Bad Education: Lee Edelman on the Fantasy of Social Order

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Lee Edelman, Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University, about the continued resonance and influence his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke UP, 2004) and about his newest work Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing (Duke UP, 2022). Edelman discusses his theorization of queerness as a constitutive exclusion and form of negation, his work with the late Lauren Berlant, psychoanalysis, and the ways in which emotions and affects -- pessimism and utopianism and their interplay -- animate and circulate in the political scene.