Empire's Calculus in the Queer and Now

In reflecting on the first decade of QED's significance, I want to return to its title as a provocation to think about the present and future. As the journal's co-founders theorize, the “QED” in the title is deliberately ambivalent, allowing for possibilities that are capacious and that signify differently across various contexts. The “Q” in the title “resonates queerly” if indeterminately, allowing it “to be playful, productive, propulsive.” But the title also gestures toward the journal's investment in the performative—i.e., “by the difference it seeks to manifest in the world.” “QED” thus plays on quod erat demonstrandu, the Latin phrase meaning “that which had to be demonstrated,” used most typically in mathematical contexts.1I am interested in sitting with the proximity of “queer” with the logics of mathematics in the journal's title. “QED” references the mathematical “stamp of consummation” that gestures towards the journal's investments in praxis. The conceptual framing here echoes Michael Warner's early theorizations on the elastic character of queer theorization that ranges from critiques of “racial and national fantasy” to an investment in theorizing reproductive politics and healthcare. Queer means “fighting about these issues all the time . . . always with consequences.”2 Indeed, the first decade of the journal is a testament to this capacious quality in which articles have grappled with queer politics in the contexts of national security, the health humanities, reproductive justice, surveillance studies, and critiques of imperialism.To think about the journal's first decade might appear at first to reflect on its formative years in the past, but it is perhaps, more urgently, to reflect about “queer” and its worldmaking manifestations in the present and future. I am interested here in mathematical rhetorics in the journal's title as it forces us to reckon with the elasticity of “queer” in Warner's thinking above. In what ways is this elasticity demonstratable? Answering this might also confront us with those moments when queer's stretchability meets its limits.As I write these observations, we are into a second year of genocide in Gaza. In this calculus of forever war, a different kind of mathematical formulation contravenes queer's demonstratable and worldmaking logics. Indeed, what has been more clearly demonstratable in the here and now is the instrumentalization of queerness to make forever war seem justified and even the only ethical option. I will not simply rehearse the important work on homonationalism and pinkwashing theorized by thinkers and activists such as Jasbir Puar, Nadia Elia, and Dean Spade (among many others). Instead, I want to briefly demonstrate the kind of thinking that QED has made possible in its call to manifest differently and queerly in the world.The journal's reference to quod erat demonstrandu, while drawing on mathematical logics, also departs from a conventional mathematical fait accompli—the idea that “queer” can simply and clearly be demonstrated toward a neat and conclusive politics of fulfillment. In this sense, the journal title holds on to investments in material praxis, but also reorients the mathematical by asking questions about how the material comes to matter—how what is “demonstratable” is shaped and molded by the unequal distribution of life chances. Perhaps the Q in QED can also signify differently—as a question mark, as a relentless querying of mathematical and taken for granted certitudes.The logics of mathematical certitude inhere in the performative vicinity of forever war. Take, for example, how there appears to be an almost universal consensus around the number of Palestinian lives lost since October 7, 2023 that is fixed at the 40,000 mark. A recent Lancet study concluded that this number has undercounted the deaths by 41 percent.3 This number appears to be frozen in perpetuity, defying material reality of the continued and everyday brutalities committed by the Israeli Occupying Forces, aided and sponsored by the U.S. government. At one level, the halting of this number is, of course, a form of genocide denialism and its interminable impacts. But at another level, the continued maiming and killing also has a calcifying effect—it simply renders the violence banal through its quotidian repetition. In The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes: “The human mind can only conceive of so much tragedy at once—and when lost lives spiral into the hundreds, then thousands, and then millions, when murder becomes a wide, seemingly unending mass, we lose our ability to see its victims as anything more than an abstract, almost theoretical, collection of lives” (116). In these words, Coates articulates what Ronak Kapadia has called a “queer calculus of forever war” (1)—a modality that renders tactile, that which has been deliberately obfuscated and abstracted by the logics of empire.Take for example, the subtle but ideologically insidious framing of empire and genocide via the equivocations of “conflict” in the Middle East, or the “Israel–Hamas war,” or anodyne declarations of “complicated” history. Such a flattening of power asymmetries manifests itself through yet another kind of calculus in which genocide must be recast via the logics of balanced mathematical equations. In empire's calculus, it becomes easy to equate the entire weight of the IOF's military strength, backed by Western imperialist powers, with, for example, a Palestinian civilian who hurls stones at soldiers. The task at hand for any scholar, activist, teacher, and policy maker who is invested in what QED calls “an emphasis on worldmaking praxis,” is to contravene these insidious frames, to brush up against claims of “complexity” in thinking about Palestine's history from the Nakba to the present moment. The calculus of forever war is deeply dependent on the smokescreen of “complicated” history, in which power imbalances are obscured through the euphemisms of conflict. Homonationalist fantasies function to buttress such a calculus. “Conflict,” and “complicated history” sit in the same ideological vicinity of Israel being the exceptionalist queer “mecca” or the “only democracy” in the Middle East. These bromides offer fodder to a calculus in which Israel's putatively democratic and queer-friendly values strengthen one side of the equation.What might it mean to contravene this calculus of forever war, and more crucially, what is the place of queer studies in such a project? Ronak Kapadia's Insurgent Aesthetics offers a useful cognitive and epistemological map for such an undertaking. He writes: “. . . a queer calculus of U.S. empire . . . makes intimate what is rendered distant, renders tactile what is made invisible, and unifies what is divided, thereby conjuring forms of embodied critique that can envision a collective world within and beyond the spaces of U.S. empire's perverse logics of global carcerality, security, and war.”4 QED's decade long investment in worldmaking practices resonates clearly (and queerly) with Kapadia's gesture toward a “collective world” beyond the U.S. empire.To queer the calculus of forever war is in keeping with QED's formative decade with its capacious projects that have linked queer studies with work on U.S. security studies, anti-militarism, and abolition. To reflect on the journal's past, as I suggested at the very outset, is also a future-oriented gesture: to think about what the journal has already “demonstrated,” is to also think about its future from our “present.” The “present,” as Lauren Berlant reminds us, is always a “temporal genre”—its ontological parameters can never be clearly delineated. When Berlant asks “when did ‘the present’ begin?,” they are not proposing to clearly define its parameters. Instead, they are urging us to think through the protractions of the present as an “extended now.”5 In this light, if October 7 is the temporal fulcrum that grounds (and overdetermines) “the present,” we must follow queer thinkers (like Berlant or Puar) who eschew the scandal of crisis exceptionalism and urge us to track the biopolitics of debility over time. This is another kind of queering of calculus—one that informs QED's past, and, one hopes, its present and future.In Awakening, a recent animated film (and part of Ground Zero, the anthology collection of twenty-two shorts directed by filmmakers from Gaza), director Mahdi Kreirah offers something like a queer calculus of forever war. Awakening's animation is composed entirely from marionette puppets made out of discarded and rusted food cans—its bare bones and barely held together form capturing the precarity of life under military attacks and bombings. The puppet animation stages the story of a father who wakes up from a coma caused by explosions in 2014’s attacks on Gaza. His waking moments are marked by confusion, since the year is 2024, and while his son is grown and a is decade older, Gaza is still under siege. The year 2014 seems indistinguishable from 2024, and 2024 seems indistinguishable from 1948. The father's waking moments are marked by confusion—has he woken up to the nakba? Is it still 2014? How can time toggle between radically changing in some ways but remaining so profoundly unaltered in others? The film's queer calculus puts Kapadia's theories into aesthetic form, making visceral the abstractions of forever war.QED's future must continue these investments in pushing for the capaciousness of queer as an analytic, but also acknowledging and articulating those moments where it fails or where it is instrumentalized and co-opted. It is only then that we can animate a queer calculus to think beyond the brutal and genocidal quagmires of forever war

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