originally published here

Thanks to stalwart cluster members James Cummings and Audrey Verma, as well as first-time visitor Katy Lamb, for a fantastic cluster meeting on Weds 14th February. James, Audrey and Katy talked from their research projects about the vastly different capacities of a range of social actors to imagine alternative liveable futures through reflections on pasts that were narrated in terms of loss, pain – and also joy.

Gay lives and heteronormative futures in Hainan, China. James’s PhD research has identified really interesting contrasts between his participants’ narratives of excitement and joy when they talk about their pasts and current experiences in terms of entering into the gay scene – and narratives of uncertainty and absence when contemplating their personal futures. James talked about the ways in which biographical narratives are dominated by anticipated futures of heterosexual family life and children, and of a strong push to reproduce filial relationships to maintain a line of ancestry and to ensure ongoing care for ageing generations. Discursive alternatives to heteronormative and patrilineal visions were almost entirely absent, and an imaginable future without them was often coined in terms of absence and even death. James gave us a really powerful account of how sexual subjectivities are constituted in relation not just to desires and relationships in the present but by temporally ordered biographies.

Readings that informed James’s analysis include: Edelman, L. (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press; Hildebrandt, T. (2018). The One-Child Policy, Elder Care, and LGB Chinese: a Social Policy Explanation. Journal of Homosexuality; Wang, Q (2011) The Confucian Conception of Transcendence and Filial Piety. In Ruiping Fan (ed.), The Renaissance of Confucianism in Contemporary China. Springer. pp. 75–90