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+====We should use the academic setting to facilitate change, rather than roleplaying as policymakers we should take this chance to challenge the heteronormative structures that pervade the Academy.==== |
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+**Elias 2003** (John Elias, Professor at San Francisco University, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, no. 2/3/4, p. 64, 2003) |
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+Akin to organized religion and the biomedical field, the educational system has been a major offender. Wedded to disseminating the idea that heterosexuality is the ultimate and best form of sexuality, "Schools have maintained, by social custom and with reinforcement from the law, the promotion of the heterosexual family as predominant, and therefore the essence of normal. From having been presumed to be ‘normal,’ heterosexual behavior has gained status as the right, good, and ideal lifestyle" (Leck, 1999, p. 259). School culture in general is fraught with heteronormativity. Our society has long viewed queer sexualities as ". . . deviant, sinful, or both, and our schools are populated by adolescent peers and adult educators who share these heterosexual values" (Ginsberg, 1999, p. 55). Simply put, heteronormativity and sexual prejudice pervade the curriculum at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels (for examples of this and ways of intervening, see: Adams, Bell, and Griffin, 1997; Letts and Sears, 1999; Lovaas, Baroudi, and Collins, 2002; Yep, 2002). Besides the hegemonic hold schools have had regarding a heterosexual bias, school culture continues to devote much energy to maintaining ". . . the status quo of our dominant social institutions, which are hierarchical, authoritarian, and unequal, competitive, racist, sexist, and homophobic" (Arnstine, 1995, p. 183). While there has been modest success in addressing various forms of prejudice in schools (Kumashiro, 2001), what is sorely lacking is serious attention to how the intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender are interwoven and dialectically create prejudice (e.g., racism, classism, and hetero~~sexism~~). Schools would be an ideal site to interrogate, and begin to erode, the kind of hegemony upon which heterosexism rests and is supported. To date, not much is being done in a systematic fashion to disrupt the ways in which U.S. schooling has perpetuated such hierarchies. It seems to me that sexuality education is ripe for the opportunity to challenge heterosexism in school culture; however, public school-based sexuality education is presently in serious crisis, as it has turned mostly to the business of pushing for abstinence- only sexuality education. According to federal legislation, states that accept funding for this form of sexuality education require that young people are taught to abstain from sexual activity until they get married. This has numerous implications for relationship construction; a more in-depth description and analysis of this form of sexuality education will follow later in this essay. |
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+====Debate is education. This is a critical site to interrogate heterosexuality ==== |
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+**Elia 03 **Elia, Professor @ San Francisco University, 2003. (John, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, no. 2/3/4, p. 64, JCE) |
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+Akin to organized religion and the biomedical field, the educational system has been a major offender. Wedded to disseminating the idea that heterosexuality is the ultimate and best form of sexuality, "Schools have maintained, by social custom and with reinforcement from the law, the promotion of the heterosexual family as predominant, and therefore the essence of normal. From having been presumed to be ‘normal,’ heterosexual behavior has gained status as the right, good, and ideal lifestyle" (Leck, 1999, p. 259). School culture in general is fraught with heteronormativity. Our society has long viewed queer sexualities as ". . . deviant, sinful, or both, and our schools are populated by adolescent peers and adult educators who share these heterosexual values" (Ginsberg, 1999, p. 55). Simply put, heteronormativity and sexual prejudice pervade the curriculum at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels (for examples of this and ways of intervening, see: Adams, Bell, and Griffin, 1997; Letts and Sears, 1999; Lovaas, Baroudi, and Collins, 2002; Yep, 2002). Besides the hegemonic hold schools have had regarding a heterosexual bias, school culture continues to devote much energy to maintaining ". . . the status quo of our dominant social institutions, which are hierarchical, authoritarian, and unequal, competitive, racist, sexist, and homophobic" (Arnstine, 1995, p. 183). While there has been modest success in addressing various forms of prejudice in schools (Kumashiro, 2001), what is sorely lacking is serious attention to how the intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender are interwoven and dialectically create prejudice (e.g., racism, classism, and hetero~~sexism~~). Schools would be an ideal site to interrogate, and begin to erode, the kind of hegemony upon which heterosexism rests and is supported. To date, not much is being done in a systematic fashion to disrupt the ways in which U.S. schooling has perpetuated such hierarchies. It seems to me that sexuality education is ripe for the opportunity to challenge heterosexism in school culture; however, public school-based sexuality education is presently in serious crisis, as it has turned mostly to the business of pushing for abstinence- only sexuality education. According to federal legislation, states that accept funding for this form of sexuality education require that young people are taught to abstain from sexual activity until they get married. This has numerous implications for relationship construction; a more in-depth description and analysis of this form of sexuality education will follow later in this essay. |
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+===K story === |
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+====The entirety of the aff is predicated on solving and saving lives – i.e. stopping extinction, and any body count under util calculus – and while these are noble feats the obsession with ending death adheres to the futurist agenda of the squo. Futurism, using the idea to save lives and fear the death drives, only furthers the obsession with heteronormative reproduction and marginalized queer sex. ==== |
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+====Notions of preserving some sort of future for our species valorize reproductive, heterogenital sex, while subordinating queer sex to nothing more than "meaningless acrobatics." This impregnates heterosexuality with the future of signification, necessitating violence against queerness.==== |
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+**Edelman 2004** (Lee Edelman, Prof. English at Tufts University, "No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive," 2004, pp. 11-13) |
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+Charged, after all, with the task of assuring "that we being dead yet live," the Child, as if by nature (more precisely, as the promise of a natural transcendence of the limits of nature itself), excludes the very pathos from which the narrator of The Children of Men recoils when comes upon the –nonreproductive "pleasures of the mind and senses." For the "pathetic" quality he projectively locates in nongenerative sexual enjoyment – enjoyment that he views in the absence of futurity as empty, substitutive, pathological – exposes the fetishistic figurations of the Child that the narrator pits against it as legible in terms of identical to those for which enjoyment without "hope of posterity" so peremptorily dismissed" legible, that is, as nothing more than "pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins." How better to characterize the narrative project of Children of Men itself, which ends, as anyone not born yesterday surely expects form the start, with the renewal of our barren and dying race through the miracle of birth? After all, as Walter Wangerin Jr., reviewing the book for the New York Times, approvingly noted in a sentence delicately poised between description and performance of the novel’s pro-creative ideology: "If there is a baby, there is a future, there is redemption." If, however, there is no baby and in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself. Given that the author of The Children of Men, like the parents of mankind’s children, succumbs so completely to the narcissism – all pervasive, self-congratulatory, and strategically misrecognized – that animates pronatalism, why should we be the least bit surprised when her narrator, facing the futureless future, laments, with what we must call as straight face, that "sex totally divorced from procreation has to become almost meaninglessly acrobatic"? Which is, of course, to say no more than that sexual practice will continue to allegorize the vicissitudes of meaning so long as the specifically heterosexual alibi of reproductive necessity obscures the drive beyond meaning driving the machinery of sexual meaningfulness: so long, that is, as the biological fact of heterosexual procreation bestows the imprimatur of meaning-production on heterogenital relations. For the Child, whose mere possibility is enough to spirit away the naked truth of heterosexual sex – impregnating heterosexuality, as it were, with the future of signification by conferring upon it the cultural burden of signifying futurity – figures our identification with an always about-to-be-realized identity. It thus denies the constant threat to the social order of meaning inherent to the structure of Symbolic desire that commits us to pursuing fulfillment by way of a meaning unable, as meaning, either to fulfill us or, in turn, to be fulfilled because unable to close the gap in identity, the division incised by the signifier, that "meaning," despite itself. |
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+====The rhetoric of "survival" or "fighting against the future" implicitly valorizes the Child and subsequently reproductive sex. This kind of heteronormative discourse constructs a temporal operation to which queerness is inherently antagonistic.==== |
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+**Lippert 08 **Lippert - University Assistant in American Studies @ the University of Vienna – 2008 (Leopold, Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis, November. ~~PDF Online @~~ othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26'0303723.pdf) Accessed 07.02.11 jfs |
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+Edelman opens his book with what he modestly terms "a simple provocation" (Future, 3), and what encapsulates the futility of an affirmative and assimilationist queer politics. He argues "that queerness names ~~...~~ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism" (Future, 3), and reveals the implicitly homophobic discourse of all the Obamas and O’Sullivans who are fighting for the future of our children and our grandchildren. The futurist bias towards heteronormativity has been fueled, as Judith Butler points out, by "fears about reproductive relations" ("Kinship", 21), by uncanny anxieties over the prospect that queer citizenship may interfere with a nation "imagined for fetuses and children" (Berlant, Queen, 1), and by the fundamental antithesis that the queer and the child embody. The principal concern of futurist America, then, is the fate of its offspring, expressed in a fearful inquiry: "What happens to the child, the child, the poor child, the martyred figure of an ostensibly selfish or dogged social progressivism?" (Butler, "Kinship", 21). Edelman recognizes that the mythical child – is the epitome of a heteronormative future-oriented social – can only be saved by a "marriage of identity to futurity in order to realize the social subject" (Future, 14), which leads him to the ensuing claim that only the linear temporal process of "ever aftering" ("After", 476, emphasis in the original) can keep "society alive" ("After", 476). Heteronormative America, accordingly, is constituted through its own posterity, through a temporal operation to which queerness is inherently antagonistic. In an imagined community that relies on futurism as its life-giving engine, then, "the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form" (Edelman, Future, 4). |
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+====Heteronormativity instills a fundamental fear of impurity in society; this amplifies systemic violence against queerness and places our species on a trajectory towards omnicide. ==== |
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+**Sedwick 1990** (Eve Sedgwick, Professor of English CUNY, "Epistemology of the Closet," 1990, pp. 127-130.) |
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+From at least the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorray, scenarios of same-sex desire would seem to have had a privileged, though by no means an exclusive, relation in Western culture to scenarios of both genocide and omnicide. That sodomy, the name by which homosexual acts are known even today to the law of half of the United States and to the Supreme Court of all of them, should already be inscribed with the name of a site of mass extermination is the appropriate trace of a double history. In the first place there is a history of the mortal suppression, legal or subjudicial, of gay acts and gay people, through burning, hounding, physical and chemical castration, concentration camps, bashing—the array of sanctioned fatalities that Louis Crompton records under the name of gay genocide, and whose supposed eugenic motive becomes only the more colorable with the emergence of a distinct, naturalized minority identity in the nineteenth century. In the second place, though, there is the inveterate topos of associating gay acts or |
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+===Alt=== |
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+====Vote negative as an act of flourishing via traversing material conditions are the only imaginable way to transgress our constant desire of filling the Lack — allowances of ambivalence and risk allow for us to move through desire-filled states and into a world of pure pleasure==== |
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+**Berlant and Edelman 14 **(Lee, Professor of English at Tufts, Laura, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, "Sex, or the Unbearable," pg 10-12 shr) |
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+I never suggested that flourishing involves a "simple" self- evidence in happiness that demands a detachment from "the bad life": flourishing involves traversing material conditions and then the affective sense of thriving, which is something different from and often incoherently bound to scenes and modes of living. This is why the materially "good life" might not be accompanied by a sense that life is good, why "good sex" might not be something one would want to repeat: without allowing for ambivalence, there is no flour- ishing. It therefore entails a complex navigation of life and noise, and the will to achieve it calls for practices and tendencies beyond mere accommodation to the world’s and our own negativity. Like- wise it isn’t quite right to call psychoanalytic processes "structure" in contrast to the rule of misrule that marks ongoing modes of social domination: both domains of repetition structure, in that they are scenes in which subjects and scenes assume forms that have pre- dictable, not determined, impacts. Structure is a process, not an imprint, of the reproduction of life.¶ De-antinomizing structure and the everyday, for example, one no longer has to see sex only as expressing a relation of power, or someone’s singular pleasures, or the shattering activity of the drives. We wouldn’t have needed Rubin to help us calm down and think about sex, and to think about affirming what’s threatening about it either, if we did not need to figure out how sex reproduces normativity while predictably disorganizing assurance about why we want what we want and what our variety of attachments mean; at the same time, not quite knowing ourselves, we demand all sorts of things on behalf of the appetites, such as the right to anonymity, ag- gression, acknowledgment, pleasure, relief, protection, and, often, repair. Fantasy, formally speaking, is not what glosses over this craziness but that which makes it possible to move within it— sometimes in the blindingly glossy sense of optimism Lee proposes but more formally in the sense its setting provides that ambivalent, incoherent, proximate forces can be moved, moved through, and with. These processes of exposure to power, norm, and desire are structuring in their very variety and variation. As I wrote recently in an essay about the work of Leo Bersani and David Halperin, "When in a romance someone has sex and then says to the lover, ‘You make me feel safe,’ we understand that she means that there’s been an emotional compensation to neutralize how unsafe and close to the abject sex makes her feel. ‘You make me feel safe’ means that I can relax and have fun where I am also not safe, where I am too close to the ridiculous, the disgusting, the merely weird, or—simply too close to having a desire. But some situations are riskier than others, as the meanings of unsafe sex change according to who’s having the sex" (Berlant 2009, 266). That’s where the politics comes in.¶ So when I say that I want to dedramatize our conceptual and em- bodied encounters with sex, I don’t mean that I want to live in the pastoral sex world of Shortbus (Mitchell 2006), cruising like a happy puppy sniffing around a sea of interesting crotches. To some degree Lee is right that my stance is a way of making peace with misrecog- nition. Making peace with it, it seems to me—being a realist of sorts as well—gives us a shot at displacing sex from its normative func- tion as the mechanism of emotional cohesion that sustains aggres- sive heteronormativity. But also, since misrecognition is inevitable, since the fantasmatic projection onto objects of desire that crack you open and give you back to yourself in a way about which you might feel many ways will always happen in any circuit of reciprocity with the world, why fight it? The question is where we move the dramatics of projection, what we can make available for changing their imaginary shape and consequence. I take cues from Lacan and Cavell to see sex as part of a comedy of misrecognition at the same time as it also can be a tragic drama of inflation and deflation. But "comedy" is a technical term here; it does not point to what’s funny or what feels good. Comedy stages explosive and implosive prob- lems of adjustment that are fundamentally affective and political— and survivable, if not affectively too bearable, even beyond the limit. |
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+====The Ballot is a performative act – the ballot is a discourse exercising binding power. Every ballot matter – repetition is what confers power on the performative act. ==== |
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+**Butler 93 **Butler, noted for her studies on gender and teaches composition and rhetoric at Berkeley, 93 (Dr. Judith, ‘Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex’) pp. 225 LRP |
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+Performative acts are forms of authoritative speech: most performatives, for instance, are statements that, in the uttering, also perform a certain action and exercise a binding power.4 Implicated in a network of authorization and punishment, performatives tend to include legal sentences, baptisms, inaugurations, declarations of ownership, statements which not only perform an action, but confer a binding power on the action performed. If the power of discourse to produce that which it names is linked with the question of performativity, then the performative is one domain in which power acts as discourse. Importantly, however, there is no power, construed as a subject, that acts, but only, to repeat an earlier phrase, a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability. This is less an "act," singular and deliberate, than a nexus of power and discourse that repeats or mimes the discursive gestures of power. Hence, the judge who authorizes and installs the situation he names invariably cites the law that he applies, and it is the power of this citation that gives the performative its binding or conferring power. And though it may appear that the binding power of his words is derived from the force of his will or from a prior authority, the opposite is more true: it is through the citation of the law that the figure of the judge's "will" is produced and that the "priority" of textual authority is established. Indeed, it is through the invocation of convention that the speech act of the judge derives its binding power; that binding power is to be found neither in the subject of the judge nor in his will, but in the citational legacy by which a contemporary "act" emerges in the context of a chain of binding convention. |