Edelman is wrong their scholarship upholds an essentialist analysis of reproductive futurism which falsely assumes that the child is the telos of all modern politicsAndil Gosine, 6-28-2010, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, York University, Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, p. 149-73, google booksFirst, a concern about the political geography of queer ecology: Is the production of queer ecology a decidedly Euroamerican project? Work theorizing sexuality and nature has tended to assume (at the same time that it critiques) an understanding of environmentalism and nature as Western teleological narratives. This essay, for example, has been concerned with the representation of non-white reproductive and homo-sex in Euroamerican environmental discourses; non-white heterosexual reproduction is queer sex in the sense that it deviates from the social conventions advocated in North American environmental discourses. What are the implications of setting this historical-geographic limit to queer ecology? If the Euroamerican context always remains the primary reference point, how will its questions and analysis meaningfully contribute to the production of nature elsewhere, or to the contemporary articulation of environmentalism as a global project? Is the privileging of Euroamerican stories of environmentalismeven for the purpose of critical examinationcomplicit with the agendas of empire, and American imperialism in particular? Second, a concern about race-racism: If queer ecology is to maintain a primary gaze on the production of nature in Euroamerican contextswhich, despite my reservations is, I think, a legitimate and viable optionwhat becomes of race-racism? Many scholars engaged in the production of the field of queer ecology (e.g., Ingram, Sandilands, and the contributors to Rachel Steins New Perspectives in Environmental Justice ) have certainly invited, even sometimes privileged, an analysis of race. In her important essay, Toward a Queer Ecofeminism, Greta Gaard outlines some of the linkages between colonization and homophobia. She describes how homosexual relationships between North American Indians were viewed by colonial scientists as being responsible for their extermination, and engages a discussion of Cynthia Enloes work on masculinity to demonstrate some links among the production of masculinity, sexual identity, and nationalism. Gaard also points out that not only did transgender practices and sodomy disturb the colonizers; even heterosexual practices devoid of the restrictions imposed by Christianity were objectionable (2004, 35). However, some of the claims of queer ecology about the construction of heterosexuality as natural become troublesome without a contaminant analysis of race-racism. For example, in the same essay, Gaard argues, as many others have done, how the natural is associated with the procreative; this may be true in the context of white nationalism, but the procreative proclivities of non-white people has certainly not been regarded as natural (rather, as I have outlined above, as dangerously perverse) in Western environmentalism. Given the recognized interwoven investments of sexuality with race in the production of nature and the nation, must we not always be alert to the simultaneous foregrounding of both? I would add to this list gender and class, which I have not discussed here, but which I also believe must always be primary considerations in our analysis. Also implicit in this analysis has been a separation of the queer subject from the racialized-as-non-white subject; that is, subjects are seen to occupy either position, not both, in effect disappearing the non-white queer and, I would also suggest, the diasporic subject. As I have already stated, it is the non-white queer subject that in this contemporary moment is cast as a deadly and dangerous deviant, through tropes of HIV/AIDS; I would suggest that a special focus on the constitution of the non-white queer subject might even provide for a more insightful project of queer ecology. Third, a concern about the political resistance: Related to this point, my characterization of non-white reproduction and homosexual sex as queer acts against nature is not just a call for more determined engagement in an analysis of sexuality with race, gender, and class, but also for political projects that recognize and challenge the shared investments of projects of heterosexism, racism, and capitalism in the production of white nationalism (including white nationalism practiced by non-whites fully committed to the reproduction of Euroamerican model of capitalist nation-states). What I am trying to suggest is that the refusal of race-racism is not separate from the refusal of heteropatriarchy, as both are productions of capitalism-nationalism. Thus, rather than think about a coalition of different interests (e.g., Gaards and others calls for feminists, queers, and non-white people to forge alliances), might a queer ecological political project present a different kind of framework of resistance? Might queer ecology be better served, for example, by the kind of model of political resistance that has been articulated by black lesbian feminists such as Audre Lorde, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Dionne Brand, where its work is not merely to attend to the sexuality part of oppression, but to recognize and work with its full, complex rendering?

Alt fails orienting the affirmation of queerness towards pessimism and failure locks in a purely reactionary politics that actively precludes imagining queerness as a positive articulation of hopeful futures---shuts down potential roles for queer resistance Kim Q. Hall 14, Professor of Philosophy and Faculty Affiliate of Women's Studies and Sustainable Development, Appalachian State University, 2014, No Failure: Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures, Radical Philosophy Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, p. 203-225 While J. Jack Halberstam has critiqued the absence, in Edelman and others, of any reflection on what a queer politics of no future might look like in the world and how it might speak to the material lives of queers, he nonetheless shares Edelmans critique of reproductive futurity. Halberstams critique of the future emphasizes societys relentless optimism. In this context of optimism, queerness, Halberstam argues, is that which is associated with failure. By characterizing queerness as an art of failure, Halberstam suggests it resists the nave optimism that squelches creativity and prevents the development of genuinely counter-hegemonic alternatives.39 After all, in the context of neoliberal capitalism, success is connected to reproductive maturity and wealth accumulation.40 Consequently, failures are people who refuse those norms in favor of living life otherwise.41 Halberstam writes, Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, umaking, undoing, unbecoming, unlearning, 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.42 In other words, because queers do not conform to norms of identity, success, maturity, or having a life, queers are failures, and our failure promises to open new directions in queer theory, communities, and lives. What can it mean to think radically about queerness when it is conceived as a site of failure and no future? Things certainly seem, at first glance, very bleak indeed. Edelman and Halberstam accurately portray how heteronormativity frames the concept of queerness. They also rightly critique the homonationalism and homonormativity that dominate contemporary neoliberal movements for LGBTQ rights in the U.S., a movement that seeks recognition of LGBTQ normalcy. Nonetheless, Halberstams association of optimism with a desire for normative happiness seems to make it impossible for hope to be anything other than a rejection of queerness in favor of normalcy and positive thinking. Hope, for Halberstam, is a response that locks one into a reactionary politics that vacillates between cynical resignation or nave optimism.43 Thus, Halberstams interest in the resistant possibilities of failure reflects his interest in thinking after hope.44 One of failures queer virtues, for Halberstam, is its challenge to the toxic positivity of contemporary life.45If queer is by definition a failed identity with no future, is there any non-nave way in which there could be hope for queers? Could this hope be radical? I certainly appreciate Halberstams point and agree that queer has been associated with failure to achieve heteronormative happiness and success. Nonetheless, I am concerned that embracing failure leaves only a reactionary role for queer resistance. In other words, queer resistance, when understood as failure, becomes a mere rejection of hope, which is understood as only a heteronormative affect. Because this ultimately limited conception of queer resistance does not reflect our naturecultural being in the world, it is unable to address how modes of life and thinking among global elites have contributed to a toxic environment for human and nonhuman bodies and communities. In addition to efforts to conceive of queerness, gender, and disability in ways that remain open to possible transnational alliances, a critically radical conception of queerness must also, to borrow from Rosi Braidotti, strike . . . an alliance with the productive and immanent force of zo, or life in its non-human aspects. This requires a mutation of our shared understanding of what it means to think at all, let alone think critically.46 While I am wary of Braidottis reference to a shared understanding,47 her claim presents a provocative challenge to persistent anthropomorphisms in feminist, queer, and disability studies.Being radical, at least in part, is being critically aware of and accountable to the historical, economic, social, and political contexts in which one lives. In this sense, queer crip feminist critique is radical to the extent that it not only understands identity as situated within and shaped by structures of power, but also to the extent that it strives to be cognizant of its impact on those structures of power. It is this radical conception of situatedness and contingency that Diana Coole and Samantha Frost seem to have in mind when they characterize new materialist critique as concerned not only with the material but also with the immersion in the material, including the immersion in the material of theorists and theories themselves.48 What would it mean for queer, feminist, and disability studies to attend to the realities of climate change, for instance, in their discussions of urban and rural environments, access, global capitalism, or the future? In part, it seems that in order to take seriously its immersion in the material, queer crip feminist critique must be informed by an awareness that questioning of the boundaries between the human and the non-human, the organic and the inorganic, is central, not merely additive, to its critical