This paper elaborates the consequences of Lee Edelman’s critique of “reproductive futurism” for reproductive politics and abortion activism —very briefly brought into proximity with queer politics by Edelman in No Future. The paper discusses the difference between Edelman’s reproductive futurism and the futurism of reproductive politics, and Jasbir Puar’s argument that Edelman may mean to oppose but ends up presupposing a collapse between sexuality and a “thin bio-political frame of reproduction.” I consider the female sinthomosexuals briefly mentioned in No Future, including figures representing a bad, cruel, or indifferent maternity and interrogate the language of “cost" of a number of forms of reproductive futurism.
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Penelope Deutscher is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University and co-director of its Critical Theory Cluster. Her publications include The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Ambiguity, Conversion, Resistance (Cambridge U.P., 2008), How to Read Derrida (Granta/Norton 2005), A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (Cornell U.P., 2002) and Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy (Routledge 1997). She co-edited (with Françoise Collin) Repenser le politique: l’apport du féminisme (Campagne première/Les Cahiers du Grif, 2004) and (with Kelly Oliver) Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman, (Cornell U.P., 1999). She has just completed Foucault's Children: The Reproduction of Biopolitics, forthcoming with Columbia University Press. She is currently working on From Analogy, a project on the analogical role of animals, children, slaves, servants, primitives, plant-life and sovereigns in the emergence of women's rights claims.