SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE POLITICS OF NEGATIVITY IN THE ANTI-SOCIAL TURN OF QUEER STUDIES AND BLACK AFROPESSIMISM

Abstract

This article explores the relationships between two critical perspectives on the politics of hegemony in the LGBT and anti-racist movements: the anti-social turn of queer theory and Afropessimism in black studies. Both theories share an interest in understanding negativity and its dissolving meaning as inherent to sex and/or race, as well as an anti-identitarian, non-relational and inarticulable vision of queerness and blackness. We will investigate the work of Lee Edelman, which is central to the anti-social turn in queer theory in its anti-reproductivism and anti-futurism, provoking some intersections with the afropessimism of Frank Wilderson III, who understands blackness as a structural position. of abjection and social death, irreducible to hegemonic and counter-hegemonic articulations. This dialogue leads us to the question of whether it is possible to find a generative dimension of politics, beyond the authors' refusal to follow this direction.