1AC

We live in the 100 years after homosexuality: in the 19th century, the
Sodomite was a momentary aberration, but already by the 20th, the
homosexual was a species, a population, a pathology, a toxic contaminant.
These epistemic moments evidence a radically different understanding of
the purposes and role of the legal system: at first to punish, then to produce
subjects in accordance with the logic of heteronormativity, to create
perfectly rational, disciplined subjects who performed sexual acts this
erects a regime by which certain modes of becoming in the world are always
already shut down, rendered intelligible, and criminalized
Mogul, Ritche, and Whitlock 11. Joey Mogul, partner at the Peoples Law Office in Chicago, Illinois and

Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at DePaul University College of Law; Andrea J. Ritchie, police misconduct attorney and
organizer in New York City. She has engaged in extensive research, writing, speaking, litigation, organizing and advocacy
on profiling, policing, and physical and sexual violence by law enforcement agents against women and lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in the US and Canada over the past decade. She currently coordinates Streetwise
& Safe (SAS), a leadership development initiative aimed at building knowledge, community and power among LGBT youth
of color with experience of gender, race, sexuality and poverty-based policing and criminalization in the context of quality
of life initiatives and the policing of sex work and trafficking; Kay Whitlock, Montana-based writer, organizer and
consultant working for progressive social change. As an activist, she was worked for almost 40 years to build bridges
between LGBTQ struggles and movements fighting for racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice. She formerly
served in national leadership positions on LGBTQ issues, including National Representative for LGBT Issues for the
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC, a Quaker organization advocating for peace, social and economic justice, and
human rights); chair of the National NOW Lesbian Rights Committee; and member and co-chair of the board of directors
of the (as it was then known) National Gay Task Force. Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT

People in the United States, pg. 17

THE BEGINNING OF REFORM

Eventuallyand over a long period of timethe death penalty for sodomy was abolished.
Pennsylvania was the first colony to do so, at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Quaker lawmakers replaced capital punishment for those convicted of sodomy
or bestiality with life imprisonment, but only for whites . A separate law
ensured that Black people convicted of buggery , burglary , murder , or the rape
of a white woman could still be put to death , though the law was silent on the
rape of Black women . This humanitarian reform marked an early explicit
attribution of inferior legal status to Blacks under colonial sodomy laws .69 As
the effort to reduce the use of capital punishment for sodomy gained momentum,
Thomas Jefferson unsuccessfully recommended that Virginia require male rapists
and sodomists to be castrated , and that women convicted of sodomy have a
hole at least a half inch in diameter drilled through the cartilage of their noses.70
The temptation is to imagine that sodomy laws and the troubling history that
attends them are now mere historical artifacts whose cultural shadows will
eventually disappear. It simplifies things to describe those laws as the result of
religious rigidity and repression , ignorance, and psychological prejudice, and to
cast the contemporary Religious Right in the role of dour Puritans, as the primary
producers of queer oppression . Yet complexity muddies the reductive

waters . Even in the colonial period, not everyone possessed the same frenzied ,
antisodomitic zeal that characterized some notable religious and civic leaders. And
even progressive religious groups , such as the Quakers , were complicit in
strengthening racism and other institutional forms of violence in their own
policing of sodomy .
From the colonial period on, sodomy laws would continue to evolve, and their
enforcement would begin to escalate by the late nineteenth century. The very
existence of those laws would be used by the late twentieth century to help
fuel initiatives seeking to limit and, where possible, roll back gains made by
gay and lesbian people . That story, sometimes taken to be the foundational story of
LGBT oppression, is told elsewhere.
This discussion does not attempt an original interpretation of the evolution of sodomy
law and its policing. Rather, the focus is broadened to include the policing and
punishment of queer people and lives that go forward under many legal
premises , often outside of any recognizable legal framework . It is commonly
believed that only certain, proscribed sexual acts were punished in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries; that sexual identities as we now know them did 0Ot take hold until
the early twentieth century.71 As Somerville puts it, Michel Foucault and other
historians of sexuality have argued, although sexual acts between two people of
the same sex had been punishable during earlier periods through legal and
religious sanctions , these sexual practices did not necessarily define
individuals as homosexual per se . Only in the late nineteenth century did a
new understanding of sexuality emerge, in which sexual acts and desires
became constitutive of identity . Foucault himself characterizes the shift as follows:
The sodomite had been a temporary aberration , the homosexual was now a
species .72
By the latter part of the nineteenth century, so-called scientific efforts to classify and
control normal and abnormal sexualities were well underway. Despite critiques of
Foucaults analytical limitations, his description of the shift in Western
classification of sexuality holds .73 As queer identities substituted for
individual perverse acts , the process of criminalizing sexual and gender
nonconformity was facilitated through the construction of ever-shifting and
evolving archetypal narratives . Rooted in historical representations of
Indigenous peoples , people of color , and poor people as intrinsically
deviant , fueled and deployed by mass media and cultural institutions , these
narratives now permeate virtually every aspect of the criminal legal system

The attempt to render all identity coherent and legible is a disciplinary

technique which paves over, rendering illegible, modernitys foundational
Conquest the always already ongoing war that determines what is and is
not coherent, revealing and concealing ways of being in the world through
the regime of sense. This is also the sum total of all other wars, all acts of
violence which make the material convergence of this debate possible.
---seriousness is a disciplinary apparatus
---strive towards the unpredictable, dimly lit places Benjaminian street walker
Halberstam 11. J. J. Jack Halberstam, professor of English at the University of
Southern California, The Queer Art of Failure, pg. 5
Illegibility , then, has been and remains, a reliable source for political
autonomy . James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State
Any book that begins with a quote from SpongeBob SquarePants and is motored by
wisdom gleaned from Fantastic Mr. Fox, Chicken Run, and Find- ing Nemo, among
other animated guides to life, runs the risk of not being taken seriously. Yet this is my
goal. Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous ,
promiscuous , and irrelevant . The desire to be taken seriously is precisely
what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge
production around which I would like to map a few detours. Indeed terms like
serious and rigorous tend to be code words , in academia as well as other
contexts, for disciplinary correctness ; they signal a form of training and
learning that confirms what is already known according to approved
methods of knowing , but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights
of fancy . Training of any kind , in fact, is a way of refusing a kind of
Benjaminian relation to knowing, a stroll down uncharted streets in the
wrong direction (Benjamin 1996); it is precisely about staying in well-lit
territories and about knowing exactly which way to go before you set out . Like
many others before me, I propose that instead the goal is to lose ones way , and
indeed to be prepared to lose more than ones way. Losing , we may agree with
Elizabeth Bishop, is an art , and one that is not too hard to master / Though it may
look like a disaster (2008: 166167).
In the sciences, particularly physics and mathematics, there are many examples of
rogue intellectuals , not all of whom are reclusive Unabomber types (although more
than a few are just that), who wander off into uncharted territories and refuse the
academy because the publish-or-perish pressure of academic life keeps them
tethered to conventional knowledge production and its well-traveled byways.
Popular mathematics books, for example, revel in stories about unconventional
loners who are self- schooled and who make their own way through the world of
numbers. For some kooky minds , disciplines actually get in the way of answers
and theorems precisely because they offer maps of thought where intuition
and blind [unscripted] fumbling might yield better results. In 2008, for example,

The New Yorker featured a story about an oddball physicist who, like many ambitious
physicists and mathematicians, was in hot pursuit of a grand theory, a theory of
everything. This thinker, Garrett Lisi, had dropped out of academic physics because
string theory dominated the field at that time and he thought the answers lay elsewhere.
As an outsider to the discipline, writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Lisi built his theory as
an outsider might, relying on a grab bag of component parts: a hand-built mathematical
structure, an unconventional way of describing gravity, and a mysterious mathematical
entity known as E8.1 In the end Lisis theory of everything fell short of expectations,
but it nonetheless yielded a whole terrain of new questions and methods. Similarly the
computer scientists who pioneered new programs to produce computer-generated
imagery (CGI), as many accounts of the rise of Pixar have chronicled, were academic
rejects or dropouts who created independent institutes in order to explore their dreams
of animated worlds.2 These alternative cultural and academic realms , the areas
beside academia rather than within it, the intellectual worlds conjured by
losers , failures , dropouts , and refuseniks , often serve as the launching pad
for alternatives precisely when the university cannot .
This is not a bad time to experiment with disciplinary transformation on
behalf of the project of generating new forms of knowing , since the fields that were
assembled over one hundred years ago to respond to new market economies
and the demand for narrow expertise, as Foucault de- scribed them, are now losing
relevance and failing to respond either to real-world knowledge projects or
student interests . As the big disciplines begin to crumble like banks that have
invested in bad securities we might ask more broadly, Do we really want to
shore up the ragged boundaries of our shared interests and intellectual
commitments, or might we rather take this opportunity to rethink the project of
learning and thinking altogether ? Just as the standardized tests that the U.S.
favors as a guide to intellectual advancement in high schools tend to identify people
who are good at standardized exams ( as opposed to , say, intellectual
visionaries ), so in universities grades , exams , and knowledge of canons
identify scholars with an aptitude for maintaining and conforming to the
dictates of the discipline .
This book, a stroll out of the confines of conventional knowledge and into the
unregulated territories of failure, loss, and unbecoming, must make a long detour around
disciplines and ordinary ways of thinking. Let me explain how universities (and by
implication high schools) squash rather than promote quirky and original
thought . Disciplinarity , as de- fined by Foucault (1995), is a technique of modern
power: it depends upon and deploys normalization , routines , convention ,
tradition , and regularity , and it produces experts and administrative forms
of governance . The university structure that houses the disciplines and
jealously guards their boundaries now stands at a crossroads , not of
disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, past and future, national and transnational; the
crossroads at which the rapidly disintegrating bandwagon of disciplines ,

subfields , and interdisciplines has arrived offer a choice between the

university as corporation and investment opportunity and the university as
a new kind of public sphere with a different investment in knowledge , in
ideas , and in thought and politics .
A radical take on disciplinarity and the university that presumes both the breakdown of
the disciplines and the closing of gaps between fields conventionally presumed to be
separated can be found in a manifesto published by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in
2004 in Social Text titled The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses. Their
essay is a searing critique directed at the intellectual and the critical intellectual, the
professional scholar and the critical academic professionals. For Moten and Harney,
the critical academic is not the answer to encroaching professionalization
but an extension of it , using the very same tools and legitimating strategies
to become an ally of professional education . Moten and Harney prefer to pitch
their tent with the subversive intellectuals , a maroon community of
outcast thinkers who refuse , resist , and renege on the demands of rigor ,
excellence , and productivity . They tell us to steal from the university , to
steal the enlightenment for others (112), and to act against what Foucault called
the Conquest , the unspoken war that founded , and with the force of law
refounds, society (113). And what does the undercommons of the university want to
be? It wants to constitute an unprofessional force of fugitive knowers , with a
set of intellectual practices not bound by examination systems and test scores. The
goal for this unprofessionalization is not to abolish; in fact Moten and Harney set the
fugitive intellectual against the elimination or abolition of this, the founding or
refounding of that: Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a
society that could have prisons , that could have slavery , that could have the
wage , and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but
abolition as the founding of a new society (113).
Not the elimination of anything but the founding of a new society . And why not?
Why not think in terms of a different kind of society than the one that first
created and then abolished slavery ? The social worlds we inhabit , after all, as
so many thinkers have reminded us, are not inevitable ; they were not always
bound to turn out this way , and whats more, in the process of producing this
reality , many other realities , fields of knowledge , and ways of being have
been discarded and, to cite Fou- cault again, disqualified . A few visionary books,
produced alongside disciplinary knowledge, show us the paths not taken. For example, in
a book that itself began as a detour, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to
Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999), James C. Scott details the ways the
modern state has run roughshod over local , customary , and undisciplined
forms of knowledge in order to rationalize and simplify social, agricultural, and
political practices that have profit as their primary motivation . In the process,

says Scott, certain ways of seeing the world are established as normal or
natural , as obvious and necessary , even though they are often entirely
counterintuitive and socially engineered . Seeing Like a State began as a study of
why the state has always seemed to be the enemy of people who move around, but
quickly became a study of the demand by the state for legibility through the
imposition of methods of standardization and uniformity (1). While Dean
Spade (2008) and other queer scholars use Scotts book to think about how we came to
insist upon the documentation of gender identity on all govern- mental documentation, I
want to use his monumental study to pick up some of the discarded local
knowledges that are trampled underfoot in the rush to bureaucratize and
rationalize an economic order that privile ges profit over all kinds of other
motivations for being and doing .
We are speaking of the Society of Control and its attempt to render all
identities of the world intelligible and contained this is the logic which
makes possible a war against all forms of life that do not cohere to those
prescribed by heteronormative citizenship.
Puar 07. Jasbir Puar, professor of womens and gender studies at Rutgers University,
Duke University Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 214
Linked to this is what Massumi calls "ontogenetic difference" or "ontogenetic priority," a
concept that rescripts temporality exterior to the sheer administrative units
that are mobilized to capture the otherwise unruly processes of a body :
To say that passage and indeterminancy "come first" or "are primary" is more a
statement of ontological priority than the assertion of a time sequence. They have
ontological privilege in the sense that they constitute the field of emergence , while
positionings are what emerge . The trick is to express that priority in a way that
respects the inseparability and contemporaneousness of the disjunct
dimensions: their ontogenetic difference .
And later: "The field of emergence is not pre-social. It is open-endedly social. ... One of
the things that the dimension of change is ontogenetically 'prior to' is thus the very
distinction between individual and the collective, as well as any given model of their
interaction. That interaction is precisely what takes form."' The given models of
interaction would be these bifurcated distinctions between the body and the social (its
signification) such that the distinctions disappear. Massumi's move from ontology
(being, becoming) to ontogenesis is also relevant to how he discusses affect and
cognition and the processes of the body: "Feedback and feed forward, or recursivity, in
addition to converting distance into intensity, folds the dimensions of time into each
other. The field of emergence of experience has to be thought of as a space-time
continuum , as an ontogenetic dimension prior to the separating-out of
space and time . Linear time , like position- gridded space , would be
emergent qualities of the event of the world's self- relating . " 2 7
This ontogenetic dimension that is "prior" but not "pre" claims its priorness not through

temporality but through its ontological status as that which produces fields of
emergence; the prior and the emergence are nevertheless "contemporaneous."
"Ontological priority" is a temporality and a spatialization that has yet to be imagined, a
property more than a bounded- ness by space and time. The ontogenetic dimension that
articulates or occupies multiple temporalities of vectors and planes is also that which
enables an emergent bifurcation of time and space.
Identity is one of affect , a capture that proposes what one is by masking its
retrospective ordering and thus its ontogenetic dimension - what one was through the guise of an illusory futurity : what one is and will continue to
be . However, this is anything but a relay between stasis and flux; position is but
one derivative of systems in constant motion , lined with erratic trajectories
and unruly projectiles . If the ontogenetic dimensions of affect render affect
as prior to representation -prior to race , class , gender , sex , nation , even as
these categories might be the most pertinent mapping of or reference back to affect
itself-how might identity-as-retrospective-ordering amplify rather than inhibit
praxes of political organizing ? If we transfer our energy, our turbulence, our
momentum from the defense of the integrity of identity and submit instead to this
affective ideation of identity, what kinds of political strategies, of "politics of the open
end,"" might we unabashedly stumble upon? Rather than rehashing the pros and
cons of identity politics , can we think instead of affective politics?
Displacing queerness as an identity or modality that is visibly , audibly ,
legibly , or tangibly evident-the seemingly queer body in a "cultural freezeframe" of sorts- assemblages allow us to attune to movements , intensities ,
emotions , energies , affectivities , and textures as they inhabit events, spatiality,
and corporealities. Intersectionality privileges naming, visuality, epistemology,
representation, and meaning, while assemblage underscores feeling, tactility, ontology,
affect, and information. Further, in the sway from disciplinary societies (where the
panoptic "functioned primarily in terms of positions, fixed points, and identities") to
control societies , the diagram of control, Michael Hardt writes, is "oriented toward
mobility and anonymity . . . . The flexible and mobile performances of
contingent identities , and thus its assemblages or institutions are elaborated
primarily through repetition and the production of simulacra . " 2 9
Assemblages are thus crucial conceptual tools that allow us to acknowledge and
comprehend power beyond disciplinary regulatory models , where " particles,
and not parts , recombine, where forces , and not categories, clash . " 3 0
Most important, given the heightened death machine aspect of nationalism in our
contemporary political terrain-a heightened sensorial and anatomical domination
indispensable to Mbembe's necropolitics- assemblages work against narratives of
U.S. exceptionalism that secure empire , challenging the fixity of racial and
sexual taxonomies that inform practices of state surveillance and control and
befuddling the "us versus them" of the war on terror . (On a more cynical note,
the recent work of Eyal Weizman on the use of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Felix

Guattari, and Guy Debord by the Israeli Defense Forces demonstrates that we cannot
afford to ignore concepts such as war machines and machinic assemblages, as they are
already heavily cultivated as instructive tactics in military strategy.) For while
intersectionality and its underpinnings -an unrelenting epistemological
will to truth - presupposes identity and thus disavows futurity , or, perhaps
more accurately, prematurely anticipates and thus fixes a permanence to forever ,
assemblage, in its debt to ontology and its espousal of what cannot be known , seen ,
or heard , or has yet to be known , seen , or heard , allows for becoming
beyond or without being .32
The 1AC turns the resolutions presumption of legality as a solution on its
head we consider the resolution to be the equivalent of a dominant history
and we exists in its cracks, its fissures. As opposed to drive towards
successful legalization, the failure of criminal activity as a passionate
pursuit of alternatives may prove more fruitful, or at least more fun.

So what say you? To us, the queer pirates, the mob that has
been written out of histories of legalization and western common law?
Dominant history casts the piradical revolts of the 16th century as criminal
failures; radical historians read these pirates as queer criminal failures,
important foils to the dominant order that may provide glimpses of being
otherwise in the world.
Halberstam 11. J. J. Jack Halberstam, professor of English at the University of
Southern California, The Queer Art of Failure, pg. 18
What else is criminal activity but the passionate pursuit of alternatives ?
Design Collective Zine, Shahrzad (Zurich and Tehran)
A great example of low theory can be found in Peter Linebaughs and Marcus Redikers
monumental account of the history of opposition to capitalism in the seventeenth and
eighteenth century, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the
Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Their book traces what they call the
struggles for alternative ways of life that accompanied and opposed the rise of
capitalism in the early seventeenth century (2001: 15). In stories about piracy ,
dispossessed commoners , and urban insurrections they detail the modes of
colonial and national violence that brutally stamped out all challenges to
middle class power and that cast proletarian rebellion as disorganized ,
random , and apolitical . Linebaugh and Rediker refuse the common wisdom about
these movements (i.e., that they were random and not focused on any particular political
goal); instead they emphasize the power of cooperation within the anticapitalist
mob and pay careful attention to the alternatives that this many-headed
hydra of resistant groups imagined and pursued .
The Many-Headed Hydra is a central text in any genealogy of alternatives

because its authors refuse to accede to the masculinist myth of Herculean

capitalist heroes who mastered the feminine hydra of unruly anarchy ;
instead they turn that myth on its many heads to access a powerful legacy of
possibility , heeding Halls cogent warning, The more we understand about the
development of Capital itself , the more we understand that it is only part of the
story (1997: 180). For Linebaugh and Rediker, capital is always joined to the
narratives of the resistance it inspired, even though those resistant movements
may ultimately not have been successful in their attempts to block capitalism. And
so they describe in detail the wide range of resistance with which capitalism was
met in the late sixteenth century: there were levelers and diggers who resisted the
en closure of the public land, or commons; there were sailors and mutineers and
would-be slaves who rebelled against the captains authority on ships to the
New World and devised different understandings of group relations; there were
religious dissidents who believed in the absence of hierarchies in the eyes of
the Lord ; there were multinational motley crews who engineered mutinies
on merchant ships and who sailed around the world bringing news of uprisings
to different ports. All of these groups represent lineages of opposition that echo in
the present. Linebaugh and Rediker flesh out the alternatives that these resistant
groups proposed in terms of how to live , how to think about time and space , how
to inhabit space with others , and how to spend time separate from the logic
of work .
The history of alternative political formations is important because it contests
social relations as given and allows us to access traditions of political action
that, while not necessarily successful in the sense of becoming dominant, do offer
models of contestation , rupture , and discontinuity for the political present.
These histories also identify potent avenues of failure , failures that we might build
upon in order to counter the logics of success that have emerged from the
triumphs of global capitalism . In The Many-Headed Hydra failure is the map
of political paths not taken , though it does not chart a completely separate land;
failures byways are all the spaces in between the superhighways of capital .
Indeed Linebaugh and Rediker do not find new routes to resistance built upon new
archives; they use the same historical accounts that have propped up dominant
narratives of pirates as criminals and levelers as violent thugs , and they
read different narratives of race and resistance in these same records of church
sermons and the memoirs of religious figures. Their point is that dominant history
teems with the remnants of alternative possibilities , and the job of the
subversive intellectual is to trace the lines of the worlds they conjured and
left behind .

If you are looking for a legible solution to the problem of heteronormative

reproduction, you will not find it here. Instead, we propose the Queer Art of
Failure as a potential entry point into a systemic analysis of the violence of
the heteronormative will to success in general. This is particularly
important in the context of criminalization: it means cultivating forms of
knowledge that do not presume the neutrality of success and failure in the
legal system.
Halberstam 11. J. J. Jack Halberstam, professor of English at the University of
Southern California, The Queer Art of Failure, pg. 2
In this book I range from childrens animation to avant-garde per- formance and queer
art to think about ways of being and knowing that stand outside of conventional
understandings of success. I argue that success in a heteronormative, capitalist
society equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined
with wealth accumulation. But these measures of success have come under serious
pressure recently, with the collapse of financial markets on the one hand and the epic
rise in divorce rates on the other. If the boom and bust years of the late twentieth century
and the early twenty-first have taught us anything, we should at least have a healthy
critique of static models of success and failure .
Rather than just arguing for a reevaluation of these standards of passing and failing, The
Queer Art of Failure dismantles the logics of success and failure with which we
currently live. Under certain circumstances failing , losing , forgetting ,
unmaking , undoing , unbecoming , not knowing may in fact offer more creative ,
more cooperative , more surprising ways of being in the world . Failing is
something queers do and have always done exceptionally well ; for queers failure
can be a style , to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life , to cite Foucault, and it can stand
in contrast to the grim scenarios of success that depend upon trying and
trying again. In fact if success requires so much effort , then maybe failure is
easier in the long run and offers different rewards .
What kinds of reward can failure offer us? Perhaps most obviously, failure allows us to
escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human
development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to
orderly and predictable adulthoods . Failure preserves some of the wondrous
anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and
children, winners and losers. And while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of
negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides
the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic
positivity of contemporary life . As Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us in Brightsided, positive thinking is a North American affliction , a mass delusion
that emerges out of a combination of American exceptionalism and a desire to
believe that success happens to good people and failure is just a consequence of

a bad attitude rather than structural conditions (2009: 13). Positive thinking is
offered up in the U.S. as a cure for cancer, a path to untold riches, and a surefire way to
engineer your own success. Indeed believing that success depends upon ones attitude is
far preferable to Americans than recognizing that their success is the outcome of the
tilted scales of race, class, and gender. As Ehrenreich puts it, If optimism is the key to
material success, and if you can achieve an optimistic outlook through the discipline of
positive thinking, then there is no excuse for failure. But, she continues, the flip side of
positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility , meaning that
while capitalism produces some peoples success through other peoples failures, the
ideology of positive thinking insists that success depends only upon working hard and
failure is always of your own doing (8). We know better of course in an age when the
banks that ripped off ordinary people have been deemed too big to fail and the people
who bought bad mortgages are simply too little to care about.
In Bright-sided Ehrenreich uses the example of American womens application of
positive thinking to breast cancer to demonstrate how dangerous the belief in
optimism can be and how deeply Americans want to believe that health is a matter of
attitude rather than environmental degradation and that wealth is a matter of
visualizing success rather than having the cards stacked in your favor . For the
nonbelievers outside the cult of positive thinking, however, the failures and losers, the
grouchy, irritable whiners who do not want to have a nice day and who do not believe
that getting cancer has made them better people, politics offers a better explanatory
framework than personal disposition . For these negative thinkers, there are
definite advantages to failing. Relieved of the obligation to keep smiling
through chemotherapy or bankruptcy, the negative thinker can use the experience of
failure to confront the gross inequalities of everyday life in the United
States .
From the perspective of feminism , failure has often been a better bet than
success . Where feminine success is always measured by male standards , and
gender failure often means being relieved of the pressure to measure up to
patriarchal ideals , not succeeding at womanhood can offer unexpected
pleasures . In many ways this has been the message of many renegade feminists in the
past. Monique Wittig (1992) argued in the 1970s that if womanhood depends upon a
heterosexual framework , then lesbians are not women , and if lesbians are
not women , then they fall outside of patriarchal norms and can re-create
some of the meaning of their genders . Also in the 1970s Valerie Solanas suggested
that if woman takes on meaning only in relation to man, then we need to cut up
men (2004: 72). Perhaps that is a little drastic, but at any rate these kinds of feminisms,
what I call shadow feminisms in chapter 5, have long haunted the more acceptable
forms of feminism that are oriented to positivity, reform, and accommodation rather
than negativity, rejection, and transformation. Shadow feminisms take the form not of
becoming, being, and doing but of shady, murky modes of undoing, un- becoming, and
violating.

We offer this debate as a queer convivial gather, a becoming with, imagining

an unpredictable becoming with rather than an overdetermined effacement
of queer alterity, its inability to move or escape, which characterizes the
status quo
Puar 10. Jasbir Puar, professor of womens and gender studies at Rutgers University,
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Vol. 19, No. 2, July 2009, pg. 168
Out of the numerous possibilities that assemblage theory offers, much of it has already
begun to transform queer theory, from Elizabeth Groszs crucial re-reading of the
relations between bodies and prosthetics (which complicates not only the contours of
bodies in relation to forms of bodily discharge, but also complicates the relationships to
objects, such as cell phones, cars, wheelchairs, and the distinctions between them as
capacity-enabling devices) (1994), to Donna Haraways cyborgs (1991), to Deleuze and
Guattaris BwO (Bodies without Organs organs, loosely defined, rearranged against
the presumed natural ordering of bodily capacity) (1987). I want to close by
foregrounding the analytic power of conviviality that may further complicate
how subjects are positioned , underscoring instead more fluid relations between
capacity and debility . Conviviality , unlike notions of resistance ,
oppositionality , subversion or transgression (facets of queer exceptionalism
that unwittingly dovetail with modern narratives of progress in modernity),
foregrounds categories such as race , gender , and sexuality as events as
encounters rather than as entities or attributes of the subject .
Surrendering certain notions of revolution , identity politics , and social
change the big utopian picture that Massumi complicates in the opening
epigraph of this essay conviviality instead always entails an experimental
step . Why the destabilization of the subject of identity and a turn to affect
matters is because affect as a bodily matter makes identity politics both
possible and yet impossible . In its conventional usage, conviviality means
relating to , occupied with , or fond of feasting , drinking , and good
company to be merry , festive , together at a table , with companions and
guests, and hence, to live with . As an attribute and function of assembling, however,
conviviality does not lead to a politics of the universal or inclusive common , nor
an ethics of individuatedness , rather the futurity enabled through the open
materiality of bodies as a Place to Meet . We could usefully invoke Donna
Haraways notion of encounter value here, a becoming with companionate (and I
would also add, incompanionate) species, whereby actors are the products of relating,
not pre-formed before the encounter (2008, 16). Conviviality is an ethical
orientation that rewrites a Levinasian taking up of the ontology of the Other by
arguing that there is no absolute self or other ,15 rather bodies that come
together and dissipate through intensifications and vulnerabilities ,
insistently rendering bare the instability of the divisions between capacity-

endowed and debility-laden bodies . These encounters are rarely comfortable

mergers but rather entail forms of eventness that could potentially unravel
oneself but just as quickly be recuperated through a restabilized self, so that the
political transformation is invited , as Arun Saldhana writes, through letting
yourself be destabilized by the radical alterity of the other , in seeing his or
her difference not as a threat but as a resource to question your own
position in the world (2007, 118). Conviviality is thus open to its own
dissolution and self-annihilation and less interested in a mandate to reproduce its
terms of creation or sustenance, recognizing that political critique must be open to the
possibility that it might disrupt and alter the conditions of its own emergence
such that it is no longer needed an openness to something other than what
we might have hoped for. This is my alternative approach to Lee Edelmans No Future,
then, one that is not driven by rejecting the figure of the child as the overdetermined
outcome of reproductive futurism (2004),16 but rather complicates the very
terms of the regeneration of queer critique itself. Thus the challenge before us is
how to craft convivial political praxis that does not demand a continual
reinvestment in its form and content , its genesis or its outcome , the
literalism of its object nor the direction of its drive.