Files Documents 596

Arizona Debate Institute 2009
Holbrook/Nielson
Queer Theory K Index

Queer Theory K Index..........................................................1
Queering Shell......................................................................2
Link: Liberal State Politics...................................................7
Link: Social Construction.....................................................8
Link: Feminism....................................................................9
Link: Nationalism...............................................................10
Link: Future Orientation.....................................................11
Link: Face of the Child.......................................................15
Link: Nuclear Family.........................................................18
Link: Hetero/Homo Binary.................................................19
Link: Military.....................................................................23
Link: War on Terror............................................................26
Link: Penetration Language...............................................27
Link: Gay Identity..............................................................28
Link: Feminism..................................................................29
Link: Ecofeminism.............................................................30
Internal Link: Naturalizing the Hetero...............................31
Impact: Soul Murder...........................................................32
Impact: Dehumanization....................................................33
Impact: Colonization..........................................................34
Impact: Root of Oppression................................................35
Impact: Violence.................................................................36
Impact: Violence to Women...............................................38
Impact: Violence to Men....................................................40
Alternative: Queer Performance.........................................41
Alternative: Liberating the Erotic.......................................42
Alternative: Do Nothing.....................................................43
Alternative: Fuck the Future...............................................45
Alternative: S&M...............................................................47
Alternative Solves: Heterosexism......................................48
Alternative Solves: Racism................................................49
Alternative Solves: Dichotomies/Binaries.........................50
Alternative Solves: Inclusivity...........................................51
Alternative Solves: Oppression..........................................53
Role of the Ballot................................................................54
Framework..........................................................................55
Language Matters...............................................................57
Kritik Comes 1st..................................................................59
Answer To: Case Outweighs..............................................60
Answers To: Prevents Political Change..............................61
Answers To: Historical Critique of Queer..........................64
Answer To: Obligation to Help Others...............................65
Answer To: Identity Politics Bad........................................67
Answer To: Totalizing Heterosexuality..............................69
Answers To: Race/Culture Ks of Queer Theory...............70
Answer To: Must Stabilize Queer for X Reason................72
Answer To: Perm................................................................73
Aff Answer: Historical Critique of Queer.......................74
Aff Answer: Must Deal With The Future...........................74
Aff Answer: Queer Families Perm.....................................76
Aff Answer: Race Kritik of Queer Theory.........................77
Aff Answer: Capitalism Turn.............................................79
Aff Answer: Alt doesnt Solve............................................80
Aff Answer: Queer Theory Not Inclusive..........................84
Aff Answer: Identity Politics Good....................................86
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Aff Answers: Perm - Intersectionality................................87
Aff Answer: Perm Identity Politics.................................88
Aff Answer: Perm Resistance with the System...............89
Aff Answer: Perm Coalitions..........................................91
Aff Answer: Perm Ecofeminism......................................92
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Holbrook/Nielson
Queering Shell
The affirmatives obsession with life is a symptom of futurist compulsory reproduction.
This type of thinking is heterosexist and fascist, leading to the idea that queers are not
worthy of being part of society.
Edelman, Professor of English Literature , 2004.
(Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, pp. 74-76, JCE)
This conflation of homosexuality with the radical negativity of sinthomosexuality continues to shape our
social reality despite the well intentioned efforts of many, gay and straight alike, to normalize queer
sexualities within a logic of meaning that finds realization only in and as the future. When the New York
Times Magazine, for example, published in 1998 an issue devoted to the status items specific to various
demographic groups, Dan Savage found in a baby's gurgle the music to soothe the gay male beast: "Gay
parents," he wrote, "are not only making a commitment to our political future, but to the future, period.... And
many of us have decided that we want to fill our time with something more meaningful than sit-ups, circuit
parties and designer drugs. For me and my boyfriend, bringing up a child is a commitment to having a future.
And considering what the last I5 years were like, perhaps that future is the ultimate status item for gay men."
The messenger here may be a gay man, but the message is that of compulsory reproduction as inscribed
on the anti-abortion billboard I mentioned in chapter I: choose life, for life and the baby and meaning hang
together in the balance, confronting the lethal counterweight of narcissism, AIDS, and death, all of
which spring from commitment to the meaningless eruptions of jouissance associated with the "circuit
parties" that gesture toward the circuit of the drive. This fascism of the baby's face, which encourages
parents, whether gay or straight, to join in a rousing chorus of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," suggests that if
few can bring up a child without constantly bringing it up-as if the future secured by the Child, the one
true access to social security, could only be claimed for the other's sake, and never for one's own- then that
future can only belong to those who purport to feel for the other (with all the appropriative implications
that such a "feeling far" suggests). It can only belong to those who accede to the fantasy of a compassion
by which they shelter the infant future from sinthomosexuals, who offer it none, seeming, instead, to
literalize one of Blake's queerest Proverbs of Hell: "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted
desires." 13 Who would side with such "gravediggers of society" over the guardians of its future? Who
would opt for the voiding of meaning over Savage's "something more meaningful"? What might Leonard
teach us about turning our back on what hangs in the balance and deciding-despite the rhetoric of
compassion, futurity, and life-to topple the scales that are always skewed, to put one's foot down at last,
even if doing so costs us the ground on which we, like all others, must stand? To figure out how we might
answer that question, let's think about Leonard as a figure, one metonymically figured in North by Northwest
by the terra-cotta figurine ("a pre-Columbian figure ofa Tarascan warrior" [90], according to the screenplay,
that is referred to throughout the Mount Rushmore episode simply as "the figure" [e.g., 138]), which
contains, like a secret meaning, the secrets on the microfilm hidden inside it. In Leonard, to be sure, the
figure of the sinthomosexual is writ large-screen, never more so than during what constitutes his anti-Sermon
on the Mount, when by lowering the sole of his shoe he manages to show that he has no soul, thus showing
as well that the shoe of sinthomosexualiry fits him and that he's wearing it-insofar as he scorns the injunction
to put himself in the other's shoes. But the gesture by which he puts his stamp on sinthomosexuality-by
stamping on the fingers with which Thornhill holds fast to the monument's ledge with one hand while he
holds fast to Eve with the other-constitutes, as the film makes clear, a response to an appeal, even if his mode
of response is intended to strike us as unappealing.

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Heteronormativity is a powerful form of normalization which is the site of all violence.

Yep, Lovaas, and Elia, Professors @ San Francisco University, 2003.
(Gust, Karen, and John, Journal of Homosexual Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4,, pp. 18, JCE)
In this passage, Simmons vividly describes the devastating pervasiveness of hatred and violence in her
daily life based on being seen, perceived, labeled, and treated as an Other. This process of othering
creates individuals, groups, and communities that are deemed to be less important, less worthwhile,
less consequential, less authorized, and less human based on historically situated markers of social
formation such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and nationality. Othering and marginalization
are results of an invisible center (Ferguson, 1990, p. 3). The authority, position, and power of such a
center are attained through normalization in an ongoing circular movement. Normalization is the
process of constructing, establishing, producing, and reproducing a taken-for-granted and allencompassing standard used to measure goodness, desirability, morality, rationality, superiority, and a
host of other dominant cultural values. As such, normalization becomes one of the primary
instruments of power in modern society (Foucault, 1978/1990). Normalization is a symbolically,
discursively, psychically, psychologically, and materially violent form of social regulation and control,
or as Warner (1993) more simply puts it, normalization is the site of violence (p. xxvi). Perhaps one of
the most powerful forms of normalization in Western social systems is heteronormativity. Through
heteronormative discourses, abject and abominable bodies, souls, persons, and life forms are created,
examined, and disciplined through current regimes of knowledge and power (Foucault, 1978/1990).
Heteronormativity, as the invisible center and the presumed bedrock of society, is the quintessential
force creating, sustaining, and perpetuating the erasure, marginalization, disempowerment, and
oppression of sexual others.
Compulsory Heterosexuality is the logic of discrimination which materializes into violence

against everyone who is incompatible with their world view. Everyone is at risk.
Gmez, Political theorist on Hate Crimes, 2005 (Mara Mercedes, On Prejudice, Violence, and
Democracy, la-buena-vida.info, ongoing project from 2005 until 2008, pp. 2-3, JAR)
The logic of discrimination seeks to maintain the other as inferior while the logic of exclusion seeks
to liquidate or erase the other from the social world.7 These logics materialize in two uses of
violence, which I call hierarchical and exclusionary. In the hierarchical use of violence, perpetrators
maintain and enjoy difference as a mark of inferiority. In contrast, the exclusionary use of violence
attempts to eliminate differences because they are understood to be incompatible with the
perpetrator(s) world-view. In a compulsory heterosexual system of domination, non-heterosexual
practices and identifications are a threat to the system. Keeping them as inferior is, in some cases,
instrumental to heterosexual supremacy. But non-heterosexual identities are overall targets for exclusion
although such exclusion takes place in different degrees for individuals perceived or defined as gay, lesbian,
and transgender.

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Alternative: Queering must embrace unintelligibility. We must prevent ourselves from

being known, demeaning ourselves and embracing the inhuman suffering that has been
projected onto the singled out queer. This alone prevents the violence of signification.
But what if it didn't? What if Antigone, along with all those doomed to ontological suspension on
account of their unrecognizable and, in consequence, "unlivable" loves, declined intelligibility, declined
to bring herself, catachrestically, into the ambit of future meaning- or declined, more exactly, to cast off
the meaning that dings to those social identities that intelligibility abjects: their meaning as names for the
meaninglessness the Symbolic order requires as a result of the catachresis that posits meaning to begin with.
Those figures, sinthomosexuals, could not bring the Symbolic order to crisis since they only emerge, in
abjection, to support the emergence of Symbolic form, to metaphorize and enact the traumatic violence of
signification whose meaning-effacing energies, released by the cut that articulates meaning, the Symbolic
order constantly must exert itself to bind. Unlike Butler's Antigone, though, such sinthomosexuals would
insist on the unintelligible's unintelligibility, on the internal limit to signification and the impossibility of
turning Real loss to meaningful profit in the Symbolic without its persistent remainder: the inescapable Real
of the drive. As embodiments of unintelligibility, of course, they must veil what they expose, becoming,
as figures for it, the means of its apparent subjection to meaning. But where Butler's Antigone conduces to
futurism's logic of intelligibility by seeking no more than to widen the reach of what it allows us to grasp,
where she moves, by way of the future, toward the ongoing legitimation of social form through the
recognition that is said to afford "ontological certainty and durability," sinthomosexuality, though destined, of
course, to be claimed for intelligibility, consents to the logic that makes it figure for what meaning can never
grasp. Demeaned, it embraces de-meaning as the endless insistence of the Real that the Symbolic can
never master for meaning now or in the "future." That "never," Butler would argue, performs the law's
instantiation, which always attempts to impose, as she puts it, "a limit to the social, the subversive, the
possibility of agency and change, a limit that we cling to, symptomatically, as the final defeat of our own
power" (21). Committed as she is to intelligibility as the expanding horizon of social justice, Butler would
affirm "our own power" to rearticulate, by means of catachresis, the laws responsible for what she aptly
calls our "moralized sexual horror" (71). Such a rearticulation, she claims, would proceed through "the
repeated scandal by which the unspeakable nevertheless makes itself heard through borrowing and
exploiting the very terms that are meant to enforce its silence" (78). This, of course, assumes that "the
unspeakable" intends, above all else, to speak, whereas Lacan maintains, as Copjec reminds us, something
radically different: that sex, as "the structural incompleteness of language" is "that which does not
communicate itself, that which marks the subject as unknowable." 53 No doubt, as Butler helps us to see, the
norms of the social order do, in fact, change through catachresis, and those who once were persecuted as
figures of "moralized sexual horror" may trade their chill and silent tombs for a place on the public stage.
But that redistribution of social roles doesn't stop the cultural production of figures, sinthomosexuals
all, to bear the burden of embodying such a "moralized sexual horror." For that horror itself survives
the fungible figures that flesh it out insofar as it responds to something in sex that's inherently
unspeakable: the Real of sexual difference, the lack that launches the living being into the empty arms
of futurity. This, to quote from Copjec again, "is the meaning, when all is said and done, of Lacan's
notorious assertion that 'there is no sexual relation': sex, in opposing itself to sense, is also, by definition,
opposed to relation, to communication." 54 From that limit of intelligibility, from that lack in
communication, there flows, like blood from an open wound, a steady stream of figures that mean to
embody-and thus to fill-that lack, that would stanch intelligibility's wound, like the clotting factor in
blood, by binding it to, encrusting it in, Imaginary form. Though bound therefore to be, on the model of
Whitman, the binder of wounds, the sinthomosexual, anti-Promethean, unbound, unbinds us all. Or rather,
persists as the figure for such a generalized unbinding by which the death drive expresses at once the
impossible excess and the absolute limit both of and within the Symbolic. On the face of Mount
Rushmore, as he faces the void to which he himself offers a face, Leonard gestures toward such an unbinding
by committing himself to the sinthomosexual's impossible ethical act: by standing resolutely at, and on, and
for that absolute limit. Alenka Zupancic, in Ethic of the Real, notes that what Kant called the ethical act "is
denounced as 'radically evil' in every ideology," and then describes how ideology typically manages to
defend against it: The gap opened by an act (i.e., the unfamiliar, 'out-of-place' effect of an act) is
immediately linked in this ideological gesture to an image. As a rule this is an image of suffering, which
is then displayed to the public alongside this question: Is this what you want? And this question

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already implies the answer: It would be impossible, inhuman, for you to want this!" 55 The image of
suffering adduced here is always the threatened suffering of an image: an image onto which the face of the
human has coercively been projected such that "I.e, by virtue of losing it, must also lose the face by which
we (think we) know ourselves. For "we are, in effect," as Lacan ventriloquizes the normative understanding
of the self, "at one with everything that depends on the image of the other as our fellow man, on the
similarity we have to our ego and to everything that situates us in the imaginary register." 56 To be anything
else-to refuse the constraint, the inertia, of the ego as form would be, as Zupancic rightly says, "impossible,
inhuman." As impossible and inhuman as a shivering beggar who asks that we kill him or fuck him; as
impossible and inhuman as Leonard, who responds to Thornhill by crushing his hand; as impossible and
inhuman as the sinthomosexual, who shatters the lure of the future and, for refusing the call to
compassion, finally merits none himself. To embrace the impossibility, the inhumanity of the
sinthomosexual: that, I suggest, is the ethical task for which queers are singled out. Leonard affords us
no lesson in how to follow in his footsteps, but calls us, beyond desire, to a sinthomosexuality of our
own-one we assume at the price of the very identity named by "our own." To those on whom his ethical
stance, his act, exerts a compulsion, Leonard bequeaths the irony of trying to read him as an allegory, as one
from whom we could learn how to act and in whom we could find the sinthomosexual's essential
concretization: the formalization of a resistance to the constant conservation of forms, the
substantialization of a negativity that dismantles every substance. He leaves us, in short, the impossible
task of trying to fill his shoes -shoes that were empty of anything human even while he was wearing them,
but that lead us, against our own self-interest and in spite of our own desire, toward a jouissance from which
everything "human," to have one, must turn its face.

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And put away your perms. Radical inclusivity is NOT the goal. The excluded is a future
horizon of unending, unrepresentability. The result is a disruptive site which rocks the
reason of the masters discourse.
Butler, noted for her studies on gender & teaches composition and rhetoric at Berkeley, 93
(Dr. Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex) pp. 52-53 LRP
The regulation of sexuality at work in the articulation of the Forms suggests that sexual difference operates in
the very formulation of matter. But this is a matter that is defined not only against reason, where reason is
understood as that which acts on and through a countervailing materiality, and masculine and feminine
occupy these oppositional positions. Sexual difference also operates in the formulation, the staging, of
what will occupy the site of inscriptional space, that is, as what must remain outside these oppositional
positions as their supporting condition. There is no singular outside, for the Forms require a number of
exclusions; they are and replicate themselves through what they exclude, through not being the animal,
not being the woman, not being the slave, whose propriety is purchased through property, national and
racial boundary, masculinism, and compulsory heterosexuality . To the extent that a set of reversemimes emerge from those quarters, they will not be the same as each other; if there is an occupation
and reversal of the master's discourse, it will come from many quarters, and those resignifying practices
will converge in ways that scramble the self-replicating presumptions of reason's mastery. For if the copies
speak, or if what is merely material begins to signify, the scenography of reason is rocked by the crisis on
which it was always built. And there will be no way finally to delimit the elsewhere of Irigaray's
elsewhere, for every oppositional discourse will produce its outside, an outside that risks becoming
installed as its non-signifying inscriptional space. And whereas this can appear as the necessary and
founding violence of any truth-regime, it is important to resist that theoretical gesture of pathos in
which exclusions are simply affirmed as sad necessities of signification. The task is to refigure this
necessary "outside" as a future horizon, one in which the violence of exclusion is perpetually in the
process of being overcome. But of equal importance is the preservation of the outside, the site where
discourse meets its limits, where the opacity of what is not included in a given regime of truth acts as a
disruptive site of linguistic impropriety and unrepresentability, illuminating the violent and contingent
boundaries of that normative regime precisely through the inability of that regime to represent that
which might pose a fundamental threat to its continuity. In this sense, radical and inclusive
representability is not precisely the goal: to include, to speak as, to bring in every marginal and
excluded position within a given discourse is to claim that a singular discourse meets its limits
nowhere, that it can and will domesticate all signs of difference. If there is a violence necessary to the
language of politics, then the risk of that violation might well be followed by another in which we begin,
without ending, without mastering, to ownand yet never fully to ownthe exclusions by which we
proceed.

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Link: Liberal State Politics

Traditional liberalism extends the power of the state by requiring citizens to be free which
normalizes responsibilities leading to self policing and submission
Halperin 95
(David M., American theorist in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, critical theory, material culture and visual
culture, "Sain Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, " New York Oxford University Press, pg. 18-19, 1995, DES)
ALTHOUGH SOME of Foucault's critics on the Left may simply have misunderstood his claim, "power is
everywhere," to imply that contemporary forms of social domination are so total in their operations and so
overwhelming in their effects as to leave no possibility for individual or collective resistance, what most of
them are likely to have reacted against in his political theorizing is not a totalitarian concept of power that
would deny the possibility of resisting domination--a concept of power that, in any case, is quite alien to
Foucault's thinking--but something resembling its opposite: namely, Foucault's reversal of the standard
liberal critique of totalitarianism. When he says that "power is everywhere," Foucault is not talking
about power in the sense of coercive and irresistible force (which in his lexicon goes by the name not of
"power" but of "determination"); rather, he is referring to what might be called liberal power-that is, to the
kind of power typically at work in the modern liberal state, which takes as its objects "free subjects"
and defines itself wholly in relation to them and to their freedom. 7 Modern forms of governmentality
actually require citizens to be free, so that citizens can assume from the state the burden of some of its
former regulatory functions and impose on themselves--of their own accord--rules of conduct and
mechanisms of control. The kind of power Foucault is interested in, then, far from enslaving its objects,
constructs them as subjective agents and preserves them in their autonomy, so as to invest them all the more
completely. Liberal power does not simply prohibit; it does not directly terrorize. It normalizes,
"responsibilizes," and disciplines. The state no longer needs to frighten or coerce its subjects into
proper behavior: it can safely leave them to make their own choices in the allegedly sacrosanct private
sphere of personal freedom which they now inhabit, because within that sphere they freely and
spontaneously police both their own conduct and the conduct of others--and so "earn," by
demonstrating a capacity to exercise them, the various rights assigned by the state's civil institutions
exclusively to law-abiding citizens possessed of sound minds and bodies.
What shocked traditional liberals about Foucault's dictum that power is everywhere, then, is the dark vision
of modernity, of the liberal state, and of progressive, Enlightenment-era values (such as freedom, truth, and
rationality) that it expresses. For according to Foucault's analysis, civil society, scientific research,
intellectual activity, and personal life are not in fact free zones from which power has progressively retreated
since the Enlightenment but colonized spaces into which it has steadily expanded, proliferated, and diffused
itself. In one book after another, but most of all in The History of Sexuality, Volume I, Foucault attempts to
show that the separation of public and private, of power and knowledge, which is characteristic of
modern liberal societies, has not limited (as it is often supposed to have done) the operative field of
power but instead has functioned strategically to extend the reach of power and to multiply techniques
of social control. Modern liberalism has eliminated certain modes of domination only to produce many
others (which do not present themselves as modes of domination and are all the more difficult to challenge
or oppose); it has championed an ethic and an ideal of personal freedom while making the exercise of
that freedom conditional upon personal submission to new and insidious forms of authority, to ever
more deeply internalized mechanisms of constraint.

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Link: Social Construction

Sexuality is not socially constructed. The construction/determinism dualism fails to grasp
the complexity of sexuality. Sexuality is a performance, a ritualized production, existing
within constraints that make the very conditions of the performance.
(Dr. Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex) pp. 94-97. LRP
Such efforts to underscore the fixed and constrained character of sexuality, however, need to be read
carefully, especially by those who have insisted on the constructed status of sexuality . For sexuality
cannot be summarily made or unmade, and it would be a mistake to associate "constructivism" with
"the freedom of a subject to form her/his sexuality as s/he pleases." A construction is, after all, not the
same as an artifice. On the contrary, constructivism needs to take account of the domain of constraints
without which a certain living and desiring being cannot make its way. And every such being is
constrained by not only what is difficult to imagine, but what remains radically unthinkable: in the
domain of sexuality these constraints include the radical unthinkability of desiring otherwise, the
radical unendurability of desiring otherwise, the absence of certain desires, the repetitive compulsion of
others, the abiding repudiation of some sexual possibilities, panic, obsessional pull, and the nexus of
sexuality and pain. There is a tendency to think that sexuality is either constructed or determined; to
think that if it is constructed, it is in some sense free, and if it is determined, it is in some sense fixed.
These oppositions do not describe the complexity of what is at stake in any effort to take account of the
conditions under which sex and sexuality are assumed. The "performative" dimension of construction
is precisely the forced reiteration of norms. In this sense, then, it is not only that there are constraints to
per-formativity; rather, constraint calls to be rethought as the very condition of performativity.
Performativity is neither free play nor theatrical self-presentation; nor can it be simply equated with
performance. Moreover, constraint is not necessarily that which sets a limit to performativity;
constraint is, rather, that which impels and sustains performativity. Here, at the risk of repeating myself,
I would suggest that performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a
regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed fa a subject; this
repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This
iterability implies that "performance'' is not a singular "act" or event, but a ritualized production, a
ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the
threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will
insist, determining it fully in advance.

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Link: Feminism
Feminism fails to account for an encompassing view of the subject which rejects the ridgid
gender binaries defined by the Heteronormative. Radical feminism is an example of
Heteronormativity par excellence.
Butler, Judith Butler is a noted for her studies on gender, she teaches composition and rhetoric at
U.C. Berkeley, 93( Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex), pp. 238-239
. LRP
In theories such as Catharine MacKinnon's, sexual relations of subordination are understood to establish
differential gender categories, such that "men" are those defined in a sexually dominating social
position and "women" are those defined in subordination. Her highly deterministic account leaves no
room for relations of sexuality to be theorized apart from the rigid framework of gender difference or
for kinds of sexual regulation that do not take gender as their primary objects (i.e., the prohibition of
sodomy, public sex, consensual homosexuality). Hence, Gayle Rubin's influential distinction between the
domains of sexuality and gender in "Thinking Sex" and Sedgwick's reformulation of that position have
constituted important theoretical opposition to MacKinnon's deterministic form of structuralism. My sense is
that now this very opposition needs to be rethought in order to muddle the lines between queer theory
and feminism.2' For surely it is as unacceptable to insist that relations of sexual subordination
determine gender position as it is to separate radically forms of sexuality from the workings of gender
norms. The relation between sexual practice and gender is surely not a structurally determined one,
but the destabilizing of the heterosexual presumption of that very structuralism still requires a way to
think the two in a dynamic relation to one another.
Separatist feminism is based on biological homogeneity that silences queer populations.

Stryker & Whittle, lecturer in law at Manchester Metropolitan University, 06, (Where Did We
Go Wrong? Feminism and Trans TheoryTwo Teams on the Same Side, The Transgender Studies Reader. New
York: Routledge, 2006) LRP
The historical location of Raymond's book places it in the history of sex-role, early feminist theory and
from it emerged a construction of the transsexual person in which they are no longer merely a medicolegal construction, but they become part of the story, and mechanism, of patriarchal oppres sion. This
discourse, documented by Raymond (she did not invent it single handedly) reproduces the power relations
that are themselves inherent in radical feminist separatist theory. That some values and some
knowledge are better ... and others are inherently flawed. it promotes radical separatism as the only
viable alternative to the patriarchal hegemony, because the patriarchy is always involved in the
treacherous act of building the Trojan Horse [containing the transsexual woman] (and liberal feminism and
Marxist feminism will always open the gate to the horse); it supports the notion of separatism in that it
sanctions an "invisible" oppression of transsexual people by women. It allows women to become dominant
in telling their narrative about their past in order to justify and promote the use of sex-role theory,
and, in assuming a homogeneity in voices, it subsumes any other discourse about gender and sex. In
this way the transsexual person's story of gender oppression and a search for identity is silenced. It
assumes that biology is destiny, despite all that feminism seems to say in opposition to this in terms of
the pre-determination of sex and gender roles. What is anatomically observable - the possession of a penis
or a vagina at the birth of a childwhat is viewed as 'natural' becomes the dictator of the socially constructed
gender role.

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Link: Nationalism
The modern nation state is defined by what it opposes and excludes, it uses difference to enshrine
a collective national identity. Our conception of state hood is heteronormative.
Gaard, educator, writer, scholar and activist working at the intersections of literature,
feminism, and environmental justice, 97 (Greta, Toward A Queer Ecofeminism, Hypatia. Volume: 12.
Issue: 1. Publication Year: 1997. Page Number: 114.LRP)
In her study of race and gender in international politics, Cynthia Enloe finds important connections between the conceptions of
nationalism and of masculinity. In colonialist discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the subordinated countries are
feminized, the subordinated men are emasculated, and the colonized women are often depicted as sex objects by foreign men. One male
writer described colonialism as the condition wherein a man's women are "turned into fodder for imperialist postcards. Becoming a
nationalist requires a man to resist the foreigner's use and abuse of his women" ( Enloe 1989 , 44). in her study of U.S. polar expeditions,
Lisa Bloom finds that "the explorations symbolically enacted the men's own battle to become men," and the recorded narratives left by
the explorers present "U.S. national identity as essentially a white masculine one" ( Bloom 1993 , 6, 11). Both Enloe's and Bloom's texts
reprint popular colonial postcard images of naked or partially clothed native women reclining on the ground in what Bloom calls the
"odalisque pose" ( Bloom 1993 , 104). Like the colonizers of three and four centuries past, the explorers and
imperialists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have used the perceived eroticism of native
peoples as a justification for their colonization. Serving as a foundation for all imperialist exploits,
colonial nationalism offers a definition of identity that is structurally similar to the master identity.
Enloe defines a nation as "a collection of people who have come to believe that they have been shaped
by a common past and are destined to share a common future. That belief is usually nurtured by a
common language and a sense of otherness from groups around them" ( Enloe 1989 , 45; emphasis added).
Nationalism, then, is "a set of ideas that sharpens distinctions between 'us' and 'them'. It is, moreover,
a tool for explaining how inequities have been created between 'us' and 'them' " ( Enloe 1989 , 61). Similarly,
the editors of Nationalisms and Sexualities explain that "national identity is determined not on the basis of its own
intrinsic properties but as a function of what it (presumably) is not" ( Parker et al. 1992 , 5). Inevitably
"shaped by what it opposes," a national identity that depends on such differences is "forever haunted
by [its] various definitional others" ( Parker et al. 1992 , 5). The feature of masculine identity that Enloe and Bloom seem to
overlook and that Plumwood does not explicitly address is sexuality. Here again, feminist and ecofeminist theories fall short without a
queer perspective. As Gayle Rubin has noted, "Feminism is the theory of gender oppression. To automatically assume that this makes it
the theory of sexual oppression is to fail to distinguish between gender, on the one hand, and erotic desire, on the other" (1989, 307).
Queer theorist Eve Sedgwick argues that gender and sexuality are "inextricable . . . in that each can be expressed only in terms of the
other . . . in twentieth-century Western culture gender and sexuality represent two analytic axes that may productively be imagined as
being as distinct from one another as, say, gender and class, or class and race" (1990, 30). From a queer ecofeminist perspective, then, it
is clear that notions of sexuality are implicit within the category of gender. Simply stated, the masculinity
of the colonizer and of Plumwood's master identity is neither homosexual, bisexual, nor transgendered.
Heterosexuality -- and a particular kind of heterosexuality as well, a heterosexuality contained within certain
parameters -- is implicit in conceptions of both dominant masculinity and Plumwood's master model. In the
preceding examples, the discourse of nationalist colonialism contains specific conceptions not only of race and gender but also of
sexuality. The native feminized other of nature is not simply eroticized but also queered and animalized,
that any sexual behavior outside the rigid confines of compulsory heterosexuality becomes queer and
subhuman. Colonization becomes an act of the nationalist self asserting identity and definition over
and against the other -- culture over and against nature, masculine over and against feminine, reason
over and against the erotic. The metaphoric "thrust" of colonialism has been described as the rape of
indigenous people and of nature because there is a structural -- not experiential -- similarity between the
two operations, though colonization regularly includes rape.
in

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Link: Future Orientation

Political debate is necessarily framed in terms of the Child, which ideologically constrains
our thinking in terms of heteronormativity. Any possible political reform will remain
within this heterosexist mindset, making real change impossible. Queerness refuses
political reaffirmation of the future Child, resisting the social structures that authenticate
reproductive futurism.
But what helped him most in these public appeals on behalf of America's children was the social
consensus that such an appeal is impossible to refuse. Indeed, though these public service
announcements concluded with the sort of rhetorical flourish associated with hard-fought political
campaigns ("We're fighting for the children. Whose side are you on?"), that rhetoric was intended to
avow that this issue, like an ideological Mobius strip, only permitted one side. Such "self-evident" onesidedness - the affirmation of a value so unquestioned, because so obviously unquestionable, as that of the
Child whose innocence solicits our defense- is precisely, of course, what distinguishes public service
announcements from the partisan discourse of political argumentation. But it is also, I suggest, what makes
such announcements so oppressively political - political not in the partisan terms implied by the media
consultant, but political in a far more insidious way: political insofar as the fantasy subtending the image
of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought. That logic
compels us, to the extent that we would register as politically responsible, to submit to the framing of
political debate-and, indeed, of the political field -as defined by the terms of what this book describes as
reproductive futurism: terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving
in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside
the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal
relations. For politics, however radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a
more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure,
to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner the
children"? How could one take the other "side," when taking any side at all necessarily constrains one
to take the side of, by virtue of taking a side within, a political order that returns to the Child as Child.
That Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary
of every political intervention. Even proponents of abortion rights, while promoting the freedom of
women to control their own bodies through reproductive choice, recurrently frame their political
struggle, mirroring their anti-abortion foes, as a "fight for our children-for our daughters and our
sons," and thus as a fight for the future.' What, in that case, would it signify not to be "fighting for the
image of the future it intends? Impossibly, against all reason, my project stakes its claim to the very space
that "politics" makes unthinkable: the space outside the framework within which politics as we know it
appears and so outside the conflict of visions that share as their pre-supposition that the body politic must
survive. Indeed, at the heart of my polemical engagement with the cultural text of politics and the
politics of cultural texts lies a simple provocation: that queerness names the side of those not "fighting
for the children," the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of
reproductive futurism. The ups and downs of political fortune may measure the social order's pulse, but
queerness, by contrast, figures, outside and beyond its political symptoms, the place of the social order's
death drive: a place, to be sure, of abjection expressed in the stigma, sometimes fatal, that follows from
reading that figure literally, and hence a place from which liberal politics strives-and strives quite reasonably,
given its unlimited faith in reason - to disassociate the queer. More radically, though, as I argue here,
queerness attains its ethical value precisely insofar as it accedes to that place, accepting its figural
status as resistance to the viability of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance
from every social structure.

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The queer is the figure of the death drive standing in opposition to the future. Saving our
children represents saving our ideal citizens and preserving our social institutions
The drive-more exactly, the death drive-holds a privileged place in this book. As the constancy of a pressure both alien and internal to the logic of
the Symbolic, as the inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within , the death drive names what the queer, in the
order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability. Lacan
makes clear that the death drive emerges as a consequence of the Symbolic; indeed, he ends Seminar 2 with the claim
that "the symbolic order is simultaneously non-being and insisting to be, that is what Freud has in mind when he talks about
the death instinct as being what is most fundamental-a symbolic order in travail, in the process of coming,
insisting on being realized." This constant movement toward realization cannot be divorced, however, from a
will to undo what is thereby instituted, to begin again ex nihilo. For the death drive marks the excess embedded within the
Symbolic through the loss, the Real loss, the advent of the signifier effects. Suzanne Barnard expresses this well in distinguishing between the
subject of desire and the subject of the drive: "While the subject of the drive also is 'born' in relation to a loss, this loss is a real rather than a
symbolic one. As such, it functions not in a mode of absence but in a mode of an impossible excess haunting reality, an irrepressible remainder
that the subject cannot separate itself from. In other words, while desire is born of and sustained by a constitutive lack, drive emerges in relation
to a constitutive surplus. This surplus is what Lacan calls the subject's 'anatomical complement,' an excessive 'unreal' remainder that produces an
ever-present jouissance. This surplus, compelling the Symbolic to enact a perpetual repetition, remains spectral, "unreal," or impossible insofar as
it insists outside the logic of meaning that, nonetheless, produces it. The drive holds the place of what meaning misses in much the same way that
the signifier preserves at the heart of the signifying order the empty and arbitrary letter, the meaningless substrate of signification that meaning
intends to conceal. Politics, then, in opposing itself to the negativity of such a drive, gives us history as the
continuous staging of our dream of eventual self-realization by endlessly reconstructing, in the mirror of desire,
what we take to be reality itself. And it does so without letting us acknowledge that the future, to which it
persistently appeals, marks the impossible place of an Imaginary past exempt from the deferrals intrinsic to the operation of the
signifying chain and projected ahead as the site at which being and meaning are joined as One. In this it enacts the formal repetition distinctive of
the drive while representing itself as bringing to fulfillment the narrative sequence of history and, with it, of desire, in the realization of the
subject's authentic presence in the Child imagined as enjoying unmediated access to Imaginary wholeness. Small wonder that the era of
the universal subject should produce as the very figure of politics, because also as the embodiment of futurity
collapsing undecidably into the past, the image of the Child as we know it: the Child who becomes, in Wordsworth's
phrase, but more punitively, "father of the Man." Historically constructed, as social critics and intellectual historians including Phillipe Aries,
James Kincaid, and Lawrence Stone have made clear, to serve as the repository of variously sentimentalized cultural identifications , the Child
has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is
held in perperual trust." In its coercive universalization, however, the image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived
experiences of any historical children, serves to regulate political discourse-to prescribe what will count as political
discourse- by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to the reality of a collective future whose
figurative status we are never permitted to acknowledge or address. From Delacroix's iconic image of Liberty leading us
into a brave new world of revolutionary possibility- her bare breast making each spectator the unweaned Child to whom it's held out while the
boy to her left, reproducing her posture, affirms the absolute logic of reproduction itself-to the revolutionary waif in the logo that miniaturizes the
"politics" of Les Mis (summed up in its anthem to futurism, the "inspirational" "One Day More"), we are no more able to conceive of
a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the
Child. That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share
in the nation's good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights "real" citizens are allowed. For the social
order exists to preserve for this universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly
valued than the actuality of freedom itself, which might, after all, put at risk the Child to whom such a
freedom falls due. Hence, whatever refuses this mandate by which our political institutions compel the
collective reproduction of the Child must appear as a threat not only to the organization of a given social
order but also, and far more ominously, to social order as such, insofar as it threatens the logic of futurism on
which meaning always depends.

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The future of the child is a promise to shield ourselves against the threat of apocalypse. The
fetish fixation on the Child is a mark of heteronormativity. Edelman, Professor of English
Literature , 2004.
The Child, in the historical epoch of our current epistemological regime, is the figure for this compulsory
investment in the misrecognition of figure. It takes its place on the social stage like every adorable Annie
gathering her limitless funds of pluck to "stick out [her] chin! And grin! And say: 'Tomorrow!! Tomorrow!! I
love ya! Tomorrow! You're always! A day! Away.' "And lo and behold, as viewed through the prism of the
tears that it always calls forth, the figure of this Child seems to shimmer with the iridescent promise of
Noah's rainbow, serving like the rainbow as the pledge of a covenant that shields us against the
persistent threat of apocalypse now- or later. Recall, for example, the end of Jonathan Demme's
Philadelphia (1993), his filmic act of contrition for the homophobia some attributed to The Silence of the
Lambs (199r). After Andrew Beckett (a man for all seasons, as portrayed by the saintly Tom Hanks), last
seen on his deathbed in an oxygen mask that seems to allude to, or trope on, Hannibal Lecter's more
memorable muzzle (see figures I and 2), has shuffled off this mortal coil to stand, as we are led to suppose,
before a higher law, we find ourselves in, if not at, his wake surveying a room in his family home, now
crowded with children and pregnant women whose reassuringly bulging bellies (see figure 3) displace
the bulging basket (unseen) of the HIV-positive gay man (unseen) from whom, the filmic text suggests, in
a cinema (unlike the one in which we sit watching philadelphia) not phobic about graphic representations
of male-male sexual acts, Saint Thomas, a.k.a. Beckett, contracted the virus that cost him his life.
When we witness, in the film's final sequence, therefore, the videotaped representation of Andrew
playing on the beach as a boy (see figure 4), the tears that these moving pictures solicit burn with an
indignation directed not only against the intolerant world that sought to crush the honorable man this
boy would later become, but also against the homosexual world in which boys like this eventually grow
up to have crushes on other men. For the cult of the Child permits no shrines to the queerness of boys
and girls, since queerness, for contemporary culture at large as for Philadelphia in particular, is understood
as bringing children and childhood to an end. Thus, the occasion of a gay man's death gives the film
the excuse to unleash once more the disciplinary image of the "innocent" Child performing its
mandatory cultural labor of social reproduction. We encounter this image on every side as the lives,
the speech, and the freedoms of adults face constant threat of legal curtailment out of deference to
imaginary Children whose futures, as if they were permitted to have them except as they consist in the
prospect of passing them on to Children of their own, are construed as endangered by the social disease as
which queer sexualities register. Nor should we forget how pervasively AIDs-for which to this day the
most effective name associated with the congressional appropriation of funds is that of a child, Ryan Whitereinforces an older connection, as old as the antigay reading imposed on the biblical narrative of Sodom's
destruction, between practices of gay sexuality and the undoing of futurity. This, of course, is the
connection on which Anita Bryant played so cannily when she campaigned in Florida against gay civil rights
under the banner of "Save Our Children," and it remains the connection on which the national crusade against
gay marriage rests its case. Thus, while lesbians and gay men by the thousands work for the right to
marry, to serve in the military, to adopt and raise children of their own, the political right, refusing to
acknowledge these comrades in reproductive futurism, counters their efforts by inviting us to kneel at
the shrine of the sacred Child: the Child who might witness lewd or inappropriately intimate behavior;
the Child who might find information about dangerous "lifestyles" on the Internet; the Child who
might choose a provocative <CONTINUED>

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<CONTINUED>
book from the shelves of the public library; the Child, in short, who might find an enjoyment that
would nullify the figural value, itself imposed by adult desire, of the Child as unmarked by the adult's
adulterating implication in desire itself; the Child, that is, made to image, for the satisfaction of adults,
an Imaginary fullness that's considered to want, and therefore to want for, nothing. As Lauren Berlant argues
forcefully at the outset of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, "a nation made for adult
citizens has been replaced by one imagined for fetuses and children." On every side, our enjoyment of
liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening
shadow of a Child whose freedom to develop undisturbed by encounters, or even by the threat of
potential encounters, with an "otherness" of which its parents, its church, or the state do not approve,
uncompromised by any possible access to what is painted as alien desire, terroristically holds us all in
check and determines that political discourse conform to the logic of a narrative wherein history
unfolds as the future envisioned for a Child who must never grow up. Not for nothing, after all, does the
historical construction of the homosexual as distinctive social type overlap with the appearance of such
literary creations as Tiny Tim, David Balfour, and Peter Pan, who enact, in an imperative most evident today
in the uncannily intimate connection between Harry . Potter and Lord Voldemort, a Symbolic resistance to
the unmarried men (Scrooge, Uncle Ebenezer, Captain Hook) who embody, as Voldemort's name makes
clear, a wish, a will, or a drive toward death that entails the destruction of the Child. That Child, immured
in an innocence seen as continuously under siege, condenses a fantasy of vulnerability to the queerness
of queer sexualities precisely insofar as that Child enshrines, in its form as sublimation, the very value
for which queerness regularly finds itself condemned: an insistence on sameness that intends to restore
an Imaginary past. The Child, that is, marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically
charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of
reproductive futurism. And so, as the radical right maintains, the battle against queers is a life-and-death
struggle for the future of a Child whose ruin is pursued by feminists, queers, and those who support the legal
availability of abortion. Indeed, as the Army of God made clear in the bomb making guide it produced for the
assistance of its militantly "pro-life" members, its purpose was wholly congruent with the logic of
reproductive futurism: to "disrupt and ultimately destroy Satan's power to kill our children, God's children.

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Link: Face of the Child

The cult of fetal-personhood is symptomatic of the masculine fertility complex which put
extinction within our reach; using the fetus as a cosmic model leaves the problematic
portions of the military-industrial complex unchallenged, displacing extinction anxieties
into abortion, collapsing the future tense into the ideology of progress, forcing us to live in a
preapocalyptic world of paralyzed action
Sofia, Noted Austrailan cyber and cyber-gender theorist, 84 (Zoe "Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament,
and the Sexo-semiotics of Extraterrestrialism," Diacritics; A review of Contemporary Criticism, Vol 4, Pg. 56-57,
Summer 1984, DES)
The absolutist logic of the Pro-Lifers for Survival line, and the dichotomies structuring the abortion
debate, are symptomatic of the very mode of thought which has placed extinction within our reach: that
peculiarly masculinist mode which has stubbornly devalued the visible ordering and multiplyembedded character of terrestrial life in favor of the decontextualized abstractions of Jupiter Space.
The binarist logic of masculinist thought is stumped by contextual relations like that of the fetus to the
woman's body, and on the subject of reproduction, it still employs an Aristotelian model which accords
ail of the transformative, generative power to males and reduces females to mere nurturant vessels for
male seeds. 2001 is clearly working on this model: all of the embryological imagery is associated with men
and their tools, and Mother Earth keeps getting left out of the picture.
Pro-choice activist Janet Gallagher complains about the level of abstraction which arises in discussions with
pro-lifers, and observes:
There's a way in which the fetus is discussed as though it were not within a living woman. As if that
woman didn't exist. . . .9
Dr. J. C. Wilke from the National Right to Life Committee has claimed that pro-choice forces "do violence to
marriage by helping remove the right of a husband to protect the child he has fathered in his wife's womb." l
o This statement expresses the kernel of the masculinist fertility complex, which disappears the
womanlwifelmother into the protecting superwomb of patriarchal culture and accords male semen all
the fertile power.
This same Dr. Wilke in 1973 copyrighted a lurid anti-abortion flyer containing graphic depictions of dead
fetuses and sensational descriptions of unborn life. The back page of this flyer is interesting on several
counts. The far right panel, which claims that "abortion-ondemand laws give to one person (the mother) the
legal right to kill another (the baby) in order to solve the first person's social problem," brings forward an
aspect of the abortion question which tends to be glossed under the legalist rhetoric of "choice," namely, that
social and economic conditions are so unfriendly to children and mothers that many women feel they have no
choice but to terminate their pregnancies. The flyer's middle panel, of babies dead in the garbage and the
title "Human garbage," can be read as symptomatic of anxiety over the wastage of life which would
result from a nuclear war. The New Right's rhetoric of defense and protection of fetal life is
similarly resonant with militaristic scenarios. But of particular interest here is the origin story which
appears on the left panel. Its text is as follows:
Did you "come from" a human baby?
No! You once were a baby.
Did you "come from" a human fetus?
No! You once were a fetus.
Did you "come from" a fertilized ovum?
No! You once were a fertilized ovum.
A fertilized ovum? Yes! You were then everything you are today.
<CONTINUED>

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<CONTINUED>
A line is then drawn across the column, and underneath it the following words appear in heavy type:
Nothing has been added to the fertilized ovum who you once were except nutrition.
The fetus here is all mouth, the mother all food, and the pregnancy entirely spermatic. The line between
these last sections is particularly interesting, given what we already know of Dr. Wilke's attitude to fathering.
The text here "draws the line" at a point where biological knowledge constrains it from asserting something it
really believes. If we put this line under a microscope, it would probably read as follows:
Did you "come from" your father's sperm?
No! You once were your father's sperm.
Where does the pro-life fetus exist, if not in living woman's body? The front cover of this flyer gives us one
answer: the dead fetus is in the man's hands. One pro-life lawyer has been , quoted as saying "the fetus might
well be described as an astronaut in an interuterine space ship."" He is correct: the fetus is a
decontextualized abstraction of Jupiter Space, which here means patriarchal consciousness. It is an
overblown symbol of the parasitic male ego, and more generally, of the corporate Superbabies which
feed off the Earth while pretending it doesn't exist.
Its associations with an anti-erotic repressive morality and pro-militarist sentiments make the
movement to protect the fetal person seem less about life and more about preventing its termination:
the New Right is not so much "pro-life" as "anti-abortion." Like the Star Child, the pro-life fetus
arises as the negation of life's negation, through which the male ego resurrects itself as a spermatic
creation. And like the Star Child, this other inhabitant of Jupiter Space may also stand for extinction.
One pro-choice activist has claimed that the notion of fetal personhood is a relatively new one, which is
"taking a form that has its own energy, almost like a religious cult." We look again to the film 2001 for
clues to the source of this energy. The astral fetus is visually equated with the planet, and in the last frame,
substituted for it: it becomes a world of its own. At one level, then, the fetus is working as a symbol for the
Earth. It is a cosmic symbol. It is not entirely inappropriate that the planet be represented by a signifier
of unborn life, for it presently contains all of the possibilities for future life forms. From this
perspective, disarmament might be seen as an act to prevent a cosmic abortion.
But there are three major dangers in using the fetus as a cosmic symbol:
If the cosmic associations are left unspecified, then anxieties over the fate of the Earth can be
unconsciously expressed in hysterical or abstract discussions of individual fetal life, while leaving
untroubled that part of the belief system which favors further development of doomsday machines.
The cult of fetal personhood can thus serve as a safety valve for the right's bad conscience over its
exterminist policies. More generally, the individualist rhetoric on both sides of the abortion debate
prevents proper recognition of the radical reproductive choices being made daily by the militaryindustrial complex, and tends to keep questions of reproductive morality confined to the private sphere
Even where the connections between cosmic and individual unborn are explicitly recognized, as in the
Pro-Lifers for Survival position, there is no guarantee that extinction anxieties wont continue to be
displaced onto the more manageable issue of abortion, a tendency already encouraged by moral
absolutism, and which may gain further impetus as people lose hope of dismantling the nuclear
apparatus.
The Earth is usually pictured as a Mother, and there is something disturbing about its image as fetusthe profound individualism of it perhaps, and the way it appears at the moment we're threatened with
nuclear abortion. But there is also a space oddity involved: for if the Earth is an embryo, then its womb is
space. Although we know of no other living worlds, centuries of extraterrestrial fantasies capped off by
several decades of off-world practice have encouraged us to think of space as a good womb, full of
inhabitable planets. From this view, the Earth is just one of many cosmic pregnancies. It doesn't really
matter if we abort it, for we can always escape to one of the new Star Children we pluck from the
vacuum; we might even mutate into extraterrestrial cyborgs.
<CONTINUED>

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<CONTINUED>
Apart from the space oddities it shares with 2001, the cult of fetal personhood employs termporal distortions
remarkably similar to those of science-fiction culture. Dr. Wilke's embryological catechism attempts to
persuade us that we did not just "come from" an embryo (the future conditional), we "once were" that
embryo (collapsed future); that embryo was always already what we are now, an adult person. The embryo
faces no alternative futures, but one single destiny, which is moreover collapsed back onto all previous
states of being, allowing the conceptus to be spoken of as a "tiny person" and the deliberate arrest of
its development equated with homicide. Contrasting with this collapsed future tense of antiabortion
rhetoric is the future conditional of feminists, who understand conception as an occurrence with a
number of possible outcomes, to be determined by the future events or decisions which might influence
or terminate its development.
The collapsed future tense lies at the heart of our culture of space and time travel. It is the "bound to be"
of the ideology of progress, operative in the discourse of those who tell us that since nuclear reactors,
deep-sea mining, Star Wars, and space colonies are inevitable parts of our future, we might as well quit
griping about their bad side-effects and get on with making the future happen; after all, there's no time
like the present. Trouble is, the collapse of the future leaves the present with no time, and we live with
the sense of the preapocalyptic moment, the inevitability of everything happening at once.
The perversity of the collapsed future tense lies in its ability at once to invoke and deny the future. For
if the future is already upon us, we have no need to consider the survival needs of future generations: we
are the future generation. The collapse of adulthood into the fetus-world symbol helps render
extinction conscionable by reductively equating the megadeath of the cosmic unborn with the
individual deaths we all know we must face. The pro-life prosition is therefore continuous with all of
those other discourses of future collapse which work to paralyze people into inaction in the face of the
extraterrestrial and exterminist technologies which seem destined to take over our lives.

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Link: Nuclear Family

The nuclear family reinforces the dominant family structure.
Weber, 01 (Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality; A Conceptual Framework.
Boston: McGraw Hill. LRP
Ideological. Families are institutions where the ideas that bolster and justify the dominant power
structure are reinforced daily in an intimate setting. Conservative politicians and political interest
groups in the 1990s, for example, used the term "family values" to refer to the political values that
serve the interests of nuclear, heterosexual, White, middle- and upper-class, Christian familiesthat
is, those values that serve to reinforce the dominant power structure. Political. Families are institutions
where the public authority and power of middle- and upper-class White, male heterosexuals are
reinforced daily in a variety of ways. When a man rapes or otherwise sexually assaults the child of a
neighbor, for example, the violation is typically seen as a crime and is often pursued in the criminal justice
system. When, however, the same man rapes or otherwise sexually assaults his own daughter, the rape is
more often either not challenged at all, treated as an issue for social services, or dealt with in therapy. The
public power of men (including their greater economic power) gives them power in the family, making it
especially difficult for women and children to successfully challenge the abuse of that power either within
the family or in the criminal justice system (cf. Herman 1992). Economic. Families are institutions where
goods and services are distributed to reinforce the economic power of dominant groups. The family
wagea wage large enough to enable a man to provide for his entire familywas extended at the end of the
nineteenth century to White men to lure them away from family farms and into factory work but was never
extended to men of color. It also served as a mechanism for exerting control over women by both denying
them access to wage work and by justifying lower wages for women (Hartmann 1997). Current tax laws
determining what part of income earned by individual workers will be retained by the state are set by family
status. Married, heterosexual couples pay one rate, unmarried individuals pay another rate, and deductions
and tax credits accrue to parents with dependent children.

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Link: Hetero/Homo Binary

The distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality is flawed- its a social
construction that has led to the heterosexual supremacy as the norm and views
homosexuality as the evil Other to be ostracized.
Katz, an independent scholar and historian of sexuality, 95( Jonathan Ned, The Invention of
Heterosexuality, New York: Dutton pg 98-101) JNF
His recasting of the hetero/homo polarity did suggest that there are degrees of heterosexual and homosexual
behavior and emotion. But that famous continuum also emphatically reaffirmed the idea of a sexuality divided
between the hetero and homo. Kinsey's "heterosexual-homosexual rating scale," from zero to six, sounded precise,
quantitative, and scientific, fixing the het/homo binary in the public mind with new certainty.49 His science-dressed,
influential sex-liberalism thus upheld the hetero/homo division, giving it new life and legitimacy. Kinsey also
explicitly contested the idea of an absolute either/or antithesis between hetero and homo persons. Stressing the
variations between exclusive heterosexual and exclusive homosexual behavior and feeling, he denied that
human beings "represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual." The world's population,
he ordered, "is not to be divided into sheep and goats." (That revealing Biblical metaphor positions heterosexuals
as sheep, coupled with conformity, and homosexuals as goats, linked with licentiousness). The hetero/homo
division of persons is not nature's doing, Kinsey stresses, but society's. As sex-liberal reformer, he challenged
the social and historical division of people into heterosexuals and homosexuals because he saw this personlabeling used to denigrate homosexuals. Motivated by a reformist impulse, he rejected the social reality and
profound subjective force of a historically constructed tradition which, since the early twentieth century in the U.S.,
had cut the sexual population in twoand helped to establish the social and personal reality of a heterosexual and
homosexual identity. The idea of hetero and homo identitiestwo discrete, essentially different types of people
is a deeply ambiguous political legacy. On the one hand, the historical establishment of a heterosexual
identity as universal, presumed, and normative has supported the formation of heterosexual supremacy. On
the other hand, the historical establishment of a female heterosexual identity has encouraged twentieth-century
women to pursue erotic enjoyments unknown to many of their nineteenth-century foremothers. At the same time,
modern women's pursuit of heterosexual happiness has often been degraded by sexism and co-opted by commerce
("You've come a long way, baby!") and made dangerous by men's sexual harassment and violence. The historical
emergence of a specifically homosexual person has, especially since 1969, led to the development of a powerful
movement publicly and actively affirming a gay and lesbian "identity." Modeled after American movements affirming "racial" and "ethnic" identities, the mass coming out of gay and lesbian persons has freed thousands of women
and men from a deep, painful, socially induced sense of inferiority and shame. This movement has helped to bring
about a society-wide liberalization of responses to persons identified as homosexual.5 At the same time, Kinsey's
contesting the notion of homosexual and heterosexual identities and persons was one early, partial form of resistance
to the antihomosexual use of the hetero/homo distinction. Another sex reformer, Gore Vidal, has for years
been joyfully proclaiming: there is no such thing as a homosexual or a hetero sexual person. There are only
homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices, and what anyone does
with a willing partner is of no social or cosmic significance. So why all the fuss? In order for a ruling class to
rule, there must be arbitrary prohibitions. Of all prohibitions, sexual taboo is the most useful because sex
involves everyone. ... we have allowed our governors to divide the population into two teams. One team is
good, godly, straight; the other is evil, sick, vicious." But can we not take Vidal's analysis of our "wacky division"
one step further? Can we now question, not only the division into hetero and homo persons, but the hetero/homo
division itself? As early as 1949, the twenty-five-year-old James Baldwin was initiating an inquiry into his society's
sacred sexual labels. In "Preservation of Innocence," published obscurely in Tangier, Baldwin innovatively warned
that the tagging of homosexual persons denied human complexitynot only that of homo sexuals but of
everyone:52 It is quite impossible to write a worth-while novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for
people refuse, unhappily, to function in so neat and one-dimensional a fashion. If the novelist considers that they
are no more complex than their labels, he must, of necessity, produce a catalogue, in which we will find, neatly
demands the 'presence and passion of human beings, who cannot ever be labeled. Once the novelist has created a
human being, he has
<CONTINUED>

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<CONTINUED>
shattered the label, and in transcending the subject matter, is able, for the first listed, all those attributes with which
the label is associated. . . . Though Baldwin doesn't mention it, a worthy novel about a Heterosexual would also
seem to be ruled out, for the reasons he discusses: A novel insistently time, to tell us something about it. . . . Without
this passion, we'may all smother to death, locked in those airless, labeled cells, which isolate us from each other and
separate us from ourselves.53 The differentiation of homosexual and heterosexual persons, the young Baldwin
suggests, is linked inextricably to a system of moralizing judgments about men and women: Before we were
banished from Eden and the curse was uttered, "I will put enmity between thee and the woman," the homosexual did
not exist; nor, properly speaking, did the heterosexual. We were all in a state of nature.54 The homo/hetero
distinction, Baldwin hints, is not natural but social and value-laden, and tied to a problematic cultural connection of
men and women. The "present debasement" of the male homosexual, "and our obsession with him," Baldwin
stresses, "corresponds to the debasement of the relationships between the sexes."55 The division between man and
woman, Baldwin declares, "can only betray a division within the soul of each." The either/or, man/woman
distinction is a problem for the psy che. It won't help our souls to declare "that men must recap ture their
status as men and that women must embrace their function as women." That "rigidity of attitude" puts to
death "any possible communion." Anyway, "having once listed the bald physical facts," it's difficult to
"decide, of our multiple human attributes, which are masculine and which are feminine. "56 "The recognition
of this complexity"this ambiguity of the sexes and sexual divisions"is the signal of maturity, it marks,"
says Baldwin, "the death of the child and the birth of the man."
Hetero/Homo is an artificial division. The language of gay is accepting their worlds

linguistic attempt to divide and conquer
Katz, an independent scholar and historian of sexuality, 95( Jonathan Ned, The Invention of
Heterosexuality, New York: Dutton pg 104-105) JNF
Hetero/homo is "an artificial division," Baldwin says: "There's nothing in me that is not in everybody else,
and nothing in everybody else which is not in me." We're "trapped in language, of course," he admits. But
the complexities of human experienceBaldwin's own experience, for examplecast doubt on the
language of heterosexual and homosexual, words that divide and try to conquer: I loved a few people
and they loved me. It had nothing to do with these labels. Of course, the world had all kinds of words for
us. But that's the world's problem. Baldwin's response to the world's sex problem parallels his response
to the world's race problem: My own point of view, speaking out of black America, when I had to try to
answer that stigma, that species of social curse, it seemed a great mistake to answer in the language of
the oppressor. As long as I react as a "nigger," as long as I protest my case on evidence or assumptions held
by others, I'm simply reinforcing those assumptions. Imagining a radically new future sex, Baldwin says:
No one will have to call themselves gay. Maybe that's at the bottom of my impatience with the term. It
answers a false argument, a false accusation. That is, that you have no right to be here, that you have
to prove your right to be here. I'm saying I have nothing to prove. The world also belongs to me. In a
world in which no one identifies as gay, no one will identify as straight. That world, Baldwin suggests,
divested of the homosexual/heterosexual division, will belong to all of us.

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Because of the homo/heterosexual binary, heterosexuality is dependent on a perverted

opposite, such as homosexuality or queerness, to survive. It must constantly restate itself
repeatedly by denying homosexuality as a viable alternative. In other words,
heterosexuality is caught in a cycle of unending compulsion towards reaffirming itself.
(Gust, Karen, and John, Journal of Homosexual Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4,, pp. 28-29, JCE)
Heterosexuality Needs to Constantly Reproduce Itself. In spite of its immutable appearance,
heterosexuality is neither fixed nor stable. Because of the relational nature of the homo/heterosexual
binary, heterosexuality can never be completely, positively, and ultimately free of its dependence on
homosexuality. In a never-ending attempt to appear as authentic, pure, and uncontaminated
from homosexual invasion and infringement, heterosexuality erects heavily policed borders. Such
borders are closely watched and carefully defended because they are points of danger for one or the other or
both identities involved (Johnson, 1997). Just imagine the anxiety, tension, and anger even violence
which can be provoked by suggesting to a self-proclaimed heterosexual man that he might be gay. But
why such anxiety? I contend that the source of anxiety and tension partly emanates from awareness
that heterosexuality is fundamentally fragile. Butler (1996), heterosexuality has to re-elaborate itself, to
ritualistically reproduce itself all over the place (p. 114). Such incessant ritualistic reproduction is an
attempt to maintain the fiction of a stable heterosexuality. Calling it the heterosexual comedy, Butler
maintains that the heterosexual ideal, like other sexual norms, is fragile and fundamentally comic.
Elaborating on her notion of comedy, she states, If you say I can only desire X, what youve
immediately done, in rendering desire exclusive, is created a whole set of positions which are
unthinkable from the standpoint of your identity. Now, I take it that one of the essential aspects of
comedy emerges when you end up actually occupying a position that you have just announced to be
unthinkable. (Butler, 1996, p. 114) In a sense, through the erection of boundaries, such as the articulation of
ones exclusive desire for only members of a different sex and engagement in only certain authorized erotic
practices, a host of sexual possibilities are denied yet immediately conjured up. If heterosexuality is not
independent and stable, then it must continuously re-affirm itself through repeated performance.
Invoking her notion of performativity, Butler (1993) points out that . . . hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a
constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations. That it must repeat this imitation, that it
sets up pathologizing practices and normalizing sciences in order to produce and consecrate its own
claim on originality and propriety, suggests that heterosexual performativity is beset by an anxiety that
it can never fully overcome, that its effort to become its own idealizations can never be finally or fully
achieved, and that it is consistently haunted by that domain of sexual possibility that must be excluded
for heterosexualized gender to produce itself. (p. 125) In short, heterosexuality, as an institution and
identity, is caught up in an anxious and unending cycle of repetition compulsion.

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The hetero/homo binary is a homophobic production. We must break out of this binary
hierarchy
Halperin 95
David M. Halperin, American theorist in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, critical theory, material culture
and visual culture, "Sain Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, " New York Oxford University Press, pg. 44-46,
1995, DES.
The heterosexual/homosexual binarism is itself a homophobic production, just as the man/woman
binarism is a sexist production. Each consists of two terms, the first of which is unmarked and
unproblematized--it designates "the category to which everyone is assumed to belong" (unless someone
is specifically marked as different)--whereas the second term is marked and problematized: it designates
a category of persons whom something differentiates from normal, unmarked people. 70 The marked
(or queer) term ultimately functions not as a means of denominating a real or determinate class of
persons but as a means of delimiting and defining--by negation and opposition--the unmarked term. If
the term "homosexuality" turns out, as we have seen, not to describe a single, stable thing but to operate as a
placeholder for a set of mutually incompatible, logically contradictory predicates, whose impossible
conjunction does not refer to some paradoxical phenomenon in the world so much as it marks out the limits
of the opposed term, "heterosexuality," that is because homosexuality and heterosexuality do not represent
a true pair, two mutually referential contraries, but a hierarchical opposition in which heterosexuality
defines itself implicitly by constituting itself as the negation of homosexuality. 71 Heterosexuality
defines itself without problematizing itself, it elevates itself as a privileged and unmarked term, by
abjecting and problematizing homosexuality. Heterosexuality, then, depends on homosexuality to lend
it substance--and to enable it to acquire by default its status as a default, as a lack of difference or an
absence of abnormality. 72 ("A source of heterosexual comfort," Paul Morrison suggests: "'Whatever else
you might say about [heterosexuality], at least it's not that.'" also "a source of heterosexual anxiety: 'There is
nothing else to say about it but that.'") 73 Although the unmarked term claims a kind of precedence or
priority over the marked term, the very logic of supplementarity entails the unmarked term dependence on
the marked term: the unmarked term needs the marked term in order to generate itself as unmarked. In that
sense the marked term turns out to be structurally and logically prior to the unmarked one. (In the case of
heterosexuality and homosexuality, the marked term's priority to the unmarked term is not only structural or
logical but historical as well: the invention of the term and the concept of homosexuality preceded by some
years the invention of the term and concept of heterosexuality--which was originally the name of a
perversion [what we now call bisexuality] and only gradually came to occupy its familiar place as the polar
opposite of homosexuality.) 74 "Homosexual," like "woman," 75 is not a name that refers to a "natural
kind" of thing; it's a discursive, and homophobic, construction that has come to be misrecognized as
an object under the epistemological regime known as realism. Which is not, of course, to say that
homosexuality is unreal. On the contrary, constructions are very real. 76 People live by them, after
all--and nowadays, increasingly, they die from them. You can't get more real than that. But if
homosexuality is a reality, it is a constructed reality, a social and not a natural reality. The social world
contains many realities that do not exist by nature.
24
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Holbrook/Nielson
Link: Military
The military solider is premised on an ideology of manliness. Violence and denigration of
the other are a way of constituting the masculine self by making feminine or homosexual
the target nation or enemys body.
Richter-Montpetit, Political Science Department, York University, 2007
(Melanie, Empire, Desire and Violence: A Queer Transnational Feminist Reading of the Prisoner 'Abuse' in Abu
Ghraib and the Question of 'Gender Equality,International Feminist Journal of Politics; Mar 2007, Vol. 9 Issue 1,
p38-59, 22p) Hdo
In stark contrast to the seemingly benign intentions articulated in this hegemonic national fantasy, the four
reports came to a similar conclusion whereby between October and December 2003, numerous incidents of
sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees in Abu Ghraib prison
(Taguba 2004: 16). At this point, we should note a large body of feminist literature challenging the supposed
exceptionalism of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses among soldiers in war zones and at home
(see Seifert 1996; Barrett 1999;
Whitworth 2004). This feminist scholarship on militarism suggests that being a soldier is, in short, about
violence and about preparing people to destroy other human beings by force (Whitworth 2004: 151).
Yet the problem goes beyond military training, it is about what constitutes becoming and being a soldier it
is about militarized masculinity. Drawing on Cynthia Enloe, Whitworth (2004: 16) argues that militaries
rely on a certain kind of ideology of manliness in order to function well, an ideology premised on
violence and aggression, individual conformity to military discipline, aggressive heterosexism,
misogyny and racism. The military compensates the soldier for subordination and physical stress with the
promise of community, and physical and emotional toughness (Whitworth 2004: 16). Militarized
masculinity is inherently fragile, due to the discrepancies between the myths and promises associated with
militarized masculinity as
experienced and enacted in military training as well as in simulations of warfare, and the lack of control in
the actual lives of soldiers (Whitworth 2004: 166). Whitworth further argues that, through violence and the
denigration of Others who undermine their promised entitlements, soldiers seek to (re)constitute their
militarized masculine self. Following Whitworth, I suggest that the various forms of torture enacted by the
soldiers on the bodies of Abu Ghraib detainees were a way of reasserting control and reconstituting the
soldierly Self, particularly after the emasculating events on 9/11 and the daily resistance against the
occupation of Iraq. The heavy involvement of female-identified soldiers in the torture of prisoners seems to
stand in clear contradiction to feminist theories of militarized masculinity. How can we make sense of this
tension? I argue that we can do so if we understand Operation Iraqi Hope as a colonial endeavour, the
racialized encounter between prison guards and detainees as a colonial one and the torturing of detainees as
acts of colonial violence rooted in the desire to enact Whiteness.11 I will now turn to the ways the acts of
torture were staged. According to the military reports male detainees were sodomized by prison guards,
forced to masturbate themselves and/or perform indecent acts on each other (Fay and Jones 2004: 72),
such as simulating and/or performing oral or anal sex on fellow male detainees. The prison guards also
arranged naked male detainees in a human pyramid, in such a way that the bottom guys [sic] penis would
touch the guy on tops [sic] butt (Taguba 2004), and called them names such as gay. Many of these
homosexual acts 14 indecent acts were photographed and/or videotaped. Moreover, the soldiers stripped
male detainees and forced them to wear female underpants, often on their heads.I suggest that these torture
practices are embedded in colonial narratives and practices that, first, paint the colonies or dark
corners of the earth as feminized and spatially spread for male exploration (McClintock 1995: 23) or
penetration; and, second, equate the lack of potency and domination of the male body (and the
nation) with femininity and male homosexuality.

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Heteropatriarchal associations with the penetrated body play a significant role in US

military conquests. The use of homosexuality in violence relegates it to dehumanization and
obscures state-sponsored systemic violence.
p38-59, 22p) Hdo
In the late nineteenth century, the western colonial projects coincided and intersected with the rise of
scientific racism and its systematic racialization of Others in the colonies and in the mother country. In
the colonies, [t]he personage of the savage was developed as the Other of civilization and one of the first
proofs of this otherness was the nakedness of the savage, the visibility of its sex (Mercer and Julien cited
in Somerville 2000: 5). Back home, the twin processes of sexualization and racialization constructed
internal Other(s) the degenerate European races such as the Jews and the Irish, prostitutes, the
unemployed, the insane (McClintock 1995: 50) and homosexuals. These intersecting processes helped
erect and police the boundaries between the imperial elites and the European and non-European
subaltern, and served to rationalize, to render natural, the concomitant acts of exclusion and
violence. The hetero-patriarchal association of the penetrated body as passive and feminine, and of the
penetrator as virile and masculine has played, and continues to play, a significant role in military
conquests of the US Empire. It intersects clearly with racialized notions of inferiority and superiority.
For example, during the 1991 Gulf War, US airforce soldiers scribbled messages on their bombs, such as
Mrs Saddams sex toy, a suppository for Saddam and bend over Saddam (Progler 1999). In this
hetero-patriarchal narrative, to be feminized and sexualized by a female-identified soldier is deemed
particularly humiliating for the colonized male body (and his nation). In the court martial of army
reservist Charles Graner, witnesses reported that female soldiers were instructed by officers to shout abuse
(Reid 2005). As I will elaborate below, I do not suggest that the female soldiers were puppets in the service
of racialized heteropatriarchy, but rather that their motivations were located in colonial desires. The
deliberate involvement of females in Abu Ghraib (and Guantanamo Bay), which also included a female
Soldier . . . press[ing] a broom against his [a male-identified detainees] anus (Fay and Jones 2004: 77),
intersects with racist orientalist discourses that depict acts of sexualized violence against men at the hands
of women, as well as homosexual sex and its simulation, as particularly humiliating for oriental men. An
example of this can be seen in an article by high-profile investigative journalist and commentator, Seymour
Hersh, in the New Yorker newspaper. Hershs article was the first to offer a detailed analysis countering the
Bush- administrations few bad apples thesis on the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib. Hersh (2004) argues
that [s]uch dehumanization is unacceptable in
any culture, but then continues to say that it is especially so in the Arab world. Homosexual acts are
against Islamic law. This reasoning conflates homosexuality with dehumanization, as well as all
inmates with Arabs Fundamentalist; it also obscures how terror against queers in the alleged most
free nation in the world is systemic and state-sponsored.

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The affs taming of the military is an illusion. The US militaries saving civilization fantasy
require placing the Other into an association of feminity with subordination, weakeness,
passivity, and inferiority
p38-59, 22p) Hdo
As my analysis of the sexed, racialized torture practices has shown, the save civilization itself-fantasy,
that is, the hegemonic national fantasy envisaging the First World civilized Self bringing (liberal)
democracy to the Third World Other incapable of self-determination, and the subject-position
Whiteness, depend on the association of femininity with subordination, weakness and passivity, in
short, inferiority. While the (hetero)sexualized humiliation of racialized men at the hands of White
western women disrupts the fictitious clear-cut male/female dichotomy underpinning this fantasy, the
violent practices constitute merely a reversal of that logocentrism, they do not displace it. To remain
within Ehrenreichs problematic framework, the female-identified soldiers ironically contributed actively
to gender inequality.
Moreover, I think Ehrenreichs hope of taming/civilizing the military is an illusion. The military cannot
be transformed, as its mission is to prepare and organize its workers to kill people; the reproduction of
the New World Order continues to depend heavily on the deployment of military force. As discussed
earlier, physical violence and aggressive Othering play a constitutive role in the construction of the
soldier Self. In sum, the acts of violence perpetrated by the female-identified soldiers on the bodies of
prisoners should be located within colonial desires. Given the systematic, simultaneously racialized and
heterosexed character of the acts of torture, and given that their effect is to re/produce the identity and
hegemony of the US Empire and its heterosexed, racialized and classed World (Dis)Order, the
participation of the three female-identified soldiers is not a sign of gender equality. Further, as Whiteness
and the concomitant World (Dis)Order are also a classed project,19 both female- and male-identified prison
guards occupy the subject-position White but not quite (Agathangelou 2004).
Though none of the torture pictures published depict soldiers of colour, the Fay-Jones Report (2004: 77, 80)
twice mentions Black soldiers engaging in torture of prisoners, and one of the seven soldiers convicted of
prisoner abuse self-identifies as a Black male. These reports do not contradict my argument that the soldiers
desired and enacted a fantasy of racial supremacy. I argue that the essentially colonial character of
Operation Iraqi Hope, the commonsensical fantasy of the First World civilized Self that brings (liberal)
democracy to the Third World Other incapable of self-determination, creates discursive space for the
interpellation and participation of the sexed, classed and racialized bodies of some of the US Empires
internal Others.

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Link: War on Terror

The war on terror is an act rooted in racialized, heterosexualized violence.
p38-59, 22p) Hdo
Drawing on the insight of Edward Said (1993) and other postcolonial scholars, that Empire is not only
about the accumulation of wealth, but also about a deeply held belief in the need to and the right to
dominate others for their own good, others who are expected to be grateful (Razack 2004: 10, emphasis
in original), I argue that the torture and murder of prisoners were acts of colonial violence, firmly rooted
in a continuum of racialized, (hetero)sexualized, classed violence. This continuum of violence reaches
back in time to the modern civilizing mission and outward in space to link the imperial violence
enacted on the bodies of people of colour, Muslims, queers and women in the mother
country/homeland, with the perceived moral righteousness or even duty of the US Empire to bring
(liberal) democracy to the dark corners of the earth (Bush 2002a) in the war on terror, the war to
save civilization itself (Bush 2001e). Making legible some of the larger social relations at work in the
events at Abu Ghraib is not intended to exonerate the military prison guards, but rather to show how our
desires are not just a question of individual preference.4

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Link: Penetration Language

Under heteropatriarchy the discourse of penetration means the penetrate relinquish
power they are unmanned
Heterosexuality and Pleasure. As I noted earlier, sex is defined in terms of the penetrative norm
(Jackson, 1999, p. 145), a genitally focused activity in which the mans penis penetrates the womans
vagina. This script for sex and sexual pleasure is defined by and for men. Although penetration
occupies a privileged place in heterosexual sexual relations, it does not necessarily signify the invasion
and subjugation of womens bodies. Because men penetrate men, women penetrate women and
women can penetrate men, Smart (1996b, p. 236) writes, This diversity of practices allows penetration to
have various meanings, not the exclusive meaning of dominance and subordination which is endlessly
mapped onto the binary of male and female. Wrenching penetration out of a heterosexual matrix of meanings
deprives it of its symbolic power. Although the possibility of re-coding heterosexual sex as a broader scope
of desires, acts, and practices appears promising, the potential for re-signifying penetrative sex, in our current
cultural landscape, is limited. Jackson (1999) observes, Even in consensual sex, most straight men are
decidedly queasy about the very idea of being penetrated. The unease and revulsion this activity
provokes is precisely because it is generally still read within the heterosexual matrix of meanings.
For most straight men being fucked means being unmanned. Most are not particularly receptive,
either, to the idea of giving up the idea that sex with women equates with penetrating them. (p. 172)
Even for queer-identified heterosexual men, penetration is not an option (Thomas, 2000; Thomas &
MacGillivray, 2000). A penetrable body is a vulnerable body; to be penetrated is to relinquish power
(Bersani, 1988; Robinson, 2000). The limited conceptions of heterosexual pleasure are connected to
gender. This is hardly surprising: Under heteropatriarchy, the language of eroticism is mans language
(Frye, 1990). Although there is language for erotic pleasure in literary contexts, everyday discourses of
female sexual agency and female sexual pleasure are largely absent (Holland et al., 1994, 1996; Jackson,
1999). The same is true for lesbian sex. Although Frye (1990) is optimistic that a vocabulary of pleasure and
sex, a language for doing it (p. 314), will emerge among lesbians, she points out that a lexicon for lesbian
sex is utterly inarticulate (p. 311). In contrast, a diverse language is available to gay men to express and
articulate their sexual desires, pleasures, acts, and practices. In short, women in general, and heterosexual
ones in particular, do not have an adequate language to assert, articulate, and share their pleasures.

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Link: Gay Identity

The gay movement is has the same effect on the marginalized groups that normative
heterosexuality has. In other words, we need a queer identity, not a gay identity.
Contesting Identity. Since early liberation movements, particularly the civil rights, womens, and gay and
lesbian liberation movements, members of excluded groupsethnic minorities, women, gays and lesbians
have demanded inclusion in U.S. society and politics by arguing that they possess the characteristics that
allowed white men to govern themselvesthat they were fully persons (Turner, 2000, p. 11). Such a move
depends on claims about identity, that is, a sense of recognition and solidarity based on shared characteristics
(Ryan, 2001). Although initially conceived in terms of a liberation politics aimed at freeing people who
are locked into homo/heterosexual and feminine/ masculine roles, the lesbian and gay movement
became increasingly interested in community building and gaining civil rights by adopting the ethnic
model in the mid-1970s (Seidman, 1993). Thus, a unified homosexual subject a stable gay identity
emerged. A unitary gay identity created visible and commodified lesbian and gay urban communities.
Gay culture became mainstreamed and through this process, a new hierarchy emerged with white,
middle-class, able-bodied gay men at the top (Seidman, 1997). Women, people of color, transgenders,
working-class individuals became increasingly alienated and started interrogating the viability of a gay
identity that marginalized, and, in some cases, erased their subjectivities and excluded their
participation (Anzalda, 2000; Combahee River Collective, 1979/1998; Lorde, 1984; Seidman, 1997). In
addition, individuals who engaged in certain erotic practices, such as leather and sadomasochism, also
found themselves marginalized by the mainstream gay community (Seidman, 1997). The question Is
and should sexual object choice be the most significant basis for community? was debated among different
individuals and groups within ethnic, gender, and sexual minority communities (see, for example, Anzalda,
2000; Brandt, 1999; Clausen, 1990; Lorde, 1984; Moraga & Anzalda, 1983; Smith, 1998; Vance, 1984).

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Link: Feminism
Feminism is a theory of gender oppression because it distinguishes between gender through
biological means; sex has replaced gender
Rubin, a cultural anthropologist best known as an activist and influential theorist of sex
and gender politics, 1993 (Gayle S., , "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,"
Social Perspective in Lesbian and Gay Studies, NY Routledge, , DES)
.
Whichever feminist position on sexuality right, left or center - eventually attains dominance, the existence of
such a rich discussion is evidence that the feminist movement will always be a source of interesting thought
about sex. Nevertheless, I want to challenge the assumption that feminism is or should be the privileged
site of a theory of sexuality. Feminism is the theory of gender oppression. To assume automatically that
this makes it the theory of sexual oppression is to fail to distinguish between gender, on the one hand,
and erotic desire, on the other.
In the English language, the word "sex" has two very different meanings. It means gender and gender
identity, as in "the female sex" or "the male sex." But sex also refers to sexual activity, lust,
intercourse, and arousal, as in "to have sex." This semantic merging reflects a cultural assumption that
sexuality is reducible to sexual intercourse and that it is a function of the relations between women and
men. The cultural fusion of gender with sexuality has given rise to the idea that a theory of sexuality
may be derived directly out of a theory of gender.
In an earlier essay, "The Traffic in Women," I used the concept of a sex/gender system, defined as a "set of
arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity. "94 I went
onto argue that "Sex as we know it - gender identity, sexual desire and fantasy, concepts of childhood - is
itself a social product. "95 I did not distinguish between lust and gender, treating both as modalities of the
same underlying social process.
"The Traffic in Women" was inspired by the literature on kin-based systems of social organization. It
appeared to me at the time that gender and desire were systemically intertwined in such social formations.
This mayor may not be an accurate assessment of the relationship between sex and gender in tribal
organizations. But it is surely not an adequate formulation for sexuality in Western industrial societies. As
Foucault has pointed out, a system of sexuality has emerged out of earlier kinship forms and has
acquired significant autonomy:
Particularly from the eighteenth century onward, Western societies created and deployed a new apparatus
which was superimposed on the previous one, and which, without completely supplanting the latter,
helped to reduce its importance. I am speaking of the deployment of sexuality . .. For the first
[kinship], what is pertinent is the link between partners and definite statutes; the second [sexuality] is
concerned with the sensations of the body, the quality of pleasures, and the nature of impressions. 96
The development of this sexual system has taken place in the context of gender relations. Part of the
modern ideology of sex is that lust is the province of men, purity that of women. It is no accident that
pornography and the perversions have been considered part of the male domain. In the sex industry,
women have been excluded from most production and consumption, and allowed to participate primarily as
workers. In order to participate in the "perversions," women have had to overcome serious limitations on
their social mobility, their economic resources, and their sexual freedoms. Gender affects the operation of
the sexual system, and the sexual system has had genderspecific manifestations. But although sex and
gender are related, they are not the same thing, and they form the basis of two distinct arenas of social
practice.

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Queer Sex the Bomb
Link: Ecofeminism
Contemporary ecofeminism just adds queers and stirs, it is time for the queers to come out
of the words and speak for ourselves!
Gaard, an educator, writer, scholar and activist working at the intersections of literature,
feminism, social and environmental justice, 97
(Gretta Toward a Queer Ecofeminism, Hypatia, Volume: 12, Issue: 1, pg. 114, DES)
"We have to examine how racism, heterosexism, classism, ageism, and sexism are all related to
naturism," writes ecofeminist author Ellen O'Loughlin ( 1993 , 148). Chaia Heller elaborates: "Love of
nature is a process of becoming aware of and unlearning ideologies of racism, sexism, heterosexism,
and ableism so that we may cease to reduce our idea of nature to a dark, heterosexual, 'beautiful'
mother" (1993, 231). But as Catriona. Sandilands astutely comments, "It is not enough simply to add
'heterosexism' to the long list of dominations that shape our relations to nature, to pretend that we can
just'add queers and stir' " (1994, 21). Unfortunately, it is exactly this approach that has characterized
ecofeminist theory to date, which is the reason I believe it is time for queers to come out of the woods
and speak for ourselves.2

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Queer Sex the Bomb
Internal Link: Naturalizing the Hetero

Naturalizing heterosexuality powerfully stabilize reality resulting in homophobia
By attempting to "naturalize" sexuality, the dominant discourse of Western culture constructs queer
sexualities as "unnatural" and hence subordinate. As Jeffrey Weeks writes in Against Nature, "appeals to
nature, to the claims of the natural, are among the most potent we can make. They place us in a world
of apparent fixity and truth. They appear to tell us what and who we are, and where we are going. They
seem to tell us the truth" (1991, 87). Arguments from "nature," as feminist philosophers of science have
repeatedly argued, are frequently used to justify social norms rather than to find out anything new
about nature ( Bleier 1984; Fausto-Sterling 1985; Hubbard, Henifin, and Fried 1982; Keller 1985; Lowe and
Hubbard 1983). Attempts to naturalize one form of sexuality function as attempts to foreclose
investigation of sexual diversity and sexual practices and to gain control of the discourse on sexuality.
Such attempts are a manifestation of Western culture's homophobia and erotophobia.

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Queer Sex the Bomb
Impact: Soul Murder

Heteronormativity has so much power that the people it ends up destroying the identity of
those it affects in what is called Soul Murder.
These are the internal injuries that individuals inflict upon themselves. Very early in life children learn from
interpersonal contacts and mediated messages that deviations from the heteronormative standard, such as
homosexuality, are anxiety-ridden, guilt-producing, fear-inducing, shame-invoking, hate-deserving,
psychologically blemishing, and physically threatening. Internalized homophobia, in the form of selfhatred and self-destructive thoughts and behavioral patterns, becomes firmly implanted in the lives
and psyches of individuals in heteronormative society. Exemplifying the feelings and experiences of many
people who do not fit in the heteronormative mandate, Kevin Jennings (1994) tells us his personal story: I
was born in 1963. . . . [I] realized in grade school that I was gay. I felt absolutely alone. I had no one to talk
to, didnt know any openly gay people, and saw few representations of gays in the media of the 1970s. I
imagined gay people were a tiny, tiny minority, who had been and would always be despised for their
perversion. Not once in high school did I ever learn a single thing about homosexuality or gay people. I
couldnt imagine a happy life as a gay man. So I withdrew from my peers and used alcohol and drugs to try
to dull the pain of my isolation. Eventually, at age seventeen I tried to kill myself, like one out of every three
gay teens. I saw nothing in my past, my present, or (it seemed) my future suggesting that things would ever
get any better. (pp. 13-14) Heteronormativity is so powerful that its regulation and enforcement are
carried out by the individuals themselves through socially endorsed and culturally accepted forms of
soul murder. Soul murder is a term that I borrow from the child abuse and neglect literature to
highlight the torment of heteronormativity (Yep, 2002). Shengold (1999) defines soul murder as the
apparently willful abuse and neglect of children by adults that are of sufficient intensity and
frequency to be traumatic . . . [so that] the childrens subsequent emotional development has been
profoundly and predominantly negatively affected (p. 1). Further explaining this concept, Shengold
(1989) writes, soul murder is neither a diagnosis nor a condition. It is a dramatic term for
circumstances that eventuate in crimethe deliberate attempt to eradicate or compromise the separate
identity of another person (p. 2, my emphasis). Isnt the incessant policing and enforcement, either
deliberately or unconsciously, by self and others, of the heteronormative mandate a widespread form
of soul murder?

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Queer Sex the Bomb
Impact: Dehumanization
Heterosexism justifies dehumanization and violence as Anti-Semitism did with the Jews in
Nazi Germany
Rozdzial, co-chair of the National Council of NOMAS, 2000
Moshe, NOMAS, Anti-Semitism and Heterosexism: Common Constructs of Oppression, Winter 2000,
http://www.nomas.org/node/139, Accessed 7-8-09, AMG
Similarly, religious attacks on homosexuals, defended under biblical precedent, echo the vilest forms of
anti-Semitism. The slander of "sodomites has replaced "Christ-killers" in the vocabulary of hatred
and heaven's retribution against a minority community has, once again, become the excuse to justify
victimizing the victim. Even the promise of "salvation" through "conversion" (Jews to Christianity;
homosexuals to heterosexuality) reflects the common perception that both minorities are "outcast in
the sight of G-d." And the stereotype of stubborn adherence to a despised lifestyle even in the shadow of
salvation is another common accusatory theme. After all, how can the "other" want to be who he is and
stubbornly hold on to a life of deprivation when the doors are, figuratively, opened to a life of safety,
privilege, and saving grace? To look at the similar language of marginalization of these two groups
without noticing the historical connection would mean yielding to ignorance. Common weapons of
oppression include the emasculation of Jews and stereotyping of homosexuals to perpetuate an excuse
for dehumanization and a perception of facile targeting for violence. Thus, Jewish men are labeled
Hymies, nerds, weaklings, just as gay men are the sissies and pansies - to mention only a few of the
epithets hurled at them. Jewish women and lesbians are, respectively, bitches and princesses, or butches
and dykes. The modern propaganda of hatred that equates AIDS to homosexuality echoes Hitler's
racial anti-Semitism that accused the Jews of spreading disease, contagion and contamination and are
reminders of past genocide and the excuses for a present violence. The recent push to find a biological
origin for homosexuality has a frightening parallel to the Nazi's eugenics response to the "Jewish
problem."
DEHUMANIZATION IS NUCLEAR WAR, ENVIRONMENTAL APOCALYPSE AND

INTERNATIONAL GENOCIDE. THERE IS NO WORSE WEAPON AGAINST
HUMANITY
Berube, Ph.D., Professor of Communication Studies at the University of South Carolina,
1997
(David Nanotechnological Prolongevity: The Down Side," NanoTechnology Magazine, 3:5,
June-July, http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/faculty/berube/prolong.htm)
Assuming we are able to predict who or what are optimized humans, this entire resultant worldview
smacks of eugenics and Nazi racial science. This would involve valuing people as means. Moreover, there
would always be a superhuman more super than the current ones, humans would never be able to escape their treatment as means to an
always further and distant end.
This means-ends dispute is at the core of Montagu and Matson's treatise on the dehumanization of humanity. They warn:
"its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on
record -- and its potential danger to the quality of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond
calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.... Behind the
genocide of the holocaust lay a dehumanized thought; beneath the menticide of deviants and
dissidents... in the cuckoo's next of America, lies a dehumanized image of man... (Montagu & Matson, 1983, p. xi-xii). While it
may never be possible to quantify the impact dehumanizing ethics may have had on humanity, it is safe
to conclude the foundations of humanness offer great opportunities which would be foregone. When
we calculate the actual losses and the virtual benefits, we approach a nearly inestimable value greater
than any tools which we can currently use to measure it.
Dehumanization is nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and international genocide. When people
become things, they become dispensable. When people are dispensable, any and every atrocity can be
justified. Once justified, they seem to be inevitable for every epoch has evil and dehumanization is
evil's most powerful weapon.

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Queer Sex the Bomb
Impact: Colonization
Colonization and environmental destruction is the relationship compulsory heterosexuality.
Men have done with Mother Nature this same dominance/submission flip-flop. They have by their
technologies worked steadily and for generations to transform a psychologically intolerable
dependence upon a seemingly powerful and capricious "Mother Nature" into a soothing and
acceptable dependence upon a subservient and non-threatening "wife." This "need to be above" and
to dominate permeates male attitudes toward nature ( Gray 1979 , 42).10 As I have argued elsewhere,
when nature is feminized and thereby eroticized, and culture is masculinized, the culture-nature
relationship becomes one of compulsory heterosexuality ( Gaard 1993). Colonization can therefore be
seen as a relationship of compulsory heterosexuality whereby the queer erotic of non-westernized
peoples, their culture, and their land, is subdued into the missionary position -- with the conqueror "on
top."11

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Queer Sex the Bomb
Impact: Root of Oppression

Compulsory heterosexuality is the root cause of oppression. It causes sexism, racism,
patriarchy, and the creation of stereotypes. Progress cannot be achieved without a radical
restructuring of male subjectivity.
Pinar, Professor at Louisiana State, 2003.
(William F., Journal of Homosexual Studies, JCE)
It is queer theory that has enabled me to understand that the democratization of American society
cannot proceed without a radical restructuring of hegemonic white male subjectivity (Savran, 1998;
Boyarin, 1997). Indeed, hegemonic male subjectivity must be brought to ruin, shattered as Kaja
Silverman (1992) and Leo Bersani (1995) have suggested, its narcissistic unity dissolved, its repressed
feminine composition reclaimed, homosexual desire (now collectively sublimated into identification with
the oedipal father and a fascistic fraternalism) re-experienced. The straight mind valorizes difference,
Bersani (1995, p. 39) asserts. The association of compulsory heterosexuality with a hierarchical view of
difference an association elaborated earlier by Monique Wittig (1992)I understand psychoanalytically.
Bersani reminds us that Kenneth Lewes (1988) theorized male heterosexual desire as the complicated
consequence of flight to the father following a horrified retreat from the mother. So conceptualized,
hegemonic male heterosexuality is constructed upon and actively requires a traumatic privileging of
difference. The cultural consolidation of heterosexuality, Bersani writes, is grounded in its more
fundamental, non-reflective construction as the compulsive repetition of a traumatic response to
difference (1995, p. 40). In this regard, the straight mind might be thought of as a sublimation of this
privileging of difference (Bersani, 1995, p. 40). In addition to psychoanalytically-inspired studies, crosscultural anthropological research (see Gilmore, 1990) also underlines the defensive and traumatic character
of much male heterosexual desire. The compulsory production of an exclusively heterosexual orientation
in men appears to depend upon a misogynous identification with (and suppression of desire for) the
father as well as a permanent and ongoing disavowal of femininity, associating it with castration, lack,
and loss. In the United States (as well as in other former slave states and colonial powers, although each
differently), this gendered formation is racialized, and race is gendered. In the social production of
hegemonic (white) masculinity, the fabrication of masculine identification requires the relocation of
repudiated desire onto others who are already fictionalized (constructed as, for instance, stereotypes),
that is, whose civic existence corresponds to their imagined and often sexualized existence in the white
male mind.

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Queer Sex the Bomb
Impact: Violence
Compulsory Heterosexuality creates a norm which excludes Queers/Women and it is the
root cause of violence against the Feminine and Sexualities.
Deconstruction and queer theories, as well as research on sexual behavior, have shown that a binary
categorization of differences is inadequate and insufficient to contain the fluidity of our desires and our
identifications. It is not only that for some people biological sex, gender roles, sexual desire and
practices do not correspond, but that they do not coincide for anyone. Our sexuality and our self is
undetermined and contingent. But the perception of this generates extreme anxiety because it not only
discloses the unsubstantiated condition of sexual binaries, but puts them at stake. It also puts at risk
the privileges that derive from such binaries.
Many of us dwell in societies of compulsory heterosexuality 3 and act and live as if the binary
construction of the world were natural and universal instead of contingent and socially constructed.
Compulsory heterosexuality operates through political, sexual, social and economic practices that
stigmatize and make targets of violence that which is perceived as feminine and sexualities, which do
not conform to the heterosexual norm. Such a norm assumes male and female bodies invested with
masculine and feminine roles, desiring the opposite sex and acting accordingly. Despite the cultural and legal
reforms that dissenting sexualities have achieved in the past decades --especially gay men and lesbians and,
in a lesser degree transgender people-- they are still submitted to second class citizenship and to
extraordinary State and non-state violence in many societies.
Anti-queer politics results in institutionalized violence and humiliation

p38-59, 22p) Hdo
Amongthe current anti-queer sexual politicsoftheBushadministrationistheattempttopassaconstitutional
amendmentlimiting marriage to unions between men and women.Bush(2004a)declared thatabanon
samesexmarriagewasamatterofnationalimportancebecausetheunionofamanandwomaninmarriageisthe
mostfundamentalinstitutionofcivilization.Same-sex marriage threatens the basis of an orderly society(Bush
2004b)and the welfare of children(Bush2004a)ultimately it threatens civilization itself.Infact,the only
times Bush conjures up threats to civilization are in the war on terror and the war on same-sex
marriage.13Moreover,the anti-queer sexual politics of the Bush administration are not limited to defending
marriage, but are aimed at fighting non-normative sexualities tout court.14Forexample,queer organizations
in New York City have reported a dramatic increase in anti-queer violence since the Bush administrations
aggressively anti-queer agenda(Goldstein2004).Today,federallawprohibitsopenlygaymenandlesbiansinthe
USmilitary.Between1994and2003,nearly9,500membersoftheUSarmedforcesweredischargedunderthe
dontask,donttell,dontpursuepolicy(AssociatedPress2005).Moreover,itwasnotuntil2003thattheUS
SupremeCourtstruckouttheantisodomylawsoffourteenUSstatesandthemilitary,whichhadcriminalized
consensualanalsexintheprivatesphere.15Againstthebackdropofthe institutionalized aggressive
heteronormativity of the US nation-state,particularly within its military,itshouldnotbesurprisingthatthe
prisonguardssetthestagefortheiracts of violence and humiliation according to an aggressively homophobic
script.Inthefollowing,Izoominalittlecloseronthediscursivepracticeofreferringtohomosexualsexand
sodomy,which,Isuggest,helpserasecertainaspectsoftheviolences.

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Queer Sex the Bomb
Institutional violence underpins all of our societal institutions. Heteronormativity causes

continuous violence against LGBTQ individuals, and it is everywhere.
These are systematic and socially accepted injuries inflicted upon individuals outside of the heteronormative
mandate. Institutional violence is widespread for LGBTQ individuals and communities. Undergirding
all social institutions is heteronormative ideology (Berlant & Warner, 1998; Richardson, 1996).
Hegemonic heterosexuality permeates the family (VanEvery, 1996a, b), domestic and intimate life
(Croghan, 1993; Holland, Ramazanoglu, & Thomson, 1996; VanEvery, 1996b), education (Kumashiro,
2002; Pinar, 1998; Talburt & Steinberg, 2000), social policy (Carabine, 1996; Eskridge, 2002; Kaplan, 1997),
the mass media and popular culture (Fejes & Petrich, 1993; Gross, 2001; Gross & Woods, 1999;
Ingraham, 1999), among others. In short, heteronormative thinking is deeply ingrained, and
strategically invisible, in our social institutions. The process of normalization of heterosexuality in our
social system actively and methodically subordinates, disempowers, denies, and rejects individuals who
do not conform to the heterosexual mandate by criminalizing them, denying them protection against
discrimination, refusing them basic rights and recognition, or all of the above (Kaplan, 1997; Rubin,
1984/1993). More simply stated, the regulatory power of heteronormativity denies LGBTQ individuals
and couples their citizenship. There are numerous positive rights (Stein, 1999, p. 286) that
heterosexual individuals take for granted but LGBTQ persons are categorically denied. They include
being able to marry a person of the same sex, gain custody of their children, become foster and
adoptive parents, visit ones same-sex partner in the hospital, being able to obtain bereavement leave
when ones partner passes away, being able to file joint income tax returns with ones partner, among
many others. Although the issue of same-sex marriage is highly contested on ideological grounds within
LGBTQ communities in the U.S. (Yep, Lovaas, & Elia, 2003), LGBTQ couples are deprived of the
numerous rights and privileges accorded to heterosexually married dyads (Kaplan, 1997; Stein, 1999).
In sum, heteronormativity is a site of unrelenting, harsh, unforgiving, and continuous violence for
LGBTQ individuals. Such violence is everywhere: in the individual psyche and in collective
consciousness, in the individual perceptions and experiences and in the social system and institutions.

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Queer Sex the Bomb
Impact: Violence to Women

Compulsory heterosexuality forces women into the service of men. Heterosexuality creates
dominant power relations for males.
One of the ways in which heteronormativity manifests itself is through obligatory heterosexuality
(Rubin, 1975, p. 179), compulsory heterosexuality (Rich, 1980/1993, p. 227), or compulsive
heterosexuality (Jackson, 1999, p. 142). Compulsory heterosexuality creates the conditions by which
it never occurs to many women to be anything else but heterosexual (Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1993b, p.
31) and channels these women into marriage and motherhood in the service of men (Richardson, 2000).
Feminist scholars (see, for example, Carabine, 1996; Delphy & Leonard, 1992; Holland, Ramazanoglu, &
Thomson, 1996; Jackson, 1996, 1999; Kitzinger& Wilkinson, 1993a, 1994a, b; Rich, 1980/1993; Richardson,
2000; VanEvery, 1996a, b; Walby, 1997) accurately maintain that heterosexuality is a key site of male
power and dominance. (I discuss this further when I examine the relationship between heterosexuality and
gender later in this essay.) Heterosexuality is a patriarchal institution that subordinates, degrades, and
oppresses women. As such, it is hardly surprising that heterosexually-identified women can readily
identify sites of emotional, psychic, physical, and economic suffering in their relationships. According to
Kitzinger and Wilkinson (1993b), the reasons for heterosexual womens misery have been well
documented (p. 26) and they range from physical and emotional exhaustion to violence and diminished
mental health. Because asymmetry of power and sexist norms are common in heterosexual
relationships, many heterosexual women live in inequitable and exhausting relationship arrangements:
They carry the burden of housework, care-taking expectations, child-rearing obligations, and parenting
responsibilities associated with motherhood (Croghan, 1993; Jacklin, 1993). Further, research findings (e.g.,
Gelles, 1987; Jones, 1998; Kitzinger&Wilkinson, 1993b; Russell, 1990; Wood, 2001) indicate that much of
the physical violence against womenbattering and physical abuse, rape, murderoccurs within the
context of heterosexual relationships. Kitzinger and Wilkinson (1993b) point out, Women who date men,
or voluntarily have sex with or marry them, are disproportionately at risk for violence, rape and
murder from those men (p. 27). Because such violence has been normalized in society, many women
learn to overlook their suffering (Wood, 2001) or may not even recognize their own torment and pain.
Finally, after reviewing previous research, Kitzinger and Wilkinson (1993b) note that heterosexually
married women report lesser psychological health (i.e., more mental disorders) than heterosexually
married men, and lesser psychological adjustment (i.e., more anxiety, tension, and depression) than
lesbians. Based on their extensive work with heterosexual feminists (Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1993),
Kitzinger and Wilkinson (1993b) conclude: The behaviors commonly known as heterosexuality are
commonplace among our feminist contributors: they are married, have sex with their husbands and/or
other men, and bring up children with the fathers of those children. The identity of heterosexual (a
sense that they are accurately described by that label) is much rarer. We refer to heterosexual identity as
precarious in part as a way of signifying the difficulty women have in claiming the label
heterosexual as their ownhard to do when it stands, in so much feminist theory, as synonymous with
oppression. . . . Heterosexual identities are precarious, despite the ubiquity of heterosexual behavior, because
who would be heterosexual, really, if they had a choice? (p. 28, emphasis in the original) Here they highlight
the regulatory power of heteronormativity, as manifested in compulsory heterosexuality, in the lives of
women who are well aware of the gender-based patterns of dominance and submission.

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Queer Sex the Bomb
Heterosexuality reinstalls and reaffirms gender divisions. Heteropolarity is the necessary

condition for patriarchy
Heteropatriarchy is an overarching system of male dominance through the institution of compulsory
heterosexuality. In this section, I examine heteropatriarchy through its interlinkages and interconnections
with gender, pleasure, and whiteness. Heterosexuality and Gender. Although there is disagreement about
whether sexuality or gender should be emphasized in the analysis of heterosexuality, researchers agree
that heterosexuality and gender are inextricably linked (Ingraham, 1996; Jackson, 1996, 1999; Jeffreys,
1996; Kitzinger&Wilkinson, 1993b, 1994b; Rubin, 1975; Wilton, 1996; Wittig, 1992). (For detailed analyses
of the link between gender and sexuality, see Butler [1990, 1993], and the connection between
heterosexuality and gender, see Ingraham [1996] and Jackson [1999].) Heterosexuality, by its very
definition, reinstalls and reaffirms gender division. Kitzinger and Wilkinson (1994b) point out that
hetero means other, different; heterosexuality means sexual involvement with one who is other, one who is
differentman with woman, woman with man. The otherness of the other sex, the differentness of man
from woman, is thereby immediately reinforced (p. 444). Through this relation of otherness, a
naturalized polarity and binarisma heteropolarity (Wilton, 1996, p. 127)is created. Heteropolarity
is a social construction founded upon a presumed complementarity between women and men (the
natural fit between penis and vagina). Heteropolarity permeates scientific and popular discourse; people
uncritically speak about the opposite sex when there is no biological or somatic sense in which the
bodies of women can be understood as opposite to the bodies of men (Wilton, 1996, p. 126). Yet this
discourse is critical for the maintenance of heterosexuality and heteropatriarchy. Wilton (1996) further
explains: This heteropolarity is necessary for patriarchy, for it must be possible to distinguish men
from women in order to institute and reproduce a power differential that is (precisely) predicated upon
that difference (p. 127). Thus, a social hierarchy, based on gender to secure male domination and
female submission, is maintained as a fundamental feature of social life.

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Queer Sex the Bomb
Impact: Violence to Men

Compulsory heterosexuality does violence to men
Although the manifestations and effects are different, compulsory heterosexuality is also imposed and enforced
on men (Connell, 1995). As a patriarchal institution, heterosexuality privileges, elevates, and maintains the
dominant social and material status of men at the expense of women and sexual others. Indeed, men, endowed with
their heterosexual privilege, have less impetus and motivation to expose the violence of heteronormativity, as
Ramazanoglu (1993) reminds us, men have much less reason to struggle and go on struggling than women (p. 60).
However, heteronormativity and heteropatriarchy are also harmful to men in perhaps less tangible ways
(Thomas & MacGillivray, 2000). Heterosexuality constitutes men as real men (Wittig, 1992). To be a real
man is an exhausting and unending performance, or as Michael Kimmel (2001) puts it, that nightmare from
which we never seem to awaken (p. 277). Homophobia and the fear of being perceived as gay become the
central organizing principle and the cultural policing of manhood. The fear of humiliation and emasculation
keeps realmen afraid, ashamed to be afraid, and silent about their own fears (Kimmel, 2001). Fear and
shame are sites of psychic violence for these men. In addition, on the level of sexual practice, MacGillivray
notes, there is harm, since I for one would suggest that heterosexuality is based on a repression of all
unsanctioned sexual impulses, which mostif not allof us feel (Thomas& MacGillivray, 2000, p. 257). In sum,
heteronormativity impels heterosexual men into a lifelong labor of proving their manhood and concealing,
if not banishing, a range of sexual possibilities, gender performances, and pleasures.

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Queer Sex the Bomb
Alternative: Queer Performance

Queer performance engages its audience and makes them relflect on the message being
presented to them. Performances open up discussions and allow for the message to be
passed on from people to people.
Ramirez, Queer Latina/o Community histories Professor at UCSB, 2005
(Horacio N. Roque, from Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings, pp. 184. JAR )
Hardly a static and predictable response to systems of marginalization and exploitation, cultural work
travels with its makers. Queers move with their cultures, reinventing in their migrations the forms and
meanings with which they invest their products. As cultural productions, they open spaces for dialogue and
reflection. As audience members exit theaters, health agencies, and other venues for viewing and
experiencing these productions collectively, they engage each ot her and themselves with the images and the
words, considering technical questions along with content, intent, and impact. In this regard, cultural
productions construct social space and facilitate further opportunities for creative interplay-feelings, thought,
and social action thus intersected. In this tradition, El Corazon Nunca Me Ha Mentido and Del Otro Lado
were critical interventions into notions of the state, of citizenship broadly defined, and of queer bodies in
transit between local and global histories.

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Queer Sex the Bomb
Alternative: Liberating the Erotic

The way out of heterosexist violence requires a genuine transformation of conceptions of
the erotic. Liberal reforms wont get it done.
Today, all those associated with nature and the erotic continue to experience the impact of centuries of
Western culture's colonization, in our very bodies and in our daily lives. Rejecting that colonization
requires embracing the erotic in all its diversity and building coalitions for creating a democratic,
ecological culture based on our shared liberation. To create that culture, we must combine the insights of
queer and ecofeminist theories. As feminists have long argued, the way out of this system of endemic
violence requires liberating the erotic -- not in some facile liberal scheme, which would authorize
increased access to pornography or child sexual encounters, but through a genuine transformation of
Western conceptions of the erotic as fundamentally opposed to reason, culture, humanity, and
masculinity. A queer ecofeminist perspective would argue that liberating the erotic requires
reconceptualizing humans as equal participants in culture and in nature, able to explore the eroticism
of reason and the unique rationality of the erotic. Ecofeminists must be concerned with queer liberation,
just as queers must be concerned with the liberation of women and of nature; our parallel oppressions have
stemmed from our perceived associations. It is time to build our common liberation on more concrete
coalitions.

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Queer Sex the Bomb
Alternative: Do Nothing
The social order will always attempt to translate our negativity into a position. Our
response is to do nothing, turning ourselves against all norms. We withdraw from your
system of rules and refuse to have an alternative. Requiring us to have an alternative is a
social construction that reaffirms reproductive futurism, and we reject it.
Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might, as I
argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing it. Not in the hope of forging thereby some
more perfect social order- such a hope, after all, would only reproduce the constraining mandate of
futurism, just as any such order would equally occasion the negativity of the queer- but rather to refuse the
insistence of hope itself as affirmation, which is always affirmation of an order whose refusal will
register as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane. And the trump card of affirmation? Always the
question: If not this, what? Always the demand to translate the insistence, the pulsive force, of
negativity into some determinate stance or "position" whose determination would thus negate it:
always the imperative to immure it in some stable and positive form. When I argue, then, that we might
do well to attempt what is surely impossible-to withdraw our allegiance, however compulsory, from a
reality based on the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism - I do not intend to propose some "good"
that will thereby be assured. To the contrary, I mean to insist that nothing, and certainly not what we
call the "good," can ever have any assurance at all in the order of the Symbolic. Abjuring fidelity to a
futurism that's always purchased at our expense, though bound, as Symbolic subjects consigned to figure
the Symbolic's undoing, to the necessary contradiction of trying to turn its intelligibility against itself, we
might rather, figuratively, cast our vote for "none of the above," for the primacy of a constant no in
response to the law of the Symbolic, which would echo that law's foundational act, its self constituting
negation. 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 attending to the persistence of something internal to
reason that reason refuses, that turning the force of queerness against all subjects, however queer, can
afford an access to the jouissance that at once defines 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. In contrast to what Theodor Adorno describes as the "grimness with which a man clings to himself, as
to the immediately sure and substantial," the queerness of which I speak would deliberately sever us from
ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves and hence of knowing our "good." 4 Such
queerness proposes, in place of the good, something I want to call "better," though it promises, in more
than one sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing. I connect this something better with Lacan's
characterization of what he calls "truth," where truth does not assure happiness, or even, as Lacan makes
clear, the good. Instead, it names only the insistent particularity of the subject, impossible fully to articulate
and Intend[ing] toward the real." 6 Lacan, therefore, can write of this truth: The quality that best
characterizes it is that of being the true Wunsch, which was at the origin of an aberrant or atypical behavior.
We encounter this Wunsch with its particular, irreducible character as a modification that presupposes no
other form of normalization than that of an experience of pleasure or of pain, but of a final experience from
whence it springs and is subsequently preserved in the depths of the subject in an irreducible form. The
Wunsch does not have the character of a universal law but, on the contrary, of the most particular of lawseven if it is
<CONTINUED>
<CONTINUED>
universal that this particularity is to be found in every human being.' Truth, like queerness, irreducibly linked
to the "aberrant or atypical", to what chafes against "normalization," finds its value not in a good susceptible
to generalization, but only in the stubborn particularity that voids every notion of a general good. The

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embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some
positive social value; its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus
in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself.' For by figuring a refusal of the coercive
belief in the paramount value of futurity, while refusing as well any backdoor hope for
dialectical access to meaning, the queer dispossesses the social order of the ground on which it rests: a
faith in the consistent reality of the social- and by extension, of the social subject; a faith that politics,
whether of the left or of the right, implicitly affirms. Divesting such politics of its thematic trappings,
bracketing the particularity of its various proposals for social organization, the queer insists that politics is
always a politics of the signifier, or even of what Lacan will often refer to as "the letter." It serves to shore
up a reality always unmoored by signification and lacking any guarantee. To say as much is not, of course, to
deny the experiential violence that frequently troubles social reality or the apparent consistency with which it
bears-and thereby bears down on-us all. It is, rather, to suggest that queerness exposes the obliquity of our
relation to what we experience in and as social reality, alerting us to the fantasies structurally
necessary in order to sustain it and engaging those fantasies through the figural logics, the linguistic
structures, that shape them. If it aims effectively to intervene in the reproduction of such a reality-an
intervention that may well take the form of figuring that reality's abortion, then queer theory must always
insist on its connection to the vicissitudes of the sign, to the tension between the signifier's collapse into the
letter's cadaverous materiality and its participation in a system of reference wherein it generates meaning
itself. As a particular story, in other words, of why storytelling fails, one that takes both the value and the
burden of that failure upon itself, queer theory, as I construe it, marks the "other" side of politics: the
"side" where narrative realization and derealization overlap, where the energies ofvitalization
ceaselessly turn against themselves; the "side" outside all political sides, committed as they are, on every
side, to futurism's unquestioned good.

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Alternative: Fuck the Future

Fuck the Symbolic order of futurism. There can be no future for queers. Only destroying
the future gives us hope for a life.
Bernard Law, the former cardinal of Boston, mistaking (or maybe understanding too well) the degree of authority bestowed on him by
the signifier of his patronymic, denounced in 1996 proposed legislation giving health care benefits to same-sex partners of municipal
employees. He did so by proclaiming, in a noteworthy instance of piety in the sky, that bestowing such access to health care would
profoundly diminish the marital bond. "Society," he opined, "has a special interest in the protection, care and upbringing of children.
Because marriage remains the principal, and the best, framework for the nurture, education and socialization of children, the state has a
special interest in marriage." With this fatal embrace of a futurism so blindly committed to the figure of the Child that it will justify
refusing health care benefits to the adults that some children become, Law lent his voice to the mortifying mantra of a communal
jouissance that depends on the fetishization of the Child at the expense of whatever such fetishization must inescapably queer. Some
seven years later, after Law had resigned for his failure to protect Catholic children from sexual assault by pedophile priests, Pope John
Paul II returned to this theme, condemning state-recognized same-sex unions as parodic versions of authentic families, "based on
individual egoism" rather than genuine love. Justifying that condemnation, he observed, "Such a 'caricature' has no future -and cannot
give future to any society." Queers must respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only
by insisting on our equal right to the social order's prerogatives, not only by avowing our capacity to
promote that order's coherence and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the
whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or
manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively
terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws
both with capital Ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that
serves as its prop. We might like to believe that with patience, with work, with generous contributions
to lobbying groups or generous participation in activist groups or generous doses of legal savvy and
electoral sophistication, the future will hold a place for us-a place at the political table that won't have to
come at the cost of the places we seek in the bed or the bar or the baths. But there are no queers in that
future as there can be no future for queers, chosen as they are to bear the bad tidings that there can be
no future at all: that the future, as Annie's hymn to the hope of "Tomorrow" understands, is "always! A day!
Away." Like the lovers on Keats's Grecian urn, forever "near the goal" of a union they'll never in fact
achieve, we're held in thrall by a future continually deferred by time itself, constrained to pursue the dream of
a day when today and tomorrow are one. That future is nothing but kid stuff, reborn each day to screen
out the grave that gapes from within the lifeless letter, luring us into, ensnaring us in, reality's
gossamer web. Those queered by the social order that projects its death drive onto them are no doubt
positioned to recognize the structuring fantasy that so defines them. But they're positioned as well to
recognize the irreducibility of that fantasy and the cost of construing it as contingent to the logic of social
organization as such. Acceding to this figural identification with the undoing of identity, which is also to
say with the disarticulation of social and Symbolic form, might well be described, in John Brenkman's
words, as "politically self-destructive." But politics (as the social elaboration of reality) and the self (as
mere prosthesis maintaining the future for the figural Child), are what queerness, again as figure,
necessarily destroys -necessarily insofar as this "self" is the agent of reproductive futurism and this
"politics" the means of its promulgation as the order of social reality. But perhaps, as Lacan's
engagement with Antigone in Seminar 7 suggests, political self-destruction inheres in the only act that
counts as one: the act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a life. If the fate of
the queer is to figure the fate that cuts the thread of futurity, if the jouissance, the corrosive enjoyment,
intrinsic to queer (non)identity annihilates the fetishistic jouissance that works to consolidate identity
by allowing reality to coagulate around its ritual reproduction, then 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 and insisting, against the cult ofthe Child and the political order it
<CONTINUED>

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<CONTINUED>
enforces, that we, as Guy Hocquenghem made clear, are "not the signifier of what might become a new
form of 'social organisation,' "that we do not intend a new politics, a better society, a brighter
tomorrow, since all of these fantasies reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the
future. We choose, instead, not to choose the Child, as disciplinary image of the Imaginary past or as
site of a projective identification with an always impossible future. The queerness we propose, in
Hocquenghem's words, "is unaware of the passing of generations as stages on the toad to better living. It
knows nothing about 'sacrifice now for the sake of future generations' ... [it] knows that civilisation
alone is mortal." Even more: it delights in that mortality as the negation of everything that would define
itself, moralistically, as pro-life. It is we who must bury the subject in the tomb-like hollow of the
signifier, pronouncing at last the words for which we're condemned should we speak them or not: that
we are the advocates of abortion; that the Child as futurity's emblem must die; that the future is mere
repetition and just as lethal as the past. Our queerness has nothing to offer a Symbolic that lives by
denying that nothingness except an insistence on the haunting excess that this nothingness entails, an
insistence on the negativity that pierces the fantasy screen of futurity, shattering narrative temporality with
irony's always explosive force. And so what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest
despite us is this willingness to insist intransitively-to insist that the future stop here.

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Alternative: S&M
Sadomasochism associates pleasure with different parts of the body besides penetrative sex
for pleasure. It is an acting out of power differentials in a game. This runs contrary to
heterosexual pleasure, and avoids the patriarchical idea that penetrative sex is necessary
for pleasure.
Another area of embodiment is, of course, the domain of erotic practices. Jackson (1999) argues that the idea
of queering sexual practicesthat is, making them innovative and nonnormativehas little political effect.
Foucault (1989) might disagree. Using the example of sadomasochism (S/M) as the real invention of new
avenues and possibilities of erotic pleasure, Foucault debunks popular beliefs about the association of
S/M with deep-seated psychological violence and aggression. He argues that individuals who engage in
S/M are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their bodythrough the
eroticization of the body He elaborates, . . . the S/M game is very interesting because it is a strategic
relation, but it is always fluid. Of course, there are roles but everybody knows very well that those roles
can be reversed. Sometimes the scene begins with the master and slave, and at the end the slave has
become the master. Or, even when the roles are stabilized, you know very well that it is always a game.
Either the rules are transgressed, or there is an agreement, either explicit or tacit, that makes them aware of
certain boundaries. This strategic game as a source of bodily pleasure is very interesting. But I wouldnt say
that it is a reproduction, inside the erotic relationship, of the structures of power. It is an acting out of power
structures by a strategic game that is able to give sexual pleasure or bodily pleasure. Contrary to
heterosexual relationships where strategic relations, such as pursuit, conquest, or flight, are played out
before sex to obtain sex, S/M practices are played out within sex. In this sense, S/M practices are
transgressive. Proposing a queer praxis through the transformative potential of queer sex
Foucault suggests that S/M practices, for example, radically re-map and re-orient sites of eroticism and
pleasure in the body. This re-mapping of the erogenous zones extends beyond private pleasures: By
focusing on the entire surface of the body as a site of potential erotic pleasure, S/M practices challenge
to dissolve the monopoly of genitally-focused sexualitythat is, penetrative sex encoded within the
heterosexual matrix of meanings.

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Alternative Solves: Heterosexism

Queer theory challenges mainstream heteronormativity.
Slagle, Professor @ University of Puerto Rico, 2003.
(R. Anthony, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4, pp. 135-136, JCE)
Heteronormativity. Queer criticism challenges the heteronormative assumptions in the mainstream
(Seidman, 1993; Warner, 1993). In other words, queer rhetoric insists that there is nothing necessarily
normal about being heterosexual. In this world view, those who are not heterosexual are labeled as
deviant. When heterosexuality is seen as normal or natural, other sexualities are seen as
abnormal, unnatural, or they are ignored entirely (Butler, 1990; Fuss, 1991; Morrison, 1992; Smyth,
1992). In popular culture, this notion abounds. We are bombarded every day with messages that tell us
not only that heterosexuality is the only acceptable way to live our lives, but also that a particular kind
of heterosexuality is normative; that is, we are told regularly by a variety of sources that, at least in the
United States, the nuclear family is the foundation of everything that we believe as a nation. Queer
criticism rejects the idea that normative heterosexuality is the only acceptable sexual posture. Queer
theory is critical of dominant models that view heterosexuality as the only normal form of sexual
expression because these models leave no room for discourses that come from other perspectives. The
force of queer criticism is that it illuminates normative heterosexual privilege in discourse. Put another way,
queer criticism challenges the notion that traditional heterosexual relationships are the only normal
sexual expression, to the exclusion of other sexual possibilities.4 Queer rhetorical criticism celebrates
the range of queer sexual expression, which can, indeed, include normative heterosexual expression to
the extent that heterosexual constructions of the world do not dismiss or diminish queer sexualities. For
this reason, some have argued that there are straight queers (Powers, 1993). Straight queers are
individuals who immerse themselves in queer cultures and ideologies, yet their objects of sexual desire
are members of the opposite sex. In other words, they are queer except in terms of sexual activity.5
Straight queers provide a unique challenge to dominant ideologies; that is, they challenge the dominant
notion that sexual object choices define queerness (as is the case with gay, lesbian, bisexual,
homosexual, and straight). The debates in Congress during 1996 over the Defense of Marriage Act
(DOMA) were filled with language that reinforced this notion (Smith, 1997). For example, these debates
emphasized that marriage is a legal bond between one man and one woman. Even for heterosexuals, nonmonogamous relationships are condemned; non-procreative relationships are not given the same
emphasis in our society as relationships that produce children, to say nothing of relationships between
members of the same sex, or combinations of more than two individuals regardless of the biological sex
of the participants.

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Alternative Solves: Racism

The belief that race or identity is essential and immutable causes violence to the racial
other. Queering solves by collapsing the borders between norms and deviance.
People who embody difference are marked in two ways. The first way is premised on the
assumption that one cannot become the other because the borders between the norm and those
outside the norm are rigid. Race and gender, for instance, have been historically conceived, in social,
cultural and legal settings, as essential, visible, and largely immutable physical attributes.4 In contrast,
the second way seeks to exteriorize difference when the other threatens to become one of us or
part of the norm. Prejudice against dissenting sexualities is paradigmatic of border anxiety because
unlike other seemingly essential, visible and immutable differences, sexual orientation has often been
seen as invisible and mutable.5 In this case, the assumed permeability of the borders of difference
between the norm and deviance or dissent-- is related to violence in a specific way. A fundamental
principle of democratic societies should be, as Nancy Fraser puts it, to achieve participatory parity for
all their members in order to make collective decisions regarding the way they want to live their lives.6
Prejudices and the violent ways in which they manifest are central obstacles for the achievement of
participatory parity. Many of the political, cultural and legal efforts to overcome prejudice focus on a
notion of discrimination. I contend however, that explanations about different types of prejudices when
collapsed into a single explanatory logic of discrimination are insufficient to elucidate the complexity of
exclusionary practices.
Heterosexuality and whiteness produce similar findings when investigated. Heterosexuality

is akin to a white, masculine colonial identity.
(Gust, Karen, and John, Journal of Homosexual Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4,, pp. 34, JCE)
Heterosexuality and Whiteness. It is apparent that an examination of heterosexuality produces parallel and
analogous findings to investigation of whiteness. I am using whiteness to refer to a historical systemic
structural race-based superiority (Wander, Martin, & Nakayama, 1999, p. 15) which produces a racial subject
that is privileged, normalized, deified, and raceless (Johnson, 1999, p. 1). Both heterosexuality and
whiteness are everywhere and strategically invisible, universalized, naturalized, and taken for granted,
seemingly formless, shapeless, and without content, and normalized to evade theoretical scrutiny and
critical analysis. Heterosexuality and whiteness appear as the very air we breathe, the stuff that creates us
with no reminder that it is doing so (Stokes, 2001, p. 14, my emphasis), thus underscoring their normalizing and selfgenerating power. Observing the similarities between heterosexuality and whiteness, Smart (1996a) points out that
heterosexual identity is akin to a white colonial identity. It entails an effortless superiority, a moral
rectitude, a defeat of the emotional and the neurotic by the power of unconscious struggle and, of
course, the certain knowledge of masculine superiority (p. 173). However, a closer examination of heterosexuality
and whiteness reveals that their relationship is deeply ambivalent and eminently troubled : Heterosexuality is simultaneously
the means of ensuring and the site of endangering the reproduction and perpetuation of whiteness
(Dyer, 1997; Stokes, 2001). On the one hand, heterosexuality is absolutely indispensable for the reproduction of
whiteness; on the other, it is also the mechanism through which whiteness can annihilate itself (Dyer, 1997). In this sense,
heterosexuality makes the reproduction of whiteness unstable. Such an unstable mixture of excitement and horror results in a compulsive
imagining of interracial sex (Ferber, 1998; Stokes, 2001; Young, 1995). In the process, white women become silent markers in the
systems of exchange that make both whiteness and heterosexuality cultural givens. Simultaneously imagined as the key to whitenesss
future and its weakest defense, white women enable whiteness at the same time that they are denied its fruits. They make it possible, yet
are kept from the fullness of its franchise, given their status as women in the always patriarchal shape that whiteness assumes. (Stokes,
2001, p. 17) Once again, gender becomes inextricably linked to sexuality in the ongoing tension and struggle between heterosexuality
and whiteness to reproduce and sustain a white heteropatriarchya self-evident standard against which all differences are measured.

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Alternative Solves: Dichotomies/Binaries

Queer theory breaks with the tyranny of Western duality which solves violence to the other.
Gearhart, Communication Professor, 2003.
(Sally Miller, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4, pp. xxix-xxxviii, JCE)
Finally, I have a vision of Queer Theorys future that will require a fundamental change in the minute-byminute thinking of our thoughts. We stand, it seems to me, at a delicate, almost heart-stopping cusp in our
evolution, appalled as we have never been before by the human capacity for cruelty and greed, and surrounded as
we have never been before by the speed and the vast capability of an electronic revolution. Queer Theory, I believe,
is poised to play a critical part in the Western minds break with the tyranny of dualistic thinking. As always
in our bids for freedom, we want to honor and preserve both the characteristics that make us unique (for
example, our language, our stories, our rituals, our foods, our dress, our expressions of love) and the unity that we
hunger for which can make us into an organic, whole, peaceful, global family. We are appropriately wary of
those who wish to unite us by merging, masking, and diluting our differences; and similarly we are wary of
those who wish to divide us into essential little particles that can be (and historically are) made into
hierarchies or warring factions. I suggest that, as queer theorists, we make a deliberate and consistent change
in one of our primary habits of thinking. Let us replace our practice of constructing dichotomiesthe
differentiation and total divorce of any pair of qualities, beings, or entitieswith the practice of constructing
correlativesthe involvement of a mutual, reciprocal relationship between any pair of qualities, beings, or
entities. Let us forgo the labeling found in dichotomous thinking and embrace the naming found in
correlative thinking, This will mean that, as we think, write, and speak, we confirm the necessary
interdependence of every contrasting pair of things. For instance, it means acknowledging the fact that to name
myself a lesbian I need the heterosexual woman to distinguish myself from, and the fact that the heterosexual
woman can so name herself only in counterdistinction to a lesbian sister; it means acknowledging the fact that
Asian men is a name that can exist only if there is a category of all men who are not Asian, and vice versa. These
groups of men have a reciprocal and absolutely necessary relationship to each other. In short, to think correlatively
is to name, to connect, to unify, and to affirm, while to think dichotomously is to label, to disconnect, to
separate, and to negate. In shifting our thinking in this way the greater wholeness that we all seek will be implicit
in the differences that comprise it, and each identity that we long to preserve will exist because the wholeness
that it is different from also exists. A salutary byproduct of correlative thinking would be our understanding
at last that since I share a unity with every Otherthe That-Which-Is-Not- Myselfthen to harm that Other is
to harm myself.

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Alternative Solves: Inclusivity

Queer is a re-appropriated discourse to include culturally marginalized individuals its
complexity leaves it open-ended.
Originally used as slang for homosexual and a homophobic epithet, queer, has, in recent years, been
re-appropriated in popular culture and academic discourse. Queer can signify self-identified culturally
marginal individuals of various sexualities and/or describe an emerging and fluid theoretical model
that has evolved and developed out of more traditional lesbian and gay studies (de Lauretis, 1991;
Jagose, 1996). Although seemingly simple, the term queer is actually astonishingly complex and fairly
perplexing (Anzalda, 2000; Clarke, 1994; Jakobsen, 1998). It is a category in the process of forming and
becoming without predetermined or final borders; it is conceptually elastic, unrestrained, and openended (Jagose, 1996). Given that the category of queer is never closed, how can it be defined? In a
true sense, it cannot. However, I identify some common conceptions that circulate around the term. In
an interview, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick contends that one of the interesting features of the word queer is
that it isnt up to one person to define. Any word like that represents a very contested site, and queer
does so in some especially interesting ways, partly because it started out as a pejorative term and has
been consciously reclaimed as an honorific term; partly because its an experiment not the first
experimentwith finding a non-gender-specific name for a variety of sexual experiences and practices. Part
of what interests me a lot about it is that in reclaiming the term, I dont think that whats being done is to
disavow a lot of the negative stereotypes associated with it, but rather reinhabit them in different ways.
(Chinn, DiGangi, & Horrigan, 1992, pp. 80-81) She further points out that there are a lot of people that are
gay that arent queer . . . [and] there are probably a lot of people that are truly queer that arent gay (Chinn et
al., 1992, p. 81). Kumashiro (2002) identifies two ways in which he uses the term. In a narrow sense, queer
is intended to mean lesbian, gay, bisexual, two-spirited, transgender, intersexed, questioning, or different
because of ones sexual orientation, presentation, or identity. Although intended to be fairly narrow, the
designation is, in reality, capacious and deliberately inclusive. In a broader sense, queer signifies
nonnormativity. Agreeing with Warner (1993, 1999), Butler (1993), Seidman (1996, 1997), Kumashiro
(2002), and Clarke (1994), Parker (1994) contends that queerness takes its bearings in defining itself
against normativity, not heterosexuality; given the fact that heterosexuality is nothing if not
normative (p. 55). Halperin (1995) extends it beyond normative heterosexuality: Queer is by definition
whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to
which it necessarily refers. . . . [It] demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis--vis the
normative. . . . [It] does not designate a class of already objectified pathologies or perversions; rather, it
describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be
delimited in advance. (p. 62, emphasis in the original) Imagining the possibilities of queer-world making,
Halperin (1995) further explains, It is from the eccentric positionality occupied by the queer subject that
it may become possible to envision a variety of possibilities for reordering the relations among sexual
behaviors, erotic identities, constructions of gender, forms of knowledge, regimes of enunciation, logics
of representation, modes of self-constitution, and practices of communityfor restructuring, that is, the
relations among power, truth, and desire. (p. 62) Based upon these common conceptions, queer can and
does coexist with terms such as lesbian and gay; however, they are not interchangeable with one another
(Jagose, 1996; Parker, 1994). Next, I turn to discuss the emerging and fluid theoretical modelqueer theory
that I alluded to earlier.

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Queer theory deconstructs normativity in order to form an open politics of difference,

where difference is not oppressed.
Originating from, developed in, and distancing itself from conventional lesbian and gay studies, queer
theory and its predecessor have overlapping but distinctively different theoretical and political goals,
neither one of which is necessarily superior to or more inclusive than the other (Berlant & Warner,
1995). Departing from the gay ethnic identity model of homosexuality (Epstein, 1990, p. 285) and
inspired by the radical, confrontational, in-your-face queer politics of activist groups such as ACT UP and
Queer Nation, queer theory is characterized by a transgressive agenda and a rebellious spirit. As such,
queer theory challenges the assumption of the unified homosexual subject undergirding much of
Western homophobic and gay-affirmative theory (for a detailed account of this assumption, see Epstein,
1990; Seidman, 1996, 1997). A unified homosexual subject reproduces the homo/heterosexual binary, as
Seidman (1996) explains, Modern Western affirmative homosexual theory may naturalize or normalize
the gay subject or even register it as an agent of social liberation, but it has the effect of consolidating
heterosexuality and homosexuality as master categories of sexual and social identity; it reinforces the
modern regime of sexuality. (p. 12, my emphasis) As I argue throughout the essay, this regime of sexuality
based on the homo/heterosexual binary becomes injurious and violent to individuals and communities
through the workings of heteronormativity. Recognizing normalization as a site of violence, Seidman
(1996, pp. 12-13) points out that Queer theory wishes to challenge the regime of sexuality itself, that is,
the knowledges that construct the self as sexual and that assume heterosexuality and homosexuality as
categories marking the truth of sexual selves. . . . Queer theorists view heterosexuality and
homosexuality not simply as identities or social statuses but as categories of knowledge, a language that
frames what we know as bodies, desires, sexualities, identities. This is a normative language as it shapes
moral boundaries and political hierarchies. In the process, queer theory calls for a dramatic shift from
lesbian and gay assimilationist politics to a politics of difference (Slagle, 1995). Seidman (1996) further
explains, Queer theorists shift their focus from an exclusive preoccupation with the oppression and
liberation of the homosexual subject to an analysis of the institutional practices and discourses
producing sexual knowledges and the ways they organize social life, attending in particular to the way
these knowledges and social practices repress differences. . . . [In short], queer theory aspires to
transform homosexual theory into a general social theory or one standpoint from which to analyze
social dynamics. (p. 13, my emphasis) As such, queer theory does not aspire to attain theoretical
hegemony or domination in cultural politics. Rather, queer theory provides another view, another
discursive horizon, and another perspective from which social relations can be analyzed and examined.
Because it is an open system, queer theory is neither a singular nor a determinate body of ideas (Berlant
& Warner, 1995; Halperin, 1995; Jagose, 1996). As such, it is not a traditional theory that can be described
and explicated in propositional form. Queer theory, then, is more about an open system of discursive and
conceptual possibilities than a rigid and fixed theoretical model.

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Alternative Solves: Oppression

Queering solves social injustice, including classism, racism, sexism, and sexual prejudice.
Developing a queer understanding of oppression becomes part of a commitment to
dismantling that oppression one person at a time. There is no need for a revolution,
individuals working one at a time can do it.
Elia, Professor @ San Francisco University, 2003.
(John, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, no. 2/3/4, pp. 79-80, JCE)
On a larger scale, queering relationships can begin to address, if not serve as a corrective to, the social
injustices that pervade our lives regarding the various sorts of sexual lifestyles and relationships we
choose. This is important in general, but it is even more crucial to challenge the injustices from which
disenfranchised individuals have suffered for hundreds of years. This means that classism, racism,
sexism, and sexual prejudice (e.g., biphobia, homophobia, sex negativity, and transphobia) need to be
exposed and challenged very directly. Calling attention to the saliency of classism and racism regarding
access and obstacles to choosing families, Kath Weston (1991) asserts, There are constraints on any choice.
Color, access to money, and social connections leave some people more constrained than others. . . . Race
and racism, class and class pretensions, all go into the evaluative mix (p. xv). Therefore, it is critical to be
cognizant of the reality that some folks have more opportunities available to them than others in terms
of being able to create queer romantic and sexual relationships. Sex, socio-economic class, ethnicity
and race are significant factors to be taken into consideration. Simply put, for many marginalized
individuals, creating and sustaining such relationships is an arduous task, if not seemingly impossible.
This becomes yet another outrageous commentary about how omnipresent and deeply entrenched
injustices are in U.S. society. The first step to ameliorate and ultimately eliminate such inequities is by
Developing a deep understanding of the forces of oppression and acting in the pursuit of social
justice . . . (Weber, 2001, p. 182). Queering relationships becomes part of the larger ideological
commitment to dismantle brick by brick the oppressive forces of dominant cultural beliefs,
expectations, and practices. Lynn Weber (2001) puts it best by declaring, The pursuit of social justice
gives meaning to peoples lives. To derive meaning from the struggle for justice, we dont have to bring
about a revolution; we can plant together. By preparing the fields and planting the seeds together, we
can live fulfilling lives even as we wait for the harvest. (p. 182)

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Role of the Ballot

The Ballot is a performative act the ballot is a discourse exercising binding power. Every
ballot matter repetition is what confers power on the performative act.
(Dr. Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex) pp. 225 LRP
Performative acts are forms of authoritative speech: most performatives, for instance, are statements
that, in the uttering, also perform a certain action and exercise a binding power.4 Implicated in a
network of authorization and punishment, performatives tend to include legal sentences, baptisms,
inaugurations, declarations of ownership, statements which not only perform an action, but confer a
binding power on the action performed. If the power of discourse to produce that which it names is linked
with the question of performativity, then the performative is one domain in which power acts as
discourse. Importantly, however, there is no power, construed as a subject, that acts, but only, to repeat
an earlier phrase, a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability. This is less an
"act," singular and deliberate, than a nexus of power and discourse that repeats or mimes the
discursive gestures of power. Hence, the judge who authorizes and installs the situation he names invariably
cites the law that he applies, and it is the power of this citation that gives the performative its binding or
conferring power. And though it may appear that the binding power of his words is derived from the force of
his will or from a prior authority, the opposite is more true: it is through the citation of the law that the figure
of the judge's "will" is produced and that the "priority" of textual authority is established. Indeed, it is
through the invocation of convention that the speech act of the judge derives its binding power; that
binding power is to be found neither in the subject of the judge nor in his will, but in the citational
legacy by which a contemporary "act" emerges in the context of a chain of binding convention.
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Framework
Framework is the dominant ideology of restraint. Excluding the criticism maintains the
heterosexual norm. Voting for framework makes ignorance the preferred social policy
this anti-intellectual stance has no place in an educational activity
Weber, 01 (Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality; A Conceptual Framework.
Boston: McGraw Hill. LRP
The dominant ideology of sexuality is one of restraint, with the alleged sexual practices of the
heterosexual majority taken as the moral norm against which the sexual orientation and practices of
people who are gay, bisexual, lesbian, and transgenderedl are seen as deviant and dangerous. The
dominant ideology of sexuality is not that we should be blind to differences, that they shouldn't matter or
don't exist, but rather that they should be denied or ignoredneither discussed in public nor condoned.
The military's policy toward homosexuals of "Don't ask, don't tell" captures the dominant ideology of
sexual restraint: "We won't ask and you shouldn't tell, because if you tell you will be punished." Think about
these ideologies. Why would we use denial and blindness as bases for social policy and the assessment of
moral rightness? To do so implies that we seek not to see and therefore not to know. It suggests that
ignorance is a preferred foundation for social policyan anti-intellectual stance that has no valid place in the
modern academy, where we use our senses to seek knowledge, truth, and wisdom. Yet these stances to race,
class, gender, and sexuality prevail for at least two basic reasons: Because members of privileged groups
are not disadvantaged and in fact benefit from these systems, people in these groups find it relatively
easy to dismiss the claims of oppressed groups as unreal. In our education and in mass media we do not
systematically learn about the totality of the experiences of subordinate groups.
Communication Scholars are deeply involved in current systems of power that produce and
disseminate knowledge. In other words, we as debaters are implicated in the maintenance of the
homo/heterosexual binary and heteronormativity. We must join queer theorists in talking about
and theorizing about how to solve the problems that heteronormativity presents in order to
prevent the social, cultural, sexual, and systemic violence that is forced upon disenfranchised
groups every day.
Communication scholars, like researchers in other areas of academic study, are profoundly involved and
deeply implicated in current systems of power as they produce and disseminate knowledge. In his
power/knowledge matrix, Foucault reminds us that knowledge and truth are closely interconnected. He
writes, Each society has its regime of truth, its general politics of truth: that is, the types of discourse which
it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and
false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the
acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault, 1980, p.
131) In other words, communication scholars are inextricably involved in current regimes of power and
knowledge. As such, communication scholars are profoundly implicated in the maintenance of the
homo/heterosexual binary, the fundamental conceptual pair that organizes modern Western discourses of
sexuality. In the academy and elsewhere, institutional heterosexuality, through the process of normalization,
becomes heteronormative. Heteronormativity produces the equation heterosexual experience = human
experience and renders all other forms of human sexual expression pathological, deviant, invisible,
unintelligible, or written out of existence (Yep, 2002, p. 167). More simply put, heteronormativity is violent
and harmful to a range of people across the spectrum of sexualities, including those who live within its
borders. Aware of the mobility of power relations, queer/quare theorists from a variety of disciplines have provided
analytical tools to create new openings and
<CONTINUED>

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<CONTINUED>
possibilities of change and transformation. Such scholars are not interested in speaking for others, providing
definitive solutions, proclaiming transhistorical generalizations, declaring transcultural knowledge, or making
universal pronouncements. These queer/quare theorists and activists are invested in detaching the power of
truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present
time (Foucault, 1980, p. 133). Committed to the celebration of human differences and dedicated to the
interrogation of the normalizing technologies of power, these interdisciplinary scholars and community activists
scrutinize the homo/heterosexual binary as the foundation of current discourses of sexuality, and critically examine
heteronormativity. As a communication teacher and scholar who travels across academic disciplinary
boundaries, I invite communication scholars across the spectrum of social locations to join these theorists and
practitioners in this radical project to expand, stretch, reorient, and re-map the conceptual landscape of the
field of communication. I urge communication teachers and scholars to interrogate and unpack the
homo/heterosexual binary, disentangle and demystify the power of heteronormativity in our scholarship,
pedagogy, and cultural politics, and to create and produce historically specific and embodied racialized
knowledges of the human sexual subject.
Debate is education. This is a critical site to interrogate heterosexuality

(John, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, no. 2/3/4, p. 64, JCE)
Akin to organized religion and the biomedical field, the educational system has been a major offender.
Wedded to disseminating the idea that heterosexuality is the ultimate and best form of sexuality,
Schools have maintained, by social custom and with reinforcement from the law, the promotion of the
heterosexual family as predominant, and therefore the essence of normal. From having been presumed
to be normal, heterosexual behavior has gained status as the right, good, and ideal lifestyle (Leck,
1999, p. 259). School culture in general is fraught with heteronormativity. Our society has long viewed
queer sexualities as . . . deviant, sinful, or both, and our schools are populated by adolescent peers and adult
educators who share these heterosexual values (Ginsberg, 1999, p. 55). Simply put, heteronormativity and
sexual prejudice pervade the curriculum at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels (for
examples of this and ways of intervening, see: Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 1997; Letts & Sears, 1999; Lovaas,
Baroudi, & Collins, 2002; Yep, 2002). Besides the hegemonic hold schools have had regarding a
heterosexual bias, school culture continues to devote much energy to maintaining . . . the status quo of
our dominant social institutions, which are hierarchical, authoritarian, and unequal, competitive,
racist, sexist, and homophobic (Arnstine, 1995, p. 183). While there has been modest success in
addressing various forms of prejudice in schools (Kumashiro, 2001), what is sorely lacking is serious
attention to how the intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender are interwoven and dialectically create
prejudice (e.g., racism, classism, and hetero[sexism]). Schools would be an ideal site to interrogate, and
begin to erode, the kind of hegemony upon which heterosexism rests and is supported. To date, not
much is being done in a systematic fashion to disrupt the ways in which U.S. schooling has perpetuated
such hierarchies. It seems to me that sexuality education is ripe for the opportunity to challenge
heterosexism in school culture; however, public school-based sexuality education is presently in serious
crisis, as it has turned mostly to the business of pushing for abstinence- only sexuality education. According
to federal legislation, states that accept funding for this form of sexuality education require that young people
are taught to abstain from sexual activity until they get married. This has numerous implications for
relationship construction; a more in-depth description and analysis of this form of sexuality education will
follow later in this essay.

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Language Matters
Language shapes identities. The K is a way to reinvent the world
Ritchie & Barker 06, Southampton Solent University & London South Bank University (Ani
& Meg, There arent words for what we do or how we feel so we have to make them up: constructing polymorous
languages in culture of compulsory monogamy,SAGE Publications, mnc)
The social constructionist approach to sexuality is grounded in the belief that our identity, desires,
relationships and emotions are shaped by the culture in which we live (Weeks, 2003). We come to understand
ourselves in terms of the concepts that are available to us in the time and place we live in. The language
around us shapes our self-identities (Burr, 1995) and our understanding of sexual identity depends on
the language of sexuality available to us. The language and everyday experience of sexuality are thus
intrinsically linked (Weeks, 2003). There is a wealth of literature considering how people of nonheterosexual sexualities have developed their own languages to express their identities and experiences and
to claim community, rights and recognition. For example, Weeks (2003) argues that the emergence of the
label 'gay' in the early 1970s was important in terms of the public expression of homosexuality as a legitimate
sexual identity. It established a clear social identity, which offered a previously unavailable sense of security
and community, although such categorization may also be seen as restricting and inhibiting (Plummer, 1980).
The reclamation of the term 'queer' by some may offer a move away from fixed sexual identities
(Jagose, 1997). It seems that the existing language of sexual identity may shape our experiences but that
people and communities also invent, alter and reclaim language in order to fit experiences for which
there is no existing language.
The political economy of sexual discourse is crucial to delegitimating heterosexist authority

Halperin 95
1995, DES.
There are doubtless many other factors that may explain the over determined appeal for gay activists of
Foucault in general and The History of Sexuality, Volume I, in particular. For the purpose of this essay,
however, I want to concentrate on only one motive for the gay-militant appropriation of Foucault. I believe
that Foucault's political approach to discourse, specifically his inquiry into what might be called the
political economy of sexual discourse, 34 enables us to devise some effective strategies for confronting
and resisting the discursive operations of contemporary homophobia. For one thing, Foucault's example
teaches us to analyze discourse strategically, not in terms of what it says but in terms of what it does
and how it works. That does not mean that we learn from Foucault to treat the content of particular
discourses as uninteresting or irrelevant (after all, one has to understand what discourses say in order to be
able to analyze what they do and how they work); it does mean that we learn from him not to allow the truth
or falsity of particular propositions to distract us from the power-effects they produce or the manner in which
they are deployed within particular systems of discursive and institutional practice. 35 The effect of
Foucault's political approach to discourse is not to collapse truth into power but to shift the focus of our
attention from matters of truth to matters of power. 36 That shift has proven extremely profitable for the
analysis of homophobic discourse; 37 it has also proven crucial for the larger projects of
delegitimating heterosexist authority and empowering gay practices of knowledge and community. I
shall take up each of these three points in turn.

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Viewing sexuality from a history of discourses enables the resistance of biopolitical control
and quasi-scientific understanding.
Halperin 95
1995, DES.
Foucault's shift of perspective, his insistence on writing the history of sexuality "from the viewpoint of a
history of discourses" 56 rather than from the viewpoint of the history of science, 57 enables him both
to denaturalize and to politicize sexuality. Conceived according to Foucault in discursive terms, sexuality
can now be analyzed according to the strategies immanent in its discursive operation. When sexuality is
viewed from that angle, it appears not as a natural drive but instead (as we have seen) as "an especially
concentrated point of traversal for relations of power." Sexuality is in fact part of an "apparatus" or "device"
(dispositif) 58 that serves to connect new forms of power and knowledge with new objects and new domains.
It can therefore be described as "a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the
intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the
strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major
strategies of knowledge and power." 59 The political importance of sex consists in the way it supports
the modem regime of "bio-power," which Foucault defines, contrasting it with the old regime of "power
over life and death," as an "entire political technology of life." "Bio-power" refers to the modern
political procedure of regulating human life by means of expert techniques (statistics, demographics,
eugenics, sterilization, etc.)--techniques that make possible a strategic alliance between specialized
knowledge and institutionalized power in the state's management of life. Sex contributes to this
technology, specifically, by connecting the body and the nation, linking "the procedures of power that
characterized the disciplines" of sexuality (the "anatomo-politics of the human body") with "an entire
series of. . . regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population." 60
Foucault's conceptual reorientation of sexuality, his transformation of it from an object of knowledge
into a cumulative effect of power--"the sum of effects produced in bodies, behaviors, and social relations by
a certain apparatus that emerges from a complex political technology" 61 --enables him effectively to
displace conventional ontologies of the sexual and thereby to resist the preemptive claims of various
modern expert knowledges, of positivist epistemologies that constitute sexuality as a (or as the) real
thing, an objective natural phenomenon to be known by the mind. Foucault's own discursive
counterpractice seeks to remove sexuality from among the objects of knowledge and thereby to
deauthorize those branches of expertise grounded in a scientific or quasi-scientific understanding of it;
it also seeks to delegitimate those regulatory disciplines whose power acquires the guise of legitimate
authority by basing itself on a privileged access to the "truth" of sexuality. By analyzing modem
knowledge practices in terms of the strategies of power immanent in them, and by treating "sexuality"
accordingly not as a determinate thing in itself but as a positivity produced by those knowledge
practices and situated by their epistemic operations in the place of the real, Foucault politicizes both
truth and the body: he reconstitutes knowledge and sexuality as sites of contestation, thereby opening
up new opportunities for both scholarly and political intervention.

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Kritik Comes 1st

Utilizing a methodology to accurately characterize problems is a prerequisite to taking
action
Halperin 95
1995, DES.
Keith Gandal has attempted to explicate Foucault's political attitudes and practices, and his account is worth
quoting at some length:
Foucault developed a new political role for intellectual work and a new sort of political activism that
was informed by historical analysis. What has often been thought of as his nihilism was, first of all, his
sense that articulating a set of values inhibits effective and ethical political action, and, secondly, his
understanding that resistance cannot stand in pure opposition to the powers that be, but that, instead,
struggle and change always take place through co-optation, that, in fact, change is made possible by cooptation because, in the process of co-optation, in assimilating the resistance, the terms of power
change.... [H]e wanted to establish an activism that was predicated, not on the enumeration of values or the
proposal of social policy, but on tactical considerations and ethical practice (including a practice of reform
that would not depend upon the expert reformer). Foucault was concerned above all with the effects of his
thinking and political activity.... He pursued struggles where the situation was "intolerable," but also where
an alteration of power relations was possible.... Those who come to Foucault's work looking for political
solutions will be perpetually disappointed. Foucault's project--in both his politics and his histories-was
not to lay out solutions, but rather to identify and characterize problems.... For Foucault, Truth did not
reside in a set of ideas about the way things should be, but in a practice that talked about problems in a
manner that opened up new possibilities for action. Identifying and sizing up a problem was the most
determinate act of thought.... Foucault challenged the intellectual activism whose claim to a progressive
politics is a theoretical apparatus, or a correct set of values, or a program for a legitimate political system. He
believed that a progressive politics needed, not a vision of what should be, but a sense of what was
intolerable and an historical analysis that could help determine possible strategies in political struggles.... If
Foucault remained fairly silent on the subjects of answers and principles, it was because he was acting
ethically and strategically, it was because he believed that asserting principles would get in the way of an
ethic of "popular" participation. He wanted to allow and even inspire a practice of criticism which proceeded,
not with expert, theoretical or scientific knowledges, but with "lowranking knowledges."

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Answer To: Case Outweighs

Discussion of sexuality is not second to poverty, war, or epidemics, but magnified by these
conditions requiring a serious investigation of internal politics, inequities and modes of
oppression
Rubin, a cultural anthropologist best known as an activist and influential theorist of sex
and gender politics, 1993 (Gayle S., , "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,"
Social Perspective in Lesbian and Gay Studies, NY Routledge, , DES)
The time has come to think about sex. To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant topic, a
frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine, or nuclear
annihilation. But it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable
destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality. Contemporary conflicts
over sexual values and erotic conduct have much in common with the religious disputes of earlier
centuries. They acquire immense symbolic weight. Disputes over sexual behavior often become the
vehicles for displacing social anxieties, and discharging their attendant emotional intensity.
Consequently, sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great social stress.
The realm of sexuality also has its own internal politics, inequities, and modes of oppression. As with
other aspects of human behavior, the concrete institutional forms of sexuality at any given time and place
are products of human activity. They are imbued with conflicts of interest and political maneuvering,
both deliberate and incidental. In that sense, sex is always political. But there are also historical periods in
which sexuality is more sharply contested and more overtly politicized. In such periods, the domain of erotic
life is, in effect, renegotiated.

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Answers To: Prevents Political Change

Language and the material flesh of the world are intimately bound up. We cannot posit the
material world outside of language. There is no action without language.
The linguistic categories that are understood to "denote" the materiality of the body are themselves
troubled by a referent that is never fully or permanently resolved or contained by any given signified.
Indeed, that referent persists only as a kind of absence or loss, that which language does not capture,
but, instead, that which impels language repeatedly to attempt that capture, that circumscriptionand
to fail. This loss takes its place in language as an insistent call or demand that, while in language, is
never fully o/language. To posit a materiality outside of language is so to posit that materiality, and the
materiality so posited will retain that positing as its constitutive condition. To posit a materiality outside of
language, where that materiality is considered ontologically distinct from language, is to undermine the
possibility that language might be able to indicate or correspond to that domain of radical alterity.
Hence the absolute distinction between language and materiality which was to secure the referential function
of language undermines that function radically. This is not to say that, on the one hand, the body is simply
linguistic stuff or, on the other, that it has no bearing on language. It bears on language all the time. The
materiality of language, indeed, of the very sign that attempts to denote "materiality," suggests that it
is not the case that everything, including materiality, is always already language. On the contrary, the
materiality of the signifier (a "materiality" that comprises both signs and their significatory efficacy)
implies that there can be no reference to a pure materiality except via materiality. Hence, it is not that
one cannot get outside of language in order to grasp materiality in and of itself; rather, every effort to
refer to materiality takes place through a signifying process which, in its phenomenality, is always
already material. In this sense, then, language and materiality are not opposed, for language both is and
refers to that which is material, and what is material never fully escapes from the process by which it is
signified. I But if language is not opposed to materiality, neither can materiality be summarily
collapsed into an identity with language. On the one hand, the process of signification is always material;
signs work by appearing (visibly, aurally), and appearing through material means, although what appears
only signifies by virtue of those non-phenomenal relations, i.e., relations of differentiation, that tacitly
structure and propel signification itself. Relations, even the notion of difference, institute and require relata,
terms, phenomenal signifiers. And yet what allows for a signifier to signify will never be its materiality
alone; that materiality will be at once an instrumentality and deployment of a set of larger linguistic relations.
The materiality of the signifier will signify only to the extent that it is impure, contaminated by the
ideality of differentiating relations, the tacit structurings of a linguistic context that is illimitable in
principle. Conversely, the signifier will work to the extent that it is also contaminated constitutively by
the very materiality that the ideality of sense purports to overcome. Apart from and yet related to the
materiality of the signifier is the materiality of the signified as well as the referent approached through the
signified, but which remains irreducible to the signified. This radical difference between referent and
signified is the site where the materiality of language and that of the world which it seeks to signify are
perpetually negotiated. This might usefully be compared with Merleau-Ponty's notion of the flesh of the
world.12 Although the referent cannot be said to exist apart from the signified, it nevertheless cannot be
reduced to it. That referent, that abiding function of the world, is to persist as the horizon and the "that
which" which makes its demand in and to language. Language and materiality are fully embedded in each
other, chiasmic in their interdependence but never fully collapsed into one another, i.e., reduced to one
another, and yet neither fully ever exceeds the other Always already implicated in each other, always
already exceeding one another, language and materiality are never fully identical nor fully different.

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Queernees can be used as a form of political resistance

Halperin 95
1995, DES.
AT THE SAME time as he proposed practicing what Bersani calls 'jouissance as a mode of ascesis," 192
Foucault also argued implicitly against the tendency to associate resistance only with radically non-normative
social and sexual practices. Despite his interest in the transformative potential of S/M, Foucault was far from
insisting that gay life or gay sex had to be thoroughly transgressive, experimental, or avant-gardist in order to
qualify as a form of political resistance. Given the way that society is currently organized, after all, even the
most innocuous-seeming expressions of gay sexuality threaten the coherence of the social order. To reduce
the inventiveness and creativity of gay life to sexual promiscuity, for example, is in Foucault's view to erase
"everything that can possibly be upsetting about affection, tenderness, friendship, faithfulness, comradeship,
companionship, for which a fairly controlled society cannot make room without fearing that alliances might
be formed, that unexpected lines of force might appear." 193 And he added,
Imagining a sexual act that does not conform to the law or to nature, that's not what upsets people. But that
individuals might begin to love each other, that's the problem. That goes against the grain of social
institutions: they are already crisscrossed by emotional intensities which both hold them in place and fill
them with turmoil--look at the army, where love between men is endlessly solicited and stigmatized. The
institutional regulations cannot approve such [emotional] relations [between men], with their multiple
intensities, variable colorations, imperceptible movements, and changing forms--relations that produce a
short circuit and introduce love where there ought to be law, regularity, and custom. 194
Hence it is "the homosexual way of life" that, according to Foucault, is much more threatening "than the
sexual act itself." 195 (Which may be why it is easier to legalize gay sex than gay marriage.) And he added
that what straight society finds intolerable about gay people is not our specific pleasures or sexual practices
but their outcome, their effect on the quality of our lives: straight people can forgive us our physical thrills,
but what they ultimately cannot forgive us is our happiness. 196
Similarly, the most interesting things about S/M and fistfucking, in Foucault's eyes, may not have been their
allegedly disaggregating impact on the individual subject of desire but their incongruous integration into
"homosexual ways of life." As Rubin has recently documented, the 1970s were a time of vigorous and
expansive community formation for gay leathermen in San Francisco and elsewhere in the United States.
197 What that meant is that fist-fucking and S/M did not remain merely occasional or isolated practices but
became linked to other expressions of subcultural development, including dress, patterns of life and work, the
transformation of neighborhoods, the growth of community organizations, the provision of public services,
the staging of athletic events, and ultimately the emergence of locally based and funded social and political
groups. These developments represented signal instances of the new sorts of things that gay men could do
with their sexuality, and in fact what may have intrigued Foucault most about fistfucking was the way a
specific non-normative sexual practice could come to provide the origin and basis for such seemingly remote
and unrelated events as bake sales, community fundraisers, and block parties. Those "communitarian
practices of life and sexuality" which Foucault saw knitting together the social relationships of gay
leathermen demonstrated dramatically how one could "use... one's sexuality to achieve a multiplicity of types
of relations," "to define and develop a way of life," to "construct cultural forms."
ULTIMATELY, in Foucault's opinion,
[T]he gay movement has a future which goes beyond gays themselves.... [It may include the possibility of a]
culture in the large sense, a culture which invents ways of relating, types of existence, types of values, types
of exchanges between individuals that are really new and are neither the same as, nor superimposed on,
existing cultural forms. If at's possible, then gay culture will be not only a choice of homosexuals for
homosexuals. It would create relations that are, at certain points, transferable to heterosexuals.
<CONTINUED>

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<CONTINUED>
(Elsewhere Foucault cited gay bathhouses as an institution that heterosexuals might benefit from; 198 the
codification of "relations of provisional coexistence" might enable other "types of exchanges" equally
beneficial to heterosexuals).
We have to reverse things a bit. Rather than saying what we said at one time: "Let's try to re-introduce
homosexuality into the general norm of social relations," let's say the reverse: "No! Let's escape as much as
possible from the type of relations which society proposes for us and try to create in the empty space where
we are new relational possibilities." By proposing a new relational right, we will see that non-homosexual
people can enrich their lives by changing their own schema of relations. 199
The future Foucault envisages for us is not exclusively or categorically gay. But it is definitely queer.

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Answers To: Historical Critique of Queer

Laying claim to the term queer is necessary to refute homophobic power deployments.
Queering can be a historical inquiry that resolves your K.
In this sense, it remains politically necessary to lay claim to "women," "queer," "gay," and "lesbian,"
precisely because of the way these terms, as it were, lay their claim on us prior to our full knowing.
Laying claim to such terms in reverse will be necessary to refute homophobic deployments of the terms
in law, public policy, on the street, in "private" life. But the necessity to mobilize the necessary error of
identity (Spivak's term) will always be in tension with the democratic contestation of the term which
works against its deployments in racist and misogynist discursive regimes. If "queer" politics postures
independently of these other modalities of power, it will lose its democratizing force. The political
deconstruction of "queer" ought not to paralyze the use of such terms, but, ideally, to extend its range,
to make us consider at what expense and for what purposes the terms are used, and through what
relations of power such categories have been wrought. Some recent race theory has underscored the use of
"race" in the service of "racism," and proposed a politically informed inquiry into the process of racialization,
the formation of race.10 Such an inquiry does not suspend or ban the term, although it does insist that
an inquiry into formation is linked to the contemporary question of what is at stake in the term. The
point may be taken for queer studies as well, such that "queering" might signal an inquiry into (a) the
formation of homosexualities (a historical inquiry which cannot take the stability of the term for
granted, despite the political pressure to do so) and (b) the deformative and misappropriative power
that the term currently enjoys. At stake in such a history will be the differential formation of
homosexuality across racial boundaries, including the question of how racial and reproductive
relations become articulated through one another.

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Answer To: Obligation to Help Others

Choosing not to help our neighbors, or those that are near us, actually helps them achieve
self-actualization. Attempting to help someone do to some arbitrary moral duty causes
their self-actualization to be disrupted, leading to a complete evacuation of their self-worth
and identity. The best thing we can do for our neighbor is to not help them.
Edelman, Professor of English Literature, 2004 (Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, pp. 82-85,
JCE)
Despite that blow, the sinthomosexual opposes the fantasy that generates endless narratives of
generation. Hearing, to borrow Joel Fineman's phrase, "the sound of 0" in Thornhill-the "0" that parades as
Thornhill's initial to the extent that it stands for nothing-Leonard refuses the tragedy of desire that Thornhill's
cry portends." To the contrary, Leonard, linked as he is to the figure full of microfilm, North by Northwest's
MacGuffin (Hitchcock's term for an object invested with "vital importance" in the narrative, though it "is
actually nothing at all" 17), might interpret Thornhill's tragedy as his newfound sincerity in the face of this
threat to Eve and thus as his ceasing to stand for nothing, his turning away from the empty "0" that turns the
globe to rot, in order to stand for the law of desire to which we properly owe our standing as subjects of the
Symbolic. Leonard thus stands opposed to the desire for which Thornhill solicits support by standing on
the hand that Leonard refuses to lift in order to help him-or, to inflect that last phrase differently, refuses
to lift the better to help him: to help him slip free of fantasy and the clutches of desire, free of the hold
by which love holds off his access to jouissance while offering, instead, the promise of totalization and
self-completion, the Imaginary One of the Couple and its putative sexual rapport, in a future that's
unattainable because always still to come.18 Lacan affords us some guidance here through his gloss on the
legend of St. Martin, whose response to a certain beggar who asked for his help on a cold winter's day was to
cut his own warm cloak in two and give half to the man who had nothing. "Saint Martin shares his cloak, and
a great deal is made of it," Lacan observes in invoking this touchstone of compassion. "We are no doubt
touching a primitive requirement in the need to be satisfied there, for the beggar was naked. But perhaps over
and above that need to be clothed, he was begging for something else, namely that Saint Martin either kill
him or fuck him. In any encounter there's a big difference in meaning between the response of philanthropy
and that of love." 19 The love Lacan refers to here, the love that surpasses philanthropy (etymologically,
the "love of man"), disdains the Imaginary structure informing the inevitably narcissistic love we take
for love itself. What Lacan calls love in this passage exceeds all feel-good forms of altruism with which
we're wont to identify compassionate identification, the compassion that, Lacan points out, reinforces
the ego's narcissism. "My egoism is quite content with a certain altruism," he declares, "altruism that is
situated on the level of the useful." And he adds, to make this clearer still: "What I want is the good of others
provided that it remain in the image of my own" (187). Lacan, however, distinguishes all such altruism,
philanthropy, and compassion from the kind of love the beggar may actually have been soliciting from the
saint: "It is in the nature of the good to be altruistic. But that's not the love of thy neighbor" (I86). Instead, at
the heart of the neighborly love that Augustine associated with the "counsel of compassion" Lacan perceives
the function of "malignant jouissance" (187). And this alone, Lacan insists, explains why Freud, confronted
with the biblical injunction to "love one's neighbor," "retreats in understandable horror" (193) Lacan, of
course, is thinking of Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud, having noted with understatement that
"men are not gentle creatures" questions the imperative to "love one's neighbor," since, for most human
beings, in his view, "their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also
someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work
without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate
him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him." 20 One might hear in this a faint echo of Kant, who,
maintaining "that our species, alas! is not such as to be found particularly worthy of love," insists that love,
as a feeling, cannot be imposed upon us as duty, since what we do by constraint of duty is not, it
follows, done from love. The commandment to love one's neighbor, therefore, cannot, as Kant puts it,
<CONTINUED>

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<CONTINUED>
"mean, 'Thou shalt first of all love, and by means of this love (in the first place) do him good'; but:
'Do good to thy neighbor, and this beneficence will produce in thee the love of men.' "21 Lacan draws out
the extent to which such a translation of "love one's neighbor," though appearing to support a
compassionate love with its roots in the Imaginary- by virtue of which "I imagine [others') difficulties and
their sufferings in the mirror of my own" - has the effect, to the contrary, of rupturing the subject's
Imaginary totalization, the image of self-completion that "love" as fantasy would sustain, by installing
the abstract logic of duty as the submission to moral law, whereby pathos becomes pathological and
reason the logical path.22 In this way the command to love one's neighbor unleashes its negativity
against the coherence of any self-image, subjecting us to a moral law that evacuates the subject so as to
locate it through and in that very act of evacuation, permitting the realization, thereby, of a freedom beyond
the boundaries of any image or representation, a freedom that, like the ground of God's power, according
to Lacan, ultimately resides in nothing more than "the capacity to advance into emptiness" (196). Kant's duty
to conform to moral law without any pathological motive, for the sake of duty alone, thus trenches, and this
marks the central point of Lacan's elaboration of Kant with Sade, on the question of jouissance: "When one
approaches that central emptiness, which up to now has been the form in which access to jouissance has
presented itself to us, my neighbor's body breaks into pieces" (202). Here, in this access to jouissance,
paradoxical though it may seem, psychoanalysis encounters the innermost meaning of the commandment to
"love one's neighbor," which, as Lacan is quick to remind us, "may be the cruelest of choices.

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Answer To: Identity Politics Bad

Queer theory is not oppositional to heteronormative culture; it stands in opposition to any
logic of opposition. Being oppositional would constitute an identity in and of itself, and
queerness rejects any such identity. Queerness undoes all identity using a death drive to
stand in opposition to any social reality.
How should we read this constant disruption of narrative signification, a disruption inextricable from the
articulation of narrative as such, but as a version of the death drive, which Barbara Johnson calls, in a
different context, "a kind of unthought remainder ... a formal overdetermination that is, in Freud's case, going
to produce repetition or, in deconstruction's case, may inhere in linguistic structures that don't correspond to
anything else"? If irony can serve as one of the names for the force of that unthought remainder, might not
queerness serve as another? Queer theory, it follows, would constitute the site where the radical threat
posed by irony, which heteronormative culture displaces onto the figure of the queer, is uncannily
returned by queers who no longer disown but assume their figural identity as embodiments of the
figuralization, and hence the disfiguration, of identity itself. Where the political interventions of
identitarian minorities-including those who seek to substantialize the identities of lesbians, gay men,
and bisexuals- may properly take shape as oppositional, affording the dominant order a reassuringly
symmetrical, if inverted, depiction of its own ostensibly coherent identity, queer theory's opposition is
precisely to any such logic of opposition, its proper task the ceaseless disappropriation of every
propriety. Thus, queerness could never constitute an authentic or substantive identity, but only a
structural position determined by the imperative of figuration; for the gap, the noncoincidence, that the order
of the signifier installs both informs and inhabits queerness as it inhabits reproductive futurism. But it does so
with a difference. Where futurism always anticipates, in the image of an Imaginary past, a realization of
meaning that will suture identity by closing that gap, queerness undoes the identities through which we
experience ourselves as subjects, insisting on the Real of a jouissance that social reality and the futurism on
which it relies have already foreclosed. Queerness, therefore, is never a matter of being or becoming but,
rather, of embodying the remainder of the Real internal to the Symbolic order. One name for this
unnameable remainder, as Lacan describes it, is jouissance, sometimes translated as "enjoyment": a
movement beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the distinctions of pleasure and pain, a violent passage
beyond the bounds of identity, meaning, and law. This passage, toward which the pulsion of the drives
continuously impels us, may have the effect, insofar as it gets attached to a particular object or end, of
congealing identity around the fantasy of satisfaction or fulfillment by means of that object. At the same
time, however, this jouissance dissolves such fetishistic investments, undoing the consistency of a social
reality that relies on Imaginary identifications, on the structures of Symbolic law, and on the paternal
metaphor of the name." Hence, for Lacan there is another name that designates the unnameability to which
jouissance would give us access: "Behind what is named, there is the unnameable," he writes. "It is in fact
because it is unnameable, with all the resonances you can give to this name, that it is akin to the
quintessential unnameable, that is to say to death." 29 The death drive, therefore, manifests itself,
though in radically different guises, in both versions of jouissance. To the extent that jouissance, as
fantasmatic escape from the alienation intrinsic to meaning, lodges itself in a given object on which
identity comes to depend, it produces identity as mortification, reenacting the very constraint of meaning
it was intended to help us escape. But to the extent that it tears the fabric of Symbolic reality as we know it,
unraveling the solidity of every object, including the object as which the subject necessarily takes itself,
jouissance evokes the death drive that always insists as the void in and of the subject, beyond its
fantasy of self realization, beyond the pleasure principle.

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Queer theory challenges essentialist theories of identity by opening up new space for the
subject of desire
(R. Anthony, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4, p. 130, JCE)
The goals of queer theory are consistent with those of postmodernity. In particular, queer theory raises
challenges to totalizing theory, entrenched values, and essential identity categories. In line with
postmodern theories, queer theorists view identity as fractured and individual. Queer theorists bring
issues of sexualityissues generally considered private and personalto the fore through critical
inquiry. Morton (1996) explains that queer theory is seen as making an advance by opening up new space
for the subject of desire, a space in which sexuality becomes primary (p. 1). In terms of the emergence of
queer theory and activism, one must understand the distinction between the gay and lesbian liberation
movements and the more recent queer movements. In general, people in the liberation movements have
sought to allow gay men and lesbians participation within the dominant system. Whereas liberation theory
has explicitly reified sexual identity and gender categories, queer theory is a progressive move toward
inclusivity and the celebration of differences. In other words, the recent emergence of queer theory and
activism is a reaction to the more conservative approach to framing identity of the liberationists. More
broadly, in fact, queer theory is a reaction to other late 20th-century identity political movements that have
generally relied on essential identity constructions in order to form cohesive groups for political action.
Queer theory focuses on the uniqueness of the individual, rejecting essentialism or any
argument that attempts to say identity is universal.
(R. Anthony, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4, p. 133, JCE)
Challenge of essentialism. One of the fundamental assumptions of queer theory is that essential notions
of identity are problematic. Indeed, queer critics focus on the uniqueness of individual identities and
celebrate the novelty of differences among all people (Seidman, 1993). Put another way, queer theory
rejects any perspective that approaches the construction of identity from a universal perspective.
Rather than arguing that queers communicate in a particular way, queer theory explodes the notion
that individual identities and differences are constructed, communicated, and performed by
individuals, and that individual communication varies widely from person to person. Thus, queer
critics adamantly reject the idea that identity categories are a sufficient way to label the identities of
groups of individuals. This is significant because queer critics reject any perspective that approaches
discourse from a universal perspective. Furthermore, audiences are also composed of unique
individuals; they are not the monolithic entities that mainstream theorists often assume. Queer
criticism examines artifacts for essential identity categories. Because queer theorists challenge the
notion of a static, essential, or natural identity, a queer critique must focus on how identities are
represented in the artifact. Queer criticism acknowledges that all human beings are, by their nature,
unique. That is to say that no two people experience their identities in the same way. The critic engaged
in queer criticism celebrates the diversity of humanity by emphasizing diversity and difference of those
who are oppressed by the mainstream.

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Answer To: Totalizing Heterosexuality

Overlooking the complexity of heterosexuality is a necessary move to prevent it from
evading scrutiny for violence committed. And its a social phenomena which makes the
multiplicity of sex acts less relevant.
Although we are living in times of declaration and affirmation of diversity and difference,
heterosexuality is still generally treated as a monolithic and unitary concept (Crawford, 1993; Eliason, 1995;
Jackson, 1996, 1999; Smart, 1996a). As an institution, radical lesbian feminists simply treat it as eroticized power (Jeffreys, 1990, 1994).
Unlike marginalized sexual identities that are achieved after tremendous emotional labor and immense personal struggle, heterosexuality
is considered a default identity achieved without much effort, thought, or struggle (Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1993b, p. 31). As such,
heterosexual identities are unremarkable. As a practice, heterosexuality, by locating itself inside Rubins (1984/1993, p. 13) charmed
circle, escapes analytical scrutiny. By ignoring that heterosexuality may be many things (Smart, 1996a, p. 170), the complexity of
heterosexuality as an institution, identity, practice, and experienceis disregarded. There are reasons for overlooking the
complexity of heterosexuality. Perhaps the most important reason for such a move, Smart (1996a)
argues, is that the pluralisation [of heterosexuality] might appear as if it were trying to evade the
accusation of holding institutional power. It might seem that, if we acknowledge heterosexualities,
heterosexuals as a class cannot be held responsible for heterosexism and homophobia and the range
of harms addressed to other sexualities. (p. 171) This move is neither new nor unproblematic. For
example, the classifications of white and people of color are used to highlight material and
structural power differences in racialized and racist societies. Similarly, feminists used to argue that
gender division should be primary, while keeping other categories such as race and social class as
secondary in an attempt to challenge sexism and patriarchal power. Such moves, however, tend to homogenize,
ignore, silence, and erase important differences from within and can lead to misleading hierarchies of oppression. Heterosexuality, like
other forms of human expression, is extremely complex. Heterosexuality is not merely sexual; it is social (VanEvery,
1996b). As such, Jackson (1996, 1999) suggests that, to examine its complexities, four analytical domains should be considered: (1)
Heterosexuality as an institution; (2) heterosexuality as identity; (3) heterosexuality as practice; and (4) heterosexuality as experience.
Although such domains obviously interconnect and intersect, Jackson (1999) argues that they are useful analytical tools for debunking
myths of monolithic heterosexuality. As an institution, heterosexuality is rooted in gender hierarchy and manifested
through its central mechanism, marriage (Jackson, 1996). Implicit in the marriage contract is mens appropriation and exploitation of
womens bodies (e.g., sexual, reproductive) and labor (e.g., domestic, emotional) (Delphy & Leonard, 1992). Through
institutionalized heterosexuality, discourses and representations of sex are articulated in phallocentric

terms, that is, the positioning of women as sexual objects and men as sexual subjects (Jackson, 1996).
As an identity, heterosexuality tends to be unmarked and uncontested. It is a normal, taken-forgranted and default identity and social location. Its ordinariness represents a lack of reflection
characteristic of the privilege of power. However, many of the identities available to women (e.g., wife, girlfriend, mother,
and daughter) come from heterosexual relations. Such identities shape, influence, and constrain how women and men operate and
function in the social world. For example, cultural conceptions of a good wife or good mother create expectations and experiences
and regulate womens behavioral choices. Among feminists, heterosexual identities are more problematic. Exemplifying these struggles,
Mary Gergen (1993), when asked to contemplate her heterosexuality, wrote, I . . . became aware that no one had ever actually called me
a heterosexual before. . . . Yet I dont deny it; I do not murmur, There must be some mistake. No, I do affirm some basic selfidentification tag. . . . Then, my reactions shifted to a mingled puzzlement, resentment, a slight annoyance. Why address me so
categorically as a heterosexual? Why was anyone so sure? Because I am married? Or because my husband seems straight? (p. 62)
While Gergens reaction is one of puzzlement, others are more defensive. Take Sandra Bems, for example: Although I have lived
monogamously with a man I love for over 26 years, I am not now and never have been a heterosexual (1993, p. 50, my emphasis).
Heterosexual identities, then, appear to be highly contested among feminists (for a more detailed presentation of this debate, see
Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1993). As a practice, heterosexuality involves behaviors and actions derived from our
current gender hierarchy. Such actions include domestic labor, emotional work, and sexual behaviors. In her research on longterm domestic living arrangements, VanEvery (1996b) observes that men control and appropriate womens labor in most domestic
situations. Male control is also found in committed antisexist living arrangements where a more egalitarian principle governed division
of housework and child-rearing practices. Similarly, Holland and associates (1994) found that, in terms of sexual practice,
sex is still defined as penetration for mens pleasure in which women find fulfillment primarily in the
relationship, in giving pleasure (p. 31)

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Answers To: Race/Culture Ks of Queer Theory

The aff romanticizes 3rd gender acceptance in non-western cultures.
Roen, Associate Professor of Psychology at Oslo University, 1 (Katrina, Transgender Theory
and Embodiment: the risk of racial marginalization, Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3,
pg 254-255)JNF
Anthropological research documents numerous examples of non-western cultures where concepts of gender
liminality are accommodated through available gender roles (e.g., Roscoe, 1987, 1991; Nanda, 1990;
Besnier, 1994). The relationship between this aspect of anthropological study and research on transsexuality
and transgenderism has complex implications for the various parties involved. On the one hand, a
romanticised version of third-gender acceptance within non-western cultures can provide images of
hope for transgendered people fighting gender oppression. Besnier (1994), critical of such romanticising
of Polynesian acceptance of gender liminality, comments on the risk of assuming that gender-phobic
attitudes are purely colonial phenomena. He writes: `explaining violence against liminal individuals as
the sole result of emergent modernity in the Pacific Islands presupposes a romanticized view of
Polynesia that has no validity outside the western imagination' (p. 560, note 47). On the other hand,
through the processes of westernisation (via colonisation), it is now not uncommon for gender liminal
persons to seek sex reassignment surgery even though they live within a cultural context where their
gender liminality might formerly have been understood in terms of a gender role for which bodily
change was not considered an issue. For some gender liminal people, however, it is important to maintain
`traditional' cultural values by resisting identification with (conmporary western) medical discourses on
transsexuality. For other gender liminal people, particularly in contexts where little detailed historical
information about sexuality and gender remains decades after colonisers' attempts at assimilation and
annihilation, it is not simply a case of reclaiming cultural values around gender liminality, but of
creating gendered ways of being that satisfy aspects, of both racial and (trans)gendered politics.
Queer is a highly inclusive terms There are enough crossing discourse for cultural
histories to remain intact.
pg 258-259)JNF
Some aspects of Don's reclaiming fa'afafine as a highly esteemed way of being and challenging Palagi
approaches to sexuality and gender seem to me to work along similar lines to inclusive and expansive
in a way that is reminiscent of some authors' descriptions of queer (Goldman, 1996; queer and
transgendered critiques of psycho-medical discourses on transsexuality. He describes fa'afafine as Walters,
1996). He describes fa'afafine as encompassing gender-crossing possibilities similar to those discussed by
some transgender authors (e.g., Stryker, 1994). Given that there are these parallels between Don's
discourse on fa'afafine ways of being and some queer and transgender discourses, how might they
inform one another more fruitfully? How might queer be theorised to better take into account Don's
perspective of putting culture first and gender/sexuality second? Must there be such a prioritising for
issues of racism, homophobia and transphobia to be effectively combated? Perhaps fa'afafine identities
provide an example of a crossing that can be sanctioned (for Don, if not for all fa'afafine) because family
ties and the knowledge of cultural history are still sufficiently intact. This is different in cultural contexts
where such historical ties have been lost. As Besnier points out, with the possible exceptions of New Zealand
and Hawai'i, Polynesian societies were generally not subjected to systematic annihilating efforts on the part
of colonizing populations ... [so w]hile North American berdache traditions died out with the contexts that
supported them, the cultural setting in which Polynesian gender liminality is embedded never disappeared.
(p. 559, note 36) Therefore, how might Don's perspective on gender liminality differ from those of people for
whom such historical, cultural connections have been largely lost? What recourse do these people have for
reclaiming culturally specific understandings of gender crossing? Some Maaori transpeople are attempting to
map discursive pathways for the purpose of reclaiming both cultural and queer identities. They juggle Maaori
and transgendered identities in their attempts to hold specific forms of racialised gender liminality in high
esteem. Issues of specific concern are: the lack (or inaccessibility) of knowledges about pre-colonial concepts
of gender and sexuality; the relative facility of accessing western psycho-medical discourses as ways of

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understanding experiences of gender liminality, the possible contradictions between medical and Maaori
discourses on (transsexual) bodies; and the current power differential between Maaori and Pakeha which
enables New Zealand laws (and therefore transsexuals' legal rights) to be dictated primarily by Pakeha
(medical) understandings of sexed embodiment. According to New Zealand legislation at the time of writing
this paper, it was possible for documentation relating to passports and marriage certificates to carry the posttransition gender marker (M or F) only after sex reassignment surgery had taken place (Alston, 1998a, b).

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Answer To: Must Stabilize Queer for X Reason

Any attempt stabilize queer relationships within boundaries or borders is heteronormative
and heterosexist.
As indicated earlier, queer relationships go against the grain of heteronormativity and heterosexist
beliefs and practices. Queer relationships contest hegemony and boxiness/containment, and constantly
call into question the ubiquitous essentialized notions about sexuality and gender. When one thinks
about queer(ing) relationships, images of potentiality, expansiveness, plasticity, instability, and lability
come to mind. To attempt to capture the innumerable types of queer relationships possible here
presents a paradox and is, in fact, a conceptual trap. I could go on and on by listing and describing
various con figurations of relationships, such as threesomes, polyamorous/polyfidelity, SM, virtual, crossethnic, cross-generational, financially-based, short-term non-monogamous, fuck buddies, fetishistic, etc., but
ultimately it would be another way of naming and containing such relationships. Clearly, there are
countless types of relationships and various combinations of qualities that constitute queer
relationships. It is truly staggering and impressive. It is impossible, and even unwisein the spirit of
queeringto attempt to provide an exhaustive list of the forms of queer relationships. Explicating the
various functions queer relationships serve is also an impossible task. However, some functions include:
sexual gratification, pair bonding, political activism, liberation from traditional gender roles, emancipation
from traditional family structures, freedom from patriarchal ideologies and practices, being extricated from
fixed notions about sexual identity, etc. A particular queer relationship might provide one of these functions
or share several concomitantly. And it goes without saying that there are incalculable other functions as well.
Between forms and functions, there are infinite possibilities for how queer relationships can be
constructed and lived.

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Answer To: Perm

The perm is part of the assimilative process of heteronormativity which takes over all
spheres of life. Heteronormativity is in the unmarked portion of the perm a normalized
acceptance of a dangerous policy into the alt. The perm is part of the process of forcing us
to learn to conform or survive in the heteronormative regime.
Heteronormativity is ubiquitous in all spheres of social life yet remains largely invisible and elusive.
According to Berlant and Warner (in Warner, 2002), heteronormativity refers to: the institutions,
structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only
coherentthat is, organized as a sexualitybut also privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its
privilege can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms: unmarked as the basic idiom of the personal
and the social; or marked as a natural state; or projected as an ideal or moral accomplishment. It
consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness
produced in contradictory manifestationsoften unconscious, immanent to practice or to institutions. (p.
309, my emphasis) Heteronormativity makes heterosexuality hegemonic through the process of
normalization. Although it is experienced consciously or unconsciously and with different degrees of pain
and suffering, this process of normalization is a site of violence in the lives of women, men, and
transgendersacross the spectrum of sexualitiesin modern Western societies. Not unlike the
experiences of children who must learn to survive in an emotionally and physically abusive
environment where violence is the recipe for daily existence (Miller, 1990, 1991, 1998, 2001), individuals
living in the heteronormative regime need to learn to conform, ignore, and banish their suffering to
survive. The process of coping by repressing the pain and identifying with the perpetrator is, in my
view, a powerful mechanism for heteronormativity to perpetuate itself in current forms of social
organization. Drawing from the work of feminists and womanists, critical scholars, and mental health
researchers, I identify and examine the injurious and violent nature of heteronormativity in this section. For
purposes of discussion, I focus on the violence of heteronormativity enacted upon: (a) women inside the
heteronormative borders, (b) men inside the heteronormative borders, (c) lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgendered, and queer people, and (d) individuals living at the intersections of race, class, gender, and
sexuality.
Queers are not interested in assimilating into mainstream culture, or becoming the
dominant force in society. Queers are the progressive change that will root out domination
and oppression in our current system.
(R. Anthony, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4, pp. 136-137, JCE)
Assimilation. Queer critics adamantly argue that queers are not interested in assimilating seamlessly
into an unchanged mainstream (Seidman, 1993; Tierney, 1993). For example, queer critics reject the
rhetoric of gay liberation that strives to make sexual identity something that should ultimately not be a
factor in determining who is allowed to participate in society, and who is not. Queer critics argue that
individual sexual differences are significant, that queers are unique, and that these differences still do
not justify oppression. Finally, it is important to remember that queer criticism has an explicitly
activist agenda; that is, queer criticism seeks to dismantle the existing social order that silences queer
voices in our society. Queer critics attempt to construct a world in which sexual difference is not only
acknowledged, but celebrated. Queer theorists argue that it is not sufficient to point out that
oppression and domination merely exist; instead, a major goal of queer criticism is to point to the
potential for progressive change in the social structure.

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Aff Answer: Historical Critique of Queer

We must critique queer politics the history of the term demonstrates the impossible
conflicts between racial, ethnic, or religious affliations and sexual politics.
(Dr. Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex) pp. 227 LRP
This view of performativity implies that discourse has a history7 that not only precedes but conditions
its contemporary usages, and that this history effectively decenters the presentist view of the subject as
the exclusive origin or owner of what is said.8 What it also means is that the terms to which we do,
nevertheless, lay claim, the terms through which we insist on politicizing identity and desire, often
demand a turn against this constitutive historicity. Those of us who have questioned the presentist
assumptions in contemporary identity categories are, therefore, sometimes charged with depoliticizing theory.
And yet, if the genealogical critique of the subject is the interrogation of those constitutive and
exclusionary relations of power through which contemporary discursive resources are formed, then it
follows that the critique of the queer subject is crucial to the continuing democratization of queer
politics. As much as identity terms must be used, as much as "outness" is to be affirmed, these same notions
must become subject to a critique of the exclusionary operations of their own production: For whom is
outness a historically available and affordable option? Is there an unmarked class character to the demand for
universal "outness"? Who is represented by which use of the term, and who is excluded? For whom does the
term present an impossible conflict between racial, ethnic, or religious affiliation and sexual politics? What
kinds of policies are enabled by what kinds of usages, and which are backgrounded or erased from view? In
this sense, the genealogical critique of the queer subject will be central to queer politics to the extent
that it constitutes a self-critical dimension within activism, a persistent reminder to take the time to
consider the exclusionary force of one of activism's most treasured contemporary premises.
Queer politics cannot divorce itself from its past. Critiquing the term queer will open up
new possibilities for mobalization that are not possible if only a presentist perspective is
affirmed.
Butler, Judith Butler is a noted for her studies on gender, she teaches composition and rhetoric at
U.C. Berkeley, 93( Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex), pp. 228-229
. LRP
It may be that the conceit of autonomy implied by self-naming is the paradigmatically presenrist
conceit, that is, the belief that there is a one who arrives in the world, in discourse, without a history, that this one makes oneself in and through the
magic of the name, that language expresses a "will" or a "choice" rather than a complex and constitutive history of discourse and power which compose die
invariably ambivalent resources through which a queer and queering agency is forged and reworked .
To recast queer agency in this chain

of historicity is thus to avow a set of constraints on the past and the future that mark at once the limits
of agency and its most enabling conditions. As expansive as the term "queer" is meant to be, it is used
in ways that enforce a set of overlapping divisions: in some contexts, the term appeals to a younger
generation who want to resist the more institutionalized and reformist politics sometimes signified by
"lesbian and gay"; in some contexts, sometimes the same, it has marked a predominantly white
movement that has not fully addressed the way in which "queer" playsor fails to playwithin nonwhite com-munities; and whereas in some instances it has mobilized a lesbian activism, in others the
term represents a false unity of women and men. Indeed, it may be that the critique of the term will
initiate a resurgence of both feminist and anti-racist mobilization within lesbian and gay politics or
open up new possibilities for coalitional alliances that do not presume that these constituencies are
radically distinct from one another. The term will be revised, dispelled, rendered obsolete to the extent
that it yields to the demands which resist the term precisely because of the exclusions by which it is
mobilized.
Aff Answer: Must Deal With The Future

The choices is self-determination or nuclear doom. We cant avoid the mess; we must sort
through it

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Lucy, Research Fellow with the Australia Research Institute at Curtin University, 07 (Niall, a
Research Fellow with the Australia Research Institute at Curtin University, Beyond Semiotics: Text, Culture, and
Technology, Continuum, pg. 54-71, July 19, 2007, DES)
Other fates await us too, of course, perhaps like long-lost letters gone astray. We just have to sort our way
through all the mess. How we might go about doing so is undeniably urgent and crucial, but it's not as
simple as resolving the fate of technology by situating the nuclear question on the side of speech. The
logocentric choice is no choice at all: that way the future is already written. Instead, or perhaps by the
same token, we need to take account of the 'postal' effects of our thinking on technology, as if the
'technological' future or the 'natural' past were all there is - a choice between techno-doom and self
determination.

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Aff Answer: Queer Families Perm

Perm- Do Both. The future is not valueless to queering. Queered families can openly resist
heterosexism, pronatalism, and can help resist the growth economy. This is key to
resisting compulsory heterosexuality as well as heteronormativity.
Park, Professor of Philosophy, 2006.
(Shelley M., Hypatia vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 217-218, JCE)
Reprosexuality, as defined by Michael Warner, is an interweaving of heterosexuality, biological
reproduction, cultural reproduction, and personal identity (1991, 9). The straight personal identity
interwoven with biological and cultural reproduction is a breeder identitya self-understanding
(along with fantasies of self-transcendence) that is tied to ones status as procreative. As Warner claims,
Reprosexuality involves more than reproducing, more even than compulsory heterosexuality: it involves a
relation to self that finds its proper temporality and fulfillment in generational transmission (9). As such,
reprosexuality is closely aligned with repro-narrativity, or the notion that our lives are somehow made
more meaningful by being embedded in a narrative of generational succession (7). Adoptive relationships,
when brought out of the closet, have the potential to queer the family by openly resisting both reprosexuality
and repro-narrativity. In particular, as nonprocreative adult bodies, adoptive maternal bodies openly
resist the notion that reproduction must be the logic of sexuality and the means of self-transcendence
(Warner 1991, 9). As Warner indicates, the notion that reproduction is the goal of sexuality (and hence
that if everyone were queer, humanity would become extinct) presupposes that there are no lesbian or
gay parents, that people who have gay sex do not have other kinds, that heterosexuals only have sex
when they want to reproduce, that sex always means coupling, [or] that parental narcissism is higher
consciousness (9). Adoptive maternal (and paternal) bodies embody a critique of the notion that
reproduction and (hetero)sexuality are inextricably intertwined. Adoptive parents may be single as
well as coupled, lesbian or gay as well as straight, and even if straight and coupled, their status as
parents bears no essential connection to their sexuality. The fact that most adoptive parents are
straight and married highlights the enforcement of predominant cultural values; it is not a function of
any natural edict. Adoptive parental bodies resist reprosexuality also in an even more basic way. As
Warner explains, the problems with repro dogma are so obviousgiven the absurdity of the notion that
humans are in short supplythat it is difficult to know why anyone would believe it. Why then do so many
wish to assume a paradigmatic status for heterosexual coupling? The real reason, Warner suggests, is to
render the tacit value on reproduction itself unquestionable. Heterosexuality would not find itself
necessarymeaningfully opposed to something elsewere we not invested in a growth economy of
population (1991, 10). Similarly, the notion of real motherhood might not find itself necessary
meaningfully opposed to something else, namely, adoptive (or foster) motherhoodwere there no
investment in a growth economy of population. Uncloseted adoptive maternal bodies stand openly (even if
unintentionally) against a growth economy of population. Thus we also undermine a primaryalbeit
absurdrationale for both compulsory motherhood and compulsory heterosexuality. In open adoptive
relationships, adoptive mothers also challenge the paradigms of real motherhood and of the
heterosexual nuclear family in another wayby the deliberate inclusion in a childs life of more than
one mother. As Homans emphasizes, there is a physical maternal body presupposed by adoption a
childbearing body that should not be erased or rendered invisible (Homans 2002, 270). The practice of open
adoption insists that we consider this gestational body a maternal body alongside the maternal body legally
authorized to raise her birth child. Thus the practice of open adoption rejects the notion that children must
have only one real mother, refusing the logic of either/or embedded in the nature/nurture dichotomy in
favor of both/and reasoning. When adoptive mothers and gestational mothers embrace each other as coparticipants in child rearing, we openly challenge both (biological and legal) ownership paradigms of
parental rights and the heteronormative paradigm of families.

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Aff Answer: Race Kritik of Queer Theory

Queer politics push gender and sexuality to the point of obscuring race altogether the
division of queer identities and even the use of queer as a label espouse more inclusive
holistic understanding of gender coming from culture.
pg 257-258)JNF
Don provides an example of reclaiming a traditional sexuality/gender subject position which is very
distinct from, but in some respects resembles, transgenderism. He talks about the importance of fa'afafine in
Samoan culture, and how his own sense of self-esteem relates to being fa'afafine. To begin with, he describes the relationship between
his Samoan and fa'afafine identities by saying: 'for me culture is always first and then sexuality', and 'any
interaction I have with anybody, the two things I want them to find out about me is the fact that I'm
Samoan first and foremost and ... [secondly] that I'm fa'afafine'. In stating his priorities thus, Don sets
himself in sharp relief to queer and transgender stances which often highlight gender and sexuality to
the point of obscuring race altogether. Elaborating on this contrast Don describes how, to him, fa'afafine simply 'means like
a woman', whereas: All the Palagi [4] [English] terms: gay, faggot, queer ... [they're] awful ... [Those terms] actually tell you how that
society views that person. My culture just views it 'like a woman'. And it's like a special woman. It's a knowledgeable woman but
recognised [as] ... anatomically male. (Don, interviewed: May, 1996) He describes being taught from an early age that to be fa'afafine
was to be valued and respected, despite shifting to New Zealand as a child and having to learn that fa'afafine were far less tolerated
there. I was never put down or anything ... I grew up with this really arrogant opinion of myself: for some reason the world is rather
special with me in it! Being fa'afafine was really special. Jesus, when I came to New Zealand that was soon cut out! ... I remember my
mother saying: 'You mustn't walk like that, Don'; I said: 'Why not?' [and she replied:] 'Well, they don't do that in New Zealand'. ... That's
something I never ever accepted. (Don, interviewed: May, 1996) For Don, cultural identity precedes gender/sexuality
identity in political importance, but the two are intrinsically linked: one does not make sense without
the other. Although he plays an active role in his local gaylesbitrans support networks, he is highly sceptical about the
Palagi system of dividing and labeling sexualities and genders, preferring to espouse a more holistic
approach. He is also critical of Palagi attempts to reclaim words such as queer, suggesting that this only
reflects Palagi cultures' intolerant attitudes towards sexuality and gender variance. Don points out that
the division-by-labels of sexuality and gender categories makes it hard to talk about concepts of
fa'afafine and holism, for the language assumes categories which obscure the importance of the
inclusivity of fa'afafine. For Don, being fa'afafine does not imply dissatisfaction with sexed embodiment nor does it make
specifications about partner-gender : fa'afafine is constructed across sexuality and gender. However, he echoes his
elders in expressing concern about younger fa'afafine being attracted by the glamour and lifestyle of cities where they come to think of
themselves more in terms of western transvestite and transsexual identities, rather than according to traditional understandings of
fa'afafine Some of these young fa'afafine opt for sex reassignment surgery. Don hastens to add that he is not simply opposed to sex
reassignment surgery: he has some older fa'afafine friends who have waited years, ensuring that they are making the right decision,
before going ahead with surgery. Nevertheless, he is concerned about the general westernization and subsequent degradation of
fa'afafine identities, saying: 'I know of some of the traditional fa'afafines and each time I've gone back to Samoa it's always been the case
"Oh gosh, we're being reduced to a ... cock in a frock" '. Don's willingness to accept that some of his fa'afafine friends seek sex
reassignment surgery, accompanied by his concern for younger fa'afafine who are completely seduced by Palagi understandings of
sexuality and gender, remind me of Besnier's comment: `Further discussion of gender liminality in Polynesia cannot take place without
locating the category in a specific historical context and must address its relationship to modernization and change' (1994, p. 328). To
this I add that discussion of transgenderism would benefit from further consideration of the effects of
westernisation on gender liminality: not for the sake of a simplistic reclaiming of a 'third gender' [5]
status, but for the sake of contextualising transgender theorising with respect to cross-cultural understandings of gender as those understandings change over time.

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Queer theory does not take into account issues of race. Quare studies critiques the concept
of race while also taking into account differences between sexual and social groups that
queer theory does. Queer theory doesnt do enough to focus on race issues, we need quare
theory.
Race Problems. Although the broad umbrella of queer may appear to include queers of all races and
social classes, it is a misleading faade (Anzalda, 1991; Johnson, 2001). Calling it a queer blind spot,
Muoz (1999) observes, Most of the cornerstones of queer theory that are taught, cited, and canonized
in gay and lesbian studies classrooms, publications, and conferences are decidedly directed toward
analyzing white lesbians and gay men. The lack of inclusion is most certainly not the main problem
with the treatment of race. . . . When race is discussed by most white queer theorists, it is usually a
contained reading of an artist of color that does not factor questions of race into the entirety of their
project. (p. 10, my emphasis) In light of this situation, Muoz offers the notion of disindentifications as a
lens to interpret minoritarian politics based on interlocking components of race, class, gender, and
sexuality and discusses how such components affect the social. Focusing on a critique of stable
conceptions of identity and committed to racialized and class knowledges, Johnson (2001) introduces
quare theory. He explains, Quare studies . . . would not only critique the concept of race as
historically contingent and socially and culturally constructed/performed, it would also address the
material effects of race in a white supremacist society. . . . As a theory of the flesh quare necessarily
engenders a kind of identity politics, one that acknowledges difference within and between particular
groups. Thus, identity politics does not necessarily mean the reduction of multiple identities into a
monolithic identity or narrow cultural nationalism. Rather, quare studies moves beyond simply
theorizing subjectivity and agency as discursively mediated to theorizing how that mediation may
propel material bodies into action. (p. 9) Both disindentifications and quare theory appear productive
points of engagement with mainstream queer theory about racialized knowledges and experiences. (For
a more detailed explanation of these approaches, see Johnson [2001] and Muoz [1999].)
Queer erases the ethnic and racial ties that people have ends up denying difference.
Gamson, Professor of sociology at University of San Francisco, 1995
(Joshua, Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma from the book Social Perspectives in Lesbian
& Gay Studies: A Reader, republished in 1998. pp. 593-594, JAR)
In the hands of many letter writers, in fact, queer becomes simply a short hand for "gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgender," much like "people of color" becomes an inclusive and difference-erasing short
hand for a long list of ethnic, national, and racial groups. And as some letter writers point out , as a quasinational shorthand "queer" is just a slight shift in the boundaries of tribal membership with no attendant
shifts in power; as some lesbian writers point out, it is as likely to become synonymous with "white gay male"
(perhaps now with a nose ring and tattoos) as it is to describe a new community formation. Even in its less
nationalist versions, queer can easily be difference without change, can subsume and hide the internal
differences it attempts to incorporate. The queer tribe attempts to be a multicultural, multigendered, multisexual,
hodge-podge of outsiders; as Steven Seidman points out, it ironically ends up "denying differences by either
submerging them in an undifferentiated oppositional mass or by blocking the development of individual and
social differences through the disciplining compulsory imperative to remain undifferentiated" (1993: 133).
Queer as an identity category often restates tensions between sameness and difference in a different language.

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Aff Answer: Capitalism Turn

While concentrating on decentering identity, queer theory succeeds in promoting the very
goals of global capitalism that work against the formation of communities or provide the
means to destroy those that already exist
Kirsch 6 (Max, PhD Florida Atlantic University, Queer Theory, Late Capitalism and Internalized Homophobia,
Journal of Homosexuality, Harrington Park Press, Vol. 52, No. , 2006, pp. 19-45, DES.
Jameson has proposed that the concept of alienation in late capitalism has been replaced with
fragmentation (1991, p.14). Fragmentation highlights the it also becomes more abstract:
What we must now ask ourselves is whether it is precisely this semi-autonomy of the cultural sphere that has
been destroyed by the logic of late capitalism. Yet to argue that culture is today no longer endowed with the
relative autonomy is once enjoyed as one level among others in earlier moments of capitalism (let alone in
precapitalist societies) is not necessarily to imply its disappearance or extinction. Quite the contrary; we must
go on to affirm that the autonomous sphere of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which
everything in our social lifefrom economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of
the psyche itselfcan be said to have become cultural in some original and yet untheorized sense. This
proposition is, however, substantially quite consistent with the previous diagnosis of a society of the image or
simulacrum and a transformation of the real into so many pseudoevents. (Jameson, 1991, p. 48)
The fragmentation of social life repeats itself in the proposal that sexuality and gender are separate
and autonomous from bureaucratic state organization. If, as in Jamesons terms, differences can be
equated, then this should not pose a problem for the mobilization of resistance to inequality. However, as
postmodernist and poststructuralist writers assume a position that this equation is impossible and
undesirable, then the dominant modes of power will prevail without analysis or opposition. The danger,
of course, is that while we concentrate on decentering identity, we succeed in promoting the very goals
of global capitalism that work against the formation of communities or provide the means to destroy
those that already exist, and with them, any hope for political action.
For those who are not included in traditional sources of community buildingin particular, kinship based
groupingsthe building of an affectional community . . . must be as much a part of our political movement
as are campaigns for civil rights (Weeks, 1985, p. 176). This building of communities requires
identification. If we cannot recognize traits that form the bases of our relationships with others, how then
can communities be built? The preoccupation of Lyotard and Foucault, as examples, with the
overwhelming power of master narratives, posits a conclusion that emphasizes individual resistance
and that ironically, ends up reinforcing the narrative itself.

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Aff Answer: Alt doesnt Solve

Queer theory focuses in the individual; this makes hinders community and makes it more
difficult to effect change and identify with others.
(Gust, Karen, and John, Journal of Homosexual Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4,, p. 45, JCE)
On the other hand, queer theorists are criticized for their neglect of community organizing, based on a
shared identity, to promote social change. Kirsch (2000), for example, argues that instead of focusing on
specific areas of oppression and strategies to change them, queer theory focuses on the individual as a
site of change. Such a move insulates individuals and hinders community building. In other words,
collective identities and power in numbers are politically effective. Collective identities require clear
membership boundaries, that is, discrete in-group/out-group distinctions (Gamson, 1997). Kirsch (2000)
cautions us that queer theory, with a focus on individual self-expression, might actually be harmful to
people by making it more difficult to identify with others. Queer theory, Kirsch vociferously argues,
needs to be refocused to take into account the realities of everyday life in a capitalist world system.
This means an end to academic posturing, where obfuscation is more valued than strategies for
recognition and community-building (2000, p. 123).
Queering is disadvantageous to queers. Queering thrives on blurring boundaries and being

unpredictable while challenging cultural norms. In terms of a relationship it would make
many people insecure. It would also disadvantage them socially.
At a very practical level, it could be extraordinarily difficult, if not downright disadvantageous, to be in
a queer relationship. Queer thrives on blurring boundaries, being uncontained and unpredictable, and,
at the same time, challenging dominant cultural norms regarding romantic and sexual relationships.
This is quite a challenge. Another thing to consider is that a queer relationship would necessarily lack
the security and anchor that are features of so many relationships. For some individuals, such a
relationship construction would constantly keep them on edge and insecure. Such a radical
departure from the usual, mainstream relationship construction could potentially disadvantage queers
socially in terms of reputation, job security, custody rights of children, material benefits that are
usually afforded to those in normalized relationships, and so on.

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Using the term Queer prevents political inclusion institutionalizes difference.

& Gay Studies: A Reader, republished in 1998. pp. 593, JAR)
Queer thus asserts in-your-face difference, with an edge of defiant separatism: "We're here, we're
queer, get used to it," goes the chant. We are different, that is, free from convention, odd and out there and
proud of it, and your response is either your problem or your wake-up call. Queer does not so much rebel
against outsider status as revel in it. Queer confrontational difference, moreover, is scary, writes Alex Chee
(1991), and thus politically useful: "Now that I call myself queer, know myself as a queer, nothing will keep [queerhaters] safe. If I tell them I am queer, they give me room. Politically, I can think of little better. I do not want to be
one of them. They only need to give me room."
This goes against the grain of civil rights strategists, of course, for whom at least the appearance of
normality is central to gaining political "room." Rights are gained, according to this logic, by demonstrating
similarity (to heterosexual people, to other minority groups) in a non-threatening manner. "We are
everywhere," goes the refrain from this camp. We are your sons and daughters and co-workers and soldiers,
and once you see that lesbians and gays are just like you, you will recognize the injustices to which we are
subject. "I am not queer," writes a letter writer named Tony. "I am normal, and if tomorrow I choose to run down
the middle of Market Street in a big floppy hat and skirt I will still be normal." In the national gay weekly 10
Percent-for which Rant & Rave can be seen as a proud evil twin - Eric Marcus (1993: 14) writes that "I'd rather
emphasize what I have in common with other people than focus on the differences," and "the last thing I want
to do is institutionalize that difference by defining myself with a word and a political philosophy that set me
outside the mainstream." The point is to be not-different, not-odd, not-scary. "We have a lot going for us,"
Phyllis Lyon says simply in the Bay Times. "Let's not blow it" - blow it, that is, by alienating each other and
our straight allies with words like "queer."
Without a clear and static identity, queerness makes civil rights unattainable.
The overwhelmingly female participation in the Bay Times disputes over bisexuality and transgender
inclusion underscores this point. Lesbians are especially threatened by the muddying of male/female and
gay/straight categorizations exactly because it is by keeping sexual and gender categories hard and clear that
gains are made. Lesbian visibility is more recent and hard won; in struggles against patriarchal control,
moreover, lesbianism and feminism have often been strongly linked. Gay men react with less vehemence
because of the stronger political position from which they encounter the queer challenge: as men, as gay men
with a more established public identity. Just as they are gaining political ground as lesbians, lesbians are asked not
only to share it but to subvert it, by declaring woman and lesbian to be unstable, permeable, fluid categories. Similar
pitfalls were evident in the 1993 fight over Colorado's Amendment 2, which prohibits "the state or any of its
subdivisions from outlawing discrimination against gay men, lesbians, or bisexuals" (Minkowitz 1993). The
Colorado solicitor general, as reporter Donna Minkowitz put it, made arguments" that could have appeared in a
queer core rant, "promoting" a remarkably Foucaultian view of queerness as a contingent category, whose members
can slip in and out of its boundaries like subversive fish" (Minkowitz 1993:27). "We don't have a group that is easily
confinable," the solicitor general argued. Here, the fluidity of group boundaries and the provisional nature of
collective identity was used to argue that no one should receive legal benefits or state protection-because there
is no discernible group to be protected. Although the solicitor-general-as-queer-theorist is a strange twist, the
lesson is familiar: as long as membership in this group is unclear, minority status, and therefore rights and
protection, are unavailable.

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Queer theory emulates late capitalism by refusing the collective leading to daily lived
violence and marginalization to queer folk
Journal of Homosexuality, Harrington Park Press, Vol. 52, No. , 2006, pp. 19-45, DES.)
This mirroring of late capitalism in queer theory has unforeseen consequences for the individual in
society and has hindered its practioners from engaging important ways of envisioning collective action.
Queer theory promotes the self of the individual as an alternative to wider social interaction,
disassembling the social ties that bind. Recognizing that oppression and violence, symbolic and physical,
are part of the daily reality for those of us who do not correspond to dominant standards is
compromised by queer theorys rejection of the category of identity, and indeed, categories as a whole.
The stance that it is limiting to pose categories of behavior and belief, even if those constructs are fluid
and changing, puts the individual subject in the position of internalizing thoughts and feelings without
the benefit of peer feedback. Too, this aspect of marginality can itself become an identity: if one
recognizes and embraces the fact that one is marginalized, there is no need to seek support or to engage
social action. It declares that the only way to prevent being overwhelmed by power is to disclaim
(Butler, 1993, p. 308). But to simply disclaim creates isolation, and, as I will maintain, reinforces
internalized homophobia.
Queer politics are ineffective due to their fear of essentializing and inability to unify;
reflection leads nowhere
Journal of Homosexuality, Harrington Park Press, Vol. 52, No. , 2006, pp. 19-45, DES.)
If the tenets of queer theory reject strategies of mobilization for fear of essentializing identity, what
then, are its politics? The historical and ethnographic fallacies in defense of postmodernist and
poststructuralist critique aside, it is doubtful that queer theory would exist at all without new political
juncture that Rorty (1991) and Jameson (1991) both note is being produced in late capitalism, and which
Haraway (1985), Eagleton (1986) point to as having led to a new stage of politics. Be that as it may, queer
as put forward by queer theorists, has no inherent historical or social context. We continually return to the
following question: to whom does it belong and what does it represent? These advocates of queer do not
acknowledge that queer is produced by social relations, and therefore contains the attributes of
existing relationships of power.
Legitimization in queer theory means the right to be as one is, a kind of free activity that incorporates
gender, sexuality, and individual variants in thought and speech. The problem, of course, lies in the fact
that this process of legitimization does not create equality: dominance still exists; ideals still rule the
day. The problem we thus encounter is that the collective level is deemed impossible: the legitimating
function is purely personal, the ultimate statement of the personal as political. Indeed, when Judith
Butler was asked for suggestions on how to proceed in the political arena, she answered:
I actually believe that politics has a character of contingency and context to it that cannot be predicted
at the level of theory. And that when theory starts being programmatic, such as here are my five
prescriptions. And I set up my typology, and my final chapter is called What is to be Done?, it preempts the whole problem of context and contingency, and I do think that political decisions are made
in that lived moment and that they cant be predicted from the level of theorythey can be prepared
for but I suppose Im with Foucault on this . . . It seems like a noble tradition. (Bell, 1999, p. 167)
But context and contingency, and the lived moment, are aspects of personal recognition, and a
failure to specify leads nowhere. Simply reflection on the success of movements around the world and
throughout modern history tells us otherwise.

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Queer theory will not succeed in improving lives due to the reliance on postmodern and
poststructuralist theory; identifying with social movements that appreciate difference can
create real material change
Kirsch 6 (Max, PhD Florida Atlantic University, Queer Theory, Late Capitalism and Internalized
Homophobia, Journal of Homosexuality, Harrington Park Press, Vol. 52, No. , 2006, pp. 19-45, DES
The promise of queer theoryand its imagined advance over previous approaches in gay and lesbian studies
is inclusiveness. The paradox of queer theory is that while it strives for this inclusiveness in a manner
that identity politics cannota laudable goalthe reliance by its practioners on postmodern and
poststructuralist theory, the epistemology of which is the negation of political action and the reification
of the individual self, has made this strategy untenable.
Identifying with social movements in an era of global capitalist accumulation presupposes a
recognition that exploitation, prejudice, and violence are facts of everyday life that many experience. It
is not necessary to agree with all of the beliefs of your neighbor to establish a mutually supportive
alliance. Nor it is necessary to experience the reality of your cohorts to identify with common causes. In
other words, it is necessary to refocus on practiceunifying and practicegenerating principles (Bourdieu,
1977, p. 101). The ability to create a true political movement assumes identification with the struggles
and projected outcomes of that movement while recognizing the differences between members that
need to be accommodated. The process is liberatory. The characters that Duberman documents in this
exposition of Stonewall (1993) all differ in their backgrounds and in their understanding of the world at large.
The movement generated by Stonewall cut across class and status, but its general demands were the same for
all: an end to discrimination and persecution.

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Aff Answer: Queer Theory Not Inclusive

Destabilization of identity, which is caused by queer theory, leads to lesbians erasure. This
happened before with the gay rights movement, causing gay to become a term associated
almost primarily with males. Queer theory also fails to recognize transgender issues,
relegating drag queens to performances at primarily male spaces instead of being a
category that a person lives as.
Gender Trouble. As a non-gender-specific term, queer appears inclusive of all genders. However, such
terminological breaks can be read as reactionary and potentially dangerous (Thomas, 2000). Under a
non-gender specific umbrella, Jeffreys (1997) is concerned about the disappearance of the lesbian and
denial of lesbian oppression under patriarchy and heteronormativity. Similarly, Wolfe and Penelope
(1993) contend that destabilization of identity categories, a typical move in queer analysis, leads to
lesbian erasure. They write, We [cannot] afford to allow privileged patriarchal discourse (of which
poststructuralism is but a new variant) to erase the collective identity Lesbians have only recently begun
to establish. . . . For what has in fact resulted from the incorporation of deconstructive discourse, in
academic feminist discourse at least, is that the word Lesbian has been placed in quotation marks,
whether used or mentioned, and the existence of real Lesbians has been denied, once again. (p. 3) Given
the history that gay, as a label, came to signify male homosexuality in a number of contexts, the
concern that queer might become a male generic is certainly not unwarranted. Queer theory is also
guilty of transgender erasure. Namaste (2000), for example, argues that queer theory, with its focus on
performativity, fails to take into account the context in which gender performances occur. She points
out that Butlers drag queens perform in gay male cultural spaces and reduces drag to something a
person does on stage rather than a person who is. In addition, queer theory ignores the material
realities, the lived experiences and the subjectivities of transgendered people. Elliot and Roen (1998) call
for the development and articulation of transgender theories, that is, ideas and assertions that inform and are
informed by transgender political movements and articulated by transgenderists. Queer theory is committed
to the deconstruction of gender and sexual categories. Engagement with the social context and the material
realities associated with gender performance under heteropatriarchy would diminish the danger of excluding,
erasing, and othering genders that are not male.

Holbrook/Nielson
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Queer Sex the Bomb
The usage of the word Queer drives further down the split between generations, it
divides the community.
In the discussion of the "Year of the Queer" theme for the 1993 lesbian and gay pride celebration, the venom
hits first. "All those dumb closeted people who dont like the Q-word," the Bay Times quotes Peggy Sue
suggesting, "can go fuck themselves and go to somebody else's parade." A man named Patrick argues along the
same lines, asserting that the men opposing the theme are "not particularly thrilled with their attraction to other
men," are "cranky and upset," yet willing to benefit "from the stuff queer activists do." A few weeks later, a letter
writer shoots back that "this new generation assumes we were too busy in the '70s lining up at Macy's to purchase
sweaters to find time for the revolution-as if their piercings and tattoos were any cheaper. "Another sarcastically
asks, "How did you ever miss out on 'Faggot' or 'Cocksucker' ?" On this level, the dispute reads like a sibling
sandbox spat.
Although the curses fly sometimes within generations, many letter writers frame the differences as
generational. The queer linguistic tactic, the attempt to defang, embrace and resignify a stigma term, is loudly
rejected by many older gay men and lesbians. "I am sure he isn't old enough to have experienced that feeling
of cringing when the word 'queer' was said," says Roy of an earlier letter writer. Another writer asserts that 35 is
the age that marks off those accepting the queer label from those rejecting it. Younger people, many point out, can
"reclaim" the word only because they have not felt as strongly the sting, ostracism, police batons, and
baseball bats that accompanied it one generation earlier. For older people, its oppressive meaning can never
be lifted, can never be turned from overpowering to empowering.

Holbrook/Nielson
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Queer Sex the Bomb
Aff Answer: Identity Politics Good

Identity politics are a precondition for political Action
The recognition of common goals can give rise to an identification based on common purpose. One
need not have the same sexual orientation or the same taste in fashion to understand that
discrimination exists and therefore to embark on a fight against it together. In a culture where variants
on the norms of gender and sexuality are not fully accepted, those identities constitute a precondition
for political action. As Weeks notes,
To argue that anything goes is to fall back on an easy libertarianism which ignores questions of power and
the quality of relationships. . . . There exists a plurality of sexual desires, or potential ways of life, and of
relationships. A radical sexual politics affirms a freedom to be able to choose between them . . . .
Identity, may, in the end, be no more than a game, a ploy to enjoy particular types of relationships and
pleasures. But without it, it seems, the possibilities of political choice are not increased but diminished.
The recognition of sexual identities, in all their ambivalence, seems to be the precondition for the
realization of sexual diversity. (1985, p. 210)
Contrary to the fear that identity limits choice, then, it is a choice.
If our goal is to produce a society that accepts difference, welcomes diversity, and champions human
rights, how do we get there? Working towards structural change requires strategies for social change,
which is what answering the question what is to be done entails. We can learn from past successes
and analytical mistakes. Just as Oscar Lewiss (1963) belief that the culture of poverty could only be
broken through intensive psychotherapy ignored the structures that created it, so we too must
recognize that the conditions of oppression are not self-generated. Anything else is blaming the victim.

Holbrook/Nielson
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Queer Sex the Bomb
Aff Answers: Perm - Intersectionality

Perm: Theorize queer to specifically address issues of race and indigenous colonization
pg 259)JNF
Tania describes herself as moving in predominantly Maaori circles, and talks about Maaori women in
general, and a Maaori male-to-female transgendered friend in particular, serving as role models in her
development of her self as a woman. According to Tania, her transgendered friend appears to have been
accepted by local Maaori insofar as she has authority as a woman during traditional gender-specific cultural
rituals and practices. (Incidentally, this friend of Tania's is non-operative.) Tania talks about this person as
very vocal and assertive in demanding acceptance as a woman within traditional Maaori contexts. Perhaps
following her friend's lead, Tania has developed various arguments herself which validate her transsexuality
and depend upon the assertion of her identity as Maaori. To explain this, she draws on the Maaori conception
of identity as something which is never based in the individual alone but relates to the extended family
(whaanau) and to genealogy (whakapapa). She argues that to deride her for being transsexual would be to
denigrate her entire ancestral line: a far more risky and grave action than merely discriminating against an
'individual'. Theorising transgender and queer more specifically to address race, indigenousness and
colonisation might provide more discursive pathways for indigenous people strug gling to live in gender
liminal ways. For this purpose, it is vital to theorise queer so that it is more relevant and open to people
for whom gender/sexuality identities come second to racial identities, and to theorise queer so that it is
open to cross-cultural interpretations of the relationship between sexed embodiment and lived gender.
By this means, the important work being done by transgenderists and queers who challenge medical
definitions of sexualities and genders, may be accessible to a more racially diverse range of people who
might otherwise find no recourse but to invest in medical discourses on transsexuality.
One form of oppression is not more important or independent from all others. It is not
helpful to compare oppressions or to specify which oppression a person feels affects them
more deeply. They are all interconnected in our social institutions.
People inhabiting and navigating the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality experience violence
and oppression simultaneously based on such systems of social ordering (Kumashiro, 2001; Yep, Lovaas,&Ho,
2001). These systems are neither independent nor additive (Combahee River Collective, 1979/1998; hooks,
1990; Kumashiro, 2001; Lorde, 1984; Smith, 1998; Takagi, 1996; Yep et al., 2001). It is not theoretically useful or
pragmatically helpful to compare and rank different forms of oppression. For example, a claim that Asian
Americans are more homophobic is futile without specification of the interplay between race, class, gender, and
sexuality, and the purpose and basis for such a comparison. Neither is asking an individual to specify a rank
order for their oppression (e.g., do you feel that oppression based on your race is more intense than your
sexuality or your gender?). According to Weber (2001), race, class, gender, and sexuality are systems of
oppression. As such, they are complex (i.e., intricate and interconnected), pervasive (i.e., widespread throughout
all social domains), variable (i.e., ever changing and always transforming), persistent (i.e., prevailing across time
and space), severe (i.e., serious consequences for social life), and hierarchical (i.e., creation of social stratifications
that benefit and provide options and resources for some and harm and restrict options and resources for others). For
individuals located at these intersections, the process of performing the hybrid self (Muoz, 1999, p. 138)
means negotiating different histories, economic disparities, and sex/gender systems, and experiencing the
violence of racism, sexism, classism, and heteronormativity.

Holbrook/Nielson
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Queer Sex the Bomb
Aff Answer: Perm Identity Politics

PERM - we must embrace the fact that identity, as viewed through Queer theory, must be
both fluid and static to fight oppression.
& Gay Studies: A Reader, republished in 1998. pp. 589-590, JAR)
Yet this impulse to build a collective identity with distinct group boundaries has been met by a
directly opposing logic, often contained in queer activism (and in the newly anointed "queer theory") to take
apart the identity categories and blur group boundaries. This alternative angle, influenced by academic
"constructionist" thinking, holds that sexual identities are historical and social products, not natural or
intrapsychic ones. It is socially produced binaries (gay/straight, man/woman) that are the basis of oppression,
fluid, unstable experiences of self become fixed primarily in the service of social control. Disrupting those
categories, refusing rather than embracing ethnic minority status, is the key to liberation. In this
deconstructionist politic, clear collective categories are an obstacle to resistance and change.
The challenge for analysts, I argue, is not to determine which position is accurate but to cope with the
fact that both logics make sense. Queerness spotlights a dilemma shared by other identity movements (racial,
ethnic, and gender movements, for example). Fixed identity categories are both the basis for oppression and the
basis for political power. This raises questions for political strategizing and, more importantly for the purposes
here, for social movement analysis. If identities are indeed much more unstable, fluid and constructed than
movements have tended to assume-if one takes the queer challenge seriously, that is-what happens to identitybased social movements such as gay and lesbian rights? Must sociopolitical struggles articulated through
identity eventually undermine themselves?
Social movement theory, a logical place to turn for help in working through the impasse between
deconstructive cultural strategies and category-supportive political strategies, is hard pressed in its current state to
cope with these questions. The case of queerness, I will argue, calls for a more developed theory of collective
identity formation and its relationship to both institutions and meanings, an understanding that includes the
impulse to take apart that identity from within.
In explicating the queer dilemma and its implications for social movement theory, I first briefly summarize
the current state of relevant literature on collective identity. Then, zeroing in on the dilemma, I make use of internal
debates, largely as they took place in the letters column of the weekly San Francisco Bay Times in 1991, 1992, and
1993. I turn initially to debates within lesbian and gay communities over the use of the word queer, using them to
highlight the emergence of queer activism, its continuities with earlier lesbian and gay activism, and its links with
and parallels to queer theory. Next, I take up debates over the inclusion of transgender and bisexual people-the two
groups brought in under an expanded queer umbrella-in lesbian and gay politics. Here I point to a distinctive
(although not entirely new) element of queerness, a politic of boundary disruption and category
deconstruction, and to the resistance to that politic, made especially visible by the gendered nature of these
debates. Finally, in drawing out ramifications for social movement theory, I briefly demonstrate affinities between
the queer debates and debates over multi-racialism in African American politics, arguing that queerness illuminates
the core dilemma for identity movements more generally. I conclude by suggesting ways in which social
movement literature can be pushed forward by taking seriously, both as theoretical and empirical fact, the
predicament of identity movements.

Holbrook/Nielson
90
Queer Sex the Bomb
Aff Answer: Perm Resistance with the System

Perm: Do Both. The negative fundamentally misunderstands power; resistance within is
possible.
Foucault, Philosopher of Awesomeness, 1978.
(Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, pp. 94-96, JCE)
Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to
slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations.
-Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships
(economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter; they are
the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal
conditions of these differentiations; relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or
accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play. - Power comes from below; that is,
there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power
relations, and serving as a general matrix -no such duality extending from the top down and reacting on more and more limited
groups to the very depths of the social body. One must suppose rather that the manifold relationships of force that take shape and come
into play in the machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage
that run through the social body as a whole. These then form a general line of force that traverses the local oppositions and links them
together; to be sure, they also bring about redistributions, realignments, homogenizations, serial arrangements, and convergences of the
force relations. Major dominations are the hegemonic effects that are sustained by all these confrontations. -Power relations are both
intentional and nonsubjective. If in fact they are intelligible, this is not because they are imbued, through and through, with calculation:
there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or
decision of an individual subject; let us not look for the headquarters that presides over its rationality; neither the caste which governs,
nor the groups which control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network of
power that functions in a society (and makes it function); the rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit
at the. restricted level where they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power), tactics which, becoming connected to one another,
attracting and propagating one another, but finding their base of support and their condition elsewhere, end by forming comprehensive
systems: the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few
who can be said to have formulated them: an implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken strategies which
coordinate the loquacious tactics whose ':inventors" or decision makers are often Without hypocrisy. -Where there is power,
there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in
relation to power. Should it be said that one is always "inside" power, there is no "escaping" it, there is no
absolute outside where it is concerned, because one is subject to the law in any case? Or that, history being the ruse of reason, power is
the ruse of history, always emerging the winner? This would be to misunderstand the strictly relational character of power relationships,
Their existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power
relations. These points of resistance represent everywhere in the power network. Hence there IS no single
locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary.
Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible,
necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent;
still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist in
the strategic field of power relations. But this does not mean that they are only a reaction or rebound,
forming with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to
perpetual defeat. Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles; but neither are they a lure or
a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible
opposite. Hence they too are distributed in irregular fashion: the points, knots, or focuses of resistance
are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a
definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behavior. Are there no great
radical ruptures, massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more often one is dealing with
mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting
regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in
their bodies and minds. Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes
through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of
points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities. And it is doubtless the
strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible, somewhat similar to
the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships.

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Queer Sex the Bomb
Social movements and politics are necessary to prevent exploitation we can reject static
identities without rejecting all identity.
I have argued here that this turn towards the individual, acknowledged or disputed, has led to a
disengagement of coalition building and social movements, and the mirroring of the current social
conditions of late capitalism, including the renouncing of identity. Indeed, As Butler (1993) has stated,
the prospect of being anything, even for pay, has always produced in me a certain anxiety, for to be
gay, to be lesbian seems to be more than a simple injunction to become who or what I already am.
She is therefore
. . . not at ease with lesbian theories, gay theories, for as Ive argued elsewhere, identity categories tend
to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as normalizing categories or oppressive structures or
as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression. (1993, pp. 307-308)
In contrast to the currents in the development of gay and lesbian studies, the anxiety with categorical
identification has been a main current in queer theory, from its beginnings in sex and gender studies to
its expansion into the wider cultural realm. The concern is not unfounded. Labeling can become a
constricting structure that limits the possibilities of being or becoming, as many queer writers have shown.
But one has to wonder, if we do not have rallying points, from where do we fight prejudice and
exploitation? Foucault has argued that participating in a homosexual perspective admits a
homophobic discourse; yet how do we deny homophobia? Social movements and politics are necessary
to counter dominant ideologies and power structures. A perception that we can reject static systems of
identity without rejecting all bases for identity, however temporary they may be, is necessary for true
resistance and social change. Thus, we can identify with social movements rather than simply
identifying as a particular category.

Holbrook/Nielson
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Queer Sex the Bomb
Aff Answer: Perm Coalitions

Working alone will never suffice, if queer is really a refusal to category, identifying with
social movements that aim to end exploitation will be more productive than deconstruction
subjugated identity categories
The tension between gay and lesbian studies and queer theory represents wider differences in the
approach to the analysis of the social, and the individuals relationship to society, including the
strategies that derive from those differences. But it should be clear that we cannot struggle alone against a
global system of military power and the ever-present threat of economic and physical destruction. If
all things queer, then, is to become anything more than a novel digestion of difference, it must
include the individual as more than the self as text. It must accommodate the individual in society.
Identifying with social movements on the basis of the recognition of exploitation and devaluation,
rather than mechanistically deconstructing the identities that comprise subjugated positions, can begin
to resolve the stagnation that has dominated attempts to develop coalitions around issues that matter.
Community, coalitions, and united action without predefined categories is necessary to

overcome oppression. Separatist strategies are the most harmful strategy of all
Community, identity and self-actualization are indeed complementary. Social and emotional health is
promoted by active participation with others. Power in numbers has been the call of resistance
movements world wide, from anti-colonial movements to calls for better working conditions. Such
struggles have larger outcomes. The community is a forum for debate for the construction of strategy.
Separatist movements have proven unproductive as the group becomes isolated and involutes with
disagreement. Assimilationist movements cannot work towards sustained social change because there is no
confrontation with the basis of oppression. The call for individuality, for self, is the most harmful
strategy of all, for it separates every person from any concrete sense of identity and collective
opposition.

Holbrook/Nielson
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Queer Sex the Bomb
Aff Answer: Perm Ecofeminism

Adding the heterosexual/queer and reason/the erotic reinforcing dualisms to the list of
problematic dichotomies allows ecofeminism and queer theory to unite
Gaard, an educator, writer, scholar and activist working at the intersections of literature,
feminism, social and environmental justice, 97
(Gretta Toward a Queer Ecofeminism, Hypatia, Volume: 12, Issue: 1, pg. 114, DES)
Queers experience backgrounding, radical exclusion, and incorporation. As Sedgwick argues, the
heterosexual identity is constituted through a denied dependency on the homosexual/queer identity
(backgrounding). In terms of radical exclusion, queers find that the erotic (a particularly perverse erotic) is
projected onto queer sexuality to such a degree that this quality is seen as the only salient feature of
queer identities. When queers come out, heterosexuals frequently conclude they know everything there
is to know about us once they know our sexuality. In terms of incorporation, it is clear that
heterosexuality and its associated gender identities are taken as the standard in dominant Western
culture, and queers are defined primarily in relation to that standard, and our failure to comply with
it. But the problem of oppression based on sexuality is not limited to the heterosexual/queer dualism.
As queer theorists have shown, the larger problem is the erotophobia of Western culture, a fear of the
erotic so strong that only one form of sexuality is overtly allowed; only in one position; and only in the
context of certain legal, religious, and social sanctions ( Hollibaugh 1983, 1989; Rubin 1989). The
oppression of queers may be described more precisely, then, as the product of two mutually reinforcing
dualisms: heterosexual/queer, and reason/the erotic. As Plumwood has ably demonstrated, Western
culture's oppression of nature can be traced back to the construction of the dominant human male as a
self fundamentally defined by its property of reason, and the construction of reason as definitionally
opposed to nature and all that is associated with nature, including women, the body, emotions, and
reproduction ( Plumwood 1993). Feminists have also argued that women's oppression in Western culture is characterized by our
association with emotion, the body, and reproduction, and have responded to these associations in three different ways. Some have
rejected these associations and attempted to align themselves with the public male sphere of rationality (liberal feminists). Others have
reversed the valuation and embraced these associations while devaluing the male rational culture (cultural feminists). In contrast,
ecofeminists have argued for a "third way," one that rejects the structure of dualism and
acknowledges both women and men as equal parts of culture and nature ( Warren 1987; King 1989;
Plumwood 1993; Gruen 1993; Gaard 1994 b). As a logical development of ecofeminism, a queer
ecofeminist theory would build on these analyses, using both queer theory and feminist theories about
the oppression of the erotic. Though the reason/erotic dualism seems to be an aspect of the original
culture/nature dualism, the heterosexual/queer dualism is a fairly recent development, as it is only in
the past century that the concept of homosexual and heterosexual identities has developed ( Smith
1989; Katz 1990). A queer ecofeminist per spective would argue that the reason/erotic and
heterosexual/queer dualisms have now become part of the master identity, and that dismantling these
dualisms is integral to the project of ecofeminism. Bringing these dualisms into the list of self/other and
culture/nature dualisms offered by Plumwood is one step toward queering ecofeminism. With this added
perspective, ecofeminists would find it very productive to explore "vertical" associations on either side
of the dualisms: associations between reason and heterosexuality, for example, or between reason and
whiteness as defined in opposition to emotions and nonwhite persons; or associations between women,
nonwhite persons, animals, and the erotic. From a queer ecofeminist perspective, then, we can examine the
ways queers are feminized, animalized, eroticized, and naturalized in a culture that devalues women,
animals, nature, and sexuality. We can also examine how persons of color are feminized, animalized,
eroticized, and naturalized. Finally, we can explore how nature is feminized, eroticized, even queered. The
critical point to remember is that each of the oppressed identity groups, each characteristic of the other, is
seen as "closer to nature" in the dualisms and ideology of Western culture. Yet queer sexualities are
frequently devalued for being "against nature." Contradictions such as this are of no interest to the
master, though such contradictions have been of great interest to feminists and queer theorists alike,
who have argued that it is precisely such contradictions that characterize oppressive structures ( Frye
1983; Mohr 1988; Sedgwick 1990).

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Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Queer Theory K Index

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Heteronormativity is a powerful form of normalization which is the site of all violence.

Compulsory Heterosexuality is the logic of discrimination which materializes into violence

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Alternative: Queering must embrace unintelligibility. We must prevent ourselves from

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Link: Liberal State Politics

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Link: Social Construction

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Separatist feminism is based on biological homogeneity that silences queer populations.

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Link: Future Orientation

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Link: Face of the Child

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Link: Nuclear Family

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Link: Hetero/Homo Binary

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Hetero/Homo is an artificial division. The language of gay is accepting their worlds

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Because of the homo/heterosexual binary, heterosexuality is dependent on a perverted

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Heteropatriarchal associations with the penetrated body play a significant role in US

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Link: War on Terror

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Link: Penetration Language

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Link: Gay Identity

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Internal Link: Naturalizing the Hetero

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Impact: Soul Murder

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

DEHUMANIZATION IS NUCLEAR WAR, ENVIRONMENTAL APOCALYPSE AND

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Impact: Root of Oppression

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Anti-queer politics results in institutionalized violence and humiliation

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Institutional violence underpins all of our societal institutions. Heteronormativity causes

Arizona Debate Institute 2009

Impact: Violence to Women