 As Gayle Rubin wrote in 1984, it is precisely at times such as these when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality. So I thought in light of this and in the midst of our current impending nuclear crisis, the never-ending debate about marriage equality seems a fitting topic to apply the theoretical questions I have been exploring and that I'd like to talk to you about today about whether we can and should and indeed how we should hope for a better world. So I'm really applying this theory to this specific topic. So the story goes, it gets better. This is a common refrain of LGBTIQ youth services in Australia. It gets better refers to the promise that when you leave school, you won't have to deal with bullies any longer. You'll be free to live your life as a happy LGBTIQ person. Now for many of us, this isn't totally wrong. Leaving the social intensity of many different institutions that we're growing up in as a child and becoming independent from family units can mean that we're able to find new communities of acceptance. But how cruel might this hopeful promise be when bigotry can be canvassed as state-sanctioned legitimate debate as we are seeing now? When homophobic and transphobic ideas are not originating from the schoolyard itself, as we know people aged 15 to 24 are the most avid supporters of marriage equality, but are being shown on television and receiving these leaflets in the mail in my suburb in Melbourne, they're being shown these things on television during the nightly news. So perhaps the promise to our children that it gets better is a cruel one. As Lauren Ballant writes, when we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make us and to make possible for us. And for the yes campaign, yes to marriage equality, marriage equality has become the object of desire that contains within it a cluster of promises, a hope about what will get better and for whom. But cruel is the optimism of the segments of the yes campaign that refuse to confront the homophobia and transphobia emerging in the debate and instead seek to enhance in minds on the basis of respectability, normality and the idea that love is indeed love. As Ballant argues, it is a cruel optimism that operates when we live with toxic conditions of the present, laboring under the view that the future will somehow deliver something better. And indeed it is cruelly optimistic to imagine what the future will entail if we do not question the social constitution of futurity in the first instance. As Lee Adelman argues, it is the child that acts as the pervasive cultural emblem of the future, the ultimate signifier of the hope of tomorrow. Adelman explains that while the left operates under a liberalism that sees the elasticity of this signifier extend, so children can still signify the future despite queer family arrangements, conservatives cling to a more intense vision of social rupture that must preserve such signifiers at all costs. The child is not only a symbol of a future horizon but also a concretely heterosexual future. And I think we could add a white colonial future where heterosexuality is to reproduction, is to the child, is to the future operating in a circular and spectacular logic. And this is precisely what we have seen playing out for over a decade, albeit more sharply in recent times in the marriage equality debate. While the right have repeated the refrain, think of the children. The left, too, have taken up this mantle constantly leaning on statistics about the welfare of queer youth or children from queer families in order to make a point of the utter sameness of the child under queer circumstances. In this envisioning the queer child doesn't queer the future, rather the queerness of the child is contained in order to suggest that there is very little threat, only a slight extension to the more conservative vision. As the recent get up ad for marriage equality suggests, in the words of the mother in the heterosexual nuclear family unit, kids learn their values at home from their parents. That's why we'll vote yes in the upcoming marriage equality vote. And if she asks her daughter, we'll tell her it's about fairness and kindness. In this ad there is the removal of the threat of queering of the child who is represented as safe from having to learn about sexuality or gender diversity because she learns her values from the family rather than through programs like safe schools. We learn in this ad that marriage equality is no challenge to the social logic of heterosexual normativity. This is the vision of transformation under marriage equality, total preservation of the existing social order. But Adelman suggests a different approach to this logic is possible. Adelman writes, fuck the social order and the figural children paraded before us as its terroristic emblem, fuck Annie, fuck the way from Les Mis, fuck the poor innocent kid on the net, fuck laws both with capital Ls and with small fuck the whole network of symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. Adelman utterly refuses the sweetness of hope and investment in a future and instead endorses a queer negativity soaked in the bitterness of the present. Now, we might wonder about the astringency of Adelman's anti-social thesis in light of the fact that attachment to same-sex marriage is currently being enacted by many as a mode of survival. Many have thrown themselves into the fight for a yes campaign precisely in order to assist a striving toward a getting better. But we might also question the limits of Adelman's radical presentism and anti-futurity and wonder if a different kind of future envisioning might be possible without a cruel investment in a sense of inevitable progress. As some have pointed out, Adelman reduces a version of the future to the version of the future. More radical imaginings of opening up spaces of possibility for queer lives are rendered as problematic as hegemonic dominant visions of how the future ought to be conserved. So could there be a glimmer of a different set of possibilities, a transformed social order and another logic to be found, rather than a cruel and unrupturing hope, can a queer hope be possible? As Jose Esteban Munoz suggests, queerness is a longing that propels us onward beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. And here Munoz suggests that we might adopt a concrete utopian imagining where the hopes of the collective are connected to real lived struggle in the historical present. In other words, we might have educated hope. In contrast to Adelman, Munoz insists on the importance of hope as a critical tool where hope is spawned of a critical investment in utopia, profoundly resistant to the stullifying temporal logic of a broken down present. However, as Teresa de Laredes also reminds us, we must read Adelman's point about negativity, not as the call to negativity being the political act, but rather the reflection of a condition of society, the death drive at the heart of it all, where there is always the attempt to overcome and resolve this negativity with positivity and hope. Adelman's imagining is heterotopic as he reflects the death drive back at us, but argues against its resolution. Similarly, Anne Spetkovich's work extends this heterotopic view of society to get to the depression at the heart of things, that is not the negativity and negation of life, but more specifically the feelings that are part and parcel of occupying this world. As feminists have long argued, the personal is political, and we might also extend this to say that we feel politics at the level of the body. Spetkovich argues that effective states like depression can be political, because while they can be antisocial in a literal way through withdrawal, there is also the possibility that a new sociality may form through making public these effective states. But in making the negativity at the heart of things public rather than private, we can also become targeted as the problem, rather than merely pointing out the problem, as Sarah Ahmed illustrates the figure of the feminist killjoy, who offers critique and anger can be seen as the source of unhappiness. Does the feminist kill other people's joy by pointing out moments of sexism, she says, or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced or negated under public signs of joy? In other words, unveiling already circulating but hidden negativity is risky business. While we solely focus on concepts like fairness and kindness, positivity, good stories, the good homosexual, the unqueer, queer child, the bad feelings at the heart of the marriage equality debate remain occluded and politically impotent. To fail to recognise and name the homophobia and transphobia that are proliferating under conservative discussions in the marriage equality debate is to inadvertently reiterate a narrative of a heteronormative future where it gets better. To engage in a queer hopefulness then is not to shy away from negativity, but rather is to embrace the possible world that it reveals to us. It is only in confronting those elements of the present that we would rather deny, from which a truly utopian vision might emerge. In this case, my educated hope is that we will have a marriage equality debate that confronts homophobia and transphobia, that embraces gender and sexual diversity, and that makes space for the LGBTIQ community well beyond the question of marriage. Thank you.