Reddit reviews No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Series Q)

Okay, I'm finding that a little hard to believe, because a simple search on Google Scholar would find dozens of such articles. But here are a few citations purely from my own research:

Balay, A. (2012). “Incloseto Putbacko!”: Queerness in Adolescent Fantasy Fiction. The Journal of Popular Culture, 45(5), 923-942.

Ehnenn, Jill R. (2007). Queering Harry Potter. In Peele, Thomas (Ed.), Queer popular culture: Literature, media, film, and television (pp.229-256). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hall, D. (2003). Queer theories. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Halperin, D. (2003). The Normalization of Queer Theory. Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, Iss. 2-4.

Hollinger, V. (1999). (Re)reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the Defamiliarisation of Gender. Science Fiction Studies 26(1), 23-40.

Kilgore, De W. (2009). Queering Humanity in SF. In ‘SFS Symposium: Sexuality in Science Fiction’. Science Fiction Studies, 36(3), 385-403.

Lipton, M. (2008). Queer Readings of Popular Culture: Searching [to] Out the Subtext. In Driver, S. (Ed.), Queer Youth Cultures (pp.163-180). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Pearson, W. (1999). Alien Cryptographies: the View from Queer. Science Fiction Studies, 26(1), 1-22.

Pearson, W. (2009). Queer Theory. In M. Bould, A. Butler, A. Roberts & S. Vint (Eds.), The Routledge companion to science fiction (pp. 298-307). Oxford: Routledge.

And here are five academic books on the topic:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Critical-Introduction-Queer-Theory/dp/0748615970/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Queer-Theory-Introduction-Annamarie-Jagose/dp/0814742343/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/No-Future-Queer-Theory-Death/dp/0822333694/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Genealogy-Queer-Theory-American-Subjects/dp/1566397871/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Queer-Phenomenology-Orientations-Objects-Others-ebook/dp/B00EHNZ2FY/

Or the more academic version, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

NO FUTURE

This is probably one of the questions and arguments that gets me in a lot of trouble with people, primarily because I refuse to comply with what they consider to be the best decision. I've pulled a lot of my thinking on the subject by looking at Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. It's an excellent book, although a bit hard to read, about how for the queer individual, we should not have to think about the the future, through the image of a child. In a way, he calls it our queer ascension into the negative. Rather than putting my favorite quotes from the book, I'll give a very very simple gist of the book:

We have conditioned our language and perception of the world with the child in mind. The image of the child is what beckons us to think of the future, and therefore the things we do today, our productive labor, politics, economy is postured with the agreement that it's for the future... for the child. So, the refusal of kids, the refusal to be reproductive, is to open space for non-hetero, non-normative functions to take place. Edelman suggests that this will always be seen as a negative, so he argues that we should ascend to our call towards negativity. The book brings in examples from the movie Children of Man and Hitchcock movies to point out how our "logic" (or as many people in this thread have argued as "programmed") has been prescribed towards a reproductive bias.

I commend /u/jwhoch on your refusal and should you want more discussion about this, I can scan pages from the book that allow you to patiently and elegantly suggest why your choice to not want kids, is in fact just you playing out the role of homos. It really is a thrilling book to read, to see your choices be spelled out as not crazy or bitter, but actual sensibility is rewarding and extraordinary.