Lee Edelman's No Future

 A couple of day's ago I stumbled on Lee Edelmans book No Future: Queer Theory and the death drive. This book is originally formulated as a way to create queer contention towards current society, but what I came to think about was it usage of archetypes. In Eldemans book it is clear that politics often revolves around a concept of the Child, which is an archetype that is considered as pure and innocent. Furthermore, the Child also represents the idea of societies future, since it eventually is our children that will pave the way for society. According to Edelman this creates a problem in politics, were no sane person can claim to not act on the interest of the Child, since this would also mean not acting on the interest of the future. 

Even though this only a passage in Edelmans writing, it came to be quite interesting in regard to my previous research on children and childhood. When writing my dissertation I was rather fond of a theoretical concept such as "the swede" or "mandatory swedishness", which I however had to remove eventually. In this regard I thought about creating an abstraction similar to that of Edelmans the Child, which represented to fully correct swede against whom all other persons or groups were measured against. Similar to the writing of for instance Robert McRuers idea of able-bodiness and the normate, the idea was here to create a subject out of what other subjects were not. 

This an idea that I have redevloped in a research application. What I however suspect is that this an idea that for some reasons might not be well received within the larger historical community. The reasons for this is many-foldth. One of them being that whilst history to a large degree is a very open discipline when it comes to theory and method (that is one of the things I love about), the subject is also deeply suspicious of going against the standard procedure of source criticism. It is, for many historians, perfectly fine to adress what contention against the norms say about unspoken norms, which often have been highlighted within post-structuralist or queer studies. Yet, all of these met with some resistance and this was possibly also due to that it was invoked from the field of literature. Let's not forget that it was only some decades ago that work of fictions were allowed into the warmth of the history, largely due to history being seperated from studying myth in the late 20th century. 

                                         Making the difference, restroom symbols as examples of ablebodiness 

Despite all this, I still believe that archetypes such as the Child or the Normate is worth of earnest consideration. Not only as an analytical tool for carrying out studies on for instance norms of sexuality, childhood or able-bodiness but also as a way to actually make our studies comprehensible for the further public. Only time will tell, and one of the exciting things with being a historian by trade is that whilst we know alot about the past, the future is yet to be written. 

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