Queer Children, Queer Futures: Navigating lifedeath in The Hunger Games

TLDR: A decade ago, Lee Edelman published No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive as mentioned in this paper, a polemic grounded in Lacanian psychoanalysis, in which he argued that the future is child stuff.

Abstract: It has been a decade since Lee Edelman published his scathing polemic grounded in Lacanian psychoanalysis--No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. A lot can happen in a decade. A decade ago, I was a teenager; two decades ago, I was a child. I hope to begin making sense of the ways in which Edelman's work resonates in our contemporary moment, and I mention my decades-long removal from childhood because this is the aspect of Edelman's work with which I am most preoccupied: the Child. Of course--as Edelman repeatedly insists throughout No Future--I am here referring to the Child with a capital "C," not the lived historical realities of any "actual" children; to the social symbolic function of the Child, a figure with a contested history in the field of queer studies. While I will borrow concepts from Edelman's entire work, I will draw primarily on his opening chapter, the significantly titled "The Future is Kid Stuff," which evokes one of the major bonds of signification central to this essay: the signifier of the Child and the signified of the future. Following yet detouring from Edelman, I aim to unpack the oppositional and appositional relationship between this bond of signification and another--the signifier of queerness and the signified of death. After outlining the work of Edelman on the pairings of the Child/the future and queerness/death, I will fuse the two in Kathryn Bond Stockton's conception of the queer child--a figure, I argue, that productively muddles the future with death, death with the future, to become an embodiment of lifedeath, suturing together humanity's perpetuation and demise. I propose then to approach this theoretical conversation through an examination of the contemporary cultural fascination with narratives of the death of children as mass public spectacles--both delight in fictional representations of this manner and horror over media coverage of actual death, as perhaps most haunting in the ongoing epidemic of school shootings. Specifically, I will offer an admittedly cursory reading of Suzanne Collins's highly popular The Hunger Games book trilogy and movie franchise, contextualized through the obsessive American media coverage of the infiltration of fatal violence into the spaces of childhood, from the classroom to the movie theatre. The book series, which features a dystopian alternate reality in which children are selected to fight each other to the death in a televised event, presents a recurring cultural narrative and provides a complication of Edelman's contrasting alignment of children with life and queerness with death. What happens when children die? When they kill? As a series both aimed at children and young adults, and primarily about children, The Hunger Games is an apt point of intervention for this essay. To stay on the note of popular culture for a moment, when I first read No Future, what came to mind was Helen Lovejoy from The Simpsons. In an episode about prohibition, the reverend's wife, Helen, shrilly demands, "won't somebody please think of the children?" ("Homer"). According to Edelman, this epitomizes a constant refrain of our socio-political reality--whether coming from the mouths of liberals or conservatives--and one that attempts to inextricably tie the symbolic Child to the perpetuation of the future. In short, all we ever think about is the children. Edelman describes the "oppressively political" (2) "coercive universalization" (11) of the Child, "insofar as the fantasy subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought," binding us in a logic of "reproductive futurism" (2). The Child can be invoked, especially by a reverend's wife like Helen Lovejoy, to do battle with various "social misfits," ranging from pro-choice advocates to homosexuals and other figures of death, in order to defend the future. We must fight "righteous" wars, accumulate wealth and material like proper capitalist subjects, all to preserve a future for our children. …