1AC

I woke up one Sunday morning, stopped believing in Jesus

Stopped believing in churches, I stopped believing in preachers
I realized I was a teacher, not just one of the heathens
I'm born to destroy the fallacies, start creating believers
Start creating the leaders, tell 'em who they should follow
Nobody but themselves, especially if they hollow
Especially when they're empty, and death reserved for fulfillment
You're the only person alive who holds the key to your healin'

So you take it and you run with it

And keep going even when your sun's hidden
Because the time we spend in darkness when the rain come
Is where we often find the light soon as the pain's done

There ain't material things in the world

That can change the fact that you feel alone
Despite the fact that it gets hard
You take it all and you still go
Take the sun and you still grow
Lose the light and you still glow
I been there, I'm still here and I know how you feel, so
The War on Terror’s “us vs. them” binary weaponizes homonormative subjects against
queered “monstrous” terrorist Others associated with the perverse, the inhuman, and
the non-national in service of U.S. Nationalism.
Puar 7 – Jasbir K. Puar, Rutgers University. [“the sexuality of terrorism,” Terrorist Assemblages:
Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007.] MYLES

There has been a curious and persistent absence of dialogue regarding sexuality in public debates about
counterterrorism, despite its crucial presence in American patriotism, warmongering, and empire
building. Without these discourses of sexuality (and their attendant anxieties)—heterosexuality,
homosexuality, queerness, metrosexuality, alternative and insurgent sexuality—the twin mechanisms of
normalization and banishment that distinguish the terrorist from the patriot would cease to properly
behave. At this historical juncture, the invocation of the terrorist as a queer, nonnational, perversely
racialized other has become part of the normative script of the U.S. war on terror. One need only reflect
upon the eager proliferation of homophobic-racist images (reactivated from the 1991 Gulf War, the
Israel-Palestine conflict, and eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Orientalist histories) of
terrorists since September 11, 2001. Take the case of Osama bin Laden, who was portrayed as
monstrous by association with sexual and bodily perversity (versions of both homosexuality and
hypertrophied heterosexuality, or failed monogamy, that is, an Orientalist version of polygamy, as well
as disability) through images in popular culture (also the case with Saddam/Sodom Hussein). Recall, as
an example, a website where weapons are provided to sodomize Osama bin Laden to death. Or even
spy novelist John le Carré’s pronouncement in The Nation that Osama bin Laden’s manner in his video
was akin to a ‘‘man of narcissistic homoeroticism,’’ which can provide Americans with hope as ‘‘his
barely containable male vanity, his appetite for self-drama and his closet passion for the limelight . . .
will be his downfall, seducing him into a final dramatic act of self-destruction, produced, directed,
scripted and acted to death by Osama bin Laden himself.’’

Sexual deviancy is linked to the process of discerning, othering, and quarantining terrorist bodies, but
these racially and sexually perverse figures also labor in the service of disciplining and normalizing
subjects worthy of rehabilitation away from these bodies, in other words, signaling and enforcing the
mandatory terms of patriotism. In this double deployment, the emasculated terrorist is not merely an
other, but also a barometer of ab/normality involved in disciplinary apparatuses. Leti Volpp suggests,
‘‘September 11 facilitated the consolidation of a new identity category that groups together persons
who appear ‘Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim.’ This consolidation reflects a racialization wherein
members of this group are identified as terrorists, and are dis-identified as citizens.’’ This
disidentification is a process of sexualization as well as of a racialization of religion. But the terrorist
figure is not merely racialized and sexualized; the body must appear improperly racialized (outside the
norms of multiculturalism) and perversely sexualized in order to materialize as the terrorist in the first
place. Thus the terrorist and the person to be domesticated—the patriot— are not distant, oppositional
entities, but ‘‘close cousins.’’

Through this binary-reinforcing ‘‘you’re either with us or against us’’ normativizing apparatus, the war
on terror has rehabilitated some—clearly not all or most—lesbians, gays, and queers to U.S. national
citizenship within a spatial-temporal domain I am invoking as ‘‘homonationalism,’’ short for
‘‘homonormative nationalism.’’ Homonormativity has been theorized by Lisa Duggan as a ‘‘new neo-
liberal sexual politics’’ that hinges upon ‘‘the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a
privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.’’ Building on her critique
of gay subjects embroiled in ‘‘a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative forms but
upholds and sustains them,’’ I am deploying the term homonationalism to mark arrangements of U.S.
sexual exceptionalism explicitly in relation to the nation. Foucault notes that the legitimization of the
modern couple is complicit with, rather than working against, the ‘‘outfitting’’ and proliferation of
compartmental, circulating, and proximity-surveillance sexualities, pursued pleasures and contacts. We
see simultaneously both the fortification of normative heterosexual coupling and the propagation of
sexualities that mimic, parallel, contradict, or resist this normativity. These proliferating sexualities, and
their explicit and implicit relationships to nationalism, complicate the dichotomous implications of
casting the nation as only supportive and productive of heteronormativity and always repressive and
disallowing of homosexuality. I argue that the Orientalist invocation of the terrorist is one discursive
tactic that disaggregates U.S. national gays and queers from racial and sexual others, foregrounding a
collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by national rhetorics
of patriotic inclusion and by gay and queer subjects themselves: homonationalism. For contemporary
forms of U.S. nationalism and patriotism, the production of gay and queer bodies is crucial to the
deployment of nationalism, insofar as these perverse bodies reiterate heterosexuality as the norm but
also because certain domesticated homosexual bodies provide ammunition to reinforce nationalist
projects.

Mapping forms of U.S. homonationalism, vital accomplices to Orientalist terrorist others, instructively
alludes to the ‘‘imaginative geographies’’ of the United States. Derek Gregory, reworking Edward Said’s
original framing, describes these geographies as fabrications, ‘‘combin[ing] ‘something fictionalized’ and
‘something made real’ because they are imaginations given substance.’’ What I take from this definition
is that certain desired truths become lived as truths, as if they were truths, thus producing material
traces and evidences of these truths, despite what counterevidence may exist. In other words, Gregory
argues, imaginative geographies are performative: they produce the effect that they name and describe.
Importantly, imaginative geographies endeavor to reconcile otherwise irreconcilable truths; they are
mechanisms of, in Freudian terms, disavowal. It is through imaginative geographies produced by
homonationalisms, for example, that the contradictions inherent in the idealization of the United States
as a properly multicultural heteronormative but nevertheless gay-friendly, tolerant, and sexually
liberated society can remain in tension. Despite the obvious unevenness of sexual and racial tolerance
across varied U.S. spaces and topographies of identity, it nonetheless exists as a core belief system
about liberal mores defined within and through the boundaries of the United States.

Queerness does not represent a connection to deviant sexualities, nor an identity – it

represents the living death of the collateral subject, defined by permanent war.
Coates 19 – Oliver Coates, Cambridge University. [“Collateral Damage: Warfare, Death, and Queer
Theory in the Global South,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Volume 25, Number 1. Duke
University Press, January 2019.] MYLES

As Maya Mikdashi and Jasbir Puar reveal, queer theory is intimately implicated in this landscape of
"permanent" and asymmetrical warfare. Queer subjects in this context are not simply individuals who
experience same-sex desire but all those who, regardless of sexual identity, are placed in a queer
relation to neoliberal conceptions of death, life, and futurity. It is therefore no accident that Mikdashi
and Puar's subject matter deliberately parts company with queer theorists' favored focus on visible
queer communities, texts, and activism. They deliberately emphasize the ways in which queer theory
forces us to confront stigmatized and marginal forms of life without focusing on sexual identities that
might be either unavailable or unattractive to those in non-Western cultures. We might also think of
what this emerging queer theory tells Western readers about the prisons, homeless shelters, and
working-class communities of their own supposedly "developed" neoliberal societies. Eschewing an easy
focus on what they term "queer theory's general obsession [with] … the sexualized human form" (ibid.:
221), they instead draw our attention to precarious forms of life that exist at the margins of
policymaking, media coverage, and activism in Washington, Paris, and London. They specifically avoid
any easy attempt to universalize Western categories such as sexuality and LGBTQ rights, and instead
show how queer theory can explore the lives of Afghani or Iraqi war veterans; they remain critical of the
"homonationalism" or "queer imperialism" of millennial gay rights discourses, with their attendant
devaluation of queer subjects who persist in forms of religious, linguistic, or cultural identification that
fail to respect neoliberal projects of sexual self-determination. If we accept a long-standing tendency
within queer theory to position the "queer" as being disruptive, antinormative, and subversive to
prevalent discourses of sexuality and biopolitics, then we find much provocative material in Mikdashi
and Puar's article, as well as in Puar's (2007) earlier work on terrorism and the body. What has held
queer theory back from this encounter? Too often, as the authors observe, queer theorists have simply
been unwilling to accept that queer theory could address the experiences of a disabled war veteran in
Kabul or a transgender prostitute in Bagdad. Put bluntly, "white, cisgendered, masculinist and middle-
class queer histories" have tended to constitute the archive of queer theory. Other lives, Puar and
Mikdashi contend, have been judged as somehow unworthy of queer theorists' attention. The Academy,
as much as the military or NGOs, appears to consider such lives as being illegible and "collateral"; at
best, they have been consigned to a different disciplinary framework, most often sexuality or area
studies. Mikdashi and Puar's 2016 article reminds us that this situation is untenable. Both scholars have
made these arguments before, and similar critiques of queer theory have existed for years, but the 2016
article, itself a report on a roundtable on queer theory and area studies, coincides with a gathering
momentum within queer and transgender studies (Mikdashi 2013: 351). It makes a concise, simple, and
compelling case for queer theory to deprovincialize itself and move outside the West (Whab 2016:
707; Smith 2013: 180). This argument has been taken up in other work that has drawn explicitly on
Achille Mbembe's notion of "necropolitics" to theorize the troubling forms of expendable life apparent
throughout the South. Mbembe's term describes the hegemonic deployment of death as a form of
sovereignty or "the subjugation of life to the power of death;" in a nightmare mirror image of Michel
Foucault's argument about the use of life as a form of governance, necropolitics has reshaped our
understanding of queer relationships with death, previously a subject of psychoanalytic theory (Bersani
2009; Mbembe 2003: 11–12, 39). Queer and transgender theories have played a vital role in this project
and transformed our understanding of these collateral populations who face death and preciousness on
a daily basis (Lamble 2013; Snorton and Haritaworn 2013).Partly in the light of Puar's work, Jin
Haritaworn (Haritaworn et al. 2015) has argued for a distinctive "queer necropolitics" that reveals how
forms of life that are deemed worthwhile are sharply divided from those that are consigned to the
garbage heap, as disposable and worthless. In an argument that recalls Judith Butler's theorization of
"precarious life" in post-9/11 America, we might consider the contrast between the wealthy, white gay
and lesbian couples imagined in neoliberal advertising campaigns aimed at the "pink pound," and an
incarcerated transgender subject seeking urgent surgical interventions (Butler 2006). In a 2015
volume, Haritaworn and others (2015) have shown how working-class and marginal queers have
repeatedly been marked by death as a form of social control. Like Puar's studies of maimed and
collateral populations, necropolitics reveals those who are not yet dead, their lives neglected and
subject to the chance drone strike, the possible drive-by shooting, or a malfunctioning batch of fake
black-market pharmaceuticals; in other words, the living dead. Mikdashi and Puar contend that
following the lengthy US war in Afghanistan, the country was left with the world's highest population of
individuals relying on prosthetic body parts, often without adequate aftercare and support. The authors
deliberately use the term crippled to distinguish between those who have received medical care and
identification as disabled, and those simply left to live without any limb; Puar (2017) has recently
advanced her theorization of physical impairment in this context. These are the lives of queer and
collateral subjects; their deaths are as yet unrealized, but they are always already sanctioned. Deprived
of legal protection, one thinks of villagers subjected to drone strikes, collateral subjects can die at any
time. These queer life stories run at odds with core assumptions within Western LGBTQ rights
discourses; they are deprived of the self-realization deemed integral to the emergence of a sexual
subject. Queer forms of living death marked by permanent war clearly preclude the possibility of
middle-class self-discovery. The mobilization of living death, as evinced separately in the work of
Mbembe and Haritaworn, is in itself of considerable interest to queer theorists, who have long been
concerned with the politics of life, reproduction, and futurity (Edelman 2004). To live without the
privilege of a future, or to have children who are not privileged as the bearers of futurity, are conditions
that must develop queer theory's otherwise sophisticated accounts of biopolitics and reproduction.

In response to the resolution and assemblages of homonationalism, the 1AC seeks to

become weapon – to deploy the Gay Bomb and refuse all external military alliances.
Queer approach to military alliances solves
Puar 4 (Preverse proectiles under the specter of (counter) terrorism) http://jasbirkpuar.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/08/JKP-Remaking-.pdf P91-92) MZ

Therefore, a new mission for the American state emerges, one that Bush has christened
America’s “calling”: The United States, with its unique ability to build partnerships and project
power, will lead the fight against terrorist organizations of global reach. By
striking constantly and ensuring that terrorists have no place to hide, we will compress their
scope and reduce the capability of these organizations. By adapting old alliances and creating
new partnerships, we will facilitate regional solutions that further isolate the spread of terrorism.
Concurrently, as the scope of terrorism becomes more localized, unorganized and relegated to
the criminal domain, we will rely upon and assist other states to eradicate terrorism at its root.
The strategy has many prongs, and in that sense actualizes the sliding between the pyramid and
the networks of the terrorists themselves: building international alliances and “partnerships” (and
it is signifi cant here that the United Nations, as a political body, is only mentioned once
throughout the text); projecting a world-dominant American power to the far reaches of the
globe; striking constantly at the nodes of terrorist networks; developing transnational ties that
map out local, radical solutions to terrorism (assassinations, torture, disappearances, extortion);
and strengthening policing functions and processes of criminalization around the world. But
perhaps most crucial is the very grammar involved: the obsessive use of the future tense signals
both a founding anxiety of (and in) this discourse and the drawing of the subject of
counterterrorism to the pleasures of the always as yet unimagined. As if projecting itself into an
always already mastered future, where the risk of terrorism is neutralized before actualization,
the time of counterterrorism discourse is always in a future that is continuous with a fi xed and
romanticized national past. Derrida once said, “The future can only be anticipated in the form of
an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be
proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity.” Counterterrorism is a technology that dreams of
managing and mastering this monstrosity by targeting subjectivities, communities, countries,
and, indeed, time itself. Thus, if “the United States will confront the threat of terrorism for the
foreseeable future,” the counterterrorism imaginary aspires to the total management of this
“foreseeable” political risk. 38 In that sense its immediate precursor and ally is the technology of
insurance. In insurance, the term risk designates neither “an event nor a general kind of event
occurring in reality (the unfortunate kind) but a specifi c mode of treatment of certain events
capable of happening to a group of individuals—or, more exactly, to values or capitals possessed
or represented by a collectivity of individuals: that is to say, a population. Nothing is a risk in
itself; there is no risk in reality. But on the other hand, anything can be a risk; it all depends on
how one analyzes the danger, considers the event.”39 In the counterterrorism imaginary, risk
names a procedure of assessment, counterintelligence, containment, and projection into the
future. Its analysis is predicated on the fi xity of implacably opposed political forces whose only
resolution resides in the murderous destiny of the United States to manage democracy for the
world (it is our “calling,” as President Bush says). Moreover, the sliding between structure and
network returns here in the form of a sort of insurance value. The sliding between the securely fi
xed and the terrifyingly unmoored that names the essential dynamic of counterterrorism
technologies generates specifi c kinds of selflegitimating exchange values that have innumerable
trajectories and their own surplus: cultural (counterterrorism revalues Western civilization),
political (it gives the security state the aura of a need), economic (the economics of fear drives
the billions of dollars spent on everything from spy planes to home security systems), and
affective (fear itself has been given a new value after 9/11).

The Gay Bomb rewires the fear conjured by the figure of the queer terrorist – we hack
our monstrosity as a weaponization of life itself against homonationalism and control
societies.
Blas 8 – Zach Blas, University of London. [“Understanding Queer Technological Strategy,” Gay Bombs
User’s Manual. UCLA, 2008.] MYLES

While the Admiral Duncan marks an interlude to the point of birth of the Gay Bomb, the de-faced USS
Enterprise GBU-31 JDAM that hit Afghanistan in October 2001 inaugurates its existence within the
world. Before deployment, a US Navy Sailor tagged the bomb with “High Jack This Fag [queer].”21 Again,
the military understands positioning the dreaded and feared non-Western terrorist as “fag” [“queers”]
as victory guaranteed. Fags [queers] like to be penetrated, so here’s the ultimate in penetrating
pleasure. The determination of the bomb equated with militaristic homophobia results in a
multiplicitous mass destruction: the murdered Afghans and the desired-to-be-murdered fags [queers].
When the gay bomb becomes an unquestioned struggle over life and death, it becomes a weapon of
biopower—an explosion of sovereignty.22 The moment a bomb is inscribed with intentions of the mass
destruction of “fags [queers],” a counter-bomb produces itself within the queer imaginary. This
counterbomb—the Gay Bomb—is biopolitical in that it uses bodies and life as weapons. Gay Bombs,
consisting of a queer multitude, are living. The defacement of the Gay Bomb reads, “Hi Jack This
Queers.” Gay Bombs intercept power—at the risk of life and death—to re-wire control structures for
queer use. HARDWARE SETUP AND CONFIGURATION While Gay Bombs will always consist of bodies and
life, they also expand into a materialism of everything. That is, the Gay Bomb materializes through queer
bodies but can take any form necessary. The production of its hardware and configuration can only be
specified in general: Gay Bombs take shape only in their deployment. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has
articulated that queerness must always be in relation / tension with the normal. Queerness in a vacuum
or queerness as impermeable form does not exist. Therefore, Gay Bombs materialize only in relation to
something (their target). This is how Gay Bombs become queer bombs. If configuration is always based
on target, wiring becomes the topology—the political map, the logic of the bomb’s integrated circuit.
Wiring in relation to target simultaneously builds and deploys Gay Bombs. The political act is executed
by the logic of its map, and theSoftQueerBody23 crystallizes in hardware at a specific point in time and
space. INSTALLING Friedrich Kittler has stated that fiber optic networks are immunized against the
bomb. Thus, “optical fibers can transmit any imaginable message but the one that counts—the one
about the bomb.”24 The Gay Bomb’s materialism of everything is bound by nothing other than
materiality itself. Gay Bombs move easily through boundaries, and like AIDS, there is no immunization
against infection. They flow elated and unchecked through the very fiber optic networks they plan to
attack. These networks willingly transmit its message and bring about their own collapse. A form a
terrorist drag, Gay Bombs are like the female Algerian resistance fighters in The Battle of Algiers: the
material instantiations of their bodies conceal the bombs they possess—indeed, their bodies become
part of the bomb itself; this mutated materiality of the bomb allows for free flow through traffic in
highly surveilled regions. Installation of a Gay Bomb is always a welcomed trespass. DEPLOYING Gay
Bombs do not create new channels of transmission; they use those already in existence. Galloway and
Thacker write that “counterprotocol practices can capitalize on the homogeneity found in networks to
resonate far and wide with little effort.”25 If Gay Bombs are a form of counterprotocol—that is,
interventions within standards of technological control, their successful deployment resides in the
fullest exploit possible of the networks they travel through for detonation. In networks of capital, the
common logic of production and consumption offers deployment strategies. Gay Bombs as commercial
consumables exploit the standardization of product to explode the whole world market. In militaristic
networks, strategies of conquest, destruction, and defense produce anticipated paranoid fear and
expected death through the violence of the weapon. Gay Bombs deploy as warheads to intercept state-
sponsored terror so that queers may actually become the terrorist. Gay Bombs as weapons of mass
destruction: this bomb makes queers fuck jubilantly, re-wiring the military’s No (Queer) Future promise
to the “No Future!” of queer jouissance. Deployments of Gay Bombs are living erratic viruses. As
deployment constructs life, the circulation of Gay Bombs mutates and multiplies as it spreads
throughout networks of the world. Gay Bombs are always already alive in every network—always
already deployed, always already dormant. When deployment is activated, a crystallization forms as the
materialization of Queer Technologies’ discourse: an assemblage—a bomb—with a long detonation wire
that, when lit, burns from interiority to interiority. Deployment exposes the living Gay Bombs thriving in
all network formations. Deployment is permutated ontology.

The Gay Bomb inaugurates posthuman methods of becoming – constituting an

interstice between rigid definitions of sexuality and gender – this form of mutual
mutation and dynamic difference engenders a deregulatory move of hacking
assemblages of sovereignty, discipline, and control.
Blas 8 – Zach Blas, University of London. [“Preferences and Presets,” Gay Bombs User’s Manual. UCLA,
2008.] MYLES

DEREGULATIONS Deregulations are queer imaginaries—desires that have become charged by a life that
is always plugged in and yet always disconnected. Deregulations are inherent to technology; it is a
question of how to gain access—through conceptual flaw, production error, hacking, disidentifying. As
the queer user engages with deregulations, a mutation between the two produces queer technological
agency. If deregulations can be discovered or configured, the first question of interrogation asks what is
already queer about technology. Followed by: how locatable is this queerness? Do deregulations always
call for the knowledge of the technologist? If there is never a stable entry point into a deregulation, can
any strategy consistently gain access? The impossibility of these questions solders deregulations with
knowledge production. Knowledge paradigms shift technological structures. Thus, active engagement
with contemporary generations of knowledge provides robust possibilities of locating deregulations. A
neo-luddite position is not a viable possibility for political agency in our technological times.
Disidentifying with technology is queer knowledge production. Deregulations are a discursive and
material instantiation of this process. Deregulations do not destroy technological progress but instead
use / hack / exploit for queer survival. Creating, Editing, and Deleting Presets Gay Bombs explode from
deregulations, and Gay Bombs explode into deregulations. How do technological deregulations
restructure knowledge production (re-form / de-form the queer user and technology-in-use)? Mutual
Mutation To re-state Judith Halberstam’s concept, “mutual mutation” is the constant process that
unites space, flesh, and technology in a “technotopic vision.”30 As mutual mutation deregulates (a Gay
Bomb explodes), material forms collapse in space and time, self-shattering the boundaries that
constitute their existence in the world. Necessarily, mutual mutation works against notions of human-
centered construction: the determination of life fluctuates between not only how we build and use our
technologies but how our technologies build and use us. Mutual mutation changes life on all levels,
reinforcing the Gay Bomb as biopolitical. Posthuman Ways of Being Posthuman formations debunk
simulated nostalgias of human purity. Today, assuming a humanist stance actually subtracts agency.
Existence as posthuman is cybernetics: the position of co-evolving feedback loops. The posthuman has
always been shaped / defined by the shifting perceptions enacted by human and technological mutual
mutations. Embodying the posthuman exposes a new material—beyond skin—that holds a body
together. This encasement of non-stasis is always porous, anticipating the human’s constant genesis as
nonhuman, beyond human. Flows of deregulation pour through the holes / spaces of differentiation of
the posthuman body. The posthuman is always an embodied form of knowledge production,
deregulating the body to become / un-become in forms that push past regulations. These forms are
always tactics of impurity that the pure, humanist body can never access. The Terrorist The terrorist
defines itself by mutating with organizations and methodologies. The formation of the terrorist always
exists in relation to its target(s); therefore, the terrorist can never exist in-and-of-itself and only
materializes through specified political action. Unlike the British Redcoats of the American Revolutionary
War, the identities of the terrorist are never a priori and take shape only at moments of explosion. This
fluidity of change and flexibility makes the terrorist always more dynamic than the network under
attack. Yet, beyond constituting identity, the terrorist teaches methodologies of deregulation. Terror is
re-imagined at the utmost extreme to hi-jack meaning, that is, the terrorist will go to extremes in order
to succeed in the act of hi-jacking: mass panic, mass death, the death of the terrorist. The death of the
terrorist is an ultimate play in the struggle for biopolitical stronghold—the willful relinquishing of life for
the re-assignment of meaning. The hi-jack will always initiate deregulations at the apex of extremity. The
hi-jack steals meaning with the force of an atomic bomb blast. This force can produce an avalanche of
deregulations, for terror and fear perfectly strikes the target of societal capitulation. Systems of
Dynamic Difference De)regulations manifest dynamically in the technological object as quasi-object.
Within a system of formalism, historicity, functionality, consumption, and semiotics, technological
(de)regulations locate themselves in any given layer(s) of this system. As a system of dynamics
predicated on regulation, technology can be deregulated by a tactics of locationality: what layer is / can
be coded (disidentifed) as queer? This queer locatability de-stabilizes an ideology of dynamics,
producing the technological quasi-object as system of dynamic difference. If systems of dynamic
regulations are built upon the consumption of user-friendliness, the abject must always be absent. The
title of Leo Bersani’s article “Is the Rectum a Grave?” provides fertile ground for developing user-
friendliness as an abjection that generates systems of dynamic difference. In the system of dynamic
regulation, enter through the undesired hole of unproduction. The hole that contradicts consumption.
The hole that users avoid at all costs. A hole of exploitation—hidden but always there—appears as
negation. Inside this hole, visuality reveals the negation—a graveyard; yet, layers beyond visuality
expose methods of counter-production. The rectum of systems of dynamic regulation is the erogenous
zone for systems of dynamic difference. Holes of Non-Teleology In Empire, Hardt and Negri write,
“Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds
and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves.” This process of redefinement—
embodiment, unavoidably political, offers the possibilities of new systems of dynamic difference. One
such cybernetic system, video feedback, generates a hole of deregulation. The hole of video feedback is
a hole of non-teleology. Comparatively, David Halperin has described anal fisting as an act of sexual non-
teleology. The stakes of aligning these holes of non-teleology produces a positioning against body and
technology as regulated / regulator. Feedback, more generally, has always been associated with self-
regulating processes, such as genes, machines, ecosystems, and a myriad of technological and biological
systems. In fact, devices with corrective feedback were considered “teleological mechanisms,” such as a
steam engine with a feedback valve for speed control. 31 Norbert Wiener, in his cybernetics theory, also
understood feedback in terms of control. We learn from science studies that our biological make-up is
comprised of feedback processes, causing our bodies to follow internalized rules of self-regulation.
Video feedback is a historical break from this understanding of the feedback process as one of
teleological control, just as the queer body makes cultural and physical breaks from this definition of
feedback. Like Halperin has claimed, if “fist-fucking” is the only sex act invented in the 20th century, 32
it is the newest sexual system of dynamic deregulation. Interstice In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze
describes the interstice as the space between two spliced strips of film. As a space that does not belong
to either piece of film, the interstice becomes a “differentiation of potential” that engenders something
new.33 Deleuze writes: “Sometimes, as in modern cinema, the cut has become the interstice, it is
irrational and does not form part of either set, one of which has no more an end than the other has a
beginning: false continuity is such an irrational cut. [. . . and this cut is] disjunctive.”34 The queer body
articulates a space similar to Deleuze’s formation of the interstice: just as the interstice exists in
disjunction to what precedes and follows it, the queer body must be articulated outside of normative
configurations of male and female binaries. A physical manifestation of the interstice created by the
queer body can be located at the moment when measurement that distinguishes a penis from a clitoris
becomes blurred, when breasts take the place of a chest on a “male” body (as the British government
forced Turing to develop), when facial hair overcomes the fuzz on a “female” face. The interstice
becomes a manifestation—discursively, culturally, and physically—of a politics for the queer body.
Cyberfeminists such as VNS Matrix transform the phallic temple of technology into an all-powerful
interstitial clitoris when they write in their manifesto, “saboteurs of big daddy mainframe / the clitoris is
a direct line to the matrix.” 35 It is as if VNS Matrix stretch their collective clitoris out like a penis—like a
networking cable—to connect with the Internet, mutating the form of the clitoris but not its
functionality as a clitoris. We must build upon the interstice as a discursive and physical space for queer
dynamic difference. Building Mutation Engines The Gay Bomb’s materialism of everything constitutes
itself through mutual mutation and dynamic difference. Gestating through these various cycles of
deregulated construction, the Gay Bomb behaves as engine: within a system of bomb, target, and
biopolitical struggle, an engine emerges that dynamically generates deregulations. The mutation engine
is a constant process that affords deregulations nonstablility. Deregulations as becoming. Deregulations
as un-becoming. Think of the mutation engine as a power leveler, automatically situating deregulations
to nodes of exploit within a network of constantly shifting power structures. Building mutation engines
for queer technical agency exposes its necessity in vying for political power. Exploding out of the ecstasy
of deregulations, queer mutation engines fuel the formation of a political network of bodies,
technology, and cultural codes. A network defined by soft(ware) bodies that constructs queerness as
dynamic digital technology of mutated difference.

The explosion of the Gay Bomb generates a social flesh of theSoftQueerBody – daring
to infect and exploit oneself not only combats the hegemony of liberal self-hood, but
contributes to an architecture of technotopia – a queer world hidden and constructed
by hi-jacked grids of capital and technologies of sovereignty.
Blas 8 – Zach Blas, University of London. [“Creating and Organizing,” Gay Bombs User’s Manual. UCLA,
2008.] MYLES

THESOFTQUEERBODY If queerness potentially capitulates to (de)regulatory digital control structures to

become a politically ambiguous assemblage, theSoftQueerBody is a political / politicized concept for
queer technical agency and being. theSoftQueerBody operates as a software application, running
queerness as a dynamic digital technology. The application defines queerness and all other networked
constructions of human existence as technologies in flux / struggle with one another. theSoftQueerBody
processes queer technological assemblages as an abstraction, a multitude in common. Like the Gay
Bomb, theSoftQueerBody is constructed by a materialism of everything: it is queer bodies, Queer
Technologies, queer cultures, queer spaces, queer places, Gay Bombs, mutation engines, systems of
dynamic difference, queer capital. In fact, theSoftQueerBody parses all these types equally. The “new”
body of technological queers is beyond flesh, where nervous systems become network connections,
DNA as code, subjectivity as logic. As Hardt and Negri write, the multitude is composed as a singularity
of difference that constitutes itself as a “monstrosity of the flesh.”36 Further, this “flesh of the
multitude is pure potential, an unformed life force, and in this an element of social being, aimed
constantly at the fullness of life. . . . The unformed and the unordered are horrifying. The monstrosity of
the flesh is not a return to the state of nature but a result of society, an artificial life. . . . Every reference
to life today . . . has to point to an artificial life, a social life.”37 theSoftQueerBody is this skin of pure
potential that mutates a consistency of queer technological action and being. MOBILIZATION OF
COMBAT If we are in what Deleuze has described as control societies, “bodies are consonant with more
distributed modes of individuation that enables their infinite variation.” 38 Gay Bombs travel, like blood
cells, through theSoftQueerBody. A flexible body, composed in common, by a queer materialism of
everything. The logic of the theSoftQueerBody, coded by potentials of the perpetual present, directs,
routes, mobilizes, and deploys Gay Bombs. Gay Bombs become the vital organs of theSoftQueerBody,
constantly regenerated, stolen, and sutured by the fluctuating clashes of biopower and biopolitics. A
stable body is a dead body. Like Galloway and Thacker claim, not resistance but hypertrophy—the
growth and enlargement of new organs to redirect and reconstitute a body. In any mobilization of
combat, the task becomes to explode organs and accumulate Gay Bombs in their absence.
theSoftQueerBody must mobilize a new flesh to gain biopolitical power. This mobilization produces the
potential of queer technical sociality. A TOPOLOGICAL ARCHITECTURE To illustrate the construction of
theSoftQueerBody’s materialism of everything, we turn back to Muñoz and his concept of identities-in-
difference. He writes, “identities-in-difference emerge from a failed interpellation within the dominant
public sphere . . . [contributing] to the function of a counterpublic sphere.”39 Importantly, identities-in-
difference are always in the process of constituting themselves. As the dominant public sphere
continuously shifts power structures, identities-in-difference recombine and rearticulate identifications,
counteridentifications, disidentifications. Identities-in-difference build themselves in direct correlation
to current political flows. Neither opting for assimilation or opposition to a given structure, identities-in-
difference can be said to mutually mutate with all dominant spheres of power. theSoftQueerBody’s
topological architecture is composed of identities-in-difference. Multitude As a networked assemblage,
theSoftQueerBody breaks down boundaries between the individual and the collective, human and
machine, object and subject. Boundaries of a single body or consciousness are not longer demarcated.
Rather, identities-in-difference produce a larger living social flesh out of a materialism of everything.
This living social flesh configures itself to live and thrive in relation / tension with global flows of power.
As Hardt and Negri suggest, it takes networks to fight networks. Therefore, in times of networked global
capital and warfare, their concept of the multitude is a powerful formulation against dominant spheres.
Building a queer multitude allows the circulation and success of Gay Bombs. Building such a queer living
flesh reveals an architecture beyond the body. Swarms Swarms suggest insects. According to Eugene
Thacker, “social insects.”40 A queer swarm shall return to the insect and not be plagued by existing as
such, like Kafka. The multitude as swarm operates under a logic of negotiation that appears as chaotic. A
collaborative, collective chaos that only the swarm understands as logic. Distributed nonlogic as logic.
The queer swarm performs under no clear leadership, enacting dynamic disidentifications that flow the
swarm through space and time. The swarm’s radical reorganization of a collective body emphasizes a
chaos of collective negotiation. theSoftQueerBody must always perform a collective negotiation to
swarm networks of dominant power. This act will always require the shifting of the body—to insect and
beyond. Viruses theSoftQueerBody relies on replication and distribution. By becoming viral,
theSoftQueerBody exponentially corrupts power. Historically, within grids of viral capitalism, the queer
body has been interpolated as grid of contagion. Beginning with GRID (Gay-Related Immuno-
Defciency)—the name before HIV—the queer body was already sliced apart by networked
infrastructures of dominant power (medicine, education, public policy). The queer body internalized a
grid of death, networked to other grids of death (dying, infected bodies). The logic of the biological
queer’s grid was a logic of destruction. In his book on computer viruses, Jussi Parikka points out that
“HIV infects cultural categories,” which leads him to explain how “biological viruses spread to digital
bodies of electricity and silicon.”41 The historically biological infected queer carries the weight of this
infection into the cultural abstraction of theSoftQueerBody. In Empire, Hardt and Negri explain that
“Empire’s institutional structure is like a software program that carries a virus along with it, so that it is
continually modulating and corrupting the institutional forms around it.”42 theSoftQueerBody as
software program must modulate and corrupt even more erratically to infect and contaminate the
virus(es) of Empire. When Galloway and Thacker write that “viruses are life exploiting life,”43 the
biopolitical stakes of viral existence become stunningly clear: viruses “exploit the normal functioning of
their host systems to produce more copies of themselves.”44 This exploitation of the self—while could
be considered a care of the self could also be a depletion of the self, but importantly, this exploitation of
the self is at the expense of manufacturing difference, “recalculating as a way of never-being-thesame.”
45 theSoftQueerBody, queer multitude, must always exploit the selves of its nodes to produce a
replicated difference of never-being-the-same. Within a craze of computer hygiene, theSoftQueerBody
must align with Alan Liu’s notion of “destructive creativity”—a creativity that goes “beyond the new
picturesque of mutation and mixing to the ultimate form of such mutation and mixing: what may be
called the new sublime of ‘destruction.’ [. . .] the critical inverse of the mainstream ideology of creative
destruction [. . . a] viral aesthetics.”46 This aesthetics becomes like a repetitive stream of
disidentifcations—disidentifying as queer cryptography, repetitively blowing up the infections of
mainstream ideology (a “cool” virus) at the risk of obliterating one’s own “hygiene.” 56
theSoftQueerBody is always an aesthetic, always rooted in queer affect, always personal politics, always
biopolitical. It must infect its own historical infections for technological agency. If viral repetitions have
been defined as “illegible and incalculable,”47 Gay Bombs must explode into queer affect—nonhygienic
ways of being and living—that chart for the theSoftQueerBody the possibilities of queer world-making.
The Pack In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari write “that animals are packs, and that packs form,
develop, and are transformed by contagion.”48 Viruses are living. The social flesh of theSoftQueerBody
is always a pack of animals. Continuing, Deleuze and Guattari suggest “a becoming-animal always
involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity . . . [but a becoming-animal only
occurs with] a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity.”49 The desire of the theSoftQueerBody is always
predicated by a multiplicitous contagion. The pack permits the swarm, the network, the virus, the
multitude that the individual is incapable of constituting. theSoftQueerBody, as a pack, protects (yet
simultaneously collapses) the body of the individual. There is safety in numbers. The pack is a survival
strategy. It is the call of the pack that unites Travis and his colleagues to attack their college in Linday
Anderson’s If. “Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real.”50 The
multiplicity of the queer viral machine makes animals—packs—out of us all, and as our social flesh
extends into the unhuman, other packs become part of the identities-in-difference of
theSoftQueerBody. Product PACKaging is one mutation that Queer Technologies has replicated to
combat viral capitalism. This PACKaging, always a Gay Bomb, rapidly circulates an alternative method of
exchange (exchanges of knowledge, power, affect, belonging), encrypting a different queer world of
technology and consumables. The PACKage is always life exploiting life. As Queer Technologies redesigns
capitalistic visuality, the living networks of the entire capitalist machine are used to give life to a
minority multitude diseased by exploited labor and production. PACKaging is a face of queer
technological agency for theSoftQueerBody. Faces and Fakeness Parikka points out that “from a societal
point of view, you need a face, an address, and a net password to exist. . . . Subjectification works
through assigning faces to otherwise anonymous preindividual flows.”51 The face makes
theSoftQueerBody exist, but the face can challenge subjectification. A fake face can individualize the
multiplicity of theSoftQueerBody to allow for unhindered movements throughout the grids of capital. A
face of a body. A face of a code. An inter-face. Faces of iteration. Nonfaces. Galloway and Thacker
describe the enmity of networked combat as defacement— faceless. theSoftQueerBody, always
networked, will always have and not have a face. The downtown of theSoftQueerBody will be a face.
TECHNOTOPIAS The topological architecture of theSoftQueerBody, fortified by a viral aesthetics, builds
queer worlds called technotopias. Disidentifying with space and architecture, Judith Halberstam explains
the technotopic as a spatial site where the body resists idealization of integrity and rationalization of
disintegrations.52 theSoftQueerBody strives for the utopia of the technotopic. A world for the “‘non-
logical self,’”53 where the self is multiple, replicated, networked. Inhabitants of technotopias are
unstable, perhaps impossible. Glocal explosions of Gay Bombs promise the reconstitution of
architectonic materials, an architecture of never-being-the-same. The repetition of the replication of
difference coupled with the corruption of dominant power encrypts the possibilities of queer technical
world-making. The flesh (logic) of theSoftQueerBody holds the passwords to its own utopia,
programmed within its layers of monstrosity, contagion, and never-being-thesameness.
The 1AC’s viral politics moves towards a world unconceivable within registers of
liberal humanism – this speculative realism attempts to access an ethic, aesthetic, and
politics that is fundamentally unhuman – the neg’s reformist impulse will try to
convince you to assimilate the inhuman into the human – instead, embrace the alien
that hides quite literally right in-front us.
Blas 12 – Zach Blas, artist-theorist working at the intersections of networked media, queerness, and the
political. [“Virus, Viral,” WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, Volume 40, Issue 1 & 2. Feminist Press at
CUNY, 2012.] MYLES

While there certainly appears to be a becoming-number of the virus based on its replicating and
cryptographic existence, is a configuration of the viral based on this numeric paradigm a reduction not
only of what could count as viral but also of the virus itself? Viruses not only change through replication,
they also change their embodied contexts, in that all viruses require a host and can be spread from one
host to another. Galloway and Thacker state that the material substrate of the virus—its materiality
paired with its host—is not as necessary in understanding the virus's existence as is its mathematical
identity, but given that a virus cannot survive unless residing within a host, it seems that the host is
crucial, in that there would be no "number" without the host. To understand the virus as becoming-
number leaves unanswered questions of a virus's affects, sensations, and desires. Are there not
multiplicitous potentialities for the virus to become? Perhaps the code is what counts if the virus is to be
understood as primarily a mathematical abstraction, but what of the perceptions of the virus, its affects,
embodiments, and host organisms? Could their be another viral that emerges from these qualities? The
prospects of constructing a viral based on these criteria of the virus have an air of inaccessibility. What is
the affect of the virus and how could it ever be corralled into a viral if it is irreducible to the human?
How does one gain access to such affective knowledge of another thing? What this impasse makes clear
is that all virals are ethical, aesthetic, and political treatments of the virus; they are configurations that
gesture toward the overall inaccessibility of fully knowing a virus. This section will present the
possibilities of another viral, not popular or in use, through a speculative practice on the impossible
question of affect and phenomenology. Jakob von Uexküll gives us the first conceptual tool needed, the
Umwelt, or the perceptual world of an animal or creature. Uexküll, a biologist of the early to mid-
twentieth century who popularized biosemiotics, developed the concept of the Umwelt to think about
the radically diverse sensory worlds that different creatures exist within; he refers to these worlds as
bubbles or islands of senses, arguing that each animal can never leave or escape its self-world, or
Umwelt. Crucial to Uexküll's phenomenological thought is the premise that things do not have an
autonomous existence from the creatures that perceive them: "No one, who has the least experience of
the Umwelten of animals will ever harbour the idea that objects have an autonomous existence that
makes them independent of the subjects" (von Uexküll 2001, 108). While Uexküll's speculative
Umwelten provide a potential framework for developing a notion of the viral from the virus's affects or
perceptions, his argument against autonomy requires a second theoretical tool, media theorist Ian
Bogost's alien [unhuman] phenomenology, which helps break from this position. Alien [unhuman]
phenomenology is part of a new philosophical movement called "speculative realism," primarily rooted
in the continental tradition, that argues for an ability to speculatively gain access to that which exists
beyond or outside the correlation of being and world. Within the strand of object-oriented ontology or
philosophy, Ian Bogost is developing a "pragmatic," or "applied," speculative realism, which he calls
"alien [unhuman]phenomenology" (Bogost, n.d.). For Bogost, the "true alien [unhuman]" is right in front
of us, not hidden in the farthest reaches of another galaxy but in everything everywhere, from our
kitchenware to the sidewalk cement to the electronics in our cell phones. He asks about the
microcomputer: "But what do they experience? What is their proper phenomenology? In short, what is
it like to be a thing? If we wish to understand a microcomputer... on its own terms, what approaches
might be of service?... When we ask what it means to be something, we pose a question that exceeds
our own grasp of the being of the world. These unknown unknowns characterize things about an object
that may or may not be obvious, clear, or even knowable" (Bogost, n.d.). While Bogost claims, similarly
to Uexküll, that all things infinitely recede from human grasp, he surprisingly argues that it is the
philosopher's duty to speculate on these unknown unknowns. He writes that speculation is poetic and
creative, a "phenomenology that explodes like shrapnel" away from the terrain of the human.
Fascinatingly, Bogost refers to this practice of speculation in terms of disturbance: "A speculum is a
mirror, but not in the modern sense of the term as a device that reflects back the world as it really is,
unimpeded and undistorted— The speculum of speculation is... a funhouse mirror made of hammered
metal, whose distortions show us a perversion of a unit's sensibilities" (Bogost, n.d.). Alien [unhuman]
phenomenology operates as a break or distortion, from the nonhuman unknown to human speculation,
creatively paving the way for an unhuman poetics. When Bogost asks, "What is it like to be a thing?" can
this be expounded upon to ask, "What is it like to be a virus?" More precisely, can the idea of alien
[unhuman] phenomenology be used to speculate upon the virus's Umwelt and, as a result, conceive a
new viral? This viral would surely bring about a different viral, or unhuman, politics. This other viral—a
minor viral?—would have to take into account questions like How does the virus sense? Is the virus
dead, alive, undead? Does the virus emote? How does desire play into the virus's drive toward
multiplicity? How does it feel to replicate and spread in a particular substrate, such as silicon, animals, or
plants? How does the virus affect and how is it affected in different symbiotic encounters? If viruses
assemble spontaneously within cells, what is the poetic dimension to such a choreography? If these
affective dimensions The of the virus are ambivalent toward capitalism or sexuality, how does one
speculate on such relations?

***We play the game through an affective politics – its generative multiplicity
reimagines the plane of politics and bodily potential – we are not interested in
marking boundaries and limits, but rather producing corporeal virtualities, constant
viral becomings.
Puar et al. 9 – Jasbir Puar, Rutgers University, and Ann Pellegrini, NYU. [“Affect,” Social Text, Vol. 27, No.
3. Duke University Press, 2009.] MYLES

These contradictions have produced rich and fruitful debates over what affect “is” and/or “does,” as
well as exposed intellectual tensions about the relation and difference between affect and terms such as
emotion, feeling, and sensation with which it is sometimes used interchangeably (Jameson himself uses
affect and feeling interchangeably). In the rough schematic, hardly exhaustive, that follows, we are less
interested in delimiting the boundaries of what affect is or is not and more compelled by the generative
and productive multiplicity of its deployment as an analytic and political frame. Affect may anchor
claims about the materiality of bodies and physiological processes that are not contained or
representable by language or cognition alone. Philosophical inquires into bioscience, for example,
propose affect as both a “precognitive” attribute (not in terms of a telos, but in terms of a quality) of the
body as well as emotion’s trace effect. This conception of affect poses a distinction between sensation
and the perception of the sensation. Affect, from this perspective, is precisely what allows the body to
be an open system, always in concert with its virtuality, the potential of becoming. As Jameson’s own
references to the death of “the older psychological subject, with its anxieties and its Unconscious” (ST 6,
1982), suggests, psychoanalysis, too, has had much to say on the matter—and topography—of affect.
Recent and forthcoming work at the intersection “between” psychoanalysis and affect attempts not so
much a return to the modernist subject of depth as a reopening of the relations between ontology and
epistemology, and between psychoanalysis and phenomenology.2 Finally, much productive critical work
has been invested in how concepts like affect, emotion, and feelings aid in comprehending subject-
formation and political oppositionality for an age when neoliberal capital has reduced possibilities for
collective political praxis. The provocation of all of these critical approaches is to ask how affect—and
emotions, feelings, and sensation (call it what you will?)—might be mobilized toward different political
ends. While we are not particularly interested to settle these terms, as such attempts may be seen as
semantic quibbles or demands for genealogical purity and loyalty, it is interesting that some theories of
affect foreground affective (and affected subjects) while others see the promise of politics working
through precisely the surface intensities of bodies that

[mark]

Jameson so quickly dismisses. While Jameson registers his complaint about the waning of affect
predominantly in relation to aesthetic production—architecture and painting—he does so out of
concern and worry over precisely this question of left political resistance. More recently, two major
special issues of Social Text have continued these lines of inquiry regarding affect and politics—Patricia
Clough’s “Technoscience” (ST 80, 2004) and “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” coedited by
David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz (ST 84 – 85, 2005). Both these collections
foreground work that understands affect as simultaneously vital to the conditions of possibility for
identity politics yet indicative of their limitations. Jameson worried that the death of the modernist
subject meant the end of politics—and let us be clear, a certain kind of politics. However, recent work in
affect studies—across manifold interdisciplinary and genealogical influences—points not only to
different ways of conceiving bodies and subjects of politics but also, and perhaps more crucially, takes
on the imperative of (re)imagining the terrain of politics “itself.”

It’s not our job to propose policies, it’s our job to complain – complaining is a different
frequency of objection that mobilizes an affective politics of hate against traditional
calls for civic engagement and creates fringe communities linked through expressions
of resistance.
Stanley 18 – Eric A. Stanley, University of California, Riverside. [“The Affective Commons: Gay Shame,
Queer Hate, and Other Collective Feelings,” GLQ: A Journal of Volume 24, Issue 4. Duke University Press,
2018.] MYLES
Gay Shame formed in the late 1990s in Brooklyn in opposition to the corporatization and otherwise
assimilatory grounding of mainstream LGBT politics. Its first events there, and a few years later in San
Francisco, were offered as a DIY “alternative” to the massively commercialized Pride parade, where
speakers, workshops, bands, and DJs assembled in an attempt to fuse partying with a radical queer
analysis. Many of the early organizers were alienated by the austerity of left politics, which attended to
sexuality, gender, disability, race, and aesthetics as an inconvenience (at best) to class struggle. While
drawn to the collective potential of nightlife, they also wanted to confront the racism, classism, and
transmisogyny of the gay party scene.12 Because Gay Shame is not legally or economically tied to
legitimate and legitimating institutions, or p23erhaps because of the group’s bad attitudes, it continues
to produce incendiary interventions that disturb across the political range. This nonalignment to a
controlled platform, or the political as such, planned through an anarchist consensus model, has found
the collective being charged as divisive, negative, and disruptive. In their 2017 zine, “Is there room for
direct action divas?,” a how-to guide for horizontal organizing, between sections on building takeovers
and wheat pasting is the “complaining is not a luxury” subheading that states, People are often confused
by the name “GAY SHAME.” The more people hate on our name the more we realize it’s working. People
think that sarcasm is for people who are too scared to speak truth to power. But Bayard doesn’t know
how bad it is now. No matter how outrageous the messaging of our actions is, it pales in comparison to
the genocidal realities that we’re up against. Actually, our jokes are always about 8,000 steps behind
how bad things actually are. We don’t feel it’s worth starting a conversation with Power™. We don’t
want to work within a shitty system that is already stacked against us. We complain. After all, our
purpose is not to propose policy. We find community through expressing resistance. ALL ARE WELCOME.
(Gay Shame 2017) For Gay Shame complaining names forms of disruption made by those outside, which
is to say those captured inside, the properly recognized, might include trolling politicians like Gavin
Newsom, critiquing gay marriage, reading the ableism of much direct action organizing, and more.
Complaining is the lower frequency of objection that vibrates in the same field and might be the method
of expressing anger for those at the borders of the properly human. Rather than situate complaining as
that which inhibits direct action, for Gay Shame it is a form of struggle in a long practice of interruption.
Complaining reorders the political logic that demands the affective be exchanged for the pragmatism of
legislative maturity and parliamentary participation. A politics against the political — they weaponize
the negativity of critique in and against a world where the respectable modes of operation catch
participants in the ruse of democracy. Yet this negativity is not aimed toward self-obliteration or a
decomposition into the nihilism of finitude. By scavenging the remnants of the social, Gay Shame finds,
or more precisely fashions, collectivity through the commons of hate.13

In a world of suicide bombing, the body can no longer be delineated from the weapon – these intimate
assemblages of becoming-weapon and ballistic corporealities allude to the possibility of futures at this
site of coalescence where the lines between technology and the body are permanently blurred.

Puar 7 – Jasbir K. Puar, Rutgers University. [“conclusion: queer times, terrorist assemblages.” Terrorist
Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007.] MYLES

The fact that we approach suicide bombing with such trepidation, in contrast to how we approach the
violence of colonial domination . . . indicates the symbolic violence that shapes our understanding of
what constitutes ethically and politically illegitimate violence.— Ghassan Hage, ‘‘ ‘Comes a Time We Are
All Enthusiasm’ ’’
Ghassan Hage wonders ‘‘why it is that suicide bombing cannot be talked about without being
condemned first,’’ noting that without an unequivocal condemnation, one is a ‘‘morally suspicious
person’’ because ‘‘only unqualified condemnation will do.’’ He asserts, ‘‘There is a clear political risk in
trying to explain suicide bombings.’’ With such risks in mind, my desire here is to momentarily suspend
this dilemma by combining an analysis of these representational stakes with a reading of the forces of
affect, of the body, of matter. In pondering the modalities of this kind of terrorist, one notes a pastiche
of oddities: a body machined together through metal and flesh, an assemblage of the organic and the
inorganic; a death not of the Self nor of the Other, but both simultaneously, and, perhaps more
accurately, a death scene that obliterates the Hegelian self/other dialectic altogether. Self-annihilation is
the ultimate form of resistance, and ironically, it acts as self-preservation, the preservation of symbolic
self enabled through the ‘‘highest cultural capital’’ of martyrdom, a giving of life to the future of political
struggles—not at all a sign of ‘‘disinterest in living a meaningful life.’’ As Hage notes, in this limited but
nonetheless trenchant economy of meaning, suicide bombers are ‘‘a sign of life’’ emanating from the
violent conditions of life’s impossibility, the ‘‘impossibility of making a life.’’ This body forces a
reconciliation of opposites through their inevitable collapse— a perverse habitation of contradiction.

Achille Mbembe’s devastating and brilliant meditation on necropolitics notes that the historical basis of
sovereignty that is reliant upon a notion of (western) political rationality begs for a more accurate
framing: that of life and death, the subjugation of life to the power of death. Mbembe attends not only
to the representational but also to the informational productivity of the (Palestinian) suicide bomber.
Pointing to the becomings of a suicide bomber, a corporeal experiential of ‘‘ballistics,’’ he asks, ‘‘What
place is given to life, death, and the human body (especially the wounded or slain body)?’’ Assemblage
here points to the inability to clearly delineate a temporal, spatial, energetic, or molecular distinction
between a discrete biological body and technology; the entities, particles, and elements come together,
flow, break apart, interface, skim off each other, are never stable, but are defined through their
continual interface, not as objects meeting but as multiplicities emerging from interactions. The
dynamite strapped onto the body of a suicide bomber is not merely an appendage or prosthetic; the
intimacy of weapon with body reorients the assumed spatial integrity (coherence and concreteness) and
individuality of the body that is the mandate of intersectional identities: instead we have the body-
weapon. The ontology of the body renders it a newly becoming body:

The candidate for martyrdom transforms his or her body into a mask that hides the soon-to-be-
detonated weapon. Unlike the tank or the missile that is clearly visible, the weapon carried in the shape
of the body is invisible. Thus concealed, it forms part of the body. It is so intimately part of the body that
at the time of its detonation it annihilates the body of its bearer, who carries with it the bodies of others
when it does not reduce them to pieces. The body does not simply conceal a weapon. The body is
transformed into a weapon, not in a metaphorical sense but in a truly ballistic sense.

Temporal narratives of progression are upturned as death and becoming fuse into one: as one’s body
dies, one’s body becomes the mask, the weapon, the suicide bomber. Not only does the ballistic body
come into being without the aid of visual cues marking its transformation, it also ‘‘carries with it the
bodies of others.’’ Its own penetrative energy sends shards of metal and torn flesh spinning off into the
ether. The body-weapon does not play as metaphor, nor in the realm of meaning and epistemology, but
forces us ontologically anew to ask: What kinds of information does the ballistic body impart? These
bodies, being in the midst of becoming, blur the insides and the outsides, infecting transformation
through sensation, echoing knowledge via reverberation and vibration. The echo is a queer
temporality—in the relay of affective information between and amid beings, the sequence of reflection,
repetition, resound, and return (but with a difference, as in mimicry)—and brings forth waves of the
future breaking into the present. Gayatri Spivak, prescient in drawing our attention to the multivalent
textuality of suicide in ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak,’’ reminds us in her latest ruminations that suicide
terrorism is a modality of expression and communication for the subaltern (there is the radiation of
heat, the stench of burning flesh, the impact of metal upon structures and the ground, the splattering of
blood, body parts, skin):

Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through. It is both
execution and mourning, for both self and other. For you die with me for the same cause, no matter
which side you are on. Because no matter who you are, there are no designated killees in suicide
bombing. No matter what side you are on, because I cannot talk to you, you won’t respond to me, with
the implication that there is no dishonor in such shared and innocent death.

We have the proposal that there are no sides, and that the sides are forever shifting, crumpling, and
multiplying, disappearing and reappearing, unable to satisfactorily delineate between here and there.
The spatial collapse of sides is due to the queer temporal interruption of the suicide bomber, projectiles
spewing every which way. As a queer assemblage—distinct from the queering of an entity or identity—
race and sexuality are denaturalized through the impermanence, the transience of the suicide bomber,
the fleeting identity replayed backward through its dissolution. This dissolution of self into other/s and
other/s into self not only effaces the absolute mark of self and other/s in the war on terror, but
produces a systemic challenge to the entire order of Manichaean rationality that organizes the rubric of
good versus evil. Delivering ‘‘a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through,’’
suicide bombers do not transcend or claim the rational nor accept the demarcation of the irrational.
Rather, they foreground the flawed temporal, spatial, and ontological presumptions upon which such
distinctions flourish. Organic and inorganic, flesh and machine, these wind up as important as (and
perhaps as threatening) if not more so than the symbolism of the bomber and his or her defense or
condemnation.

Figure 24 is the November/December 2004 cover of a magazine called Jest: Humor for the Irreverent,
distributed for free in Brooklyn (see also jest .com) and published by a group of counterculture artists
and writers. Here we have the full force of the mistaken identity conundrum: the distinctive silhouette,
indeed the profile, harking to the visible by literally blacking it out, of the turbaned Amritdhari Sikh male
(i.e., turban and unshorn beard that signals baptized Sikhs), rendered (mistakenly?) as a (Muslim) suicide
bomber, replete with dynamite through the vibrant pulsations of an iPod ad. Fully modern, animated
through technologies of sound and explosives, this body does not operate solely or even primarily on
the level of metaphor. Once again, to borrow from Mbembe, it is truly a ballistic body. Contagion,
infection, and transmission reign, not meaning.

The body of Mbembe’s suicide bomber is still, however, a male one, and in that universalized
masculinity, ontologically pure regardless of location, history, and context. Whereas for Mbembe,
sexuality—as the dissolution of bodily boundaries—is elaborated through the erotic ballistic event of
death, for female suicide bombers, sexuality is still announced in advance: the petite manicured hands,
mystical beauty (‘‘beauty mixed with violence’’), and features of her face and body are commented
upon in a manner not requisite for male suicide bombers; the political import of the female suicide
bomber’s actions are gendered out or into delusions about her purported irrational emotional and
mental distress. Female suicide bombers disrupt the prosaic proposition that terrorism is bred directly of
patriarchy and that women are intrinsically peace-manifesting. This rationale is reinscribed, however,
when observers proclaim that women cast out of or shunned by traditional compositions of gender and
sexuality (often accused of being lesbians) are most likely to be predisposed toward violence. Insofar as
female suicide bombers are mentored within masculinist organizations, Spivak notes, ‘‘the female
suicide bomber, thus persuaded, does not make a gendered point . . . there is no recoding of the
gendered struggle.’’ These discursive identity markers reflect the enduring capacities of
intersectionality—we cannot leave it completely behind—but also its limitations: we are once again
stuck within a resistance-complicity binary circuit. Assemblage is possible not through the identity
markers that encapsulate this body, but through the temporal and spatial reorderings that the body
iterates as it is machined together and as it explodes. The assemblage is momentary, fleeting even, and
gives way to normative identity markers even in the midst of its newly becoming state.

Confronting the scene of suicide bombing calls for a new discourse on the power of
life and death – only through confronting these spectacles of violence can we abolish
essentializing dichotomies and liberal rationality.
Murray 6 – Stuart J. Murray, Carleton University. [“Thanatopolitics: On the Use of Death for Mobilizing
Political Life,” Polygraph 18, 2006.] MYLES **edited for ableist language with brackets

The argument of this essay moves toward a different kind of discourse. Insofar as this is possible, it is
perhaps even hopeful in the face of such manifest hopelessness. I address neither the “causes” nor the
“reasons” motivating the suicide bomber—I prefer to follow Mbembe and Foucault and call human
being into question rather than impose some colonizing vision of causality or reason. I take inspiration
from Mbembe, who sets the following challenge for postcolonial studies: “we need to go beyond the
binary categories used in standard interpretations of domination, such as resistance vs. passivity,
autonomy vs. subjection, state vs. civil society, hegemony vs. counter-hegemony, totalization vs.
detotalization.”15 I therefore turn to a discussion on death, whether we choose to call it suicide or
sacrifice. In Mbembe’s words, we are forced “to discuss the status of death-as-such or, more precisely,
of death’s life or the life of death.”16 Through such a discussion, we might find that death—deathin-
life—drives a wedge between conventional binaries and opens us perforce onto something new,
inaugurating a new discourse, new hope for our living together. Thus, how might the death of the
suicide bomber him- or herself begin to change the face of political life today? What is the rhetorical
force of such death, with its myriad social, cultural, and political effects?

I argue that thanatopolitics—the politics of death—is both a response and a resistance to biopolitical
power and to the Western conception of rational sovereignty with which biopolitics is allied. But it is
more than this. While the resistance of the suicide bomber is sparked within the circuits of power, this
resistance also approaches the absolute: he or she destroys the very condition of possibility for
biopolitical regulation and control. Because the suicide bomber usually dies in the blast, for instance, he
or she cannot be brought within the mechanism of justice. While suicide bombing is destructive, while it
is clearly a force of negation, I argue that we must also understand this act as productive—it produces
something, it has independent rhetorical effects which are not easily comprehended within a biopolitical
logic. These effects impinge on everyday life and extend beyond war zones; their symbolic valence is
unable to be contained or explained by our current moral norms or codes. How do we understand such
death, the homicide–suicide, when it is explicitly carried out as a political act, an ultimate—and
productive—act of refusal? What is “produced”? And how might this prompt us to reconsider our own
faith in those liberal-humanist notions of the subject that have founded ethics and politics for so long?
To begin to answer these questions, I address the effects of suicide bombing, and I read them as
rhetorical, as effects which produce a particular response, a response that cannot be grasped through
biopolitical reason alone. The hope is both to avoid the impasse imposed by the sovereign subject of
liberal humanism, bequeathed to us from modern Enlightenment philosophy, and (at the other end of
the spectrum) a postmodern nihilism that seemingly destroys the ethic of responsibility that is
traditionally aligned with sovereign agency. Rather than terminating in a well-worn discourse that would
blindly [ignorantly] condemn these acts by reaffirming the sacred value of (biopolitical) life, I argue that
a discourse on death will both challenge the hegemony of biopolitical reason while opening onto a
renewed way of conceiving what is sacred in political life today.

Queer revolutionaries must combat nonexistence – it’s apriori

Blas 8 – Zach Blas, University of London. [“Managing Output,” Gay Bombs User’s Manual. UCLA, 2008.]
MYLES

The Gay Bomb hinges upon the queer as non-normative—a queerness that has avoided
heteronormative subsumption. Thus, the effectiveness of proliferations of Gay Bombs requires that
queerness remain a dynamic non-normativeness of never-being-the-sameness. Any questions regarding
the management of output pushes toward the concern: is queerness at a point of total absorption into
heteronormativity? In her discussion of homonationalism, Jasbir Puar writes that queerness cannot fit
into a “tiny vessel.”56 Yet, culture appears to have produced a queerness that bottles itself within this
tiny vessel. The queer eye of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy produces a queer visuality—a queer way of
looking and being seen—that results in a homonormative perspectivalism. The vessels of Gay Pride
parades become tax-deductible expenses for multinationals, where the banner of the company and the
rainbow flag exist as one. The collapse of queerness, capitalism, and heteronormativity suggests an
emptiness of the word “queer.” This emptying out leaves homonormativity in its place, what Puar
defines “as a formation complicit with and incited into the biopolitical valorization of life in its habitation
and reproduction of heteronormative norms.”57 Conversely, a queerness as exceptional—exclusive of
homonormativity—risks regulation. Building upon Agamben’s theories of the state of exception, Puar
urges that a queerness that locates itself as a cultural exception becomes regulated by power:
“Queerness here is the modality through which ‘freedom from norms’ becomes a regulatory queer ideal
that demarcates the ideal queer.”58 Queer homonormativity, queer exceptionalism—both not mutually
exclusive—contest every fiber of queerness. The location of queerness is the position of possibility. That
said, where does queerness as dynamic non-normativeness of never-being-the-sameness locate itself?
Has the word “queer” emptied out beyond reconstitution? Is the mobilization of the nameless a tactic to
embrace? How would this mobilization execute without reducing to sexual difference? Are the
localizations of power within technology adequate points of possibility to acquire a form of agency that
is not homonormative, that is not sexual exceptionalism? Is the Gay Bomb a “tiny vessel,” even though it
is constructed by a materialism of everything? WAR The Gay Bomb is a weapon and, while at war, wages
the dangers of direct appropriation. Asking if the Gay Bomb’s representation might impode on itself asks
what is the violence of the Gay Bomb, how erratic is this violence, and does this violence ultimately
defend and create? Hardt and Negri state that “democratic violence can only defend society, not create
it.”59 Looking back toward Alan Liu’s concepts of destructive creativity and viral aesthetics, we must
virulently debate the creative possibilities of destruction. If we entertain the idea that the Gay Bomb
defends and creates, what does weaponry offer our future? “We need to create weapons that are not
merely destructive but are themselves forms of constituent power.”60 Perhaps the weapon in times of
war returns to a question of use. Yet use seems unable to determine—qualify—the violence of the Gay
Bomb, for what is enacted after use—the explosion—is the true risk of potential. Just as the violence of
the word queer now defends a homo/hetero-normativity, the violence of the words Gay Bomb promise
the risk of a historical violence—a violence of the gay bomb before the Gay Bomb. Once again, that
which is nameless returns: are the promises of a weapon that allude representation by no name fruitful?
When Galloway and Thacker describe the defacement of enmity as that which is faceless, would a
faceless, nameless weapon offer the most constructive violence, a constructive destruction? As they
postulate in “The Politics of Nonexistence,” love situates as that which is nonrepresentable. Shall new
weaponry of theSoftQueerBody offer the violence of nonexistence? Not through a negative destruction
but a willful rendering to a fundamental deletion of being. A deletion of being that reconstructs society
at the fulcrum of never-being-the-sameness. This is a question of love. Instead of The Smiths’ lyric “If it’s
not love then it’s the bomb that will bring us together,” the bomb will bring love. Specifically, the Gay
Bomb will bring love as a positive nonexistence, deleting representations of the queer face and name,
generating new unknown materialities, somewhere between bomb and body.