Queer Times, Queer Becomings

Edited by E. L. McCallum & Mikko Tuhkanen

Subjects: Queer Studies, Literature, Lesbian / Gay Studies, Film Studies, Philosophy
Paperback : 9781438437729, 372 pages, November 2011
Hardcover : 9781438437736, 372 pages, November 2011

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Table of contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Becoming Unbecoming: Untimely Mediations
E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen

Part I. The Intimacies of Time
Queer Aesthetics
Claire Colebrook

Sedgwick’s Twisted Temporalities, “or even just reading and writing”
Jane Gallop

Bareback Time
Tim Dean

No Second Chances
David Marriott

Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come: Velvet Goldmine’s Queer Archive
Dana Luciano

Part II. Looking ahead to the Postfutural
Happy Futures, Perhaps
Sara Ahmed

Close Reading the Present: Eudora Welty’s Queer Politics
Lloyd Pratt

“My Spirit’s Posthumeity” and the Sleeper’s Outflung Hand: Queer Transmission in Absalom, Absalom!
Kevin Ohi

Stein und Zeit
E. L. McCallum

Part III. Chronic Anachronisms

Mestiza Metaphysics
Mikko Tuhkanen

Return from the Future: James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography
Valerie Rohy

Still Here: Choreography, Temporality, AIDS
Steven Bruhm

Keeping Time with Lesbians On Ecstasy
Judith Halberstam

Rhythm
Kathryn Bond Stockton

Contributors
Index

Queer theory essays on time and becoming in the fields of literature, philosophy, film, and performance.

Description

If queer theorists have agreed on anything, it is that for queer thought to have any specificity at all, it must be characterized by becoming, the constant breaking of habits. Queer Times, Queer Becomings explores queer articulations of time and becoming in literature, philosophy, film, and performance. Whether in the contexts of psychoanalysis, the nineteenth-century discourses of evolution and racial sciences, or the daily rhythms of contemporary, familially oriented communities, queerness has always been marked by a peculiar untimeliness, by a lack of proper orientation in terms of time as much as social norms. Yet it is the skewed relation to the temporal norm that also gives queerness its singular hope. This is demonstrated by the essays collected here as they consider the ways in which queer theory has acknowledged, resisted, appropriated, or refused divergent models of temporality.

E. L. McCallum is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University. She is the author of Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism, also published by SUNY Press. Mikko Tuhkanen is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Texas A&M University. He is the author of The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright, also published by SUNY Press.

Reviews

"This book opens up new areas and new questions for queer theory by bringing together the writings of some of the most well-known and respected writers with the work of a number of exciting younger scholars regarding queer temporalities, queer experiences of time, and queer times themselves. Time deserves queering; and equally queer sexualities and styles are queer partly in virtue of their untimeliness. This wonderful collection explores the way each is bound up with and helps to complicate the other. " — Elizabeth Grosz, author of Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth

"This collection offers some of the most interesting recent work in queer studies about ontology, the virtual, and temporality. Ambitious and original, these essays illuminate the contemporary stakes of becoming and un-becoming queer. " — Heather Love, author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History