Feminist Studies

Theorizing Queer TemporaliTies a roundtable Discussion

Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher Nealon, Nguyen Tan Hoang

This roundtable took place via e-mail in March, April, and May of 2006. Par- ticipants wrote in clusters of three, sending their remarks back to me to be col-

lated and sent on to the next cluster for a total of three rounds of comments. I

edited the results for continuity, occasionally shifting a remark to an “earlier” or

“later” place in the conversation, cutting digressions, or adding transitions. Thus

the temporality, polyvocality, and virtual space of this production are quite dif-

ferent than a real-time, face-to-face roundtable would have been: perhaps this is

fitting for a special issue on queer temporalities. My deepest gratitude goes to all

the scholars and critics who participated and to J. Samaine Lockwood and Kara

Thompson for copyediting assistance. — Elizabeth Freeman

Elizabeth Freeman: To begin with, I’d like to ask how and why the rubric of tempo-

rality (however you understand that) became important to your thinking as a queer

theorist. What scholarly, activist, personal, political, or other concerns motivated

the turn toward time for you? What does this turn seem to open up conceptually,

institutionally, politically, or otherwise? Does it threaten to limit or shut down par-

ticular kinds of analysis or possibilities for social change?

Carolyn Dinshaw: Working primarily on a period in the distant past — the Middle

Ages — I have been concerned since day one of graduate school with the relation-

ship of past to present. “Obsessed” is more like it, really: I felt caught between the

GLQ 13:2 – 3

DOI 10.1215/10642684-2006-030

© 2007 by Duke University Press

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scholarly imperative, especially keen at Princeton, to view the past as other and

my sense that present concerns could usefully illuminate the past for us now. My

dissertation was basically an agon played out between these two positions; by the

time of my first book I had developed a moderate historicist view of the past that

allowed for connections with the present via discursive traditions like gender. But

I had also stowed away, not just as scholarly resource but also as token of affir-

mation and desire, Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,

which I — a lesbian graduate student in that desert of normativity, Princeton —

had bought as soon as it came out.

Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern

(Duke University Press, 1999), was my attempt to deal directly with such desire —

a queer desire for history. I was again trying to negotiate between alteritists (social

constructionists) and those who appealed to transhistorical constants of some sort

(essentialists), but this time in my analyses I found that even Foucault, the inspi-

ration of social constructionists, connected affectively with the past. I focused on

the possibility of touching across time, collapsing time through affective contact

between marginalized people now and then, and I suggested that with such queer

historical touches we could form communities across time.

This refusal of linear historicism has freed me to think further about mul-

tiple temporalities in the present. Postcolonial historians have been most influen-

tial in this process, and the turn toward temporality has been thrilling: it opens

the way for other modes of consciousness to be considered seriously — those of

ghosts, for example, and mystics. But the condition of heterogeneous temporali-

ties can be exploited for destruction as well as expansion: Ernst Bloch recounts

chillingly the Nazis’ deployment of temporal asynchrony in recruiting Germans

who felt backward in the face of an alien modernity.1 So we must take seriously

temporality’s tremendous social and political force.

Christopher Nealon: My book is Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emo-

tion before Stonewall (Duke University Press, 2001). I came to graduate school at

Cornell in the early 1990s, the moment of the rise of queer theory in the academy.

I’d been working as a reporter at Gay Community News, in Boston, where I’d been

writing about what turned out to be the heyday of ACT UP’s activism; this kept

in my mind the idea that the “subjecthood” of social movements was at least as

interesting as the vicissitudes of the individual, not least because of the ways that

social movements could generate very mobile and responsive kinds of collectivity

to meet assault and crisis.

Later, working in the human sexuality library at Cornell, I became inter-

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Theorizing Queer TemporaliTies  179

ested in the ways that lesbian and gay writers who lived before the time of a social

movement were dreaming of collectivities, and forms of participation in History-

with-a-capital-H, that they might never, themselves, experience. I was struck by the

strangeness of witnessing that dreamed-of collectivity realized long after the fact,

in the archive: a history of mutually isolated individuals, dreaming similar dreams,

arrayed before me in the aftermath of collective struggles and new identities.

This two-part sense of queer sodality — fluid in the present, expectant

in the past — led me to write about “historical emotion.” That phrase seemed to

name both those earlier dreams of belonging to “History” and the feeling a latter-

day queer subject might have reading the archive of those dreams.

I’m more attached to “history,” then, than “temporality” or “time,” as a

keyword, though I understand that they tangle together.

Annamarie Jagose: I’d like to seem a good deal more scholarly but, for a long

while when I was working on what turned out to be Inconsequence: Lesbian Rep-

resentation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Cornell University Press, 2002), I

didn’t know that I was writing about temporality at all: I thought I was writing a

book about the persistent problem of lesbian representation and what I considered

the shortcomings of various corrective attempts, in popular culture but also in

activist and academic circles, to bring the lesbian into the field of vision. But my

thinking about the visibility-invisibility dialectic in relation to the figure of the

lesbian delivered me to a clutch of terms — sequence, derivation, retrospection,

belatedness — that had more to say about temporality than representation per se.

I started thinking about lesbian “visibility” not as a solution to but as a

variant of lesbian “invisibility”: both can be seen as the historical effects of a con-

tradictory but tightly worked network of counterweighted relations among mascu-

linity, femininity, heterosexuality, and homosexuality that is internal to the mod-

ern sex/gender system. Rather than try to isolate the distinctive outlines of lesbian

difference, I preferred to think about the productive possibilities of lesbian deriva-

tion. Using a fairly eclectic archive — influential sexological and psychoanalytic

texts but also a lurid photo-essay of a lesbian sexual encounter inserted in the

1970s reissue of a popular 1950s pulp sexology title; canonic and popular lit-

erature from Little Dorrit to Rebecca; the erotically surreal diaries of Anne Lister

(1791 – 1840) and their contemporary critical reception — I traced the processes

whereby the cultural production of lesbianism as imitative and second-best might

usefully be seen as a defense against the difficult knowledge that all categories of

sexual registration are necessarily derivative, secondary, and belated.

Roderick A. Ferguson: In Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique

(University of Minnesota Press, 2003), I wanted to extend critiques of histori-

cism from Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd’s introduction to The Politics of Culture in

the Shadow of Capital and from Walter Benjamin’s “Thesis on the Philosophy of

History.”2 Specifically, I wanted to take the critique of progress as constitutive

of Western epistemology and rationality and apply that to sociology and its dis-

courses about African American sexuality, discourses that are foundational for

how we understand American citizenship. In this way, the sociological figures of

the unwed mother, the priapic black heterosexual male, and the working-class

homosexual became really important as illustrations of figures outside the rational

time of capital, nation, and family. Here, you can probably also see my debt to

Max Weber.

I also wanted to use time in a Derridean sense. I tried to think about Afri-

can American culture, capital, sociology, and black nonheteronormative forma-

tions as different types of palimpsests with residues of earlier discourses and his-

tories written on them. For instance, I began the introduction of Aberrations with

the transgendered prostitute from Tongues Untied (dir. Marlon Riggs, USA; 1989)

to open a discussion about the racialized and sexualized itineraries of capital in

nineteenth-century Britain, which have changed radically, of course, in the con-

temporary moment, but persist. Using time in this way was also a means for under-

mining a certain identitarian expectation — that queer of color critique and the

analysis of black nonheteronormative formations be a “history of a people.”

Recently, I’ve tried to project a theory of time into other geopolitical his-

tories of racialized sexuality. I’ve tried to theorize this historical and geopolitical

heterogeneity in ways that directly intervene into queer studies. If we think of

the past and the present, for instance, as made up of heterogeneous sexual for-

mations, part of that heterogeneity is derived from the various national histories

that constitute those sexual formations. In doing this work, I wanted to promote

the kaleidoscopic qualities of sexuality so that the question of sexuality for racial

formations means interrogating the historicity of the various shards that make up

those formations. Hence I’ve tried to make the question of time simultaneous with

the question of historical space and its diversity.

Lee Edelman: Opening this conversation with a series of questions presupposing a “turn toward time” already establishes as our central concern not the movement

toward time but of it: the motionless “movement” of historical procession obedient

to origins, intentions, and ends whose authority rules over all. And so we have the

familiar demand for narrative accountings of “how and why,” for self-conscious

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Theorizing Queer TemporaliTies  181

avowals of motivation, for strategic weighings of what’s opened up in relation to

what’s shut down. Implicit throughout are two assumptions: time is historical by

“nature” and history demands to be understood in historicizing terms. But what

if time’s collapse into history is symptomatic, not historical? What if framing this

conversation in terms of a “turn toward time” preemptively reinforces the consen-

sus that bathes the petrified river of history in the illusion of constant fluency?

What if that very framing repeats the structuring of social reality that establishes

heteronormativity as the guardian of temporal (re)production? These questions

shape my recent book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke Uni-

versity Press, 2004), which suggests that the logic of repetition, associated with

the death drive, though projectively mapped onto those read as queers, informs as

well the insistence on history and on reproductive futurism that’s posited over and

against them.

I’m less interested, then, in the “turn toward time” than in the turning

or troping by which we’re obliged to keeping turning time into history. Whether

polyphonous or univocal, history, thus ontologized, displaces the epistemologi-

cal impasse, the aporia of relationality, the nonidentity of things, by offering the

promise of sequence as the royal road to consequence. Meaning thus hangs in the

balance — a meaning that time, as the medium of its advent, defers while affirm-

ing its constant approach, but a meaning utterly undone by the queer who figures

its refusal. This is the truth-event, as Badiou might say, that makes all subjects

queer: that we aren’t, in fact, subjects of history constrained by the death-in-life of

futurism and its illusion of productivity. We’re subjects, instead, of the real, of the

drive, of the encounter with futurism’s emptiness, with negativity’s life-in-death.

The universality proclaimed by queerness lies in identifying the subject with just

this repetitive performance of a death drive, with what’s, quite literally, unbecom-

ing, and so in exploding the subject of knowledge immured in stone by the “turn

toward time.”

Judith Halberstam: I would like to be able to attribute my turn to temporality to

a rigorous reading of Freud, Marx, or Hegel, or better still Kant, or to a deep and

powerful reading of queer history, but in fact most of my ideas come to me in less

recognizably scholarly ways. A few occasions come to mind when I try to recollect

why I ever thought temporality might be important: I am in a drag king club at

2:00 a.m. and the performances are really bad, and some kid comes onstage and

just rips an amazing performance of Elvis or Eminem or Michael Jackson and the

people in the club recognize why they are here, in this place at this time, engaged

in activities that probably seem pointless to people stranded in hetero temporali-

ties. Or, I am in grammar school in England in the 1970s, and in assembly hall

the headmistress wants to let the girls know that it is our responsibility to dress

appropriately so as not to “incite” the male teachers to regrettable actions. This,

she says, will be good training for us, since we are here to prepare ourselves for

marriage and family. I hear a loud voice in my head saying fuck family, fuck mar-

riage, fuck the male teachers, this is not my life, that will not be my time line.

Queer time for me is the dark nightclub, the perverse turn away from the narra-

tive coherence of adolescence – early adulthood – marriage – reproduction – child

rearing – retirement – death, the embrace of late childhood in place of early adult-

hood or immaturity in place of responsibility. It is a theory of queerness as a way

of being in the world and a critique of the careful social scripts that usher even the

most queer among us through major markers of individual development and into

normativity.

Someone recently said to me of my new book, In a Queer Time and Place:

Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York University Press, 2005), “You

are so ambitious to be taking on time and space.” Of course, being the counterca-

nonical creature that I am, I never thought of my project in those terms. I certainly

did not ever consider surveying the philosophical literature on time and space,

even though I did glance at postmodern geography, and it would be hard to locate

my book in relation to any set of “big questions” about temporality and spatiality.

People like to say of their work that “this is part of a much larger project,” but I

like to imagine that my work is “part of a much smaller project,” one that asks lit-

tle questions, settles for less than grandiose answers, speculates without evidence,

and finds insights in eccentric and unrepresentative archives. I think through the

thematics of time and space in my book by consciously and deliberately privileg-

ing two rubrics: the transgender body and subcultural spaces. These rubrics have

their own logics, their own contradictory relations to temporality, and their own sets

of insights about embodiment, counterhegemonic practices and subjugated knowl-

edges. Queer time, in that it shifts our attentions away from discrete bodies perform-

ing their desires, offers an alternative framework for the theorization of disquali-

fied and anticanonical knowledges of queer practices. And it lets you say that going

to queer clubs and watching children’s film constitutes your research project . . .

but it doesn’t attract grant or research money . . . for that you need to promote mar-

riage and having kids and saving gay and lesbian teens from suicide . . . which

will be my next project . . .

Nguyen Tan Hoang: With Erica Chough, I co-curated Pack-Switch on Queer

Time, a film-video program for MIX: The New York Queer Experimental Media

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Theorizing Queer TemporaliTies  183

festival in April 2005. The catalyst for this program was the same-sex marriage

ceremonies that took place with great fanfare at San Francisco City Hall the previ-

ous year. Erica and I wanted to intervene in the public discussion around gay mar-

riage and the mainstreaming of queer culture. As videomakers, we also wanted to

contest the increasing corporatization of queer film festivals, which has resulted

in the further marginalization of “difficult,” experimental work that refuses the

model of white-boy-looking-for-love-in-West-Hollywood-narrative-feature. The

works we included were Avant j’étais triste (dir. Jean-Gabriel Périot, France; 2002);

Skip (dir. Felix Chang and Marnee Meyer, USA; 2005); Loverfilm — An Uncontrolled

Dispersion of Information (dir. Michael Brynntrup, Germany; 1996); A Horse, a Fili-

pino, Two Women, a Soldier, and Two Officers (dir. Nguyen Tan Hoang, USA; 2005);

The Pool (dir. Sara Jordenö, Sweden/USA; 2004); Clay (A Would-Be Ghost Town)

(dir. Sara Mithra, USA; 2005); School Boy Art (dir. Erica Chough, USA; 2004); and

To Hold a Heart (dir. Michael Wallin, USA; 2005).

A central question in Pack-Switch — and my interest in queer temporal-

ity broadly — is how queer experience gets transmitted from one generation to

the next, a process that exceeds, in innovative ways, the heterosexual kinship/

reproductive model. Among many paths that delineate “queer time,” two of the

most generative for me include (1) retracing a young person’s secretive and circu-

itous routes to queer culture (through music, art, literature, popular culture) and

(2) revisiting the various scenes of queer pedagogy (not only in the classroom and

library but also in the park, street, bar, basement, kitchen, chat room, bedroom).

An example of the first practice is the inclusion of found footage in many of my

videos. This strategy bespeaks a critical desire to mine traces of queer Asian

presence in images made for other times and places (e.g., 1970s gay pornography,

newsreel footage of Vietnamese boat people, or a Hollywood flop like Reflections

in a Golden Eye [dir. John Huston, USA; 1967]). At the same time, using found

footage also registers my intense pleasure in reassembling and recirculating past

images to make them stand in as “evidence” for my present-day queer specula-

tion. Judith’s comments concerning the need to invert or displace linear hetero

time lines resonate deeply with me. A sense of belatedness marks the ways in

which I have arrived at the present: as a refugee who couldn’t get to the “final

destination,” America, soon enough; a gay man who came out after the advent of

AIDS (again, too late, having missed the 1970s Fire Island orgies); an artist who is

always “emerging”; an academic who doesn’t want to settle down in any one disci-

pline. Instead of bemoaning belatedness as an index of, say, arrested development

or lack of responsibility, perhaps we can conceptualize it as a spatial movement

out of the mainstream/into the margins. There is also a homonormative time line.

We pity those who come out late in life, do not find a long-term partner before they

lose their looks, or continue to hit the bars when they are the bartender’s father’s

age. We create our own temporal normativity outside the heteronormative family.

Carla Freccero: In Queer/Early/Modern (Duke University Press, 2006), both queer

and time are at issue. In that book, I sought to disrupt the historicist periodicity of

early modern studies as it is generally thought and practiced, on the one hand, and

to dislodge the remnants of substantivizing claims made by “queer,” on the other.

The first half of the book demonstrates the queerness of subjectivity at the heart of

the Western lyric tradition thought to instantiate heterosexual love; refutes histori-

cist taxonomies of Western homosexual identity; and tracks the queerly heteronor-

mativizing imperatives of early French nation-state formation by analyzing texts

that foreground subjectivity’s excess, relative to the normativizing claims made in

its name, and that queer time by resisting reproductive futurity, as Lee Edelman

calls it, or telos itself. The second half of the book, a work of mourning and thus a

working through, proposes queer spectrality as a phantasmic relation to historic-

ity that could account for the affective force of the past in the present, of a desire

issuing from another time and placing a demand on the present in the form of an

ethical imperative.

I do not know if I have “turned toward” time, if time is something to which

one can turn; it is easier for me to think of turning away from not time exactly, but

its passing certainly.

I often work on the dead, and as time goes by I have begun to think of

myself as a future dead person writing myself out of my time while time is run-

ning out. Before, there was always now (mostly there was “now!”) or (back) then,

or someday, and then it seemed like the deictics were just that, temporal markers

relative to a context. At a certain point (then? now?), they became more absolute:

past, present, and future became substantive conditions sometimes related to me

and sometimes not. I began to calibrate time; it became something to have or not

to have, and something that could run out, something I could not watch pass, but

that passed anyway. I keep trying to re-turn, but like that angel, I keep getting

blown backward, away from or toward. This is my experience of the limit (a limit)

to thinking through temporality.