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10.1057/9780230307087 - Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture, Edited by Ben Davies and Jana Funke
Sex, Gender and Time in
Fiction and Culture
10.1057/9780230307087 - Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture, Edited by Ben Davies and Jana Funke
Selection and editorial matter © Ben Davies and Jana Funke 2011
Individual chapters © contributors 2011
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
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save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
10.1057/9780230307087 - Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture, Edited by Ben Davies and Jana Funke
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Notes on Contributors ix
10.1057/9780230307087 - Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture, Edited by Ben Davies and Jana Funke
vi Contents
Index 220
10.1057/9780230307087 - Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture, Edited by Ben Davies and Jana Funke
List of Illustrations
vii
10.1057/9780230307087 - Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture, Edited by Ben Davies and Jana Funke
Acknowledgements
viii
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Notes on Contributors
ix
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x Notes on Contributors
10.1057/9780230307087 - Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture, Edited by Ben Davies and Jana Funke
Notes on Contributors xi
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1
Introduction: Sexual Temporalities1
Based on a short story by Noël Coward, the British film Brief Encounter
(1945) depicts the thwarted affair between housewife mother Laura
Jesson and married doctor Alec Harvey, whom she meets by chance on
a train. The film is predominantly set in trains and train stations, so that
the relationship develops against a backdrop of clocks, schedules and
timetables. The control time exerts over the lives of the protagonists
is emphasized in the still (Figure 1) by the large, bright station clock,
which looms over Laura. The regulated temporality of trains and sta-
tions reinforces the idea that Laura and Alec are on the verge of deviat-
ing from the ordered, routine time line of heterosexual and marital life.
The play with temporal order is emphasized by the structure of the nar-
rative itself, which opens with the end of Laura and Alec’s relationship.
The lovers board separate trains, which take them back to their respec-
tive family lives. Laura is embedded in heteronormative time – she has
boarded the train home to her husband and children. But she is also
out of time by virtue of her aberrant desire for a married man. This
distance from the temporal trajectory of her regulated, married life is
reinforced when she withdraws from the overly talkative acquaintance
travelling with her on the train by closing her eyes and pretending to
be asleep. Conveyed through voiceover, she reiterates her desire (‘I wish,
I wish’) and imaginatively enters a different, parallel time while moving
along the parallel, binary lines of the train tracks. Laura’s experience
of sexuality and time encourages us to question the theoretical binary
of being in or out of time at the same time as it exposes the potential
queerness of supposedly straight sexual relations.
Focusing on sexualities, here understood as the nexus of physical
sex and gender as well as sexual object choice and erotic relations, the
essays in this collection seek to investigate temporal experience. By
1
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Introduction: Sexual Temporalities 5
the competing insurance companies who are ‘behind the time’ in their
failure to include the LGBT community. At the same time, the buyer is
invited to identify with the gay male couple, which implies that they
cannot fully be understood in present terms and have to turn to the past
to find a figure of identification. Indeed, the advertisement suggests that
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Introduction: Sexual Temporalities 7
for certain subjects in certain social locations. For others, that place
of pure critique might constitute epistemological self-destruction,
and so I would argue for a kind of counterintuitive critique, one that
works against the grain of the true, the good, and the right but one
that nonetheless refuses to make a new orthodoxy out of negativity.
(Dinshaw, Edelman et al., 2007, p. 194)
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Introduction: Sexual Temporalities 9
this can’t last … this misery can’t last … nothing lasts really, not
happiness nor despair, not even life lasts very long. There’ll come a
time in the future when I shan’t mind about this anymore. When
I can look back and say quite peacefully and cheerfully how silly
I was. But no, no, I don’t want that time to come ever. I want to
remember every minute. Always. Always to the end of my days.
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Introduction: Sexual Temporalities 15
Notes
1. We would like to thank Bettina Bildhauer and Sarah Dillon for their invalu-
able comments and suggestions about this introduction.
2. The ‘Queer Temporalities’ special edition of GLQ (2007) edited by Elizabeth
Freeman was the first collective response to the growing interest in the topic.
The edition provides a diverse and highly original exploration of queer time
understood as a set of non-normative temporalities. Two important issues
raised, but not discussed exhaustively, in the GLQ edition are the relationship
between straight time and queer time on the one hand, and the relationship
between heterosexual sexualities and queer time on the other. The present
volume seeks to investigate further these problematics.
3. See Freeman’s ‘Introduction’ to the special edition of GLQ (2007) for an
insightful overview of the genealogical origins of the ‘turn to time’.
4. The advertisement was part of a series of ‘gay friendly’ advertisements by
Progressive, which were, for instance, published in the US LGBT magazine The
Advocate.
Works Cited
Boellstorff, T. (2007) ‘When Marriage Falls: Queer Coincidences in Straight Time’,
GLQ, 13(2/3), 227–48.
Brief Encounter (1945) Directed by D. Lean (UK: Eagle-Lion).
Butler, J. (2004) Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge).
Derrida, J. (1995) Points – Interviews 1974–1994 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press).
Dinshaw, C. (1999) Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and
Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
Dinshaw, C., Edelman, L., et al. (2007) ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities:
A Roundtable Discussion’, GLQ, 13(2/3), 177–95.
Edelman, L. (2007) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC and
London: Duke University Press).
Freeman, E. (2000) ‘Packing History: Count(er)ing Generations’, New Literary
History, 31(4), 727–44.
Freeman, E. (2007) ‘Introduction’, GLQ, 13(2/3), 159–76.
Halberstam, J. (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural
Lives (New York: New York University Press).
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16 Ben Davies and Jana Funke
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Section 1
Backwards and Forwards:
Negotiating History and Futurity
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2
Queer Medieval Time in Hamlet
(1921)
At the moment, queer studies are much concerned with time. Rather
than claim that gay people experience time differently, a surge of recent
sophisticated theories of ‘queer time’ are uncovering the ‘queerness’,
the sexual and temporal instability, inherent in all concepts of straight
or linear time. There is clearly more than a contingent link between
straight sexuality and the idea that time flows linearly from one moment
to the next. This linear conception of time is so deeply entrenched that
even people working in queer studies often still take it for granted
rather than rethink it or explain its links to sexuality. As Tom Boellstorff
observes:
19
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20 Bettina Bildhauer
and to help to rethink the concept of linear time through a double chal-
lenge to heteronormativity and modernity.
This chapter aims to rework our understanding of linear time by bring-
ing into play the premodern, because the discourse of modernity relies on
setting itself apart from the premodern in a linear narrative of progress.
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22 Bettina Bildhauer
even with its frequent use of irises (black masks that frame the image and
are opened or closed slowly to fade in or out of a scene, often leaving
the screen blank). The plot is further interrupted by being separated
into a prelude and six acts, each of which is introduced by a title card
announcing its beginning and wrapped up by a title card announcing
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24 Bettina Bildhauer
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Queer Medieval Time in Hamlet (1921) 25
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26 Bettina Bildhauer
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28 Bettina Bildhauer
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Queer Medieval Time in Hamlet (1921) 29
The crown is lost!’ Hamlet continues to be both too slow (in his killing
of Claudius and Laertes) and too hasty (in his killing of Polonius and his
rushing ahead of Fortinbras from Norway) to become king. Instead, he
unmasks the crown as the status symbol it is: in his feigned madness, he
forms a crown from clay and squashes it, explaining to Claudius that it
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30 Bettina Bildhauer
Finally, the fourth way in which linear time and heteronormativity are
based on each other is the suppression of the melancholic standstill
underneath the ostensibly straight, linear time of gender assumption.
Freud famously postulated that in the Oedipal drama, a boy has to
relinquish his mother as a love object. But as Butler points out, Freud
does not even mention that the boy also has to renounce his father as
a same-sex love object. In Butler’s analysis, this entirely unacknowl-
edged lost same-sex love object is incorporated into the body to create
the boy’s masculinity. This happens because the loss of the father is
an unconscious loss. In psychoanalytic theory, any lost love object
is initially incorporated into the body (through appropriating the
loved one’s clothes, gestures and bodily habits). In a normal process of
mourning, the bereaved person would eventually recognize the loss as
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such, realize that the incorporation was merely symbolic and gradually
expel the lost object through talking. But due to the taboo on homosex-
uality, the loss of the same-sex love object remains totally unconscious
and the lost object is literally sustained in the body rather than expelled;
the bereaved person – everyone – remains stuck in what Butler calls a
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34 Bettina Bildhauer
One could speculate about the links between on the one hand a notion
of time (and of gender roles and sexual behaviour) that was challenged
by the rapid modernization of German society during this period, and
on the other hand the development of film technology that could
represent time in non-linear ways ever more impressively.16 However,
Notes
1. On medieval time as static see, for example, Gurevich (1992, pp. 65–89),
Le Goff (1988, pp. 165–94) and, in the context of medieval film, de la Bretèque
(2004, pp. 47–8); more critically, Haskins (1927, especially p. 4) and Oexle
(1994).
2. See also Boellstorff (2007), Freccero’s (2006) argument that queerness and
medievalism often come together and Kelly and Pugh’s (2009) observation
that they particularly do so in cinema.
3. For queer readings of Hamlet, see, for example, Chedgzoy (1995) and Burt
(1998); on delay and disjointed temporality in Hamlet, see, for example,
Turner (1971), Greenblatt (2002) and Sedinger (2007).
4. On Butler’s analysis of gender as melancholic incorporation of one’s same-
sex parents, and how this raises the issue of the anachronism of emulating a
previous generation’s gender performance, see Freeman (2000).
5. On Hamlet in silent film, see Ball (1968), Rothwell (2002) and Buchanan
(2009); on female Hamlets, see Howard (2007). There was also a queer and
cross-dressing tradition in Weimar German cinema, about which see Kuzniar
(2000, especially pp. 21–56) and Dyer (2003, especially pp. 23–62).
6. On the film’s use of Vining, see Thompson (1997). Ernest Jones (1948) used
Hamlet as a model for the Oedipal drama. See also Chedgzoy (1995, pp. 34–6).
7. Shakespeare is seen rarely as a continuator of this medieval heritage, but more
often as a pioneer of the new early modern era of the Renaissance. When
Nielsen’s Hamlet claims to be based on the medieval tales, it reorganizes the
sequence of preliminary sources, ‘original’ and ingenious Shakespeare and
derivative adaptation. On medievalist settings in other Hamlet performances,
see Cook (2009). Buchanan (2009, pp. 235–6) and Howard (2007, pp. 148
and 155) view Hamlet as a modern figure removed from the period setting,
adding another layer of anachronism. Starks (2002) argues that Hamlet’s
double gender marks a return of the repressed past – not that of the Middle
Ages but the First World War.
8. J. Lawrence Guntner (1998, pp. 96–7) points out that throughout the film
the innocent, conciliatory world of youth to which Hamlet, Horatio and
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young Fortinbras belong is portrayed much more positively than the violent,
lustful adult world into which Hamlet is forced and which kills him.
9. On the gendering of this and other spaces in this film, see Seidl (2002).
10. For a positive reading of the film and its ending, see Petro (1989, pp. 153–60),
Thompson (1997, p. 222) and Howard (2007, especially p. 155). Lawrence
Dawson (1992/3) doubts the film’s liberating potential.
Works Cited
Ball, R. H. (1968) Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange Eventful History (London:
Allen & Unwin).
Bildhauer, B. (2008) ‘Mourning and Violence: Kriemhild’s Incorporated Memory’,
in H. Fronius and A. Linton (eds), Women and Death: Representations of Female
Victims and Perpetrators in German Culture 1500–2000 (Rochester: Camden
House).
Boellstorff, T. (2007) ‘When Marriage Falls: Queer Coincidences in Straight Time’,
GLQ, 13(2/3), 227–48.
Bretèque, F. A. de la (2004) L’imaginaire médiéval dans le cinéma occidental,
Nouvelle Bibliothèque du Moyen Âge, 70 (Paris: Champion).
Buchanan, J. (2009) Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Burt, R. (1998) Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie
Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Butler, J. (1999) Gender Trouble (London: Routledge).
Chedgzoy, K. (1995) Shakespeare’s Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary
Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
Cook, P. J. (2009) ‘Medieval Hamlet in Performance’, in M. Driver and S. Ray
(eds), Shakespeare and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Performance and Adaptation
of the Plays with Medieval Sources or Settings (Jefferson, NC: McFarlane).
Dawson, L. (1992/3) ‘Gazing at Hamlet, or the Danish Cabaret’, Shakespeare
Survey, 45, 37–62.
Dinshaw, C. (1999) Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and
Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
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3
No Present
In his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Lee
Edelman could be said to have undermined the future as the goal to
which our labours tend and in whose name we work. His target is the
narrowing of political and critical discourse effected by the fetishiza-
tion of human reproduction, which he calls reproductive futurism.
This reproductive futurism seeks to establish the perpetuation of the
bourgeois family and of the complex of ideas associated with it as the
standard against which all efforts must be evaluated. It is thus not so
much that there is or should be no future at all but rather that there
is no future for queers in acceding to the demands of this ideology, in
conceiving the future through conception. Edelman’s ideas would leave
us with the present, but the concept of the present is itself problematic.
In reproductive futurism, for example, the present is chiefly important
as that which will produce the Child. In literary analysis, however, the
present is evaluated by how it differs from and improves upon the past.
In both cases, what is paramount is the sense of history as a narrative
that Edelman has called ‘the poor man’s teleology’ (p. 4). In this chapter,
I aim to free the past from the tyranny of the present.1
Edelman argues that queer theory provides a way to resist the tele-
ological understanding of history and of the present. I would argue that
this resistance is potential rather than actual, as queer theory, at least
in its literary applications, has tended to perpetuate teleology by sub-
jecting the past to an analysis in which what is important is the past’s
contribution to us. This is part of a larger shift in literary studies, one
that has changed the meaning of the term ‘literary history’: while this
term once meant the history of literature, it now, in effect, means history
done through literary texts. For many literary critics, the discipline of
literature must have the teleological value of leading to the discipline of
38
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No Present 39
history. What is more, some literary critics feel that by analysing litera-
ture they are also being teleological in that their analyses can actually
change history. In this view of things, literary critics who concentrate
on literature are insufficiently serious, while literary critics who look
beyond literature are contributing to the greater good. Perhaps the most
This view of the literary critic as the Dorothea Brooke of social activism
has a wistful appeal, but it is a flimsy and unconvincing justification for
a life spent in the study. We should instead consider the possibility that
our academic careers do not have and may not even require a justifica-
tion dictated by the teleological imperative.
Within literary studies, the teleological imperative is felt most heav-
ily in areas associated with identity politics. Queer critics have tended
to feel that their scholarly work should be a form of activism and
should consequently be evaluated by the extent to which it helps the
cause. As Heather Love has pointed out, these feelings have had the
effect of restricting the kinds of conversations we have about texts:
‘the premium on strategic response in queer studies has meant that
the painful and traumatic dimensions of … texts (and of the experi-
ence of reading them) have been minimized or disavowed’ (Love, 2007,
pp. 3–4). Moreover, if our criticism must be strategic according to the
real or perceived needs of a real or perceived cause, then literary criti-
cism must be part of a teleology: it must have a clear use. Queer work
on literature written before the end of the nineteenth century has been
further restricted by our contemporary stress on difference: the past was
different, it turns out; past sexuality was really different; to say otherwise
is to be anachronistic. Thus, while queer critics have been encouraged to
identify with contemporary queer agendas, this very identification has
made it impossible for them to identify with the past eras they study –
or, at least, it has led them to see this second kind of identification as
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No Present 41
While idem-identity implies that both the identifier and the thing with
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42 Stephen Guy-Bray
“their” sexuality is not only knowable and different from “ours,” but
is also a precursor to our own, both unlike and like us. Rarely, if ever,
does it suggest that the idea of a consequential continuum might itself
be problematic’ (Menon, 2008, p. 47). The tacit assumption intended
to guide and restrict our work on the sexuality of the past is thus both
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No Present 43
often called presentism. As I see it, presentism has two main forms: one
is preoccupied with the question of use – as the passage from Traub
quoted above suggests, many critics hope to find material in the litera-
ture of the past that will help them in political struggles today. While
this is in many ways a reasonable and even admirable goal, we should
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44 Stephen Guy-Bray
shows that he was not vain at all. As well, much of the recent commen-
tary on the story of Narcissus has censured him for his homoeroticism;
while recent queer commentators on the story have not seen a man’s
desire for another man as something culpable, they have also been
reluctant to use this story as a precedent for ways to talk about same-sex
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No Present 45
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46 Stephen Guy-Bray
built environment and the natural environment, and so on. But when
the speaker moves into the fields and woods that surround the house,
difference gradually becomes indistinguishable from sameness. To some
extent, the speaker’s journey into the woods is the traditional retreat to a
locus amoenus for contemplation, but it is also a search for sex, and for a
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No Present 47
In this stanza, then, sex comes from clothing rather than from naked-
ness and cannot be distinguished from the poetic and social ambitions
that are important to the poem throughout. What is more, the scene
is not one of man discovering nature and thus affirming his distinctness
from it, but rather one of man merging with nature. All these themes are
Now, the speaker wants to be forcibly confined in the wilds, which are
no longer wild but have, at least in his eyes, produced a natural order
that mimics the perfect and harmonious proportion of the great house.
Instead of surveyors and workers putting a road through a forest, he
sees the woods themselves as having made the lane: as was the case
with the ivy, for instance, this vision of nature confounds the normal
picture of man as active and nature as acted upon – as, of course, does
the speaker who wants to be tied up in the morning by the woods and
in the evening by the meadow. The important actor in this part of the
poem is not the speaker, who desires passivity, but the river. We learn
that the river has turned the meadow into art: it is ‘fresher dy’d’ (79.2)
and resembles ‘green Silks’ (79.4). As well, the river is not only like an
artificer but also like a lover: it holds the meadow in ‘wanton, harmless
folds’ (80.1) and licks the ‘yet muddy back’ (80.3) of the fields until they
become like a ‘Chrystal Mirrour slick’ (80.4).
For me, the mirror is the crucial part of this passage as it leads to the
reference to Narcissus. But this mirror is not, or not exactly, the kind of
mirror in which we recognize our reflection or, as in Lacan, in which we
recognize our selfhood and against which we form our identity; instead,
it is a mirror that blurs the seemingly indispensable distinction between
the self and the reflection or between the original and the copy. This is
a mirror ‘Where all things gaze themselves, and doubt / If they be in it
or without’ (80.5–6). Rather than returning an image of oneself against
which one can define oneself, this mirror undermines our sense of
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48 Stephen Guy-Bray
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No Present 49
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50 Stephen Guy-Bray
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No Present 51
were always stupidly refusing to become us. To see his love of himself
as instructive is to refuse the superior position and to seek to see with
Narcissus that sometimes sameness and difference – in the context of this
chapter, the sameness and difference between then and now – cannot
be distinguished and that our proper response may not be to assess the
Notes
1. Here I have been influenced by numerous thoughtful attempts to develop a
queer historiography; I cite in particular Goldberg (1992), Dinshaw (1999)
and Freccero (2006).
2. I focus on the Renaissance partly because it is my field and partly because the
combination of historicism and queer theory has been especially volatile.
3. For a good discussion of narcissism and Freud, see Warner (1990).
Works Cited
Abbott, A. (2007) ‘Against Narrative: A Preface to Lyrical Sociology’, Sociological
Theory, 25, 67–99.
Dinshaw, C. (1999) Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and
Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
Edelman, L. (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press).
Fradenburg, L. and Freccero, C. (1996) ‘Introduction: Caxton, Foucault, and
the Pleasures of History’, in L. Fradenburg and C. Freccero (eds), Premodern
Sexualities (New York: Routledge).
Freccero, C. (2006) Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
Goldberg, J. (1992) Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press).
Love, H. (2007) Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press).
Marvell, A. (1971) The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth,
revised by P. Legouis and E. E. Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Clarendon).
Menon, M. (2008) Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature
and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).
Ovid (1612) The Fifteene Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso; Entituled Metamorphoses, trans.
A. Golding (London).
Ovid (2004) Metamorphoses, ed. R. J. Tarrant (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Patterson, L. (1990) ‘On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and
Medieval Studies’, Speculum, 65, 87–108.
Ricoeur, P. (1992) Oneself as Other, trans. K. Blamey (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press).
Rohy, V. (2006) ‘Ahistorical’, GLQ, 12, 61–83.
Sinfield, A. (2006) Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural
Materialism (London: Routledge).
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52 Stephen Guy-Bray
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4
History’s Tears1
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54 Michael O’Rourke
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56 Michael O’Rourke
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History’s Tears 57
temporalities, far from it, but would like to draw attention to the way in
which this capitulation in the end refuses and forecloses – is a little bit
spooked by the promise of – the future.7
Lest it sound as if I am being too suspicious, let me trace this resistance
to futurity back to Goldberg’s earlier collection of essays, Shakespeare’s
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I say these words with my eyes turned, certainly, towards the opera-
tions of childbirth, but turned too toward those who, in a society from
which I do not exclude myself, are still turning them away before the
still unnameable that is looming and which can only do so, as is neces-
sary every time a birth is at work, in the species of the non-species, the
formless, mute, infant and terrifying form of monstrosity. (Derrida,
1978, p. 293)23
the child is the future, the other that is the same and not the same,
the one to whom past and present generations are asked to give
without return. The child is no less a paradigm for the historian,
for the children are the ones to come in history no less than in the
family. History is being written for the children, to children, and it
is to the children that we call ‘come’, for whom we pray and weep,
viens, oui, oui. The historian writes in the time between the dead
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62 Michael O’Rourke
and the children, between irreparable suffering and hope for the
unforeseeable to-come. (Caputo, 2004, pp. 115–16)24
To finish then, but not to have done with all these ghosts, I am arguing
that the term queer, in its very spectral indeterminacy, anessentiality,
God does not bring closure but a gap. A God of the gaps is not the
gap God fills, but the gap God opens. The name of God makes the
present a space troubled by an immemorial past and an unforesee-
able future. ‘Good, good,’ indeed very good. That is not a declaration
of fact, but a promise on which we are expected to make good. And
nobody is guaranteeing anything. (Caputo, 2010)
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of history, is one we ought to try to make good on, here and now, even
as we move inexorably towards what remains to-come.
Notes
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Works Cited
Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press).
Bray, A. (2003) The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Caputo, J. D. (1987) Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the
Hermeneutic Project (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press).
Caputo, J. D. (1993) Against Ethics (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press).
Caputo, J. D. (1997) The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press).
Caputo, J. D. (2004) ‘No Tear Shall Be Lost: The History of Prayers and Tears’, in
D. Carr et al. (eds), The Ethics of History (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press).
Caputo, J. D. (2006) The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press).
Caputo, J. D. (2007) What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism
for the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker).
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68 Michael O’Rourke
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5
Jeanette Winterson’s Love
Intervention: Rethinking the
Is there a future? More specifically, is there a future for the queer? Queer
theorists have recently been wrestling with the question of futurity,
and two polarized positions are emerging from the fray: the anti-social
thesis with its emblem of ‘no future’, and the perspective of queer
utopianism, which conversely asserts that ‘queerness is primarily about
futurity’ (Muñoz, 2006, p. 826). This chapter investigates the debate
regarding queer futurity in the context of Jeanette Winterson’s novel
The Stone Gods (2008). A foray into possible futures, The Stone Gods both
affirms and defies a queer temporality characterized by the disavowal
of a redemptive future. While Winterson echoes the anti-social concept
of the future as fatal repetition through her depiction of repeating,
self-destructive worlds, her novel also manages to resist the futility of
this perspective by offering the possibility of a love intervention that
disrupts the replication of the past. In describing how Winterson prob-
lematizes distinctions between queer/straight futurities, this chapter
also contributes to the ongoing debate regarding the ‘queerness’ of
Winterson’s work.
Queer Futurity
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74 Abigail Rine
asserts, seems interested in Iris Murdoch’s sex life, yet all are interested
in hers – and for Winterson, this amounts to ‘harassment by the back
door’ (ibid.).
The aim of this chapter is to engage these two ongoing discussions:
first, the debate between the anti-social thesis and queer utopianism;
Repeating Worlds
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76 Abigail Rine
new meaning on Orbus, as each individual can select a present that will
last indefinitely and immunize themselves against growth, change and
becoming. Orbus, the planet with no future, is all present – and the
present is not pretty. Difference is slowly being obliterated because the
unified standard of sameness is dangerously attainable. Billie remarks
so this is the future: girls Fixed at eight years old … or will they
want women’s minds in girls’ bodies and go for genetic reversal?
The future of women is uncertain. We don’t breed in the womb
anymore, and if we aren’t wanted for sex … But there will always be
men. Women haven’t gone for little boys. … Surrounded by hunks,
they look for the ‘ugly man inside’. Thugs and gangsters, rapists and
wife-beaters are making a comeback … So this is the future. F is for
future. (Ibid.)
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A Love Intervention?
every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those
possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse – there is more than
one reading. The story won’t stop, can’t stop, it goes on telling itself,
waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.
Love is an intervention. (Ibid., p. 68)
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Jeanette Winterson’s Love Intervention 79
Winterson repeatedly asserts the need for an ‘intervention’ that will dis-
rupt the ceaseless, lethal repetition of the social order. But in what way is
love an intervention? In the section that follows, I will read Winterson’s
love intervention as twofold: first, she presents love as a renewed form
of relationality that is not constrained by the dominant order, one that
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80 Abigail Rine
‘a force of a different nature from the forces of death that dictate what
will be’ (ibid.). Or, to use Edelman’s terminology, this love can disrupt
the lethal repetition of the normative order and queer the future.
Although Winterson emphasizes the transformative potential of love,
it is important to address that each of the queer love stories in the
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Jeanette Winterson’s Love Intervention 81
twice turned out – once from the womb-world, once from her, and for
ever – banishment became its narrative equivalent, a story I could tell.
But because of this I know that inside the story told is the story that
cannot be told. Every word written is a net to catch the word that has
escaped. (Ibid., p. 127)
The loss of her mother is what gives Billie desire and what allows her
to write as an expression of that desire. The splitting of the subject is
not the only effect of entering the symbolic; the realm of the symbolic
is also the realm of language, and as both Ruti and Winterson suggest,
the experience of loss and access to language gives rise to unlimited
creative potential. Edelman reads the split subject as unable to signify
meaning, but Ruti argues that our inability to fulfil our lack, our loss,
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The love that Winterson is depicting in The Stone Gods, the love that
has the potential to intervene in the ceaseless, lethal repetition of the
social order, is a love that is radical enough to let the other exist fully
and autonomously. This love is possible not only between two people,
but between a work of literature and its reader. When this love is fer-
Conclusion
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Notes
1. For more on critical receptions to Jeanette Winterson’s oeuvre, see Merleau
(2003), Ellam (2006), Andermahr (2007) and Detloff (2007).
2. For readers unfamiliar with Lacan, a helpful introduction is Grosz (1990).
3. In ‘“Who Cares About Gender at a Time Like This?” Love, Sex and the Problem
Works Cited
Andermahr, S. (2007) Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide (London:
Continuum).
Dean, T. (2006) ‘The Antisocial Homosexual’, PMLA, 121, 826–8.
Detloff, M. (2007) ‘Living in “Energetic Space”: Jeanette Winterson’s Bodies and
Pleasures’, English Language Notes, 45(2), 149–59.
Edelman, L. (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press).
Edelman, L. (2006) ‘Antagonism, Negativity, and the Subject of Queer Theory’,
PMLA, 121, 821–2.
Ellam, J. (2006) ‘Jeanette Winterson’s Family Values: From Oranges Are Not the
Only Fruit to Lighthousekeeping’, Critical Survey, 18(2), 79–88.
Grosz, E. A. (1990) Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge).
Merleau, C. T. (2003) ‘Postmodern Ethics and the Expression of Differends in the
Novels of Jeanette Winterson’, Journal of Modern Literature, 26, 84–102.
Morrison, J. (2006) ‘“Who Cares About Gender at a Time Like This?” Love, Sex and
the Problem of Jeanette Winterson’, Journal of Gender Studies, 15(2), 169–80.
Muñoz, J. E. (2006) ‘Thinking Beyond Antirelationality and Antiutopianism in
Queer Critique’, PMLA, 121, 825–6.
Muñoz, J. E. (2009) Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
(New York: New York University Press).
Ruti, M. (2006) Reinventing the Soul: Posthumanist Theory and Psychic Life
(New York: Other Press).
Ruti, M. (2008) ‘Why There Is Always a Future in the Future’, Angelaki: Journal of
the Theoretical Humanities, 13(1), 113–26.
Winterson, J. (1995) ‘The Semiotics of Sex’, in J. Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on
Ecstasy and Effrontery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).
Winterson, J. (2008) The Stone Gods (London: Hamish Hamilton).
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Section 2
In and Out of Time: Sexual
Practices, Sexual Identities
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6
Hymenal Exceptionality1
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90 Ben Davies
the state of nature and the state of exception are nothing but two
sides of a single topological process in which what was presupposed
as external (the state of nature) now reappears, as in a Möbius strip or
a Leyden jar, in the inside (as state of exception), and the sovereign
power is this very impossibility of distinguishing between outside
and inside, nature and exception, physis and nomos. The state of
exception is thus not so much a spatiotemporal suspension as a com-
plex topological figure in which not only the exception and the rule
but also the state of nature and law, outside and inside, pass through
one another. (Agamben, 1998, p. 37)
In his theory of exception, the prepositional signifiers ‘in’ and ‘out’ are
no longer interpreted as binary, allowing for a reconceptualization of
spatiotemporality. Despite his dismissal of the concept of suspension,
Agamben repeatedly returns to it. The combination of spatial models
and temporal abeyance shows how his theory explicitly involves both
time and space; the indistinction between in and out applies to both time
and space – they are mutually implicated. The interrelationship of time
and space is essential to all three of the theorists I am working with in
this chapter. In ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1986), Foucault expressly emphasizes
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this relationship when he writes: ‘it is not possible to disregard the fatal
intersection of time with space’ (p. 22). The exceptional spatiotemporal-
ity of the hymen deconstructs the division of time into ‘straight’ (linear,
sequential, routine) and ‘queer’ (non-linear, intricate, asynchronic), the
division of being ‘in’ (straight) or ‘out’ (queer) of time. It deconstructs
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the hymen, the confusion between the present and the nonpresent,
along with all the differences it entails within the whole series of
opposites … produces the effect of a medium (a medium as element
enveloping both terms at once; a medium located between the two
terms). It is an operation that both sews confusion between opposites
and stands between the opposites ‘at once’. What counts here is the
between, the in-betweenness of the hymen. The hymen ‘takes place’
in the ‘inter-’, in the spacing between desire and fulfilment, between
perpetration and its recollection. (Derrida, 2004, p. 222)
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what is marked in this hymen between the future (desire) and the
present (fulfilment), between the past (remembrance) and the present
(perpetration), between the capacity and the act, etc., is only a series of
temporal differences without any central present, without a present of
which the past and future would be but modification. (Ibid., p. 220)
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with all the undecidability of its meaning, the hymen only takes place
when it doesn’t take place, when nothing really happens, when there is
an all-consuming consummation without violence, or a violence with-
out blows, or a blow without marks, a mark without a mark (a margin),
etc., when the veil is, without being, torn, for example when one is made
to die and come laughing. (Derrida, 2004, p. 223)
Hymenal Spatiotemporality
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sex. Importantly, the entire action of the principal diegesis takes place
within the two rooms that comprise the couple’s suite or outside on the
beach, and the move from suite to beach marks a shift from heterotopia
to named, societal time and space.
The threshold between hotel and beach represents the division
they could see a luminous grey smoothness that may have been the
silky surface of the sea itself, or the lagoon, or the sky – it was difficult
to tell. The altered breeze carried through the parted French windows
an enticement, a salty oxygen and open space that seemed at odds
with starched table linen, the corn-flour stiffened gravy, and the
heavy polished silver they were taking in their hands. (Ibid., p. 18)
Through this seductive breeze, the external world becomes internal and
affects the couple’s interior space:
the rising mist continued to unveil the nearby trees, the bare green
cliffs behind the lagoon and portions of a silver sea, and the smooth
evening air poured in around the table, and they continued their
pretence of eating, trapped in the moment by private anxieties.
(Ibid., pp. 25–6)
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They literally end up outside on Chesil Beach, the ‘real’ named space of
the principal diegesis.
Through the juxtaposition of the demonstrative and possessive pro-
nouns, exceptional temporality is figured in the novel’s opening words:
‘they were both young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wed-
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debris around their uneaten supper – but she did not let her gaze
shift to take it in. Despite the pleasing sensation and her relief, there
remained her apprehension, a high wall, not so easily demolished.
Nor did she want it to be. For all the novelty, she was not in a state
of wild abandonment, nor did she want to be hurried towards one.
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seen as exceptional. Despite Edward’s desire and his use of force, he fails
to penetrate Florence’s hymen and ejaculates prematurely. This untimely
arrival ruptures the exceptional moment and ruins the possibility of the
momentous, the time between desire and satisfaction, presence and
non-presence, as Edwards fails to rupture the hymenal membrane itself.
Exceptional Rupture
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when his life came under pressure from all the new excitements and
freedoms and fashions, as well as from the chaos of numerous love
affairs – he became at last reasonably competent – he often thought
of her strange proposal, and it no longer seemed quite so ridiculous,
and certainly not disgusting or insulting. In the new circumstances
of the day, it appeared liberated, and far ahead of its time, innocently
generous, an act of self-sacrifice that he had quite failed to under-
stand. (McEwan, 2007, pp. 160–1)
it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness: the abil-
ity to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the capacity to
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her hope was that in whatever was to come, she would regain some
version of that spreading, pleasurable sensation, that it would grow
and overwhelm her and be an anaesthetic to her fears, and deliver
her from disgrace. It appeared unlikely. The true memory of the
feeling, of being inside it, of truly knowing what it was like, had
already diminished to a dry historical fact. It had happened once,
like the Battle of Hastings. (McEwan, 2007, p. 100)
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he did not want to see her photograph and discover what the years
had wrought her, or hear about the details of her life. He preferred to
preserve her as she was in his memories, with the dandelion in her
buttonhole and the piece of velvet in her hair, the canvas bag across
her shoulder, and the beautiful strong-boned face with its wide and
artless smile. (Ibid., p. 165)
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Notes
1. I am extremely grateful to Sarah Dillon and Jana Funke for their comments
and criticisms of this essay. I would also like to thank those who responded
to an early version of this chapter, which I presented at the Edinburgh–
St Andrews Sexualities Conference 2008, and to the undergraduates at the
University of St Andrews, with whom I had the pleasure to discuss the novel
in the spring of 2010.
2. For an insightful account of the legal, social and biopolitical effects of the clitoris
and the practice of clitoridectomy, see Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak (1981).
3. In 2009, RFSU (the Swedish National Association for Sexuality Education)
published a pamphlet entitled ‘Vaginal Corona: Myths Surrounding Virginity –
Your Questions Answered’. RFSU argues that instead of a hymen every woman
possesses a vaginal corona. The text still employs mythologizing language when
describing the corona, despite criticising the use of ‘“breaking the hymen” and
“deflowering”’ (p. 12). For instance, ‘petals of a rose’ and ‘carnation-shaped’, are
employed alongside ‘jigsaw piece’ and ‘half-moon’ (p. 6). While RFSU stresses
‘the vaginal corona isn’t a brittle membrane’ (p. 9), it still admits the possibility
of ‘minor ruptures in the mucous folds that hurt, and sometimes … a little bleed-
ing’ (p. 9). Most significantly, RFSU claims: ‘what’s actually there, is the vaginal
corona, consisting of elastic folds of mucous tissue, which can’t be ruptured by
a penis or by any other object inserted into the vagina. When the mucous tissue
is stretched, minor ruptures sometimes develop and may smart a little. These
soon heal, usually within 24 hours’ (pp. 12–13). In relation to my argument,
the vaginal corona would diminish the significance of first-time sex, but would
allow multiple ‘hymenic’ or ‘coronic’ spatiotemporal moments, resulting in
repeated ruptures. Women could experience more than one personal hymenic
moment. Far from undermining the concept of hymenic exceptionality, this
breakthrough in female biology suggests the possibility of a freshly nuanced spa-
tiotemporality. In contrast to the possibility of repeated coronal moments, the
American television series True Blood featured a storyline focusing on the pain
and anguish caused by hymenal re-growth. In the eighth episode of series two –
‘Timebomb’ (dir. John Dahl, 2009) – two virgins experience sex for the first
time. While the human male experiences the pleasure this entails, the female
vampire is made to feel the pain associated with first-time vaginal intercourse.
Worse still, as a vampire, she repeatedly heals. Consequently, she can never
go beyond this painful experience and is subjected to the physical hurt of
virginal intercourse. Despite the interesting possibilities opened up by RFSU’s
research and the True Blood storyline, I retain the metaphorical concept of
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106 Ben Davies
the hymen and the idea of virginal sex for this chapter, as the narrative of On
Chesil Beach specifically concerns first-time sex and the implications of that
moment.
4. The temporal and spatial significance of the honeymoon is articulated in
Michèle Roberts’s recently published short story, ‘Honeymoon Blues’ (2010).
Told in poetic, fragmentary prose, the narrative focuses on the protagonist
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Hymenal Exceptionality 107
in the relationship between sex and philosophy. In the first of three sections
on jealousy, she writes about a ‘time that behaves as if it did not exist at all,
time that has been given the lovely name instant. Between an instant and
eternity, there is grace. Sex wants it, right away, now. Maximum intensity
in “no time at all”. Eternity procured by an instant of grace. Time canceled
out or wholly given over. At once instant and aion, full time, accomplished
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Works Cited
Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press).
Alvarez, A. (2007) ‘It Happened One Night’, New York Review of Books, 54(12), 32–3.
Atkins, B. T., A. Duval, R. C. Milne, P-H. Cousin, H. M. A. Lewis, L. A. Sinclair,
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Time for the Gift of Dance
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Quotidian Time
Shall We Dance? opens with a camera shot from the front of a moving
train. The shot draws the eye along a strikingly straight railway track.
Once the eye has followed that line, however, it is caught by the top
centre-left of the frame, in which the rising sun reflects brightly off a
tall skyscraper. While only lasting a moment, this opening shot of the
film quickly replaces the potential symbolism of the linear train track
with that of the sun, representing as it does the cyclical temporality of
quotidian time. In the opening montage of the film, the viewer wit-
nesses the protagonist, John Clark (Richard Gere), along with millions
of others, going through the repetitive motions of his daily routine:
his journey to work by train while the sun is still rising; his day at his
desk, his boredom indicated by his slumped figure and idle playing with
his pen; and his return home retracing his morning train journey. The
final shots of this montage find him sitting on the train, staring out of
the window, looking tired, worn out and dejected; and then returning
to the affluent family home, the porch light blazing his welcome. This
opening montage is accompanied by a voice-over, narrated, the viewer
presumes, by the character himself:
a million and a half people ride the ‘L’ trains everyday. Over twenty
years I’ve written wills for about eight thousand of them. I’ve sat with
them as they’ve combed through their assets, figured out which kid
gets the painting over the fireplace, which one gets the antique spoon
collection. Last thanks, parting shots, confessions, people try to fit
it all in. And once I’ve finished, another life has been summed up,
assets and debts tallied and zeroed out. You initial here and there, you
sign at the bottom, and if you’re like most clients, you look up, smile,
and you ask the question I’ve heard for twenty years: ‘Is that it then?’
‘That’s it for the paperwork,’ I tell ’em. ‘The rest, is up to you.’
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Time for the Gift of Dance 111
The verb ‘ride’ in the first line of this opening voice-over determines
the initial semantic interpretation of the ensuing ‘written’, which, in
Gere’s accent, sounds to the viewer like ‘ridden’ – it is only the following
word, ‘wills’, that retroactively corrects the viewer’s misunderstanding.
This aural, if mistaken, link between ‘written’ and ‘ridden’ connects the
the voice and the body are represented simultaneously, but the voice,
far from being an extension of that body, manifests its inner lining.
The voice displays what is inaccessible to the image, what exceeds
the visible: the ‘inner life’ of the character.
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112 Sarah Dillon
shot of him on the train and continue as we see him return home.3
They provide another aural link, this time between the film’s opening
montage and the narrative proper, between the monotony of quotidian
time – exemplified on an annual scale with the yearly repetition of one’s
birthday – and the heterosexual family unit: John’s wife, Beverly, enters
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Time for the Gift of Dance 113
to a fundraiser at the school, his dinner is in the oven and the girls have
already eaten. John, however, wants to escape these family rhythms:
‘can we go see a movie some time?’ he asks her as she leaves. She turns
and looks back at him, seemingly genuinely shocked by the question,
which she decides to treat as a joke in the ludicrousness of its assump-
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114 Sarah Dillon
than those that currently contain and curtail him. Halberstam argues
that this freeing queer time and space is to be found in ‘queer sub-
cultures’ that ‘produce alternative temporalities by allowing their
participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to
logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience –
Adolescence
The film swiftly and derisively dismisses the first of these possibilities,
the one to which Halberstam is partial. Halberstam offers, as an alterna-
tive to family and reproductive time, the idea of a stretched-out adoles-
cence achieved through subcultural involvement:
In the second homecoming of the early part of the film, John peeps in
at the door of the den, in doing so provoking shrieks from the teen-
age girls, including his daughter, gathered therein. In response to his
question, ‘what are they doing in there?’, Beverly smoothly jokes about
rebellious adolescence:
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Adultery
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118 Sarah Dillon
alibi does not check out; his shirts smell of perfume. In the end, Beverly
hires a private detective agency – Devine Investigations – their office
located, like the dance school, at the top of a steep flight of stairs. John’s
journey up the dance school stairs is a vertical movement different from
the horizontal train journey of his normal routine, which signals his
‘all these promises that we make and we break. Why is it, do you
think, that people get married?’
‘Passion?’
‘No … because we need a witness to our lives. There’s a billion
people on the planet, I mean what does one life really mean? But in a
marriage, you’re promising to care about everything, the good things,
the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things, all of it, all
the time, every day. You’re saying: your life will not go unnoticed
because I will notice it. Your life will not go unwitnessed because
I will be your witness.’
These lines are so poorly written, however, that even Susan Sarandon
has trouble delivering them convincingly. While the film does vindicate
and support marriage, and dispense with the option of adultery as an
escape from its constraints, it does so not in this pat Hollywood speech
but in an exploration of the way in which dance and dancing can fun-
damentally alter one’s being in the world.
Dancing
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Time for the Gift of Dance 119
John is left wondering what type of person he will be – one for whom
things stay the same, or one who changes things, one who embraces an
uncertain future. The earlier scene when John first leaves the train to
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120 Sarah Dillon
go to the dance school is repeated here with John getting off the train,
hesitating and going to get back on as the doors close. He then runs
to the dance class, pauses, has a moment of indecision at the bottom
of the stairs (one that mirrors the first time he comes here), turns to
leave and leaves. In this repeated scene, the buxom whirlwind that is
Leaving the young lady perplexed, John runs, literally skipping and
dancing, back to class.
John’s decision to continue dancing constitutes a step off the treadmill
of quotidian time into the time and space of ballroom dance: quotidian
time is characterized by repetition and monotony, and is connected –
in this instance, though not necessarily in all – with family and repro-
ductive time; the time of dance, in contrast, is the time of the gift and of
the event, and is connected – in this instance, though not necessarily in
all – with the queer time and space of ballroom dancing. Elsewhere, read-
ing Jacques Derrida’s ‘Choreographies’ (1982) alongside ‘Women in the
Beehive’ (1984), I have carefully traced the intimate connection between
the gift and dance.14 For Derrida, the randomness and chance of the gift
is also the randomness and chance of the dance: both provide models
of (sexual) relationality as ‘an incessant, daily negotiation – individual
or not – sometimes microscopic, sometimes punctuated by a poker-like
gamble; always deprived of insurance, whether it be in private life or
within institutions’ (Derrida and McDonald, 1982, p. 69). Rejecting
private or public insurance (such as, for instance, the wills John writes),
Derrida’s idea of the time of dance and the gift is explicitly opposed
to the urgency to guarantee the future that characterizes Halberstam’s
(2005, p. 5) description of ‘hypothetical temporality … that demands
protection in the way of insurance policies, health care, and wills’.
Instead of this need to secure the future, in the event of the gift or the
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Time for the Gift of Dance 121
however well you may be acquainted with the history of, say, the
dance piece (every technique involved in it, the choreographic
design), at the time of watching, something else is at stake. This
‘something else’ exists in the moments of the dance as they happen.
It doesn’t exist before or after, and is not susceptible to existing
forms of critical analysis. … To take time and space as self-evident
phenomena, as so often happens in dance, is to fail to perceive that
movement creates its own time and space, that time and space are
not containers which movement fills to varying degrees. (Kemp,
1993, p. 95)
The climactic late-night tango between John and Paulina is the film’s
key gift event of dance. In place of an adulterous sexual consum-
mation of their relationship, John and Paulina engage instead in a
passionate tango. The dance is introduced in the same way that sex
might be: Paulina leaves John to prepare, ‘Give me one hour,’ she says;
when he enters the dance school she orders him to ‘leave the light’;
as they begin, she insists, ‘Don’t say anything, and don’t think … and
don’t move unless you feel it.’ The dance, in the end, though, is not a
sexual betrayal of Beverly – in the moment of dancing together, John
and Paulina each come into their own passionate being in the world,
but this emergence is negotiated through the event of the dance, not
through their engagement with each other. Although they are both
sweating by the end in the same way they might be after vigorous
sex, the dance has both brought them together and held them apart –
they have shared in this intense moment of sexual revitalization but
the result is not a union but an invigorated return to their own lives:
John takes his new passion back to his marriage; Paulina returns to the
professional dancing she loves. ‘Be this alive. Be this alive tomorrow,’
Paulina urges John.
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122 Sarah Dillon
if there is, from the man to the woman, or from the woman to the
man, a destination of whatever kind, of an object, of a discourse, of
a letter, of a desire, of jouissance, if this thing is identifiable as passing
from subject to subject – from a man to a woman, or from a woman
to a woman, or a man to a man, etc., etc. – if there is a possible
determination of subject – at that moment, there is no longer a gift.
(Ibid.)
In the tango, nothing is passed from John to Paulina – not even desire –
and neither are their identities predetermined in advance: John is not
the extramarital-affair-seeking man; Paulina is not the beautiful young
home-wrecking woman. Nor, importantly, is their sexual relationality
determined in advance. In the earlier scene in which John comforts
Paulina after her coat has been ruined and asks her to dinner, they are
already precisely determined in advance in these roles and in a poten-
tially adulterous sexual relationship. In that scene, John gives Paulina
his handkerchief, which she accepts in a moment of weakness. This is
not a gift, however, but the first gesture in an exchange that desires her
reciprocation – an acceptance of his advances. Paulina quickly realizes
this and symbolically returns the handkerchief – ‘You know I shouldn’t
have taken this from you, erm, I’ll buy you a new one.’15 In contrast,
in the tango no exchange is enacted, no reciprocation is demanded.
Rather, both are given to the event of the dance, which happens, as
Mark Franko (2004, p. 118) explains, by ‘passing through the body
without the body’s ability to contain, bind, or channel its energy’.16
The power and time of the dance are the power and time of the event
and the gift:
Derrida began his first seminar on the gift in 1979–1980 at the École
Normale Supérieure, with this quote from Heidegger: ‘Die Zeit ist
nicht; es gibt die Zeit.’ (‘There is no time; time is given.’) The power
of the event is its giveness as it arrives, which power is sustained by
the secretiveness surrounding its original intention (it is ‘concealed
in unconcealedness’). (Ibid., p. 117)
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Time for the Gift of Dance 123
‘To dance you need a partner. My partner is right here. Beverly, dance
with me?’
‘I don’t know how.’
‘Yeah you do. Yeah. You’ve been dancing with me for nineteen
years.’
‘But I don’t know the steps.’
‘I’ll teach you.’
‘Here?’
‘Right now.’
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124 Sarah Dillon
at that point there would be no more sexes … there would be one sex
for each time. One sex for each gift. A sexual difference for each gift.
That can be produced within the situation of a man and a woman,
a man and a man, a woman and a woman, three men and a woman,
etc. (Ibid., p. 199)
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Time for the Gift of Dance 125
nothing other than post-coital: ‘See, why can’t you just do it like that?’
she asks John; ‘Anyone else care for a glass of water?’ asks Miss Mitzi.
Although, of all dance, ballroom has perhaps the strictest roles for
‘men’ and ‘women’, these roles do not have to be inhabited by male
and female bodies. Offering an illuminating comparison to Paulina and
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126 Sarah Dillon
in sequins walks a very lonely road, I got news for you.’ Conforming
to neither heterosexual nor homosexual models of normativity, Link’s
‘dream’, echoing Derrida’s dreaming at the end of ‘Choreographies’,
‘is to be able to dance free and proud, under my own name, for all the
world to see. That’s my dream.’
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Time for the Gift of Dance 127
Notes
1. Peter Chelsom went on five years later to direct none other than the American
heteronormative teen staple Hannah Montana – The Movie (2009). It is not the
intention of this chapter to provide a comparative analysis of the Japanese
original and the American remake. Suffice it to say that the original is perhaps
less interesting in relation to dance, since, as Chelsom has noted in interview,
‘the Japanese movie relied on that taboo about ballroom dancing per se. If
there was to be a taboo in the American story, it was that if you’re living the
American dream there’s a kind of shame involved in raising your hand and
saying, “Actually, this is not enough. I’m not happy.” Or to put it another
way, it’s possible to have everything and be lacking something’ (Chelsom,
2005). Not simply a cultural taboo in the USA, ballroom dance therefore plays
a more complex role in Chelsom’s remake.
2. I am indebted here to Dana Luciano’s ‘Coming Around Again: The Queer
Momentum of Far From Heaven’ (2007) for this reference to Hallas’s essay.
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128 Sarah Dillon
3. In this respect, the film follows the classic pattern in which, as Doane
explains, ‘the voice-over very often simply initiates the story and is subse-
quently superseded by synchronous dialogue, allowing the diegesis to “speak
for itself”’ (Doane, 1980, p. 41).
4. José Esteban Muñoz (2007, p. 365) supports Halberstam’s definition, stating
that ‘queerness should and could be about a desire for another way of being
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19. Jagose continues that paying attention to, for instance, postcolonial scholar-
ship, Derrida’s ideas regarding spectrality, or Lacanian theory, to name but
a few, ‘might make us hesitate to annex the queerness of time for ourselves’
( Jagose, 2007, p. 186). Carla Freccero agrees, urging the necessity to ask
‘what the specificity is of “queer” in relation to temporality, since I agree that
not all nonlinear chronological imaginings can be recuperated as queer’ (in
Works Cited
Albright, A. C. (1995) ‘Incalculable Choreographies: The Dance Practice of Marie
Chouinard’, in E. W. Goellner and J. S. Murphy (eds), Bodies of the Text: Dance
as Theory, Literature as Dance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).
Berlant, L. and Warner, M. (1998) ‘Sex in Public’, Critical Inquiry, 24(2), 547–66.
Chelsom, P. (2005) Interview with Stella Papamichael. BBC Online, http://www.
bbc.co.uk/films/2005/02/17/peter_chelsom_shall_we_dance_interview.shtml
(accessed 5 July 2010).
Copeland, R. and Cohen, M. (1983) ‘What Is Dance?’, in R. Copeland and
M. Cohen (eds), What Is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press).
Davies, B. (2010) ‘Exceptional Intercourse: Sex, Time and Space’, PhD disserta-
tion, St Andrews: University of St Andrews.
Derrida, J. (1984) ‘Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida’, in
A. Jardine and P. Smith (eds), Men in Feminism (New York and London:
Routledge, 1987).
Derrida, J. and McDonald, C. (1982) ‘Choreographies’, Diacritics, 12(2), 6–76.
Dillon, S. (2012) Infidelity: Derrida, Fiction, Film (in preparation).
Dinshaw, C., Edelman, L. et al. (2007) ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities:
A Roundtable Discussion’, GLQ, 13(2/3), 177–95.
Doane, M. A. (1980) ‘The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and
Space’, Yale French Studies, 60, 33–50.
Franko, M. (2004) ‘Given Movement: Dance and the Event’, in André Lepecki
(ed.), Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press).
Freeman, E. (2007) ‘Introduction’, GLQ, 13(2/3), 159–76.
Halberstam, J. (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural
Lives (New York and London: New York University Press).
Hallas, R. (2003) ‘Aids and Gay Cinephilia’, Camera Obscura, 52, 84–127.
Haraway, D. J. (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant
Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press).
Kemp, S. (1993) ‘Conflicting Choreographies: Derrida and Dance’, New Formations,
19, 91–102.
Lepecki, A. (2004a) ‘Introduction’, in A. Lepecki (ed.), Of the Presence of the Body:
Essays on Dance and Performance Theory (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press).
Lepecki, A. (2004b) ‘Inscribing Dance’, in A. Lepecki (ed.), Of the Presence of
the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press).
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8
The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer:
Narrating ‘Uncertain’ Sex1
132
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The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer 133
if you wish to begin a new life, give yourself and others an account
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134 Jana Funke
of straight and queer time that Baer’s narrative constructs a stable and
coherent heterosexual masculinity that nevertheless leaves space (and
time) for alternative readings.
Sex as Narrative
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The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer 137
play of forces’, but it also takes on the burden of decision. For James
Kincaid (1992, p. 125), puberty is monstrous, ‘an awesome catastrophe’,
precisely because it allows for latency and suspense, but in doing so
‘take[s] on the responsibility for releasing all that pent-up pressure’.
The delay of sexual difference in childhood is possible only because
Neugebauer lists all the possible ways in which the youth can go astray
only to confirm that all of these detours ultimately lead to the rec-
ognition of a singular, true sex. A couple of sentences later, however,
Neugebauer adds: ‘but though in the majority of cases the true sex
can be determined at puberty, in a certain number the task before the
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medical man is a much more difficult one’ (ibid., p. 242). This aside is
telling in that it indicates that the unruly, overproductive and leaky
pubescent body might not so easily be contained within a safely cir-
cumscribed temporal period. Puberty as a temporal framework might be
prone to leakage itself. The considerable length of Neugebauer’s quota-
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drive children like Baer to suicide in the first place (Presber, 2006, p. 5).
Baer himself stresses in the final sentence of his memoirs that he wrote
the text as ‘a contribution to modern psychology … in the interest of
science and truth’ (Baer, 2006, p. 108). Presber and Baer are thus keen
to legitimize the publication of the memoirs by emphasizing not only
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The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer 141
histories purely as literature can also, as Laura Marcus (1994, pp. 84–5)
maintains, underplay the remaining tension between literature and
science and obscure the fact that Freud continued to be invested in the
referential and therapeutic function of narrative.
If readings of Freudian case histories tend to come down in favour
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142 Jana Funke
necessarily because sexology enforced more rigid rules but because it did
not attempt to subsume a variety of diverse life histories under a single
theoretical dogma.15
Surprisingly, this emphasis on individual freedom did not lead
Hirschfeld to challenge the assumption of a ‘true’ sex, which was
Proleptic Masculinity
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The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer 143
narrative point to his future sense of self, so that the memoirs become
the very archive of an always already anticipated masculinity. Baer’s
rhetoric is essentialist, as he describes that the awareness of his as yet
unconfirmed masculinity was ‘stronger than all logic’ (ibid., p. 89). The
deterministic trajectory of the narrative is expressed on the opening page
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144 Jana Funke
body not be so, too? … And then, all at once, I became conscious:
yes, the others, down there, they were certainly very different! And
a nameless fright took hold of me. (Baer, 2006, p. 31)
the old doubts began anew. Whatever could I be? Boy or girl? If I was
a girl, why were my breasts not growing? Why did I alone remain
childish and undeveloped? … If I was a boy, why, then, this girl’s
name? All the deep suffering, which I had thought was behind me,
began again and tormented me dreadfully. (Baer, 2006, p. 55)
The pubescent Martha has found a language to describe her own ambiv-
alence, which is no longer nameless: she is either a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl’.
The struggle of self-discovery is here mapped more explicitly onto the
pubescent body. Martha does not menstruate, but she cannot yet read
this absence as an affirmation of her masculinity. Instead, she believes
that she suffers from consumption and is doomed to die. Martha lapses
into self-effacement and becomes ‘no body’, as she lacks the necessary
knowledge to signify her body successfully in the present.
Baer’s memoirs do describe the turning point at which his ‘true’ sex
is discovered and Martha’s feelings are retrospectively accounted for.
However, the ending of the narrative unsettles rather than affirms
Baer’s masculinity. Baer subverts the turning point, as he implies that
his masculinity is not fully established through the medical diagnosis.
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The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer 145
His physical sex has been affirmed as male, but he has yet to overcome
serious practical obstacles that keep him from functioning successfully
as a man in society. He stresses, for instance, that finding employment
will be difficult for ‘Norbert O. Body’ because all of his ‘certificates or
testimonials’ are issued to ‘Nora O. Body’ (ibid., p. 106). While Baer’s
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146 Jana Funke
this essential continuity, which alone can fully assure a human being
that he is alive, that he exists, that he is in the world … is totally
absent in women. When a woman contemplates her life … it does not
appear to her under the aspect of an inexorable, incessant thrust-
ing and striving, but she continually gets stuck at individual points.
(Weininger, 2005, p. 109)
Weininger believed that women are ‘stuck’ in time and cannot progress,
as they are determined by sexual instinct and reproductive function.
Through this biologization of feminine time, woman is positioned in
a past that precedes male consciousness and individualization. She
emerges as the predecessor of a self-conscious and temporally complex
male subject, who recognizes the disparity of life but can still produce
a continuous narrative.
Taking into consideration how gender came to inflect understandings
of temporal consciousness, it is possible that Baer kept his middle name
and published his memoirs under a gender-ambiguous pseudonym
precisely because he wanted to remind us of the femininity he had left
behind. In this sense, the pseudonym ‘N. O. Body’ does not only signify
effacement, but rather reminds us of the past Baer has overcome.19 It
is only by virtue of his masculinity that he can rise above a position of
uncertainty, remember and begin to align the memory of the girl he used
to be with the knowledge of the man he is in the present. The fact that he
would choose an English pseudonym for the articulation of his German-
Jewish self is not only an expression of displacement, but also, as Helga
Thorson (2009, p. 151) maintains, a sign of worldliness and education
that further underlines his ability to work together elements that are
usually thought of as oppositional. The final deferral of a future certainty
can also be read as an attempt to emphasize temporal consciousness. By
‘failing’ to conclude his narrative, he proves himself capable of recogniz-
ing the continuous quality of time. He anticipates an open-ended future
against which the will of the male subject can be measured in the first
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The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer 147
place. If Baer breaks away from the coherent structure of the case study
to emphasize the distance between the man he is and the woman he
was, it is not because he wishes to undermine his masculinity; nor is it a
revolt against sexological norms. Instead, the ability to write coherently
about the self is proven in the face of the discontinuity of his life story, of
Remembering Martha
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148 Jana Funke
Martha Baer was a feminist and there is no evidence that Baer sought to
distance himself from his earlier belief in women’s rights at any point
of his life. Quite the contrary, the fact that he chooses the name ‘Nora’
for his female alter ego is telling, as it is a direct reference to Ibsen’s
New Woman play The Doll’s House (1879) (Thorson, 2009, p. 157). It is
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The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer 149
Notes
1. I am very grateful to Laura Marcus for her help with an earlier draft of this
chapter. I also thank Ben Davies and Sherri L. Foster for their comments and
criticism. Ideas used in this chapter have been presented in several confer-
ence papers; I am grateful for the suggestive feedback I have received on these
occasions. In addition, I would like to thank Hermann Simon, who has been
very generous in sharing information about Baer’s life and making published
and unpublished materials available to me.
2. See Simon (2004) for a discussion of the filmic adaptations of Baer’s
memoirs.
3. See Brenner (1998) for a discussion of the reception history of the text.
4. I am using male pronouns throughout. This is partly for the sake of conven-
ience and readability, but also to underline my affirmative reading of Baer’s
masculinity.
5. For more biographical information on Baer, see, for instance, Gilman (2006b),
Simon (2006) and Thorson (2009).
6. I am using the term sexology to refer to a variety of medical and psychological
discourses on gender and sexuality that emerged during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.
7. Hirschfeld would use Baer as a case study in several of his own publications.
For example, Baer appears as Anna Laabs in Hirschfeld’s Sexualpathologie
(1921–8, pp. 44–8) and is also referenced in Transvestites (Hirschfeld, 1991,
p. 63) as N. O. Body. See Thorson (2009, pp. 155–6) for a comparative discus-
sion of Baer’s memoirs and Hirschfeld’s case studies.
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150 Jana Funke
8. Dreger (2000) has argued that the gonads emerged as the key marker of sex
towards the end of the nineteenth century and maintains that the age of
gonads ended in 1915. Even though sexologists like Krafft-Ebing explicitly
questioned the gonadal criteria at least ten years earlier, Dreger is right in
pointing out that, at least theoretically, the gonads were central in discussions
of sexual determination over the course of the late nineteenth century.
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The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer 151
little doubt that he would have read Weininger. Moreover, Weininger did not
produce his study in a cultural vacuum and many of the ideas he expressed
were also found in other contemporary texts.
19. Brenner (1998) also argues in favour of an affirmative reading of Baer’s
memoirs.
20. Baer’s Jewish identity and its significance in the memoirs has been discussed
Works Cited
Baer, K. [N. O. Body] (2006) Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press).
Brenner, D. (1998) ‘Re-Dressing The “German-Jewish”: A Jewish Hermaphrodite
and Cross-Dresser in Wilhelmine Germany’, in E. Barkan and M-D. Shelton
(eds), Borders, Exiles, Diasporas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
Butler, J. (2004) Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge).
Crozier, I. (2008) ‘Introduction: Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds
and the Construction of Sexual Inversion’, in I. Crozier (ed.), Sexual Inversion
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Currie, M. (2007) About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
Dreger, A. (2000) Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press).
Ellis, H. (1915) Sexual Inversion, 3rd edn (Philadelphia: Davis Company).
Ellis, H. (2008) Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan).
Felski, R. (1995) The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press).
Foucault, M. (1980) ‘Introduction’ in M. Foucault (ed.), Herculine Barbin: Being
the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite
(New York: Pantheon).
Foucault, M. (1990) The History of Sexuality: Volume One: An Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage).
Freeman, E. (2000) ‘Packing History: Count(er)ing Generations’, New Literary
History, 31(4), 727–44.
Freud, S. (2001) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Volume 7 (London: Vintage).
Genette, G. (1980) Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (New York: Cornell
University Press).
Gilman, S. L. (2006a) Multiculturalism and the Jews (New York: Routledge).
Gilman, S. L. (2006b) ‘Preface: Whose Body Is It, Anyway? Hermaphrodites,
Gays, and Jews in N. O. Body’s Germany’, in Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).
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152 Jana Funke
Herzer, M. (1992) Magnus Hirschfeld: Leben und Werk eines jüdischen, schwulen und
sozialistischen Sexologen (Hamburg: MSK).
Hill, D. B. (2005) ‘Sexuality and Gender in Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten: A Case
of the “Elusive Evidence of the Ordinary”’, Journal of the History of Sexuality,
14(3), 316–32.
Hirschfeld, M. (1921–8) Sexualpathologie: Ein Lehrbuch für Ärzte und Studierende.
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The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer 153
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9
Transgender Temporalities and
the UK Gender Recognition Act
This chapter focuses on the question of how time connects to legal regu-
lation. Specifically, it investigates how ideas about time work as tech-
niques of governance to create embodied legal subjects with particular
histories, trajectories and futures. It traces the temporal mechanisms at
play in one UK rights project in particular: the Gender Recognition Act
2004 (GRA). The GRA came into force on 4 April 2005 and allows trans
people to apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate, which grants the
legal rights, obligations and disadvantages of their ‘acquired’ gender. It
is the result of sustained activism by trans groups in the UK such as Press
for Change, and it follows and responds to decisions in the European
Court of Human Rights, which held the UK in breach of the European
Convention on Human Rights for failing to recognize trans people
in their ‘reassigned’ gender and for not granting trans people the right
to marry.2
As a governmental regime that seeks to ratify ‘acquired’ gender, the
GRA stands in contrast to other possible legal ‘solutions’ for the problems
associated with binary gender classification systems. In the United States,
154
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Transgender Temporalities and the UK GRA 155
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156 Emily Grabham
Bourdieu analyses social action and social agency through the concepts
of habitus (dispositions and systems of perception) and field (social
spaces and the normative structures attaching to these spaces). Habitus,
in particular, offers routes into thinking about the incorporation of
norms (including, for these purposes, temporal norms) into bodies in
a non-reductionist fashion, while also allocating sufficient weight to
the force or pull of social structures. Habitus reacts to field (or social
space) through a series of strategies, which, despite being generative, are
also limited by existing and historical conditions. Past experiences are
inscribed on the body through habitus; the relationship between field
and habitus therefore has corporeal effects (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 138).
Bourdieu’s theories therefore provide useful tools for investigating
durable gendered and classed systems of power, as well as the moments
when these systems ‘misfire’.4 What is relevant for the purposes of this
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Transgender Temporalities and the UK GRA 157
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158 Emily Grabham
Bureaucratized Transitions
Time is expressed, and lived out, through an imminent sense of the forth-
coming, but it is also the subject of power relations through which agents’
engagement with the field can be directed or shaped. The legislated wait-
ing periods contained in the GRA (two years of living in the appropriate
gender; the period that elapses while the panel makes a decision, for
example) exemplify the type of administrative ‘socially expected dura-
tion’ to which Bourdieu (2000, p. 230, citing Merton) explicitly refers
when theorising the politics of waiting. To the extent that it forces trans
subjects into regulated periods of gender performance (as opposed to
performativity), and also into ‘down-time’, while administrative deter-
minations are made about official gender, it is possible to argue that the
GRA displays the temporal characteristics of many types of contemporary
legislation and is not, on this basis, unique or exceptional. Nevertheless,
it is still worth emphasizing the point that administratively determined
time pervades the GRA. As a legislative response to the bureaucratic vio-
lence of gender classifications, the GRA shapes trans subjects’ experiences
of their own temporalized orientations in relation to future plans.
However, unlike the durations and waiting periods outlined above, the
permanence requirement does appear exceptional as a form of temporal
mechanism. While techniques of the type outlined above – durations,
waiting periods, as well as other types such as age limits – can be found
in many types of legislation, injunctions to remain in a particular state
‘until death’ are relatively rare. Furthermore, even within the logic of
administrative necessity, the legislative history of the GRA suggests that
the provision is surplus to requirements. As such, while it would be
expected that the GRA would contain temporal mechanisms that shape
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Transgender Temporalities and the UK GRA 159
trans subjects’ encounters with legal and bureaucratic bodies, the con-
tent of the permanence provision raises more questions than usual.
The requirement of gender permanence takes on a significant, yet
largely unexplained, role in the context of the policy statements and
debate around the GRA (previously, the Gender Recognition Bill). To
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160 Emily Grabham
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Transgender Temporalities and the UK GRA 161
as a nation, which ‘includes’ trans people and grants them rights to live
in their ‘acquired’ gender.
The temporal mechanisms contained in the GRA should therefore be
read in the context of the work that the GRA, as a national inclusion
project, performs in the current political moment. And it is at this point
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162 Emily Grabham
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Transgender Temporalities and the UK GRA 163
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164 Emily Grabham
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Transgender Temporalities and the UK GRA 165
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166 Emily Grabham
Concluding Remarks
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Transgender Temporalities and the UK GRA 167
Notes
1. I would like to thank Davina Cooper, Paisley Currah, Sarah Lamble and the
reviewers for this publication for extended and insightful comments. Any
errors are my own. An earlier version of this chapter has been published in
the journal Social and Legal Studies (Grabham, 2010).
2. See Goodwin v. United Kingdom and I v. United Kingdom (2002), 35 EHRR 447,
engaging the European Convention on Human Rights Articles 8 (the right
to private and family life) and 12 (the right to marry). See also the decision
of the House of Lords in the case of Bellinger v. Bellinger (2003), 2 WLR 1174,
HL, which declared UK law incompatible with ECHR Articles 8 and 12 for
failing to recognize as valid the marriage of a trans woman to her husband.
3. See, for example, Cowan (2005, p. 72) and Currah and Spade (2007, p. 1).
4. See, for example, Lovell (2000), Adkins and Skeggs (2004) and Skeggs
(2004).
5. See also McNay (2003).
6. See further Spade (2008).
7. See David Lammy, Hansard, 23 February 2004, col. 53.
8. New Labour refers to the UK Labour Party’s reincarnation in the 1990s as
a ‘third way’ party – that is to say, a party that treads a line between neo-
liberal, pro-business policies and socialism. See further Levitas (2005).
9. See Fortier (2005), Yuval-Davis et al. (2005), Cheong et al. (2007) and Brown
(2008).
10. See further Currah and Moore (2009).
11. See also Prosser (1998).
12. See Stychin (2004).
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Works Cited
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Transgender Temporalities and the UK GRA 169
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Section 3
(Un)Becoming: Negativity, Death
and Extinction
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10
Unbecoming: Queer
Negativity/Radical Passivity
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174 Judith Halberstam
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Unbecoming: Queer Negativity/Radical Passivity 175
I examine in this chapter refuse to think back through the mother. They
actively and passively lose the mother, they abuse the mother, they
love, hate and decimate the mother, and in the process they produce
a theoretical and imaginative space that is ‘not woman’ or that can only
be occupied by unbecoming women.
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176 Judith Halberstam
refusal? The politics of refusal emerges in its most potent form from
anti-colonial and anti-racist texts and challenges colonial authority by
absolutely rejecting the role of the colonized within what Walter D.
Mignolo (2000) has called ‘coloniality of power’.
Postcolonial feminists from Spivak to Saba Mahmood have shown how
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Unbecoming: Queer Negativity/Radical Passivity 177
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178 Judith Halberstam
forms of agency that do not take the form of resistance. In her Derridean
deconstructivist mode, Spivak is calling for a feminism that can claim
not to speak for the subaltern or to demand that the subaltern speak in
the active voice of western feminism, but she imagines on the distant
horizon a feminism born of a dynamic intellectual struggle with the
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Unbecoming: Queer Negativity/Radical Passivity 179
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180 Judith Halberstam
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Unbecoming: Queer Negativity/Radical Passivity 181
I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with
an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to
take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending. Perversely,
I will not give the happy ending. I think life is difficult and that’s
that. I am not at all – absolutely not at all – interested in the pursuit
of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am
interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not
happiness but its opposite. (Kincaid and Snell, 1997, p. 2)
Kincaid’s novels do indeed withhold happy endings and she adds the
fine shading to the narrative of colonialism by creating characters who
can never thrive, never love and never create precisely because colonial-
ism has removed the context within which those things would make
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182 Judith Halberstam
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Unbecoming: Queer Negativity/Radical Passivity 183
And when finally the brash young man does head off into the Vienna
evening, Erika returns home to her maternal cocoon and locks herself
up in the bathroom to cut away at her private flesh with a shaving
razor.
When finally Klemmer and she begin an explicitly sexual relation-
Cutting
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184 Judith Halberstam
end of The Piano Teacher, she drips blood onto the pavement. The cut
she has made in her shoulder, which repeats a number of other cuts she
has applied to her own skin and genitalia at other times, represents her
attempt to remake herself as something other than a repository for her
mother, her country and her class, but it also crafts a version of woman
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Unbecoming: Queer Negativity/Radical Passivity 185
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186 Judith Halberstam
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Unbecoming: Queer Negativity/Radical Passivity 187
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188 Judith Halberstam
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Unbecoming: Queer Negativity/Radical Passivity 189
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190 Judith Halberstam
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Unbecoming: Queer Negativity/Radical Passivity 191
Conclusions
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192 Judith Halberstam
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Unbecoming: Queer Negativity/Radical Passivity 193
with forms of liberty that are unimaginable to those who offer freedom
as the freedom to become a master. Here, Ono sits still, waits patiently
and passively and refuses to resist in the terms mandated by the structure
that interpellates her. To be cut, to be bared, to be violated publically, is a
particular kind of resistant performance and in it Ono inhabits a form of
Works Cited
Bersani, L. (1986) The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia
University Press).
Bersani, L. (1996) Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Bryan-Wilson, J. (2003) ‘Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece’, Oxford Art Journal,
26(1), 99–123.
Bustamente, N. (2003) ‘An Interview with José Esteban Muñoz’, RISK/RIESGO
Felix, 2(3), 120–7.
Chicken Run (2000) Directed by P. Lord and N. Park (UK and USA: Pathé and
DreamWorks Pictures).
Clover, C. J. (1992) Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
De Beauvoir, S. (1953) The Second Sex (London: Jonathan Cape).
Ferguson, R. (2005) Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Freud, S. (2001) ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’, in J. Strachey and A. Freud (eds), The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume
XVII (London: Vintage).
Hart, L. (1998) Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism
(New York: Columbia University Press).
Hartman, S. V. (1997) Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press).
Hartman, S. V. (2008) Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
(New York: Farrah, Strauss and Giroux).
Jelinek, E. (1999) The Piano Teacher (London: Serpent’s Tail).
Jones, E. (1955) Sigmund Freud: Life and Work. Years of Maturity 1901–1919,
Volume II (London: Hogarth Press).
Kincaid, J. (1997) Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Plume).
Kincaid, J. and Snell, M. (1997) ‘Jamaica Kincaid Hates Happy Endings’, Mother
Jones, http://motherjones.com/politics/1997/09/jamaica-kincaid-hates-happy-
endings (accessed 21 June 2010).
Love, H. (2009) Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press).
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194 Judith Halberstam
Mahmood, S. (2005) The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist
Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Mignolo, W. D. (2000) Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press).
Muñoz, J. E. (2006) ‘The Vulnerability Artist: Nao Bustamente and the Sad Beauty
of Reparation’, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 16(2),
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11
Difference, Time and Organic
Extinction
How, today, might the question of time and sexual difference be articu-
lated? It might appear, at first, as though the mode of this question has
always been sexual (or at least gendered) and that this engendering of
the question of time has impeded any fruitful understanding: time has
been regarded either as the time taken for forms to come into being
and pass away (a premodern Aristotelian notion) or as the neutral
abstract ‘container’ within which changes occur (modern Cartesian
time) (Deleuze, 2005, p. 4).1 In both cases, one could argue that time has
been conceived organically and anthropomorphically. Either the world
is composed of proper forms that it will take time to unfold – so that
here the earth is one bounded whole, reaching fulfilment through time,
with time as a delay in the realization of an end, and ‘man’ as that being
blessed with reason capable of intuiting the forms of time. Or there is
one general substance in extended space, and time measures the move-
ment from any one point to another. Time is the series of equivalent
‘nows’ and man, no longer analogous to (or a lesser form of) a God who
sees the reason of the world, charts movements from a point of view
that is purely calculative.
Such a modern understanding of time as the abstract container
within which movement takes place, time as a general substrate that
is not man’s own, nor privileged in any way, marks a certain under-
standing of human sexuality and sexuality as human. ‘Man’ is a being
whose sense is determined by a general temporality of life: because he
is a historical animal, going through the time of evolution, cultural
developments and linguistic formations, his being in the present bears
a density that is not immediately transparent to his own intentional-
ity (Foucault, 2002, p. 139). For psychoanalysis, this meant that there
would be the sense of a lost (maternal) plenitude that the subject would
195
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196 Claire Colebrook
be able to read within himself. Woman would figure as the lost pre-
linguistic origin, an origin that can only be fantasized, ex post facto,
as that which must have been abandoned in order for man to enter a
communal, rational history (Brennan, 1993). Even if we no longer hold
to such psychoanalytic mythographies, it is possible to discern this gen-
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Difference, Time and Organic Extinction 197
man may now recognize for the sake of his living on), and not only the
policy rhetoric of climate change that supposedly deals with the anthro-
pogenic shortening of time, for this rhetoric addresses only man’s living
on through time by adapting and mitigating his own being. There is
also a broader imaginary re-humanization of time in contemporary
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198 Claire Colebrook
or slips away from, the aim of meeting metabolic needs? A macro ver-
sion of such slippage may be evidenced in the life of humanity. Man is
coupled with the earth for his own survival. He nevertheless intensifies
the processes of this coupling (processes of consumption, production,
resource depletion and capitalization) to the point where the process
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Difference, Time and Organic Extinction 199
its needs, going through a time that is nothing more than the time
taken to restore quantities to their natural and proper equilibrium: this
is a myth, a sexual myth of the organism. It is only after the emergence
of desire, whereby the mouth effects a relation to what is not present
(the feel of the breast, lips, fluid, sucking) that something like a before
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200 Claire Colebrook
Time Is Sexuality
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Difference, Time and Organic Extinction 201
effect of syntheses that are neither centred (on life) nor oriented towards
maintenance. The organism is, after all, the effect of multiple series of
irreversible annihilations. Literally, carbon-based life only emerges from
a radical disturbance of earlier milieux in which oxygen was toxic. At
the level of thought and life, the organism’s bounded unity occurs
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202 Claire Colebrook
act as ideals, norms or figures that are never attuned to the individua-
tions of bodies. The ideality of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ can be understood
both as deflecting life from its organic normality, creating a disjunction
between immediate existence and a received notion, and as productive
of destructive modes of consumption: the libidinal investments in the
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Difference, Time and Organic Extinction 203
alter its spatial extensive trajectory (for it may now be too late to halt
the destruction of habitable earth within an already predictable time
period), there might be an intensive opening to a counter-ethics. No
longer focused on an ethos of abode – a morality grounded upon where
we dwell – and certainly not a logic of sustaining or rendering ourselves
Notes
1. On this topic, see Julia Kristeva’s classic essay, ‘Women’s Time’ (1981), which
reinforces a distinction between a mathematical linear time of the rational
subject (‘man’) and a time that goes beyond the subject. Luce Irigaray (1985,
p. 252) has also argued that the supposed subjectivity of time, whereby time is
the synthesized ground through which man represents and orders the world,
is a ‘pass’ time or dead time – not time at all so much as the displacement of
temporality by the figure of the self-sufficient organism. Paul De Man, also
critical of the natural, organicist and human figures of time, has insisted on
the catastrophic nature of temporality in contrast with the ways in which it
has been figured as human, all too human (De Man, 1996, p. 134).
2. I refer here to the widespread uptake of the work of Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela (1992), whose highly influential theory of embodied cogni-
tion and living minds stresses that the world is never neutral matter to be rep-
resented but is always the world of this or that coupled living system; further,
living systems are always already coupled with a milieu that is irreducibly
their own. Maturana and Varela’s work has been extended, valorized and even
further humanized (through a stress on the lived body of phenomenology) by
digital media theorists (Hansen and Clarke, 2009) and philosophers working
in cognitive science (Thompson, 2007), political theory (Protevi, 2009) and
cultural theory (and its proclamation of the ‘affective turn’: Clough and
Halley, 2007).
3. Giorgio Agamben’s The Open (2004) is most explicit about the ways in which
the world is always the world for this or that living being, even if ‘man’s’ world
is marked by its capacity to break with its actualized range and live itself in a
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204 Claire Colebrook
potentiality beyond that of mere life. The intensification of the political, and
its thorough immanence to living labour, is presented by Micheal Hardt and
Antonio Negri (2000) as the proper trajectory of a thoroughly human life.
Works Cited
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12
Busy Dying
Near the end of Isaac Julien’s film Looking for Langston, police and thugs
burst into a gay club only to find the revellers gone, vanished so utterly
that the smoke hanging, illuminated, in mid air comes to figure all that
is not visible in the sudden stillness. Finding no one, the intruders are
confounded. But the effect of the scene, the shock of that empty room,
may also strike the queer observer as an uncanny missed encounter.
When the club’s occupants escape to another place – or as likely, in
the logic of this film, to another time – the scene turns swiftly from
anticipation to belatedness, as if its temporal register did not permit a
present tense. As such, it could allegorize the impossibility of history
even within the historical inquiry that is the film’s project: our recur-
rent missed encounter with the past. Dedicated to the recovery of black
gay history from the Harlem Renaissance and the articulation of that
era’s anachronistic resonance with the film’s 1980s, Looking for Langston
offers a theory of queer temporality avant la lettre. But while queer and
LGBT communities have always been concerned – albeit in different
voices – with questions of history, only recently have queer scholars
shown a sustained engagement not merely with the historical record
but also with time as such; in the past decade a remarkable surge of criti-
cal interest in temporality, to which the present volume contributes,
has considered time’s contingencies, consequences, narrative forms and
affective burdens.
Why, one might ask, has queer theory been consumed by ques-
tions of historicity at this historical moment? Why is now the time
to ask about time? One answer might note the waxing and waning
of historical methodologies in literary studies and other disciplines,
since the advent of sustained scholarship in gay and lesbian stud-
ies in the 1980s coincided with the arrival of New Historicism, and
205
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206 Valerie Rohy
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Busy Dying 207
assume that non-normative time will ally itself with perversion against
the Law.
Present Tense
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208 Valerie Rohy
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Busy Dying 209
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210 Valerie Rohy
Thus at the same time that queer theory faces reports of its demise,
studies of queer temporality become increasingly vital. The broadening
of historical questions to problems of temporality as such both unmoors
readings from the past and enables analyses of time’s systematicity,
addressing precisely the temporal ideologies that subtend the supposed
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Busy Dying 211
Retro
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212 Valerie Rohy
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Busy Dying 213
in the past few decades, there has been a revolution in the study of
sexuality. Sex is today understood as fundamentally social. … This
deep sociology of sexualities is what we call the new sexuality stud-
ies. The reader is left to ponder how a decades-old ‘revolution’ can
also be ‘new’, and what exactly is new about such questions as ‘how
is it that certain body parts become sexualized?’ (Seidman et al.,
2006, pp. x, xi)17
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214 Valerie Rohy
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Busy Dying 215
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216 Valerie Rohy
Notes
For their comments and assistance, I thank Paul Deslandes, Liz Fenton, Beth
Mintz, Ben Davies and Jana Funke.
1. This delay is surely overdetermined, but for many in the 1980s the possibil-
ity of anticipation was annulled by the traumatic capacity of the HIV/AIDS
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Busy Dying 217
10. If the coincidence of the rise of temporality studies with ‘death of queer
theory’ rhetoric cannot help but signify, so too must the coincidence of
sexuality studies with that rhetoric. A more detailed account would consider
that intersection in relation to the institutionalization of queer theory in the
academy, with the gains and losses this accomplishment must entail for any
oppositional criticism.
Works Cited
Adams, R. and Savran, D. (2002) ‘Introduction’, in R. Adams and D. Savran (eds),
The Masculinity Studies Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell).
Barber, S. M. and Clark, D. L. (2002) ‘Queer Moments: The Performative
Temporalities of Eve Sedgwick’, in S. M. Barber and D. L. Clark (eds), Regarding
Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press).
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218 Valerie Rohy
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Busy Dying 219
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Index
220
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Index 221
future, 2–3, 5–10, 32, 33, 38, 43, Jagose, Annamarie, 8, 126, 130, 134,
53–66, 70–84, 94, 119–20, 156–8, 207, 209, 210, 214, 216
163–7, 197–203 Jelinek, Elfriede, 182–3
anticipation, 5, 98–9, 137, 138,
142–5, 167, 198–200, 205–10, 216 Kincaid, Jamaica, 173, 175, 180–2,
deferral, 10, 60, 71, 99, 134–7, 183, 188
Halberstam, Judith, 3, 7, 11, 54, marriage (straight and gay), see time
111–14, 120, 128, 163, 165, 208 Marvell, Andrew, 45–50
Halperin, David, 8, 55, 214, 216 masculinity, 4, 30, 32, 132–4, 142–9,
Hamlet (film, 1921), 19–35 150, 175
see also Shakespeare, William masochism, 173–93
Hardt, Michael, 54, 204 maturity, 7, 10, 98, 136, 145
hermaphroditism, see intersex McEwan, Ian, 89–107
heterosexuality, see time melancholia, 30–4, 63
historiography, 5, 40, 53, 55, 58, 60, Menon, Madhavi, 41–3, 53–8, 60, 61,
62, 66, 180 63, 66, 210–11
history, 4–6, 8, 38–51, 53–63, 64, modernity, 19–34, 35, 40, 44, 63, 195–6
101–3, 174, 196, 205–6, 208–10, pre-modern, 20, 31–2, 40, 195
213, 215 post-modern, 73, 113, 163–4
see also genealogy Muñoz, José Esteban, 7, 54–6, 70–2,
Hirschfeld, Magnus, 132, 136–42, 149, 74, 77, 83–4, 128, 191, 216
150
HIV/AIDS, 53, 216 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 53, 58, 59–60, 63
homonationalism, 161–3 Narcissus, 43–51
homosexuality, see time negativity, 7–8, 54, 71–2, 80, 173–93,
hymen, 89–107 207, 209, 215
see also Derrida see also anti-social; future
Negri, Antonio, 54, 204
identification, 3–4, 5, 9, 25, 32, 39–41, Nicholls, J.A., 189–92
45, 49, 50, 64, 143, 155, 160
see also sexual identity Ono, Yoko, 185–8, 191–3
identity politics, 39, 56, 212, 214, 216
critique of, 55, 58, 174–93, 212 post-colonial, see anti-colonial
intersex/DSD, 132, 135–6, 148, 150 primitive, see femininity
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222 Index
Prosser, Jay, 135, 154, 155, 166 generational, 3, 26–30, 33, 111,
puberty, see adolescence 174–5, 182; see also temporal drag
lesbian, 3–4, 188–9, 207, 210, 216
queer time, see time marital, 1, 6, 7, 9–10, 19, 32,
96–100, 104, 109–27; 128, 160;
race/racialization, 50, 71, 145–7, 149, see also adultery
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