One of the more difficult task I had this past semester was to present on the Lee Edelman’s daunting work No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Judith Butler shows us the way in which heteronormativity is performed, and Judith Halberstam explains how queerness situates itself is both space and time. Through Edelman, queerness is divorced from anything gay and reinvisioned as a disrupting force for heteronormativity, the children it produces, and the future into which we all invest.

Making his clever argument through a Lacanian psychoanalytic and semiotic framework, Edelman questions our conception of the future. If our notion of the future is constantly changing, he asks, why then are we mortgaging our present in the name of a future we will never reach?

Want more to know more? Check out the poster.

Coincidentally, I found a brilliant review of Edelman’s book on k-punk’s blog. Unfortunately I found it too late to help me on this project, but it is a great review of his work, and certainly worth a read.