THE Prof Lee Edelman (Tufts) joins me to talk about one of my favourite topics: nothing. Lee’s extremely clever (and incredibly influential) work in queer studies has most recently led him to write an entire book about all the things that nothing can mean and what this has to do with queer life, film, and literature. Lee also talks about his previous work on reproductive futurism and No Future, about awesome queer films, about how knowledge as well as poetry come out of ‘nothing’, and about why queer people aren’t always queer people. Confused yet? Awesome! Let’s go on this queer journey together.

If you too like chatting about queer stuff, nothing, and everything, follow @queerlitpodcast on Instagram and Twitter.

Works by Lee mentioned:

Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (Stanford, 1987)
Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (Routledge, 1994)
No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke, 2004)
with Lauren Berlant. Sex, or the Unbearable (Duke, 2014)
Edelman, Lee. "Learning nothing: bad education." differences 28.1 (2017): 124-173.
Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing (Duke, Forthcoming December 2022)

Texts, people and concepts mentioned:

Badiou
Augé
Lena Mattheis “Silence, Absence, Non-Lieux.” Translocality in Contemporary City Novels (Palgrave, 2021)
Susan Stryker
Hannah Gadbsy’s Nanette
Catherine Malabou
Luce Irigaray
Julia Kristeva
Afropessimism
Ontology
W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” (1939)
Lacan
Ab-sense
Almodóvar’s La Mala Educación (Bad Education, 2004)
Haneke’s Funny Games (1997)
Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou (1997)
Slavoj Žižek
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Judith Butler
Miscegenation
Non-lieu
Plato’s atopia
Socrates
Reproductive futurism

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1.Make a list of all the things “nothing” can mean. How would you explain what Lee means when he talks about “nothing”?
2.What is Lee’s definition of queerness and/or queer literature?
3.Please look up Lee’s No Future and write a brief definition of “reproductive futurism”, a term he also uses in this episode.
4.In the episode, we speak about the Auden quotation “Poetry makes nothing happen”. What does this mean for you? Please also look up and read the whole poem (“In Memory of W.B. Yeats”) for context.
5.How can film, art, and literature help us understand all of this? Please give an example from the podcast or from your own experience.