics) - University of California, Santa Cruz 1991, Ecofeminism
and Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context, and Religion, edited by Eaton, Lorentzen, google books,
http://books.google.com/books?id=4dlOAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA101&lpg=PA101&dq=%22ecofeminism%22+
%22pessimism%22&source=bl&ots=EGS-
I70RLA&sig=q9qsm0ChRAAcnWV5JR59kDvEYgI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uh60U9f0NOXMsQTN8oDwCg&ved=0C
DEQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22ecofeminism%22%20%22pessimism%22&f=false)--CRG
Environmental problems, it has been pointed out frequently, do not honor fixed spatial areas, whether
they be de-lined as national areas or spaces of private property. This characteristic of environmental
problems has been, at different moments, the source of environmentalist claims for the need for a new
global cooperation as well as a deep _ about the possibilities of solving environmental crises. The
optimism of the global environmentalists has a negative side, however, and that is the use that can be
made of the universalizing momentum of environmentalism by forces of technocratic, exploitative,
neocolonialist, neo-capitalist political economies. Southern environmentalists, like Guha, have thus
critiqued the ways in which consciousness of these environmental problems are global in another
sense, that is, tools for colonialist projects of northern exploitation of southern peoples and lands.
( ) Reject Edelmans psychoanalysis it forecloses progressive possibilities.
Bateman 6 R. Benjamin Bateman, doctoral candidate in English at the University of Virginia, 2006
(The Future of Queer Theory, The Minnesota Review, ns 65-66, Spring, Available Online at
http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns6566/ bateman_r_benjamin_ns6566_stf1.shtml,
Accessed 04-08-2007)
But his book falters as it comes increasingly to rely upon arcane appeals to Lacanian psychoanalysis
(conspicuously absent from this book is a single reference to Foucault). Edelman's argument runs
something like this: a stubborn kernel of non-meaning resides at the core of language, forcing each
signifier to find its meaning in the next ad infinitum, thus preventing signification from ever completing
itself or establishing meaning once and for all. This internal limit subtends and makes possible all
meaning-making while simultaneously disrupting it. An unbridgeable gap, it marks the place of a
recalcitrant, functionless, and socially corrosive jouissancean excessive enjoyment over which
language, society, and the future stumble. Heterosexual culture, anxious to name and contain this
minatory abyss, casts homosexuals as it and into it. They are "the violent undoing of meaning, the loss
of identity and coherence, the unnatural access to jouissance"(132). One might fault Edelman, as John
Brenkman has, for transposing a rule of language onto the order of being. But even if one takes his
equation seriously, one must ask what is gained by actively occupying a structurally necessary role. In
other words, if the Real must exist for the Symbolic to function, then the abyss will remain whether
homosexuals agree to inhabit it or not. Edelman acknowledges this reality but argues that if
homosexuals exit the abyss a new subaltern will be compelled to enter it. Better, then, to remain inside
and mirror back to heterosexuality what troubles it mostmeaninglessness, death and antisocial desire.
Unfortunately, Edelman provides few details as to how we might accomplish this task, and his insistence
elsewhere that the powers-that-be will clamp down with unmitigated force to repress and disavow the
encroaching Real renders such a strategy less than appealing. At one point he encourages queers to
pursue a more traditional politics alongside his radical recommendation (29), but he fails to
acknowledge that if the former succeedsand the dominant culture brings queers and/or their
practices into its foldthen the latter's intended audience will no longer be listening.

Perm 1AR
Queer negativity does not leave enough room for change, but a combination of
traditional queer theory (negativity) with optimism can solve
Selfhood Resignified, 10 (Blog written by an anonymous queer-identified, "academic, currently in
my second year of Ph.D. work in Feminist Studies, December 2, 2010, Optimistic? Well, Theoretically:
Found on Selfhood Resignified, http://selfhoodresignified.wordpress.com/tag/queer-theory/) --CRG
In many ways, Queer Optimism is Snedikers attempt to trouble the framework of queer negativity, that
he believes monopolizes and limits queer theory. Almost immediately, Snedikers introduction calls for
a reconceptualization of optimism itself (2). Optimism, as it is conventionally understood, is often
equated with prematurity or naivety, and rarely associated with queerness (1). Consequently, queer
theory has historically had more to say about negative affects than positive ones(4). Yet, as Snediker
preemptively clarifies, his redefinition of optimism aims to uncouple positivity and futurity from our
understanding of optimism. Undeniably queer optimism is a direct response to what Snediker calls
queer pessimism (i.e. Edelman). By subtly weaving his notions of queer optimism throughout his close
readings of classic literary texts, Snediker posits that, thus far, queer theory has not queered queer
literature to its fullest extend.

Optimism good 1AR
Queer politics should be hopeful, not fatalistic. There is room for progressive change.
Ahmed 6 Sara Ahmed, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of
London, 2006 (Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies, Volume 12, Issue 4, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Project Muse)
If orientations point us to the future, to what we are moving toward, then they also keep open the
possibility of changing directions, of finding other paths, [End Page 569] perhaps those that do not clear
a common ground, where we can find hope in what goes astray. Looking back is what keeps open the
possibility of going astray. We look back, we go behind; we conjure what is missing from the face. This
backward glance also means an openness to the future, as the imperfect translation of what is behind
us. As a result, I would not argue that queer has "no future" as Edelman suggeststhough I understand
and appreciate this impulse to "give" the future to those who demand to inherit the earth, rather than
aiming for a share in this inheritance. Instead, a queer politics would have hope, not even by having
hope in the future (under the sentimental sign of the "not yet") but because the lines that accumulate
through repeated gestures, the lines that gather on skin, already take surprising forms. We have hope
because what is behind us is also what allows other ways of gathering in time and space, of making lines
that do not reproduce what we follow, but instead create new textures on the ground. It is interesting to
note that in landscape architecture the term desire lines is used to describe unofficial paths, those
marks left on the ground that show everyday comings and goings, where people deviate from the paths
they are supposed to follow. Deviation leaves its own marks on the ground, which can even help
generate alternative lines, which cross the ground in unexpected ways. Such lines are indeed traces of
desire, where people have taken different routes to get to this point or that point. It is certainly desire
that helps generate a queer landscape, shaped by the paths that we follow in deviating from the straight
line.
Focus on Future good 1AR
Turn: Meaning to Life embracing futurity is necessary to find meaning in our lives
now. Striving for a better future creates a better present.
Unger 7 Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Roscoe Pound Professor of Law at Harvard University, 2007
(The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound, Published by Harvard University Press, ISBN 0674023544, p.
151)
The hope held out by the thesis that we can change our relation to our contexts will remain hollow
unless we can change this relation in biographical as well as in historical time, independent of the fate of
all collective projects of transformation. It will be hollow as well unless that change will give us other
people and the world itself more fully. That the hope is not hollow in any such sense represents part of
the thesis implicit in the idea of futurity: to live for the future is to live in the present as a being not fully
determined by the present settings of organized life and thought and therefore more capable of
openness to the other person, to the surprising experience, and to the entire phenomenal world of time
and change. It is in this way that we can embrace the joy of life in the moment as both a revelation and a
prophecy rather than discounting it as a trick that nature plays on spirit the better to reconcile us to our
haplessness and our ignorance.
The chief teaching of this book is that we become more godlike to live, not that we live to become more
godlike. The reward of our striving is not arousal to a greater life later; it is arousal to a greater life now,
a raising up confirmed by our opening up to the other and to the new. A simple way to grasp the point
of my whole argument, from the vantage point of this its middle and its center, is to say that it explores
a world of ideas about nature, society, personality, and mind within which this teaching makes sense
and has authority.

A2 K Psychoanalysis
1) Perm do both, Science fiction plays a crucial role in psychoanalysis- inclusion of
our narrative is key to solve their K
Under the heading of critical theory, Freedman names psychoanalysis as a secondary version of critical
theory, its task being to develop the concept of subjectivity missing in Marx; and he also adds the "less
important" body of "postdialectical" poststructuralism. He treats them as distinct interpretive
technologies, and sometimes turns to these secondary tools to supplement his primary one. If one were
to reflect on the emergent formation of "theory" in cultural studies, one might meditate on the
intriguing peculiarity of yoking together into a single configuration a number of disparate theorists
most typically Marx, Freud, and Nietzschewhose theoretical legacies are widely variant if not
incommensurable, and whose followers have often been at each others throats. To be sure, these are
all ideologies of suspicion, with specific additional features, but both the additional features and the
consequences of turning suspicion on one another are productive of conflictual interanimations that are
as important as the critical disposition they share. Freedman fails to take much advantage of the
intellectual strengths of this configuration. In fact, he intends to avoid practical deviance from the
Marxist master discourse in the work that the book actually does, even when he comes to supplement
the discourse of critique with a discourse of utopianism.
2) We solve their impact - Science Fiction has large psychoanalysis undertones
SEE, 14 (The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, June 26, 2014, Critical and Historical Works About SF
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/critical_and_historical_works_about_sf) --CRG
By the 1970s a large body of sf criticism had been built up, though much of it was and is difficult to get
hold of. The earlier notion that sf should be judged by criteria different from those normally applied to
conventional literature began steadily to lose ground in the 1970s to the view that sf is strong enough to
be gauged by the same standards that prevail elsewhere in literary criticism. Very naturally, however,
the literary analysis of sf tends to this day to be argued thematically and structurally, and to eschew a
criticism grounded in concepts of psychological realism on the one hand or metaphorical power on the
other. Although this is inevitable, mimetic realism and good characterization being qualities somewhat
marginalized by the very nature of sf, it does help explain why even now sf criticism has not generally
developed a vocabulary enabling judgmental distinctions to be well made; that is, when explaining why
some books and stories are worse than others (an explanation that sf criticism feels called upon to make
more seldom than is healthy), it does not usually do the job with much conviction.
A2 K SF Cap
1) Science fiction helps to break down capitalist ideology
Freedmans argument, simplified, is that real sf is Marxist, and that therefore Marxists should pay more
attention to it. He claims an affinity between critical theory and science fiction, summarized in the
equivalence relationship: "each is a version of the other" (xv). While he makes no effort to show that
critical theory is fictional (see also endnote 2 below), he is prepared to substitute strategically the more
euphemistic "critical-theoretical" for "Marxist," since the work that the book does in many of its pages is
literary criticism and the slippages around "critical theory" provide a lot of wiggle room for the
argument. While he does not ultimately show much Marxism in sf, he does successfully build a case to
show that a number of first-rate sf works can be organized together into a critical intellectual tradition.
Building that case, partly by argument and partly by extended readings that display elements resonant
with the concerns argued, is the main achievement of Freedmans book. Nevertheless, he overstates the
importance of this selective tradition as equivalent to the essence of science fictionits intrinsic generic
characteristicto the neglect, marginalization, or exclusion of other virtues or achievements. This
inflated system of definitions and descriptions is then turned prescriptive, and slipping back up to the
societal level of critical theory, the literary tradition thus constructed is assigned a gatekeeping task that
will impact on future membership: the redemptive task, in the absence of other historical-revolutionary
agencies, of keeping critical theory alive and making it effective (in order to break the total reification of
the world). Through the system of slippages around "critical theory," it is hoped that literature can be
pressed into social service.
2) The very beginnings of SF are traces back to anti-capitalist struggles
SEE, 14 (The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, June 26, 2014, Critical and Historical Works About SF
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/critical_and_historical_works_about_sf) --CRG
The cautious interest being shown in sf by the US academic world bore its first fruits in 1959, in the
shape of the critical journal Extrapolation. For many years this was stencilled, not printed, which
suggested that the financial support it was receiving from academia at large was small; nevertheless it
lived on. Two further academic magazines about sf followed, both (in different ways) a little livelier:
Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction in the UK from 1972, and Science Fiction Studies in the USA
from 1973. The former as much fannish as academic emphasized reviews and critical and sociological
studies of contemporary and post-World War Two sf; the latter more strictly academic concentrated
on writers of sf's past plus only the more academically acceptable of the present, with good coverage of
European sf and some interesting and, to many, unexpected Marxist criticism. A relative newcomer has
been Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, published since 1988.

A2 K Intersectionality
1) No link extend the second Merrick evidence, which says ecofeminism calls
for a non-reductionist, interdisciplinary, and synthesizing understanding of a
whole series of interlocking relations, from gender to race, sexuality,
economics, globalism, and, of course, the environment
2) While historically eco-feminist movements have been mostly white women,
there have been successful movements and coalitions built. Even if they win a
risk of a link, a coalition strategy is the step in the right direction. They also
essentalize ALL eco-feminist movements, because there have been non-white
women in the movement. Their evidence also doesnt assume the third wave
feminist movement
3) Perm do both
In the West, an ecofeminist focus in activism emerged during the second wave of the women's
movement and was predicated on seeing the relations between militarism, sexism, racism, classism,
and environmental damage. By the middle 1980s, many women, committed to direct action against
militarism, started naming themselves ecofeminists to depict the interdependencies of their political
concerns (Sturgeon 1997, 27). As ecofeminism evolved, it took up additional ... issues such as toxic
waste, deforestation, military and nuclear weapons policies, reproductive rights and technologies,
animal liberation, and domestic and international agricultural development (Sturgeon1997,25), in its
efforts to reweave the nature/culture dualism. The roots of ecofeminist theory can also be seen in
earlier feminisms as Val Plumwood explains: From early and liberal feminism, it takes the impulse to
integrate women fully as part of human culture and from socialist feminism, it draws an understand-
ing of the processes and structures of power and domination. From radical feminism, it takes the
critique of the masculinity of dominant culture and the aspiration to replace it, to affirm whathas been
denigrated (.1992, 13) Ecofeminism is distinct, however, in its insistence that nonhuman nature is a
feminist concern (Warren1997).Ecofeminist theory utilizes principles from both ecology and feminism to
inform its political organizing and its efforts to create equitable and environmentally sound life- styles.
From ecology, it learns to value the interdependence and diversity of all life forms;from feminism, it
gains the insights of a social analysis of women's oppressionthat intersects with other oppressionssuch
as racism, colonialism, classism, andheterosexism (Lahar1991,42).Ecofeminism, in its use of ecology as
a model for human behavior,suggests that we act out of a recognition of our interdependencywith
others, all others:human and nonhuman. In so doing, it builds on Carol Gilligan's (1982)"ethic of care"
in that-the relational caring position (whereeveryone's needs must be taken into consideration in
relation to all others), in ecofeminsim is extended to other races, nationalities, and to the nonhuman
world. Ecofeminist politics embrace heterogeneous strategies and solutions (Diamond and Orenstein
1990, xii). Ecofeminists do share a broadvision of a society beyond militarism, hierarchy,and the
destruction of nature, but like feminism itself, they often have different analyses and strategiefor
achieving them (Plumwood 1992, 10). In many ways, an ecofeminist style of politics represents
Foucault's (1980)notion of "local resistance" against power relations. Praxis, for Foucault, should be
located in local contextual moral values ratherthan universalizing principles. Like Fou-
cault,ecofeminists understandpowerasa"multiplicityofforcerelations" that are not centered, but are
diverse and are constantly being reproduced (Quinby 1990, 123). While ecofeminism emphasizes local
activism, it also maintains the importance of a global perspective. In ecofeminism, where everything is
seen as interconnected and/or interdependent, there is a serious regard for women whose cultures and
geographic locations are being eroded as a result of so-called development projects that are being
foisted on the thirdworld(Heller1992;WellsandWirth1997).Ecofeminists challenge the relationship
between economic growth and exploitation of the natural environment (Mies and Shiva 1993), and as
noted above, ecofeminist anthologies contain work by and about women resisting ill-conceived
development projects in the third world, in addition to those in the West.
4) No link-Evolution of eco-fem means its no longer a bunch of middle class white
women
As the second wave of feminism progressed,however,lesbians, women of color, and third-worldwomen
began asserting their voices into the debate, arguing that their social locations provided them with
different vantage points and different conceptions of themselves other than those being articulated
by white, middle-class feminists (Fraserand Nicholson 1990, 33). In this regard,some women of color
authors, such as Gloria Anzaldua (1981)and bell hooks (1984), are also examples of theorizing from
embodiment, during this period, to call attention to the intersectionality of racism, and heterosexism
with sexism, further illustrating the unevenness in the movement of second-wave feminism into third-
wave feminism. Demands from women of color and/or third-worldwomen that the differences among
women occupying different social locations be acknowledged,facilitated recognizing the universalism
inherent in both the feminist argumentsforequality andfordifference(FraserandNicholson 1990). As a
result, feminists became more likely to addressthe intersectionality of various "isms" with sexism
(Cohen et al. 1997). As feminists increasingly took account of the differences that exist among women,
many feminists also moved from the tenets of modernism with its notion of a unified subject, that is, a
universal (female)nature, to several postmodern tenets, especially the notion of a multiple and socially
construed subject (Malson et al. 1989). Third-wave feminism emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s with
the development of new considerations and emphases in feminism (Arneil 1999). In addition to the
recognition of the diversity of the subject women and their differing, often interrelated oppressions,
feminists recognized other concerns and as a result, developed new emphases. Among these features is
the tendency to move away from foundational theoretical schools, often accompanied by a loss of faith
in the ability of established socio-political theories to account for women's situations. Third-wave
feminism, instead, thoughtfully selects from among the tenets of different foundational theories, while
expanding on an emphasis developed in the second wave of adding women's perspectives to
established explanations. Like some authors in later second-wave feminism, third-wave feminists work
to make women's situated embodied perspectives "the" explanations while embracingthe
diversityanddifferencesin perspectivesamong women. Third-wave feminism, in particular, refutes
dualistic thinking in general-thinking that divides the world into hierarchical dichoto- mies with one
aspect regardedas superiorand the "other"regardedinfe- rior,recognizing instead the existence of
multiplicities. Todayfeminists commonly speak to the intersectionality of various "isms" with sexism
(Cohn et al. 1997), recognize the social constructedness of categories (Malsonet al. 1989),question the
relatednotions of dualism andhierarchy (Plumwood 1992), and work to further develop theories from
women's situated and embodied perspectives (Arneil 1999). Third wave is seen as an evolution, albeit a
less than even one, in feminist thought generally,not a breakfrom the past. While second wave worked
for the need to include women in the public sphere, together with the need to recognize that private
concerns merited public attention, and later second wave began to work for a general recognition of
the interrelatedness of class, race, and heterosexism with sexism, third wave responds to additional
concerns, some significant to its historical times. Among these problems is the fundamentalist backlash
to the women's movement, the so-called "postfeminist" feminism, cultural sexualiza- tion of girls,
traditional sex and gender categorization, an increasingly globalizing economy, with its accompanying
"maldevelopment"projects, particularly their disproportionate effects on women and children, and
increasingly precariousenvironmental problems.To no small extent, the higher educational opportunities
allowed to women by second-wavefemi- nists' policymaking and the subsequent theorizing many of
these women undertook, together with the significant contribution of women of color and/or third-
worldwomen's challenges, have contributed to the expansion of feminist theory, enabling third-wave
feminists' awareness of the concerns they respond to. Below, I discuss three examples of feminism:
generationalfeminism, postcolonial feminism, and ecofeminism. In their present form, these feminisms
illustrate many of the current expressions of third-wavefeminism, particularlythe reweaving of the
nature/culture duality by theorizing from embodiment.
5) Aff key to solve - only way to get rid of exclusive history is to educate ourselves
Giventhewidespreadandprofoundlyseriousnatureofenvironmentadlegrada- tion,
environmentailssueshavegreatpotentialforbringingpeopletogetheracross linesof race and class. For
such collaboration to work, people need to have some basis for knowing one another, some shared
stake in the community, and the prospect for developing trust despite differences in culture, ethnicity,
and class. There needs to be authentic connection based on honesty and mutual respect. Much has
been written about building bridges across linesof differencein the past decade or so.18One obstacle
is ignorance-simply not knowing each other's experience as well as not understanding its significance-
though people in op- pressed groups always know more about dominant groups than the other way
around.Otherobstaclesincludetreatingothergroups'concernsaslessmeaning- fulthanone'sownandalackof
trustbetweenpeopleseparatedbyprofound differencesin classand culture.The bridgesto be built
areemotionalas well as intellectual,makingpersonalconnectionsthat reachacrossour segregatedlives.
Alliancesrequireconscientiouslistening,honesty,activecompassion,and a will- ingnessto be self-
critical.Learningaboutothersmeansbeing open to uncer- taintyandsurprise,anabilityto
suspenddisbelief,andasenseof easewithour- selvesso thatwe can be fullypresentto eachother.19This
requiresettingsand projectswherepeoplecanworktogetherto developa sharedpoliticalcultureand
language,providinga key role for individualswhose experiencesand connec- tionsenablethemto
crosslines. Women of color poin tout to white women that we conveniently ignore our privilege as
white while emphasizing our oppression as women.To build bridges across gender and race for white
feminists means understanding that womenof color cannot separate race and ethnicity from gender,
any more than we can ourselves.We have to make allianceswith women and men of color and, in the
process, may have to deal with what we consider to be sexist attitudes and behavior. White women
need to acknowledge the ways we sustain, perpetuate, and benefit from racism, albeit often
unknowingly-in itself an aspect of privilege. Those of us who write and teach about ecofeminism need
to remedy the class, race, and ethnic limitations of our perspectives so as to build authentic alliances
that cross race and class lines. We need to use our privilege in the interests of social justice. It is
important to make a distinction here between a politics of solidarity,implying support for others in
struggle, and a politics of engagement where we are in struggle together.
A2 K Essentialism
1) No link extend the second Merrick card, which says ecofeminism calls for a
non-reductionist, interdisciplinary, and synthesizing understanding of a whole
series of interlocking relations, from gender to race, sexuality, economics,
globalism, and, of course, the environment
2) We dont essentalize-their evidence is about a certain author that we didnt cite
in our 1ac. However, Merchants claims werent essentialist, and she realizes
there is NO universal female behavior
Thompson, 2006 (Charis Thompson, Professor of Gender and Womens Studies, the Associate
Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Center at UC Berkeley, read Philosophy, Psychology,
Physiology at Oxford, received her Ph.D. from the Science Studies program at UC San Diego, previously
taught at Science and Technology Studies Department at Cornell University, at U of I Urbana, and at the
History of Science Department at Harvard University, Back to Nature? Resurrecting Ecofeminism after
Poststructuralist and Third-Wave Feminisms, September 2006, PDF from JSTOR, Accessed: 6/25/14, RH)
Ecofeminism is nearly always criticized for its essentialisms in supposedly equating women with nature
and conflating one woman with another, without regard for, say, class, race, nation, able-bodiedness,
and age. But while some varieties of ecofeminism may have equated women with nature in an
essentialist manner, Merchants argument does this as an empirical rather than a priori fact; indeed, she
argues expressly against the error and dangers of reifying the identification. Similarly, she argues
explicitly against the idea that there is a universal female behavior and against depictions that
uniformly cast woman as a nurturer. The affiliation between women and nature does interest her, but
for the underlying argument, not for its own essential identification: Women and nature have an age-
old associationan affiliation that has persisted throughout culture, language and history, Merchant
tells us, but it is not the purpose of this analysis to reinstate nature as the mother of humankind nor to
advocate that women reassume the role of nurturer dictated by that historical identity. Both need to be
liberated from the anthropomorphic and stereotypic labels that degrade the serious underlying
issues.14
A2 K Race
1) No link extend the second Merrick card, which says ecofeminism calls for a
non-reductionist, interdisciplinary, and synthesizing understanding of a whole
series of interlocking relations, from gender to race, sexuality, economics,
globalism, and, of course, the environment
2) Their K is essentialist - they assume that all people of a certain race experience
oppression in the same way which is NOT TRUE the thesis of our aff is that
identity is much more complex than their K grants it link turn and means no
alt solvency
3) Eco-feminism is key to combat the environmental injustice-environmental
issues disproportionately affect women of color(good perm card)
The people most affected by poor physical environments in the United States are women and
children, particularly African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinas. Many women of color and
poor white women are active in hundreds of local organizations campaigning for healthy living and
working conditions in working-class communities, in communities of color, and on Native American
reservations, which are all disproportionately affected by pollution from incin- erators, toxic dumps,
pesticides, and hazardous working conditions in industry and agriculture.1oThis movement drawson
concepts of civil rights, and its organization, too, has roots in the civil rights movements as well as in
labor unions, Chicano land grant movements, social justice organizations, and Native Ameri- can rights
organizations. Its tactics include organizing demonstrations and ral-lies, educating the public,
researching and monitoring toxic sites, preparing and presenting expert testimony to government
agencies, reclaiming land through direct action, and maintaining and teaching traditional agricultural
practices, crafts, and skills. Specific organizations represent different mixes of these strands, depending
on their memberships, geographical locations, and key issues. Ex- amples include West Harlem
Environmental Action, the Mothers of East L.A., the Southwest Organizing Project (Albuquerque), and
the Citizens' Clearing- house for Hazardous Wastes (Virginia). Besides opposing hazardous conditions,
the environmental justice move- mental so has a powerful reconstructive dimension, involving
sustainable projects that intertwine ecological, economic, and cultural survival. The 4-H Urban Gar-
dening project in Detroit, for example, coordinates well over one hundred small gardens citywide and
relies on the expertise of local people, mostly elderly Afri- can American women, who raisevegetables,
both for individual use and to supplement food prepared at senior centers, as well as crops for sale:
loofah sponges, fresh herbs, honey, and worm boxes for fishing." Many of these women were brought
up in ruralareasin the southern United Stateswhere they learned about gardening before coming to
Detroit for work in the 1930s and 1940s. By drawing on local people's knowledge, these gardening
projects provide fresh produce at little financial cost, contribute to the revitalization of inner-city
communities, and give a sense of empowerment that comes from self-reliance. When people are
outdoors working they also make neighborhoods safer by their presence, watch- fulness, and care. An
additional goal is to teach young people about gardening, strengthening connections between the
generations and helping young people to become more self-supporting. Examples of sustainable
projects in ruralareasin- clude the White Earth Land Recovery Project, a project that produces wild rice
and maple sugar on Native American land in Minnesota, and Tierra Wools, a New Mexico worker
cooperative of twenty people-most of them women-that owns some three thousand head of Churro
sheep and produces high quality, hand-woven rugs and clothing and organically produced lamb.12 Their
objec- tives include economic development and environmental protection, as well as cultural revivaland
conservation.13
4) Perm do both
Women make up the majority of local activists in environmental justice organizations, sometimes
because they have a sick child or because they have become ill themselves. Illnesses caused by toxins
are often difficult to diagnose and treat because they affect internal organs and the balance of body
functioning.Women have been persistent in raising questions and searching for plausible explanations
for such illnesses, sometimes discovering that their communities have been built on contaminated land
or tracing probable sources of pollution affecting the neighborhood.14They have publicized their
findings and taken on governmental agencies and corporations responsible for contamination. In so
doing they are often ridiculed as "hystericalhousewives" by officials and report- erswho have
trivializedtheir researchas emotional and unscholarly. By contrast, Lin Nelson honors this works as
kitchen table science. In October 1991 women were 60 percent of the participants at the First National
People of Color Envi-ronmental Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C. Many urban gardenersin
northern cities are elderly women, while in rural areaswomen work on family garden plots, planting,
harvesting, and processing fruit and vegetables for home use.15As ethnobotanists, women know
backcountry areasin great detail because they go there at different seasons to gather herbs for
medicinal purposes. Among Mexican Americans, for example, curanderas-traditional healers-continue to
work with herbalremedies.16 This detailedknowledge is learnedfrom olderpeople, as is also the case
with some Native Americans and others who live in ruralareas. Gender is significant for women in the
environmental justice movement, but thisisnot aconcept of gender divorced from race and class.
Women activistssee their identity as women integrated with their racial and class identities, with race
and/or class often more of a place of empowerment for them than gender. Al- though they recognize
their own subordination based on gender, they are not interested in separatingthemselves from the
men in their communities and frame their perspectives, as
AT: Cap New
AT: Capitalism K
1. Link turn - capitalism demands constant growth and production - queerness refuses
to create, introducing death into the system - solves better
Edelman, 4 (Lee, philosopher pioneering the radically uncompromising new ethics of queer theory and
death drive, professor in the English Department at Tufts University, November 15, 2004, No Future-
Queer Theory and Death Drive, pages 111-115)
In an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe that was published to coincide with Mother's Day in Igg8, Sylvia
Ann Hewlett and Cornel West announced their campaign for what they called a "Parent's Bill of Rights,"
a series of proposals designed, in their words, to "strengthen marriage and give greater electoral clout
to mothers and fathers." To achieve such an end- an end both self-serving (though never permitted to
appear so) and redundant (what "greater electoral clout" could mothers and fathers have?) -the essay
sounded a rallying cry that performed, in the process, and with a heartfelt sincerity untouched by ironic
self-consciousness, the authors' mandatory profession of faith in the gospel of sentimental futurism: It
is time to join together and acknowledge that the work that parents do is indispensable-that by
nourishing those small bodies and growing those small souls, they create the store of social and human
capital that is so essential to the health and wealth of our nation. Simply put, by creating the conditions
that allow parents to cherish their children, we will ensure our collective future.1 Ignore for a moment
what demands to be called the transparency of this appeal. Ignore, that is, how quickly the spiritualizing
vision of parents "nourishing and growing . . . small bodies and . . . small souls" gives way to a rhetoric
affirming instead the far more pragmatic (and politically imperative) investment in the "human capital . .
. essential to the health and wealth of our nation." Ignore, by so doing, how the passage renominates
those human "souls" as "capital" without yielding the fillip of Dickensian pathos that prompts us to
"cherish" these "capital"- ized humans ("small" but, like the economy in current usage, capable of being
grown) precisely insofar as they come to embody this thereby humanized "capital." Ignore all this and
one's eyes might still pop to discover that only political intervention will "allow," and the verb is crucial
here, "parents to cherish their children" so as to "ensure our collective future"-or ensure, which comes
to the same in the faith that properly fathers us all, that our present will always be mortgaged to a
fantasmatic future in the name of the political "capital" that those children will thus have become. Near
enough to the surface to challenge its status as merely implicit, but sufficiently buried to protect it from
every attempt at explicitation, a globally destructive, child-hating force is posited in these lines - a force
so strong as to disallow parents the occasion to cherish their children, so profound in its virulence to the
species as to put into doubt "our collective future" - and posited the better to animate a familial unit so
cheerfully mom-ified as to distract us from ever noticing how destructively it's been mummified. No
need to trick out that force in the flamboyant garments of the pedophile, whose fault, as "everyone"
knows, defaults, faute de mieux, to a fear of grown women-and thus, whatever the sex of his object,
condemns him for, and to, his failure to penetrate into the circle of heterosexual desire. No need to call
it names, with the vulgar bluntness of the homophobe, whose language all too often is not the bluntest
object at hand. Unnamed, it still carries the signature, whatever Hewlett and West may intend, of the
crime that was named as not to be named ("inter christianos non nominandum") while maintaining the
plausible deniability allowing disavowal of such a signature, should anyone try to decipher it, as having
been forged by someone else. To be sure, the stigmatized other in general can endanger our idea of the
future, conjuring the intolerable image of its spoliation or pollution, the specter of its being
appropriated for unendurable ends; but one in particular is stigmatized as threatening all end to the
future itself. That one remains always at hand to embody the force, which need never be specified, that
prohibits America's parents, for example, from being able to cherish their children, since that one, as we
know, intrudes on the collective reproduction of familialism by stealing, seducing, proselytizing, in short,
by adulterating those children and putting in doubt the structuring fantasy that ensures "our collective
future."
I've already defined this child-aversive, future-negating force, answering so well to the inspiriting needs
of a moribund familialism, as sinthomosexuality, a term that links the jouissance to which we gain access
through the sinthome with a homosexuality made to figure the lack in Symbolic meaning-production on
account of which, as Lacan declares, "there is no sexual relation." Designating a locus of enjoyment
beyond the logic of interpretation, and thus beyond the correlative logic of the symptom and its cure,
the sinthome refers to the mode of jouissance constitutive of the subject, which defines it no longer as
subject of desire, but rather as subject of the drive. For the subject of desire now comes to be seen as a
symptomatic misprision, within the language of the law, of the subject's sinthomatic access to the force
of a jouissance played out in the pulsions of the drive. Where the symptom sustains the subject's
relation to the reproduction of meaning, sustains, that is, the fantasy of meaning that futurism
constantly weaves, the sinthome unravels those fantasies by and within which the subject means. And
because, as Bruce Fink puts it, "the drives always seek a form of satisfaction that, from a Freudian or
traditional moralistic standpoint, is considered perverse," the sinthome that drives the subject, that
renders him subject of the drive, thus engages, on a figural level, a discourse of what, because
incapable of assimilation to heterosexual genitality, gets read, as if by default, as a version of
homosexuality, itself conceived as a mode of enjoyment at the social order's expense. As Fink goes on to
observe: "What the drives seek is not heterosexual genital reproductive sexuality, but a partial object
that provides jouissance." 2 Sinthomosexuality, then, only means by figuring a threat to meaning, which
depends on the promise of coming, in a future continuously deferred, into the presence that reconciles
meaning with being in a fantasy of completion a fantasy on which every subject's cathexis of the
signifying system depends. As the shadow of death that would put out the light of heterosexual
reproduction, however, sinthomosexuality provides familial ideology, and the futurity whose cause it
serves, with a paradoxical life support system by providing the occasion for both family and future to
solicit our compassionate intervention insofar as they seem, like Tiny Tim, to be always on their last legs.
The agent responsible for effecting their destruction has been given many names: by Baudrillard, a "global
extermination of meaning"; by Hewlett and West, whatever refuses to "allow parents to cherish their children"; by Francois Abadie,
"homosexuals" as "the gravediggers of society"; by psychoanalytic theory, the death drive and the Real of
jouissance. Just as the Lacanian sinthome knots together the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real, so
sinthomosexuality knots together these threats to reproductive futurism. No political catachresis, such as
Butler proposes, could forestall the need to constitute, then, such a category of sinthomosexuals. For even
though, as Butler suggests, political catachresis may change over time the occupants of that category, the category itself,
like Antigone's tomb, continues to mark the place of whatever refuses intelligibility. Catachresis, moreover,
cannot assure the progressive redistribution of meaning. To the extent that the rearticulation of the signifier, and
therefore the reach of a term like "human," supplements without effacing the prior uses to which it was put, no historical category of
abjection is ever simply obsolete. It abides, instead, in its latency, affecting subsequent significations,
always available, always waiting, to be mobilized again. Catachresis can only formalize contestation over "the proper,"
repeating the violence at the core of its own always willed impositions of meaning. Sinthomosexuality presents itself as the
realization of that violence exactly to the extent that it insists on the derealization of those meanings,
occupying the place of what, in sex, remains structurally unspeakable: the lack or loss that relates to the Real and
survives in the pressure of the drive. Because the Child of the heteroreproductive Couple stands in, at least
fantasmatically, for the redemption of that loss, the sinthomosexual, who affirms that loss, maintaining it as the empty
space, the vacuole, at the heart of the Symbolic, effectively destroys that Child and, with it, the reality it means to
sustain.3 Nor could any sinthomosexual, whatever the revisions of sociocultural norms catachresis may entail, escape the coils of the twisted
fate that ropes him into embodying such a denial of futurity, such a death blow to meaning's survival in the figure of the Child, simply by virtue
of being, or having been, someone's Child himself.
2. Libidinal economy turn
Jean Francois Lyotard, 1974, (Libidinal economy, pages 97-98
We say that this postponement, which results in the 'Economy' never being completed, 1 and in the calculations
of Capital, Book 3 being false, 2 already demonstrates a whole dispositif, a libidinal monster with the huge fat head of a
man full of warrior's thoughts and petty quarrels, and with the soft body of young amorous Rhenane - a
monster which never achieves the realization of its unity, because of this very incapacity, and it is this
'failure' which is marked in the interminable theoretical suspense. What we have here is not exactly the
centaur, the master of politicians as Chiron was the master of Achilles; rather, it would be the
hermaphrodite, another monster in which femininity and masculinity are indiscernibly exchanged, thereby
thwarting the reassurance of sexual difference. But it is exactly this which is in question in the 'Economy', and we maintain,
dear comrades, the following thesis: the little girl Marx, offended by the perversity of the polymorphous body of
capital, requires a great love; the great prosecutor Karl Marx, assigned the task of the prosecution of the
perverts and the 'invention' of a suitable lover (the proletariat), sets himself to study the file of the accused
capitalist. What happens when the person assigned to the prosecution is as fascinated by the accused as he
is scandalized by him? It comes about that the prosecutor sets himself to finding a hundred thousand good
reasons to prolong the study of the file, that the enquiry becomes meticulous, always more meticulous, that the
lawyer submerged in the British Museum in the microscopic analysis of the aberrations of capital is no longer
able to detach himself from it, that the organic unity, that this swarming of perverse fluxes that is supposed to
have to produce (dialectically), never stops moving away, escaping him, being put off, and that the
submission of petitions is kept waiting interminably. What was happening then throughout the thousands of
manuscript pages? The unification of Marx's body, which requires that the polymorphous perversity of capital
be put to death for the benefit of the fulfilment of the desire for genital love, is not possible. The prosecutor is unable to
deduce the birth of a new and beautiful (in)organic body (similar to that of precapitalist forms) which would be child-
socialism, from the pornography of capitalism. If there is a body of capital, this body is sterile, it engendcrs nothing:
it exceeds the capacity of theoretical discourse as unification. ' I do not want to be resigned to sending just
anything', Marx wrote to Engels who presses him (31 July 1S(5), prior to having the whole work in his sight. 'Whatever defect they
may have, it is to the advantage of my writings that they constitute an artistic whole, and I can only achieve this result in my own way and by
never having them printed until I have them before me in their entirety.' These writings on their own, however, never
constitute this invisible artistic whole whose model is an (in)organic body, organic insofar as it is a complete and fecund totality,
inorganic insofar as it is not biological, but theoretical here (the same unitary model which will be desired and 'recognized' in precapitalist forms
or in socialism, this time 011 the socio-economic plane). The young innocent Little Girl Marx says: you see, I am in love with
love, this must stop, this industrial and industrious crap, this is what makes me anxious, I want the return to the
(in)organic body; and it has been taken over by the great bearded scholar so that he may establish the
thesis that it cannot stop, and so that he may testify, as the counsel to the poor (amongst which is the Little Girl Marx), to his
revolutionary conclusions; so that he may perform the obstetrics of capital; and so that he may give, to her,
this total body he requires, this child, at least this child of words which would be the anticipated double (the younger
child born first) of the child of flesh: of the proletariat, of socialism. But alas, he does not give her this child. She will never
have this 'artistic whole' before her, these writings 'in their entirety'. She will have suffering growing before her and in her,
because her prosecutor will discover in the course of his research, insofar as it is endless, a strange jouissance:
the same jouissance that results from the instantiation of the pulsions and their discharge in
postponement. The jouissance of infinity. This 'perversity' of knowledge is rightly called (scientific) research, and
intensity there is not, as it is in orgasm, 'normal', the intensity of discharge instantiated in a genital couple,
but is the intensity of an inhibition, of a putting into reserve, of a postponement and of an investment in
means. So much so that the prosecutor charged with obtaining proof of the pornographic ignominy of capital
repeats, in his enquiry and even in his preparation and pleading, this same 'Don't come yet' - so to speak - which is simply
another modality of jouissance, which is found in the libidinal dispositif of capital. While, as concerns the content,
it is always in search of the lovable body which he-she desires, the form of this research already contains
its denial and its impossibility.

DA/CP Answers
A2 DA generic
We solve the root cause of all war and violence impacts queer ecofeminism,
specifically in A Door Into Ocean, endorses because passivity as an effective form of
resistance
Moody 2K, (Nickianne, Aphasia and Mother Tongue: Themes of Language Creation and Silence in
Womens Science Fiction, Speaking Science Fiction: Dialogues and Interpretations, pg. 179)//ED
Defining science fiction is a quagmire, especially when considering how it was redefined by publishers,
writers, booksellers and readers during the 1980s. The definition used by this study was therefore
Norman Spinrad's infamous statement that science fiction is whatever is sold as science fiction. The
study's main focus became two groups of writers, one predominantly male and the other a group of
women writers who continued to write and had their writing signified as science fiction. They wrote
fiction which addressed and explored contemporary science and scientific practice, new technology and
social change. Both groups, that is cyberpunk and feminist science fiction, were recognized by critics and
readers from outside a specialist interest in the genre. Both prospective futures featured imminent and
far-reaching social change. Cyberpunk proposes an urban high-tech dark future medievalism, which was
not denied by the feminist fiction. However, in contrast women writers offered the possibility of a
collective [end page 179] pastoral guild-ordered life in the fictional future which may nor may not utilize
new technology. In order to consider the representation of silence in this fiction we are going to look at
a smaller group of the feminist science fiction writers. It is a pleasing peculiarity of the genre that
feminist writers could appropriate science fiction forms, conventions and marketing for their critique of
contemporary society and social relations. Dystopian representations of technological transformations
in culture, society and the experience of the working environment become dominant themes in science
fiction of the 1980s. Utopian and dystopian writing built on the tradition of New Wave in the 1970s to
provide an informal site for debates concerning the nature of contemporary experience and
extrapolative contingencies in near future patterns of social organization. During the same period
cyberpunk considered postmodern identity and corporate capital, by focussing on the city and re-
employing the conventions of hardboiled detective or mystery fiction. Whereas these narratives
concentrated on the experience of the individual and their actions, women's science fiction visualized a
postindustrial society from a very different perspective. Their response to the evolution of such a
society was to propose alternatives to patriarchy and effect speculative transformations of society
through communal will. The meeting of language and patriarchy raises critical debates in this fiction
which directly address the prospect of social change. Suzy McKee Charnas' opening to Walk to the End
of the World (1979) is a good example of the general premise shared by these novels: They *the men+
forbade all women to attend meetings and told them to keep their eyes lowered and their mouths shut
and to mind their own business, which was reproduction. 1 Either through cataclysm, ecological
disaster, war or the social change wrought by alien contact, a sharp division has arisen between men
and women, with women existing in a state not just of inequality, but of powerlessness. The novels
commonly envisage a state of post-feminism. Central to Haden Elgin's (1984) construction of society in
the late twentysecond century is the 1991 amendment to the United States Constitution which revokes
women's rights. 2 In consequence they are declared to be legal minors who must have male guardians.
In The Handmaid's Tale (1985) we witness the passing of the feminist movement that is our past as it is
suppressed by religious fundamentalism in the wake of a future nuclear war. 3 Themes of language and
its relationship to the physical and cultural environment have long been popular topics in science fiction.
Since the 1930s the problem of alien contact in linguistic terms has been seen as more than just the
need for a universal translator. It has also figured [end page 180] prominently in future extrapolations of
human society. Katherine Burdekin published Swastika Night in Britain in 1937, under the name Murray
Constantine. In the narrative's fictional world the Nazi Reich has endured for 700 years and Burdekin
offers a feminist critique relating power politics to gender politics. Women have been reduced to empty
vessels, with no name, no voice and no language of their own. The narrative forewarns that women will
eventually cease to exist in a world totally populated by men, leading to the demise of the species.
However, Burdekin sees the women's complicity in keeping silent at the beginning of this assault on
their civil rights as the cause of the tragedy. 4In Lefanu's (1988) history of women's science fiction
writing, she demonstrates how feminists turned to science fiction to analyse social and literary
constructions of women as gendered subjects. Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1974) is
often taken as the prime example, for Piercy enters the genre to engage with Shulamith Firestone's
views on gender and technology. Piercy uses science fiction conventions to bring the theoretical debate
into sharper relief. 5 Twenty years later, Piercy's He She and It (1992) can take on the cyberpunk of male
writers and respond in fiction to Donna Haraway's cultural interrogation of the cyborg. 6 Other writers
such as Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale) and Zo Fairbairns (Benefits, 1979) also found the
dystopian aspect of the near future diegesis ideally suited for their exploration of sexual politics,
feminist debate and cultural anxiety. In the 1980s more authors became interested in linguistic theory
and researched it as they would any other science. Feminist writers began to use feminist linguistic
theory as a premiss for a science fiction narrative a way of disseminating that theory in a popular form
and a process of extrapolation both to test and to explore the theory. For example, Miller Gearhart in
The Wanderground (1979) experiments in the first part of the text with her use of language. 7
Cyberpunk writers (or Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, 1962) 8 use a similar technique to produce a
futuristic argot. Miller Gearhart invents words and expressions complementary to the society of women
that she is outlining, gradually drawing together an interconnecting series of narrative and purely
descriptive chapters. The prose only becomes clear to the reader when the action is imperative and the
language used to describe the city, the purges and the hunts is startlingly contemporary. Therefore the
experience of our own time intrudes directly on to the previous rhythm of the text which has been
constructed by the utopian writing. A common motif used by the group of writers that we are
considering is the examination of the role of language in the construction of institutionalized
oppression. Aphasia and speech are central metaphors [end page 181] which are used recurrently in
woman's science fiction. At the beginning of the novels women are rendered mute or knowingly speak a
language which is not their own. They exist as a dispossessed or subjugated indigenous population.
Some narratives respond to this situation by constructing or promoting a language spoken by women,
which can express the experience of women and thus empower them. Others foresee an increasingly
gendered stratification reaching a point where the two sexes are unable to communicate with one
another. Language is seen as something which is always in a state of change and these societies are
themselves in flux. These novels are neither utopian nor dystopian. I would call them eutopias, which
adapt the discourse for constructing an alternative future, allowing them to debate a range of
contingencies. Social change and a new society in this fiction necessitate a new language. The novels are
challenging, they distance and disconcert their readers. Moreover, the narrative conclusions are not
necessarily certain, especially as the fictive future is often only present in fragments and snatches. There
are inconsistencies and elisions which require active reading. Novels such as Margaret Atwood's The
Handmaid's Tale use pseudo-documentary discourse which provides ample room for speculation on the
part of the reader. This appears to be a very important aspect of the novels' presentation. In this way
the writer draws attention to the fact that she is using a construction of the future to examine the past
and contemporary experience. The issues that are constantly reiterated are presented as moral
concerns firmly rooted in economic, social and physical power relations. Frequently the starting point
for these novels is the recreation of classical attitudes to the speech of women, the founding tradition of
Western political thought. For in Plato's Republic women are silenced. The private speech of the
household, the speech of women, is judged to lack either the form for philosophical argumentation or
the force for poetry. It was therefore seen as without meaning, unformed, chaotic, the speech of doxa
and mere opinion and not truth. Moreover, household speech could neither be heroic nor part of the
philosophic male quest for wisdom through dialogue. Thus women were excluded from politics and
from participating in philosophic discourse. Women had no place to bring their thoughts to a public
arena. And as one sex was confined to the private sphere and the other had access to the public, the
two could not speak to one another. This is a dramatic premiss which is taken literally by writers such as
Sheri Tepper in The Gate to Women's Country (1988). 9 The aphasia found within these texts is partially
brought about by characters physically being prevented from speaking, but frequently the silence is self-
imposed. The novels consider an older definition of aphasia, [end page 182] of being unable to voice
thought in words. Although the ability to voice thought enables autonomy, as the inability prevents it, it
is often a rite of passage. Silence is seen as productive and not just a prelude to confession or evil, its
signification in Greek drama. Silence, contemplation and selfknowledge are seen as strategies to
confront patriarchy. A direct example of this is the plot to Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean (1986).
A patriarchal society attempts to colonize a matriarchal one. The invasion of the planet is justified by a
colonial discourse of protection and order, with the objective of bringing patriarchal law to a backward
society of women. The Sharers of that planet are seen as a valuable resource as they possess knowlege
of life science lost to the patriarchy through a major and destructive war. A large number of these
feminist futures see a return to rural order as capitalism collapses under its own weight. The Sharers
response to the invasion is collective silence and not individual speech: Day by day, a wall of deafness
crept inexorably from raft system to raft system, cluster to cluster. All around the globe, natives were
shutting their ears and mouths to Valian troops, Iridian and Dolomite alike. Nothing seemed to break
that silence, not shouting, beating, imprisoning. In other narratives passive resistance comes in the
form of language creation . Native Tongue, written by a doctor of linguistics, is the prime example of this
approach. These women, the women of linguists for years back, had taken on a task of constructing a
language that would be just for women. A language to say things women wanted to say, and about
which men always said Why would anybody want to talk about that? Linguists in this diegesis have risen
to the top of the professional and social hierarchy. The economic necessity to trade with alien worlds
relies on the skills of translators which are at a premium. In order to retain one professional group's
monopoly over this essential service, their wives and daughters become a working resource and
gradually come to recognize themselves as such. In Native Tongue, silence or being silenced forces
women to take action and to learn to speak for themselves. In A Door into Ocean silence, or as it is
referred to in the text, unspeaking, has great cultural significance. It is seen as a form of violence and in
this fictional society it is the ultimate deterrent. As well as being violent it is a response to violence.
Unspeaking can be undertaken between individuals and groups and it is an action to settle differences.
In an extreme form silence is a response to pain, a way [end page 183] of controlling pain called
whitetrance. Whitetrance is complete silence and withdrawal to the extent that if you talk to a person in
whitetrance the mental invasion will kill them. The experience of many changes in social behaviour is
not necessarily harmony, but conflict, debate and discussion which is resolved or mediated by speech
rather than physical violence. Frequently speech and violence in these narratives are interlocked by
cogent imagery. Alternatively, quite a lot of the women's writing moves towards giving women a voice
denied by patriarchal language. The language created by Haden Elgin in Native Tongue called Ladan
provides the following terms. The women have used their science to create a language which will voice
their feelings and facilitate collectivity. For example: radema: to non-touch, to actively refrain from
touching rademalh: to non-touch with evil inte nt radela: non-garden, a place that has much flash and
glitter and ornament, but no beauty radiidin: non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so
much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there
are too many guests and none of them to help. 12 However, this writing is not just amelioration, neither
should it be seen as writing for comfort. Its goal is not to provide space for the fantasy of autonomy.
Irigary sees the silence of the female other as ensuring the autosufficiency of the male. 13 She raises the
question just as these writers do: what would happen if the other wanted to speak? Not all of the
writers are certain, but they are quite aware of the responsibility attached to the freedom to determine
one's actions. Aphasia takes many forms in this fiction and it is generally seen as part of a process
through which women learn to value themselves and learn to contribute to and work as a community.
The narratives are set within or acknowledge a harsh dystopian future as part of their diegesis. Language
and the power of speech are seen as holding counter-cultural potential. In the cyberpunk novels
language is often referred to as a virus. In Native Tongue it is unknown what releasing a new language
will do. All right, then suppose we begin to use it, as you say we should do. And then as more and more
little girls acquire Ladan and begin to express the perceptions of women rather than those of men,
reality will begin to change, isn't that true? 14 Language is seen as something more complex than a
social variable, a magic cure or a narrative resolution. It reveals complicity and the responsibility [end
page 184] of the speaker or listener. The fiction combines a representation of women's experience in a
male-dominated culture with linguistics as a central speculative concept. Women's autonomy is seen to
exist within the reciprocated relations of a communitya community which can operate because it can
communicate clearly and freely. The books address a need for women to challenge the patriarchal base
of language if they are to change the patriarchal base of society. Silence is a major part of that
imaginative process. In Greek the term ataxeria makes a connection between silence and freedom from
anxiety. The anxiety predominant in these narratives is pain and death, which is one of the ways that
Slonczewski's whitetrance is used. There is however also a fear for the loss of agency. Silence is not just
the result of fear: it allows protagonists to conquer fear and thus escape their social incapacitation. Le
Guin acknowledges this duality in one of her sayings from the valley in Always Coming Home (1985):
When I'm afraid I listen to the silence of field-mice When I'm fearless I listen to the silence of the
mousing cat. 15 The creation of a new language and the freedom to explore history and the possibility
of change allows women to share collective experience. This new language is used to illustrate a
democracy where all can speak. The feminist texts view social change as a long-term plan. This is very
much the case in Always Coming Home (1985) where Le Guin sets out her society by examining its
imaginary form through a melange of ethnographic and anthropological data. A decisive moment in the
history of this future postnuclear war Northern California society is the confrontation between a
patriarchal and a matrilineal society. The distinction between the two forms of social organization is
examined in terms of culture, and the management of resources, ineffective economies and land use
result in personal and societal impoverishment. One of the most effective contrasts between the two
societies is found in their use of language: The Dayao [patriarchy] seemed never to decide things
together, never discussing and arguing and yielding and agreeing to do something before they did it.
Everything was done because there was a law to do it or not to do it, or an order to do it or not to do it.
And if something went wrong it seemed never to be the orders, but the people who obeyed them who
got blamed. 16 As Burdekin has already acknowledged the relationship between silence and complicity,
these novels negotiate the relationship between action and responsibility. They do so by extending
metaphors around the power of language, silence and speech. As Offred in The Handmaid's Tale is able
to [end page 185] remember her mother's stories about the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s,
she also remembers the Commander's wife Serena Joy from an Evangelical television programme: She
wasn't singing then. She was making speeches. She was good at it. Her speeches were all about the
sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home She doesn't make speeches anymore. She
has become speechless. She stays at home, but it doesn't seem to agree with her. How furious she must
be, now that she has been taken at her word. 17 The conclusion to these novels is not decisive. Speech
has often been created and the aphasia of women has produced wise counsel. However, the new status
quo is seen as fragile and only sustainable if the members of the community are committed to talk and
to engage in the continual creation of language and the shared experience this engenders. Once more
the clearest example of this is the conclusion to The Handmaid's Tale, where we are returned as readers
to Atwood's framing device for the novel (i.e. the lecture being given to the Twelfth Symposium on
Gileadan Studies). The text that has just been read by the reader (or heard in the fiction) is now
addressed as something which requires interpretation. We do not know what happened to Offred, but
like the characters at the symposium we can celebrate the consignment of Gilead to a future past.
However, for Atwood this is a precarious course, and we need to be vigilant in public speech and private
study. In exploring these diegeses with clear dystopian or utopian contingencies the eytmological, legal
and social construction of language forms part of the way in which these narratives return to the grim
realities and histories of gendered experience. This is a practice which is unwelcome in the hegemonic
consensus of a post-feminist, consumer-orientated society.

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