Affirmative – Becoming Queer – OE

2022
 1AC
What is queer?
Always the primary inquisition whenever discourse turns to identity
which demands a simple definition as a prior requisite to
comprehension and engagement
A definition which creates a static and unchanging framework of
queer being
For some, a definition which one must match to be embraced by
liberal security
For others, a definition against which they are marked as outlier and
outcast
And an impossible choice of unsafe or unauthentic for those lodged in
between
------------------------------------------------
The topic necessitates a discussion of security which is the modern
mechanism of instructional production and stabilization of identity –
as the populous is assimilated into the security state, they become a
demystified tool to binarily exclude the excessive queer Other
Randell-Moon ‘22 (Holly Randell-Moon; senior lecturer of Indigenous Australian studies at Charles
Sturt University with a Ph.D. in cultural studies from Macquarie University. “Mediations of Security,
Race, and Violence in the Pulse Nightclub Shooting: Homonationalism in Anti-Immigration Times”
https://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-abstract/28/1/1/290953/Mediations-of-Security-Race-and-
Violence-in-the 1 January 2022) // ELog

This article examines news and political mediations of security, race, and violence in the Pulse Nightclub
shooting in an attempt to isolate how dominant institutions reaffirm and preserve the American state’s
monopoly on violence and cultural preservation through the calculated balance of security in relation to
tolerance of diversity. The analysis takes place in a temporal fold where the materials examined comprehend the event in its
immediate aftermath, whereas the analysis is refracted through a lapse in which the “urgencies of racism” (Alley 2018: 2) and antiqueer
violence continue to manifest and even appear heightened at this point in time. The perpetrator of the shooting was Omar Mateen, an
American of Afghani descent. Because of the shooter’s ethnicity and possible links to Islamist terrorism, the event was predominantly mediated
through security discourses of the “war on terror.” This martial framing enabled the production of homonationalist rhetoric (Puar 2007) that
aimed to include previously excluded queer Latino/a populations within the American body politic. Focusing on news media reporting and
political as well as activist responses to the shooting during the months of June–August 2016, I show how this process of homonationalist
inclusion was not smooth. As
Salvador Vidal-Ortiz (2016) points out, the Pulse victims and survivors represent
an “excess of difference” for hegemonic institutions. Memorialization and advocacy for the Pulse victims by dominant
institutions is striated by colliding phobias (Islamo-, xeno-, and homo-) that interrupt a clear mode of nationalist address or point of
Drawing from the work of Jasbir K. Puar and Michel Foucault, I define
identification in mediations of the shooting.
security as constituted through the biopoliticization of populations (and identity) in terms of their utility
to the overall health and economy of the state. In the event constellations examined below, the biopolitics of security
associated with the “war on terror” was productive of discourse and practice, such as antihomophobia and gun control, that in the immediate
aftermath of the shooting would otherwise have been digested differently in the American body politic. For Elijah Adiv Edelman (2018: 32), how
different communities come to matter and be valued through the mediations of the Pulse shooting has implications for the kinds of critique and
activism made possible when included “in that valuation.” Dominant
forms of mediation and state-based responses are
mobilized on the basis of particular biopolitical categories (hate-crime victims and victims of terror),
while the ongoing phobias directed toward the populations assumed by these categories expose the
limited template for livability within North American state practices and discourses of security. The event
therefore exemplifies the productive role of phobias in both generating security practices and inciting discourse that might illustrate
embodiments of community not typically mediated in dominant news reporting. Nomination
is central to mediations of
security and violence in the Pulse shooting, and this analysis reveals “how identities are produced and
how they reify social norms and the identity categories that define them” (Young 2018: 9). The research for
this article has been conducted in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, where international media hailed me (Althusser 1970) as a queer
subject and therefore related to news salience of homophobic violence. With this hailing of deracialized homophobic violence to heighten the
queer identities of the Pulse victims and survivors, dominant media flows of the event are connected to white and Anglo–settler-colonial
diasporic connections between North America and Australia and New Zealand (see Osuri and Banerjee 2004). These flows center North America
and the violence that occurs there to international news coverage. As I go on to discuss, white queers such as myself could be interpellated into
dominant news cycles as part of a transnational queer community affected by the violence of the event, obscuring the racialized operations of
In explaining how intersecting identities mobilize and expose
homonationalist state security and protection.
homonationalist discourses and practices of security, I am aware that identification can abstract
individuals from their life histories so they become representative of a type (as if being gay or Hispanic,
for instance, is the only significant part that colors victims’ and survivors’ lives). This form of identification as
typification also works to make invisible African American and straight victims of the shooting and the complex politics of closeting and outing
when victims are publicly named as queer. It
is precisely in these constructions of identity as representativity, as
being representative of a community, that nationalist practices of security and protection are mustered
with biopolitical consequences. I attempt to balance the analysis of isolating how some identities become disaggregated from
others in their interpellation into homonationalist discourse with attention to the disruption of the logics of biopolitical calculation by queer
Latino/as and peoples-of-color communities who practice intersectional and coalitional responses to the shooting. A further explanation of the
positioning and nomination of the affected communities is offered below. I have organized the mediations and responses to the shooting in my
media survey into four event constellations. I hope this organization is heuristic in disclosing how the intersecting forms of violence that
produced the event simultaneously evoke sites of identification that interrupt news media and political mediations of the shooting as aberrant
rather coherent with the American body politic. 1. The contradictions of claiming tolerance of sexual diversity as an exceptional feature of
American nationalism in contradistinction to Islamist terrorism. Framing of the event as a primarily terrorist act positions queer and Latino/a
victims of violence as exceptional only in the context of the “war on terror.” This emphasis on the terrorist dimensions to the shooting occludes
a focus on the everyday violence queer and Latinos/as as well as African Americans are subject to in American public space. (See parts 1 and 2,
below) 2. The role of the shooting in renewed gun control advocacy extols the protection of everyday Americans, inclusive of queer peoples, as
a defensive right against Islamist terrorism. This defensive posture concomitantly bolsters support for other covert anti-terror policing
practices, such as the “nofly list.” (See part 3) 3. Gun control discourse proliferates along advocacy lines that do not intersect with protests
against police brutality. Legitimizing increased surveillance practices occurs at a time when intersecting communities of queer Latino/as, African
Americans, and Native Americans have been advocating against the criminalization of their communities bought about by overpolicing.
Mediations of the event as “the worst mass shooting,” or variations thereof, completely obscure histories of shooting and violence perpetrated
by European settlers against Native Americans. (See part 4) 4. The border-crossing initiated by family members of the Pulse victims to retrieve
their bodies exemplifies how civic virtue and American patriotism accommodate honorary and prosthetic modes of citizenship through
necropolitics. These mediations leave intact and undisturbed questions relating to state violence and hierarchies of citizenship, which are
further demonstrated in the Ryan Murphy–produced Stop the Hate video memorializing Pulse victims. This video uses celebrities to represent
the Pulse victims, who are in turn interpellated into representing a teleological progression of LGBTQ civil rights and gun control as the logical
progression of state protection and security. (See part 5) Part 1: Homonationalism and Securing Identity Pulse is a queer nightclub in the
downtown restaurant and nightlife area of Orlando, Florida. Pulse often hosted different themes and talent shows, and on the night of
shooting, the club featured a “Latin Night,” resulting in a large of number of Latino/a and Afro-Latino/a patrons being victims and survivors of
the massacre. In the dominant news media reporting and political discourse on the shooting, the queer identities of victims and survivors were
given prominence (see, e.g., Ackerman 2016; Bradner 2016; Carroll and Woolf 2016; Chemaly 2016; V. Edwards 2016; Green 2016; McLaughlin
2016; Oppenheim 2016; Revesz 2016; Stern 2016; Walters 2016). In this section, I argue this prioritizing of queerness was enabled through the
production of homonationalist rhetoric that juxtaposed American LGBT identities with the killer’s nomination as Muslim and Afghan (see also
Meyer 2020). Because categorizations of the violence straddled hate-crime and terrorist discourses (see, for example, Ellis et al. 2016;
McCormick 2016), these identity categorizations created a number of contradictory effects for mobilizations of national unity, depending on the
mediational mode of address. In their survey of LGBT people of color’s response to the Pulse shooting, Johanna L. Ramirez, Kirsten A. Gonzalez,
and M. Paz Galupo (2018: 591) identified a lack of intersectionality in the news reporting that rendered some communities “invisible” and
others unable to comprehend the different dimensions to the attack. For instance, respondents observed: “There were a high number of
Hispanic individuals, but in all the reports I have read there is no use of the term”; and “The way the media described the shooting, I had no
idea it was Latinx Night at Pulse.” This is similar to my initial understanding of the event in the ways the national news media in Australia and
New Zealand portrayed the event, borrowing from the dominant North American news reporting and framing to present a deracialized queer
community under attack. While Doug Meyer’s 2019 survey of LGBTQ websites reporting on the shooting reveals that Latinx queer peoples were
Unless referring to
mentioned outside the dominant news reporting, a de-ethnicized LGBTQ identification was nevertheless prioritized.
a specific author’s work, this article uses the term queer as a gesture toward José Esteban Muñoz’s
(2015: 210) understanding of queer thought as recognizing the “arduous modes of relationality that
persist in the world despite stratifying demarcations and taxonomies of being, classifications that are
bent on the silo-ing of particularity and on the denigrating of any expansive idea of the common and
commonism” (see also Rodríguez 2003: 24). Reference to the term LGBT occurs in relation to its use in news and political
discourse on the event. As I explain below, the use of the LGBT model by mainstream news and political
discourse aligns with homonationalist rhetoric that elevates certain identity categories related to
paradigms of diversity and tolerance, with implications for how intersecting communities are included
(or not) in hegemonic institutional responses to the shooting. It was rare for the news reporting surveyed here to
mention Latino/a and Hispanic communities (a notable exception is Alvarez and Madigan 2016). Outside of instances that constitute self-
designation, I follow Roberto D. Hernández’s (2018: 33–34) advice that it is potentially problematic to designate peoples with the identity Latinx
(along with the concomitant politics of Español) when the designator is not a member of the community.

Normative international relations necessarily excludes queer

approaches due to its foundational reliance on homology – this leaves
it as a failed science unable to explain queer life or the world at large
accurately
Weber ‘14 -- (Cynthia Weber, 4-3-2014, "Why is there no Queer International Theory?," University of Sussex, SAGE Journals,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1354066114524236, accessed 7-25-2022) -- nikki

Even those scholars who do not overtly employ Wight’s homology often unconsciously abide by its
recommendations. If they do not, they risk not being recognized as proper i nternational relations
theorists. In this way, then, Wight’s homology normalizes the conduct of international theorizing
rather broadly in the discipline of IR because it governs how a critical mass of IR scholars
(un)consciously think about international theories in general and about their own practices as
international theorists specifically. This is what makes Wight’s homology so dangerous and so powerful. It is dangerous
because it is a highly biased expression of what politics, theory, and knowledge ought to look like in Disciplinary IR’s view of the discipline of IR,
which is applied to the discipline as if it were objective. It is powerful because it functions as a technology of differentiation to designate failure
and pathways to success for international theories that can be applied to normalize (by validating, dismissing, or correcting) any type of theory
and theorist that/who would dare to make a claim to be (doing) International Theory. This is why Wight’s homologization of international
theories matters for queer international theories. For
when Wight’s observations about International Theory are
applied to Queer International Theory, queer international theories are homologized out of existence .
Like International Theory, Queer International Theory ‘does not, at first sight, exist’ (Wight, 1966: 17) because it fails to measure up to its ‘twin,’
Queer Political Theory, in content and in function. This is for three reasons. First, queer international theories lack a substantial, significant body
of classical texts (Wight, 1966: 17) that Queer Political Theory provides (from Foucault (1979 [1976]), to Butler (1990) to De Lauretis (1991) to
Sedgwick (1991) for example), offering in its place scattered, unsystematic texts published almost exclusively in non-IR outlets. Second,
while queer international theories contribute to scholarly discussions about war, security,
terrorism (Owens, 2010; Weber, 2002), states, nationalism (Peterson, 1999, 2013; Weber, 1998b),
sovereignty, intervention, hegemony (Pratt, 2007; Weber, 1994a, 1994b, 1999), empire
(Agathangelou, 2013) and other international forms of violence, they do not restrict themselves to
focusing on ‘high politics’ or ‘the states-system, the diplomatic community itself’ (Wight, 1966:
22). Instead, they often twin the content of Queer Political Theory by using an array of
interdisciplinary high and low theories, epistemologies, and methods (see Sedgwick, 1991) that
defy Wight’s tidy boundaries between Politics and International Politics, between Political Theory and
International Theory, and between successful and unsuccessful knowledge accumulation to
describe Queer International Politics ‘as they really are.’ This is widely seen as acceptable practice
in queer political theorizing in general because queer political practices are themselves so mixed
that they can only accurately be described with a mix of theories, epistemologies,
methodologies, and foci. But it is infrequently viewed as acceptable practice in Disciplinary IR theorizing. This is because
Disciplinary IR rarely recognizes boundary-breaking theoretical, epistemological, and
methodological approaches to international theorizing as being productive of valuable
knowledge about international politics (Weber, 2013).7 What this means in Wight’s terms, then, is that queer
international theories stray too far from telling the one true story that all International Theory must tell — the story about the survival of states
in the states-system. And they stray too far from deploying acceptable approaches in telling the stories they do tell about international politics
— approaches that use positivist methods to accumulate knowledge. Finally, because much of the ‘low,’ boundary-breaking content of queer
international political processes is classified out of existence by Wight, Wight’s homology places queer international theories at a fork in the
road where both paths lead to failure. If queer international theories explore a mix of high and low, domestic and international queer
international political processes using appropriate epistemologies and methodologies, they are faulted by Wight’s homology for twinning the
content but not the function of its twin, Queer Political Theory. Yet, if they neglect to explore this mix of queer international political processes,
they are faulted for not reflecting international political processes ‘as they really are.’ What this means is that while it might be possible to claim
that Queer Politics equals Queer Political Theory, Wight’s homology offers no successful route to a claim that Queer International Politics equals
queer international
Queer International Theory. This is how queer international theories are homologized as failures. Because
theories are (un)consciously homologized as failing the discipline of IR, Queer International
Theory is, following Wight’s contestable logic, deemed to be non-existent. And Disciplinary IR’s next
logical step is to again follow in Wight’s footsteps, by substituting a ‘successful’ type of International
Theory in its place. Wight’s homologization of theory, then, first authorizes the figuring of various types of theory as failures and then
authorizes their substitution with successful theory. Explaining how these processes work in relation to queer international theories is the task
of the next two sections.

Attempts at progress centering the state only expand the inherently

anti-queer institution – acts of violence are written off as random,
ignoring their structural necessity and reproducing a normative
relationship with humanity that founds that state’s claim to power
Stanley ‘21 (Eric Stanley; professor of gender and women’s studies at University of California, Berkeley.
“Atmospheres of Violence” pg 5-9 3 September 2021) // ELog
We are living in a time of LGBT inclusion. This is evidenced, at least in the United States, by the legal expansion of marriage, lesbian and gay
military recruitment, and the proliferation of LGBT characters in popular visual culture. Against
the narrative arc of rainbow
progress that proclaims that these changes mark a radical shift in the social, Atmospheres of Violence
argues that inclusion, rather than a precondition of safety, most properly names the state’s violent
expansion.8 I do this by attending to a wicked archive of murders, the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic, suicide notes, incarceration, police
video footage, and other ephemera of attack. These scattered cases, when read together, build my claim that anti-trans/queer violence is
foundational to, and not an aberration of, modernity. Related,
rather than imagining the law as the mechanism
through which relief from such harm might be offered, it is one of its methodologies of proliferation.
Following the ungovernable, we are asked to release the fantasy of reforming these same institutions, here the law and by extension the state,
that have caused and continue to cause destruction, not simply in effect but as their aim. Such abdication also recalls the interplay between the
horizon, as José Muñoz might have it, and horizontalism. Here the pragmatism of the present is smashed in the name of a life we might survive.
This shuttling between description and experience remains the tension that holds the possibility of transformation. To this end, I write through
the pedagogies of direct action that remind us how disciplinary power’s force resides in its resolute incoherence. My ambivalence, then, rises as
both a procedural commitment to the dangerous task of representing violence and a defense against the counterrevolution of public policy,
with its offer of salvation outside the thickness of struggle. However, this unease does not emanate from a confusion toward the kinds of
worlds I hope grow and those that must be obliterated, nor from a belief that study is in contradiction to action, but from the turbulent insight
From the phenomenological
gleaned from this collective planning.9 The time of LGBT inclusion is also a time of trans/queer death.
vault of nonexistence lived as quotidian withdrawal, to the gory details of gratuitous harm—the archive
engulfs. Nonetheless, anti-trans/queer violence is written as an outlaw practice, a random event, and an
unexpected tragedy. Dominant culture’s drive to dissolve the scope and intensity of this violence is expected. Yet mainstream LGBT
politics also colludes in this disappearance in exchange for recognition, however partial and contingent. Through this privatization, meaning the
continued trafficking in a belief that things might be any other way while leaving the social intact, the enormity of anti-trans/queer violence is
vanished.10 Thinking violence as individual acts versus epistemic force works to support the normative and normalizing structuring of public
pain. This
is to say, privatizing anti-trans/queer violence is a function through which the social and its
trauma are whitewashed, heterosexualized, and made to appear gendernormative. This relegation of
anti-trans/queer violence, which always appears in the syntax of race, casts the human—the referent for
cis white mourning— as emblematic. While mainstream LGBT politics clamors for dominant power through a reproduction of the
teleological narrative of progress, it also reproduces the idea that anti-trans/queer violence is an aberration of democracy— belonging only to a
shadowed past, and increasingly anachronistic.11 This privatization of violence also compels through the managed translation of cultures of
attack into personal incidents. At the center of this privatization is the figure of the human that produces itself as the sole beneficiary of rights
before the law. The human’s singularity comes into relief against its ability to trade the many with the
particular. In contrast, rights, the mechanism of protection from the state’s discipline, are assumed to be the province of all. Yet by reading
the anterior magic of the law, it is not so much, or at least not only, that humans (alone) have rights. It is the conditional enactment (granting of
rights) that constitutes the human as benefactor of its own creation. This recursive logic is important as it troubles the deployment of equality
under a system of law imagined and maintained, at the atomic level, as exclusion. This double lie of formal equality is necessary for the law to
lay claim to, and act as arbiter of, what might be called justice. The law, then, is a systematic and systematizing process of substitution where
the singular and the general are shuttled and replaced to inform a matrix of fictive justice. Consequently, for the law to read anti-trans/queer
violence as a symptom of civil society, justice would demand the dismantling of its own administration.12 Against the law, the constitutive
possibility evidenced by trans/queer generativity—its disruptive worlding—guides my own attachments. Yet this striking capacity resides within
the context of a state that always seeks its managed liquidation. Or, to put it another way, while people who do identify as trans and/or queer
figure largely in this text, I make no claim about identification other than that sexuality and gender, as nodes of power, are formed in and as a
relationship to racialized violence. I say this in an attempt to stall a misreading that might claim I have something definitive to say about
trans/queer or otherwise LGBT people. In contrast to such generalizations about identity, this is a study of the shattering power that threatens,
and at times erupts into the deadly force that not only kills but makes life unlivable—an atmosphere of violence.13 Here, violence takes on a
set of shifting definitions—it appears sometimes as the force that ends life, and at other times it is the only way life might unfold. This is to
suggest that what gets called violence under a regime of racialized and gendered terror can also yield the terrain that allows for safe passage
out—a leap that freedom fighters invite us to take. I focus on scenes of harm where my explicit stake is in ending those iterations in the name
of a more habitable planet, yet I also resist the idea that all forms of violence are interchangeable. This line of thought renders minoritized
defense as equal to the mechanisms of the settler state. Or, this equivocation produces community resistance as indistinguishable from
genocide. Under such logic, which we might also call legal equality, all instances of force appear undifferentiated, while survival is castigated.
Indeed, equality concretizes the structuring antagonism that produced it in the first place, which means subjugation becomes intensified. This is
another way to tell the story of the New Jersey 4, a group of Black lesbians who were strangled and punched by a straight man in New York
City’s West Village. In the aftermath of the night’s events, it was he who declared it “a hate crime against a straight man” and was awarded
restitution, while the four women were sentenced to prison for the crime of surviving.14 If
the privatization of anti-trans/queer
violence delineates not only what constitutes injury but also what redress might approximate , then this
is also one of the ways state violence is made ordinary. Further, while I’m attentive to what is more generally understood
as state violence, the ways individual acts, like the audience attacking Sylvia, collect up in the name of authority also calls for an expansion of
what demarcates those borders. As a material concept, the state remains important because, as Karl Marx reminds us, “It is therefore not the
state that holds the atoms of civil society together, but the fact that they are atoms only in imagination in the heaven of their fancy. . . . Only
political superstition still imagines today that civil life must be held together by the state, whereas in reality, on the contrary, the state is held
together by civil life.”15 While this definition accounts, in part, for Marx’s optimism toward the state form as a vehicle for redistribution, that
optimism decomposes under the weight of difference as it is instrumentalized through racial capitalism’s accumulative drive.Moreover,
the parameters of “civil life” as the domain of the human in turn produce the fiction of the state that
distributes it. As anarchists like Kuwasi Balagoon saw in nationalism, and Frantz Fanon discerned in his analysis of colonialism, the state is
fashioned from singularities, yet the structure maintains the racialized, gendered, and classed demands that enable its appearance as an
intelligible force.16Further, the state relies on this theo-juridical genealogy to lay claim to its own
inevitability. We are under the administration of the state because we are its subjects; we are subjects because we reside under the state’s
rule. Through this tautology, the state is not something external to the social but is civil society’s collective projection. This relationship
between those held by the state (perhaps most importantly as exclusion, or negative value) and the
state form might be called, by Michel Foucault and others, normativity. Yet just as the state is able to maintain itself
through adjustment and absorption, normativity too is defined not exclusively by its rigidity but through its flexibility. While this argument
allows us to see how power’s methodologies are strikingly incoherent, their impacts remain rather predictable. Indeed, those categories most
viciously subjected to violence have persisted since the moment of settler contact and chattel slavery, yet the tools administering this cruelty
are ever adapting, which is among the reasons for their endurance.17 Thus, I work to apprehend, as might be expected, direct attacks—the
personal or group acts committed against specific people where consistency and similarity build a frequency of shared destruction that undoes
the assumed singularity of their actors. Through an attention to the phenomenology of these murders, we are able to push against the
narrative that argues these are random acts that express nothing beyond the will of their instigators. However, in tandem with these direct
attacks is a paradigmatic neglect, perhaps akin to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s “organized abandonment,” where rhythms of restriction that might not
reveal themselves as such forcefully reduce one’s capacity toward the world.18 This includes the anti-Black distribution of HIV/AIDS,
imprisonment, houselessness, and other practices that do not simply impact populations but forge such a totalizing power that they radically
constrict not only life chances but life itself. This structuring antagonism offers a method for considering violence as a generalized field of
knowledge that maintains this collective undoing, lived as personal tragedy, of those lost to modernity. Yet violence also remains a tactic of
communal interdiction, anticolonial struggle, and trans/queer flourishing against an otherwise deadly world.19
------------------------------------------------
What is queer?
Defined as sexual or behavioral? As opposition to normativity? How
do these static definitions apply with complexities of me?
My voice register isn’t high, my hair isn’t long or dyed, I don’t say
“slay”, my friends are cishet white dudes who play video games, I
dress like a Midwestern dad in his forties, how can I fail so badly at
being queer by just being me?
The unwavering definition of queer creates another binary within
itself
The homonormative and the excessive
The normative is simplified into the stereotypes applicable to their
chosen label, digestible enough to be secured, albeit in a repressed
form of their authentic self
The excessive truly represents their internal desire through their
external actions, freely expressive, yet at the cost of an inconsistent
identity that renders them beyond regulation, beyond
comprehension, and thus, a threat
The question of what is queer is indeed similar to the discourse of
security
It creates a distinction between normative inside and excessive
outside which renders the queer subject with an impossible choice
Assimilate, or die.
------------------------------------------------
Choosing normativity leads to microfascism – fluid desires are policed
to avoid awakening dominant anxieties, leading to internal repression
of processes of becoming and precluding genuine social relations
Braidotti ‘22 (Rosi Braidotti; professor of philosophy at Utrecht University and founding director of the
Netherlands School of Women’s Studies, and was knighted by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands (lol?).
“Virginia Woolf, Imminence, and Ontological Pacifism”
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/ccs.2022.0439 June 2022) // ELog

Her writing
Therefore, the nonhuman dimension of Woolf’s work becomes even more prominent, through heterogeneous alliances.
traces non-human, a-subjective and pre-personal patterns of becoming in a chain of interrelations that
constitute a distributed kind of subjectivity. This suggests that consciousness is not the prerogative of the humans alone and
neither is it linked to bound, single individuals. Nor is it ‘collectivized’ within a dialectical scheme that posits one entity, be it a social class or
even a multitude, as the transcendent category that drives the progress of world history. I do not apply to my materialism a Hegelian-Marxist
paradigm of dialectical oppositions, but rather a neo-Spinozist continuum in which the vitality of self-organizing matter and the parallelism
mind-body support a relational vision of the subject. What I have called nomadic subjectivity gets actualized transversally, in-between
nature/culture, male/female, black/white, local/global, and present/past, in assemblages that flow across and displace the binaries.8 These in-
between states are not dialectical opposites, but processes of becoming that defy the logic of excluded middles. They design alternatives to the
unitary visions of the subject that are actualized in a new alliance of critique with creation, resisting the restrictive grip of dialectical reason. It is
a neo-materialist immanent philosophy, which assumes that all matter is one and that it is intelligent and self-organizing (auto-poietic) as a
process ontology.9 A philosophy of this kind is zoe-, geo- and techno-centred, and it also helps us illuminate the affective psychic sphere and
the crucial influence of social and cultural forces. This new materialist approach resists the capitalization of living matter by the profit principle,
which is the axiomatic rule of advanced or cognitive capitalism.10 It redefines the subject away from possessive individualism into a nomadic
frame of transversal relational subjectivities. Subjects are relational entities capable of mobilizing and activating connections in encounters with
multiple others, human and non-human, organic and technological. Subjectivity is a matter of power understood as potentia, that is to say not
as restrictive, but as an empowerment to relate more and better . Consciousness here is an extended entity, a distributed faculty, which aims at
expanding our relational capacity, that is to say our ability to take in and on more of the world. Relationality is a matter of a geometry of forces:
speed and slowness, movement and rest, affects and differential ways of becoming. Subjectivity can then be redefined as a praxis and a
process, a relational capacity to take on and cut across what are usually segregated into bound identities, classes and categories. Life
in this
mode is a pre-personal and impersonal force; a process ontology freed from the contingencies of bound
individualism. Honouring it requires ethical accountability for the sustainability of these assemblages or transversal compositions.
SEXUALITY Life thus defined as self-organizing matter and intelligent living force is always already sexed, or rather sexuate,11 where sexual
difference is not an essentialist concept, but a dynamic verb: differing. And what differing does is to flow in a multiplicity of directions that
cannot be contained within binary dialectical oppositions but must be conceptualized as multi-directional, nomadic or rhizomic processes of
sexual differing. Differing is a relational move, a dis/re-connection that operates within, as well as across all entities. That is to say, the
polymorphous perverse force of sexuality as a complex multiplicity operates before, beneath and beyond the binary mechanism of capture of
gender as a social system. This vital materialist vision of sexed matter, known as sexuate materialism, implies a rejection of anthropocentrism,
in that it stretches the non-unitary vision of subjectivity to embrace both organic non-humans (animals and the Earth) and inorganic ones
(technological artefacts, radios, computational networks, algorithms, codes, etc). In my brief analysis of Woolf’s love affair with Vita Sackville-
West, which inspired Orlando (1928), I stress the ‘shimmering intensity’ of the space or ‘milieu’ where this desire unfolds.12 Virginia Woolf
captures the elemental erotic energy of living matter, not without pain, but with perception and elegance. Not only does she write about the
perpetual motion of the waves, the flickering street lights and the flow of cabs on Oxford Street in London, but she brings the cosmic and the
technological phenomena together in a fluctuating continuum. This captures the shimmering materiality of the world, defying partitions as well
as bland linearity, in a sort of mutual seduction into ‘Life’. Woolf’s molecular sensibility illustrates the point that sexuality is elemental,
geological, meteorological and cross-species. Desire
is a principle that organizes entire territories and draws its own
affective landscapes of becoming by including non-human elements, like the quality of the light and the
curve of the wind. Sexuality constitutes the transversal plane of immanence that goes beyond individual psychologies and circumstances,
playing on something much more elemental, more raw: an increase or acceleration of the capacity to affect and be affected. To return to earth
and at the level of socially sanctioned identities, of course, this is a lesbian love story, but at a transversal or nomadic level of non-unitary
subjectivity it transcends bounded identity and socio-biographical specificity. It opens up to a trans-individual space of affirmation of the
transversal and depersonalized force of desire as the vector of transformation. Exceeding the social categories, the gender labels of identity
usually associated with sexual preferences, desire produces the enlargement of one’s relations and capacity to experience. In pleasure as in
pain, in secular, spiritual, erotic modes of desire that combine elements from all of these dimensions, they result in decentring and opening the
individual egos. Relating at such speed and scale entails not only interaction at a very deep level with other fellow human beings, but also a
heightening of one’s sense of perception. This quickening of the pace of life is what Vita Sackville-West was for Virginia Woolf. She was a
meteorological, zoological, trans-historical force; so much so, that Virginia could barely sustain the impact of the life in Vita (whose name is
Latin for life) and the intensity of her. What Woolf knew all too well is that desire as ontological, differential and vital (conatus/potentia) entails
the depersonalization of the self, in a gesture of everyday transcendence of the ego, an expansion into radical immanence. Desire is a
connecting force that links the self to larger internal and external relations. This is what I would see as an intensive queer theory: sexuate and
heterogeneous intensities beyond, beneath and before the binary mechanism of gender and its phallocentric premises; sexuality is always
before and beyond gender.13 It is noteworthy however that this vital new materialism, which predicates desire not so much on lack and law,
but on relational affirmation and plenitude, is always already social. Therefore, desire also plays a role in the production of political beliefs and
passions, in the affects that structure our social imaginary and political aspirations, including the negative ones. Notably, the instances
of microfascism I mentioned earlier, that is to say the paradox of a desire that desires its own
repression, its un-freedom. This is a crucial aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s work in Anti-Oedipus and parts of A Thousand Plateaus,
especially in their analysis of both historical and contemporary forms of fascism.14 It is the love for a strongman who promises to solve all your
problems, to make the trains run on time, to restore the British Empire, and to chase away all foreigners so that white people can sit in
triumphant supremacism. That is to say, the delusional, infantile, homicidal quality of a desire that desires its own extinction. Sylvia Plath
exposes precisely this social and individual pathology in her anti-oedipal manifesto ‘Daddy’: Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face,
the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. [. . . ] I made a model of you, [. . . ] And I said I do, I do. [. . . ] There’s a stake in your fat black heart And
the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.15
Desire, the movement of ontological relational forces that aspire to connection and immanence, is
repressed by microfascism; in its place arises a sick social body deprived of relational force and empathic
knowhow. This is what Deleuze and Guattari called a cancerous social body of fragmented and self-
contained, self-referential toxic units. Patriarchy is one such pathological social body, where women are expected to hold up a
mirror to the patriarch, as Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own, so that he can reflect himself twice the size, possibly more.16 Microfascists
are molecular molarities produced by complex assemblages that give desire a belligerent, violent, repressive determination. This reduction is
precisely what ethical, anti-fascist subjects need to be on guard against. Proliferating
microfascists install war machines
everywhere, saturating the social, psychic and environmental spaces with destructive drives , as Virginia
Woolf noted in her anti-fascist pamphlet Three Guineas. 17 The movement of the microfascist
assemblage is not that of creating connections, but that of sealing off, molarizing self and others. The
‘fascist inside you’ is the totalizing organism that destroys relations and instils suspicion and hatred. It
moreover tends to xenophobically scapegoat all the others – notably the sexualized (women, LGBTQ+)
and racialized (Black, Indigenous, decolonial) others – who have to carry the blame for the anxieties and
sense of failing of the dominant subjects. This scapegoating practice is loaded with epistemic and social
violence and it takes place at the expense of pursuing adequate understanding of the conditions of our
freedom and un-freedom.18 Spinoza defined the ethical life as an adequate understanding of the condition of our bondage;
adequate understanding, not delusional fantasies. What adequate understanding reconnects us to is the relational energy, the ontological
desire to persevere in one’s life alongside a multitude of others. Returning desire to its affirmative structure is a way of learning to live the non-
fascist life, that is to say, a life guided by the ethics of relational affirmation against the stream and in spite of our times of violent dis-
aggregation.

Choosing excess leads to necropolitics – normativity can only be

invisibly secured within civil society by the visibility of the non-
normative subject without – the true queer is necessarily excluded by
hegemonic institutions into a world of living death
Lawless ‘17 (Evan Lawless; Ph.D. researcher at Curtin University. “Bitchy Fags and Borderline Queers:
The Tension Between Subjective Homonormativity and Queerness in William S. Burroughs’ Queer”
https://www.academia.edu/37500835/Bitchy_Fags_and_Borderline_Queers_The_Tension_Between_Su
bjective_Homonormativity_and_Queerness_in_William_S_Burroughs_Queer_ October 2017) // ELog
In a letter that Burroughs wrote to Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in 1955, Burroughs derisively regards effeminate gay men as “complete
swish faeries” who were “traitors to the cause of queerness … selling out the human race to the forces of negation and death” (Burroughs 1994,
298 as cited in Glover and Kaplan 2009, 123). This statement from Burroughs not only posits the distinction between gay and queer, but that
Burroughs is able to direct his hate toward the ‘swish faerie’ means that he benefits from the systems of control he wishes to elude. In positing
the ‘swish faerie’ as outside of himself, he marginalizes an ‘undesirable’ subjecthood, placing himself within the centre of heteronormative
thought as he renders the body of the ‘swish faerie’ visible. It was the opinion of ‘the gays’ that by breaking with the diseased past and working
towards heteronormative excellence that “gay men could achieve a maturity cast as normalcy that would safeguard health and purchase,
sometime in the unspecified future, a place at the table of political negotiations” (Castiglia & Reed 2012, 3). In essence, gay people work to
‘betray’ the queer past in order to make themselves more acceptable to the ‘state of exception.’ In a reading of the state of exception, Puar
states that “the exception insidiously becomes the rule and the exceptional is normalized as a regulatory ideal or frame” (2007, 9).
Homonormativity, which finds itself in this instance nearly interchangeable with the homonational18,
“can be read as a formation complicit with and invited into the biopolitical valorization of life in its
inhabitation and reproduction of heteronormative norms” (9); the object of this mission is for the
homosexual subject to disarm itself of any threatening sexualities and prove that it can be
(re)productive within a capitalist framework19 . Within neoliberalism there occurs the need to reframe oneself as a winner,
the homosexual can no longer afford to indulge itself in sexual politics and trying to radically rethink the way that sexuality is understood, the
Isobel Lorey argues that the mission of the neoliberal state,
homosexual must now demand and demonstrate normalcy.
which employs biopolitics (La Berge & Slobodian 2017, 7), is to achieve security through the elimination
of the precarious subject, which is achieved through two methods: the integration of the ‘other’ who
can be neutralised, and the expulsion of the ‘other’ who cannot, a process that Lorey terms biopolitical
immunization (Lorey 2015). This immunization against precarity can be seen in homonormativity, which Lisa Duggan reasons, moves
deliberately to create a “demobilized gay constituency … anchored in domesticity and consumption” (Duggan 2002, 179). The move toward
homonormativity has two effects. One, there is a reinforcement through biopolitics, of precarity as a producer of economic, social and legal
inequality (Lorey 2015); two, when there is a system of precarity which determines that anyone can be exceptional the only social categories
that will be left are winners and losers (Berardi 2015). Subjectivity under a neoliberal society determines that the worth of all bodies is
evaluated through economy and production. Failure to demonstrate an economic value means that precarious populations “suffer from failing
social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (Butler 2009, 25). As subjects
become increasingly marginalised by a failure to meet the demands of exception, biopolitical immunization provides the means for subjects to
reduce their precarity through specific techniques of self-formation (Lorey 2015). This self-formation comes in the shape of productivity,
defined by twentieth century thinker Georges Bataille as being the growth of economy, “the very principle of living matter requires that the
chemical operations of life … be gainful, productive of surpluses” (1989, 27). As such, all matters of biological life become profitable under
neoliberalism, even ‘broken’ bodies. Puar argues that the body of the debilitated subject is profitable in both its injury and the drive to recover
from injury (2011); for instance, by purchasing medicine, attending physiotherapy, seeking medical attention, and any other method by which
A subject’s fear of becoming Other in neoliberalism, pushes them to
human lives can be preserved and extended.
remain productive and continually work toward being exceptional, especially since “ sovereign agency
signifies the power to permit any life to endure or not” (Berlant 2007, 756). Biopower positions subjects so that the
inability to move into the state of exception from precarity is the fault of the individual subject, and here homonormativity emerges as the
means by which homosexuals can move into the state of exception. Notably, homosexual subjectivity was considered tightly regulated pre-
neoliberalism, in what Peter Drucker identifies as being the “classic gay identity” (2011, 8), this identity was fractured under neoliberalism due
to capitalisms privileging of certain bodies. The classic gay identity was placed within the frame of the closet, where to be homosexual was so
unthinkable, and as such classic gay identity was only bestowed upon those who identified as being exclusively attracted to those of the same
sex and those excluded had either changed their gender-identity, or had heterosexual marriages and family (2011, 8). The privileging that
occurred was through class segregation, where gay and lesbian people in the middleclasses had their needs and rights addressed in order to
bolster their consumption and production, and homosexuals were less thought of as inhabiting a sexual space and more as inhabiting an
economic space (2011, 14). The pressure which neoliberalism places on bodies, what Puar terms the “liberal eugenics of lifestyle programming”
(Puar 2011, 153), falls outside the scope of Drucker’s research. For Puar, bodily capacity is constantly being revised, to the point where
neoliberalism demands that limits should always be exceeded, this revaluing positions the body as always debilitated, because its potential is
always expanding (2011, 153). Lauren Berlant argues that “we learned most recently from AIDS, that the epidemic concept is not a neutral
description; it’s inevitably part of an argument about classification, causality, responsibility, degeneracy” (2007, 763). Berlant’s point here is
that the descriptor ‘epidemic’ does not exist within a neutral discourse, it itself is loaded with the notion that epidemics can only be inflicted
upon the poor, or deviant. The
example of AIDS serves to highlight the point in neoliberalism where
homosexual subjectivity fractured, when faced with being discursively framed by ‘epidemic’ and being
seen as deviant and Other, some homosexuals decided to become exceptional subjects, to reject bodily
debility, as other homosexuals held firm to their marginal status. Homonormativity or, Exceptional Faggots In
neoliberalism, it seems that subjectivity is not the domain of precariousness (that precariousness populates subjectivity), rather, it is the
opposite, that precariousness is the domain that subjectivity inhabits. Gabriel Giorgi identifies that under neoliberalism “subjectivity now has to
create, to invent, to design ways to affirm its own indeterminacy, which neoliberalism has turned into its own manifest condition” (2013, 69).
Giorgi is arguing that precarity is not a trait of subjectivity, rather subjectivity deliberately inhabits precarity; precarity signals its own
ontological position of injuriousness, a horizon of power that subjectivity must form itself on. More specifically, Giorgi states that, “precarity in
its very rhetorical and semantic instability imposes new orderings of the visible, of the sensible, and of the signifiable” (2013, 71). As a result, a
subjectivity which manifests itself through precarity and neoliberalism is placed within a position of, what Jane Elliot has termed, suffering
agency. In neoliberal societies, there is significant pressure placed on homosexuals to either adhere to the social order or to reject it, and this
This suffering agency presents choice to provide subjects with the
choice signals the presence of suffering agency.
idea that agency20 is possible, though decision making is made impossible as all choices which are
presented are already prefigured within a system of logic that has determined which options are
possible and which are impossible (Elliot 2013). This domination of power over subjectivity is about reframing choice as
“intrinsically linked to the need for the subject to take significant action on his or her own behalf” (Elliot 2013, 85), as opposed to power
stripping the potential for subjective agency away, it rather limits choices subjects are able to take. The potency of this domination is due to
another overarching logic of neoliberalism, that is, the drive for selfpreservation, representative of that adage that ‘life is suffering.’ Any
homonormative subject adhering to the neoliberal hegemony will be under the governing logic of self-preservation. This
culturally
determined instinct for self-preservation is what gives drive for the subjects suffering-agency, as the
value of life is placed so high that death cannot be even be an option. In William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice
(1979) the protagonist, Sophie, while suffering under Nazi occupation, is made to choose which one of her two children should die, the choice is
such that Sophie cannot truly choose, yet the governing logic of self-preservation determines that she cannot conceive of her own death as an
alternative option Elliot argues that, “life becomes the interest of politics because it is the ultimate interest, the one intransigent, overriding
concern that everyone can be assumed to share” (2013, 91). This seems to reinforce the Enlightenment value of life and living critiqued through
the concept of continuous and discontinuous life. For Bataille, humans possess discontinuous life, a life that will end, which frightens them, and
Bodies are buried and murder is outlawed, the
as such things like death and violence become abjected in human cultures.
ultimate effect of which is to make violence and death acceptable only if sanctioned by the State (1986,
46). When a homosexual has come into their own sexuality21 the choice of the State presents itself; the choice is never one of belonging
because although homosexuals are allowed to exist within the state, they will never belong to the state (Kagan 2014, 82). That is, they are able
to occupy the state of inquiry, wherein value is placed on cultural and economic input to a society, but not for sexual or moral contributions.
Under neoliberalism, homosexual subjects must be conscious of their bodies, a policing desire, modifying campness22, to ensure that their
presence doesn’t pose a threat to the heterosexual hegemony. This supported by Mathias Nilges’ assertion that “the functioning of a given
capitalist regime requires suitable forms of subjectivity, thought, and culture that regulate the process of accumulation” (2015, 365).
Homosexuality is not an acceptable ‘agential’ subjectivity to possess and must appear heteronormative and ‘act the part’ of hegemony, or it
Homonormative subjects are deliberately working for their bodies to be rendered invisible, to
must opt out.
be on top of the status quo, the primary issue of this however, is that in order for their bodies to be
rendered invisible, they must necessarily render other bodies as visible. The effect of this is to “authorise the
unequal distribution of disembodiment” (2002, 122). I argued in the previous chapter for the imperative for subjective intelligibility as “it is the
body that matters23 today in cultural criticism” (Castronovo 2002, 120), where the choice to be made is between materiality and non-
materiality. To not have a body is a privilege, “to exist as a soul is to reap the rewards of generic personhood, but it is also to incur the
prohibitions that authorize the unequal distribution of disembodiment, abstract personhood, and other resources associated with the public
sphere” (2002, 122). This comes down to a subject’s awareness of bodily materiality, where to be rich, white, heterosexual, and male is to be
afforded a position where you never have to consider whether or not your body belongs in a public sphere; but, where to be other than
straight, other than white, or other than a man is to possess awareness of your body and its materiality. This awareness of materiality comes in
the form of conscious performances of identity by subjects. A prime example of this being Leo Bersani’s figure of the ‘leather queen.’ In this
example, ‘leather queens’ perform the task of submissive sexuality with childlike exuberance, yet outwardly presents themselves with the gruff
uniform of the serially masculine (2010, 14). The leather queen can persist only as an oxymoron; it is tolerated as an insult to masculinity only
because it is a spectacle, because in defiling masculinity, the leather queen pays tribute to it and simultaneously acknowledges its own lack. This
is because, as Bersani argues, the gay homosexual parodies heterosexual sexuality and iconography24 (2010, 14). As Bersani states “parody is
an erotic turn-off, and all gay men know this. Much campy talk is parodistic, and while that may be fun at a dinner party, if you’re out to make
someone you turn off the camp” (14). Bersani reasons that contemporary gay identity has emerged from a desublimating of desire within an
inherently homophobic society which led to the de-sexualisation of gayness as a whole, which both Bersani and Watney agree was encouraged
by the AIDS crisis25 (2010, 26). Queerness or, Borderline Characters A passive homosexual subjectivity which performs heteronormativity and
represses its own desire is not the only possibility. The opposite of homonormativity is queerness, and that queerness “figures, outside and
beyond its political symptoms, the place of the social order’s death drive” (Edelman 2004, 3). The purpose of analyzing this is to address here
whether or not the queer can exist for itself, or, must it always be placed in opposition to the normative, to define and be defined against. It is
in the place of death and dead things that Lee Edelman believes the queer can become truly oppositional. As demonstrated through subjectivity
which intrinsically is positioned in opposition to something in order to define the limits of its own body; Edelman figures the queer as what
hegemonic subjectivity defines itself against. Edelman contends in No Future that “attending to the persistence of something internal to reason
that reason refuses” (2004, 5), the act of this figuration is to position the queer as queer in as much as it exposes the constructedness of reality.
It is necessary to position the queer as oppositional because , as I’ve argued, not all homosexual bodies
are Other, and the homonormative “may, in fact, be integral to maintaining forms of nationalism that
reify hetero- and homonormative hegemonies” (Shakhsari 2014). Once again, the idea emerges that
there is a duality in homosexual identity, “this duality creates an abiding conflict between those who
demand the freedom to be otherly and those who pursue the right to be normal” (Goldstein 2002, 11).
The queer subject strives to exist outside the social order full of signifying power which can upset and
disturb the hegemonic order, yet in order to achieve this the queer subject must be disavowed by the
order it wishes to critique. It is not sufficient that the queer subject undertakes the position of Other,
but that it must as well be disavowed by the heteronormative neoliberal hegemony in order to fully
become the Other. The new power of signification creates a point at which the queer body can adopt an ontology of its own, which will
be discussed in the next section, having moved outside of the social, it exists purely outside the margins, having accepted its separate ontology
it can move beyond the position of being subsumed. The queer body in this figuration exists outside any states, be it of siege, inquiry, or
exception, and the queer can inhabit a space where it holds no fixed referent26 (Eng 2010, 34). Yet, as Jonathan Kemp states, “queer is
whatever is at odds with the norm … as such it has an inherently political motivation that sees sexuality itself as inherently political” (2009, 12),
which comes to conflict with aspects of the queer that desire to be completely outside.

------------------------------------------------
What is queer? What needs secured?
Why should I answer these questions, which create a false dichotomy
which assumes the predictable archetype one can grasp is as natural
as the inconsistent one always limited out?
We reject the stable definitions which necessarily divide the world
into true and false, good and bad, along the same lines of what we
expect and what we cannot comprehend
In favor of an ever changing, every fluid, and ever beyond binary
identity-as-becoming
For there is the world of excessive queerness, deadly yet free
There is the secure mental prison of normativity
I am a regular resident of both
And I am a frequent and sporadic traveler of the area in-between
------------------------------------------------
We advocate a method of becoming queer – we reject the static,
arboreal being grounded in opposition to heteronormativity in favor
of a fluid, rhizomatic assemblage – we escape the linear movements
defined in relation to the center from which they reject towards an
ever changing and ever different queerness yet to come
Ruffolo ‘9 (David Ruffolo; lecturer in education at University of Toronto. “Post-Queer Politics” pg 42-50
2009) // ELog
In what follows, I demonstrate how a post-queer politics of dialogical-becomings is less interested in, for example, what bodies are (what seems
I am referring to
to have consumed poststructural theorizations over the past few decades) and more concerned with what they can do.
the critical and necessary shift from being to becoming—one that offers an important political
philosophy for contemporary queer studies to consider the flows and connections of life rather than
how life is represented in and through meaning structures such as language. As Claire Colebrook explains,
Deleuze’s political philosophy is different from many poststructuralists because it is not intended to explain “how systems such as language
both come into being and how they mutate through time” but to instead think about “a difference and becoming that would not be the
becoming of some being” (2002, 3). The creativity of dialogical-becomings is this potential to understand difference as pure becoming rather
than a subjective process. Consequently, the movements of this project operate as desiring-machines that make and break connections. These
potentialities desire not to produce meaning (as we see in subjectivity) but to produce for the sake of pure difference. In other words,
dialogical-becomings are productions of productions that simultaneously produce desire and a desire for production. In agreement with Patricia
MacCormack: Desire can be a project of experimentation, but like metamorphoses of desire— becomings—it cannot be turned on and off.
Desire is a continuity that changes trajectories of relations and saturations. Desire is redistribution of self and world, self in the world, the world
in self, and self as world” (2008, 1). In what follows, I will explore post-queer dialogical-becomings by situating Deleuze and Guattari’s
schizoanalysis as a tension between desiring-machines and Body without Organs (BwO). The abolishment of the individual and
society, as outlined above, is realized in this relationship between desiring-machines and Body without
Organs where life is no longer a subjective capacity but a creative process that continuously becomes-
other. As MacCormack correctly identifies, “Deleuze and Guattari’s challenge is that we make ourselves a Body without Organs, a body which
reorganizes the flesh, refusing its emergence only through pre-ordained signifiers which make it legible” (102). Desiring-machines and Body
without Organs account for the reterritorializations and deterritorializations of life, respectively, and it is through these tensions that the
potentialities of dialogical-becomings can be actualized. Desiring-Production A political philosophy of becoming is one that functions through
flows of desiring-machines: “Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being
driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1). Unlike in subjectivity where desire
is based on lack (such as subjects desiring objects), schizoanalytic desire is the flow itself rather than how such flows can be represented in a
priori systems of language. It is, as Paul Patton explains, “precisely the force which welds together those singular, disparate elements to form a
machine, and conversely, desire does not exist outside of such machine-assemblages” (2001b, 1091). Deleuze and Guattari give the example of
the flow connecting a breast-machine and a mouth-machine: an organ-machine (breast-machine) is always connected to an energy-machine
(mouth-machine) creating times, flows, and interruptions.3 This
moves us away from the limitations of subject positions
that must refer back to a central core such as the self in order to be intelligible. Whereas subjectivity sees two
coherent subjects—one producing milk (the mother) and the other acquiring milk (the baby)—becoming refers to the flows that are produced
through the connections that are made between desiring-machines. Becoming is a multiplicity of intersecting desiring-machines that constitute
creative assemblages that are always becoming-other. Each flow is constituted by the connection of two desiring-machines and is only possible
when an interruption occurs: the moment the breast-machine and the mouth-machine create a flow, the breast-machine and the mouth-
machine detach from other desiring-machines. Everything is desiring-production: This is because there is always a flow-producing machine, and
another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast—the mouth). And because the first machine is in turn
connected to another whose flow it interrupts or partially drains off, the binary series is linear in every direction. Desire constantly couples
continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 5) Desire is organized along
the flows of desiring-machines and in order to create a new flow an existing flow must be broken. Unlike self/other binaries that make a
distinction between production and the product, these grafting processes do not make such a differentiation because everything is a production
of production. It is the productive flows of life and not the representations of subject positions that inform a critical politics of becoming and
more specifically post-queer dialogical-becomings. A politics based on flows rather than subject positions considers everything to be a desiring-
machine that is connected with another desiring-machine through a system of interruptions. What differentiates a system of interruption
(becoming) from a system of meaning (subjectivity) is that interruptions do not destruct flows but constitute them; for the latter, a signifying
departure differentiates itself from an existing representation in order to establish a new resignification. As MacCormack states: “There is
power in the reiteration of signification. Semiotic structures do not subject people to meaning. They allow them to become meaningful within
systems established before their existence” (2008, 23-25). For example, queer distinguishes itself from heteronormativity by disrupting
heteronormative practices through the creation of new queer spaces. A break within a system of interruptions, however, produces the flow
itself where, for instance, post-queer emerges out of the limitations of the queer/ heteronormative dyad. In other words, post-queer does not
function within the queer/heteronormative dyad but emerges as a result of the necessity to break away from it. Consequently, post-queer does
not simply break away from the queer/heteronormative dyad and leave it behind. In contrast, the break itself constitutes the flow from queer
to post-queer. Every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at the same time is also a
flow itself, or the production of a flow, in relation to the machine connected to it. This is the law of the production of production. That is why, at
the limit point of all the transverse or transfinite connections, the partial object and the continuous flux, the interruption and the connection,
fuse into one: everywhere there are breaks-flows out of which desire wells up, thereby constituting its productivity and continually grafting the
process of production onto the product. (36-37) I am therefore not suggesting, as I explain in plateau one, that we replace queer with post-
queer but to reconsider how we account for the flows of life itself. Desiring-machines function when they are not working properly. We see
this clearly in the queer/heteronormative dyad that has reached its political peak: it is currently in a
dormant status because it is limited by subjective capacities. Post-queer is able to function because
queer is unable to politically move forward since it is stuck in the endless cycle of being. I assert that a
political philosophy of becoming can create the critical spaces to move forward without being limited by
the past. Rhizomatic Multiplicities To restate an argument outlined above, post-queer dialogical-becomings have the potential to create new
political connections that are indefinitely becoming-other. Dialogical-becomings are highly complex networks that are connected systemically
rather than structurally. Following
Deleuze and Guattari’s botanical example, post-queer politics is not
arborescence (a tree) but rhizomatic (grass). Queer has in many respects become a sum of multiple parts through its
relationship to heteronormativity; it functions hierarchically where the political movements of queer have almost exclusively been in relation to
the queer/heteronormative structure (arborescence). In contrast to this, I see post-queer as a system of intersecting linear multiplicities
because it embodies the characteristics of the rhizome: Unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any points to any other point, and its
traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even non-sign states. The
rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a
multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (n + 1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It
has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n
dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n –
1). When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 21) A rhizome can not be defined upon its entrance into a multiplicity. We see this more often than not when queer as a political
project is defined by its disruption of heteronormative practices. There is a vast amount of literature on this topic and so it would be
inappropriate and impossible to account for all of these projects here. I outline some of these movements in plateau one and so I do not want
Movement within
to repeat myself. I want to instead focus on a few common elements that characterize these disruptive projects.
arborescence always refers back to a fixed core: it is highly referential. Although queer prides itself on
being mobile and fluid, these movements are always and only possibilities that are more often than not
in relation to heteronormative structures.4 I am thinking of concerns that arise around a politics that must continuously ask
itself “how queer can queer go?” (i.e., how far can queer move away from heteronormativity and how radical can queer be as a disruptive
politics). Thisleads to a second element of ordered progression where to be the queerest of queers implies
a linear structure that moves further and further away from heteronormativity. This movement, while radically
redefining heteronormative structures, is always and only in relation to heteronormativity. Lastly, duality is central to
arborescence. Although queer appropriately disturbs the binary organization of identity politics
(male/female; masculine/feminine; gay straight)5 its own politics relies on an explicit opposition to
heteronormative structures. Having said all of that, it is obvious that not all queer projects work to reject heteronormativity outright
and I certainly do not want to suggest that there is such a thing as a universal queer. Think of, for instance, the exceptional movements that
Muñoz makes regarding disidentification as a strategy to challenge dominant ideology: Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with
dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that
works on and against dominant ideology. Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or
attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counter-identification, utopianism), this ‘working on and against’ is a strategy that tried to
transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of
local or everyday struggles of resistance. (1999, 11-12) The politics of “working on and against” has certainly redefined the possibilities for
queer to rethink normative practices. I argue, however, that while disidentification does not strictly refute heteronormativity—its strategy to
work on and against—it can only engage a sense of politics by entering into the multiplicity of dominant ideology. Rhizomatic networks, in
contrast, are defined when a line of flight is subtracted from a multiplicity: n – 1. So rather than entering the queer/heteronormative dyad,
post-queer politics emerge by subtracting from the impossibilities of this relationship. In other words, a rhizomatic politics does not assimilate,
oppose, or work on and against a preexisting framework because this supports binary structures even if the intent is to disrupt such
oppositions. Post-queer rhizomatic politics plateau the aforementioned binaries through deterritorialized lines of flight that do not require,
reinforce, or work within hierarchical structures. Dialogical-becomings
are nonhierarchical systems that are in
constant metamorphosis: “the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map
that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exists
and its own lines of flight” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21). Dialogical-becomings are multiplicities constituted by lines of
flight that occur the moment a rhizome is cut: in comparison to a politics based primarily on preceding discourses where movement always
refers to back to a central root, rhizomatic politics are always becoming-other through the infinite connections that are made and broken. The
deterritorializations inherent to dialogical-becomings are so productive because they not only reorganize preceding connections (even though
The
they are, of course, not determined by them) but they more importantly refigure the new rhizomes that they become attached to.
rhizome is schizophrenic because it does not have any “pretraced destiny ” (13) because movement does
not rely on predetermined structures.6 The difference between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis’ treatment of the unconscious
clearly marks the distinction that I am drawing here. Unlike the arboreal model of psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis considers the unconscious to
be a rhizomatic “acentered system.”7 Let us consider the relationship that is currently underway as you read this book. A relationship is being
formed amongst the book, the author, and the world as its context. An arborescent reading of this would see the world as reality, the book as a
representation of such a reality, and the author as the subjective voice of this relationship: what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the field of
reality (the world), the field of representation (the book), the field of subjectivity (the author). In arborescence, meaning is produced through
these associations where the book serves as a constant referential structure. Rhizomatics are conversely concerned with the assemblages of
such interactions where these “fields” are not considered independent entities that together create meaning: “an assemblage establishes
connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or
several authors as its subject” (23).8 Post-Queer Politics, the book itself, is not to be considered a central reference for the meaning of post-
queer: the intention of this project is not to provide a definitive account of what post-queer is. It is instead part of a much larger assemblage
that we can potentially consider post-queer where this project is but one line of flight that I hope continues to become-other as it makes and
breaks multiple theoretical, philosophical, and practical connections. Deterritorialized Becomings Dialogical-becomings are at the core of post-
queer politics. They are not static references and do not operate as subjective relationships. They are rhizomatic networks concerned with
production rather than representation. Dialogical-becomings are intended to move us away from a politics that differentiates A from B which
reinforces unnecessary and unproductive binaries. This is exemplified in how queer differentiates from heteronormativity. The creativity of
dialogical-becomings is the potential to move from A to x: from queer to post-queer, for example.9 I want to explore a politics of becomings
more thoroughly and how dialogical-becomings can engage the doings rather than beings of life. The becomings in dialogical-becomings refers
to Deleuze’s conception of difference that is not limited to, by, or within discourse, language, and meaning. Difference, as becoming, is always a
new production that, unlike, for instance, performativity, does not require a priori materializations for its intelligibility. This is because
dialogical-becomings are not a series that is defined in a sequence of resemblances (“a resembles b, b resembles c, etc.”)10 and they are not
structures because they are not comparisons (“a is to b as c is to d”).11 Dialogical-becomings are not rational in that they do
not follow prescribed rules of association. For example, we see this in the subjective capacities of self/other binaries and
identity categories where subjects become intelligible through meaning structures such as language.12 Dialogical-becomings are involutions
not evolutions: A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an
identification…To become is not to progress or regress along a series. Above all, becoming does not occur in the imagination, even when the
imagination reaches the highest cosmic or dynamic level…They are perfectly real…Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a
false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed
terms through which that which becomes passes. (237-238) Arboreal politics interested in what something is follow an evolutionary series or
structure that can only speak to the possibilities of life that have already emerged or the possibilities that can come out of that which has
already emerged (i.e., the reiteration of identity norms or the variations on such reiterations, respectively). Rhizomatic politics, of which I
consider post-queer to be a part, is concerned with the doings of life and the potentiality to become-other. With
dialogical-
becomings, unlike subjects, there is no central point of reference that all points refer to such as the self.
This is because difference is all there is in rhizomatics: A multiplicity is defined not by its elements, not by a center of unification or
comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its
nature. Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of
heterogeneous terms on symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its
thresholds and doors. (249) Dialogical-becomings are the thresholds that connect multiplicities: they are indefinitely becoming-other through
various connections that do not rely on a priori structures for their intelligibility. As outlined above, the difference between being and becoming
is central to post-queer rhizomatic politics and it is this tension that we have arrived at once again. Within representations, significations, and
identifications, there is a certain level of reiteration required in order for subjects to circulate through social fields (i.e., subjects must reiterate
specific identity norms in order to be read as intelligible). Moreover, subjectivity largely relies on language as the predominant way for
understanding life. Becoming, on the other hand, does not require reiterations or language structures to account for experience: “Becoming is
certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing
corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation” (239). Becoming is the plateau of
multiplicities: it cannot be characterized by a sum of its parts where each movement refers back to an original core; nor can it be accounted for
through preceding discourses that are concretized through ongoing reiterations. This, as I explain above, is an arboreal structuring of life.
Becoming is pure affect. It is defined by its potentialities as seen through the doings of life rather than the beings of life: We know
nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with
other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions
with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body. (257) Unlike subjects that are constituted through various subjugations that refer
back to coherent wholes, dialogical-becomings are potentialities themselves that are marked by movements and intensities. Having said that, it
is imperative that we avoid a positivistic reading of Deleuze and Guattari. In the following plateau, I will explain more thoroughly how Bakhtin
offers an important lens for Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy. This intersection involves an important consideration of Bakhtin’s social
heteroglossia where the doings of life become less positivistic and more contextual. This
is critical for a post-queer politics of
dialogical-becomings because equity and social justice are at the heart of such a politics and so it would
be inappropriate and unjustified to offer a political philosophy that can not account for the chronotopic
complexities of life itself.
Our method solves the normalization and control of queerness
through a refusal of fixed and essentialized identity for a fluid and
unending post-queer that exists beyond regulation
O’Rourke/Giffney ‘9 (Michael O’Rourke; professor of philosophy at Michigan State University with a
PhD in philosophy from Stanford University. Noreen Giffney; lecturer in psychoanalytic psychotherapy at
Ulster University. “Series Editors’ Preface [to Post-Queer Politics]” pg ix-xiii 2009) // ELog

David V. Ruffolo’s Post-Queer Politics puts queer studies and queer theory on the line. The body of queer
studies (the institutionalised body of knowledges which have sedimented queer theory, stultifying it, often empting out its potential) is he tells
But Ruffolo’s book
us ‘stagnant’, ‘dormant’, ‘solidified’, ‘stale’. Queer has reached its ‘peak’, reached the end, as it were, of the line.
disrupts this gloomy narrative by seeking to re-fluidify queer studies, to re-invent a queer theory with
the capacity to intervene, disrupt, and produce (the new, the unforeseen). Rather than suggesting or glorying in the
‘end of queer’ Ruffolo seeks instead to re-draw the maps, to bring about new lines of flight, and to effect a ‘potential deterritorialisation of
queer as we know it today’. As Alain Badiou says in his Handbook of Inaesthetics ‘we want a theatre of capacity, not of incapacity’ (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2005, 75) and what we get in Post-Queer Politics is a theatre for the production of intensive politics, a smooth space
where the potentialities of life can be renegotiated. Ruffolo’s schizoanalytic strategy is one of reading through rather than rejecting, one of
anticipation rather than paranoia. In the face of the increasing disciplining of all sorts of bodies (of theoretical work, of knowledge, of thought)
he energetically revivifies queer studies. The post- of the title is interruptive, anticipatory and Jasbir Puar advocates a similar strategy: ‘A
paranoid temporality therefore produces a suppression of critical creative politics; in contrast, the anticipatory temporalities that I advocate
more accurately reflect a Spivakian notion of ‘politics of the open end’, of positively enticing unknowable political futures into our wake, taking
risks rather than guarding against them” (Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, xx).
We are, the author riskily tells us, post-subjectivity, post-discursivity, post-identity, post-representation. This does not mean, nor should it, that
we are after subjectivity, or discourse, or identity. Ruffolo finds such binary thinking unproductive and invents a new language which is more
fructive, less about the after and more about the beside, the peri- rather than the post- understood as after, assemblage rather than gridlock.
By fusing Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari and Mikhail Bakhtin (and implicitly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s later Deleuzian inspired work on affect and
periperformativity) he is able to emphasise crowding, besideness and dialogical connection. This move has massive ramifications for queer
The post-queering of queer shifts all the
studies and queer theory, and as Ruffolo himself points out, for theory in general.
cornerstones (if one can say such a thing) of queer studies, shapes a new ontology (or even, perhaps, a
deontology) for queer theory, one which strongly resembles Chrysanthi Nigianni’s vision in Deleuze and
Queer Theory where she exhorts us to ‘imagine, form and actualise new forms of political agency:
instead of communities of an identitarian logic, machinic assemblages; instead of the individual, a
crowd; instead of identities, singularities; instead of representations, expressions’ (‘Introduction’,
Nigianni and Merl Storr (eds) Deleuze and Queer Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009,
7). By re-thinking and re-assessing the position and influence of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler in
queer studies, Ruffolo is able to exploit Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology or intensive politics of
becoming, and this is a necessary intervention if we want to think about a non-essentialised or non-
assertable queer ‘identity’. The decentered theory (it is, after all, theory itself which Ruffolo interferes with) we get in Post-Queer
Politics is what we would call a Theory without Organs (TwO), analogous to Deleuze and Guattari’s Body without Organs (BwO). By co-
assembling the motifs of becoming and the Body without Organs, Ruffolo can dis-assemble bodies of power, desire, and institution as they have
been understood in Western formations. This newly sketched ontology of becoming (of post-queer) challenges the concretised homo- and
hetero- sexual identities on which some (perhaps most) versions of queer theory have depended. But Ruffolo’s post-queer bodies
refuse to be stabilised, fixed, binarised, regulated, disciplined, controlled. And if post-queer theory is critical of
theory itself, then it can also be said that post-queer identity is critical of queer identity itself too. Post-queer, on Ruffolo’s terms
undoes identity, is an identity without an essence. Post-queer is multiple, fluid, rhizomatic, always in
tension with stasis, permanence, and striation. Post-queer theory, then, is a rhizomic Theory without Organs (or organisation),
always in the process of becoming, always being opened by the outside. By refocusing the argument on biopower toward questions of
immanence, desiring-machines and biovirtualities (the virtual and material productivities of life) Ruffolo effects a swerve away from (or rather a
It is this turn from the
reading through) Foucauldian, Butlerian, and Agambenian frameworks towards a Deleuzoguattarian analysis.
policing of bodies (in all the senses of this term) toward bodily becoming that the practical and
theoretical force of queer can really take flight. And Ruffolo calls this, drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, a
radically democratic post-queer theory, a democracy which is open rather than closed to the world. We might, borrowing from Reza
Negarestani in Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: Re.Press, 2008), call this a ‘polytics’ of anomalous or unnatural
participation with the outside, a set of ‘schizotrategies’ for openness and insurgency. For Negarestani and Ruffolo ‘the plane of openness’
means being opened by rather than open to, means lodging oneself on the TwO. And, Ruffolo reminds us, this being opened by entails a certain
responsibility, what Lisa Henderson calls ‘a preserving and consoling receptivity that is hard to find and harder to hold onto in these mean
times’ (‘Every Queer Thing We Know’, The Massachusetts Review, xlix 1/2 [Spring/Summer 2008], 79). In the mean times Ruffolo describes in
these pages it is possible to make intelligible the Deleuzoguattarian claim that queer is a process (always en process, always tocome), not an
object; an active engagement not a rigid and stable (theoretical or sexual) identity; a performative praxis not a fixed (or fixable) category. We
might, after Jeffrey Nealon, call Ruffolo’s post-queer politics an ‘alterity politics of response’ (Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative
Subjectivity, Duke University Press, 1998, 15). To reiterate: David Ruffolo’s experimental book-machine Post-Queer Politics puts Queer Theory
‘on the line’, the original title for the opening plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, a book which begins with two queer declarations and the
opening pages of which need to be re-read alongside the present volume for an incipient theorisation of post-queer politics: First, that ‘The two
of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd’. Second, ‘we have made use of everything
that came without range’ (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 3). The first announces theirs is to be a theory of multiplicities and if Guattari talks of the way
we make love to every author we read and Deleuze talks of how, in a way, he and Guattari loved, when they wrote together, then becoming-
imperceptible for them is a queer becoming. That they will make use of everything within range is typical of the queer eclectic approach. We
may not ‘know yet what the multiple entails’ (4) but post-queer theory as war machine will arm itself with every available tool for dismantling
the arborescent, phallocentric, tree-like logic of Western metaphysics, the ‘weariest kind of thought’ (5). Postqueer theory events, experiments,
intervenes like William Burroughs cut-up method, rejects linearity, is anti-genealogical, anti-filiative as it tries to map alternative, denaturalised
models of development. Ruffolo’s post-queer theory is opposed to the teleological, the hetero-reproductive; it is rhizomatic, has
heterogeneous genealogies: ‘any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be’ (7). It is a schizo-micropolitics, a nomad
war machine, smoothing space and evolving ‘by subterranean stems and flows’ (7) like the AIDS activists of ACT–UP and Queer Nation, or the
alterglobalisation movements. Postqueer theory decenters the heteronormative logos and exposes ‘arboresecent multiplicities for what they
are’ (8), ‘never allows itself to be overcoded’ (9) but relentlessly decodes, scrambles the codes of hetero-logic (but in a way which is productive
rather than dyadic or binaristic). Post-queer theory is a war-wachine pitted against the State, a nomad which ‘constantly flees’ (9) down lines of
Refusing assimilation, refusing normalisation the ‘Pink
deterritorialisation, destratifies on the Body without Organs.
Panther’ that is post-queer politics ‘imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its
colour, pink on pink, this is its becoming-world’ (11), its open-ended becoming preferring ‘abominable’
(11), unnatural, sodomitical couplings, transversal connections, lines of flight which ‘scramble the
genealogical trees’ (11). Ruffolo’s post-queer theory to-come is a rhizome-map, always revisable, open to new events, new
experiments, new becomings. It plugs in everywhere ‘fosters connections between fields’ (12), removes blockages on the BwO, is the
The map of post-queer theory is ‘open and
‘maximum opening of the Body without Organs onto a plane of consistency’ (12).
connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification’
(12). It must not, as Ruffolo argues queer studies has, become sedimented, normalised, assimilated,
reterritorialised, must not become a tracing rather than a map. It must be rhizomorphous, produce ‘stems and filaments
that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange new uses’ (15), work in an ‘offbeat’
‘untimely’ way (16). The tree has even ‘implanted itself in our bodies, rigidifying and stratifying even the sexes’ (18) but the rhizome empties
out, dis-organises the body, makes a BwO which refuses to ‘subjugate sexuality to the reproductive model’ (18). The rhizome ‘liberates
sexuality’ and desire, allows the body to vibrate. The rhizome is always to-come ‘perpetually in construction’, a process that ‘is perpetually
prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again’ (20). It is open to the incalculable, indeterminable future, has ‘neither beginning nor end,
but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills’ (21). For Ruffolo, postqueering is always interbeing, always happens in
the middle. The rhizome, the BwO, the post-queer theory to-come are located on a thousand queer plateaus: ‘a continuous self-vibrating region
of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’ (22). For Ruffolo there are queer
machines and bodily desire is machinic, forms assemblages, effects linkages, and performs temporary combinations of parts. Embracing
rhizomatic, involutionary potentialities means being opened by queer ethics and the post-queer theory to-come on/as the plane of consistency.
The plane of consistency of post-queer theory can be diagrammed, as it is on the cover of this book in the painting by Masoud Ghaffarian-
Shirazi, as a kind of freefloating space that is formless, without subject, without development, without centre or structure, without beginning or
end. Post-queer bodies as they are thought here allow us to think the ‘becoming of zones of rarefaction. There must exist virtual rarefactions.
We need a non-organic past of bodies—there must exist virtual rarefactions. We need a non-organic past of the living being, an inorganic
becoming of bodies. Or further, we need a body without organs’. (Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence and
Matter and Memory’, Collapse III, 2007, 98) Or, further again, we need a theory without organs, a ‘typology of vital becomings’ (Meillassoux,
98), to negotiate an openness by the future, to actualise the virtual; to allow for the emergence of the radically new one must move beyond the
forms of disciplinary subjectivity, discursivity and identity, that predetermine one’s relations to the outside. To gloss this new form of
relatedness, this proliferation of connection, and the ethical imperatives to readjust or reorient our extensions, to be opened by the outside, we
will do well to follow Ruffolo and further trace the suggestive links between queer theory and Deleuze/Guattari. As Guattari himself puts it in
Soft Subversions, we desperately need ‘soft subversions and imperceptible revolutions that will eventually change the face of the world’ (Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 306). Post-Queer Politics is softly subversive and the imperceptible revolutions its schizoanalytic politics promise can
only be found on the BwO or in a TwO, and the work of changing the face of the world, work that is long overdue, will have to take place
between the two.

Our counter-conduct performance creates affective resistance which

is key to disrupt affects of normative education and transform them
towards critical pedagogy
Zembylas ‘19 (Michalinos Zembylas; professor of educational theory and curriculum studies at Open
University of Cyprus, “The affective dimension of everyday resistance: implications for critical pedagogy
in engaging with neoliberalism’s educational impact”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17508487.2019.1617180?journalCode=rcse20 14 May
2019) // ELog
In this section, I briefly illustrate how resistance is an affective movement of becoming, rather than an individual act, with consequences for
students’ and educators’ bodies, theory, research and practice in education. While
others have acknowledged the role of
emotions and affect in making sense of how neoliberal changes in education are experienced by
students and educators (e.g. see Bialostok & Aronson, 2016; Hanley, 2015; Moffatt et al., 2018), my
illustrations – which come from my own research over the years (e.g. Zembylas, 2010, 2015, 2018b,
2018c; Bozalek & Zembylas, 2018) – intend to demonstrate not only how neoliberal policies in education
use affects (e.g. fear, anxiety) to produce certain subjectivities (e.g. see Finn, 2016; McKenzie, 2017;
Sellar, 2015; Staunæs, 2011), but also how educators and students engage in micro-political movements
of affective resistance. To do so, I am using the idea of policy prolepsis introduced by Webb and Gulson (2012) as a methodological tool
to identify the particular ways neoliberal policies in education induce and prompt particular behaviors and desires in educators and students.2
Policy prolepses, according to Webb and Gulson, are a category of becoming-policy that shape policy interpretations and practices within the
spaces of desired, yet incomplete, policy initiatives and interpretations. ‘Policy prolepses operate through affective tones’ (ibid., p. 91) and ‘are
coded affectively’ (ibid., p. 92), positioning policy interpretations as well as subjects themselves. What follows, then, are two brief illustrations
of policy prolepsis that show the complexities of affective resistance produced in neoliberal education and its implications. The first example is
concerned with how the becoming-policy of standardized professional standards in schools operates affectively in paradoxical and unexpected
ways; the second example is concerned with identifying the ambivalent affective assemblages of educators’ and students’ resistance against
neoliberal policies at the university level. In the first example, it is shown how the politics of standardized professional standards in schools
instill fear, anxiety, stress and anger in teachers, who generate micro-political ways of resisting the affective atmospheres invoking
normalization of teachers’ pedagogies (see Zembylas, 2010, 2018b). For example, teachers engage in false compliance, agreeing at a rhetorical
level with some aspects of professional standards, while resisting them in practice or denouncing standards in small circles of trusted
colleagues. Importantly, teachers acknowledge the emotional ambivalence of engaging in false compliance: the assemblages of fear and anxiety
on the one hand, and the affective atmospheres of solidarity with colleagues, on the other. Clearly, resistance is not always progressive or
emancipatory, as teachers themselves often recognize that their subjectivities are caught up in the affective conditions created by such policy
interventions, producing tensions, paradoxes and ambivalences in their lives. One may, in fact, explore the numerous (anticipated and
unanticipated) micro-political ways of resistance by teachers that might change the rhythms of schooling, producing alternative affective spaces
that sometimes enable new embodied encounters and relations (e.g. between teachers and students or between teachers and their
colleagues), while other times simply reinforce the negative atmosphere of fear or anger. Illuminating the counter-conductive elements of
teachers’ resistances can reveal more specifically how counter-conduct is always prone to the entanglement of governing and surveillance
practices (Odysseos & Pal, 2018). Hence, teachers’ affective resistance towards standardizing processes in schools finds itself caught between a
negative affective atmosphere (e.g. fear or anger) that could be reproduced and, at the same time, the production of new and unexpected ways
of resistance against the material and affective forces that impinge on teachers’ bodies. In all of these different possibilities, an analysis of the
affective dimension of resistance requires that we focus upon the micro-politics of the (intended and unintended) affective assemblages in
which teachers are a part of. My second example pertains to university students’ protests in 2015 and 2016 against neoliberal and colonial
education policies in South Africa, calling for decolonizing higher education and greater access to education, which has resulted in disruptions of
examinations and academic programs (Zembylas, 2018c; Luescher & Klemenčič, 2016; Nyamnjoh, 2016; Pillay, 2016).3 I want to draw attention
to students’ collective affects (e.g. anger) which circulated through affective economies that operated across universities in the Western Cape
Collective affects were invigorated by a growing protest against neoliberal and
(Bozalek & Zembylas, 2018).
colonial policies in higher education. The anger instilled in students by such policies was transmitted onto local university
communities by circulating images of protests through the media. In particular, protests have become a prominent feature of public and
 The process of students’ occupation of university premises, in some cases, and the
university life in South Africa.
visibility it gave, especially through violence and the damages caused to university property, made it a
transfiguring moment in the lives of the participants and the local community. Hence, there were voices who
acknowledged their concomitant responsibility as a result of performing damage to public property that cost considerable amounts of money at
a time of scarcity of resources. In our research, for example, there were students and educators who noted how, and in which ways, their
subjectivities were produced within assemblages that included ambivalent affective economies – on the one hand, an assemblage of anger
against neoliberal policies; on the other hand, an assemblage of disappointment and skepticism for the use of violence as a form of protest,
thus questioning the moral legitimacy of (violent) resistance. Counter-conduct offers a compelling concept to understand the form of students’
protests as refusals of subjectivities and as acts of disobedience against being conducted as ‘consumer-students’ (Odysseos & Pal, 2018).
However, the framework of counter-conduct, also allows us to grasp counter-conducts as affective mechanisms that may either forge new ways
of resisting neoliberal policies or could become co-opted by the politics of violence. Through this tension, it is shown that there are ambivalent
affective atmospheres circulating in counter-conductive practices of students and educators that could neither be ‘simply oppositional nor
always fully articulated as part of a clear and long-term strategy of resistance’ (Odysseos & Pal, 2018, p. 17). These observations illuminate the
affective ambivalence and paradoxicality of resistance against neoliberal policies; in other words, there are limitations in resistance efforts that
signal clearly that such attempts may end in failure, possibly reproducing the risks that neoliberalism preys upon. This brief illustration also
shows that any such analysis needs to remain attuned to exploring neoliberal policies in education as complex affective sites of producing and
contesting subjectivities of students and educators – sites that are open to evading, resisting and redirecting neoliberal and colonial imperatives
(Odysseos & Pal, 2018). Implications for critical pedagogy My analysis has shown that whatever form neoliberalism is taken to be in schools and
universities, the neoliberal present has important affective implications. The affective economies of neoliberalism that are produced in schools
and universities create particular ‘capacities to affect and be affected’ for teachers and students alike. It is thus extremely important to develop
methodological and theoretical tools that critically trace the capacities of teachers and students for affecting and being affected in their
engagements and negotiations with neoliberal education, and specifically how these capacities are normalized, embodied or enable alternative
counter-practices (Zembylas, 2018b). Hence, what is required is a continued critical engagement with neoliberalism’s educational impact in
ways that take into consideration the affective potentialities of resistance. Considering the affective potentialities of resistance in critical
pedagogy can be the starting point for alternatives visions of educational policies and practices that challenge forms of neoliberal education. I
would argue, then, that what is needed in the study of resistance in critical pedagogy is what Thrift
(2008) calls a micro-biopolitical approach (Thrift, 2008) which understands the complexities and
ambivalences of neoliberal affects and norms that operate at the mundane, ordinary, and everyday level
in schools and universities and the consequences that are produced (Zembylas, 2018b). This micro-biopolitical
approach on conceptualizing resistance in critical pedagogy is valuable not only because it pays attention to the affective consequences of
mechanisms and techniques of neoliberal education in schools and universities, but also because it invokes what Braidotti (2013) terms
An affirmative critique in critical pedagogy, for example, is the sort of
‘affirmative critique’ (see also Staunæs, 2016).
critical engagement with ideas and things that creates affective spaces for alternative counter-conduct
practices against neoliberal education. In other words, recognizing the affective dimension of resistance
in critical pedagogy creates openings for an affirmative critique that has the potential to transform
teachers’ and students’ capacities to affect and be affected. In considering the approach I am suggesting here to affect
and resistance in critical pedagogy, one can indeed raise several questions and concerns such as: How may critical pedagogy itself function as an
‘apparatus of power’ (Anderson, 2014) which uses affect to mobilize resistance towards certain ideologies or structures such as neoliberalism?
How are these mobilizations of resistance connected to broader collective conditions and processes of resisting certain ideologies or structures
at the macro-political level? How do teachers’ and students’ practices and bodily capacities reproduce or enrich certain mobilizations of
resistance through their encounters? How can those practices and bodily capacities be reproductive, adaptive or resistant, whether
intentionally or not? (e.g. see McKenzie, 2017). There are no definitive answers to these questions, but they must be posed to show the
complexities and ambivalences emerging from attempts to link affect and resistance in critical pedagogy. Hence,
I would argue that
any viable theorization of resistance in critical pedagogy must not be limited to ‘conventional’
understandings of resistance but must emphasize how affects condition the ways neoliberalism
emerges, circulate and are transformed by forms of resistance waged by teachers and students. Greater
acknowledgment of the ways in which schools and universities play a fundamental role in the affective conduct of individuals, encouraging and
directing the self-perceptions, economic behavior and socio-political actions of students, citizens, and workers (Odysseos & Pal, 2018) will
renew theorization of resistance in critical pedagogy in two ways. First, by gesturing toward the particular ways in which affects come to have
force and socio-political significance, critical pedagogy disconnects resistance from a psychologized perspective or a perspective that defines
resistance in dualistic terms as a matter of either human agency or social structure. This would mean, for instance, recognizing that resistance is
not a set of individualized actions but rather it is very much embedded in the affective infrastructures of neoliberal education. To create
renewed affective relations and assemblages as counter-conduct in schools and universities, then, would essentially mean to invent new
affective practices that instigate empowerment and resistance against the various manifestations of neoliberal education. As Alldred and Fox
(2017) conclude: It is therefore more accurate to see power and resistance as dual fluxes that permeate all assemblages, a shifting balance that
is never finally settled. Defining a certain affect as an assertion of power or an effort at resistance is less important than assessing the capacities
that these affects produce. (p. 1171) For example, it is argued that ‘affective solidarity’ is necessary for a sustainable politics of transformation
(Hemmings, 2012). Hemmings proposes an approach that moves away from rooting transformation in politics of identity and towards modes of
engagement that start from the affective dissonance experience can produce. Although affective dissonance with the experience of
neoliberalism’s educational impact, for instance, cannot guarantee a resistant mode, ‘that sense of dissonance might become a sense of
injustice and then a desire to rectify that’ (Hemmings, 2012, p. 157). The
recognition of affective dissonance as the point of
departure for a possible affective solidarity among teachers and student highlights that affective
dissonance with neoliberalism’s educational impact may be a productive basis from which to seek
solidarity with others – not based on a shared identity or ideology, but on feeling the desire for
transforming the injustices inflicted by neoliberal policies and practices. Second, the recognition of the affective
dimension of resistance in critical pedagogy helps us understand the affective present in and beyond schools and universities as a series of
processes and practices in ‘the everyday’ in which the focus is on the actions that are mobilized to produce something rather than on their
representations or what they supposedly mean. By examining the consequences of affects at the micropolitical level, resistance can be
understood in terms of the ways actions produce capacities to affect and be affected, that is, ‘in terms of the forces circulating in assemblage
and the consequent capacities that are produced in assembled relations, including human bodies and subjectivities’ (Alldred & Fox, 2017, p.
1171). Calling upon theoretical insights in critical pedagogy that recognize and examine the affective dimension of everyday resistance is likely
to challenge the ‘invisible’ infrastructures of neoliberal education in schools and universities. All in all, the call for a critical pedagogy to
acknowledge the affective dimension of resistance marks an important and necessary moment that allows critical pedagogy to be further
enriched in attempts to address the challenges faced by teachers and students in neoliberal education. Schools and universities are at a critical
juncture whether and how they will be able to develop pedagogies and ideas that neither return to an idealized, pre-neoliberal past, nor expect
a sudden revolution but instead resist against the self-formations involved by neoliberalism (Odysseos & Pal, 2018). What I have offered here is
an attempt to illuminate the affective dimension of resistance and its implications for critical pedagogy through theoretical insights that
enhance individual and collective capacity for counter-conduct in neoliberal contexts. Being attentive to the complexities and potential
ambivalences in teachers’ and students’ forms of resistance enhances our analysis of how critical pedagogy more broadly, and schools and
universities more specifically, are themselves implicated in transformations of neoliberal education (Odysseos & Pal, 2018).

Ballot accumulation solves – results in a buildup of norms that push

back against queer invisibility – there’s a responsibility to evaluate
ethical pedagogy first
Blake ‘19 (Sophie Blake is a former debater. “Fighting For a Place in the Room by Sophie Blake,”
https://www.vbriefly.com/2019/10/16/fighting-for-a-place-in-the-room-by-sophie-blake/)//LFS–AP

Conventional debate is fundamentally hierarchical, there is an economy of ballots , you require a certain
number of ballots to get to outrounds. You pay to go to tournaments to get more ballots. Debaters and their
arguments earn prestige based on how far they get in tournaments and how many bids they collect.
Coaches advertise their career bids, and the number of bids they’ve coached debaters to receive, in order to get hired. This falls under the label
“Competitive Activity.” However, people use this label to justify several things that actively harm debate being a competitive activity. If debate
being a good competitive activity was the goal, structural fairness would become incredibly important to avoid certain teams dominating that
competitive activity and crowding out talented debaters from new schools or deviant identity groups. However, what instead follows is
debaters separating fairness into procedural and structural and prioritizing the former to win theory debates. While Resource Disparities is an
issue, it isn’t the focus. This
is just an example of how ballots explicitly and implicitly endorse certain norms.
Whenever you vote for a theory shell that frames the round as only caring about procedural fairness,
even if you intentionally only desire to endorse Conditionality bad, you implicitly endorse framing
fairness without accounting for structural fairness . A more egregious example I’ve come across is when someone wins a
debate on the flow despite saying problematic slurs and misgendering their opponent. Sure, the judge votes them up because they won the
disadvantage, but that judge is also allowing that behavior, making the activity less accessible. This
over time results in a buildup
of implicitly and explicitly endorsed norms that make trans debaters invisible. We trans people aren’t
even considered as existing in the debate space, because we don’t have enough representation
generally or with ballots. This materializes in community norms and even tournament rules being
exclusionary to trans people. For example, disclosure theory has become almost an undisputed rule, and open source disclosure
seems to be on its way to becoming the same. This is because of judges who vote for these theory arguments, while ignoring the consequences
of dueer[3] outing through open source disclosure, even when it’s brought up in round. Even worse is tournament organizers, who sometimes
even frame their tournament’s as progressive and pro-LGBTQ+, are making open source of narratives and performances a rule. I have contacted
several of these tournaments asking about their disclosure policies to avoid critical information being posted online, but never received a
response. This forces pers to publicly out perselves in order to compete at these tournaments, and not doing so denies them more already
limited opportunities to achieve success in this “Competitive Activity” in the form of a bid. Also, this results in a chilling effect on performances
that call out problematic actions or actors within the community. As debaters continue to conflate women with female and man with male
inside and outside of rounds, this discourse reifies a gender binary, that erases the existence of transgender debaters. The implication is, you
can’t be a womxn if you were born as a male-passing and you can’t be a man if you were born as female passing. Not only does this completely
encode over the existence of intersex, non-binary, and multi-gender people [4], but also helps reinforce toxic notions in society writ large that
contribute to internalized gender dysphoria and self-loathing. The ‘good debater’ problem [5] reifies this cycle, because
not only are trans folx left with few ‘good debaters’ as trans role models, but status quo “good debater”
behavior informs other cis debaters to adopt the same transphobic microaggressions they never had to
account for. Lack of compassion or realization of misgendering only continues to permeate the community. For example, Judges often put on their paradigm that racist, sexist,
homophobic arguments etc. are an instant loss. However, despite this, I and other trans debaters who call their opponents out on misgendering, have recognized lots of judges have odd
misgendering brightlines that result in the judge dismissing it, is two times too many? Five? Ten? Additionally, many cis debaters use their in round or after round apology to shift the guilt. I’ve
been told by my opponent’s teammate that I should feel guilty for making per cry by calling per [3] out for misgendering me. To add on to my previous criticism of how debate being a
“Competitive Activity” is leveraged, I also have a criticism of how tabula rasa is framed by judges. This isn’t to say having a judge attempt to be unbiased from their own opinions about politics
or which side of the resolution is true is a bad thing. However, the way Tech>Truth is leveraged repeatedly doesn’t lead to actual production of good norms. The classic example being, better
theory debaters can read extremely abusive positions and destroy novices. But more importantly, positions like discourse criticisms should require using your own philosophy to not vote for

Before judges’ default to philosophical notions like pain being bad

debaters who said R***** because they win 1ar font size theory.

on a util flow, or fairness is important because everyone will quit debate over a single conditional
counterplan, they should bring their paradigm as an educator into the round . That means that any microaggressive
behavior should be dealt with first because it can actively harm the other debater through verbal violence, make the space toxic and less
accessible, and prevent debate from becoming a safe competitive environment for the rest of their lives. When these concerns are
ignored for the sake of a “Competitive Activity,” that pedagogically justifies doing anything for the ballot,
and thus behaviors as egregious as debaters blackmailing their opponents. In fact, under status quo paradigms, it is
competitively advisable to intentionally misgender your opponent in front of a “tab” judge to throw them off. Judges have a
responsibility to promote a safe and equal space beyond anything else, as a prerequisite to have a
debate. Because of this, judges should be much more receptive to theoretical, philosophical, or Kritikal
arguments that deal with accessibility, survival strategies, and discourse relative to in-round procedural
questions, or substance arguments. All of these culminating factors result in a culture where the trans womxn never accesses the
debate room as a debater; we are always at least one foot out of the room. However, not only is the trans womxn not in the
debate room itself, these pedagogical choices also inform debate’s feminist movements. Which results in the
disconnect this article reveals.
Evidence
 Other Research
Tech link – gay bomb (gay bomb users manual?) – maybe its own
AFF/mechanism
https://zachblas.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/GB_users-manual_web-version.pdf

https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/61562009/
Patriotic_Penetration_Gay_Bombs_Queer_Times_and_Homonationalist_Assemblages_Crews-with-
cover-page-v2.pdf?Expires=1658084071&Signature=PlvYGoI6bqLUTJ-
HlmRE6YYwMIH6QwOGRJx1HVODFvnCTpGF-
5i3koImXODEsDFCALbLsIgt7b1krEJcfPTiQXPd3pPNszsSLFO1NXgayr-yAUSZfXykZBaGcdj5unVzsbx4b2Rp-
9vPsNN63WwMZKK0Ou5n2H46VrRgDG0rjc9q50~GkZDL-HwXIJJHMy6wgWhLrTH3LGPQ7U7jGXl-
9i~rCMlY8Zu98u5IKwMVop03qIc4F3NwgA1YIz8DSGPVrC7Y3xeiGEZz-niFvDNlRNV-
sBbA05u0t3v74am4oAtKLnRyk2Eoa9gFY0LPn2yM7lgSl28GI-96iyaNtHvrdg__&Key-Pair-
Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA

NATO link
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-97259-6_4

Security links
file:///C:/Users/easto/Downloads/(Routledge%20Handbooks)%20Caron%20E.%20Gentry,%20Laura
%20J.%20Shepherd,%20Laura%20Sjoberg%20-%20Routledge%20Handbook%20Of%20Gender%20And
%20Security-Routledge_Taylor%20&%20Francis%20Group%20(2018).pdf

file:///C:/Users/easto/Downloads/Lawless_Honours_Thesis-with-cover-page-v2.pdf

file:///C:/Users/easto/Downloads/healthy%20families%20secure%20bodies.pdf

file:///C:/Users/easto/Downloads/(Feminist%20Media%20Studies)%20Natalie%20Fixmer-Oraiz%20-
%20Homeland%20Maternity_%20US%20Security%20Culture%20And%20The%20New%20Reproductive
%20Regime-University%20Of%20Illinois%20Press%20(2019).pdf (166-end)

Puar homonationalism – (a2 tva/fwk)

file:///C:/Users/easto/Downloads/When%20Homonationalism%20Becomes%20Hegemonic
%20Homohegemony%20and%20a%20Meaningfully%20Materialist%20Queer%20Studies.pdf

Becoming
file:///C:/Users/easto/Downloads/David%20V.%20Ruffolo%20-%20Post-Queer%20Politics%20(Queer
%20Interventions)%20(2009).pdf

http://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/26 (not super specific to queerness but

good becoming explanation)

file:///C:/Users/easto/Downloads/(Transitions)%20Donald%20E.%20Hall%20-%20Queer%20Theories
%20(Transitions)-Palgrave%20Macmillan%20(2003).pdf (explains becoming queer decently well)
Le ballot key warrant
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.5250/symploke.17.1-2.0181.pdf?refreqid=excelsior
%3Ab04100a3e495d19d506e39140c94e04c&ab_segments=&origin=&acceptTC=1 (Ballot key or FW
card, written by Michigan LZ)

marquis notes vs pess

Being vs becomibg is the core debate – laundry list of terms they use that defines their horizon that
locks blackness into the worst of western racial knowledge

Faciality – serves as a norm of identity – we sustain this not through the figure of slave, but their political
ontology becomes a referendum

Defines plane of immanence of blackness towards death – carves out history of black resistance

Make arguments about how their ptx leads to desire of deathness

Marriott + his review of red white and black may be helpful

Win a thesis on how whitness operates – their thesis is only blackness as violence, ignores the ways in
which blackness.whitess can be reconstructe

Black modes of becoming

Deal with libidinal economy – almost in a Deluezian understanding – use our thesis of desire to answer
the libidinal economy – their obessions with suffering is the new Oedipus
2AC Blocks
 Case – Top Level
Security discourses necessitated by the topic create stable notions of
identity based on utility to the state – that’s Randell-Moon –
normative queers allow the state to project inclusivity, but must
constantly police their own behavior to conform to unnatural
stereotypes to avoid threatening power – that causes microfascism,
where desire begins to desire it’s own repression – that’s Braidotti –
non-normative queers are rendered perverted and dangerous in
opposition to the being they do not reflect – that causes necropolitics,
where populations are sentenced to living death – that’s Lawless –
beyond this binary of assimilate or die, we carve out a space of
becoming queer – we create a fluid, rhizomatic identity always in flux
– this is not a non-identity, but a superfluous one – which exists in a
constant metamorphosis that prevents the categorization required for
the impacts – that’s Ruffolo and O’Rourke/Giffney
Case – Poetry Solves
 Case – AT: Affect Not Political
a. Affect is uniquely political – normative education is structured
by affect, which means only affective resistace solves – that’s
1AC Zembylas
b. Politics is necessarily inclusive of affect
Berlant and Aryal 12 [Lauren Berlant, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, interview with
Yubraj Aryal, “Affect and the political,” Journal of Philosophy: A Cross Disciplinary Inquiry 7.17 (Spring
2012): p70]
L. B: Absolutely! Of course it could be converted to political resistance or revolt. But I think it's also important to point out that building a secret
life under threat of shaming or damning exposure is not necessarily an act seeking social change; people might produce sensual developments
in a radically private or idiomatic way out of desire for an otherwise not already saturated by dominant terms of belonging. Y.A.: Is affect
political or political is affective? Another way putting this can be: how do affective aspects of the world become political and vice versa? L. B. It
depends what we mean by political! If we mean saturated with the operations of power, the political is always
invested with affect because it is always inciting bodies to appear a certain way , to cite Foucault. Power is
biopolitical. This means that our visceral responses, our intuitions, are political. These responses can become-political in the
narrower sense--e.g. engaged in struggle--when our modes of attention are focused on connecting
powerful but often unstated affective formations to structures of social injustice. You might be thinking that the
political public sphere, which includes administrative and juridical institutions as well as pedagogic institutions that induce normative ideologies
as routes to reliable belonging, works in calculated and instrumental fashion too and doesn't always appeal to the affects, doesn't really care
about the affects of citizens and denizens. But here too we can say that the political is always already affective-that is, it calls on unconscious
fantasy often by soliciting normative emotion. "What
goes without saying" in the atmosphere of ideology is what's
really powerful in that sense--the threat of social negation, the promise of legitimacy or recognition--all
of this is the really sticky material that binds people to objects, ideologies, and modes of life that don't
work, for fear of having nothing, not even fantasy. Y. A--Perhaps you might say more about the difference between political
function and political affect. Are you suggesting that emotion is conscious, whereas affect is "sticky material that binds people--" perhaps
unconscious or preconscious that is "visceral response"? L. B.: It's a standard thing to say in affect theory now that affect involves nervous
system responses and modes of sensing and knowing that do not first work through cognitive processing, whereas emotion is the feeling state
more connected to norms, personality, and performance. You can't fake affect but you can fake emotion. There are debates about this. I am
very interested in unconscious fantasy and the training of intuition, and the ways that our visceral responses become events in the world. To
cap off this discussion: part of what I was talking about in terms of the historical present making itself available to our senses as a moment in
crisis is that crisis is a sense of the state of things, a sense of threat, of the inadequacy of our genres of imagining and living life. That
sense
is affective and then people throw names at it and it develops as a relation between the unstated and
unpredictable modes of attention to which we are always catching up and the project of organizing
collective life through shared rubrics. I've been tracking this for the last twenty-five years in Europe and the US, with the
diminution of the welfare state and debates about who belongs to the nation, and what the evidence of that belonging is (labor, blood,
identification, beliefs): those debates about what constitutes continuity among strangers is, in many places, at an explosive conjuncture.
 Case – AT: Cede the Political
a. Extend 1AC Stanley – the state is anti-queer regardless of
content because civil society is framed on an assumption of
normativity – politics can’t be redeemed
b. Non-unique – politics is dominated by conservatives now – even
Democrats are moderate at best
c. No impact – Republicans are already passing anti-queer bills
unopposed – proves we need non-state resistance
 Case – AT: Chambers/Carver
The card doesn’t say we should use the state – just that
heteronormativity using the state is a sign of weakness – flows AFF
because the ev is before things like legalized gay marriage, proves we
can weaken normativity without the state
 Case – AT: Civil Disobedience
a. This is argument is violent – tells marginalized groups they
should suffer to enlist moderate support which reduces
discrimination to a fetish – reject the team for psychic harm and
deterrence
b. No link – their argument is about legal punishment – that’s
distinct from losing a debate round
c. Law DA – their reliance on law ignores how it is inherently a
process of normalization – that’s 1AC Stanley
 Case – AT: Cruel Optimism
a. No link – we don’t tie survival to the ballot – it’s just a way to
endorse our methodology and critical education
b. Voting AFF is good:
1. Affect – extend Zembylas – neoliberal norms are structured
by affect – our counter-conduct performance creates an
affective rupture which reorients these norms and an
affective dissonance which spreads motivation for
intersectional resistance
2. Ballots – extend Blake – debate norms are structured by
competitive incentives – repeated success with critical
arguments gives them acceptance and appearances
 Case – AT: Deleuze Pedophilia
a. The only Deleuzean concepts we use are affect, becoming,
microfascism, and rhizomes – not his personal view on age of
consent
b. They weren’t pedophiles – they wanted to equalize consent for
homo- and heterosexual relations, not end them
Berard/Sallee ’15 (Jean Berard; professor of criminology at University of Montreal. Nicolas Sallee;
professor of sociology at University of Montreal. “The Age(s) of Consent: Gay Activism and the Sexuality
of Minors in France and Quebec (1970-1980)” https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CLIO1_042_0099--
the-ages-of-consent-gay-activism-and.htm July 2015) // ELog
As in many other countries, “les années 68” were in France and Quebec characterized by a proliferation of protest movements championing
diverse causes and demands. 1 The impetus for most of these movements came from young people who rejected the norms that embodied
dominant and authoritarian forms of behavior regulation in familial, productive and repressive institutions. These movements considered
“intolerable” the relegation to socially “minor” status of individuals who, on the basis of their age, class, sex, gender or sexual orientation,
supposed origin or assigned status (students, prisoners, the hospitalized, etc.), were subjected, legally or otherwise, to various forms of
corporal discipline and everyday privation. 2 When this relegation related to age, its denunciation focused on the
legal definition of thresholds of access to majority status, whether the context was civil (the right to
vote), matrimonial (legal age of marriage) or sexual (the age of consent, i.e. the age at which it is
permitted for sexual relations to take place between individuals, one of whom might be of minor – civil –
status). As a political issue, the question of sexual majority (the age of consent) overlapped with another front in the struggle of “les années
68”. For at the time there was not one legal age of sexual majority but several, their definition being
closely linked with the repression of homosexuality. In France, an ordinance of 2 July 1945 fixed the general age of consent
at 15. Reproducing a decree adopted by Vichy in 1942, however, Article 331 -3 of the Penal Code (331 -2 in 1980 until its repeal in 1982)
penalized any “sexual relation against nature” with a minor 3 (defined until 1974 as anyone under 21, thereafter, anyone under 18). In Canada –
and thus in Quebec Province – the definition of the age of consent relating to sex and sexual practices focused on two distinct principles more
explicitly formulated than in France, and intended to safeguard marriage and the family: the need to protect girls’ chastity against untimely
seduction, and the need to protect boys’ morality against homosexual “perversion”. The 1892 Criminal Code had thus set the age of consent,
which at the time exclusively applied to girls, at 14, and simply defined sodomy as a crime, a legacy of English law. It is true that the 1969
Omnibus Bill decriminalized sodomy as well as what were known as acts of “gross indecency”, 4 but it restricted (Article 158) these practices to
“a husband and his wife” or “two consenting individuals aged 21 or older”. 5 While a (federal) reform lowered this age of consent to 18 in 1998,
it took a (provincial) court ruling in Quebec to repeal the “double standard” in regards to sexual majority there. By revisiting the history of
French and Québécois gay movements, this article proposes to examine the emergence, over the course of the 1970s, of a political space in
which the age of consent and its relationship to sexual orientation could be debated. In
the early 1970s, French and Québécois
gay movements thus inherited a comparable legal issue: the age of sexual majority. Set higher for
homosexuals, it raised the question of the sexual liberty of (legally defined) minors who might even be
classified as children or early adolescents. 6 Yet the definition of sexual majorities was not the only area in which
homosexuality was subject to repression at the time. In France, Article 330 -2 of the Penal Code forbade “indecency in a public place”, for which
the minimum sentence was in 1960 doubled in the case of homosexual relations. The Canadian Criminal Code, for its part, made it illegal for a
man to sexually assault “another male individual”. In both cases, the offenses were vaguely defined, clearing the way for the arrest and
prosecution of homosexuals, particularly in bars and public places. Moreover, while the frequency of prosecution of these offenses varied from
These laws
one period to another, they were always marked by greater severity in the case of relations between an adult and a minor. 7
were part of a larger social and medical normative ensemble that constructed homosexuality as a
“perversion” from which, more than any other form of sexual contact, children and young minors must
be protected. 8 In this context, to challenge the age discrepancy in access to sexualities was to critique
the perception of homosexuality as a threat to youth . As such, it was part of a larger movement seeking
to normalize homosexuality. At the same time, the politicization of the subject of the age of consent led to controversial positions:
refusing to limit their demands to the sexual liberty of young minors and the repeal of the double standard within definitions of the age of
consent, some activists called for the sexual liberty of children and early adolescents to be recognized, going so far as to call into question the
very existence of any age of consent at all. 9
 Case – AT: Deleuze IDF
a. The only Deleuzean concepts we use are affect, becoming,
microfascism, and rhizomes – not war-machines
b. It’s an appropriation – they explicitly criticize Israel’s type of
war-machine
Lambert ‘10 Gregg Lambert, Dean’s Professor of the humanities at Syracuse University, The War
Machine and “a people who revolt,” Theory & Event, Volume 13, Issue 3, muse
In saying this, of course, I realize that this last association has become extremely inconvenient today in relation to the image of the suicide
bomber, the member of an anomalous and nomadic band, who walks into a public square to explode his own organs precisely in an effort, it
Equally problematic are the recent reports of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept
seems, to ward off the State form.
of the war-machine being employed by the IDF as a manual for counter-insurgency and counter-terrorist
strategy. One of the most perverse ironies is that in their “appropriation” of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory (but also that of Guy Debord), is
the IDF’s “complete identification” with the principle of exteriority that is actually ascribed to the nomadic war-machine. In this regard,
perversion bears the Hegelian meaning of “inversion” (verkerht), described by Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as an “inverse geometry,” or
“the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions.” The inversion or reversal represented in this tactic is that
it is the IDF that defines itself as a war-machine that is always external to the Palestinian State Apparatus (Beirut), which is itself defined as a
striated space of alleyways, doorways, windows (the various traps created by normal spatial thinking). Consequently, from this “positive
discovery” they develop three major axioms of counter-insurgency: doors are not for entering or leaving, windows are not for looking through;
instead, move only through the walls. Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as “striated” in the sense that they are enclosed by fences,
walls, ditches, road blocks and so on.’10 However, what is revealing, albeit problematic, in the IDF’s complete identification with the principle of
exteriority that belongs to the war machine is this: the overall objective of the IDF is not consistent with the goals of State Power traditionally
Rather, the tactical
defined as extending a line of domination through the protection and replenishment of the organs of State power.
objectives are purely aligned with the goals of the war-machine: to destroy the organs of State Power,
to deny to the Palestinian State Form its ability to replenish its own organs, to “create a little smooth
space” in the middle of Beirut, to “de-territorialize” Lebanon. The question of whether or not Deleuze and Guattari are
“morally responsible” for this appropriation of their theory does not interest me; this anxious reflection of a Leftist pseudo-intelligentsia today
still represents an earlier kind of Détente thinking, as if believing that the strategic character that has defined most contemporary political
theory since the 1970’s could actually become dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands. Instead,
the real question lies in why
most commentators of their work have already failed to acknowledge the bi-polar (or schizo, if you like)
characteristic of their concepts in the first place, including the concept of the war-machine which they
consistently argue could turn out for the better, or for the worse, depending on which line or “plan(e)”
the concept first tends toward: either toward destruction and domination, or creation and the mobility
of free elements. For example, I will simply quote the ending of “Treatise on Nomadology—the War
Machine,” where this “Either/Or” and this bi-polar tendency is stated with unmistakable clarity: The
difference between the two poles is great , even, and especially, from the point of view of death: the line
of flight that creates, or turns into a line of destruction; the plane of consistency that constitutes itself,
even piece by piece, or turns into a plan(e) of organization and domination. We are constantly reminded
that there is communication between these two lines of planes, that each takes nourishment from the
other, borrows from the other: the worst of world war machines reconstitutes a smooth space to
surround and enclose the earth. But the earth asserts its own powers of deterritorialization, its lines of flight, and its smooth spaces
that live and blaze a way for a new earth. The question is not one of quantities but of the incommensurable character of qualities that confront
one another in the two kinds of war machine, according to the two poles.11
 Case – AT: Extinction Outweighs
a. No analysis of how the ballot solves extinction – hold them to
the same standard
b. Reproduction DA – Reproductive futurism undergrids their
spectacle of the “nuclear apocalypse” that results in
heteronormative violence against queer people
Saint-Amour 13 [Paul K. Saint Amour, 2013, “Chapter 3: Queer Temporalities of the Nuclear
Condition,” Cambridge Scholars Publishing]\\pairie
When Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth first appeared in 1982, its most talked-about passage was a graphic description of what would
happen if a twenty-megaton bomb were detonated over the center of Manhattan. The ensuing account of how a full-scale nuclear change
would likely extinguish humankind along with the majority of earth’s species, leaving a “republic of insects and grass,” completed the book’s
infernal vision. Largely owing to this vivid thought-experiment, Schell’s book helped reenergize the anti-nuclear movement in the U.S., and its
cautionary portrait of a dead, irradiated planet was absorbed into mass-culture such that, read now, it chastens but does not stun. But there is
a still-astonishing moment in The Fate of the Earth. This occurs in a section called “The Second Death,” where Schell adopts “the view of our
children and grandchildren, and of all the future generations of mankind, stretching ahead of us in time.” A
nuclear extinction
event, he argues, would wipe out not only the living but all of the unborn as well; this “second
death” would be the death of a longitudinal, progenerative human future, the death of the
supersession of generations and thus, as he puts it, “the death of death.” 2 That we live in the shadow of
the death of death, says Schell, is nowhere more apparent than in our growing ambivalence toward—and here is the surprise—marriage, an
institution that consecrates a personal relationship by connecting it to the biological continuity of the species. “[By] swearing their love in
public,” he writes, “the lovers also let it be known that their union will be a fit one for bringing children into the world.” In a world
overshadowed by extinction, the biological future that endows love with social meaning begins to dematerialize, and love becomes, in
response, “an ever more solitary affair: impersonal, detached, pornographic. It means something that we call both pornography and nuclear
destruction ‘obscene.’” Although Schell is not explicit about what forms of sexual detachment he laments here, “The Second Death” clearly
implies that any sex decoupled from biological continuity and seeking refuge in licentious, solitary, distant, or momentary enjoyment—any sex
that deviates from a reproductive notion of the future—is a symptom of our nuclear extinction syndrome. Thus
when Schell, oddly
quoting Auden, says that the peril of extinction thwarts “Eros, builder of cities,” he doesn’t
need to invoke “sodomy, destroyer of cities” for a link between queerness and extinction to be
forged.3 By installing a reproductive futurism at the heart of his admonitory project, Schell
implicitly stigmatizes as futureless anyone who stands beyond reproductivism’s pale: not just
the homosexual but also the unmarried, the divorced, the impotent, the childless, the
masturbator, the hedonist, the celibate.
Schell’s book did not, of course, invent the use of reproduction as a metonym for human futurity tout court or the figuration of the biological
child as the chief beneficiary of future-oriented actions in the present. But it contributed to these figures’ prominent standing in the anti-
nuclear imaginary. “Believe me when I say to you / I hope the Russians love their children too” went the absurd refrain of Sting’s 1985 single,
“Russians,” which placed the (implicitly reproductive) body at a level more fundamental than political difference: “We share the same biology /
Regardless of ideology.” One could go on to compile a long list of 1980s movies, novels, speeches, and tracts that made the nuclear family stand
in for humanity’s beset future or invoked the child as the figure in whose name apocalypse must be averted or at least survived. These
conventions would outlast the Cold War and the waning or reimagining of the nuclear referent. Think of P. D. James’s 1992
thriller The Children of Men, whose protagonist must safeguard a miraculous pregnancy in a
future where fertility has declined globally to zero.4 Or of how Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) pares the matter
of survival in a post-apocalyptic, ambiguously nuked landscape down to a father’s efforts to protect his son from rape and cannibalism. In
both cases, the future is hanging either literally or allegorically by the thread of a single
imperiled child.
My aim in this essay is not to trace the reproductivist energies of Cold War anti-nuclear works or of more recent post-apocalyptic fiction.
Instead, I chart an alternate path through the nuclear condition,5 one that diverges from—and in places dissents from—the portrait of a future
secured primarily for the sake of the biological child and reached along the straight lines of reproductive heterosexual coupling, familial
property heritage, and linear time. This
alternate path is one on which Nuclear Criticism today might keep
company with recent work on queer temporalities, a body of scholarship that places dissident
sexuality in a critical relation to normative models of time and history. One of my broader aims,
in fact, is to indicate some of the ways Nuclear Criticism might be reenergized by an encounter
with queer temporalities scholarship. At the same time, I’ll argue that some of the key theoretical and literary works
associated with Nuclear Criticism in its early years were themselves engaged in queering temporality and history. In doing so I don’t wish to
claim Nuclear Criticism as the occulted or lost “origin” of queer temporalities work; in addition to straining credibility, such a privileging of origin
in a narrative of linear development would install queer temporalities scholarship in just the sort of historical narrative it seeks to vex by its
devotion to non-linear modes—the recursive, the discontinuous, the counterfactual. My point is, rather, that reexamining Nuclear Criticism
through the aperture of queer theoretical writings on time allows us to see a muted or latent critique in the former—a critique whose object
was not so much the existence of nuclear weapons as the straitened portraits of desire, culture, kinship, history, and futurity that were often
appealed to in calling for both those weapons’ abolition and their necessity. What emerges is a redrawn Nuclear Criticism that both deplores
the existence of nuclear weapons and declines to embrace sexually normative and historically reductive grounds for their elimination.

“Queer temporalities” as a theoretical rubric covers a broad range of scholarship by queer theorists and activists working, at least to date,
predominantly in the U.S.6 More specific than a turn toward time as theme, this
scholarship considers how
heternormative cultures perceive queer subjects in relation to history and futurity ; how queer subjects
experience and enact particular relations to history and futurity; and how queerness itself might be rethought as having less (or less exclusively)
to do with sex and sexual typology than with dissident ways of being in relation to time. I
have already referred to one of the
chief temporalities from which queer subjects are variously excluded and dissenting: the
“ reproductive futurism ” that conscripts the child as mascot for a heternormative politics of
hope and a linear conception of history as both powered and figured by biological reproduction
and the modes of inheritance and political succession it undergirds.7 Such a conception of history militates
against certain kinds of transgenerational affect, not least against the notion that the living could invest affectively in or form communities with
the dead. In response, some scholars working on queer temporalities advocate just such a queer desire for history or “touch of the queer,” the
kind of unpunctual, affective approach that could permit one to ask, as Carolyn Dinshaw does, “How does it feel to be an anachronism?”8 While
acknowledging that the feeling of being out of step with one’s contemporaries can be exploited to repressive ends, Dinshaw remains optimistic
that transtemporal communities—living anachronisms in league with the dead—might produce politically salutary effects in a present whose
dense multiplicity they help to restore.9 Others, contrastingly, refuse a politics of hope they see as irreducibly heternormative, urging queer
subjects to embrace the negative position assigned them by reproductivism. Embracing this negativity can take many forms: an insistence on
the destructive, anti-communitarian, at once selfish and self-shattering dimensions of sex and particularly homo-sex; an identification of the
queer subject with destrudo (i.e., the Freudian death drive) in its relentless opposition to a procreative understanding of libido; or a refusal of
queer triumphalism and an embrace of the shame-laced backward look. 10 Still others look to fuse the negativity of these anti-social, arguably
apolitical positions to a radical anti-racist and anti-capitalist stance, calling for a “punk negativity” whose oppositional politics declines the
language of hope, redemption, and futurity and turns instead to vandalism, masochism, pessimism, and despair.11 Real differences inhere
among these approaches. But they share a core conviction: that temporality—and perhaps futurity even more intensively than historicity—
cannot be thought apart from the sexual norms through which it is figured, licensed, and imbued with or emptied of affect.

Owing to its semi-dormancy since the early 1990s, Nuclear Criticism has largely missed the chance to think through queer theory, a field whose
principal interventions have happened in the interim. You occasionally see comparisons between queer coming-out narratives and a nation’s
coming out as a nuclear power or a military person’s coming out as an anti-nuclear activist. But the more suggestive commonalities between
Nuclear Criticism and queer theoretical writing—most of them under the sign of temporality—remain unexplored. These include an intimate
acquaintance with and even an embrace of the death drive; a related acquaintance with portraits of the future as negated or foreclosed; a
commitment not to reopen the future under repressive terms; and the alternative, in the face of a seemingly barred future, of soliciting the
queer touch of the dead whom for various reasons we suddenly apprehend as our contemporaries. Exploring
these
commonalities seems the more urgent, given that queer temporalities scholarship could
provoke debate about what nuclear abolitionists and their opponents have most in common: a
practically automated recourse to reproductive futurism in arguing for their respective
positions. Schell’s equation of low marital indices with a general sense of species futurelessness
is an extreme but not an exceptional case of antinuclear rhetoric, which continues today to
invoke “a world safe for our children” in terms nearly indistinguishable from the pro-nuclear
side of the aisle.12 The radical negativity exhibited by some queer temporalities scholars might also expose the limits of a politics of
(procreative) optimism on both sides of the nuclear debate—the limits of acting as if the world could be made safe
for “our children” or anyone else by either retaining or abolishing our nuclear deterrents.
Queer theorists, for their part, have turned occasionally during the last twenty years to Nuclear
Criticism, although usually to jump-start an argument headed away from the nuclear referent .
Peter Coviello’s essay “Apocalypse from Now On” (2000) nods in its title to both Jacques Derrida’s inaugural work of Nuclear Criticism, “No
Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)” (1984) and Susan Sontag’s 1989 AIDS and Its Metaphors (Sontag:
“Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not ‘Apocalypse Now’ but ‘Apocalypse from Now On’”).13 But Coviello’s essay invokes the nuclear
condition principally in order to set up what he sees as its succession, after 1989, by AIDS as the apocalypse du jour. “Du jour” in the way a daily
special marks the everyday’s domestication of the exceptional: for Coviello, AIDS differs from the nuclear condition in quotidienizing
apocalypse, making it a condition rather than a threatened event and thus particularly useful to the day-to-day biopolitical operations of the
state. Coviello, in other words, sets sail from Port Derrida for Port Sontag—from Nuclear Criticism to a critique of AIDS and governmentality—
without, understandably enough, booking return passage. Before leaving the nuclear behind, however, he notes “how intimately bonded the
nuclear and the sexual actually were, before the advent of AIDS gave to such bonding a ghastly quality of inevitability.”14 Coviello’s
emphasis is not on the usual string of references to the heteronormative sexualization of
nuclear weapons (e.g., “Little Boy,” Bikini atoll, the population bomb, and the nuclear family,
although he mentions these in passing). Instead, he reads nuclear discourse as having limned,
before AIDS, a “gay death drive” that figured queerness as incarnating (and more rarely as
rebuking) the extravagant sovereignty of nuclear weapons . Glossing Martin Amis’s characterization of the nuclear
arsenal as a cocked gun in the mouths of the procreative, Coviello writes that “power in the nuclear age is horrifying and unlivable because it
makes me—or wants to make me—thoroughly, irremediably queer.” 15

Thus the homophobia of certain anti-nuclear discourses anticipated homophobic responses to

AIDS as an apocalyptic threat emanating from queer subjects. What’s more, Coviello hazards,
the apocalypticism that pervaded debates around both nuclear weapons and AIDS made for
strong continuities between Nuclear Criticism and queer theory, both bodies of work
responding to high concentrations of state power in the management of populations , bilateral
depictions of the biological family as under siege, and the pervasive rhetoric of the death
wish.162
 Case – AT: Identity Good
a. Stable identities are bad – creates a normative ideal that forces
subjects to assimilate or die – that’s the 1AC
b. No link – we don’t preclude identification – the point of the 1AC
is to fluidly identify which enables normative identification as a
survival strategy but doesn’t make it a permanent source of
psychic violence
 Case – AT: IR Good
a. We are IR – we critique security, homology, and statecrafting
b. Turn – IR’s focus on state interaction actively excludes queer
theory IR’s transcendent analysis, which is key to accurate
representation of the world – that’s 1AC Weber
 Case – AT: IR Good – Cooption
a. It’s already been ceded – the majority of IR articles support US
leadership, interventions, security, etc.
b. No impact – our method is still a critique of state usage, security,
and normative IR which acts as an external check to IR-based
action
 Case – AT: Presumption
a. Vote AFF is our methodology is theoretically a good idea –
anything else turns their fairness offense
b. We solve:
1. Affect – extend Zembylas – neoliberal norms are structured
by affect – our counter-conduct performance creates an
affective rupture which reorients these norms and an
affective dissonance which spreads motivation for
intersectional resistance
2. Ballots – extend Blake – debate norms are structured by
competitive incentives – repeated success with critical
arguments gives them acceptance and appearances
c. Cross-apply all their warrants to their [off case advocacies] –
presumption flips NEG
 Case – AT: Presumption – Spill-Up
We just need to win horizontal change, not vertical – our method is
one of personal conception of identity, not politics
 Case – AT: Presumption – Subjectivity
a. Debate shapes subjectivity – proven by hours of research,
increased grades, and leftward community bias
b. We uniquely solve – we don’t need to change your entire
worldview, just how you view stable identities
c. Stubborn DA – their argument assumes static personal views –
links to our central being vs becoming debate – 1AC impacts
disprove and outweigh
 Case – AT: Puar Indicts
a. Our theory isn’t based in Puar – only the first card cites
homonationalism
b. Turn – Ruffolo specific rejects modern queer theory for it’s
explicit opposition to normativity and it’s written after Terrorist
Assemblages
c. Becoming Puar DA – answering our method with indicts of
another author locks and homogenizes queer identity – links to
our 1AC offense
 Case – AT: Puar Indicts – Processed Lives
a. It’s a link of omission – just says Puar omits blackness – which
isn’t even true, they concede Puar understands becoming as
identity shaped by social condition which obviously includes
blackness
b. Their evidence is afropessimism – talks about humanity being
structured in opposition to black women – reject non-black
debaters reading afropess – it’s morally abhorrent for non-black
debaters to be making claims that progress is impossible, and
makes black scholarship fungible
 Case – AT: State Inevitable
a. State’s not inevitable – that’s explicitly answered in 1AC Stanley
– it sustains its claim to inevitability via securitized normative
politics – means we solve
b. No impact
1. Even if it’s inevitable, that doesn’t mean it’s inevitably
powerful – we can just disavow it
2. Our fluid form of queerness prevents state policing by
allowing excessive queers to shift when needed for survival
 Case – AT: Statephobia
The state isn’t inevitable, but sustains itself through normative
protectorate relationships centered around the figure of the human –
means anti-queer violence is necessary to state action, regardless of
content, but our method can deconstruct state power – that’s 1AC
Stanley
 FW – Top Level
a. Case outweighs and turns – this is a debate of being vs becoming
and reading framework has put them on the side of being – our
1AC is a critique of static notions, and they have presented a
static notion of what debate is and what words mean – that links
to our microfascism and necropolitics impacts. If we win their
performance of framework in this round was violent, we don’t
have to engage the rest of the flow
b. We meet – we’re becoming topical
c. Counter interpretation – only our AFF is topical – only queer IR’s
multi-level analysis accurately explains state behavior – that’s
1AC Weber
d. Counter interpretation – “Resolved” means answered – AFFs can
answer the resolution by affirming or negating it – additionally,
the definition changed over time – prefer flexible interpretations
Vocabulary.com No Date (Vocabulary.com; dictionary focused on learning new words. “Resolved”
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/resolved No Date) // ELog

If you're resolved, you're strongly determined. If you've made a resolved decision, it won't be easy to change your mind. You
can also use this adjective to mean "answered," like a resolved equation in math class or a resolved
dilemma that's finally been settled. More often, you'll use it to mean "with resolve," or "with purpose." You'll be more intimidated
by a debate opponent who has a resolved expression on her face than one who looks uncertain. Resolved comes from the verb
resolve, which means "determine," but originally meant "melt or dissolve." Definitions of resolved: adjective -
explained or answered “problems resolved and unresolved” synonyms: solved |adjective – determined “she was firmly resolved to be a doctor”
synonyms: single-minded, resolute: firm in purpose or belief; characterized by firmness and determination
 e. The role of the negative is to contest the argument presented in
the 1AC – can be done through counter-methods or defending
the parts of the topic we critique – our offense outweighs any
difficulty of contestation
f. Statephilia DA – their method’s reliance on the state expands
civil society and understands anti-queer violence as random
contingencies, ignoring how they are structural necessities of
normative humanitarian statecrafting – that’s 1AC Stanley
g. Normativity DA – their defense of normal models and standards
necessarily excludes the queer subjects erased by normalization
– our model should be imperfect because queerness should be
problematic to their normative ideals
Neto ‘16 -- Senior Lecturer in Portuguese in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures.
Ph.D. in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages from the Graduate Center, CUNY. He
teaches Portuguese language, and courses on Brazilian and Lusophone culture. His research focuses on
queer theory, queer pedagogy, Brazilian culture and visual media. (João Nemi Neto, 3-16-2018, "Queer
pedagogy: Approaches to inclusive teaching," Columbia University, NY, SAGE Journals,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1478210317751273, accessed 7-23-2022) -- nikki
Queer pedagogy and questions of gender identity and sexual orientation For many American researchers and activists, the concept of
queerness seeks to incorporate bodies that lost visibility during the gay movement of the 1960s and 1970s. From this perspective, the gay and
lesbian movement was normalized as it adopted heteronormative practices (like marriage and the adoption of children) to gain public
acceptance. The
term ‘queer,’ then, attempts to recover individuals erased by this normalization, such as
feminine boys, transsexual people, transgender people, and non-binary or gender non-conforming
people among others. Briefly retracing a possible historiography of queer theory, by the beginning of 1970s, gay literary studies began
to flourish in the American academic world. As the gay movement started to seek out and create its own culture and identity, it began to look
not only to the past but also to the future. In the 1980s, U.S. political activism, still maintaining its attention to the past, adopted the word
‘queer’ as a driver of the movement, a word that up until then, had been considered the most commonly used homophobic term in the
country. In other words, the political movement reincorporated a term, previously carrying a negative connotation, trying, in this way, to
deconstruct its pejorative meaning. Taken up by the academy, queer theory seeks to denounce the heteronormativity that influences even the
gay movement. That is, the gay movement is accepted only to the extent that it conforms to certain social
values pre-established by society, rejecting those who do not follow that norm .2 Teresa de Lauretis
(1991) states that the term ‘queer’ should function as something that causes discomfort, juxtaposed to
the words lesbian and gay in the subtitle to mark a certain critical distance from the vocabulary used in
the past. For De Lauretis, queer is the ‘non-canonical,’ polyphonic, transgressive, and problematic . Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick (2008) too affirms that the term constitutes a moment, a movement, a continuous motive. Queer pedagogy, based
in these ideas of a queer theory against normalization, seeks to contribute to practices of education,
analyzing the fluidity and the mobility of society and affirming that educational institutions should not
attach themselves to one set model, since these ideals end up alienating, even excluding , certain
individuals. For Britzman (1998), queer theory transgresses seemingly stable representations and, in this
sense, queer pedagogy works to question situations of apparent normality in the classroom and
concerns itself with the social production of what is learned. Queer pedagogy does not seek the ‘correct’ method or the
‘right’ questions, but rather the possibility to question our practices or notions of equality and acceptance. Just as queer theory sought to
distance itself from the markers of gender associated with gay and lesbian studies, queer pedagogy offers everyone involved in academic
spaces, whether they be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual, etc., the possibility of understanding issues of sexuality from a new angle.
As Louro (2001) explains: “(…) a queer pedagogy and curriculum ‘speak’ to everyone and aren’t only directed at those who recognize
Queer pedagogy offers a critical view of the
themselves in this subject position, that is, as queer subjects.”3 (p. 256).
practices of exclusion that are naturalized in the classroom by a banal heteronormativity4 that makes all
those who don’t fit into a certain standard invisible . As Britzman (1998) demonstrates, queer theory recognizes the
exorbitant normality in effect and the ways in which that normality ignores queer pleasures, practices, and bodies. Neither does said pedagogy
seek merely to trade one norm for another, to simply leave a heterosexist binary for a heterosexual–homosexual modality. A queer lens for
pedagogical practice would mean observing the varied possibilities of expression of sexuality without the necessity of labels or fixed identities.
The recognition of different forms of expression would broaden an individual’s perspective, without that person having to necessarily adopt
one of these fixed identities, allowing them to acknowledge these identities or even recognize themselves in said identities. It becomes
necessary, then, to question and challenge dominant models in schools today so that socially favored groups are not the only ones visible,
including as well other bodies that are still oppressed by different spheres of society. Queer pedagogy can help us in two ways. First, by
problematizing the very school structure, the normalization of teaching per se and of the fixed and exclusionary content that is presented.
Using a queer lens would involve, for example, discussing why terms like gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender do not find space in school
vocabulary and why when they do, it is only through insults that should be silenced. More than prohibiting that students or even teachers use
these words as insults, it is important to have a discussion of such use. To be gay or transgender is part of the identity of an individual and as
such, should be included in the day-to-day just as ethnicity, religion, and many other aspects should be.5 As Britzman (2012) explains, queer
pedagogy aims at ‘something different than a plea for inclusion or merely adding marginalized voices to an overpopulated curriculum.’ (p. 297).
It is not the normalization of the ‘different’ that queer pedagogy proposes, is to ‘recognize difference outside the imperatives of normalcy.’ (p.
304).

h. Uniqueness DA – queer representation is being erased from

classrooms – there’s an ethical obligation to carve out debate as
a site of resistance and development for queer youth
Rafei et al. ’22 (Leila Rafei; content strategist at ACLU. Jared Fox; director of strategic projects at
Cleveland School District and founder at Iris Solutions. Tiffany Wright; professor of education at
Millersville University. Ricardo Martinez; CEO of Equality Texas. “How LGBTQ Voices are Being Erased in
Classrooms” https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/how-lgbtq-voices-are-being-erased-in-classrooms-
censorship 27 June 2022) // ELog
As classroom censorship bills sweep state legislatures, schools are removing books by and about LGBTQ people, BIPOC, and other marginalized
This year, more than 111 bills aiming to limit discussions
groups from curriculums and libraries at an unprecedented rate.
about race and gender in the classroom have been passed or introduced in state legislatures. These efforts
effectively erase voices, histories and lived experiences from students’ K-12 education. In honor of Pride month, three LGBTQ rights advocates
share how the recent surge of book bans and classroom censorship bills impact their work, and how they affect the students and teachers
whose identities are under attack. Jared Fox (he/him) Director, Strategic Projects at Cleveland School District in Ohio and Founder at Iris
Solutions Books are incredibly powerful, and the fact that people are trying to ban them just speaks to that. Through books, we can see
ourselves and the world around us — as Rudine Sims Bishop mentions, as a mirror, a window, or a sliding glass door allowing us to step into a
different world. As an English teacher, I tried to find books for the classroom that reflected the lived experiences of my students, whether
they’re queer or not. I want them to see that they matter, not just in my eyes but in the words on the page. There’s something meaningful
about seeing your experience published and bound in a spine. There’s a fear that reading books with LGBTQ characters will make students gay.
But I grew up reading about straight characters, with heterosexual parents, and somehow I ended up gay in this world. So if reading books is
supposed to determine your sexual orientation, that woefully failed in my case. Reading books with LGBTQ characters is important for
everybody. Students are going to be better off in the world because of it. Books can expose readers to identities beyond the scope of people
they know in their immediate lives — queer people with disabilities, queer people who are immigrants, queer people who wear a hijab —
thereby building empathy and understanding of experiences different from their own. For queer students, it validates their existence. When a
community says a book is being banned from the library because of its LGBTQ themes, it’s telling students “there’s something wrong with you,
there’s something that needs to be legislated or challenged, there’s something about you that is up for debate, that shouldn’t even be in a
book.” It tells LGBTQ students they don’t even deserve to be on the shelf — literally and metaphorically. That can be very harmful to students’
self-esteem and the way they see themselves in the world. When queer students are denied access to these stories, they lose a piece of their
humanity. It’s also important to note that many of the books that are banned are also by authors of color, which shows our desire as a society
to silence the voices of people of color. It’s yet another example of white supremacy at work. We cannot separate the work of LGBTQ equality
from the work of anti-racism because the struggles are so closely intertwined. When we are working towards a better future for LGBTQ folks,
we’re working towards a better future for people of color, too. And I think that’s important. Tiffany Wright (she/her) Graduate Program
Coordinator, Leadership for Teaching and Learning & Interim Chair of the Department of Educational Foundations at Millersville University in
Pennsylvania As a mother to a seventh-grader and a member of university faculty, I’ve seen firsthand how classroom censorship affects
students and educators alike, particularly those who are LGBTQ. Teachers are worried they could lose their jobs if they teach books about race
and gender, which shortcuts their efficacy as educators as well as their sense of personal well-being. And
I can’t imagine it’s easy for
young people to witness their own identity and existence being erased from school curricula. Representation
is so, so important. I know what it’s like to grow up unable to see yourself reflected in books or other parts of society and culture. During my
childhood in the 1980s, I never saw a book reflecting experiences and identities like my own. It wasn’t until college that I found LGBTQ voices in
literature — and even then, I had to seek it out. I think I would have had a very different experience growing up if I had been exposed to LGBTQ
voices earlier in my education. For example, maybe I wouldn’t have had to go through adolescence twice — before and after coming out.
Exposure to diverse perspectives sets students up for success as future leaders in the world. It shows
them how to treat and interact with people whose experiences are different from their own. It’s especially
important at the elementary age. Kids should be able to read books that portray LGBTQ people and families as part of the fabric of our
communities, not marginalized or erased. Today, I’m amazed at how well LGBTQ kids are learning to navigate the world at such an early age —
far younger than I was when I finally started figuring it out. I have a 14-year-old nephew who recently transitioned, and another child in the
Increasing representation of diverse voices in our books and classrooms
family came out as non-binary at age 12.
helps build students’ confidence as they discover who they are . As educators and students confront a continuing spate
of classroom and library censorship efforts, it’s important to remain open and be kind to one another — even as parents keep showing up at
school board meetings to yell about books. Instead of attacking others and pointing fingers, we should approach this issue from the base
assumption that everybody wants the best for their kids. We must come together and try to find a middle ground that doesn’t shortchange a
student’s education or harm LGBTQ students and educators. Ricardo Martinez (he/him) Chief Executive Officer, Equality Texas The reason that I
do the work that I do is because of what I learned in school. I grew up in New York and I was fortunate enough to have a program in junior high
school called Council for Unity. It was a group of civically engaged young people learning about racism, conflict resolution, how to be vulnerable
and share their life experience with their peers. We had a school field trip to the GMHC, an organization that taught me about the work of ACT
UP — an activist group that was started in the 1980s to address the AIDS crisis. And I just fell in love with the idea that someone could use their
individual power to change society. It was a profound realization for me — a moment of light that inspired me to continue a career in advocacy
and volunteer work helping the LGBTQ community. That’s what led me to Equality Texas. Over the course of the 2021 legislative year, we had
Although only one of those bills
the most anti-LGBTQ pieces of legislation filed in Texas in the history of the United States.
passed, the harmful narratives and manufactured moral panics that came with them are living on in
school board meetings, where LGBTQ students are seeing their very humanity up for debate by those
who are charged with their safety and education and in schools where books and symbols of support are
being removed from classrooms — creating hostile school climates for young people. As a direct result,
we started getting calls from all over Texas about escalating bullying, increased harassment and
violence, and even the removal of safe space stickers and flags or posters. Since January 1, 2021, the
Trevor Project has received close to 25,000 calls, texts or emails from young Texans in crisis. It’s not
surprising that the majority of the books lawmakers are trying to ban and remove from libraries are books that center the voices of LGBTQ
people or Black and Brown people. I remember what it’s like to not see people like you in your textbooks, and to see homophobia from
teachers, administrators, and peers. It added to a sense of fear about coming out, even though I already knew who I was by junior high. Going
to the library was a joyous experience because I could find those stories I didn’t always have access to in the classroom — stories of LGBTQ
people, of first or second generation immigrants like myself and my family. Seeing positive representations of people who looked like me
thriving and creating families let me know that there was hope. Inclusivity in the classroom is good for all students. It allows students to put
themselves in the shoes of somebody with a different experience, fostering empathy and compassion. It gives LGBTQ students a sense of power
and worthiness. Most importantly, it tells them that their stories matter.
 FW – Top Level – Three Tier Method
a. Case outweighs and turns – this is a debate of being vs becoming
and reading framework has put them on the side of being – our
1AC is a critique of static notions, and they have presented a
static notion of what debate is and what words mean – that links
to our microfascism and necropolitics impacts. If we win their
performance of framework in this round was violent, we don’t
have to engage the rest of the flow
b. We meet the three-tier method
1. Personal Experience – the 1AC poem describes Easton’s
experience with living up to expectations of queerness
2. Organic Intellectual – Blake is an article from a debater and
Stanley and Lawless both identify as queer
3. Traditional Evidence – the 1AC includes evidence from
academics at various prestigious universities
c. Counter interpretation – “Resolved” means answered – AFFs can
answer the resolution by affirming or negating it – additionally,
the definition changed over time – prefer flexible interpretations
Vocabulary.com No Date (Vocabulary.com; dictionary focused on learning new words. “Resolved”
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/resolved No Date) // ELog

If you're resolved, you're strongly determined. If you've made a resolved decision, it won't be easy to change your mind. You
can also use this adjective to mean "answered," like a resolved equation in math class or a resolved
dilemma that's finally been settled. More often, you'll use it to mean "with resolve," or "with purpose." You'll be more intimidated
by a debate opponent who has a resolved expression on her face than one who looks uncertain. Resolved comes from the verb
resolve, which means "determine," but originally meant "melt or dissolve." Definitions of resolved: adjective -
explained or answered “problems resolved and unresolved” synonyms: solved |adjective – determined “she was firmly resolved to be a doctor”
synonyms: single-minded, resolute: firm in purpose or belief; characterized by firmness and determination
 d. Normativity DA – their defense of normal models and standards
necessarily excludes the queer subjects erased by normalization
– our model should be imperfect because queerness should be
problematic to their normative ideals
Neto ‘16 -- Senior Lecturer in Portuguese in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures.
Ph.D. in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages from the Graduate Center, CUNY. He
teaches Portuguese language, and courses on Brazilian and Lusophone culture. His research focuses on
queer theory, queer pedagogy, Brazilian culture and visual media. (João Nemi Neto, 3-16-2018, "Queer
pedagogy: Approaches to inclusive teaching," Columbia University, NY, SAGE Journals,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1478210317751273, accessed 7-23-2022) -- nikki
Queer pedagogy and questions of gender identity and sexual orientation For many American researchers and activists, the concept of
queerness seeks to incorporate bodies that lost visibility during the gay movement of the 1960s and 1970s. From this perspective, the gay and
lesbian movement was normalized as it adopted heteronormative practices (like marriage and the adoption of children) to gain public
acceptance. The
term ‘queer,’ then, attempts to recover individuals erased by this normalization, such as
feminine boys, transsexual people, transgender people, and non-binary or gender non-conforming
people among others. Briefly retracing a possible historiography of queer theory, by the beginning of 1970s, gay literary studies began
to flourish in the American academic world. As the gay movement started to seek out and create its own culture and identity, it began to look
not only to the past but also to the future. In the 1980s, U.S. political activism, still maintaining its attention to the past, adopted the word
‘queer’ as a driver of the movement, a word that up until then, had been considered the most commonly used homophobic term in the
country. In other words, the political movement reincorporated a term, previously carrying a negative connotation, trying, in this way, to
deconstruct its pejorative meaning. Taken up by the academy, queer theory seeks to denounce the heteronormativity that influences even the
gay movement. That is, the gay movement is accepted only to the extent that it conforms to certain social
values pre-established by society, rejecting those who do not follow that norm .2 Teresa de Lauretis
(1991) states that the term ‘queer’ should function as something that causes discomfort, juxtaposed to
the words lesbian and gay in the subtitle to mark a certain critical distance from the vocabulary used in
the past. For De Lauretis, queer is the ‘non-canonical,’ polyphonic, transgressive, and problematic . Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick (2008) too affirms that the term constitutes a moment, a movement, a continuous motive. Queer pedagogy, based
in these ideas of a queer theory against normalization, seeks to contribute to practices of education,
analyzing the fluidity and the mobility of society and affirming that educational institutions should not
attach themselves to one set model, since these ideals end up alienating, even excluding , certain
individuals. For Britzman (1998), queer theory transgresses seemingly stable representations and, in this
sense, queer pedagogy works to question situations of apparent normality in the classroom and
concerns itself with the social production of what is learned. Queer pedagogy does not seek the ‘correct’ method or the
‘right’ questions, but rather the possibility to question our practices or notions of equality and acceptance. Just as queer theory sought to
distance itself from the markers of gender associated with gay and lesbian studies, queer pedagogy offers everyone involved in academic
spaces, whether they be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual, etc., the possibility of understanding issues of sexuality from a new angle.
As Louro (2001) explains: “(…) a queer pedagogy and curriculum ‘speak’ to everyone and aren’t only directed at those who recognize
Queer pedagogy offers a critical view of the
themselves in this subject position, that is, as queer subjects.”3 (p. 256).
practices of exclusion that are naturalized in the classroom by a banal heteronormativity4 that makes all
those who don’t fit into a certain standard invisible . As Britzman (1998) demonstrates, queer theory recognizes the
exorbitant normality in effect and the ways in which that normality ignores queer pleasures, practices, and bodies. Neither does said pedagogy
seek merely to trade one norm for another, to simply leave a heterosexist binary for a heterosexual–homosexual modality. A queer lens for
pedagogical practice would mean observing the varied possibilities of expression of sexuality without the necessity of labels or fixed identities.
The recognition of different forms of expression would broaden an individual’s perspective, without that person having to necessarily adopt
one of these fixed identities, allowing them to acknowledge these identities or even recognize themselves in said identities. It becomes
necessary, then, to question and challenge dominant models in schools today so that socially favored groups are not the only ones visible,
including as well other bodies that are still oppressed by different spheres of society. Queer pedagogy can help us in two ways. First, by
problematizing the very school structure, the normalization of teaching per se and of the fixed and exclusionary content that is presented.
Using a queer lens would involve, for example, discussing why terms like gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender do not find space in school
vocabulary and why when they do, it is only through insults that should be silenced. More than prohibiting that students or even teachers use
these words as insults, it is important to have a discussion of such use. To be gay or transgender is part of the identity of an individual and as
such, should be included in the day-to-day just as ethnicity, religion, and many other aspects should be.5 As Britzman (2012) explains, queer
pedagogy aims at ‘something different than a plea for inclusion or merely adding marginalized voices to an overpopulated curriculum.’ (p. 297).
It is not the normalization of the ‘different’ that queer pedagogy proposes, is to ‘recognize difference outside the imperatives of normalcy.’ (p.
304).
 FW – AT: Clash
a. Devil’s Advocate DA – clash focus predisposes us to challenge
everything – precludes listening to experience and causes us to
form our subjectivities in opposition
b. Turn – we’re best for clash by opening up robust theory of
power debates
c. Inevitable – you’ll always be able to read some generic or
backfile
d. Alt causes – tiny AFFs and process CPs
e. We solve – either only one AFF so you can prep it or topic
engagement means you can read your AFF prep on the NEG
 FW – AT: Clash Unique To Debate
a. Wrong – other forms of debate have clash
b. Essentialism DA – the assumption that what makes something
unique is the same as its purpose is a violent fallacy – used to
justify patriarchy, ableism, and slavery
 FW – AT: Debate is a Game
a. Debate is more than a game – it’s an educational activity –
proven by school sanctioning, academic research, and ending in
college
b. Game focus is bad – justifies doing anything for the ballot –
that’s 1AC Blake
c. Even in a game, ethics outweighs – proven by pro athletes
getting suspended for being racist
 FW – AT: Education
a. Pipeline DA – their education absent critical investigation
exports slanted worldviews – see Ted Cruz
b. Inevitable – you always learn something from the 1AC!
c. Alt causes – competitive incentives encourage dodging core
topic controversies
d. We solve – either we all learn our AFF which is key to
understand security or we still debate the resolution
 FW – AT: Fairness
a. Privilege DA – extend 1AC Blake – focus on procedural fairness
precludes discussions of structural fairness and assumes
everyone can succeed if the game is fair
b. Alt causes – coaches, resources, time, new and tiny AFF, process
CPs
c. Outweighs – it’s an internal link to impacts only we access
d. We solve – either it’s only our AFF and you can prep it or you can
read your resolutional AFF prep on the NEG
 FW – AT: Methods
a. Cross-apply the Statephilia DA
b. Turn – only we open up method debates beyond state or no-
state
c. Alt causes – spreading, tech focus, line-by-line, cards
d. Empirics – most debaters work in private sector jobs
 FW – AT: Moral High Ground
a. Guilt DA – they’ve equated discrimination with the discomfort of
talking about it – trivializes suffering and leads to movement
cooption
b. We solve – either it’s only our AFF or we need topic links – no
topic says 2+2=5
 FW – AT: Negating Experience Violent
a. Proves solving microfacism outweighs
b. No link – you don’t have to negate experience – just defend the
topic or read a countermethod
 FW – AT: Predictability
a. Visibility DA – what is predictable is limited to visible normative
bodies – precludes queer identity or strategic transparency
b. Inevitable – we disclose and people read queer theory every
year
c. Alt causes – people don’t disclose, break new, and read weird
DAs
d. We solve – either there’s only one AFF or all AFFs answer the
resolutional question
 FW – AT: Schulman
a. Cross-apply the Statephilia DA
b. Not true – tons of anti-war movements have been successful
without using the state – Vietnam proves
c. We solve – the 1AC is an example of the discourse they advocate
for – and their author concludes policy debate is ineffective and
requires Congressional action to change
1NC Schulman 18, Deputy Director of Studies and Leon E. Panetta Senior Fellow at the Center for a
New American Security, co-host of the national security podcast Bombshell, held senior staff positions at
the National Security Council and Department of Defense (Loren DeJonge Schulman, 12-4-2018, "Policy
Roundtable: The Future of Progressive Foreign Policy — Progressives Should Embrace the Politics of
Defense," Texas National Security Review, https://tnsr.org/roundtable/policy-roundtable-the-future-of-
progressive-foreign-policy/)
These policy positions require little analytical effort or political capital, and let Democrats occasionally posture as morally superior by
emphasizing “non-military tools” of foreign policy. The opposite alternative of a more rigid pacifism and anti-militarism, though common in the
grassroots progressive community, has no consistently organized political presence on the Hill and thus also escapes thorough interrogation.75
For those outside the Beltway, opposition to all things military offers the refuge of principle without critical justification or analysis. For many
Democrats, the Obama model was a strangely tolerable middle ground: a bipartisan budget mess made while a “responsible” president ramped
up security interventions in enough secrecy to avoid nagging scrutiny or self-examination. Re-Politicizing Defense Despite the valiant efforts of
some individuals, there is no political home for responsible defense debate, oversight, and accountability.76 Yet, with determination, the left
To be clear: There is substantial work
might find a real foothold in defense policy — without compromising progressive values.
to be done on figuring out what cohesive view of America’s role in the world the left can tolerate and
advance. There is even greater work to be done on determining how to renew, reuse, and reform international institutions.77 But any such
agendas would be well served by embracing a set of principles that make clear-eyed debate and evaluation of defense policy and execution an
asset, not an unforgiveable sin. Critical analysis of defense affairs is too often left to the technocratic and comparatively powerless “blob,”
And although
which can write a mean op-ed or tweet, but has limited ability to engage the American people on its will and interests.
Congress has willfully declawed itself so that it cannot maintain meaningful oversight of national
security,78 its ability to stage and amplify policy debate for the American people is without parallel, and
it has tremendous latent potential to restore greater balance in civil-military relations. Congress’s
absence and the associated de-politicization of national security affairs is costly. For instance, the American public
is deeply ambivalent about the 17-year conflict in Afghanistan and generally ignorant of the widespread activities of the war on terror.79 This is
unsurprising: Congress, too, is disaffected, often ignorant of where the U.S. military is even engaged,80 and has made little headway into
The most substantive and serious debate about executive war authorities
questioning or shaping this intervention.
and the effectiveness of U.S. counterterrorism strategy has resulted in little more than a reauthorization
proposal that still failed to move forward.81 Too many examples of political leaders’ stand-off or superficial approach to
defense policy and execution abound. Military superiority is generally viewed as sacrosanct, placed on “so high a pedestal as to render real
debate meaningless.”82 That reverence infantilizes defense budget debates. Thanking troops for their service is a politicized ritual that divorces
politicians and their constituents from the intent and costs of that service. With decisions on the needs of the U.S. military and sustaining legacy
systems openly linked to the economies of congressional districts, it’s understandable that skeptics of utilizing military tools have been
unwilling to evaluate their merits. These must all change. While, at its worst, the political right treats the use of force abroad as a metric of
patriotism and the size of the force as the measure of one’s love of America, the political left ought to draw from its skepticism toward
intervention and its faith in institutions to advance a more rational and accountable approach to national security. For years, Robert Farley has
highlighted that “progressives consistently underestimate the importance of discussions about military doctrine and technology,”83 taking
Instead of
what Michael Walzer calls “shortcuts”84 in their critiques of defense policy that relieve them from contributing to key debates.
excusing themselves, the left should instead propose legitimate questions about major shifts in force
employment and development: Will it work? What are its goals? What is the U.S. national security apparatus learning?
Why didn’t it work? Were U.S. objectives wrong? What did America change when it didn’t work? Will America do it again? What
could be improved? What should America do now? Joining the Conversation Jackson’s notion of what a progressive “wager” on national
security might look like in practice is useful, filling the gap between the “Republican-lite” default and the stubbornness of anti-militarism. But
the left’s diversity of thought can accommodate a wider playing field of potential alternative approaches to security than even he proposes. A
true pacifist movement on the Hill and on the campaign trail, dedicated to the advancement of non-military approaches but premised on
analysis and logical arguments, would be a serious advancement in national security and should be welcomed by the most ardent military
advocates. Likewise, a more prudent middle ground approach — one that is skeptical of, but open to, military might and intervention and
demands a better return on investment of national security tools — should play a more prominent political role. The full range of the left’s
national security spectrum should forcefully engage in oversight of the rationale for and quality of American forces and interventions abroad.
The left should therefore consider adopting a series of principles on defense matters — including criteria for the use of force — that apply to
the military-friendly and anti-militarist left alike. In practice, this means acknowledging that there are valid political positions on matters of
defense that lie somewhere in between “yes, and” and “no never” and that trivializing them is harmful to America’s national security. There are
alternatives to today’s counterterror strategy and it would not be an insult to the military to debate them. It’s entirely legitimate to study
whether the military is equipped to face today’s threats without being accused of retreating from the world or starting with an artificial budget
cut. It’s sensible to consider whether the planned growth of ground forces, a 350-ship Navy, or a 386-squadron Air Force are the right
investments or political benchmarks.85 These questions involve choices and values and should not be avoided under the umbrella of a
Just as important, it’s essential that the left avoid becoming a
supposed technocratic bipartisan agreement.
caricature of itself that promotes simplistic and superficial positions that set rigid, unserious standards.
The left may not agree on the size or purpose of the military, but it can agree America should strive for informed oversight and accountability.
 FW – AT: Switch Side Debate
a. Their advocacy for inconsistent identities proves the AFF is a
good idea
b. Becoming NEG DA – their insistence on reading Ks as NEG locks
in normative understandings of argumentation – links to our 1AC
impacts
c. Can’t solve form – 1AC Zembylas says affective rupture requires
breaking the rules
d. Can’t solve content – form overdetermines it – can’t talk about
queer theory when you read extinction outweighs
e. We meet – we read Deleuze on the AFF and Lacan on the NEG –
if that isn’t switch side, proves they require state engagement
which we’ve impact turned
 FW – AT: Topical Version of the AFF
a. Cross-apply the Statephilia DA
b. Can’t solve form – 1AC Zembylas says affective rupture requires
breaking the rules
c. Can’t solve content – form overdetermines it – can’t talk about
queer theory when your read Turkey PIC
 K – FW – Top Level
Interpretation: weigh the methodology of the AFF vs the methodology
of a competitive alternative – means we get perms
a. Clash – anything else lets uncompetitive advocacies that moot
discussion of the AFF with artificial net benefit debates
b. Coalitions – analyzing opportunity for intersectional resistance is
key to create a unified front which effectively challenges power
c. Becoming Perm DA – claims to mutual exclusivity locks in static,
unchanging beings which links to all our 1AC offense
K – FW – AT: Scalar Competition
 K – Academy – Top Level
a. Uniqueness argument – academia has only failed due to its
subservience to normative politics – our method can reclaim the
subversive potential of the university
Svirsky ‘10 Marcelo Svirsky, professor of critical and cultural theory at Cardiff University (UK),
“Introduction: Beyond the Royal Science of Politics,” Deleuze Studies Vol 4: 2010, pg. 2
As Deleuze and Guattari have explained, this characteristic ‘royal’ science of politics ‘continually appropriates the contents of vague or nomad
science’–those forms of political investigation looking ‘to understand both the repression it encounters and the interaction ‘ “containing” it’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367–8). One
major task of new activist war machines is, then, to escape entrapment
within the black hole of the majoritarian discourse on civil society, captured and defined by pervasive
notions of ‘representative participation’. Although the ‘NGOisation’ of the public sphere since the 1980s
(see Yacobi 2007), together with other forms of political proliferation, have broadened the visible
political field, the potential of non-institutional forms of action has been weakened ideologically by a
whole state apparatus comprised of research centres and budgets, instrumental teaching, and a
parliamentary politics that has incorporated the discourse of civil society – all of which have effected a
sectorisation of society and political life. The epistemological aspirations of the three ‘ideal circles’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:
367) of the state, economy and civil society are commonly used to categorise political eruptions as forms of participation in the official,
It is in this light that we must interpret the failure of academia to come to terms
representative state politics.
with the division of labour lately being imposed by the transversal relations between intellectual
investigation and political situatedness embodied in militant research. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, ‘we know of
the problems States have always had with journey-men’s associations or compagnonnages, the nomadic or itinerant bodies . . . ’ (368). It is
clear that a Jamesonian ‘strategy of containment’ is at work in the narrative tradition of royal political science. It
is in the notion of
‘representative participation’ that a function of formal unity or a strategy of containment has been
founded, which, as Jameson puts it, ‘allows what can be thought to seem internally coherent in its own
terms, while repressing the unthinkable . . . which lies beyond its boundaries’ (Jameson 1981: 38). By tying
official politics together with every form of political participation it can ensnare, what royal political science does is ‘radically impoverish . . . the
data of one narrative line’ – namely, that of the new activisms–‘by their rewriting according to the paradigm of another narrative...’–namely,
that of representative participatory politics (Jameson 1981: 22). The
subversive power of political potentia is thus
contained by this reductive strategy; civil society becomes the main territory of this imprisonment,
assisted by a false equation of official participation with challenging politics.

b. Link turn and perm –

1. Cross-apply 1AC Zembylas – our counter conduct performance
generates an affective rupture that reorients normative
education towards resistance
2. Our non-normative fluid identity situates us in the
Undercommons – we are in and not of academica, and disrupt
it’s normative productivity
Moten/Harney ‘4 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The University and the Undercommons, SEVEN
THESES Social Text 79, Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press
“To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only
possible relationship to the American university today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in
general. But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be
accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In
the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the
university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony,
its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern
university. Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like
Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But
for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came
under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but
She disappears into the underground, the downlow
cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears.
lowdown maroon community of the university, into the Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the
work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong. What is that
work and what is its social capacity for both reproducing the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one would be
performing the work of the university. Teaching is merely a profession and an operation of what Jacques Derrida calls the onto-/auto-
encyclopedic circle of the Universitas. But it is useful to invoke this operation to glimpse the hole in the fence where labor enters, to glimpse its
hiring hall, its night quarters. The university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical with and thereby erased by it. It is not
teaching then that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of
teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the prophetic
organization. But it is teaching that brings us in. Before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and journals there is the experience of
being taught and of teaching. Before the research post with no teaching, before the graduate students to mark the exams, before the string of
sabbaticals, before the permanent reduction in teaching load, the appointment to run the Center, the consignment of pedagogy to a discipline
called education, before the course designed to be a new book, teaching happened. The moment of teaching for food is therefore often
mistakenly taken to be a stage, as if eventually, one should not teach for food. If the stage persists, there is a social pathology in the university.
But if the teaching is successfully passed on, the stage is surpassed, and teaching is consigned to those who are known to remain in the stage,
the sociopathological labor of the university. Kant interestingly calls such a stage “self-incurred minority.” He tries to contrast it with having the
“determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another.” “Have the courage to use your own intelligence.” But
what would it mean if teaching or rather what we might call “the beyond of teaching” is precisely what one is asked to get beyond, to stop
taking sustenance? And what of those minorities who refuse, the tribe of moles who will not come back from beyond2 (that which is beyond
“the beyond of teaching”), as if they will not be subjects, as if they want to think as objects, as minority? Certainly, the perfect subjects of
communication, those successfully beyond teaching, will see them as waste. But their collective labor will always call into question who truly is
taking the orders of the Enlightenment. The waste lives for those moments 102 Moten/Harneybeyond2 teaching when you give away the
unexpected beautiful phrase— unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it will never come back. Is being the biopower of the Enlightenment
truly better than this? Perhaps the biopower of the Enlightenment know this, or perhaps it is just reacting to the objecthood of this labor as it
must. But even as it depends on these moles, these refugees, they will call them uncollegial, impractical, naive, unprofessional. And one may be
given one last chance to be pragmatic—why steal when one can have it all, they will ask. But if one hides from this interpellation, neither agrees
nor disagrees but goes with hands full into the underground of the university, into the Undercommons—this will be regarded as theft, as a
And it is at the same time, the only possible act. In that Undercommons of the university one
criminal act.
can see that it is not a matter of teaching versus research or even the beyond of teaching versus the
individualization of research. To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of
the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the
stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give
refuge, where the refuge gives commons. What the beyond2 of teaching is really about is not finishing
oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by
others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not
possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate
the auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the teaching as it
is the prophecy in the organization of the act of teaching.
c. Becoming Academy DA – their monolithic understanding of
academia locks in static notions of identity which links to our
1AC impacts
d. Queer DA
 K – Academy – AT: Alt – Generic
a. Perm do both – our method disrupts academia – that’s
Moten/Harney and 1AC Zembylas
 K – Afropessimism – Top Level
a. Blackness is rhizomatic, not ontological – lines of flight are
created through acts of resistance which overflow their
totalizing ontology claims – even if their worldview is correct,
material resistance is compatible and preferable
Kline ‘17 (David Kline, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Rice University, “The Pragmatics
of Resistance: Framing Anti-Blackness and the Limits of Political Ontology,” Critical Philosophy of Race,
Vol. 5, No. 1, 2017, pg. 63 - 66, Emory Debate)

Chandler is describing the way Blackness—in all of its social scope and complexity— overflows or breaks
open the boundaries of any formal imposition, the way Blackness cannot be reduced to a frame of
abjection or the irreconcilable position of an antagonism. From this perspective, Blackness is a rhizome,
a dynamic, creative, and desiring counter-force in which lines of flight present possible modes of
freedom and sociality in excess to political ontological positioning. As a paraontological phenomenon, Chandler and
Moten understand Blackness as a unique and specific exertion within modernity—which might also be called the historical regime of racial
political ontology—that challenges every schema of formalization and [End Page 63] positional fixity. In this way, from this vantage, the history
of Blackness is read as a history of a certain performativity of the drive towards a freedom not determined by the terms or boundaries of
ontology, as a history of the object’s absolute objection to the macropolitical capture of identity. This paraontological movement of Black
fugitivity, as Moten has coined it, calls into question the framing of Blackness wholly within a political ontology that seeks to index and describe
Black life in terms of pure abjection. Again, Moten and Chandler do not in any way downplay the abjection to which Blackness is given in the
modern world. Indeed, Moten considers his project and that of Afro-pessimism as two sides of a mutual project where “Black optimism and
Afro-pessimism are asymptotic” (Moten 2014, 778). Yet, by insisting on the possibilities of Black life within an immanent and micropolitical field
of becoming that moves in resistance to a rigid political ontology of social death, Moten taps into something vital that precedes the force of
imposition, the force of law, or the force of the structure of White supremacy and its sedimented political ontological order. In this way, he also
expands the frame of analysis and praxis so that a much wider field of resources and possibilities are available in terms of a project of liberation
that goes beyond the political ontological frame. This is where I suggest the decentering of political ontology and the inclusion of the Black
aleatory body as the site of struggle, evasion, and creation becomes a pragmatic mode of framing the problem and thinking a purely practical
politics of both spontaneous creation and a calculated movement against the political ontological regime of anti-Blackness. Although Moten
would certainly object to describing this turn by way of a “pragmatic politics,” I suggest that his “Black optimism” and Chandler’s paraontology
find congruence with a kind of Foucaultian-Deleuzian pragmatics which, as Paul Patton describes Deleuze’s philosophy, “[enables] a form of
description which is immediately practical” and an “ethico-political conception of philosophy as oriented towards the possibility of change”
From this angle, the accurate representation of an ontological reality, while certainly
(Patton 2003, 16, 17).
necessary and crucial to the task of naming the full scope of the problem and thinking a way forward,
does not take precedence over the task of creating new concepts and lines of flight that should be
judged on their effectiveness not in terms of properly representing an ontological problem, but in terms
of their concrete effects within a wide field of contexts, specific socio-political problems, and
conjunctures. As Deleuze and Guattari describe how pragmatics marks a study attuned to the
complexity, [End Page 64] contingency, and potential danger that defines the micropolitical, “the study
of the dangers of each line is the object of pragmatics or schizoanalysis, to the extent that it undertakes
not to represent, interpret, or symbolize, but only to make maps and draw lines, marking their mixtures
as well as their distinctions” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 227). Pragmatics, in this way, is all about
drawing lines and making maps against macropolitical sedimentations that lead somewhere, that create
something new. Such pragmatic orientation is especially pertinent in the contemporary biopolitical frame as Foucault understands it. As
I’ve already described, Foucault’s biopolitics is premised on the idea that when politics takes the biological body as its primary aim and object,
as opposed to sovereign power’s object of the legal subject and its constitutive negative, then there is introduced into politics the possibility, as
Cary Wolfe notes, “for life to burst through power’s systematic operations in ways that are more and more difficult to anticipate” (Wolfe 2014,
158). The increasing complexity of bodily knowledge and the power that takes this knowledge as its operating principle means that both risk
and possibility increase in terms of what the body can do and what can be done to the body. The pragmatic thrust of this emerges when
situating it at the level of micropolitics, where, as I’ve been describing, Deleuze and Guattari locate the conditions for lines of flight and where
“there is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine”
The pragmatic
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 216). Out of any sedimentation there will always be deterritorialization and reterritorialization.
possibility or potential, then, is that there is always a simultaneity of the micropolitical and the
macropolitical that provides the conditions for an ongoing search for new tactics, orientations,
assemblages, vocabularies, and processes of becoming that are aimed practically towards change:
“What matters is to break through the wall, even if one has to become-black like John Brown. George
Jackson. ‘I may take flight, but all the while I am fleeing, I will be looking for a weapon!” (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 277). This emphasis on
pragmatics and lines of flight—both in potentially negative and positive terms (i.e. in terms of pure contingency)—provides a much more
expansive level for framing the problem of anti-Blackness that is not reducible to fixed political ontological positions and the macropolitical
plane. Finally, I suggest this kind of pragmatics is what Moten and Harney describe as “fugitive planning and Black study,” what Jack Halberstam
[End Page 65] characterizes simply as “reaching out to find connection” (Moten and Harney 2013, 5). Pragmatics finds a footing in the highly
dynamic and shifting terrain of power relations and its multiplicity of conjunctures that signal the condition of movement and connection. It
finds its enactment in sites such as “the little Negro’s church and logos and gathering, this gathering in and against the word, alongside and
Within these and other
through the word and the world as hold, manger, wilderness, tomb, upper room, and cell” (Moten 2014, 775).
sites of micropolitical connection and the practices that take place in them, there is flight, resistance,
and the creation of something new and productive. The inclusion of these sites and practices within the
analytical frame and critique of anti-Blackness provide a much wider set of resources for thinking the
complexity of the full scope of the political field that exists in excess to the political ontological frame,
and, in the same way, orients the fight against anti-Blackness in practical (though potentially no less
revolutionary), rather than apocalyptic, terms. This, I argue, does not have to mitigate or pass over Sexton’s call that “slavery
must be theorized maximally if its abolition is to reach the proper level” (Sexton 2011, 33). The maximum theorization of slavery
and anti-Blackness does not need be completely hedged in by a political ontological frame. However,
analytical expansion beyond the political ontological frame does mean locating a positive emphasis on what Sexton disparagingly identifies as a
tendency towards “forces of mitigation that would transform the world through a coalition of a thousand tiny causes” (ibid.). Taking
Sexton’s (and Wilderson’s) call of a maximum theorization of slavery/anti-Blackness with full
seriousness, I wonder what the proper level of abolition could possibly mean other than a pragmatic
coalition—or a micropolitics—of a thousand tiny causes. As I’ve argued, thinking what this might mean would certainly
necessitate an expansive analytics of power relations flowing over a highly complex field of forces, intensities, technologies, and dispositifs that
together form a micropolitical field far in excess of sovereign power and the political ontological frame. Out of such an analytics, a pragmatics
that finds its possibility in the micropolitical field of movement and flight emerges as the condition for an ongoing life of resistance, connection,
and a movement toward freedom. [End Page 66]

b. Afropessimism is wrong and erases Africa, politics, and

intersectionality
Dawson ‘21 - Michael C. Dawson is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science at the
University of Chicago, and founding director of its Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, 5-
17-2021, "Against Afropessimism," IDEOLOGY THEORY PRACTICE, https://www.ideology-theory-
practice.org/blog/against-afropessimism//vi
Afropessimists argue that we can only understand the global system of racial domination if we acknowledge that it is, first and foremost, a
system defined in toto by anti-blackness. Moreover, Afropessimism rejects a central role for political economy and politics for understanding
the essence of black oppression. For the past few years, this branch of critical race theory has gained a number of supporters in and out of the
academy. For example, Frank Wilderson’s highly influential 2020 book Afropessimism was long-listed for the National Book Award and was
praised by several outstanding black intellectuals. This essay centres the work of Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton as they are widely
recognised leaders of the Afropessimism school of thought.[1] Wilderson and Sexton claim that the enslavement of Africans constituted a
rupture; a rupture that was essential for the development of capitalism but also a rupture that put black bodies and black people outside of the
logics of capitalism and colonialism. For Sexton and Wilderson, anti-blackness is both a unique system of structural dominance as well as an
ideology. Anti-blackness, they claim, is defined by racial slavery and impervious to change. Sexton argues for example, “the application of the
law of racial slavery is pervasive, regardless of variance or permutation in its operation across the better part of a millennium”.[2] In this essay, I
offer a critique of Afropessimism, both as a theory of black oppression and as a political project. I make the following claims. First,
Afropessimism incorrectly centres the experiences of people of African descent that were enslaved
within the U.S. This results in the homogenisation of the experiences of peoples of African descent, and ,
equally importantly, mischaracterises and belittles the oppression of non-African colonised subjects.
While I agree that anti-blackness is a central structural feature of global white supremacy that emerged with the mid-15th-century Iberian slave
trade, I argue that it is not the only critical structural feature that historically defined white supremacy. Further,
the ontological
centring of the experiences of people of African descent in the U.S. radically and incorrectly
homogenises the history and conditions of the peoples of Africa and those in the African Diaspora.
Secondly, I argue that Afropessimists overemphasise the continuities in the black experience in the U.S. While Afropessimists are
correct that there are structural continuities across time that continue to contribute to black oppression
—not the least of which is a continuing vitriolic and violent global anti-blackness—they underemphasise
the achievements of black freedom struggles. Even Wilderson’s own biography is a testimony to critical changes in the black
experience in the U.S. The positive changes that are elided in the work of many Afropessimists—such as the
formation of modern black civil society and a great expansion of a robust and often revolutionary black
politics— serves to erase the often heroic struggles of black activists; struggles that often tragically failed
to bring substantial progress, but that also sometimes achieved victories in the struggle for black
liberation. Finally, and critically, Wilderson and Sexton present a fatally flawed account of the relationship between black oppression, white supremacy and the capitalist social order. I will demonstrate that this is a flaw that not only makes impossible any accurate
account of black oppression, but also prevents us from understanding the contradictions and cleavages that exist within black communities and black politics. Afropessimism Incorrectly Centres the Experiences of People of African Descent Enslaved within the U.S. Afro-Pessimists
homogenise the black experience. I agree with Wilderson when he argues that the enslavement of blacks, and specifically the slave trade, was a condition for the development of global capitalism, particularly as the Atlantic became more economically important than the Mediterranean.
[3] The large-scale sale of Africans in 1444 by the Portuguese marked Africans as the Other, justifying in the minds of royal, religious, and secular Portuguese elites the brutal and exceptional enslavement of Africans. Previously, only prisoners of war were subject to enslavement. This
marked the moment when Africans were marked as the exception to natural law in service of accumulation; in service of profits.[4] I also agree with Wilderson that this marks the inception of a set of anti-black logics that have taken a life of their own and have rendered black lives less
valuable, subject to excessive and often arbitrary violence, and ultimately disposable during the entire history of capitalist development. I disagree, however, when Sexton and Wilderson privilege the role of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the “New World” and homogenise the
black experience. They fail to understand that black people have played a number of roles viz colonialism and have been valued differently by capitalist states and managers depending on those roles.[5] Sexton’s claim “[t]he United States provides the point of focus here, but the dynamics
under examination are not restricted to its bounds” glosses over the differences in black experience at the time of slavery and the present day, and between “New World slavery” and old-world colonialism.[6] It assumes that the figure of the enslaved African in the “New World” can
represent the entirety of black experience. This is untenable: After all, one might well argue that the experience of colonised Africans was more akin to that of the other colonised populations of Asia and the “New World” than that of their enslaved cousins. The work of scholars such as
Michael Ralph and Andrew Zimmerman, among many others, demonstrate that those enslaved in the so- called “New World” was not the same, for example, as the experience of Africans in Senegambia who worked as agents on behalf of European colonial powers.[7] Further, these
Afropessimists incorrectly belittle the oppression of non-white peoples who are not of African descent. If the threat and shadow of slavery followed those of African descent across generations, the very real threat of dispossession, massacre and even genocide at the hands of Euro-
American imperialists and their clients similarly hung over entire indigenous populations across multiple continents and islands. But Afropessimists deny this. Sexton, for example, argues that with respect to black folks, indigenous populations had the same relationship to people of
African descent as the Europeans that colonised the western hemisphere, Asia, and Africa. Sexton argues, “freedom from the rule of slave law requires only that one be considered nonblack, whether that nonblack racial designation be “white” or “Indian” or, in the rare case, “Oriental”—
this despite the fact that each of these groups has at one point or another laboured in conditions similar to or contiguous with enslaved African-derived groups.”[8] In other words, Sexton here argues that modern racial slavery was so momentous than even the indigenous victims of
genocide, or the conquered colonised peoples throughout the world, had more in common with whites than they had in common with enslaved African populations and their descendants—even though arguably colonised Africans had more in common with other colonised peoples than
with their enslaved cousins in the Western Hemisphere. Sexton declares, “we note the fact that ‘the absolute submission mandated by law was not simply that of slave to his or her owner- but the submission of all the enslaved before all whites. The latter group is better termed all non
blacks (or, less economically, the unequally arrayed category of non-blackness), because it is racial blackness as a necessary condition for enslavement that matters most, rather than whiteness as a condition for freedom.”[9] Even bracketing the historical inaccuracies, the logical and
temporal slippage in the above passages that lead to the transformation from “enslaved before all whites” to “better termed non blacks” is stunning. The genocide of indigenous peoples in the New World preceded black slavery and was in many ways as or more brutal even if the
dehumanisation processes markedly differed. Nine out of ten indigenous people died due to European diseases in the New World—yet that category was a condition for freedom? The American empire as well as that of its European counterparts required periodic massacres of racialised
“natives” at places such as Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, or in the early 20th century, the Philippines where an extraordinary percentage of the population was killed during the American military intervention before World War I. In his work on racialised U.S. imperialism in the
Philippines, Kramer calls estimates of 250,00 Filipinos dying as a result of U.S. military intervention during the late 19th early 20th century “conservative”.[10] Massacres such as these were conducted by from Southern to Northern African by brutal imperialists such as the Germans and
British. To sum up: White supremacy was and is a global imperial project that divided the world into civilised, human, citizen-subjects, and non-civilised, sub-human colonised subjects. The enslavement of Africans and the centrality of the slave trade for the early development of
capitalism and empire for Atlantic sector European states ensured that anti-blackness would be an enduring structural feature of white supremacy. But the processes of racialisation, domination, dispossession and exploitation associated with white supremacy differed within and across
regions. Only by not homogenising the experiences of the various racially subordinated populations—including the experiences of people of African descent—will we be able to analytically forge theories and practices needed for black liberation. Afropessimism is Anti-Political and Erases
the History and Achievements of Black Liberation Movements. Wilderson argues that blacks are not of the world, they are also not part of the “narrative,” not part of history. Wilderson states: “As provocative as it may sound history and redemption (and therefore narrative itself) are
inherently anti-Black.”[11] For Wilderson, blacks are outside of history; “space and time” are absent: “just as there is no time for the Slave, there is also no place for the Slave.”[12] In asserting that black people are outside of history, Wilderson is making the claim that Blackness is
irrevocably marked as slaveness—there is no historical change in the meaning of blackness and position of black people. In Afropessimism, for example, Wilderson claims that “Afropessimism is premised on an iconoclastic claim: that Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness.”[13]
“Blackness,” Wilderson emphasises, “cannot exist other than Slaveness”.[14] This is not so much an iconoclastic claim as a false one. It is true, of course, that Black lives after slavery continued to be marked by domination and violence. The spectre of extreme violence aimed at individuals
and black communities, the expropriation that marked share cropping in the rural south, the super-exploitation of black industrial workers, the precarious position of black women performing paid and unpaid domestic labour, and the continued vulnerability of black women to all of the
above as well as gender-based domination, all serve to emphasise the continuities of domination. But while there were important continuities between in the condition of black people during and after slavery, the rupture caused by the end of slavery nonetheless represented a massive
change in how black life was organised—a reorganisation that transformed the articulation between white supremacy and the capitalist social order. The end of slavery presented new and important opportunities for black agency even if full “freedom” was not achieved. It was marked by
the formation of black civil society, the emergence of new possibilities as well as new challenges for black politics. It was during this period that the institutional backbone of black civil society was developed—including the black church (which was as much a political institution as a sacred
one); black institutions of higher learning; cooperative and mutual aid societies; and. a myriad of other organisational initiatives. All were launched and/or consolidated during this period. The ability to form families, expand black politics, and build black civil society represented a type of
real if limited progress. Further, Wilderson’s claim that the black condition is defined by “slaveness,” that blacks are not of the world, they are also not part of the “narrative,” not part of history is also profoundly anti-political. For Wilderson, blacks exist outside of the domain of politics:
“The violence of the slave estate cannot be thought of the way one thinks of the violence of capitalist oppression. It takes an ocean of violence to produce a slave, singular or plural, but that violence never goes into remission. Again, the prehistory of violence that establishes slavery is
also the concurrent history of slavery. This is a difficult cognitive map for most activists to adjust to because it actually takes the problem outside of politics.”[15] Wrong. What progress has been made has been the result of fighting through social movements that, as Malcolm X urged,
used any means necessary. Fighting oppression is inherently political. The anti-political nature of Wilderson’s central claim casts aside the momentous struggles of black people for liberation in the U.S., massive struggles for freedom throughout the African Diaspora, the 20th-century
African national liberation struggles, as well as contemporary African struggles against neocolonialism, neoliberal regimes, and against the new imperial project of redividing Africa. Perhaps the most immoral implication of Wilderson’s claim that slaveness defines blackness is that the
human is defined against blackness. If blacks are not human then it is easier to claim that black people are outside of history, and blacks are outside the realm of politics. For Wilderson, all human life is defined in opposition blackness, in opposition to the condition of being a slave.
Wilderson explains, “Human Life is dependent on Black death for its existence and for its conceptual coherence. There is no world without Blacks, yet there are no Blacks who are in the World.”[16] This claim places Wilderson outside of both the black radical and black nationalist
traditions. Black movements whether black liberal, black Marxist, or black nationalist fought and died insisting on Africans’ humanity—although some, particularly but not exclusively many black nationalists, questioned the humanity of those that enslaved others. Black movements have
historically, and correctly, demanded a place in a world the recognition of one’s own humanity regardless of one’s status as enslaved, expropriated, and oppressed. Afropessimism Distorts the Relationship Between Anti-Blackness, White Supremacy, Patriarchy, and Capitalism Finally and
critically, this version of Afropessimism severely mischaracterises the relationship between anti-blackness, white supremacy, and capitalism.[17] Wilderson asserts that political economy is of little use for analysing the black condition as the condition of the slave, the condition of blacks, is
subject to violence that cannot be explained by political economy. Further, the status of the slave is invariant to “historical shifts.” I assert that only by understanding the interaction between the multiple systems of domination blacks are subject to—white supremacy (of which anti-
blackness is a central structural feature), patriarchy and capitalism—will we be able to understand for any given era the status of blacks; the massive and multiple forms of violence that blacks experience, and the way forward toward full black liberation. In Afropessimism, Wilderson only

This violence, Wilderson argues, is

briefly considers the role of political economy in black subjugation. He argues that the use/study of political economy cannot explain the violence committed against blacks.

invariant across time. Specifically: “Black people exist in the throes of what historian David Eltis calls
‘violence beyond the limit,’ by which he means: (a) in the libidinal economy there are no forms of
violence so excessive that they would be considered too cruel to inflict upon Blacks; and (b) in political
economy there are no rational explanations for this limitless theatre of cruelty, no explanations that
would make political or economic sense of the violence that positions and punishes Blackness….the
Slave’s relationship to violence is open-ended…unaccountable to historical shifts.”[18] What Wilderson
misses is that blacks are subject to multiple sources of violence—the cumulative nature of which is
monstrous. Simultaneously analysing the articulation of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism
leads one to the realisation that blacks depending on context in various combinations experience
violence as workers, women, and/or as black people. Each system of domination routinely inflicts violence for those at the bottom of each hierarchy. I would add that an aspect of white
supremacy and anti-blackness is that for blacks even the forms of violence that derive from patriarchy and capitalism are intensified due to white supremacy. This violence is also rational to the degree that each form of violence is ultimately aimed at reinforcing the rule of those at the top
of each system of domination. In a much earlier essay, Wilderson more directly addresses the relationship between capitalism and black subjugation. Wilderson asserts that “…the United States is constructed at the intersection of both a capitalist and white supremacist matrix.”[19] This
statement is promising in that it hints at the simultaneous analysis of the interaction between capitalism and white supremacy. Yet, he does not sufficiently explore the consequences of this statement and does not analyse the actual dynamics created by the articulation of capitalism and
white supremacy. For example, in Afropessimism Wilderson correctly asserts that “….the emergence of the slave, the subject-effect of an ensemble of direct relations of force marks the emergence of the capitalism itself.”[20] The “primitive” accumulation necessary for the establishment
of the capitalist social order does have at its centre the brutal and hideous social relations of slavery and the slave trade, but not only slavery.[21] But unlike what Wilderson argues, the historical record shows that under white supremacy and colonialism blacks are not the only racially
subordinate group to be subject to “direct relations of force.” As Ince argues, “direct relations of force” do not only mark the subject of the slave, but of the colonised more generally such as the genocide of the indigenous peoples of particularly the “New” World (itself a precondition of
capitalism).[22] Establishing and maintaining capitalism has required the expropriation of resources and labour—simultaneously wedded to the violation of black, brown, and yellow bodies throughout the world. In the end, non-white bodies are disposable in the global North and South;
in the ghettoes, barrios, reservations, prisons, refugee camps and immigration detention centres that can be grimly found throughout the world. The particularities are important—and anti-blackness is a key particularity that shapes capitalism and white supremacy, but as argued earlier,
it still a part a global system of white supremacy marked by direct relations of force, and which non-whites are racialised differently by that force. Within the context of the U.S., only a type of stubborn blindness, a refusal to acknowledge the historical record, and refusal to see the
interrelationship between capitalism and racial domination can lead those such as Wilderson to argue that “we were never meant to be workers…..From the very beginning, we were meant to be accumulated and die.”[23] This assertion flies against the historical evidence. No, blacks
were meant to work, die, and be accumulated as need be. White supremacy often demands that blacks die. Capitalism demands that blacks must also, when necessary work and/or be accumulated. Each, and patriarchy as well, continually make their bloody demands. Through politics and
other means of struggle blacks continually resist. This resistance can only be successful by understanding the mutual articulation between each system of domination. Conclusion: What is at Stake? What is at stake is far more critical than an abstract academic debate between theorists.
These debates speak directly to how we understand Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential elections and the racist, authoritarian and potentially fascist phenomenon of “Trumpism” and the rise of neo-fascist movements in the global north and south. It speaks to how we best
understand the accelerating rates of inequality in both the global north and south popularly described by Thomas Piketty.[24] It speaks to how we understand the rising wave of violence that black folks face here, throughout the Diaspora, and within Africa itself. Afropessimists have an
ahistorical narrative that distorts the relationship of white supremacy to capitalism—insisting despite all historical and contemporary empirical evidence to the contrary that the core logics of slave-based anti-blackness exists outside of, and ultimately invariant to, the dynamics of the
capitalist political economy. This strand of theorising has taken root in real-world activism—in this case among young black activists struggling once again for black liberation. Afropessimism, however, presents real political dangers for those organising for black liberation. I will mention
three such dangers here. By arguing that black subjugation lies outside the realm of the political, Afropessimism serves as a basis for political demobilisation rather than mobilisation. Indeed, Wilderson is correct when he states, “This is a difficult cognitive map for most activists to adjust
to because it actually takes the problem outside of politics.”[25] Second, Afropessimism severely undermines those attempting to build solidarity with other racially subordinate groups. Do we still need to be building independent radical black movements and organisations? Yes. Is
building solidarity hard. Yes. Is one likely to experience anti-black racism from some other peoples of colour? Yes. Is it still a necessary task if meaningful political victories are to be achieved? Yes. Third, by ignoring the class and gender dynamics within black communities, Afropessimism
makes it far more difficult to understand the dynamics of intra-black politics. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for fighting all forms of oppression and domination that are experienced within black communities. Afropessimists are correct to insist that the logics of racial domination
are autonomous and not fully determined by a capitalist social order. Afropessimists fail to understand, however, the effects of the interaction of multiple systems of domination have on black life and politics. It is our task to forge better theoretical weapons to not only illuminate the
nature of oppressive systems of domination, but also to provide effective tools to combat oppression.

c. No link and perm – blackness and queerness are situated

together in a paraontological space of constant flux in and
against modernity
Bey ‘17 Marquis Bey is a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow and PhD candidate in the English
department at Cornell University. His work, broadly speaking, concerns Black Feminist Theorizing,
Transgender Studies, Critical Theory, and Contemporary African American Literature. (“The Trans*-Ness
of Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-Ness,” TSQ) hrmb.
As I read the 341-page Feminism Meets Queer Theory (Weed and Schor 1997), swooning over the invigorating erudition of top-notch queer
theorists, I began to wonder, quite seriously, whether this formulation of “theoretical concept 1 meets seemingly disparate, but actually not
really, theoretical concept 2” would work for blackness and trans*-ness. Could a similar volume, perhaps also comprising collated essays from a
special issue, be fashioned under the appellation “Blackness Meets Trans*-ness”? After fantasizing about being the one to edit this volume,
perhaps alongside other, more dexterous scholars than I, I conceded that such a volume, quite simply, could not exist. Blackness cannot meet
trans*-ness; trans*-ness cannot meet blackness. But why not? Black transgender people exist, a friend of mine said, as I thought out loud with
her in a local café. My
answer then was not as articulate as I would have liked, so I will respeak now, at this
much more thoughtful and thought-fed moment: because blackness and trans*-ness, different yet
intimate primordial kin, arise from the underbelly, the “undercommons” that absently saturates
the conditions upon which subjectivity rests. Blackness and trans*-ness mark, as J. Kameron
Carter says of blackness, “a movement of the between . . . an interstitial drama on the outskirts of
the order of purity. [They mark] an improvisatory movement of doubleness, a fugitive announcement in and against the grain of the
modern world’s . . . investment in pure being.” In short, borrowing again from Carter , I designate black and trans*
as, “to invoke [Nahum] Chandler once again, ‘paraontological’” (2013: 590). I am embarking on a cogitative
journey through the para-ontological annals of the stuff of life and nonlife. Like W. E. B. Du Bois and his intellectual comrades William
Shakespeare, Honoréde Balzac, and Alexandre Dumas, here in the forthcoming essay I sit with Fred Moten and Hortense Spillers, Alexander
Weheliye, and Eva Hayward; I move arm and arm with Amaryah Shaye and Claire Colebrook—among many others, some of whom are the
editors of this special issue. With these thinkers, I come to blackness and trans*-ness by way of refusal, fugitivity, anoriginality, para-ontology,
Trans* and black thus denote poetic, para-ontological forces that are only
and eruption.
tangentially, and ultimately arbitrarily, related to bodies said to be black or transgender. They
move in and through the abyss underlying ontology, rubbing up alongside it and causing it to
fissure. Trans* and black, however, as fundamentally para-ontological do not discredit the materiality of ontic subjects who are
characterized by and through these identificatory markers. The relationship between my usage of these poetic forces and subjects identified
with/as black or trans* must be handled with care. But indeed, as Kai M. Green (2013: 289) writes about those who identify and are identified
as black, epidermal hue and racial (and sexual and gender and class) situatedness in history “cannot predict the politics of black people. So
while race, class, gender, and sexuality will no doubt inform the way a person walks through the world, it will not provide a predetermined
outcome as much as we might like it to. This is especially true when our politics or the leadership we endorse is limited by scenario.” In short,
racial identification will not determine one’s relationship to power, thus making epidermal blackness in this case not an a priori determinant of
politicality. This is what Hortense Spillers, quoting George Lamming, says “we definitively know now”: “the nature of power [is] unrelated to
pigmentation, that bad faith [is] a phenomenon which [is] independent of race” (quoted in Spillers 2012: 936). Such is the case, too, with
people who identify as transgender or gender nonconforming. Cathy Cohen writes, “People may not like this, but without an intentional
politics, I don’t see trans as inherently radical. I think there are many instances where marginal individuals are inserted into traditional
institutions or movements and they do something to change the dynamics but they don’t necessarily change these spaces and entities in a
radical way that is open and more equitable.” Cohen goes on to say, “I’m interested in trans feminist politics in the same way that I’m
committed to a black feminist politics that is tied to a transformative liberatory agenda” (Cohen and Jackson 2015). To an extent, this is
true, though I would nuance Cohen’s assertion with gender-nonconforming bodies’ situatedness in
a gender-normative space, a hegemonic grammar that utterly disallows the very possibility of
transgender; thus their very existence in a space that is constituted through the assertion of the
impossibility of trans* and nonnormative bodiesis, by virtue of their inhabitation of public
space, radical. This could also be said to be the case with black bodies occupying space
implicitly coded in and through whiteness. No doubt, in some cases, black people or transgender
folks sedulously work toward assimilation through buying into a proper black or transgender
citizenship. And this entails “fading into the population . . . but also the imperative to be ‘proper’ in the eyes of the state: to reproduce, to
find proper employment; to reorient one’s ‘different’ body into the flow of the nationalized aspiration for possessions, property[, and] wealth”
(Aizura 2006: 295). Surely, then, the two can appear at times in opposition to one another, as in those who identify as transgender and are
conservative, antiblack (people), neoliberal, and so forth; and those who identify as black may be deeply transphobic. While these combinations
arise, I maintain that even amid disruption one can harbor comforting compartments of hegemonic stability. Black and trans* are both
disruptive orientations indexed imperfectly by bodies said to be black or trans* and thus can succumb to logics of white supremacy and cis
sexism. The anoriginal blackness and trans*-ness that bodies cite exceed bodyness and thus can never be “captured” in perfect entirety, leaving
room, as has been historically evident, for moments of clash between black people and transgender people, and their imbrications. What I wish
to delineate regarding the relationship between blackness and trans*-ness (as analytics) and black and trans* bodies is the tangential and
ultimately arbitrary connection between them, yet the metonymic nature of what can be said to be black and trans* bodies’ positionalities.
That is to say, as Spillers says of black culture (though, I would assert, the logic can apply to trans* folks
as well), black and trans* bodies speak to and as metonymic flashes of the poetic forces of
blackness and trans*-ness insofar as they are imagined as “an alternative statement, as a
counterstatement to American culture/civilization, or Western culture/civilization, more
generally speaking, identifying the cultural vocation as the space of ‘contradiction, indictment,
and the refusal’” (2006: 25). They are instances, not archetypes, of this fugitive, lawless force we might call “black and trans*.” As
well, this is not to collapse blackness and trans*-ness, diluting their uniqueness and utility as analytics for different, though related, disciplinary
fields. They are, rather, nodes of one another, inflections that, though originary and names for the nothingness upon which distinction rests,
flash in different hues because of subjects’ interpretive historical entrenchment. That
is to say, they are differently
inflected names for an anoriginal lawlessness that marks an escape from confinement and a
besidedness to ontology. Manifesting in the modern world differently as race and gender fugitivity, black and trans*, though
pointed at by bodies that identify as black and/or trans*, precede and provide the foundational condition for those fugitive identificatory
demarcations. In short, what I seek to do is, as my title suggests, demonstrate the ways in which trans* is
black and black is trans*. Though I cannot cause the fictive “Blackness Meets Trans*ness” volume to materialize as an academic
tome, I can come close by showing how they perennially speak with, through, alongside, and back to (or, alternatively, black to) one another
over there on the “outskirts of the order of purity.”

d. Becoming Black DA – their ontological understanding of

blackness locks in fixed identities which links to our 1AC offense
e. Black Shadow DA – afropessimism’s focus on ontology, social
death, and gratuitous embodied harm overlooks unique forms of
injury black queer subjects experience and make their struggle
secondary
Avilez ‘20 -- (GerShun Avilez, 2020, “Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire,”
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, accessed 7-23-2022) -- nikki
Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire begins with a consideration of Big Freedia’s account of her life because her
experiences can help us think through the boundaries of queer freedom and, specifically, the social threats that are directed toward the Black
queer body. Simply moving through space—that is, walking down the street, going to work, traveling across state or national borders, or
interacting with institutions—proves to be especially risky business for racial and sexual minorities. This book explains how attending to and
Black Queer Freedom
challenging such threats constitutes the defining element in the work of Black queer cultural producers.
presents the argument that queerness, meaning same-sex desire and gender nonconformity, does
introduce the threat of injury, but artists throughout the Black diaspora use queer desire to negotiate
spaces of injury.3 I show how Black queer bodies are perceived as social threats, and this perception, in turn, results in threats (physical,
psychological, socioeconomic) against these bodies. The Black queer body is immersed in a veritable threat feedback loop. With the spatial
metaphor of the feedback loop, I describe the circular thinking that makes minority groups be perceived as perpetual threats. This loop
characterizes a situation in which a majority group feels threatened by the presence of a minority group, and this feeling encourages material
and symbolic violence against the perceived threat of the minority group, which ironically strengthens (through discriminatory logic) the social
perception of the minority population as menacing and troublemaking. This
threat loop— that minority bodies are assumed
to be threatening whether or not they pose an actual threat— constitutes the space of injury and creates
the conditions for Black queer vulnerability. This space of injury for the Black queer body is not necessarily about a particular
architecture or location; it is more about the perception and engagement of that body. The space of injury is potentially any space that a queer
body occupies or moves through. The point here is not to avoid precision in specifying the space of injury but, instead, to make clear how for
many artists and thinkers, it is vital to recognize the possibility of injury in all locations and resist the desired belief that certain places may be
assumed to be safe (such as, home, family, or places that claim to be queer friendly). The space of injury actually describes the Black queer
body as it exists and moves through space. Ido not seek to cast this body as having injury inhere to it; rather, I make
the point that because of social norms and dominant ideologies, this body may always be on the verge
of injury. Given this idea, I contend that Black queer individuals are injury-bound subjects. I develop this idea through Abdul JanMohamed’s
conception of the death-bound-subject and theories of Black social death.4 JanMohamed defines this subject as one that is formed “by the
imminent and ubiquitous threat of death” (2). It is a subject bound to and constantly directed toward death. His discussion is useful because it
provides a framework for recognizing the social construction of vulnerability for the Black (male) subject in a hostile racial climate. I
shift
focus from death to injury because the threat of death does not fully capture the multiple kinds of
threat (microaggressions, intimidation, humiliation, displacements, detention, defamation, medical
abuses, and misgenderings) that racial and sexual minorities experience. One could argue that every
physical threat implies the threat of death, but I think the overemphasis on death obscures the nuance
and complexity of the multiple kinds of vulnerability minorities face. Freedia’s concern about getting a beatdown is
first a fear of injury—physical, emotional, and social. An emphasis on different manifestations of injury illuminates how a broader array of
interactions can create conditions of vulnerability, and this more capacious sense of social threat provides the opportunity to consider how
gender and class dynamics inflect the threats posed by racism and homophobia.5 This book reflects my careful analysis about how threats of
queer injury work assiduously along lines of sex and gender expressions. Throughout this book, the reader will find an explicit focus on the
experiences of queer women and queer men with nonconventional gender expression. I work from the understanding that gender expression
and identity are imbricated with same-sex desire and can deeply impact if and how one experiences social threat. This recurring attention to
the role of gender in the experience of injury indicates the intersectional approach of the methodology as well as a recognition on the level of
the argument that all queer bodies may face injury, but all of those bodies do not experience injury in the same manner or to the same extent.
Injury, like queerness, is not one-dimensional.6 In a move toward thinking about injury and with a focus
on queer bodies that might be injured but not killed, this volume builds on Darius Bost’s bold
intervention into Afro-pessimism and the emergent discourses on Black social death.7 Bost insists, “In
the context of slavery’s afterlife, asserting the presence of black gay bodies signals how contemporary
theories of antiblackness replicate the historical processes of secondary marginalization experienced by
blackness’s others” (15; emphasis added). What this critic points to is that which gets lost in the
overemphasis on death and absence, especially when we talk about queer bodies, which are often
already marginalized if not absent from the narratives and records of the past. My framework of injury
emphasizes embodied presence rather than physical or epistemic absence. I take seriously material and epistemic violence but am mindful not
to lose sight of the specific realities of queer embodiment within those paradigms.
 f. Hope DA – pessimism destroys black mental health [TW – suicide
mention]
Davidson et al ‘10 (Collin L. Davidson, MS, LaRicka R. Wingate, PhD, Meredith L. Slish, MS, and Kathy A.
Rasmussen, MS, "The Great Black Hope: Hope and Its Relation to Suicide Risk among African Americans",
Suice and Life-Threatening Behavior, 40(2) April 2010, The American Association of Suicidology,
https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1521/suli.2010.40.2.170?
casa_token=oe9ou4Of_jMAAAAA:uCu69dDS4qbVfEeARTq-
LV4u_GPbZ8xXYPkMg_wgPzo9A9Ux18FQ_BWCm3XDbF1pq-d5lIU-_Mek, mmv)

The results from this study are generally consistent with our hypotheses. Specifically, hope negatively predicted
thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness while predicting acquired capability to enact suicide in the positive direction. These
results suggest that as a whole, hope may serve to buffer African American individuals against suicide,
consistent with previous findings in other ethnic groups (Davidson et al., in press; Range & Penton,
1994). As discussed above and in a previous study (Davidson et al., in press), the marginal positive prediction of hope for acquired capability
to enact suicide may be due to the tendency of people with high hopes to set more goals and more challenging goals, thus possibly putting
themselves in more situations where they would be likely to experience pain. If the experience of pain became frequent enough, these
individuals would theoretically habituate to the pain resulting in higher levels of acquired capability to enact suicide. Further, it was found that
hope and the pathways subscale significantly predicted suicidal ideation such that higher hope scores predicted less suicidal ideation. In
contrast, the goals and agency subscales did not significantly predict suicidal ideation. This suggests that simply having the goal or agency to
enact suicide is not enough—the strength of the relationship is in the pathway or plans to enact suicide. This is consistent with previous
research that has shown that plans and preparations for suicide are one of the strongest predictors for suicide completion (Joiner, Rudd, &
Rajah, 1997); stronger even than the desire to enact suicide. These findings may relate to the significant prediction of the pathways component
to suicidal ideation. Taken together with the aforementioned results, this suggests that hope serves as a protective factor for both suicidal risk
as described in the interpersonal-psychological theory of suicide (Joiner, 2005) and suicidal ideation. These results are contrary to previous
findings (Davidson et al., in press) which showed that although higher hope did predict lower burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness,
hope did not predict suicidal ideation. It
is possible that, among African Americans, hope plays a larger role as a
protective factor for suicide in comparison to a predominantly Caucasian sample. Additionally, we investigated the differences between the two
samples and found that the African American sample had significantly higher levels of hope, goals, and agency and that each of these scales had larger standard deviations than the predominantly Caucasian sample. It is possible that the larger variability of scores contributed to the
likelihood of significant findings. Future research should aim to clarify this relationship. Finally, consistent with our third hypothesis, it was found that the components of Joiners (2005) theory of suicidal behavior together predicted suicidal ideation. These results offer further support for
the validity of Joiners theory in conjunction with the existing empirical studies that support this theory. Additionally, these results further expand the generalizability of Joiner's theory to an African American sample. Although the components as a set predicted suicidal ideation, when
examined individually, only burden-someness and belongingness individually predict suicidal ideation, while acquired capability does not. This finding is not consistent with a previous study that examined the theory in a largely Caucasian population (David- son et al., in press), wherein
each component separately predicted suicidal ideation. Joiner proposed that for an individual to desire suicide, thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness must be elevated, whereas for an individual to physically carry out a suicide attempt, they must have higher acquired
capability to enact suicide. Theoretically then, it may be that individuals who only have elevated levels of acquired capability may not have suicidal ideation because they have no desire to end their lives. Again, future research should further investigate this relationship. One limitation of
the current study is that the sample is not particularly diverse, as it is composed only of people who self-identified as African American. However, it is of note that this is the first study to our knowledge to examine Joiners theory of suicidal behavior in an African American sample. It is
ideal to generalize the presence of theoretical findings to many different populations. Regarding this situation. Popper (1959, p. 269) stated, "once a theory is well corroborated, further instances raise its degree of corroboration only very little. This ride however does not hold good if
these new instances are very different from the earlier ones, that is if they corroborate the theory in a new field of application" (emphasis added). Although the participants in this study were African American, they were somewhat diverse in their place of living, and came from all over
the Big XII conference area, including the states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, Texas, and Colorado. In line with the previous limitation, it is important to note that there is a great amount of diversity among Black people, lo elaborate, there are cultural differences related
to the geographic location in which a person lives (all of our participants were living in the midwest), as well as their ethnic heritage and recent ancestors' country of origin (United States, Africa, Caribbean Islands, etc.). Given the heterogeneity among Black people in America, it is
important that researchers attend to ethnic differences among Blacks in the study of suicide related behaviors. Future studies should work to investigate risk factors within Black groups. Some may consider the focus on a relatively low-risk group of participants (African American college
students) a limitation of our study; however, a great deal of research on suicidal behavior and risk factors has been conducted with college samples. In addition, we specifically took the stance of examining suicidal behavior from a positive psychology approach, as suggested in Wingate et
al. (2006). Given that the rate of suicide for African Americans has been consistendy low in comparison to Caucasian Americans, it may be beneficial to identify the protective factors that help to temper the risk. Once these protective factors are identified in African Americans, it may then
be possible to implement and encourage these factors in other ethnic groups. This emphasis on buffers against suicide risk may serve to supplement the existing emphasis on suicide risk factors in clinical practice. Indeed, research has shown that hope tends to protect individuals from

It is possible that
negative outcomes in mental health (e.g., depression and anxiety) and the current study and previous studies have suggested that hope can also protect against suicide risk (Davidson et al, in press; Range & Penton, 1994).

instilling hope in clients can provide incremental increases in client safety' above and beyond the
common clinical practices of identifying and protecting clients from risk factors to ensure their safety'.
Indeed, Stellrecht et al. (2006) highlighted the importance of applying research to the clinical setting and provided recommendations for using
the interpersonal-psychological theory of suicide in risk assessment, crisis intervention, and general therapy. Specific to African Americans, it
may prove beneficial for clinicians to use techniques that encourage increased feelings of belongingness within, and contributions to, the
African American community. This could include having the client become involved in activities where they are a member of a group, where
they give back, and where they have similarities to others in the group. Cognitive techniques could be used to address distorted cognitions
surrounding feelings of burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness. Similarly, drawing from hope theory, clinicians may be able to focus on
challenging cognitive distortions related to a lack of hope, subsequendy increasing hope as a protective factor. They may also be able to
capitalize on the hope that clients already possess when presenting to therapy, and work to generalize that hope to areas of the clients life
where it is lacking. Though the current findings may inform prevention and treatment of suicidal behavior in the future, it should be noted that
additional research is required to confirm some of these potential applications. The findings from the current study are important in that they
replicate and extend the findings of Davidson et al. (in press), which demonstrated that hope served as a protective factor for suicide risk in a
As mentioned earlier, African Americans tend to be at higher risk for suicide due to
largely Caucasian sample.
overrepresentation in lower socioeconomic- status environments, associated stress, and discrimination,
but they enact suicide at lower rates. Some researchers have hypothesized (see Gibbs, 1997) that this paradox is due to
protective factors such as religiosity or strong family ties. The
current study adds to these assertions by demonstrating
that hope is potentially an important protective factor for African Americans. To our knowledge, this is the only
study that has investigated suicide from a positive psychology perspective in an African American sample, and one of few studies to do so in a
general sample.
 K – Afropessimism – AT: Alt – Generic
a. Perm do both – our struggles start from the same
paraontological undercommons – that’s Bey
b. Perm do each – our method is one of embodied conception of
identity – doesn’t preclude [x]
c. Perm do the AFF – our counter conduct performance is an
affective rupture that creates other movements against
normative education like their K – that’s 1AC Zembylas
d. AFF is a DA – they can’t solve:
1. Their thesis relies on static notions of identity that we critique
2. Their centering of blackness precludes black queer
achievement – that’s Avilez
 K – Buddhism – Top Level – Maize
a. Anti-Oedipus DA – their Loy evidence cites an ontology of lack –
that’s what Deleuze explicitly critiques! – centering everything
around a fixed, negative ontology precludes accurate power
descriptions and locks in a fixed notion of self – turns the K
b. Becoming Buddhist DA – their alt is based on an ontology of lack
and teleological goal of interconnectedness – locks in a static
notion of identity – turns the K and links to the 1AC impacts
c. Connectivity DA – their method of infinite interconnectedness
overlooks the structural violence queer people face – they force
our visibility and interaction which locks in queer death
d. Link turn and perm – the alt is described as “deconstruct the
self” – if the 1AC’s rejection of static identity isn’t that, I don’t
know what is
 K – Buddhism – AT: Alt – Maize
a. Perm do both – we’re both a deconstruction of self
b. Perm do each – our alt is about perception of ourselves, their alt
is about social connectedness
c. Perm do the AFF – our counter conduct performance is an
affective rupture that creates other movements against
normative education like their K – that’s 1AC Zembylas
d. Aff is a DA – they can’t solve:
1. Their thesis relies on static notions of identity that we critique
2. Their centering of connectedness draws queers into the
inherently anti-queer civil society
 K – Capitalism – Top Level
a. Marx is the new Oedipus – their dialectic reading of history
cannot comprehend the unpredictability of desire, leads to cult
following of traditional Marxism, and represses the
revolutionary desire fundamental to disrupt the systems they
critique
Sim ‘13 (Stuart Sim; critical theorist and professor of English literature at Northumbria University. “Post-
Marxism: An Intellectual History” pg 112-113 2013) // ELog

Lyotard’s work at the time of Libidinal Economy is close in spirit to that of Deleuze and Guattari’s,
particularly the latter’s Anti-Oedipus (followed by its sequel A Thousand Plateaus), with its irreverent
attitude to cultural heavyweights such as Freud and Marx, as well as grand narratives in general. If Libidinal
Economy’s tone is vicious and nasty, that of Anti-Oedipus is mocking and playful, but just as concerned to establish a distance between the
That past equals teleological thinking to Deleuze and Guattari, whereas
authors and the recent intellectual past.
their emphasis is resolutely anti-teleological: ‘universal history is the history of contingencies, and not
the history of necessity. Ruptures and limits, and not continuity.’33 Orthodox Marxism’s schematic model of
historical process, with its clearly delineated stages based on modes of production, is denied by such a
view, which sees history as driven by an unpredictable desire rather than a law-like dialectic. With their
‘nomad thought’, Deleuze and Guattari represent a direct attack on the systematic, problem-solving ethos of the Enlightenment. Nomad
thought seeks to keep systems open by making unexpected connections; the rhizomatic model favoured by the authors, which in the case of
Anti-Oedipus means a ‘confrontation, between Marx the revolutionary and Nietzsche the madman’.34 Marxism
and psychoanalysis
are symbolic of a particular trend in our culture that results in authoritarianism, and Deleuze and
Guattari set out to disrupt this, refusing to offer a system of thought as such. In the context of an intellectual
milieu in which thinkers like Althusser are trying to isolate the scientific ‘essence’ of Marx’s thought, there is a highly subversive quality to
Deleuze and Guattari’s anarchic approach to cultural analysis. Anti-Oedipus constitutes an attack on ‘fascism’, the ‘fascism in us all . . . that
causes us to love power’, as Foucault puts it in his preface to the work.35 Fascism
is symbolised for the authors by ‘Oedipus’,
a collective figure representing all those forces that conspire to stem the flow of desire: ‘Oedipus
presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines.’36 Psychoanalysis is one of the primary means by which this
repression is achieved, and the authors seek to replace it with schizoanalysis. The schizophrenic is taken to have the ability to resist
psychoanalysis, and becomes a model for the revolutionary subject who will escape the grasp of Oedipus: ‘The schizophrenic process (the
schizoid pole) is revolutionary, in the very sense that the paranoiac method is reactionary and fascist.’37 A new politics is at least implicit in
such a theoretical project, even if Deleuze and Guattari insist that they have no wish to construct a new system of politics. Most of the
references to Marx in Anti-Oedipus are approving, and the authors are certainly critical enough of capitalism over the course of their argument:
‘Capitalism is defined by a cruelty having no parallel in the primitive system of cruelty, and by a terror having no parallel in the despotic regime
of terror.’38 Yet the anti-system bias to the study renders it a post-Marxist document, especially given its commitment to desire in all its
unpredictability, as well as its refusal to propose any specific political programme. Unpredictability is the enemy of control,
and in its obsession with the latter, orthodox Marxism (as in the case of the Communist Party) becomes
part of the Oedipal project where desire is curtailed: ‘Subjugated groups are continually deriving from
revolutionary subject-groups . . . they fall back on Oedipus, Marx-the-father, Lenin-the father, Brezhnev-
the-father.’39 Marx himself may escape censure, but it is clear that nearly everything done in his name does not. Desire has the
ability to bring down capitalism (‘one manifestation of desire . . . would be enough to make its
fundamental structures explode’40), yet desire is just what Marxism goes out of its way to subjugate
when it achieves political power. Sadly, so effective is the Oedipal project, that the majority of us generally collude with it in helping
it to attain its objectives, and it is this internalisation of authority above all that Anti-Oedipus is designed to break. Without such
internalisation, grand narratives simply cannot work.
 b. Link turn and perm – queer theory arrives at the same
conclusions as Marxism but takes a necessary detour into
individuality – refusing the choice between the two is an act of
queering in itself
Raha ‘19 -- (Raha, Natalia, 9-2-2019, "Queer capital: Marxism in queer theory and post-1950 poetics,”
Sussex Research Online, https://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/86259/, accessed 7-23-2022) -- nikki

Queer theory engaging with Marxism has reinvigorated key Marxist concepts by grounding
theories of sexuality and queer and trans histories, cultures and texts into histories and
readings of capitalist social transformation and accumulation. This includes the Marxist concepts of the
commodity, value, labour, the gendered and racial division of labour, totality, reification, surplus population, primitive accumulation, racial
capitalism, crisis, history and capital. These concepts have been engaged with to varying degrees of detail and Marxist orthodoxy, by drawing
from different eras in Marx’s (and Marxist) thought – at times from the optimistic Young Marx of the 1844 Philosophic and Economic
Manuscripts (1959), from the revolutionary Marx and Engels of The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, from the Marx of Capital.
Queer Marxists also draw strongly from twentieth century Marxist figures such as Georg Lukaçs, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and C.L.R. James.
As I detail in Chapter 1, Gayatri Spivak’s reading of Marx’s labour theory of value (1988) has a profound influence on queer Marxism’s
conception of value. Furthermore, while often not directly cited, the strong influence of Louis Althusser’s critique of ideology (1971) is evident
in some contributions (Ferguson 2004, Liu 2015). The aforementioned Marxist concepts have been studied and
applied to deepen important current subjects within queer theory, including the history of
sexuality, utopia (of course also a subject of Marxism), affect, queer of colour critique and race,
embodiment, gender, activism, and the political economy of sexuality more broadly. For instance, the
influential work of Floyd (2009) and Hennessy (2000) connects the transformations of discourses of sexuality (of sexology and psychoanalysis) in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with developments in capitalist production and consumption. Hennessy and Floyd deploy
Georg Lukács’ theory of reification (1971), a touchstone for the development of Western Marxism in the interwar period, to theorise the
reification of sexual subjectivity and sexual desire (I discuss this work at length in Chapter 1). The variation in Marxist orthodoxy has had a
positive influence on the development of queer Marxism within queer theory, allowing for heterogeneity in critical and theoretical approaches
in the uptake of Marxist concepts. Indeed, as Floyd writes, queer Marxism pushes Marxism “to speak to
certain dimensions in social and historical reality powerfully illuminated in queer theory’s
relatively brief history, dimensions that Marxism has little history of acknowledging, much less
examining” (2009: 2, 4). The endeavour to challenge he epistemological limits of Marxism has been
particularly fruitful in the development and uptake of queer of colour critique as a mode of
analysis, as I discuss below. However, queer Marxisms have at times foregone structural critique that connects queer life and culture
to political economy and the critique of capital. In addition, the muted engagement between queer Marxisms themselves seems to have had an
adverse effect on the theoretical consistency of, and collaboration within, the discipline. For instance, addressing early work by Floyd (1996),
Hennessy highlights the lack of “studies that examine the historical relationship between the formation of new sexual identities and the reifying
cultural logic of an emergent commodity culture” (2000: 97). This is the key thesis of Floyd’s The Reification of Desire (2009), which undertakes
a detailed queer reading of Lukács as I detail in Chapter 1. However, Floyd’s text only minimally attends to the important queer Marxist work of
Hennessy (2000), Joseph (2002), Tinkcom (2002) and Ferguson (2004).16 Such a lack of engagement with other queer Marxist texts has
undoubtedly affected the development of the field within queer theory. An example of the theoretical heterogeneity of queer Marxism is found
in the roundtable discussion ‘Queer studies, materialism, and crisis’ in the GLQ special issue (Crosby et al. 2012). The discussion pays particular
attention to queer Marxism’s “orientation to political-economic questions” (127), utopia and totality, racial capitalism and capital’s need to
make certain bodies disposable in its pursuit of accumulation. The discussion brings together prominent contributors to queer Marxism and
queer theorists addressing class and queer liberalism. Floyd
explicitly historicises the uptake of certain concepts in
queer theory, such as utopia in the work of Muñoz (2009) and Edelman (2004), as “symptomatic of a
moment in which capital’s colonization of the future appears both unassailable, as a familiar
neoliberal narrative would have it [… and] transparently violent in a way that may suggest the
opposite: accumulation’s radical fragility” (Crosby et al. 2012: 128). On this point, he emphasises
that Marxism and queer studies arrive at the same conclusions. Furthermore, building upon his reconsideration
of totality in The Reification of Desire, Floyd asks “Can one ‘re-pos[e] the question of totality’ without implicating oneself in an imperial,
American universalism?”, and while gesturing towards Marx’s value-form highlights the “problem of grasping the ways in which capitalism’s
gendered, racialized and sexualized violence is inseparable from … capitalism’s simultaneous identity and nonidentity with itself” (138,
emphasis added). Two contributors strongly emphasise the relationship between capitalism, racialization and queer studies’ address of
marginalised figures and groups. Lisa Rofel emphasises the importance of a queer hermeneutics for
understanding capitalism’s drive for universality across “Euro-American metropoles” which is
“undone by the ‘difference’” of the history of the “postcolonies”, and for understanding the
relation between the value form, bodies and the value of marginalised lives (129). On the subject of
racial capitalism, Fred Moten emphasises, citing Cedric Robinson (1983), the centrality of “racism not as capitalism’s instrument but as its
conditions of possibility”, alongside the role of “regulative desire” in the pursuit of capitalist accumulation (130). Robert McRuer
emphasises queer theory’s interest in “provid[ing] some account of capitalist modernity,
neoliberalism, or globalization” must necessarily address “the invalidated and unthinkable”, crip
“figures that are sick, infected, deranged, addicted, scarred, wounded, or traumatized” (131). He notes that
queer Marxism must remain invested in crip and Mad bodies and lives (as I consider in Chapter 4). Dean Spade’s contributions describe the pain
of the NGO-industrial-complex’s “eclipse” of grassroots LGBT activism, which has transformed queer politics into “a site for building white
power” (135) through carceral regimes and non-redistributive equality politics, and highlights the importance of a critical trans politics that
cognises “the material conditions of existence and the distribution of life chances” (143). In contrast to these approaches that connect the
structural forces of capitalism globally to contemporary narratives of development, the transformation of queer politics by capital, and the
situation of marginal queer lives within these contexts, Heather Love details her interest in working-class queer writing, sometimes by writers of
colour, which “focuses on the lived experience of structural inequality” (131). For Love, this work however decentres its focus on capital and
emphasises that “this refusal of the choice between
“can seem to lack a revolutionary horizon” (131). She
revolution and capitulation is what makes this tradition queer”. 17 Love’s pessimism seems to miss the
potential of reading or theorising such lived experience into materials and ammunition of queer Marxism.

c. Becoming Bourgeoise DA – their dialectic understanding of

classes locks in fixed identities which links to our 1AC offense
d. Paternalism DA – their assertion of class primacy is an
overcompensation with the need to discuss problems of identity
which leads to movement cooption by hegemonic identities
Ross ‘2K [Marlon B., Professor, Department of English and Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies,
“Commentary: Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging,” New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 4, pages 840-841]

Although in his contribution Eric Lott targets Professor Michaels's comments and his own recent feud with Timothy Brennan (who unfortunately
is not included in this volume) rather than Ken's argument, what Eric says about “left and liberal fundamentalists” who “simply and somewhat
penitently” urge us to “‘go back to class’” could also be directed at Ken's conclusion. Ken writes, “Crafting a political left that does not merely
reflect existing racial divisions starts with the relatively mundane proposition that it is possible to make a persuasive appeal to the given
interests of working and unemployed women and men, regardless of race, in support of a program for economic justice.” On this one, I side
with Eric, rather than Tim and Ken. Standing on the left depends on whose left side we're talking about. My left might be your right and vice
versa, because it depends on what direction we're facing, and what direction depends on which identities we're assuming and affirming. Eric
adds, "Even in less dismissive [than Tim's] accounts of new social movements based not on class but on identities formed by histories of
injustice, there is a striking a priori sense of voluntarism about the investment in this cause or that movement or the other issue—as though
determining the most fundamental issue were a matter of the writer's strength of feeling rather than a studied or analytical sense of the ever-
unstable balance of forces in a hegemonic bloc at a given moment." I agree, but I'll risk mangling what Eric says by putting it more crassly.
Touting class or "economic justice" as the fundamental stance for left identity is just another way of
telling everybody else to shut up so I can be heard above the fray. Because of the force of "identity
politics," a leftist white person would be leery of claiming to lead Blacks toward the promised land, a
leftist straight man leery of claiming to lead women or queers, but, for a number of complex
rationalizations, we in the middle class (where all of us writing here currently reside) still have few
qualms about volunteering to lead, at least theoretically, the working class toward "economic justice."
What Eric calls here "left fundamentalism," I'd call, at the risk of sounding harsh, left paternalism. Of the big identity groups
articulated through "identity politics," economic class remains the only identity where a straight white
middle-class man can still feel comfortable claiming himself a leading political voice, and thus he may
sometimes overcompensate by screaming that this is the only identity that really matters—which is the
same as claiming that class is beyond identity . Partly this is because Marxist theory and Marx himself (a bourgeois intellectual
creating the theoretical practice for the workers' revolution) stage the model for working-class identity as a sort of trans-identification, a
magical identity that is transferable to those outside the group who commit themselves to it wholeheartedly enough. If we look back, we
realize even this magical quality is not special to a history of class struggle, as whites during the New Negro movements of the early twentieth
century felt that they were vanguard race leaders because they had putatively imbibed some essential qualities of Negroness by cross-
identifying with the folk and their culture.

e. Futurity DA – communal organizing relies on principles of future

for the greater good which inscribe teleological reproductive
narratives which preclude fluid identity
Giffney ‘8 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, “Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism:
The Death Drive and the Human,” Published in “Queering the Non/Human, 2008, pp 64)

Reproductive futurism imposes, according to Edelman, 'an ideological limit on political discourse as
such, preserving in die 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' (2). Reproductive futurism absorbs all challenges and translates them into more of the same. It operates in a
similar way to Monique Wittig's concept of the straight mind in that 'when thought of by the straight mind, homosexuality is nothing but
heterosexuality' (1992,28). Reproductive futurism is a more specific term than heteronormativity in that it describes the process through which
heterosexuality becomes heteronormative. Heteronormativity is thus a term to describe a conglomerate of effects while reproductive futurism
signifies the process through which such effects are wrought. It is all-encompassing, operating at the level of ideology so that it sets limits on,
not just what we think or do, but also on what and how we desire. Desire itself becomes reproductive futurism in its 'translation into a
narrative', 'its teleological determination' through politics which 'conforms to the temporality of desire', 'the inevitable historicity of desire'
(Edelman 2004, 9). Reproductive
futurism is, what I call, 'heterocycloptic', bound up with the desiring gaze
and the setting-out of a developmental trajectory of 'progress' moving endlessly towards a 'better'
future, in the process imposing a panopticon ¬like self-surveillance: 'It's a machine in which everyone is
caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised' (Foucault 1980, 156).
It is apocalyptic in the sense that desire itself becomes a trap, a disciplining device in which the norm
becomes inextricable from the natural. This technology of power — a 'coercive universalization' (Edelman 2004, 11) operates at
the level of fantasy and through the figure of the Child: '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 perpetual trust' (11). In this, the Child becomes inextricably linked to the future and in turn to politics,
and is thus reduced to a trope delimiting what will get to count as the future in advance. Reproductive futurism I believe exercises power
contradictorily through a web, a net, a grid. It encourages, perhaps contradictorily, the proliferation of desires - a looking-out as opposed to a
gazing-within - in the service of repressing any conscious self-awareness of the death drive. Reproductive
futurism is therefore,
what I term, 'hetero-prophetic' in that it tries to set out programmatically what will transpire in the
future; a future 'endlessly postponed' (13), thus holding the present to ransom. If it is invested in eschatology, it is
only as a veneer to discipline those into enslavement to its ideals.
 K – Capitalism – AT: Alt – Generic
a. Perm do both – queer theory and Marxism share the same
utopian trajectory – that’s Raha
b. Perm do each – our method is one of embodied conception of
identity – doesn’t preclude [x]
c. Perm do the AFF – our counter conduct performance is an
affective rupture that creates other movements against
normative education like their K – that’s 1AC Zembylas
d. AFF is a DA – they can’t solve:
1. Their thesis relies on teleological dialectics that precludes
fluid identity
2. Their centering of class struggle overshadows questions of
identity – that’s Ross
 K – Capitalism – AT: Alt – Communist Party
a. Perm do both – queer theory and Marxism share the same
utopian trajectory – that’s Raha
b. Perm do each – our method is one of embodied conception of
identity – doesn’t preclude party organizing
c. Perm do the AFF – our counter conduct performance is an
affective rupture that creates other movements against
normative education like their K – that’s 1AC Zembylas
d. AFF is a DA – they can’t solve:
1. Their thesis relies on teleological dialectics that precludes
fluid identity
2. Their centering of class struggle overshadows questions of
identity – that’s Ross
e. Alt is violent:
1. Hollow Hope DA – their reliance on the state for radical
change only expands the border of humanistic civil society
which necessitates destruction of the non-normative – that’s
1AC Stanley
2. Party Closet DA – communist organizations have a history of
anti-queer exclusion that renders them ineffective –
“accountability mechanisms” don’t solve when it’s
perpetuated by leaders using Marxist justifications
Devrim ‘12 (Libri Derim writes about their experiences in the Revolutionary Communist Party. “Out of
the Red Closet: Gay and lesbian experiences in the previous communist movement” Kasama, January,
2012. https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-8/kasama.pdf) alowenstein

Much has been written about the Revolutionary Communist Party and its ban on gay people within its
ranks. Some of us are familiar with the specific anti-gay rationalizations the RCP promoted for thirty
years – including its notorious argument that same-sex attrac- tions are a politically reactionary,
personal-ideological choice. But what was going on within the RCP was not just a stubborn and arrogant “error of line”– it was also
an actual practice that had an impact on real people and real struggle. That is what I want to write about, including what it was like to live “in
the closet” inside a communist organization. I want to talk about what it was like to be attracted to the dream of revolution – and then be told
that my lesbian feelings were ideologically part of a corrupt and oppressive world order, and that I force myself to have sexual relationships
with men in an effort to develop the sexual feelings I was told I was supposed to have, as part of being a revolutionary. I want to talk about the
way decent but incredibly ignorant communist com- rades were instructed to correct me, my feelings, and my behaviors. And how, within a
movement hoping to carry out liberation, the awful arguments and pressures of anti-gay bigotry were reproduced and enforced. RCP
cadre
and leaders looked people like me in the eyes and told us to change, conform and be silent — or else get
out. At the height of the AIDS crisis, they knowingly opened a horrible split between com- munist
activists and those fighting rightwing attacks on gay people. They reproduced within revolutionary ranks (and using
“communist” rhetoric) the prejudices, arguments and repressive practices of rightwing re- ligious nuts – and they tried to promote such views
more broadly within the left. It
seems that most queer revolutionaries were attracted to what the RCP was
putting out. That they’d go take out the RCP’s newspaper, the Revolutionary Worker, get involved, and
then someone would meet with them to have serious talk about “the Homosexual- ity Question,” and
then they would disappear. In that respect, I was a bit different. I got involved before I came out. After meeting the revolutionaries of the RCP, I joined the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (RCYB), really throwing myself into it. I was
con- vinced that a possible revolutionary situation might be just around the corner (remember that slogan, “Revo- lution in the ‘80s – Go for it!”?). All my free time was spent building for the work this party was doing in my area: I was going to dem- onstrations, taking the paper out,
talking to everyone about Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM), postering a couple times a week, going to meetings. It was my whole life. Falling in love Then I started feeling attracted to another girl who was hanging around the RCYB. She was really funny and cute and smart. I thought she
was great and I really respected her, especially the way she stood up for what she believed at school, how she would face off the cops at a demonstration without fear, the way she was al- ways ready to take the paper out even when the rest of us got discouraged by all the rejection. I
wanted to be around her all the time and I thought about her con- stantly. Everyone else could see I had it bad, but I never noticed! She gave me her green kaffyah and I wore it all the time, even when I went to bed. I always wanted to ride in the same car with her when we went some-
place. Her high school was across town from mine but I’d always try to find a reason to go to her side of town to take the paper out in the afternoons so that I could be with her. Finally, one of the other guys in the RCYB said something about me acting like I was in love with her. They were
all teasing me about it. I realized that I had had feelings for girls for a while and I started to come to terms with the fact that I was a lesbian. A family’s anger... When I came out, everyone at home was upset. I was prepared for their reactions, I’d heard other stories from teenagers who
had come out about how they were rejected or kicked out of the house, so I was ready to face that from my family. My family was upset and angry. They were disap- pointed in me and wanted me to just “get over” what- ever young adult phase I was going through that made me “think” I
was gay. I was so depressed that they couldn’t accept me, their daughter, for who I was. But knowing my family’s conservative background, I had expected them to have a negative reaction so it didn’t surprise me. ...then the rejection by comrades What really shocked me was how leaders
in the RCYB and the RCP reacted when I told them I was gay. I have to say that none of the other Youth Brigade members had a problem with it except one guy. He was a little immature and made a joke about how he didn’t mind if a girl was gay but there’s no way in hell he’d sleep in the
same room with a guy who was gay. (We’d just stayed at a motel when we traveled to another city for an event and all of us had shared a room). But re- ally most young communists of my generation never thought that being gay was wrong – it was something that had to be imposed on
us from without, and was done without ever really hearing or respecting our insights. But while the comrades in the Youth Brigade were fine with it I was really shocked by how hostile the RCYB leaders were. I was immediately separated from the rest of brigade – they stopped having me
there for meetings and paper discussions, I wasn’t invited to take out the paper or go running in the mornings, and when I showed up at the bookstore for an event I was told to leave. Being educated I didn’t understand the reaction. Finally, after several months of being excluded from
everything and with virtually no communication from Youth Brigade leaders, I received a phone call telling me to show up for a meeting at a coffee shop across town the next weekend. Several Youth Brigade leaders were there as well as two RCP leaders (one of whom had never spoken

They were there to explain to me what reality was, and what a

to me before but was clearly in charge). Everyone was very serious. I was pretty intimidat- ed and scared.

communist view supposedly was: Why be- ing a lesbian arose from unjustified hostilities toward men as
a whole, how it was like being a feminist-sepa- ratist, and how in the new society, men wouldn’t hurt
women and so women would no longer respond to their oppression by becoming gay. Their argument
was that lesbianism was a form of reformism – because it sought relief from oppression by developing a
lifestyle within capitalism. They made a series of deductive arguments – very divorced from reality and my own situation – that les-
bianism was an ideological choice that embodied a re- formist political program and that was therefore not compatible with being a communist
revolutionary. Let me remind you that all of this was happening to me when I was a high school student – just barely starting to sort out life,
love and sexuality. Looking back it seems clearer they had reproduced within revolutionary ranks (and using “communist” rhetoric) prejudices,
arguments and repressive practic- es that were not far removed from rightwing religious nuts and homophobes. I was very young and pretty
naïve I guess – I took what I was told at face value as the communist verdict on gay people, and on me. But at a gut level I couldn’t reconcile the
idea that my feelings for other girls meant that I was being bour- geois. I still was attracted to other girls, even when I berated myself for feeling
that way. I was told that I was viewing the girl in the RCYB that I liked as a sex object, that I was objectifying her because I had sexual thoughts
about her. In one painful meeting (at a Burger King – I never wanted to eat there again after this!) I admitted tear- fully that, yes, I had imagined
seeing her naked while masturbating. I felt really guilty. I was pushed into the closet as a price for being considered a revolutionary by those I
respected. And this was doubly painful: I was forced to deny my own feelings in public self-criticism, and I was being trained to confront my
continuing feelings as reactionary in the privacy of my own mind. Under watch Once I started being allowed back to Brigade ac- tivities I
apologized to this girl for objectifying her; but she just laughed and gave me a hug and said not to worry about it. Local RCP leaders and the
Youth Brigade coordi- nator kept me away from her though, and talked about sending me to live in a Brigade house in another city for the
summer. That idea was dropped after I failed geometry and had to go to summer school, but for the next year or so, I was closely watched.
However, I was spouting the party line, so I was “welcomed” back in the fold. But part of me wondered, what would happen if I didn’t accept
what I had been told to believe. A few years later there was another change in the division of labor, I was sent to go work in another area with a
new group of people. I had left high school and gotten my GED so I was anxious to start working full time and not having to depend on my
family. When I was told to apply for a particular kind of job and live in a shared apartment with some other party folks, I complied. I didn’t really
have any reason not to, even though I knew that living with people would be like being at the brigade house full-time; I would never be away
from people who could scrutinize my actions and “tell on me” to my leadership. This whole time I had been repressing my feelings, trying to just
pretend that they didn’t exist. My leadership brought up homosexuality during a paper discussion and I started defending a group of gay
activists and one of their slogans. I was criticized by everyone but this time I didn’t back down, I kept on saying that I didn’t understand the
RCP’s position on homosexuality. (Actually, I did understand, but I didn’t feel like I could say that I didn’t agree, it felt safer to just say I didn’t
understand).
K – Orientalism – Top Level
K – Psychoanalysis – Top Level
 K – Radical Otherness – Top Level
a. Baudrillard’s nihilistic worldview cannot understand the
differential relations within capital – only our location of
production as internal can understand and offer effective ways
out
Cole 11 (David R., Deleuzian Scholar, Associate Professor in Literacies, English and ESL in the Centre for Educational Research at University
of Western Sydney. “Matter in Motion: The educational materialism of Gilles Deleuze” 4/14/11 Journal of Educational Philosophy and Theory
Wiley Online Library. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2010.00745.x. //LP)

*Answers Marx, Baudrillaud, and Zizek

The jump in intensity level and change in focus from Difference & Repetition to Anti-Oedipus is remarkable. The sustained engagement in the
latter text with Marx and Freud gives the reader a map of capitalist society drawn from a new and exciting perspective. As Ronald Bogue (1989)
has put it, Anti-Oedipus is ‘a history and a politics of social-libidinal activity’ (p. 83). Yet despite the political manoeuvrings of Anti-Oedipus,
Deleuze & Guattari retained a philosophical perspective through the writing of this book, based on the deployment of three syntheses
(connective/conjunctive/disjunctive) that act as a basis for desire and the construction of a bridge between the material facts of capitalist
To this extent, this work
modes of production and the psychical effects of such production that are produced in the unconscious.
represents transcendental materialism, in that the materiality of living through capitalist production
flows through a process of synthesis that presents differential relations. One might recall Margaret Thatcher's
famous proclamation that there is no community, apposite in this context as capitalism works to divide us through investment strategies,
vertical lines of wealth and debt. Materialism replaces empiricism in Anti-Oedipus, though this work is no less experimental. For example,
Deleuze and Guattari use the notion of desiring-machines to exemplify a mode of capitalist production that is attached to desire. These
machines assault us through beautiful models used in advertising or in tacit ideas of wealth and freedom that are associated with buying
products that inevitably force us into ever more debt. Deleuze and Guattari present us with an analysis of capitalist production that is
penetrating and differentially individuating or, as they term it, ‘schizophrenizing’. The element of the thesis in Anti-Oedipus that is retained
from Deleuze's earlier philosophical work is transcendence. A working with and through Kant, the resultant phenomenology, and his method of
critique animate this relationship. In their final collaborative work, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) presented a machinic portrait of Kant that goes
some way to explain and illustrate their perspective: The components of the schema (in Figure 1) are as follows: 1) the ‘I think’ as an ox head
wired for sound, which constantly repeats Self = Self; 2) the categories as universal concepts (four great headings): shafts that are extensive and
retractile according to the movement of 3); 3) the moving wheel of the schemata; 4) the shallow stream of Time as form of interiority, in and
out of which the wheel of the schemata plunges; 5) space as form of exteriority: the stream's banks and bed; 6) the passive self at the bottom
of the stream and as junction of the two forms; 7) the principles of synthetic judgements that run across space-time; 8) the transcendental field
of possible experience, immanent to the ‘I’ (plane of immanence); and 9) the three Ideas or illusions of transcendence (circles turning on the
absolute horizon: Soul, World and God). (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 57) In other words, Kant is a machinic monster (as described by Figure 1).
His resultant philosophical system is also monstrous. Anyone who has engaged at length with Kantian philosophy, either in terms of
understanding it or in trying to critique it, would concur with the monstrous edifice that Kant construes as consciousness. Yet Deleuze &
Guattari (1984) retain transcendence in Anti-Oedipus, not to take us up to heaven or into the sublime, but to force us through the syntheses of
capitalist production. This includes an engagement with the monstrous, as these modes of production are not mechanistically separate or
locatable on a prioritised plane of time or space. Rather, the thesis of Anti-Oedipus is that these modes of production
sit inside us as ‘monstrous others’, playing with affect and determining our perspectives from within.
Deleuze & Guattari look to draw escape routes from Oedipal entrapment and ubiquitous capitalist
production via their method of schizoanalysis. This method turns Freud and Marx upside down, as
material forces are grouped with unconscious desires and the means to production is located on the
inside. It's as if Deleuze & Guattari are challenging us to build machines in our minds. These machines should deal with the forces that bear
down on us through the many ways in which capitalism works, and ultimately to steer that energy and resultant thought patterning outwards.
This is perhaps not an easy task, given the domination of social life that capital has attained and the ways in which capitalism is able to reinvent
itself under different social contexts and conditions. Critics of transcendental materialism such as Jean Baudrillard (1988) or Slavoj Žižek (2004)
have attacked Deleuze & Guattari at this point. Baudrillard
and Žižek have contended that the thesis of Anti-Oedipus
is idealistic and Utopian, and that the micropolitics that it looks to set up is a molecular waste of time!
Baudrillard (1988) preferred to bask and play in the nihilistic relativism that results from capital systems
levelling values and hierarchies that have defined society throughout history. Baudrillard (1988)
perceived only reverie and corruption in the politics of becoming and desire that challenges capitalism,
whereas Deleuze and Guattari posited a means to a new dawn and a potential revolution. Anti-Oedipus was
written after the events of Paris, in May 1968, and the book lurks in the shadows of this uprising. Revolution was once again possible,
alternatives to capitalism were being seriously discussed; there was a new energy around social inquiry in France. The work of Louis Althusser
(1977; Althusser & Balibar, 1977) was extremely influential at the time, and Anti-Oedipus shares many of his interpretations and ideas on Marx.
For example, their perspective on historical materialism was that it is not a linear series of events leading to proletariat revolution, but that
Populations do respond to the forces of history by trying to
history is a non-linear process of explosions and diminutions.
accumulate more capital, they also lose capital and can pay no attention to capital (even though it is
always present in their lives to some extent through partial or virtual relations). Deleuze and Guattari also
borrowed from Althusser in terms of his interpretation of the superstructure in Marx's account of history. The superstructure holds together
the means to production via the economic stance, whereby ideology can liberate one from the servitude of capitalism. This type of ideological
revolutionary thought is critical to Anti-Oedipus. For example, the project of collecting and analysing monstrous others in Anti-Oedipus that act
as an outside to capitalist modes of production assumes the stability of this outside. The historicist superstructure from Marx is henceforth a
bodily manifestation of otherness in Anti-Oedipus, represented by Judge Schreber, Antonin Artaud or William Burroughs as the body-without-
organs. Deleuze & Guattari (1984) therefore keep Althusser's ideology, though they transpose it into a deformed and internal event as other.
This otherness is carried forth through surplus value, and in the axiomatics of capitalist modes of production. The thesis is not that history
becomes irrelevant, but that, for example, savage modes of production such as coding are put forward and transformed in contemporary social
life. Fashion models sport tattoos as the latest trend, and simultaneously sell products, lifestyles and body images. The biggest selling teenage
Anti-Oedipus describes
books are about vampires that transpose everyday life into scenarios where monstrous others live amongst us.
these events as connecting devices between capitalist modes of production and the unconscious: savage
codes present revolutionary forces, emptying out Lacan's Symbolic Order and marking out territories of
psychosomatic energy and their concomitant flows.
 b. Their ontology is wrong
1. We’re not all “infinitely Other” – we share desire, biological
traits, the state of being alive
2. Reduction of Otherness to difference can’t explain the
violence against non-normative queers – cross-apply 1AC
Stanley
c. Link turn – we explicitly criticize the concrete identities that
make “difference” in favor or infinite rhizomatic “Otherness”
d. Becoming Other DA – their ontological understanding of
Otherness locks in a fixed identity binary of Self/Other which
links to our 1AC offense
e. Offspring DA – Baudrillard’s criticism of ultimate sameness leads
to a championing of genetic reproduction and opposition to
sexual liberation – no “not our Baudrillard!”, this is your specific
ontology and we have his quotes
Edelman ‘4 (Lee Edelman, Professor of English and Tuft University, Professor Edelman’s research
focuses on fields of intersection between sexuality, rhetoric, culture, politics, and film, December 6th
2004, No Future: Quuer Theory and the Death Drive, Sinthomosexuality, pg 60-66) SY
This paradox determines the trajectory of a recent essay by Jean Baudrillard that was published under the deliberately inflammatory title, ‘‘The
Baudrillard asserts that the human species is confronting a life-and-death crisis around the
Final Solution.’’
question of reproduction, more specifically, around its determination by way of sameness or difference.
But a vortex of contradictions engulfs his use of these various terms, occasioning, or rather seeming to occasion, a transvaluation of values in
accordance with which they appear to signify against our expectations: ‘‘There is something occulted inside us: our deaths. But something else
is hidden there, lying in wait for us within each of our cells: the forgetting of death. In our cells our immortality lies in wait for us. It’s common
to speak of the struggle of life against death, but there is an inverse peril. And we must struggle against the possibility that we will not die. At
the slightest hesitation in the fight for death—a fight for division, for sex, for alterity, and so for death—
living beings become once again indivisible, identical to one another—and immortal.’’49 Far from speaking,
with the sinthomosexual, for the death drive and its disarticulation of forms, Baudrillard remains an advocate here of reproductive futurism,
explicitly enlisting this notion of death, this resistance to immortality, against the force of the death drive, which he assimilates to, and
disavows as, the paradigm of sameness: ‘‘The death drive, according to Freud, is precisely this nostalgia for a state before the appearance of
individuality and sexual differentiation, a state in which we lived before we became mortal and distinct from one another’’ (interesting) ( ). He
may trumpet what he calls here the ‘‘fight for death’’ in thus opposing himself to the death drive, disparaged as eternal pursuit of the Same and
hence as immortality, but opprobrium, in Baudrillard’s argument, still attaches to the death drive only insofar as it constitutes a mortal threat to
the survival of the human—insofar, that is, as its sameness might make human difference different. The immortality for which he reproves it,
then, threatens the human precisely with a death he would have us fight against. It names the endless negation of form, and so of what, for
As he sketches an evolutionary movement
Baudrillard, defines the value of ‘‘difference’’: that is, our distinctly human identity.
from ‘‘the absolute continuity found in the subdivision of the same—in bacteria—to the possibility of life
and death’’ (), by which latter phrase he indicates the attributes of sexual reproduction, Baudrillard,
complicit with tendencies of scientific discourse in general, celebrates the triumph of sexed
reproduction over genetic duplication in a teleological narrative that itself reduplicates the Freudian
account of genitality’s triumph over the various ‘‘partial’’ drives. Naturalizing this trajectory from the replication he
associates with genetic immortality to the procreation made possible by encountering sexual, and therefore genetic, difference, Baudrillard
sounds the note of futurism’s persistent love song to itself, its fantasy of a dialectic capable of spinning meaning out of history, and history out
of desire: Next [after the evolutionary moment of bacterial replication], the egg becomes fertilized by a sperm and specialized sex cells make
their appearance. The resulting entity is no longer a copy of either one of the pair that engendered it; rather, it is a new and singular
combination. There is a shift from pure and simple reproduction to procreation: the first two will die for the first time, and the third for the first
time will be born. We reach the stage of beings that are sexed, differentiated, and mortal. The earlier order of the virus—of immortal beings—is
perpetuated, but henceforward this world of deathless things is contained within the world of the mortals. In evolutionary terms, the victory
goes to beings that are mortal and distinct from one another: the victory goes to us. () Or
goes to ‘‘us’’ so long as ‘‘we’’ don’t
identify—or get identified by others—with the regressive ‘‘order of the virus,’’ of immortal sameness or
repetition, that threatens ‘‘us’’ with the sort of death Baudrillard refuses to embrace (a death through
viral replication like that associated with what was referred to, twenty years ago, as ‘‘ the gay plague’’):
‘‘This is the revenge taken on mortal and sexed beings by immortal and undifferentiated life forms. This is
what could be called the final solution’’ (). Thus death, the corollary of difference, can function as a value for Baudrillard in the context of
individual identities alone (because this, after all, allows for the Couple’s dialectical survival in the ‘‘third ’’); it retains its negative valence where
the species itself is concerned.50 The latter’s impulse to immortality, to perpetuating its self-perpetuation through the mechanics of genetic
exchange, must resist the backward appeal of ‘‘involution,’’ which signifies, for Baudrillard, the regressive ‘‘nullification of differences’’ ( ). It
must, that is, remain the same in its difference from the lethal sameness it condemns for its nullification
of difference, thus affirming as constant the One of the Couple and the fantasy of the sexual relation as
the ‘‘duality that puts an end to perpetual indivision and successive iterations of the same’’ ( ). Unless, of
course, such iterations of the same put an end to it instead. And that, according to Baudrillard , is precisely what ‘‘sexual
liberation’’ intends: The first phase of sexual liberation involves the dissociation of sexual activity from
procreation through the pill and other contraceptive devices—a transformation with enormous
consequences. The second phase, which we are beginning to enter now, is the dissociation of
reproduction from sex. First, sex was liberated from reproduction; today it is reproduction that is liberated from sex, through asexual,
biotechnological modes of reproduction such as artificial insemination or full body cloning. This is also a liberation, though antithetical to the
first. We’ve been sexually liberated, and now we find ourselves liberated from sex—that is, virtually relieved of the sexual function. Among the
clones (and among human beings soon enough), sex, as a result of this automatic means of reproduction, becomes extraneous, a useless
function. ()) The meaning of ‘‘sex,’’ which Baudrillard had identified earlier as a mode of reproduction (‘‘sexed, differentiated, and mortal’’)
distinct from that of ‘‘deathless things’’ (such as viruses and bacteria) by virtue of its mingling of genes to create ‘‘new and singular
combination[s],’’ undergoes an important mutation here. How else to explain his odd characterization of artificial insemination as ‘‘asexual’’
and (continuous in this with cloning) as reproduction ‘‘liberated from sex’’? For whatever the mechanism by which it’s achieved—and
‘‘artificial’’ seems largely a diacritical term intended to naturalize the procreative function of heterosexual intercourse—insemination, the
fertilization of egg by sperm, defines the very principle of sexual reproduction for Baudrillard. But the evolutionary argument for genetic
combination (the essay’s original meaning of ‘‘sex’’) has morphed, as it often seems to do, into a panicky offensive against reproduction without
heterogenital copulation (the subsequent meaning of ‘‘sex’’).What can the lament for the putative loss of the sexual function mean, therefore,
if not its very opposite: that heterosexuality, stripped of its ancient reproductive alibi, must assume at last the despiritualized burden of its
status as sexual function, as sinthomosexuality; that in the face of what Baudrillard calls ‘‘automatic’’ or ‘‘biotechnological’’ modes of
reproduction, it must recognize the ‘‘extraneous’’ element in sex that is never extraneous to sex and that marks it as a ‘‘useless function,’’ as a
meaningless and unrecuperable expense, or even, as Jacques Derrida has written with regard to différance, ‘‘as expenditure without reserve, as
the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, as the death instinct.’’51 Like
Faron, the narrator of The
Children of Men, for whom sex in a world without procreation—without ‘‘the hope of posterity, for our
race if not for ourselves’’—becomes ‘‘almost meaninglessly acrobatic,’’ Baudrillard recoils in horror
before this ‘‘useless’’ sexuality. And a ‘‘useless function’’ for Baudrillard, as his use of the same phrase elsewhere suggests, means one that refuses meaning: ‘‘At the extreme limit of computation and the coding and cloning of human
thought (artificial intelligence), language as a medium of symbolic exchange becomes a definitively useless function. For the first time in history we face the possibility of a Perfect Crime against language, an aphanisis of the symbolic function.’’52 Aphanisis, the term Ernest Jones
introduced to identify the anxiety-inducing prospect of the disappearance of desire, refers in the passage from Baudrillard to the fading or, more ominously, to what he describes as the ‘‘global extermination of meaning’’, the unraveling of the braid inwhich reproductive futurism twines
meaning, desire, and the fantasy of (hetero)sexual rapport. At the same time, though, it also evokes the subsequent use of theword by Lacan, for whom it refers instead to the fading or disappearance of the subject,whose division the signifier effects in such a way that ‘‘there is no subject
without, somewhere, aphanisis of the subject.’’ Lacan will then go on to add, ‘‘There is an emergence of the subject at the level of meaning only from its aphanisis in the Other locus, which is that of the unconscious.’’53 Meaning, that is, against whose aphanisis Baudrillard’s jeremiad is
launched, always already entails, for Lacan, the aphanisis of the unconscious: ‘‘When the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as ‘fading,’ as disappearance’’ ( ). Appalled by the imminence of a ‘‘final solution,’’ the liberation from sexual difference
intended by the force of ‘‘perpetual indivision and successive iterations of the same,’’ Baudrillard holds fast to the meaning whose ‘‘global extermination’’ sinthomosexuality is always imagined to effect and whose Symbolic exchange jouissance would reduce to a ‘‘definitively useless
function.’’54 And he does so in the hope of perpetuating the temporal movements of desire, of shielding himself from the unconscious(and the iterations of the drive, and securing, through futurity, through the victory of narrative duration over irony’s explosive negativity, a ground on
which to stand: ‘‘The stakes,’’ he warns, ‘‘are no longer only that ‘history’ is slipping into the ‘posthistorical,’ but that the human race is slipping into the void’’ ( ). And all because (heterosexual) sex has ‘‘become extraneous, a useless function,’’ has become, that is, void of content
once the inspiriting meaning it carried—both like, and in the form of, a Child—has vanished into the unregenerate materiality of the signifier.55 For ‘‘the signifier,’’ as Lacan declares in his interpretation of ‘‘The Purloined Letter,’’ ‘‘is not functional’’; it exceeds its use-value in the service of
signification and, especially as localized in what the essay punningly engages as ‘‘the letter,’’ it brings us back to the Real, to the fatality of ‘‘what remains of a signifier when it has no more signification.’’56 Apostrophizing just such a signifier, Lacan, in his reading of Poe’s short story,
makes clear just what remains: ‘‘nothing, if not that presence of death which makes a human life a reprieve obtained from morning to morning in the name of the meanings whose sign is your crook’’ ( ). Baudrillard, like Silas Marner and Scrooge, may walk through the valley of the
shadow of death, but with meaning as his shepherd he shall always want, desiring from morning to morning the continuation of the reprieve by which he perpetuates the fantasy space essential to his desire. ‘We see no white winged angels now,’’ George Eliot observes. ‘‘But yet men are
led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put in theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and that hand may be a little child’s.’’ Or rather, though that Child be as helpless as Eppie, as delicate as Tiny Tim, it must be
the hand of a ‘‘little child’’ that lifts us into the future and thereby saves us, in the words of Baudrillard, from ‘‘slipping into the void’’ of all that is ‘‘backward’’ or ‘‘involuted,’’ of all that he condemns as ‘‘successive iterations of the same’’ that are, themselves, precisely what old Mr.
Lammeter knows we value in the Eppies and Tiny Tims who embody reproductive futurism. As those faces of Eppie and Tiny Tim turn their eyes to us once more, soliciting the compassion that always compels us to want to keep them safe (in the faith that they will confer on us the
future’s saving grace), let me end with a reference to the ‘‘Fourteen Words,’’ attributed to David Lane, by which members of various white separatist organizations throughout the United States affirm their collective commitment to the common cause of racial hatred: ‘‘We must secure
the existence of our people and a future for white children.’’57 So long as ‘‘white’’ is the only word that makes this credo appalling, so long as figural children continue to ‘‘secure [our] existence’’ through the fantasy that we survive in them, so long as the queer refutes that fantasy,
effecting its derealization as surely as an encounter with the Real, for just so long must sinthomosexuality have a future after all. For what keeps it alive, paradoxically, is the futurism desperate to negate it, obedient in that to the force of a drive that is futurism’s sinthome.
 K – Radical Otherness – AT: Alt – Embrace Otherness
a. Perm do both – embracing Otherness is aligned with our
acceptance of rhizomatic queerness
b. Perm do each – becoming-queer is about perception of
ourselves, their alt is about perception of Others
c. Perm do the AFF - our counter conduct performance is an
affective rupture that creates other movements against
normative education like their K – that’s 1AC Zembylas
d. AFF is a DA – they can’t solve:
1. Their thesis relies on a static binary of Self/Other that
precludes fluid identity
2. Their championing of Otherness endorses genetically created
difference, which precludes sexual freedom – that’s Edelman
 K – Ruptural Politics – Top Level
No link – their K is a critique of analysis and appropriation of
movements in the “street,” not radical advocacy in a debate round –
insert the paper’s introduction
Nayar ’17 (Jayan Nayar; professor of law at University of Warwick. “Some Thoughts on the
‘(Extra)Ordinary’: Philosophy, Coloniality, and Being Otherwise”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0304375417717171 27 July 2017) // ELog

Indeed, it is a peculiar enterprise that we “ critical intellectuals” engage in.2 We assume an audacious capacity to
contemplate the “world” and read its signs and to interpret our present and imagine better futures. We think, perhaps, this a worthwhile social
endeavor; the “thinker,” we might hope, serves as a catalyst to identify, to instigate, and to provoke otherwise merely latent potentialities of
suppressed insurgencies against the ossification of the future in unsatisfactory and captured presents.3 With this self-assumed sense
of purpose, perhaps it is understandable that many of us seek out the “street” for our thinking;4 it is
here that we search for the extraordinary “event” that marks, as we see it, a rupture, the moment of
catharsis, a transformation, the “new” born into the world. We see this tendency to philosophize the street clearly in
recent intellectual work of the critical “post-Enlightenment” philosophers.5 Reading “uprisings,” “resistance,” and
“revolutions”, interpreting the happenings of irruptions in the squares and bazaars of anger, ascribing
meaning to voice as voiced in a multitude of vernaculars in multiple locales as these events are gazed
upon and made audible to consuming eyes and ears, and investing hope and dispensing disappointment,
indeed, we observe that much political–legal thought is so moved by the (variously conceived of)
“political” projects to open up possible pathways of “rupturing” the present. In this fashion, the street
has indeed come to be the primary locale from which philosophical contemplations are undertaken in
this “age of resistance” as Costas Douzinas has named our present time: A sequence of uprisings will
dominate the world political landscape in the next period. Ours is an age of resistance. The possibility of radical change
has been firmly placed on the historical agenda.6 What inspires such fervor, such ecstatic celebration of the street, is
a perceived, hoped for, emergence, 7 here, the extraordinary event is the harbinger of hope, marking
the (possible, nascent) becoming of a “political subject” as the one who emerges into the street, and out
from the street, breaking free from the shackles of extant sovereign-biopolitical diagrams, heralding
(with “fidelity”), as Alain Badiou would have it come to be, the “rebirth” of history.8 The street, thus, portends
history. This, we see, is thinking fixed on the spectacular, the heroic, and the extraordinary of “radical change.” It is this philosophical
tendency—to appropriate the street as the ecstatic site of extraordinary becoming—that is my concern
in this essay. It is this heroic orientation of thought that is the subject of my critique. In what follows, I consider the
philosophical–political heritage from which the preoccupation with thinking the extraordinary of the
street originates and question the implications of such thinking. I argue that such thinking betrays the
continued coloniality of critical post-Enlightenment philosophy.9 My intention is to provide a different
reading of the “extraordinary” that emerges in the street—as a physical place of embodied presence
rather than a reified space of philosophical aspiration —informed by what I argue to be a decolonial
understanding of the presents (and presence) of already being in the world. The essay is organized as follows.
K – Settler Colonialism – Top Level
 DA – Capitalism – Top Level
a. No link:
1. 1AC doesn’t take a stance on capitalism – the word isn’t read
2. 1AC explicitly rejects grand narratives – even if capitalism is
broadly bad, our rhizomatic politics is not opposed to its uses
b. It’s unsustainable – means they can’t win an impact:
1. Profit – accumulation-based economics is predicated on
infinite expansion in a finite world – growth is inevitably
halted by natural constraints
2. Internalized Externalities – capitalism seeks to integrate its
impacts instead of confronting them – makes extinction
inevitable
Foster ‘19 (John, PhD from York University, Professor at the University of Oregon Department of
Sociology, “Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?,” Monthly Review, 2/1/19,
https://monthlyreview.org/2019/02/01/capitalism-has-failed-what-next/, JLin)

Less than two decades into the twenty-first century, it is evident that capitalism has failed as a social
system. The world is mired in economic stagnation, financialization, and the most extreme inequality in human history, accompanied by
mass unemployment and underemployment, precariousness, poverty, hunger, wasted output and lives, and what at this point can only be
called a planetary ecological “death spiral.”1 The digital revolution, the greatest technological advance of our time, has rapidly mutated from a
promise of free communication and liberated production into new means of surveillance, control, and displacement of the working population.
The institutions of liberal democracy are at the point of collapse, while fascism, the rear guard of the capitalist system, is again on the march,
along with patriarchy, racism, imperialism, and war. To say that capitalism is a failed system is not, of course, to suggest that its breakdown and
disintegration is imminent.2 It does, however, mean that it has passed from being a historically necessary and creative system at its inception to
being a historically unnecessary and destructive one in the present century. Today, more than ever, the world is faced with the epochal choice
between “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large and the common ruin of the contending classes.”3 Indications of this failure of
capitalism are everywhere. Stagnation
of investment punctuated by bubbles of financial expansion, which then
inevitably burst, now characterizes the so-called free market.4 Soaring inequality in income and wealth has its
counterpart in the declining material circumstances of a majority of the population. Real wages for most workers in the United States have
barely budged in forty years despite steadily rising productivity.5 Work intensity has increased, while work and safety protections on the job
have been systematically jettisoned. Unemployment data has become more and more meaningless due to a new institutionalized
underemployment in the form of contract labor in the gig economy.6 Unions have been reduced to mere shadows of their former glory as
capitalism has asserted totalitarian control over workplaces. With the demise of Soviet-type societies, social democracy in Europe has perished
in the new atmosphere of “liberated capitalism.”7 The
capture of the surplus value produced by overexploited
populations in the poorest regions of the world, via the global labor arbitrage instituted by multinational
corporations, is leading to an unprecedented amassing of financial wealth at the center of the world
economy and relative poverty in the periphery.8 Around $21 trillion of offshore funds are currently lodged in tax havens on
islands mostly in the Caribbean, constituting “the fortified refuge of Big Finance.”9 Technologically driven monopolies resulting from the global-
communications revolution, together with the rise to dominance of Wall Street-based financial capital geared to speculative asset creation,
have further contributed to the riches of today’s “1 percent.” Forty-two billionaires now enjoy as much wealth as half the world’s population,
while the three richest men in the United States—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—have more wealth than half the U.S. population.10
In every region of the world, inequality has increased sharply in recent decades.11 The gap in per capita income
and wealth between the richest and poorest nations, which has been the dominant trend for centuries, is rapidly widening once again.12 More
than 60 percent of the world’s employed population, some two billion people, now work in the impoverished informal sector, forming a
massive global proletariat. The global reserve army of labor is some 70 percent larger than the active labor army of formally employed
workers.13 Adequate health care, housing, education, and clean water and air are increasingly out of reach
for large sections of the population, even in wealthy countries in North America and Europe, while
transportation is becoming more difficult in the United States and many other countries due to
irrationally high levels of dependency on the automobile and disinvestment in public transportation.
Urban structures are more and more characterized by gentrification and segregation, with cities becoming the playthings of the well-to-do
while marginalized populations are shunted aside. About half a million people, most of them children, are homeless on any given night in the
United States.14 New York City is experiencing a major rat infestation, attributed to warming temperatures, mirroring trends around the
world.15 In
the United States and other high-income countries, life expectancy is in decline, with a
remarkable resurgence of Victorian illnesses related to poverty and exploitation . In Britain, gout, scarlet fever,
whooping cough, and even scurvy are now resurgent, along with tuberculosis. With inadequate enforcement of work health and safety
regulations, black lung disease has returned with a vengeance in U.S. coal country.16 Overuse
of antibiotics, particularly by
capitalist agribusiness, is leading to an antibiotic-resistance crisis, with the dangerous growth of
superbugs generating increasing numbers of deaths, which by mid–century could surpass annual cancer
deaths, prompting the World Health Organization to declare a “global health emergency.”17 These dire
conditions, arising from the workings of the system, are consistent with what Frederick Engels, in the Condition of the Working Class in England,
called “social murder.”18 At the instigation of giant corporations, philanthrocapitalist foundations, and neoliberal governments, public
education has been restructured around corporate-designed testing based on the implementation of robotic common-core standards. This is
generating massive databases on the student population, much of which are now being surreptitiously marketed and sold.19 The
corporatization and privatization of education is feeding the progressive subordination of children’s needs to the cash nexus of the commodity
market. We are thus seeing a dramatic return of Thomas Gradgrind’s and Mr. M’Choakumchild’s crass utilitarian philosophy dramatized in
Charles Dickens’s Hard Times: “Facts are alone wanted in life” and “You are never to fancy.”20 Having been reduced to intellectual dungeons,
many of the poorest, most racially segregated schools in the United States are mere pipelines for prisons or the military.21 More than two
million people in the United States are behind bars, a higher rate of incarceration than any other country in the world, constituting a new Jim
Crow. The total population in prison is nearly equal to the number of people in Houston, Texas, the fourth largest U.S. city. African Americans
and Latinos make up 56 percent of those incarcerated, while constituting only about 32 percent of the U.S. population. Nearly 50 percent of
American adults, and a much higher percentage among African Americans and Native Americans, have an immediate family member who has
spent or is currently spending time behind bars. Both black men and Native American men in the United States are nearly three times, Hispanic
men nearly two times, more likely to die of police shootings than white men.22 Racial divides are now widening across the entire planet.
Violence against women and the expropriation of their unpaid labor, as well as the higher level of exploitation of their paid labor, are integral to
the way in which power is organized in capitalist society—and how it seeks to divide rather than unify the population. More than a third of
Women’s bodies, in particular, are objectified, reified, and
women worldwide have experienced physical/sexual violence.
commodified as part of the normal workings of monopoly-capitalist marketing.23 The mass media-propaganda
system, part of the larger corporate matrix, is now merging into a social media-based propaganda system that is more porous and seemingly
anarchic, but more universal and more than ever favoring money and power. Utilizing modern marketing and surveillance techniques, which
now dominate all digital interactions, vested interests are able to tailor their messages, largely unchecked, to individuals and their social
networks, creating concerns about “fake news” on all sides.24 Numerous business entities promising technological manipulation of voters in
countries across the world have now surfaced, auctioning off their services to the highest bidders.25 The elimination of net neutrality in the
United States means further concentration, centralization, and control over the entire Internet by monopolistic service providers. Elections
are increasingly prey to unregulated “dark money” emanating from the coffers of corporations and the
billionaire class. Although presenting itself as the world’s leading democracy, the United States, as Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy stated in
Monopoly Capital in 1966, “is democratic in form and plutocratic in content.”26 In the Trump administration, following a long-established
tradition, 72 percent of those appointed to the cabinet have come from the higher corporate echelons, while others have been drawn from the
military.27 War,
engineered by the United States and other major powers at the apex of the system, has
become perpetual in strategic oil regions such as the Middle East, and threatens to escalate into a global
thermonuclear exchange. During the Obama administration, the United States was engaged in wars/bombings in seven different
countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.28 Torture and assassinations have been reinstituted by Washington as
acceptable instruments of war against those now innumerable individuals, group networks, and whole societies that are branded as terrorist. A
new Cold War and nuclear arms race is in the making between the United States and Russia, while Washington is seeking to place road blocks
to the continued rise of China. The Trump administration has created a new space force as a separate branch of the military in an attempt to
ensure U.S. dominance in the militarization of space. Sounding the alarm on the increasing dangers of a nuclear war and of climate
destabilization, the distinguished Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its doomsday clock in 2018 to two minutes to midnight, the closest since
1953, when it marked the advent of thermonuclear weapons.29 Increasingly severe economic sanctions are being imposed by the United States
on countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua, despite their democratic elections—or because of them. Trade and currency wars are being actively
promoted by core states, while racist barriers against immigration continue to be erected in Europe and the United States as some 60 million
refugees and internally displaced peoples flee devastated environments. Migrant populations worldwide have risen to 250 million, with those
residing in high-income countries constituting more than 14 percent of the populations of those countries, up from less than 10 percent in
2000. Meanwhile, ruling circles and wealthy countries seek to wall off islands of power and privilege from the mass of humanity, who are to be
left to their fate.30 More than three-quarters of a billion people, over 10 percent of the world population, are chronically malnourished.31
Food stress in the United States keeps climbing, leading to the rapid growth of cheap dollar stores selling poor quality and toxic food. Around
forty million Americans, representing one out of eight households, including nearly thirteen million children, are food insecure.32 Subsistence
farmers are being pushed off their lands by agribusiness, private capital, and sovereign wealth funds in a global depeasantization process that
constitutes the greatest movement of people in history.33 Urban overcrowding and poverty across much of the globe is so severe that one can
now reasonably refer to a “planet of slums.”34 Meanwhile, the world housing market is estimated to be worth up to $163 trillion (as compared
to the value of gold mined over all recorded history, estimated at $7.5 trillion).35 The Anthropocene epoch, first ushered in by the Great
Acceleration of the world economy immediately after the Second World War, has generated enormous rifts in planetary boundaries, extending
from climate change to ocean acidification, to the sixth extinction, to disruption of the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, to the loss of
freshwater, to the disappearance of forests, to widespread toxic-chemical and radioactive pollution.36 It is now estimated that 60 percent of
the world’s wildlife vertebrate population (including mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish) have been wiped out since 1970, while the
worldwide abundance of invertebrates has declined by 45 percent in recent decades.37 What climatologist James Hansen calls the “species
exterminations” resulting from accelerating climate change and rapidly shifting climate zones are only compounding this general process of
If present climate-
biodiversity loss. Biologists expect that half of all species will be facing extinction by the end of the century.38
change trends continue, the “global carbon budget” associated with a 2°C increase in average global
temperature will be broken in sixteen years (while a 1.5°C increase in global average temperature—
staying beneath which is the key to long-term stabilization of the climate—will be reached in a decade).
Earth System scientists warn that the world is now perilously close to a Hothouse Earth, in which
catastrophic climate change will be locked in and irreversible .39 The ecological, social, and economic
costs to humanity of continuing to increase carbon emissions by 2.0 percent a year as in recent decades
(rising in 2018 by 2.7 percent—3.4 percent in the United States), and failing to meet the minimal 3.0
percent annual reductions in emissions currently needed to avoid a catastrophic destabilization of the
earth’s energy balance, are simply incalculable.40 Nevertheless, major energy corporations continue to
lie about climate change, promoting and bankrolling climate denialism—while admitting the truth in
their internal documents. These corporations are working to accelerate the extraction and production of
fossil fuels, including the dirtiest, most greenhouse gas-generating varieties, reaping enormous profits in
the process. The melting of the Arctic ice from global warming is seen by capital as a new El Dorado, opening up massive additional oil and
gas reserves to be exploited without regard to the consequences for the earth’s climate. In response to scientific reports on climate change,
Exxon Mobil declared that it intends to extract and sell all of the fossil-fuel reserves at its disposal.41 Energy corporations continue to intervene
in climate negotiations to ensure that any agreements to limit carbon emissions are defanged. Capitalist countries across the board are putting
the accumulation of wealth for a few above combatting climate destabilization, threatening the very future of humanity. Capitalism is best
understood as a competitive class-based mode of production and exchange geared to the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of
workers’ labor power and the private appropriation of surplus value (value generated beyond the costs of the workers’ own reproduction). The
mode of economic accounting intrinsic to capitalism designates as a value-generating good or service anything that passes through the market
and therefore produces income. It follows that the greater part of the social and environmental costs of production outside the market are
excluded in this form of valuation and are treated as mere negative “externalities,” unrelated to the capitalist economy itself—whether in
terms of the shortening and degradation of human life or the destruction of the natural environment. As environmental economist K. William
Kapp stated, “capitalism must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs.”42 We
have now reached a point in the twenty-
first century in which the externalities of this irrational system, such as the costs of war, the depletion of
natural resources, the waste of human lives, and the disruption of the planetary environment, now far
exceed any future economic benefits that capitalism offers to society as a whole. The accumulation of
capital and the amassing of wealth are increasingly occurring at the expense of an irrevocable rift in the
social and environmental conditions governing human life on earth.43 Some would argue that China stands as an
exception to much of the above, characterized as it is by a seemingly unstoppable rate of economic advance (though carrying with it deep social
and ecological contradictions). Yet Chinese development has its roots in the 1949 Chinese Revolution, carried out by the Chinese Communist
Party headed by Mao Zedong, whereby it liberated itself from the imperialist system. This allowed it to develop for decades under a planned
economy largely free of constraints from outside forces, establishing a strong agricultural and industrial economic base. This was followed by a
shift in the post-Maoist reform period to a hybrid system of more limited state planning along with a much greater reliance on market relations
(and a vast expansion of debt and speculation) under conditions—the globalization of the world market—that were particularly fortuitous to its
“catching up.” Through trade wars and other pressures aimed at destabilizing China’s position in the world market, the United States is already
seeking to challenge the bases of China’s growth in world trade. China, therefore, stands not so much for the successes of late capitalism but
rather for its inherent limitations. The current Chinese model, moreover, carries within it many of the destructive tendencies of the system of
capital accumulation. Ultimately, China’s future too depends on a return to the process of revolutionary transition, spurred by its own
population.44 How did these disastrous conditions characterizing capitalism worldwide develop? An understanding of the failure of capitalism,
beginning in the twentieth century, requires a historical examination of the rise of neoliberalism, and how this has only served to increase the
destructiveness of the system. Only then can we address the future of humanity in the twenty-first century.
 DA – Capitalism – Top Level – Maize
a. No link:
1. 1AC doesn’t take a stance on capitalism – the word isn’t read
2. 1AC explicitly rejects grand narratives – even if capitalism is
broadly bad, our rhizomatic politics is not opposed to its uses
b. It’s unsustainable – means they can’t win an impact:
1. Profit – accumulation-based economics is predicated on
infinite expansion in a finite world – growth is inevitably
halted by natural constraints
2. Internalized Externalities – capitalism seeks to integrate its
impacts instead of confronting them – makes extinction
inevitable
Foster ‘19 (John, PhD from York University, Professor at the University of Oregon Department of
Sociology, “Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?,” Monthly Review, 2/1/19,
https://monthlyreview.org/2019/02/01/capitalism-has-failed-what-next/, JLin)

Less than two decades into the twenty-first century, it is evident that capitalism has failed as a social
system. The world is mired in economic stagnation, financialization, and the most extreme inequality in human history, accompanied by
mass unemployment and underemployment, precariousness, poverty, hunger, wasted output and lives, and what at this point can only be
called a planetary ecological “death spiral.”1 The digital revolution, the greatest technological advance of our time, has rapidly mutated from a
promise of free communication and liberated production into new means of surveillance, control, and displacement of the working population.
The institutions of liberal democracy are at the point of collapse, while fascism, the rear guard of the capitalist system, is again on the march,
along with patriarchy, racism, imperialism, and war. To say that capitalism is a failed system is not, of course, to suggest that its breakdown and
disintegration is imminent.2 It does, however, mean that it has passed from being a historically necessary and creative system at its inception to
being a historically unnecessary and destructive one in the present century. Today, more than ever, the world is faced with the epochal choice
between “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large and the common ruin of the contending classes.”3 Indications of this failure of
capitalism are everywhere. Stagnation
of investment punctuated by bubbles of financial expansion, which then
inevitably burst, now characterizes the so-called free market.4 Soaring inequality in income and wealth has its
counterpart in the declining material circumstances of a majority of the population. Real wages for most workers in the United States have
barely budged in forty years despite steadily rising productivity.5 Work intensity has increased, while work and safety protections on the job
have been systematically jettisoned. Unemployment data has become more and more meaningless due to a new institutionalized
underemployment in the form of contract labor in the gig economy.6 Unions have been reduced to mere shadows of their former glory as
capitalism has asserted totalitarian control over workplaces. With the demise of Soviet-type societies, social democracy in Europe has perished
in the new atmosphere of “liberated capitalism.”7 The
capture of the surplus value produced by overexploited
populations in the poorest regions of the world, via the global labor arbitrage instituted by multinational
corporations, is leading to an unprecedented amassing of financial wealth at the center of the world
economy and relative poverty in the periphery.8 Around $21 trillion of offshore funds are currently lodged in tax havens on
islands mostly in the Caribbean, constituting “the fortified refuge of Big Finance.”9 Technologically driven monopolies resulting from the global-
communications revolution, together with the rise to dominance of Wall Street-based financial capital geared to speculative asset creation,
have further contributed to the riches of today’s “1 percent.” Forty-two billionaires now enjoy as much wealth as half the world’s population,
while the three richest men in the United States—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—have more wealth than half the U.S. population.10
In every region of the world, inequality has increased sharply in recent decades.11 The gap in per capita income
and wealth between the richest and poorest nations, which has been the dominant trend for centuries, is rapidly widening once again.12 More
than 60 percent of the world’s employed population, some two billion people, now work in the impoverished informal sector, forming a
massive global proletariat. The global reserve army of labor is some 70 percent larger than the active labor army of formally employed
workers.13 Adequate health care, housing, education, and clean water and air are increasingly out of reach
for large sections of the population, even in wealthy countries in North America and Europe, while
transportation is becoming more difficult in the United States and many other countries due to
irrationally high levels of dependency on the automobile and disinvestment in public transportation.
Urban structures are more and more characterized by gentrification and segregation, with cities becoming the playthings of the well-to-do
while marginalized populations are shunted aside. About half a million people, most of them children, are homeless on any given night in the
United States.14 New York City is experiencing a major rat infestation, attributed to warming temperatures, mirroring trends around the
world.15 In
the United States and other high-income countries, life expectancy is in decline, with a
remarkable resurgence of Victorian illnesses related to poverty and exploitation . In Britain, gout, scarlet fever,
whooping cough, and even scurvy are now resurgent, along with tuberculosis. With inadequate enforcement of work health and safety
regulations, black lung disease has returned with a vengeance in U.S. coal country.16 Overuse
of antibiotics, particularly by
capitalist agribusiness, is leading to an antibiotic-resistance crisis, with the dangerous growth of
superbugs generating increasing numbers of deaths, which by mid–century could surpass annual cancer
deaths, prompting the World Health Organization to declare a “global health emergency.”17 These dire
conditions, arising from the workings of the system, are consistent with what Frederick Engels, in the Condition of the Working Class in England,
called “social murder.”18 At the instigation of giant corporations, philanthrocapitalist foundations, and neoliberal governments, public
education has been restructured around corporate-designed testing based on the implementation of robotic common-core standards. This is
generating massive databases on the student population, much of which are now being surreptitiously marketed and sold.19 The
corporatization and privatization of education is feeding the progressive subordination of children’s needs to the cash nexus of the commodity
market. We are thus seeing a dramatic return of Thomas Gradgrind’s and Mr. M’Choakumchild’s crass utilitarian philosophy dramatized in
Charles Dickens’s Hard Times: “Facts are alone wanted in life” and “You are never to fancy.”20 Having been reduced to intellectual dungeons,
many of the poorest, most racially segregated schools in the United States are mere pipelines for prisons or the military.21 More than two
million people in the United States are behind bars, a higher rate of incarceration than any other country in the world, constituting a new Jim
Crow. The total population in prison is nearly equal to the number of people in Houston, Texas, the fourth largest U.S. city. African Americans
and Latinos make up 56 percent of those incarcerated, while constituting only about 32 percent of the U.S. population. Nearly 50 percent of
American adults, and a much higher percentage among African Americans and Native Americans, have an immediate family member who has
spent or is currently spending time behind bars. Both black men and Native American men in the United States are nearly three times, Hispanic
men nearly two times, more likely to die of police shootings than white men.22 Racial divides are now widening across the entire planet.
Violence against women and the expropriation of their unpaid labor, as well as the higher level of exploitation of their paid labor, are integral to
the way in which power is organized in capitalist society—and how it seeks to divide rather than unify the population. More than a third of
Women’s bodies, in particular, are objectified, reified, and
women worldwide have experienced physical/sexual violence.
commodified as part of the normal workings of monopoly-capitalist marketing.23 The mass media-propaganda
system, part of the larger corporate matrix, is now merging into a social media-based propaganda system that is more porous and seemingly
anarchic, but more universal and more than ever favoring money and power. Utilizing modern marketing and surveillance techniques, which
now dominate all digital interactions, vested interests are able to tailor their messages, largely unchecked, to individuals and their social
networks, creating concerns about “fake news” on all sides.24 Numerous business entities promising technological manipulation of voters in
countries across the world have now surfaced, auctioning off their services to the highest bidders.25 The elimination of net neutrality in the
United States means further concentration, centralization, and control over the entire Internet by monopolistic service providers. Elections
are increasingly prey to unregulated “dark money” emanating from the coffers of corporations and the
billionaire class. Although presenting itself as the world’s leading democracy, the United States, as Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy stated in
Monopoly Capital in 1966, “is democratic in form and plutocratic in content.”26 In the Trump administration, following a long-established
tradition, 72 percent of those appointed to the cabinet have come from the higher corporate echelons, while others have been drawn from the
military.27 War,
engineered by the United States and other major powers at the apex of the system, has
become perpetual in strategic oil regions such as the Middle East, and threatens to escalate into a global
thermonuclear exchange. During the Obama administration, the United States was engaged in wars/bombings in seven different
countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.28 Torture and assassinations have been reinstituted by Washington as
acceptable instruments of war against those now innumerable individuals, group networks, and whole societies that are branded as terrorist. A
new Cold War and nuclear arms race is in the making between the United States and Russia, while Washington is seeking to place road blocks
to the continued rise of China. The Trump administration has created a new space force as a separate branch of the military in an attempt to
ensure U.S. dominance in the militarization of space. Sounding the alarm on the increasing dangers of a nuclear war and of climate
destabilization, the distinguished Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its doomsday clock in 2018 to two minutes to midnight, the closest since
1953, when it marked the advent of thermonuclear weapons.29 Increasingly severe economic sanctions are being imposed by the United States
on countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua, despite their democratic elections—or because of them. Trade and currency wars are being actively
promoted by core states, while racist barriers against immigration continue to be erected in Europe and the United States as some 60 million
refugees and internally displaced peoples flee devastated environments. Migrant populations worldwide have risen to 250 million, with those
residing in high-income countries constituting more than 14 percent of the populations of those countries, up from less than 10 percent in
2000. Meanwhile, ruling circles and wealthy countries seek to wall off islands of power and privilege from the mass of humanity, who are to be
left to their fate.30 More than three-quarters of a billion people, over 10 percent of the world population, are chronically malnourished.31
Food stress in the United States keeps climbing, leading to the rapid growth of cheap dollar stores selling poor quality and toxic food. Around
forty million Americans, representing one out of eight households, including nearly thirteen million children, are food insecure.32 Subsistence
farmers are being pushed off their lands by agribusiness, private capital, and sovereign wealth funds in a global depeasantization process that
constitutes the greatest movement of people in history.33 Urban overcrowding and poverty across much of the globe is so severe that one can
now reasonably refer to a “planet of slums.”34 Meanwhile, the world housing market is estimated to be worth up to $163 trillion (as compared
to the value of gold mined over all recorded history, estimated at $7.5 trillion).35 The Anthropocene epoch, first ushered in by the Great
Acceleration of the world economy immediately after the Second World War, has generated enormous rifts in planetary boundaries, extending
from climate change to ocean acidification, to the sixth extinction, to disruption of the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, to the loss of
freshwater, to the disappearance of forests, to widespread toxic-chemical and radioactive pollution.36 It is now estimated that 60 percent of
the world’s wildlife vertebrate population (including mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish) have been wiped out since 1970, while the
worldwide abundance of invertebrates has declined by 45 percent in recent decades.37 What climatologist James Hansen calls the “species
exterminations” resulting from accelerating climate change and rapidly shifting climate zones are only compounding this general process of
If present climate-
biodiversity loss. Biologists expect that half of all species will be facing extinction by the end of the century.38
change trends continue, the “global carbon budget” associated with a 2°C increase in average global
temperature will be broken in sixteen years (while a 1.5°C increase in global average temperature—
staying beneath which is the key to long-term stabilization of the climate—will be reached in a decade).
Earth System scientists warn that the world is now perilously close to a Hothouse Earth, in which
catastrophic climate change will be locked in and irreversible .39 The ecological, social, and economic
costs to humanity of continuing to increase carbon emissions by 2.0 percent a year as in recent decades
(rising in 2018 by 2.7 percent—3.4 percent in the United States), and failing to meet the minimal 3.0
percent annual reductions in emissions currently needed to avoid a catastrophic destabilization of the
earth’s energy balance, are simply incalculable.40 Nevertheless, major energy corporations continue to
lie about climate change, promoting and bankrolling climate denialism—while admitting the truth in
their internal documents. These corporations are working to accelerate the extraction and production of
fossil fuels, including the dirtiest, most greenhouse gas-generating varieties, reaping enormous profits in
the process. The melting of the Arctic ice from global warming is seen by capital as a new El Dorado, opening up massive additional oil and
gas reserves to be exploited without regard to the consequences for the earth’s climate. In response to scientific reports on climate change,
Exxon Mobil declared that it intends to extract and sell all of the fossil-fuel reserves at its disposal.41 Energy corporations continue to intervene
in climate negotiations to ensure that any agreements to limit carbon emissions are defanged. Capitalist countries across the board are putting
the accumulation of wealth for a few above combatting climate destabilization, threatening the very future of humanity. Capitalism is best
understood as a competitive class-based mode of production and exchange geared to the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of
workers’ labor power and the private appropriation of surplus value (value generated beyond the costs of the workers’ own reproduction). The
mode of economic accounting intrinsic to capitalism designates as a value-generating good or service anything that passes through the market
and therefore produces income. It follows that the greater part of the social and environmental costs of production outside the market are
excluded in this form of valuation and are treated as mere negative “externalities,” unrelated to the capitalist economy itself—whether in
terms of the shortening and degradation of human life or the destruction of the natural environment. As environmental economist K. William
Kapp stated, “capitalism must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs.”42 We
have now reached a point in the twenty-
first century in which the externalities of this irrational system, such as the costs of war, the depletion of
natural resources, the waste of human lives, and the disruption of the planetary environment, now far
exceed any future economic benefits that capitalism offers to society as a whole. The accumulation of
capital and the amassing of wealth are increasingly occurring at the expense of an irrevocable rift in the
social and environmental conditions governing human life on earth.43 Some would argue that China stands as an
exception to much of the above, characterized as it is by a seemingly unstoppable rate of economic advance (though carrying with it deep social
and ecological contradictions). Yet Chinese development has its roots in the 1949 Chinese Revolution, carried out by the Chinese Communist
Party headed by Mao Zedong, whereby it liberated itself from the imperialist system. This allowed it to develop for decades under a planned
economy largely free of constraints from outside forces, establishing a strong agricultural and industrial economic base. This was followed by a
shift in the post-Maoist reform period to a hybrid system of more limited state planning along with a much greater reliance on market relations
(and a vast expansion of debt and speculation) under conditions—the globalization of the world market—that were particularly fortuitous to its
“catching up.” Through trade wars and other pressures aimed at destabilizing China’s position in the world market, the United States is already
seeking to challenge the bases of China’s growth in world trade. China, therefore, stands not so much for the successes of late capitalism but
rather for its inherent limitations. The current Chinese model, moreover, carries within it many of the destructive tendencies of the system of
capital accumulation. Ultimately, China’s future too depends on a return to the process of revolutionary transition, spurred by its own
population.44 How did these disastrous conditions characterizing capitalism worldwide develop? An understanding of the failure of capitalism,
beginning in the twentieth century, requires a historical examination of the rise of neoliberalism, and how this has only served to increase the
destructiveness of the system. Only then can we address the future of humanity in the twenty-first century.

c. Regulated capitalism fails

Monbiot '19 [George; 4/25/19; columnist for The Guardian, has held visiting fellowships or
professorships at the universities of Oxford (environmental policy), Bristol (philosophy), Keele (politics),
Oxford Brookes (planning), and East London (environmental science); "Dare to declare capitalism dead –
before it takes us all down with it,"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/25/capitalism-economic-system-survival-
earth/]

But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognise two things. First, that it
is the system, rather than any variant of the
system, that drives us inexorably towards disaster . Second, that you do not have to produce a
definitive alternative to say that capitalism is failing . The statement stands in its own right. But
it also demands another, and different, effort to develop a new system.

Capitalism’s failures arise from two of its defining elements. The first is perpetual growth .
Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit .
Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably
to environmental calamity .

Those who defend capitalism argue that, as consumption switches from goods to services,
economic growth can be decoupled from the use of material resources . Last week a paper in the journal
New Political Economy, by Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis, examined this premise. They found that while some relative

decoupling took place in the 20th century (material resource consumption grew, but not as quickly as economic growth),
in the 21st century there has been a recoupling : rising resource consumption has so far
matched or exceeded the rate of economic growth . The absolute decoupling needed to avert
environmental catastrophe (a reduction in material resource use) has never been achieved, and appears
impossible while economic growth continues. Green growth is an illusion .

A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities .
There must always be an extraction zone – from which materials are taken without full
payment – and a disposal zone , where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution .
As the scale of economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything, from the
atmosphere to the deep ocean floor , the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone : we all inhabit the
periphery of the profit-making machine.

This drives us towards cataclysm on such a scale that most people have no means of
imagining it . The threatened collapse of our life-support systems is bigger by far than war ,
famine , pestilence or economic crisis , though it is likely to incorporate all four. Societies can
recover from these apocalyptic events, but not from the loss of soil , an abundant biosphere
and a habitable climate .

The second defining element is the bizarre assumption that a person is entitled to as great a share
of the world’s natural wealth as their money can buy. This seizure of common goods causes
three further dislocations. First, the scramble for exclusive control of non-reproducible assets,

which implies either violence or legislative truncations of other people’s rights. Second, the
immiseration of other people by an economy based on looting across both space and time .
Third, the translation of economic power into political power, as control over essential resources leads to control over the social relations that
surround them.

In the New York Times on Sunday, the Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz sought to distinguish between good capitalism, which he called “wealth
creation”, and bad capitalism, which he called “wealth grabbing” (extracting rent). I understand his distinction. But from
the
environmental point of view, wealth creation is wealth grabbing . Economic growth,
intrinsically linked to the increasing use of material resources, means seizing natural wealth
from both living systems and future generations .

To point to such problems is to invite a barrage of accusations , many of which are based on this
premise: capitalism has rescued hundreds of millions of people from poverty – now you want to
impoverish them again. It is true that capitalism, and the economic growth it drives, has radically

improved the prosperity of vast numbers of people, while simultaneously destroying the
prosperity of many others: those whose land , labour and resources were seized to fuel
growth elsewhere . Much of the wealth of the rich nations was – and is – built on slavery and
colonial expropriation .

Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good . Just as we have
found means of generating useful energy that are better and less damaging than coal, so we need to find means of

generating human wellbeing that are better and less damaging than capitalism .
 DA – NATO Good – Top Level
a. Reject their IR theorization – it’s focus on state interaction
excludes discussions of queer life and fails to accurately explain
the world – that’s 1AC Weber
b. NATO’s unsustainable – frames the rest of the flow
Clark ‘22 – Dave Clark, 2-4-2022, "Stoltenberg To Leave NATO After Battle To Keep US In And Russia
Out," No Publication, https://www.barrons.com/news/stoltenberg-to-leave-nato-after-battle-to-keep-
us-in-and-russia-out-01643980808, accessed 6-20-2022 – OBERTO!

NATO's outgoing leader Jens Stoltenberg will leave the alliance late this year after a diplomatic
battle to hold it together against outside threats and the clashing egos of its national leaders.
From December, the 62-year-old economist will again wrestle with balance sheets in his new role as head of Norway's central bank, after eight
years of high international drama. Stoltenberg's
extended mandate presiding over the alliance has not been
an easy period for NATO since he took over in 2014, and independent observers credit the
former Norwegian prime minister with holding the alliance together. Russia's President Vladimir
Putin has mobilised a huge force to try to force the alliance to drop its open door to eastern and
central European members, which during the Cold War had been held in Moscow's orbit. But -- even as he
kept an eye on external threats from Russia and Afghanistan -- Stoltenberg has also had to tread carefully to keep rival leaders within the
Trump, who resented what he saw as European
Atlantic alliance on board. Former US president Donald

freeloading in an alliance dominated by the big-spending American military, famously declared

NATO "obsolete ". Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dismissed his allies' protests and
bought a Russian air defence system incompatible with Western equipment -- while engaged in
a maritime standoff with NATO ally Greece. And France's Emmanuel Macron, frustrated by
resistance to his push for greater European autonomy and sovereignty, snapped that the alliance
was experiencing strategic "brain death". Before coming to Brussels, when he served as Norway's prime minister,
Stoltenberg was known for having good relations with Putin and Russia's former prime minister Dmitry Medvedev. During his decade in power,
the two countries -- which share a narrow Arctic border -- signed agreements on the their frontier in the Barents Sea and on visa exemptions for
their border populations. An economist by training, the former Labour Party head had never shown any particular fondness for defence or
security matters -- but his experience left him with a strong international network. Before he joined government there was little to suggest he
would lead a military alliance. In Brussels, he is known for his strait-laced appearance and unsmiling didactic style -- but as a long-haired
teenager in the 1970s, he threw stones at the US embassy in Oslo in reaction to the Vietnam War. Born into a political family -- his father was
minister of defence and then of foreign affairs, his mother a deputy minister -- the married father-of-two also devoted the majority of his career
to politics. After entering parliament in 1991, he rose rapidly, becoming minister of energy and then of finance, before being named the
country's youngest prime minister in 2000, the day after his 41st birthday. Stoltenberg won international respect with his measured response to
Norway's worst peace-time massacre. When right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people on July 22, 2011, he called for "more
democracy" and "more humanity". When it came time for him to seek the NATO job, he was backed by centrist heavyweights German
chancellor Angela Merkel and then US president Barack Obama. In Brussels, cynical observers often quip that any NATO secretary general's core
task is to "Keep the Russians out and the Americans in" -- and for a while that was Stoltenberg's main challenge. Trump came to the December
2019 NATO summit in Watford, England, ready to break up the alliance that Washington had led since it was formed in 1949. It was Stoltenberg
who talked him down, experts say. According to Jamie Shea, a former senior NATO official turned think tank expert, Stoltenberg convinced
Trump that his demands for Europe to shoulder more of the financial burden were paying off. "He kept Trump in NATO, which was far from
certain. He was one of the few European leaders that Trump was positive about," Shea told AFP, crediting the Norwegian with moving on from
an "existential situation". Stoltenberg also deftly managed the prickly Erdogan, having decided -- in Shea's words -- it was better to "keep the
family together even if it meant having to deal with an authoritarian". Trump's
departure lifted one threat, but NATO's
next challenge again showed the strains in the trans-Atlantic relationship. Amid the debacle of
the rushed departure of the remaining US and NATO troops from a collapsing Afghanistan last year,
European capitals and Stoltenberg's NATO headquarters found themselves left in the dark by American
decision-making. "It is the Afghan affair that dominates the mandate and it cannot be said to be a
success," Elie Tenenbaum, an analyst at the French Institute of International Relations. But this year's
crisis, with Putin deploying more than 100,000 troops to Russia's Ukraine border, to occupied Crimea
and to Belarus to intimidate Kiev has again given NATO a central role in events. Moscow clearly
wanted to split the allies, disregarding European nations and the European Union to demand
direct talks with Washington. But Stoltenberg's NATO ended up marshalling a tough diplomatic response. NATO members united
behind a stern reply to Putin's demands, dismissing calls to block future membership bids.

c. NATO is bad:
1. NATO’s relationship of protection centers the figure of the
human, creating a normative bond that disregards queerness
– that’s 1AC Stanley
2. Pro-NATO discourse reifies binaries and justifies imperialist
conquest
Kovacevic ‘17 -- adjunct professor in the Departments of Politics and International Studies at the
University of San Francisco (Filip Kovacevic, 4-1-2017, "NATO’s Neocolonial Discourse and its Resisters:
The Case of Montenegro," Taylor & Francis,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08854300.2016.1256583?scroll=top&needAccess=true,
accessed 6-30-2022) -- nikki

Moreover, pro-NATO discourse has been able to appropriate the

Discursive colonisation 2: NATO as civilisation
so-called modernity paradigm for its purposes and present NATO membership as the ultimate
proof of Montenegro’s political and economic ‘development’ and ‘maturity’. This is most visible in the
public statements of Milo Djukanovic´, the long-time Montenegrin authoritarian leader who is currently serving his 7th term as prime minister
("CG na pravilnom kolosjeku", 2016). Since coming to power in 1989 on the wave of the nationalist revolts against the Yugoslav Communist
apparatus, Djukanovic´ has proven to be the ultimate political ’chameleon’ of the Balkans. While in power, he amassed an immense personal
fortune by being involved in a whole series of illegal activities (Kovacevic 2014; Nutall, 2016). It is only his diplomatic immunity as the head of
government that has blocked criminal court proceedings in Italy in which there are allegations of the existence of a secretive organised crime
network under his personal control. However, ever since the heavy involvement in the Balkans by the Clinton Administration in the mid-1990s,
Djukanovic´ has acquired many high-level political friends in Washington. They include US vice-president Joe Biden with whom Djukanovic´
meets and consults regularly ("Readout of VP’s Meeting", 2015). The same goes for the EU leadership, as shown by Djukanovic´’s April 2016
press conference with the president of the EU Council Donald Tusk in Brussels where Tusk referred to him as ‘dear Milo’ ("President Tusk and
PM of Montenegro", 2016).5 No wonder then that Djukanovic has completely identified with the geopolitical agenda of the Western colonialist
elites and their neoliberal economic vision for the Balkans. He has incorporated their most cynical, corrupt schemes in the running of the
Montenegrin economy. At
the special gathering celebrating the 10th anniversary of Montenegro’s
independence referendum on May 21, 2016, Djukanovic stated that in Montenegro, the divisions are
not ‘for NATO or against NATO, but are civilizational and cultural’ ("Zaustaviti podjele", 2016,
emphasis added). This statement encapsulates the most fundamental claim of pro-NATO discourse. It goes something like this:
NATO represents the West, the West represents ‘civilisation’, therefore NATO represents
‘civilisation’. And, by extension, whoever advocates NATO is ‘civilised’ and whoever is critical of
NATO is ‘primitive’ and ‘barbarian’. It is worth noting that, as explained in detail by Larry Wolfe’s seminal study Inventing
Eastern Europe (1994), the representation of the West as ‘civilised’ and the non-West as ‘barbarian’ goes back to the eighteenth century and
the period of the Enlightenment in Europe. It can be traced back to the writings and activities of the leading intellectual and political figures of
the times. These diplomats such the Count de Se´gur, the French ambassador to Russia in the 1780s, and philosophers such as Voltaire and
Rousseau, saw so-called Eastern (generally Slavic) Europe as the West’s ‘inferior’ other half, which they strategically used as the measuring stick
of what they considered their own educational and cultural advancement. These claims had severe geopolitical consequences. Just as, in
his path-breaking 1978 book Orientalism, Edward Said argued was the case in the Middle East with
regard to British and French scholars and politicians, the claims by the intellectuals of the
Enlightenment were used to morally justify the military attack and conquest of Eastern Europe
by the West. Two notable historical periods in which the discourse of Western ‘superiority’ reached the highest pitch were those
preceding Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1814 and Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941. It is ominous that contemporary NATO
discourse uses similar discursive structures directed against the same target. That hardly bodes
well for the future. In fact, Djukanovic´ portrays himself as being in the forefront of the NATO
struggle against the East (meaning Russia). He has repeatedly and directly accused Russia of meddling in the internal
affairs of Montenegro with the aim of stopping NATO integration ("Djukanovic´ optuzˇuje", 2015). The Russian government has denied the
Further evidence that Djukanovic´ is rehashing centuries-old Western prejudices
charges ("Moskva", 2015).
against other cultures and ways of living and thinking is his cynical claim that his opponents base
their claims on ‘ignorance’ ("Zaustaviti podjele", 2016). With a clear intent to demean and humiliate
the opposition, he says that they need to be ‘properly educated’, which will supposedly make
them come to the realisation of just how much they have been mistaken and how great NATO
is in promoting democracy and the rule of law. In the same way as the leading lights of the Enlightenment, Djukanovic´
appropriates for himself and his point of view the bully pulpit of apodictic knowledge and uses it to intimidate everybody else. His
ultimate intention is to destroy any alternative, non-colonialist political and geopolitical vision
for Montenegro by discrediting its epistemological foundations. Djukanovic´’s discourse is a stark example of the
operation of arrogant political power as hegemonic knowledge.
 DA – NATO Good – AT: ! - Russia
a. Becoming Russia DA – their revisionism analysis locks in a fixed
Russian identity and conflates it with action – links to our 1AC
offense
b. Strongman DA – their depiction of Putin as a threat is couched in
understandings of white masculinity as powerful which
precludes queer bodies from seats of power
Wiedlack ‘20, Katharina; FWF Senior Post-Doc Researcher at the Department of English and American
Studies, University of Vienna and researches primarily queer and feminist theory, popular culture,
postsocialist, decolonial and disability studies, “Enemy number one or gay clown? The Russian president,
masculinity and populism in US media”, https://doi.org/10.1080/18902138.2019.1707459, //lenox

Arguments favoring a re-masculinization within the US and as world power , which imagine Putin as
the enemy, might have been expected among conservatives and the right-wing (Diamond, 2016; Gettys,
2017; Sperling, 2015). Yet, it was liberal sources, such as Politico magazine (Kirchick, 2017), which spearheaded the proliferation of
populist discourses. With Donald Trump’s election, the liberal media increased its circulation of photographs and drawings depicting Putin as
manly in order to draw attention to Trump’s alleged ties to the Russian president, and to delegitimize Trump’s power. News, political
magazines, and comedy all exploited the accusations that Russian hackers facilitated Trump’s election along with the alleged financial ties
between Trump and Putin (and other Russian agencies), again drawing attention to the idea that Russia was out to harm the US. Political
comedy especially, but not exclusively, offered satirical renditions of the Trump-Putin ‘collusion’ (Graham, 2019), manipulating photos or
creating cartoon versions of Putin shirtless that exposed or exaggerated his muscular upper body. The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
‘zoomed in’ on a photo of ‘Vladimir Putin Riding a Horse’ on 14 April 2016. The political satire site Daily Squat published a photomontage of
‘Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin enjoy riding bareback together’ (Marrs, 2016). The Simpsons’ episode ‘Homer Votes 2016’ picks up the
hacking allegations during the 2016 election, showing a horse-riding Russian president entering the voting booth in Springfield. Other satirical
half-naked versions of Putin appeared on Colbert’s Late Show on CBS, where cartoon versions of Putin and Trump kissed passionately on 16
November 2016; and Beck Bennett regularly takes off his shirt to impersonate the Russian president in season 42 of NBC’s Saturday Night Live.
The depiction of a shirtless Putin committing morally corrupt or illegal acts, and influencing the US president, suggests that Putin is a threat to
liberal and democratic values. His exaggerated masculinity mocks Putin and underlines the threat of amorality and corruption to a point where
toxic masculinity, amorality and corruption become inseparable. Of course, political satire is not the same as political commentary, and allows
for a multitude of readings, including ironic interpretations. However, the focus on the figure of Putin and its frequency within a range of
diverse media support the idea that he poses a threat to the US, contributing to an increase in anti-Russian sentiments. Today, ‘[m]ore than half
of Americans believe Russia poses a critical threat to the United States’ and ‘a record-high 73 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of
Russia’ (Lardieri, 2019) according to recent polls. Furthermore, ‘[d]emocrats are more likely to view the country’s power as a critical threat to
the U.S. than Republicans – 65 percent compared to 46 percent’ (ibid.). Focusing
on president Putin rather than on the
Russian government, state or nation, and connecting his performance of masculinity to the ascription of
power, US online media and (print) magazines thereby reinforce what Nelson calls ‘ presidentialism’
(2008). The logic of presidentialism shapes citizen’s ideas and feelings about the US president as well as
democratic practices. ‘Unexamined, these trained feelings can pull [citizens] in powerfully anti
democratic directions’ (Nelson, 2008, p. 5). Nelson argues that presidentialism can limit citizens’ agency in moments of
‘legitimate and pressing questions about the democratic ethics of presidential behavior or about the devaluation of citizen power within [the]
government. By keeping [the] democratic hopes oriented toward the salvific and powerful [sitting or future] president’ (ibid.). Arguably, the
media’s allocation of seemingly unrestricted presidential power to Putin confirms the idea that presidents do indeed have such power and that
the sitting US president should have and exercise such power for the benefit of their citizens. The emphasis on Putin’s white, able,
masculine body, his strong will, and assertiveness suggests that a ( powerful ) president needs to
represent this kind of white masculinity . By juxtaposing Putin and Trump, the images do not only suggest ‘collusion’, but they
also present Trump as a weak imposter, and as a puppet of the Russian strongman. Ironically, the idea that Trump is a weak president, because
he allows Putin to influence US politics, is based on the same ideas about potent white presidential masculinity that actually led to Trump’s
election in the first place (Chira, 2017; Katz, 2016). This idea does not simply support any form of presidentialism, but, referring to Nelson
(2008), calls for a president who acts as the male hero. Past presidents have often attempted to create discourses of presidential heroism,
national victimization, and foreign villains themselves. Masculinities studies scholar, Messerschmidt, shows that both President Obama and
President Bush portrayed themselves in their speeches as masculine and powerful men/heroes, capable of protecting the innocent, vulnerable,
and needy from foreign, and often racialized dangers, such as Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein (Messerschmidt, 2016, p. 147).
Although not all of their attempts to fashion themselves as masculine protectors succeeded, they were deeply rooted in and evoked
conservative notions of heterosexual kinship, with the presidents as the patriarchal leaders and women and children as the citizens.
Implementing military actions against terrorism, which involved killing and torture, these presidents further ‘reproduce[d] and reinforce[d]
male dominance/unequal gender relations not only in military forces but also in society’ (Shen, 2017, p. 139). Although Obama continued to
promote notions of hegemonic masculinity in connection with and through military actions, during his presidency the same hegemonic
masculinity became partially challenged and alternative versions of masculinity have become increasingly normalized within the sphere of the
public. Especially the gay white man became increasingly visible and normalized, along with urban phenomena such as metrosexuality that
allow men to explore markets and body treatments that were previously seen as strictly feminine. While
hegemonic masculinity
seemed to have somewhat receded from view within US media only a view years ago, returning the
focus to aggressive masculinities like Putin’s in the New Cold War, encourages US Americans to
reembrace equally aggressive forms of masculinity within otherwise liberal political discourses. Within
the realm of popular entertainment, for example in the form of political comedy, white heterosexual male liberals, such as Alec Baldwin, Beck
Bennet, or Steven Colbert, can now return to center stage at a time when the dominant presence of white males is contested by people of
color, women, and gender non-conforming people. That is, when threatened by a white hyper-masculine enemy, a
(white) masculine heterosexual hero may become reinstated for the good of the nation and without
any real resistance. In particular, the comic versions of Putin make it clear that an explicit compliance to female beauty standards and
male ‘posing’ are still seen as non-normative and grounds for ridicule.

c. Russia’s not a threat – sanctions, casualties, tech

Bergman 5/22- director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
in Washington, D.C.,(Max Bergmann, “Russia’s Coming Great Power Struggle,” CSIS, May 12, 2022,
https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-coming-great-power-struggle)//mcu
On Monday, all eyes were on Red Square for the annual May 9 victory day celebration to see what Vladimir Putin would do. The answer was not
much. Instead of mobilizing the country for total war against Ukraine or declaring some sort of Potemkin victory, Putin stayed the course. This is
not because the current trajectory of Russia’s operation in Ukraine is working as planned. What
has become apparent in the war
in Ukraine, especially since Russia gave up its offensive against Kyiv, is that there is a gap between
Russia’s grandiose geopolitical objectives and its capacity to deliver. In the case of Ukraine, escalating the conflict
might turn the war in Putin’s favor, but mass mobilization would not guarantee success in the battlefield. It could also lead to intense public
backlash, putting his regime at risk. Thus, the two defining obsessions of the Putin era—regime survival and Russia’s geopolitical might—are in
tension. As sanctions take their toll and battlefield losses mount, the gap between Putin’s ambitions and Russia’s capacity is likely to grow. As a
leader obsessed with geopolitics, Putin will inevitably engage in a desperate scramble to maintain Russia’s great power status, but he will find it
The basic problem for Putin is that Western strategy to
incredibly difficult in the weeks, months, and years ahead to do so.
weaken Russia is working better than anyone could have expected. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s comment may
have overstepped when he bluntly said, “We want to see Russia weakened.” But underlying Austin’s comments is a clear sense of confidence
that the strategy is clearly working. The initial thrust of this strategy began on the economic front with sanctions. The original assumption
behind sanctions was not that they would get Putin to end the war. Banks do not stop tanks, after all. But instead, by imposing significant
medium- to long-term costs on Russia, such that in the next 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years, the Russian economy would be severely weakened,
the Kremlin would be forced into a tough juggling act between guns (geopolitical ambition) or butter (domestic tranquility). What has surprised
U.S. policymakers is the speed and intensity through which the U.S. and European public have demanded stronger actions. European outrage
Europe has demonstrated it is willing to
has led to a far stronger sanctions response than imagined possible before the war.
bear substantial economic costs to weaken Russia and is now moving at an incredible pace to decouple
from Russia, now targeting Russian oil. This is having a devastating impact on Russia’s economy. The
Russian Central Bank survey reveals expectations of soaring inflation, economic contraction, and no growth. Furthermore, Russia is facing a
massive brain drain as up to 200,000 Russians may have left the country by the second week of March alone. It has also suffered substantial
damage to its burgeoning tech industry, as it lost access to some overseas markets and may lose up to 170,000 tech workers. The biggest
surprise, however, is the performance of Ukraine on the battlefield, the ineptitude of Russia’s military, and the game-changing efficacy Western
security assistance. Russia’s forces have suffered shocking losses. The Pentagon estimates that Russia has lost around 25
percent of the combat power it had used to invade Ukraine, with the UK defense minister claiming that Russia suffered losses of 15,000 in
personnel and over 2,500 in large equipment. If the war ended tomorrow, Russia would have considerable costs to recapitalize its forces—build
more tanks and Kalibr cruise missile systems, as well as train new personnel—not to mention seek to address the deficiencies exposed in the
war. But the war is not going to end tomorrow, and the long-term costs to Russia will grow. Thus, Russia finds itself in a huge hole. But
to
make matters much worse for the Kremlin, the export controls—one of the most innovative aspects of
the sanctions—is just starting to bite. The export controls are designed to restrict commercial exports to Russia of advanced
technology. This raises major questions for the Kremlin. For instance, how will Russia be able to rebuild its military
when it cannot buy semiconductors to build new Kalibr cruise missiles? When a Western component used to
manufacture Russian tanks breaks, will Russia be able to get another? If not, can it build its own? According to the White House, two major
plants that specialize in manufacturing and repair of tanks—Uralvagonzavod Corporation and the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant—have suspended
their work due to the lack of foreign components. There is no doubt that Russia will aggressively pursue work-arounds. Sanctions evasion will
be a nonstop pursuit, aided by China, as well as other complicit countries. Russia will use “burner banks” that pop up to handle a transaction,
get sanctioned, and go away. It will use shell companies, smugglers, and the criminal underworld to gain access to materials. It will, in short, act
like North Korea. But while this type of smuggling can support a bespoke missile development operation, it is highly uncertain whether this will
suffice to keep the Russian defense industrial sector humming. Nevertheless,
even if Russia finds a way, acquiring items
through the black market and through convoluted means will add substantial costs, further depleting
Russia’s economic coffers. Russia will seek to turn to domestic production, pursuing classic import substitution, hoping domestic production will replace imported goods. This could work in some areas, but items like semiconductors cannot
just be conjured out of thin air, especially when Russia’s knowledge workers have fled in droves. Even if Russia can replace imported parts domestically, this will still add costs and is unlikely to result in the same level of quality of imported goods. Whether export controls succeed in
starving Russia of the technology and machinery necessary to rebuild its military is of immense geopolitical importance. Russia’s defense industrial prowess is key to its foreign policy and undergirds its relationships with countries across the globe. This is especially true for a country like
India. India is dependent on the Russian arms industry and has $8 billion worth of outstanding military orders from Russia, and also needs a continuous supply of spare parts and components. Indian officials said they expect some short-term delays in the “S-400 Triumf missile systems,
Grigorovich-class stealth frigates, and Kalashnikov AK 203-7.62x39mm assault rifles, as well as spares supplies for Kilo-class submarines, MiG-29 fighters, and Kamov Mi-17 military transport helicopters. . . . India today imports over 10,000 types of spares and line replacement units worth
over $500 million annually from Russia.” Will Russia be able to meet its deliveries? If Russia can’t deliver, India will have to scramble, increasingly turning to U.S., European, and Asian partners for alternatives. But beyond India, Russia’s defense industrial troubles could severely impact its
foreign policy with countries around the world. In Southeast Asia, Vietnam is reliant on Russia’s defense industry and could be further alienated by closer Sino-Russian relations. Furthermore, 50 percent of Africa’s defense industrial imports come from Russia. Thus, if sanctions and export
restrictions work as expected, Putin will have to scramble to maintain Russia’s global standing. The most direct way for Putin to assert Russia’s strength and deter the West from taking advantage of a militarily weakened Russia, is nuclear saber rattling. This is already evident in loose talk
from Russian officials, leading to understandable concerns about risks of nuclear escalation. Reviving such concerns in the West could be a boon to a Kremlin, as it might foster prestige-building Cold War-era nuclear talks or help constrain Western belligerence. Russia could also continue
to look to asymmetric means to hit back and impose costs on the West. Cyberattacks, political influence and disinformation campaigns, money laundering and corruption efforts are few of the many tools in its toolbox. However, its effectiveness has eroded somewhat, as Russia has lost
the element of surprise. The United States and Europe have obsessively studied Russia’s active measures campaigns since 2016. Russian disinformation campaigns on the war in Ukraine have had little impact on the West. Instead, it is the United States, with its aggressive disclosures of
intelligence, and Ukraine, with Zelensky filming cell phone videos and posting Ukrainian battlefield successes on social media, that have been winning the information war. Russian political influencing efforts will also prove increasingly difficult. Putin-friendly politicians, from Marine Le Pen
in France to Matteo Salvini in Italy, have sought to create their distance. Russia can still attempt at the margins to impact politics, corrupting politicians or secretly donating or funding political campaigns. But U.S. and European intelligence and law enforcement are focused on this threat.
Additionally, the massive wealth and influence of Russian oligarchs, which has had a corrosive impact on their democratic hosts, has been aggressively uprooted. Russia has thus lost one of its most important soft power tools. The end result is that the West is both on guard and has built
up a degree of resilience. Cyberattacks against the West are another potential option for Putin. There are significant concerns about the vulnerability of critical infrastructure in the United States to Russian cyberattacks. But attacks on critical infrastructure, such as the May 2021 Colonial
Pipeline attack, allegedly by a nominally private Russian actors, also carry greater risks for the Kremlin now. While the Biden administration decided to prioritize summitry with Putin rather than responding in kind, a Russian cyberattack in this environment would likely be treated far
differently, possibly resulting in a U.S. cyber response against Russian infrastructure or expanding direct involvement in Ukraine. A vulnerable Russia, with its hands full in eastern Ukraine, will likely be nervous about provoking an escalatory spiral.
 DA – Hegemony – Top Level
a. Reject it – normative IR is wrong and violent due to exclusive
focus on state behavior – precludes analysis of individuated
modes of living – that’s 1AC Wilcox
b. No link:
1. 1AC doesn’t take a stance on hegemony, just says hegemonic
knowledge is bad
2. 1AC explicitly rejects grand narratives – even if hegemony is
broadly bad, our rhizomatic politics is not opposed to its uses
c. Protect and Serve DA – military power is entrenched in forms of
reproductive futurism that disavow queer life
Wool ‘14 [Zoë H. Wool, 10-09-2014, “Critical military studies, queer theory, and the possibilities of
critique: the case of suicide and family caregiving in the US military,” Critical Military Studies,
:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2014.964600]\\pairie
The family Though the sociality of the US Army breeds all kinds of intimacies (see MacLeish 2013), when “Family” (very often written with a
capital F) is evoked in military programs or official materials, the referent is the domestic unit comprising soldier, spouse, and usually children.
One reason for this is that soldiers are, as a population, more married than civilians of the same age. But this fact is neither mere coincidence
nor evidence of some soldierly essence. It is a fact cultivated through structures of entitlements and benefits that have sought to make the
military a more “family-friendly” place, part of a concerted strategy to recruit and retain soldiers after the end of the draft in 1973. Today, the
military considers the families of soldiers part of its “total force” (Chu, Hall, and Jones 2007), acknowledging that without them, and with the
intensity of multiple deployments that has characterized the last decade and a half, they would be unable to meet their own institutional
readiness needs.
This specific form of family is further honed by the logistics of military life, which can mean
frequent moves with a nuclear family away from broader networks of kin.4 Together with a whole slew
of heteronormative forces,5 the picture of “Army Family” that emerges is multiply reinforced and
decidedly nuclear, with the conjugal couple squarely at the centre. And more than an aspect of demographics, this
picture literally represents Army Family in countless images accompanying websites and promotional material about military life and resources
for families. The military is an institution that amplifies, projects, and is deeply invested in exemplary forms
of normativity – especially those addressed to embodiments of gender.6 No surprise, then, that the normative force
of the conjugal couple at the centre of this picture of the Army Family does not belong to the Army alone. Queer theory has done
much to illuminate how this form – and the logics of personhood, proper and improper intimacy, and
generational time that subtend it – structures public and political life in the contemporary US (Berlant
2000; Berlant and Warner 1998), aligning the good life, or perhaps even life worth living at all, with
heteronormative forms of reproduction and sociality (Edelman 2004; Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and
Posocco 2013). Elizabeth Povinelli has elaborated how the conjugal couple in particular, rather than the group (a competing social form in
active duty army life; Povinelli 2006, 181), is a key form through which proper personhood is seen to emerge in liberal fantasies (Povinelli 2006,
175–236). This remains true in the Army, where the conjugal couple both supports and threatens the other forms of institutional intimacy out
of which soldiers’ socialities are made (MacLeish 2013, Chapter 4), as well as in the afterwar for soldiers and veterans whose lives are forever
marked by war but who are nonetheless supposed to be edging further away from those institutional intimacies of the Army and toward other
sustaining civilian ones (Wool, forthcoming, Chapter 5). There is a long history of concern for soldiers’ sexual lives and hope that, especially
after war, they might settle into normative patterns of husband and fatherhood (Linker 2011). Given the ways that post-war rehabilitation has
always been a gendered project, and the inextricability of gendered personhood and the configuring of sexual intimacies, this should hardly be
surprising. But in the post-9/11 context, this family form has become more vital to fantasies of veteran futures than in American wars of the
past. What seems new in the contemporary moment is the explicit centrality of such hope and concern to rehabilitative projects (broadly
defined; Wool 2014), and, of special interest to the problematic I’m sketching here, the hinging of normative family forms to fears about suicide
through the mechanisms of support and care.

d. US hegemony is unsustainable – overstretching with Russia,

China, Iran, Afghanistan means it can’t meet promises
Brands ’22 – Professor of Global Affairs [Hal; Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger
Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
(SAIS) and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
He is the author or editor of several books regarding foreign policy and grand strategy; 1-18-22; "The
Overstretched Superpower”; https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2022-01-18/overstretched-
superpower; Foreign Affairs; accessed 6-26-2022; AH]

he first year of Joe Biden’s presidency ended as it began, with the United States facing crises on multiple
fronts. In the spring of 2021, there were simultaneous war scares in eastern Europe and the western Pacific, thanks to a Chinese intimidation
campaign against Taiwan and a Russian military buildup on the Ukrainian border. At the start of 2022, the world was no
calmer. China’s menacing maneuvers near Taiwan continued. Russian President Vladimir Putin, having
mobilized an even bigger force near Ukraine, was threatening to start Europe’s largest war in decades.
Meanwhile, Tehran and Washington looked to be headed for a renewed crisis over Iran’s nuclear
program and its drive for regional primacy. Being a global superpower means never having the luxury of concentrating on just
one thing. That is a rude lesson for Biden, who took office hoping to reduce tensions in areas of secondary importance so that the United States
could focus squarely on the problem that matters most: China. It also indicates a larger weakness in Washington’s global posture, one that
Biden now owns but did not create. TheUnited States is an overstretched hegemon, with a defense strategy that
has come out of balance with the foreign policy it supports. Biden’s first year has already shown how hard it is to manage
an unruly world when Washington has more responsibilities—and more enemies—than it has coercive means. Over the longer term, a
superpower that fails to keep its commitments in line with its capabilities may pay an even heavier price.
ASIA FIRST Biden’s initial theory of foreign policy was straightforward: don’t let smaller challenges distract from the big one. Of all the threats
Washington faces, Biden’s interim national security strategy argued, China “is the only competitor” able to “mount a sustained challenge to a
stable and open international system.” That challenge has become greater as China has accelerated its efforts to overturn the balance of power
in Asia. When Biden took office, U.S. military leaders publicly warned that Beijing could invade Taiwan by 2027. Biden was not naive enough to
think that other problems would simply vanish. With trouble brewing on this central front, however, he did seek a measure of calm on others.
Biden avoided another doomed “reset” with Russia, but held an early summit with Putin in a bid to establish a “stable and predictable”
relationship. He also sought to find a path back to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, thereby reducing the growing risk of confrontation in the
Middle East. Finally, Biden ended the U.S. war in Afghanistan, a decision he justified by arguing that it was time to refocus attention and
resources on the Indo-Pacific. Relations with U.S. allies followed the same pattern: the administration dropped U.S. opposition to the Nord
Stream 2 gas pipeline linking Russia and western Europe, wagering that ending a contentious dispute with Germany would make it easier to win
Berlin’s cooperation vis-à-vis Beijing. Biden’s emerging defense strategy has a similar thrust. The Trump administration made a major shift in
U.S. defense planning, arguing that the Pentagon must relentlessly prepare for a conflict against a great-power challenge—particularly from
China—even though that meant accepting greater risk in other regions. Biden’s Pentagon likewise spent 2021 focusing on how to deter or
defeat Chinese aggression, withdrawing scarce assets such as missile defense batteries from the Middle East, and making longer-term
budgetary investments meant to “prioritize China and its military modernization as our pacing challenge.” TROUBLE EVERYWHERE Biden is
undoubtedly right that the Chinese challenge overshadows all others, despite unresolved debates in Washington over exactly when that
challenge will become most severe. His administration has made major moves in the Sino-American competition during its first year—
expanding multilateral military planning and exercises in the western Pacific, focusing bodies such as NATO and the G-7 on Beijing’s
belligerence, and launching the AUKUS partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom. Yet
Biden hasn’t enjoyed anything
resembling a respite on other fronts. The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan precipitated the collapse of
the government there, generating a near-term crisis that consumed Washington’s attention and leaving
longer-term legacies—strategic and humanitarian—that are likely to do the same. Meanwhile, a brutal internal
conflict in Ethiopia destabilized one of Africa’s most important countries. Most problematic of all, U.S. relations with Iran and Russia became
worse, not better. Iran has taken a hard-line stance in negotiations on a revived nuclear deal while steadily decreasing the amount of time it
would need to produce a potential weapon. Tehran’s proxies have also conducted periodic attacks against U.S. personnel and partners in the
Middle East as part of an ongoing effort to force an American withdrawal from the region. Putin, for his part, has authorized or at least
permitted significant cyberattacks against critical infrastructure in the United States. He threatened war against Ukraine in the spring and has
now mobilized forces for what U.S. officials fear could be a major invasion and prolonged occupation of that country. To preserve the peace,
Moscow has demanded an acknowledged Russian sphere of influence and the rollback of NATO’s military presence in eastern Europe. What
exactly Putin has in mind for Ukraine is uncertain, but “stable and predictable” is clearly not how he envisions his relationship with the United
States. Theseare ominous signs for 2022. The U nited States could find itself facing grave security crises in
Europe and the Middle East in addition to persistent and elevated tensions in the Pacific. And these
possibilities hint at a deeper problem in U.S. statecraft, one that has been accumulating for years:
strategic overstretch.
 DA – Realism – Top Level
a. Turn – realism’s focus on state interaction actively excludes
queer theory IR’s transcendent analysis, which is key to accurate
representation of the world – that’s 1AC Weber
b. This is defense – at worst, it just means we don’t understand IR
but that still allows us to solve because our method is one of
embodied identity
c. Realism is wrong:
1. Ignores the Global South
Prajuli, Wendy. “Realism and Developing Countries: Do They Fit Together?” International Relations
BINUS University, 4 Apr. 2013, ir.binus.ac.id/2013/04/04/realism-and-developing-countries-do-they-fit-
together. Accessed 8-17-22 //ONHS IF
There is no single internationally-recognized definition of developing country, and the levels of development may vary widely within so-called
developing countries. In general, developing country is a term generally used to describe nations with a low level of material well being.[3]
Developing countries have limited capability on economy, such as low of economic income, lack of skillful human
resources to exploit natural resources, having problem for sharing economic cake fairly. Then, those problems cause unemployment, poverty
and, of course, low of human development index (HDI).[4] In the other side, there is developed country. The term is used to describe countries
that have a high level of development according to some criteria, such as HDI, income per capita and level of industrialization. Those
economic problems cause developing countries live in guns versus butter dilemma. The
dilemma makes the countries find difficult to increase or to accumulate their power
significantly, for example military power. As a result, they have to live in the lower level of international
system. We can see their position in international system from table 1 that shows most of the fifteen military spenders in the world is
developed countries. The position of developing countries indicates that states in international system
are not equal, but are divided by its power capability. In such system, states are classified into several vertical levels
of power capability.[5] Superpower sits on the top of the system. Then, there are great powers in the second layer. Beneath the great power
are middle powers. Finally, in the lower place of the system, there are small powers. All of developed countries sit on the top and second layer
of the system. In the third layer some developed countries and few developing countries share their position. Then, the most of the developing
countries sit in the lower place. Superpower is the dominant power. Superpower, together with his allies that live in great and middle power
position, controls the system and managing the international system under rules that benefit them and satisfying their national aspirations. In
contrast, small power or developing countries do not play anything on the system. Their very limited power capability limits
them to influence the system. Waltz realizes this condition when he said that only states that have great capability can keep the
world survives.[6] Hence, Waltz’s thought indicates that realism, especially structural realism, never give
attention to developing countries or any state that has small power. This is the first problem of
realism to understand developing countries. Either state is security maximizer or power
maximizer, realism offers balance of power as the solution to secure from the others’ threats. If
state does not have enough capability to increase their power by itself for balancing the others,
realism proposes alliance as the answer. Because of its limited capability, developing countries
cannot increase its power by itself. Then, it needs to ally with others for balancing the others.
Mostly, they ally with developed countries that have a bigger power than them. But, allying
with developed countries does not mean developing countries have solved their security
problem. The gap of capability always makes developed countries forcing developing countries
to obey what they want. Even, this also happens although they do not have an alliance with.
Unfortunately, developing countries are difficult to reject the pressures because of its small
power and its security dependency to developed countries. In the other words, developing
country loses their sovereignty and independency as a state. Paradoxically, they lose their
security when they try reaching security. At the same time, sovereignty and independency are
vital for Realism. This is the second problem of realism to understand developing countries .[7]
Structural realists believe that states are differently by its power capability, but they put that
difference in anarchical international system. In fact, this difference of capability makes
developing countries live in hierarchical international system than anarchy, because of the
developed countries have privilege to rule the international system and forcing developing
countries to obey the rules. In other words, the relations between developed countries and
developing countries international system is determined by super-subordinate relations .[8] This is
the third problem of realism to understand developing countries.

2. Ignores alt causes

Ahmed 12 (Nafeez Mosaddeq, received an M.A. in contemporary war & peace studies and a DPhil in
international relations from the School of Global Studies at Sussex University, where he taught for a
period in the Department of International Relations, also a journalist at The Guardian. “The international
relations of crisis and the crisis of international relations: from the securitisation of scarcity to the
militarisation of society” p. 343-345
https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14781158.2011.601854)NFleming

Unfortunately, orthodox IR approaches are ill-equipped to understand the complexity of these

interconnected global crises and their interdependent impacts on the international system.
Generally, IR scholars have examined global crises as discrete phenomena . Economic and financial crises are
studied within the discipline of International Political Economy, particularly with a view to understanding their
structural causes and trajectories, sometimes including their impact on development, inequality
and poverty. Energy depletion as a global systemic problem is rarely acknowledged in the IR
literature, but when (rarely) acknowledged, it is largely viewed through the lens of energy policy as an arm of ‘national security’. Similarly,
climate change is examined in the context of its strategic implications in exacerbating
vulnerability to violent conflict or scrutinised in the context of the scope for inter-state negotiations and global governance.54
For the most part, IR as a discipline has not fully acknowledged the real-world scale of these crises as
inherently interdependent phenomena requiring an integrated and holistic theoretical appraisal. Many traditional neorealist
scholars, of course, view environmental factors as of either minimal or negligible significance in identifying future security threats and
explaining past, present or potential inter-state conflicts.55 Yet as evidence of climate change has become more disturbing, such perspectives
have been increasingly contested. While some scholars tend to focus on the role of natural resource shortages or abundance in engendering
conditions of anarchy and violence, others investigate the capacity or inability of states to negotiate viable cooperative international regulatory
frameworks to prevent or respond to crises. As such, most
theorists draw either implicitly or explicitly on
neorealist or neoliberal assumptions about state behaviour in the international system,
debilitating their ability to understand these crises precisely in their global systemic context. 2.2
Neorealism: tragedy as self-fulfilling prophecy In one salient example, O’Keefe draws extensively on both offensive and defensive variants of
neorealist theory, including the work of Jack Snyder, Robert Jervis and Kenneth Waltz, to argue for realism’s continuing relevance in
understanding how the ‘biophysical environment plays a significant role in triggering and prolonging the structural conditions that result in
conflict’. She notes that standard realist concepts such as ‘anarchy, security dilemmas, and the prisoner’s dilemma’ can be used to explain the
emergence of environmental or resource-based violent conflicts largely within, and occasionally between, the weaker states of the South.
‘Environmental anarchy’ occurs in weak states which lack ‘active government regulation’ of the internal distribution of natural resources,
leading to a ‘tragedy of the commons’. This generates resource scarcities which lead to ‘security dilemmas’ over ownership of resources, often
settled by resort to violence, perpetuated by ‘the prisoner’s dilemma’. 56 Ultimately, this
theoretical hypothesis on the
causes of environmental or resource-related conflict is incapable of engaging with the deeper
intersecting global structural conditions generating resource scarcities, independently of
insufficient government management of the internal distribution of resources in weak states. It
simplistically applies the Hobbesian assumption that without a centralised ‘ Leviathan’ state
structure, the persistence of anarchy in itself generates conflict over resources . Under the guise of
restoring the significance of the biophysical environment to orthodox IR, this approach in effect actually occludes the
environment as a meaningful causal factor, reducing it to a mere epiphenomenon of the
dynamics of anarchy in the context of state failure. As a consequence, this approach is theoretically
impotent in grasping the systemic acceleration of global ecological, energy and economic crises as a direct consequence of the way in
which the inter-state system itself exploits the biophysical environment. The same criticism in fact applies to opposing theories that resource
abundance is a major cause of violent conflict. Bannon and Collier, for instance, argue that resource abundance and greed, rather than resource
scarcity and political grievances, generated intra-state conflicts financed by the export of commodities in regions like Angola and Sierra Leone
(diamonds) or West Africa (tropical timber). In other regions, abundance rather than shortages of oil, drugs and gold fuelled and financed
violent secessionist movements in the context of widespread corruption and poor governance.57 Ultimately, this departs little from the
theoretical assumptions 55 David G. Victor, ‘What Resource Wars?’, The National Interest 92 (November–December 2007): 49, 52; Stephen M.
Walt, ‘Revolution and War’, World Politics 44 (April 1992): 321–68. For an extensive critique of such positions see Mark J. Lacy, Security and
Climate Change: International Relations and the Limits of Realism (London: Routledge, 2005). 56 Meghan O’Keefe, ‘The Tragedy of Anarchy: A
Realist Appraisal of the Environmental Dimensions of Civil Conflict’, Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 11, no. 4 (Spring 2009): 1–2,
http://www.jmss.org/jmss/index.php/jmss/ article/view/60/70. 57 Ian Bannon and Paul Collier, Natural Resources and Violent Conflict: Options
and Actions (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003), 8–16. 344 N.M. Ahmed Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 08:38 09 May
2016 above, with weak central state governance still blamed for generating anarchic conditions
conducive to conflict over abundant resources. Furthermore, as Kaldor shows, this simplistic perspective overlooks the
wider context of the global political economy – the evolution of regional ‘war economies’ was
often enabled precisely by the devastating impact of neoliberal structural adjustment
programmes, which eroded state structures and generated social crises that radicalised identity
politics.58 Under traditional neorealist logic, a strategic response to global environmental crises
must involve the expansion of state-military capabilities in order to strengthen the centralised
governance structures whose task is to regulate the international distribution of natural
resources, as well as to ensure that a particular state’s own resource requirements are protected. Neorealism understands
inter-state competition, rivalry and warfare as inevitable functions of states’ uncertainty about
their own survival, arising from the anarchic structure of the international system. Gains for one state
are losses for another, and each state’s attempt to maximise its power relative to all other states is simply a reflection of its rational pursuit of

its own security. The

upshot is the normalisation of political violence in the international system ,
including practices such as over-exploitation of energy and the environment, as a ‘rational’
strategy – even though this ultimately amplifies global systemic insecurity . Inability to cooperate internationally
and for mutual benefit is viewed as an inevitable outcome of the simple, axiomatic existence of multiple states. The problem is that

neorealism cannot explain in the first place the complex interdependence and escalation of
global crises. Unable to situate these crises in the context of an international system that is not simply
a set of states, but a transnational global structure based on a specific exploitative relationship with the
biophysical environment, neorealism can only theorise global crises as ‘new issue areas’ appended to already existing security
agendas.59 Yet by the very act of projecting global crises as security threats, neorealism renders itself powerless to
prevent or mitigate them by theorising their root structural causes. In effect, despite its emphasis on the
reasons why states seek security, neorealism’s approach to issues like climate change actually guarantees greater

insecurity by promoting policies which frame these ‘non-traditional’ issues purely as amplifiers
of quite traditional threats. As Susanne Peters argues, the neorealist approach renders the militarisation
of foreign and domestic policy a pragmatic and necessary response to issues such as resource scarcities – yet,
in doing so, it entails the inevitable escalation of ‘resource wars’ in the name of energy security.

Practically, this serves not to increase security for competing state and non-state actors, but to debilitate international
security through the proliferation of violent conflict to access and control diminishing resources
in the context of unpredictable complex emergencies.60 Neorealism thus negates its own theoretical utility and normative value. For if
‘security’ is the fundamental driver of state foreign policies, then why are states chronically
incapable of effectively ameliorating the global systemic amplifiers of ‘insecurity’, despite the
obvious rationale to do so in the name of warding off collective destruction, if not planetary
annihilation?61
 DA – Russia – Top Level
a. Becoming Russia DA – their revisionism analysis locks in a fixed
Russian identity and conflates it with action – links to our 1AC
offense
b. Strongman DA – their depiction of Putin as a threat is couched in
understandings of white masculinity as powerful which
precludes queer bodies from seats of power
Wiedlack ‘20, Katharina; FWF Senior Post-Doc Researcher at the Department of English and American
Studies, University of Vienna and researches primarily queer and feminist theory, popular culture,
postsocialist, decolonial and disability studies, “Enemy number one or gay clown? The Russian president,
masculinity and populism in US media”, https://doi.org/10.1080/18902138.2019.1707459, //lenox

Arguments favoring a re-masculinization within the US and as world power , which imagine Putin as
the enemy, might have been expected among conservatives and the right-wing (Diamond, 2016; Gettys,
2017; Sperling, 2015). Yet, it was liberal sources, such as Politico magazine (Kirchick, 2017), which spearheaded the proliferation of
populist discourses. With Donald Trump’s election, the liberal media increased its circulation of photographs and drawings depicting Putin as
manly in order to draw attention to Trump’s alleged ties to the Russian president, and to delegitimize Trump’s power. News, political
magazines, and comedy all exploited the accusations that Russian hackers facilitated Trump’s election along with the alleged financial ties
between Trump and Putin (and other Russian agencies), again drawing attention to the idea that Russia was out to harm the US. Political
comedy especially, but not exclusively, offered satirical renditions of the Trump-Putin ‘collusion’ (Graham, 2019), manipulating photos or
creating cartoon versions of Putin shirtless that exposed or exaggerated his muscular upper body. The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
‘zoomed in’ on a photo of ‘Vladimir Putin Riding a Horse’ on 14 April 2016. The political satire site Daily Squat published a photomontage of
‘Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin enjoy riding bareback together’ (Marrs, 2016). The Simpsons’ episode ‘Homer Votes 2016’ picks up the
hacking allegations during the 2016 election, showing a horse-riding Russian president entering the voting booth in Springfield. Other satirical
half-naked versions of Putin appeared on Colbert’s Late Show on CBS, where cartoon versions of Putin and Trump kissed passionately on 16
November 2016; and Beck Bennett regularly takes off his shirt to impersonate the Russian president in season 42 of NBC’s Saturday Night Live.
The depiction of a shirtless Putin committing morally corrupt or illegal acts, and influencing the US president, suggests that Putin is a threat to
liberal and democratic values. His exaggerated masculinity mocks Putin and underlines the threat of amorality and corruption to a point where
toxic masculinity, amorality and corruption become inseparable. Of course, political satire is not the same as political commentary, and allows
for a multitude of readings, including ironic interpretations. However, the focus on the figure of Putin and its frequency within a range of
diverse media support the idea that he poses a threat to the US, contributing to an increase in anti-Russian sentiments. Today, ‘[m]ore than half
of Americans believe Russia poses a critical threat to the United States’ and ‘a record-high 73 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of
Russia’ (Lardieri, 2019) according to recent polls. Furthermore, ‘[d]emocrats are more likely to view the country’s power as a critical threat to
the U.S. than Republicans – 65 percent compared to 46 percent’ (ibid.). Focusing
on president Putin rather than on the
Russian government, state or nation, and connecting his performance of masculinity to the ascription of
power, US online media and (print) magazines thereby reinforce what Nelson calls ‘ presidentialism’
(2008). The logic of presidentialism shapes citizen’s ideas and feelings about the US president as well as
democratic practices. ‘Unexamined, these trained feelings can pull [citizens] in powerfully anti
democratic directions’ (Nelson, 2008, p. 5). Nelson argues that presidentialism can limit citizens’ agency in moments of
‘legitimate and pressing questions about the democratic ethics of presidential behavior or about the devaluation of citizen power within [the]
government. By keeping [the] democratic hopes oriented toward the salvific and powerful [sitting or future] president’ (ibid.). Arguably, the
media’s allocation of seemingly unrestricted presidential power to Putin confirms the idea that presidents do indeed have such power and that
the sitting US president should have and exercise such power for the benefit of their citizens. The emphasis on Putin’s white, able,
masculine body, his strong will, and assertiveness suggests that a ( powerful ) president needs to
represent this kind of white masculinity . By juxtaposing Putin and Trump, the images do not only suggest ‘collusion’, but they
also present Trump as a weak imposter, and as a puppet of the Russian strongman. Ironically, the idea that Trump is a weak president, because
he allows Putin to influence US politics, is based on the same ideas about potent white presidential masculinity that actually led to Trump’s
election in the first place (Chira, 2017; Katz, 2016). This idea does not simply support any form of presidentialism, but, referring to Nelson
(2008), calls for a president who acts as the male hero. Past presidents have often attempted to create discourses of presidential heroism,
national victimization, and foreign villains themselves. Masculinities studies scholar, Messerschmidt, shows that both President Obama and
President Bush portrayed themselves in their speeches as masculine and powerful men/heroes, capable of protecting the innocent, vulnerable,
and needy from foreign, and often racialized dangers, such as Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein (Messerschmidt, 2016, p. 147).
Although not all of their attempts to fashion themselves as masculine protectors succeeded, they were deeply rooted in and evoked
conservative notions of heterosexual kinship, with the presidents as the patriarchal leaders and women and children as the citizens.
Implementing military actions against terrorism, which involved killing and torture, these presidents further ‘reproduce[d] and reinforce[d]
male dominance/unequal gender relations not only in military forces but also in society’ (Shen, 2017, p. 139). Although Obama continued to
promote notions of hegemonic masculinity in connection with and through military actions, during his presidency the same hegemonic
masculinity became partially challenged and alternative versions of masculinity have become increasingly normalized within the sphere of the
public. Especially the gay white man became increasingly visible and normalized, along with urban phenomena such as metrosexuality that
allow men to explore markets and body treatments that were previously seen as strictly feminine. While
hegemonic masculinity
seemed to have somewhat receded from view within US media only a view years ago, returning the
focus to aggressive masculinities like Putin’s in the New Cold War, encourages US Americans to
reembrace equally aggressive forms of masculinity within otherwise liberal political discourses. Within
the realm of popular entertainment, for example in the form of political comedy, white heterosexual male liberals, such as Alec Baldwin, Beck
Bennet, or Steven Colbert, can now return to center stage at a time when the dominant presence of white males is contested by people of
color, women, and gender non-conforming people. That is, when threatened by a white hyper-masculine enemy, a
(white) masculine heterosexual hero may become reinstated for the good of the nation and without
any real resistance. In particular, the comic versions of Putin make it clear that an explicit compliance to female beauty standards and
male ‘posing’ are still seen as non-normative and grounds for ridicule.

c. Russia’s not a threat – sanctions, casualties, tech

Bergman 5/22- director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
in Washington, D.C.,(Max Bergmann, “Russia’s Coming Great Power Struggle,” CSIS, May 12, 2022,
https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-coming-great-power-struggle)//mcu
On Monday, all eyes were on Red Square for the annual May 9 victory day celebration to see what Vladimir Putin would do. The answer was not
much. Instead of mobilizing the country for total war against Ukraine or declaring some sort of Potemkin victory, Putin stayed the course. This is
not because the current trajectory of Russia’s operation in Ukraine is working as planned. What
has become apparent in the war
in Ukraine, especially since Russia gave up its offensive against Kyiv, is that there is a gap between
Russia’s grandiose geopolitical objectives and its capacity to deliver. In the case of Ukraine, escalating the conflict
might turn the war in Putin’s favor, but mass mobilization would not guarantee success in the battlefield. It could also lead to intense public
backlash, putting his regime at risk. Thus, the two defining obsessions of the Putin era—regime survival and Russia’s geopolitical might—are in
tension. As sanctions take their toll and battlefield losses mount, the gap between Putin’s ambitions and Russia’s capacity is likely to grow. As a
leader obsessed with geopolitics, Putin will inevitably engage in a desperate scramble to maintain Russia’s great power status, but he will find it
The basic problem for Putin is that Western strategy to
incredibly difficult in the weeks, months, and years ahead to do so.
weaken Russia is working better than anyone could have expected. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s comment may
have overstepped when he bluntly said, “We want to see Russia weakened.” But underlying Austin’s comments is a clear sense of confidence
that the strategy is clearly working. The initial thrust of this strategy began on the economic front with sanctions. The original assumption
behind sanctions was not that they would get Putin to end the war. Banks do not stop tanks, after all. But instead, by imposing significant
medium- to long-term costs on Russia, such that in the next 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years, the Russian economy would be severely weakened,
the Kremlin would be forced into a tough juggling act between guns (geopolitical ambition) or butter (domestic tranquility). What has surprised
U.S. policymakers is the speed and intensity through which the U.S. and European public have demanded stronger actions. European outrage
Europe has demonstrated it is willing to
has led to a far stronger sanctions response than imagined possible before the war.
bear substantial economic costs to weaken Russia and is now moving at an incredible pace to decouple
from Russia, now targeting Russian oil. This is having a devastating impact on Russia’s economy. The
Russian Central Bank survey reveals expectations of soaring inflation, economic contraction, and no growth. Furthermore, Russia is facing a
massive brain drain as up to 200,000 Russians may have left the country by the second week of March alone. It has also suffered substantial
damage to its burgeoning tech industry, as it lost access to some overseas markets and may lose up to 170,000 tech workers. The biggest
surprise, however, is the performance of Ukraine on the battlefield, the ineptitude of Russia’s military, and the game-changing efficacy Western
security assistance. Russia’s forces have suffered shocking losses. The Pentagon estimates that Russia has lost around 25
percent of the combat power it had used to invade Ukraine, with the UK defense minister claiming that Russia suffered losses of 15,000 in
personnel and over 2,500 in large equipment. If the war ended tomorrow, Russia would have considerable costs to recapitalize its forces—build
more tanks and Kalibr cruise missile systems, as well as train new personnel—not to mention seek to address the deficiencies exposed in the
war. But the war is not going to end tomorrow, and the long-term costs to Russia will grow. Thus, Russia finds itself in a huge hole. But
to
make matters much worse for the Kremlin, the export controls—one of the most innovative aspects of
the sanctions—is just starting to bite. The export controls are designed to restrict commercial exports to Russia of advanced
technology. This raises major questions for the Kremlin. For instance, how will Russia be able to rebuild its military
when it cannot buy semiconductors to build new Kalibr cruise missiles? When a Western component used to
manufacture Russian tanks breaks, will Russia be able to get another? If not, can it build its own? According to the White House, two major
plants that specialize in manufacturing and repair of tanks—Uralvagonzavod Corporation and the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant—have suspended
their work due to the lack of foreign components. There is no doubt that Russia will aggressively pursue work-arounds. Sanctions evasion will
be a nonstop pursuit, aided by China, as well as other complicit countries. Russia will use “burner banks” that pop up to handle a transaction,
get sanctioned, and go away. It will use shell companies, smugglers, and the criminal underworld to gain access to materials. It will, in short, act
like North Korea. But while this type of smuggling can support a bespoke missile development operation, it is highly uncertain whether this will
suffice to keep the Russian defense industrial sector humming. Nevertheless,
even if Russia finds a way, acquiring items
through the black market and through convoluted means will add substantial costs, further depleting
Russia’s economic coffers. Russia will seek to turn to domestic production, pursuing classic import substitution, hoping domestic production will replace imported goods. This could work in some areas, but items like semiconductors cannot
just be conjured out of thin air, especially when Russia’s knowledge workers have fled in droves. Even if Russia can replace imported parts domestically, this will still add costs and is unlikely to result in the same level of quality of imported goods. Whether export controls succeed in
starving Russia of the technology and machinery necessary to rebuild its military is of immense geopolitical importance. Russia’s defense industrial prowess is key to its foreign policy and undergirds its relationships with countries across the globe. This is especially true for a country like
India. India is dependent on the Russian arms industry and has $8 billion worth of outstanding military orders from Russia, and also needs a continuous supply of spare parts and components. Indian officials said they expect some short-term delays in the “S-400 Triumf missile systems,
Grigorovich-class stealth frigates, and Kalashnikov AK 203-7.62x39mm assault rifles, as well as spares supplies for Kilo-class submarines, MiG-29 fighters, and Kamov Mi-17 military transport helicopters. . . . India today imports over 10,000 types of spares and line replacement units worth
over $500 million annually from Russia.” Will Russia be able to meet its deliveries? If Russia can’t deliver, India will have to scramble, increasingly turning to U.S., European, and Asian partners for alternatives. But beyond India, Russia’s defense industrial troubles could severely impact its
foreign policy with countries around the world. In Southeast Asia, Vietnam is reliant on Russia’s defense industry and could be further alienated by closer Sino-Russian relations. Furthermore, 50 percent of Africa’s defense industrial imports come from Russia. Thus, if sanctions and export
restrictions work as expected, Putin will have to scramble to maintain Russia’s global standing. The most direct way for Putin to assert Russia’s strength and deter the West from taking advantage of a militarily weakened Russia, is nuclear saber rattling. This is already evident in loose talk
from Russian officials, leading to understandable concerns about risks of nuclear escalation. Reviving such concerns in the West could be a boon to a Kremlin, as it might foster prestige-building Cold War-era nuclear talks or help constrain Western belligerence. Russia could also continue
to look to asymmetric means to hit back and impose costs on the West. Cyberattacks, political influence and disinformation campaigns, money laundering and corruption efforts are few of the many tools in its toolbox. However, its effectiveness has eroded somewhat, as Russia has lost
the element of surprise. The United States and Europe have obsessively studied Russia’s active measures campaigns since 2016. Russian disinformation campaigns on the war in Ukraine have had little impact on the West. Instead, it is the United States, with its aggressive disclosures of
intelligence, and Ukraine, with Zelensky filming cell phone videos and posting Ukrainian battlefield successes on social media, that have been winning the information war. Russian political influencing efforts will also prove increasingly difficult. Putin-friendly politicians, from Marine Le Pen
in France to Matteo Salvini in Italy, have sought to create their distance. Russia can still attempt at the margins to impact politics, corrupting politicians or secretly donating or funding political campaigns. But U.S. and European intelligence and law enforcement are focused on this threat.
Additionally, the massive wealth and influence of Russian oligarchs, which has had a corrosive impact on their democratic hosts, has been aggressively uprooted. Russia has thus lost one of its most important soft power tools. The end result is that the West is both on guard and has built
up a degree of resilience. Cyberattacks against the West are another potential option for Putin. There are significant concerns about the vulnerability of critical infrastructure in the United States to Russian cyberattacks. But attacks on critical infrastructure, such as the May 2021 Colonial
Pipeline attack, allegedly by a nominally private Russian actors, also carry greater risks for the Kremlin now. While the Biden administration decided to prioritize summitry with Putin rather than responding in kind, a Russian cyberattack in this environment would likely be treated far
differently, possibly resulting in a U.S. cyber response against Russian infrastructure or expanding direct involvement in Ukraine. A vulnerable Russia, with its hands full in eastern Ukraine, will likely be nervous about provoking an escalatory spiral.
 CP – Ballot – Top Level
a. Perm do the counterplan – the 1AC describes how ballots are
helpful, but never asks for one
b. Can’t vote for the CP – otherwise it links to their net benefit –
default AFF
c. We solve:
1. Affect – extend Zembylas – neoliberal norms are structured
by affect – our counter-conduct performance creates an
affective rupture which reorients these norms and an
affective dissonance which spreads motivation for
intersectional resistance
2. Ballots – extend Blake – debate norms are structured by
competitive incentives – repeated success with critical
arguments gives them acceptance and appearances
d. Perfection DA – severing minute parts of the AFF holds us to
utopian standards – this creates a static ideal of perfection
which links to our 1AC offense
e. Savior DA – affirming our method without performing or
embodying it zeros solvency but gives [team name] the illusion
of activism so they can wash their hands of complacency while
perpetuating it
 CP – Ballot – Top Level – Blue Valley North
a. Can’t vote for the CP – otherwise it links to their net benefit –
default AFF
b. No link – their argument is about legal punishment – that’s
distinct from losing a debate round
c. This is argument is violent – tells marginalized groups they
should suffer to enlist moderate support which reduces
discrimination to a fetish – reject the team for psychic harm and
deterrence
d. Voting AFF is good:
1. Affect – extend Zembylas – neoliberal norms are structured
by affect – our counter-conduct performance creates an
affective rupture which reorients these norms and an
affective dissonance which spreads motivation for
intersectional resistance
2. Ballots – extend Blake – debate norms are structured by
competitive incentives – repeated success with critical
arguments gives them acceptance and appearances
e. Perfection DA – severing minute parts of the AFF holds us to
utopian standards – this creates a static ideal of perfection
which links to our 1AC offense
f. Savior DA – affirming our method without performing or
embodying it zeros solvency but gives [team name] the illusion
of activism so they can wash their hands of complacency while
perpetuating it
a. Law DA – their reliance on law ignores how it is inherently a
process of normalization – that’s 1AC Stanley
 CP – Ballot – AT: Phillips
Reject the Phillips evidence:
a. It’s descriptive of academia broadly – prefer Blake, it’s specific to
queer resistance in debate
b. It’s 20 years old – prefer Zembylas – it’s also about critical
resistance in the academy but assumes affect and is from 3 years
ago
c. It’s about “taking public speaking out of the streets” – there is
nobody on the street talking about postmodern queer theory –
even if the evidence is true, it’s about material movements, and
we’re a psychic one
 CP – Ban LAWs – Top Level
a. Statephilia DA – the state isn’t inevitable, but sustains itself
through normative protectorate relationships centered around
the figure of the human – means anti-queer violence is
necessary to state action, regardless of content, but our method
can deconstruct state power – that’s 1AC Stanley
b. Becoming State DA – you aren’t slick with the fake TVA – but,
claiming to solve our AFF’s education with banning LAWs
presumes a monolithic anti-drone queer identity – links to the
1AC impacts
c. Can’t solve form – 1AC Zembylas says affective rupture requires
breaking the rules
d. Can’t solve content – form overdetermines it – can’t talk about
queer theory when your read Turkey PIC
 CP – Blake – Top Level
a. Perm do the AFF – we advocate a method of becoming queer –
that’s Ruffolo, not Blake
b. They aren’t responsive to the warrants in Blake – at worst you
can mark these as analytics – debate norms are structured by
competitive incentives – repeated success with critical
arguments gives them acceptance and appearances
c. Distancing DA – rejecting evidence from within the debate
community precludes intercommunal change – only debaters
write about debate – and, they disincentivize debaters doing
academic work by barring it from rounds
d. Perfection DA – severing minute parts of the AFF holds us to
utopian standards – this creates a static ideal of perfection
which links to our 1AC offense
e. Savior DA – affirming our method without performing or
embodying it zeros solvency but gives [team name] the illusion
of activism so they can wash their hands of complacency while
perpetuating it
 CP – Sabotage – Top Level – Maize
a. Statephilia DA – the state isn’t inevitable, but sustains itself
through normative protectorate relationships centered around
the figure of the human – means anti-queer violence is
necessary to state action, regardless of content, but our method
can deconstruct state power – that’s 1AC Stanley
b. Becoming State DA – you aren’t slick with the fake TVA – but,
claiming to solve our AFF’s education with state sabotage
presumes a monolithic anti-state queer identity – links to the
1AC impacts
c. Can’t solve form – 1AC Zembylas says affective rupture requires
breaking the rules
d. Can’t solve content – form overdetermines it – can’t talk about
queer theory when your read Turkey PIC
 CP – Progressive NATO – Top Level
a. Reject it – they use gendered, sexist, and ableist language
describing a “perfect leftist” which links to our offense of
normative subjects – it’s their solvency advocate which means
it’s necessarily intertwined with their advocacy – insert this
rehighlighting
1NC Burmilla ‘19 [Ed Burmila, assistant professor of political science, “Naughty by NATO,” September
2019, The Baffler 47]

Imagine
The “crises” created by the neoliberal flavored military-foreign policy establishment will not always be so easy to answer correctly.
that a hypothetical perfect leftist finds his or her way into the White House. He or she will obviously be
smart enough not to start stupid wars as stunts. But what happens if, for example, Vladimir Putin or his successors seek to
bolster their domestic standing by invading the Baltic States—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—to reclaim them as former parts of the USSR?
What if another country, say China or Russia, uses non-state actors as a proxy to launch a coordinated attack via the internet on critical U.S.
“LOL aren’t you glad I’m not a warmongering neocon!” isn’t going to cut it as a response ,
infrastructure?
despite being a true statement. And the weird idea of a far left-far right coalition—exemplified by Tulsi
Gabbard, the “leftist” candidate every right-winger loves for not-at-all suspicious reasons —arguing that
avoiding conflict with a country like Russia is best achieved by doing whatever Russia wants is, let us just
say, not viable. What is the appropriate response? Right now, it is impossible to say what the position of the American left would be in this situation, because its foreign policy is ambiguous and situational. The gut reaction of anti-interventionism has appeal. So
too does the argument that if the United States should not be overrunning small and relatively defenseless countries, then neither should other military powers. There will be situations, no matter how much they would better be avoided, in which a hypothetical Congress or White House
occupied by a true leftist would need to react to events beyond his or her control. Alternatives to That What would that look like? What, in short, is left foreign policy? Michael Walzer, in his commendable A Foreign Policy for the Left (2018), is among the few people who have seriously
taken on that question in a practical (as opposed to strictly academic) context. He gets right the fundamental formulation: left foreign policy should and must flow naturally from the core values of the left. In modern American politics, “defense” and “foreign policy” are sometimes treated
as interchangeable concepts; that’s bad. A basic first principle for left foreign policy could be a return to the wider, traditional conception of foreign policy as a toolkit. Foreign aid, economic agreements, traditional diplomacy, combatting inequality and violent extremism (including
domestically, of course), and cooperation with international organizations to address truly global issues would all combine to offer more potential than the current bipartisan stance that foreign policy is best reduced to “We will bomb the shit out of you or not. Pick one.” A second core
principle would be a real commitment to the thing American foreign policy has paid condescending lip service to for decades: the promotion of democratic institutions in other countries. This must obviously stop short of direct intervention in the domestic affairs of other nations, and will
only be plausible once the United States deals with its own panoply of problems with voter suppression, felon disenfranchisement, and other anti-democratic practices. A third and more nebulous step must be to define, in accordance with the left’s core values, the “national interest” of
the United States. It is simple enough to say that America must protect “its interests” but much harder to articulate what those interests are beyond “anything Congress and the president feel like it is at a given moment.” If the promotion of economic, gender, LGBTQ+, and racial equality
were made a political priority at home and abroad, the considerable economic power of the United States could be a game-changer. That will require, of course, a ground-up rethinking of unregulated free markets as the basis for all American values and practices. Fortunately the left is
already pretty good at proposing alternatives to that. Finally and perhaps most obviously, the nation must shift decisively away from relying so heavily on military hegemony to advance its interests. Any leftist worth his or her salt can tell you that reducing the bloated, economically
crippling defense spending that is a cornerstone of Washington consensus politics is a first step. To implement such changes will require the same kind of thoroughness and attention to detail that the left has applied to domestic issues like Medicare for All. Exactly what will be cut? Why?
How will whatever function that spending performed (if any) be replaced by a more effective form of foreign policy? Articulating a well-developed foreign policy worldview will be aided by moving beyond today’s limited foreign policy conceptions—to shift the paradigms, to put it in the
most annoying possible terms. Left ideas are usually shoehorned into easy-to-digest categories like “pacifism” or “isolationism.” As the right has proven repeatedly, coming up with better language with which to communicate ideas to voters will be essential. HyperSimplification Look, I
don’t have all of the answers, and to be frank and crass, if I did I would not likely give them away to the world for The Baffler’s going rate for freelance contributions. I am certain, though, that the current state of left foreign policy is a void that needs to be filled with something other than
the Wikileaks Bro politics, perhaps best exemplified by the phenomenon that is Tulsi Gabbard, of apologias for authoritarian nationalist leaders around the world. It is not enough to identify the obvious flaws in liberal foreign policy, with its convoluted hawkishness and rebranded military-
centered consensus worldview, and simply conclude that the polar opposite must be the best course. Criticizing Hillary Clinton’s (or now Joe Biden’s) campaign for its terrible foreign policy stances is the low-hanging fruit. Looking inward and reflecting on the core goals and values of left
politics—rejecting the allure of Tucker Carlson-approved ideas like “Hey, isn’t being friends with Putin a good thing?”—will be the more challenging part. For over a century the United States has been a global Bad Actor, and it is imperative that it interact differently with the world. But
pretending that it alone is a Bad Actor, and the intentions of every other nation will become honorable as the United States renounces its sinful ways, is dumb. Foreign policy is not merely a set of choices; it also requires responding to events other actors initiate. This is where modern left
views come up shortest. Non-interventionism is intellectually appealing not only because it fixes many of the current evils and ills of U.S. foreign policy—Hey, let’s stop starting wars!—but because it reduces everything to one simple answer. There is no need to learn about the Spratly
Islands dispute among China and its neighbors, oppression of the Uyghurs, Donbas, Syria, the multi-sided civil war in Yemen, and other current points of tension. Like the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, confusing foreign conflicts that do not conform to the narrative of one good guy fighting
one bad guy are difficult for our political system to process. The urge to oversimplify or ignore these conflicts, especially when they are distant and not perceived as directly relevant to Americans, is strong. Vestigial organs of the Cold War world order like NATO could, with a better
underlying set of values, be useful tools toward promoting left foreign policy goals. That is not to assert that it will, as America’s role in NATO is only as good as the domestic politics driving it. Collective agreements can be a useful alternative to, for example, multi-trillion-dollar domestic
defense spending. America’s military alliances are not inherently bad; the choices our elected officials make are the problem. Growing its foothold in domestic politics will be easier when the left can advance a coherent foreign policy worldview that communicates what it intends to do
rather than only what it will not do.
 CP – Progressive NATO – WEast HR
a. Reject their IR theorization – it’s focus on state interaction
excludes discussions of queer life and fails to accurately explain
the world – that’s 1AC Weber
b. NATO’s unsustainable – frames the rest of the flow
Clark ‘22 – Dave Clark, 2-4-2022, "Stoltenberg To Leave NATO After Battle To Keep US In And Russia
Out," No Publication, https://www.barrons.com/news/stoltenberg-to-leave-nato-after-battle-to-keep-
us-in-and-russia-out-01643980808, accessed 6-20-2022 – OBERTO!

NATO's outgoing leader Jens Stoltenberg will leave the alliance late this year after a diplomatic
battle to hold it together against outside threats and the clashing egos of its national leaders.
From December, the 62-year-old economist will again wrestle with balance sheets in his new role as head of Norway's central bank, after eight
years of high international drama. Stoltenberg's
extended mandate presiding over the alliance has not been
an easy period for NATO since he took over in 2014, and independent observers credit the
former Norwegian prime minister with holding the alliance together. Russia's President Vladimir
Putin has mobilised a huge force to try to force the alliance to drop its open door to eastern and
central European members, which during the Cold War had been held in Moscow's orbit. But -- even as he
kept an eye on external threats from Russia and Afghanistan -- Stoltenberg has also had to tread carefully to keep rival leaders within the
Trump, who resented what he saw as European
Atlantic alliance on board. Former US president Donald

freeloading in an alliance dominated by the big-spending American military, famously declared

NATO "obsolete ". Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dismissed his allies' protests and
bought a Russian air defence system incompatible with Western equipment -- while engaged in
a maritime standoff with NATO ally Greece. And France's Emmanuel Macron, frustrated by
resistance to his push for greater European autonomy and sovereignty, snapped that the alliance
was experiencing strategic "brain death". Before coming to Brussels, when he served as Norway's prime minister,
Stoltenberg was known for having good relations with Putin and Russia's former prime minister Dmitry Medvedev. During his decade in power,
the two countries -- which share a narrow Arctic border -- signed agreements on the their frontier in the Barents Sea and on visa exemptions for
their border populations. An economist by training, the former Labour Party head had never shown any particular fondness for defence or
security matters -- but his experience left him with a strong international network. Before he joined government there was little to suggest he
would lead a military alliance. In Brussels, he is known for his strait-laced appearance and unsmiling didactic style -- but as a long-haired
teenager in the 1970s, he threw stones at the US embassy in Oslo in reaction to the Vietnam War. Born into a political family -- his father was
minister of defence and then of foreign affairs, his mother a deputy minister -- the married father-of-two also devoted the majority of his career
to politics. After entering parliament in 1991, he rose rapidly, becoming minister of energy and then of finance, before being named the
country's youngest prime minister in 2000, the day after his 41st birthday. Stoltenberg won international respect with his measured response to
Norway's worst peace-time massacre. When right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people on July 22, 2011, he called for "more
democracy" and "more humanity". When it came time for him to seek the NATO job, he was backed by centrist heavyweights German
chancellor Angela Merkel and then US president Barack Obama. In Brussels, cynical observers often quip that any NATO secretary general's core
task is to "Keep the Russians out and the Americans in" -- and for a while that was Stoltenberg's main challenge. Trump came to the December
2019 NATO summit in Watford, England, ready to break up the alliance that Washington had led since it was formed in 1949. It was Stoltenberg
who talked him down, experts say. According to Jamie Shea, a former senior NATO official turned think tank expert, Stoltenberg convinced
Trump that his demands for Europe to shoulder more of the financial burden were paying off. "He kept Trump in NATO, which was far from
certain. He was one of the few European leaders that Trump was positive about," Shea told AFP, crediting the Norwegian with moving on from
an "existential situation". Stoltenberg also deftly managed the prickly Erdogan, having decided -- in Shea's words -- it was better to "keep the
family together even if it meant having to deal with an authoritarian". Trump's
departure lifted one threat, but NATO's
next challenge again showed the strains in the trans-Atlantic relationship. Amid the debacle of
the rushed departure of the remaining US and NATO troops from a collapsing Afghanistan last year,
European capitals and Stoltenberg's NATO headquarters found themselves left in the dark by American
decision-making. "It is the Afghan affair that dominates the mandate and it cannot be said to be a
success," Elie Tenenbaum, an analyst at the French Institute of International Relations. But this year's
crisis, with Putin deploying more than 100,000 troops to Russia's Ukraine border, to occupied Crimea
and to Belarus to intimidate Kiev has again given NATO a central role in events. Moscow clearly
wanted to split the allies, disregarding European nations and the European Union to demand
direct talks with Washington. But Stoltenberg's NATO ended up marshalling a tough diplomatic response. NATO members united
behind a stern reply to Putin's demands, dismissing calls to block future membership bids.

c. NATO is bad:
1. NATO’s relationship of protection centers the figure of the
human, creating a normative bond that disregards queerness
– that’s 1AC Stanley
2. Pro-NATO discourse reifies binaries and justifies imperialist
conquest
Kovacevic ‘17 -- adjunct professor in the Departments of Politics and International Studies at the
University of San Francisco (Filip Kovacevic, 4-1-2017, "NATO’s Neocolonial Discourse and its Resisters:
The Case of Montenegro," Taylor & Francis,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08854300.2016.1256583?scroll=top&needAccess=true,
accessed 6-30-2022) -- nikki

Moreover, pro-NATO discourse has been able to appropriate the

Discursive colonisation 2: NATO as civilisation
so-called modernity paradigm for its purposes and present NATO membership as the ultimate
proof of Montenegro’s political and economic ‘development’ and ‘maturity’. This is most visible in the
public statements of Milo Djukanovic´, the long-time Montenegrin authoritarian leader who is currently serving his 7th term as prime minister
("CG na pravilnom kolosjeku", 2016). Since coming to power in 1989 on the wave of the nationalist revolts against the Yugoslav Communist
apparatus, Djukanovic´ has proven to be the ultimate political ’chameleon’ of the Balkans. While in power, he amassed an immense personal
fortune by being involved in a whole series of illegal activities (Kovacevic 2014; Nutall, 2016). It is only his diplomatic immunity as the head of
government that has blocked criminal court proceedings in Italy in which there are allegations of the existence of a secretive organised crime
network under his personal control. However, ever since the heavy involvement in the Balkans by the Clinton Administration in the mid-1990s,
Djukanovic´ has acquired many high-level political friends in Washington. They include US vice-president Joe Biden with whom Djukanovic´
meets and consults regularly ("Readout of VP’s Meeting", 2015). The same goes for the EU leadership, as shown by Djukanovic´’s April 2016
press conference with the president of the EU Council Donald Tusk in Brussels where Tusk referred to him as ‘dear Milo’ ("President Tusk and
PM of Montenegro", 2016).5 No wonder then that Djukanovic has completely identified with the geopolitical agenda of the Western colonialist
elites and their neoliberal economic vision for the Balkans. He has incorporated their most cynical, corrupt schemes in the running of the
Montenegrin economy. At
the special gathering celebrating the 10th anniversary of Montenegro’s
independence referendum on May 21, 2016, Djukanovic stated that in Montenegro, the divisions are
not ‘for NATO or against NATO, but are civilizational and cultural’ ("Zaustaviti podjele", 2016,
emphasis added). This statement encapsulates the most fundamental claim of pro-NATO discourse. It goes something like this:
NATO represents the West, the West represents ‘civilisation’, therefore NATO represents
‘civilisation’. And, by extension, whoever advocates NATO is ‘civilised’ and whoever is critical of
NATO is ‘primitive’ and ‘barbarian’. It is worth noting that, as explained in detail by Larry Wolfe’s seminal study Inventing
Eastern Europe (1994), the representation of the West as ‘civilised’ and the non-West as ‘barbarian’ goes back to the eighteenth century and
the period of the Enlightenment in Europe. It can be traced back to the writings and activities of the leading intellectual and political figures of
the times. These diplomats such the Count de Se´gur, the French ambassador to Russia in the 1780s, and philosophers such as Voltaire and
Rousseau, saw so-called Eastern (generally Slavic) Europe as the West’s ‘inferior’ other half, which they strategically used as the measuring stick
of what they considered their own educational and cultural advancement. These claims had severe geopolitical consequences. Just as, in
his path-breaking 1978 book Orientalism, Edward Said argued was the case in the Middle East with
regard to British and French scholars and politicians, the claims by the intellectuals of the
Enlightenment were used to morally justify the military attack and conquest of Eastern Europe
by the West. Two notable historical periods in which the discourse of Western ‘superiority’ reached the highest pitch were those
preceding Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1814 and Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941. It is ominous that contemporary NATO
discourse uses similar discursive structures directed against the same target. That hardly bodes
well for the future. In fact, Djukanovic´ portrays himself as being in the forefront of the NATO
struggle against the East (meaning Russia). He has repeatedly and directly accused Russia of meddling in the internal
affairs of Montenegro with the aim of stopping NATO integration ("Djukanovic´ optuzˇuje", 2015). The Russian government has denied the
Further evidence that Djukanovic´ is rehashing centuries-old Western prejudices
charges ("Moskva", 2015).
against other cultures and ways of living and thinking is his cynical claim that his opponents base
their claims on ‘ignorance’ ("Zaustaviti podjele", 2016). With a clear intent to demean and humiliate
the opposition, he says that they need to be ‘properly educated’, which will supposedly make
them come to the realisation of just how much they have been mistaken and how great NATO
is in promoting democracy and the rule of law. In the same way as the leading lights of the Enlightenment, Djukanovic´
appropriates for himself and his point of view the bully pulpit of apodictic knowledge and uses it to intimidate everybody else. His
ultimate intention is to destroy any alternative, non-colonialist political and geopolitical vision
for Montenegro by discrediting its epistemological foundations. Djukanovic´’s discourse is a stark example of the
operation of arrogant political power as hegemonic knowledge.

d. They turns themselves – their evidence says NATO is anti-

imperialist because of their collective defense – their
counterplan liquidates that
e. Equality DA – they cooperate to promote LGBTQ equality –
presumes a static queer goal of equality and expands inherently
anti-queer institutions – it’s violent by form, regardless of
content
 P – ASPEC – Top Level – Maize
a. We meet – 1AC says “we” endorse a method of becoming queer
Merriam Webster No Date (Merriam Wesbter; the dictionary. “we” https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/we No Date) // ELog

we pronoun \ ˈwē  \ plural in construction Definition of we (Entry 1 of 2) 1: I and the rest of a group that includes
me : you and I : you and I and another or others : I and another or others not including you —used as pronoun of the first person
pluralWe live here.We would like to order now.We had a party at school.— compare I, OUR, OURS, US 2: I entry 1 —used by sovereigns —used
by writers to keep an impersonal character

b. Becoming Agent DA – specifying a specific agent of action is

exclusionary and creates a normative action for those included –
links to our 1AC offense – turns praxis
c. Vaguness DA – specifying an agent for an individuated mode of
existence causes personal attacks against them – turns their
fairness claim
1AR Blocks
 Case – Top Level
Topical security discourse creates stable identities – that’s Randell-
Moon – citizens included in the security state must match their
stereotype, causing microfascism – that’s Braidotti – others are
marked as different via comparison, causing necropolitics – that’s
Lawless – our method of becoming queer rejects queerness as a stable
identity in favor of a fluid assemblage which cannot be regulated or
imposed – that’s Ruffolo