Professional Documents
Culture Documents
em
ioric.:s
TIMl BINDS
Perverse Modernities
A mies edited by
Judith Halberstam
and Lisa LoJVe
TIM( BINDS
eer Temporalities,
Queer Histories
ELIZABETH FREEMAN
Al l tigilts reserved
Ptinted in tile United States
of Ametica on acid-free paper oo
Designed by Amy Rud1 Buchanan
Typeset in Carter & Cone Galliard
by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging
in-Publication Data appear on the
last printed page of d1is book.
contents
Preface
ix
Acknowledgments
x:xv
lntrod uction:
Queer and Not Now
I.
2.
21
3.
4.
59
95
r 37
171
177
Bibliography
Index
175
209
193
preface
In 1915, the British poet Robert Graves wrote a poem, "It's a Queer
Time." Popularly w1derstood as a lighthearted, topical ballad about the
trauma of trench warfare, d1e poem sets up a counterpoint berween im
ages of g01y battle and of the halluci.natOty utopias the second-person
speaker encounters when he loses consciousness. "It's hard to know if
you're alive or dead;' d1e poem opens, "When steel and fire go roaring
d1ro' your head." It's also hard to know if being "alive" consists of fighting
d1e war or blacking out. Here is a sample stanza, the third of five :
You're charging madly at d1em yelling "Fag !"
When somehow something gives and your feet drag.
You fall and strike your head; yet feel no pain
And find . . . . . . . . you're digging tunnels duough d1e hay
In the Big Barn, 'cause it's a rainy day.
Oh, springy hay, and lovely beams to climb !
You're back in d1e old sailor suit again.
It's a queer time.1
Here, the homophobia necessa1y to fuel masculine violence gives way to
anod1er version of the trench: tunnels in a haystack. The spealcer finds
himself b ack on d1e farm, where rain, "springy" hay, and wood suggest
life. He also appears to be dressed as a gay icon.
Lest I be accused of reading "sailor suit" and even "queer" anachronis
tically, let me summarize the other stanzas. All but the first two-line closed
couplet end wid1 the refrain "It's a queer time:' In d1e second stanza, the
speaker is wolmded ( "you're clutching at your chest;' line 5) and astra
travels to d1e homosocial Treasure Island, which is some amalgam of
Orientalized Eastern tropical romance ( "spice winds blow I To lovely
groves of Mango, quince, and lime - :' lines 7-8 ) and dime-novel west
ern ( "Breathe no good-bye, but ho ! for d1e Red West';' line 9). In the
fourth stanza, when a bomb hits the speaker as he's sleeping in a trench,
he finds himself "struggling, gasping, struggling, d1en . . . hullo ! I Elsie
. ] Getting
her pinafore all over grime" (lines 21-24). Given the campiness of Elsie's
attire and gestures, it's hard not to read Elsie "gaily:' as a bit of a queen.
But she is also an apparition - "Funny' because she died ten years ago"
( line 25) - so "queer time" appears haunted. And in the last stanza, the
speaker remarks that d1e oouble wid1 war is d1at "things happen much
too quick" (line 27): whereas queer time elongates and twists chronol
ogy, war simply forecloses it. He tells us that "even good Christians don't
like passing straight I From Tipperary or d1eir Hymn of Hate I To
Alleluiah-chanting and d1e chime 1 Of golden harps . . . and . . . I'm not
well today . . . I It's a queer time" ( lines 30-34). The line break suggests
that the speaker himself might be "passing [for] straight;' but the next
enjambed line rewrites d1e verb to condemn d1e direct route to Heaven.
Here the speaker prefers to dwell in some other temporal regime dun
eid1er d1e foreshortened time of the paoiot or d1e eschatological scheme
where death leads direcdy to salvation. He breezily dismisses his own
mortal end, preferring to be merely "not well today;' and remains in
"queer tin1e."
This poem seemingly sets straight and queer temporalities, life and
deaili, militaty nation and hallucination against one <tnoilier: but it also
suggests dut the pleasures of queerness can be found in the interstices of
national-political life, and that they are definitely worth living for. Its
"queer time" is at once temporal (a phantasm in the first stanza, a black
out in the second, an apparitional encow1ter in the third, and the whole
scene "fading" away in the fourth, as the speaker nears death) and histori
cal ( the "it'' in "it's a queer time" is clearly World War I, situated by
the poem's references to trenches and dugouts, the chemical explosive
lyddite, and d1e "Boches;' French slang for "krauts") . So not only is d1e
time of fantasy queer here, so also is d1e time of world histmy and poli
tics proper.
This isn't exacdy news to anyone who has read any gay and lesbian
history; the First World War saw the rise of a nascendy gay subculture in
port cities where sailors and rough trade met one another, and in d1e
urban areas that expanded to accommodate any number of migrations. 2
But more than telling a stmy of how gay and global histories intertwine,
this poem narrates militaty histmy's failure to fully organize time toward
nationalist ends. The speaker is a soldier who refuses to die for the glmy
of his cowmy but comes back for more and more of the pain that will give
him access to a queer world of his own making. Queer time overtakes
10
both secular and mille1mial time. And within the lost moments of official
history, queer time generates a discontinuous history of its own, which
includes colonialist endeavors ( the source material for the novel 1i-easure
Island) , the homosocial nationalism of boys' culture ( the cultural work to
which 1i'easure Island was put) , cowboy cultme and manly Manifest Des
tiny in the "Red West" of the Americas, the aforementioned ports of
homosexual call, drag culture, and even tl1e Church itself, each of which
fostered erotic contact between men. In otl1er words, these dreams may
be dreams of an escape from histo1y, but tl1ey also give access to an
alternative hist01y. And they are more tl1ari reveries: they are moments of
eA.1:reme bodily sensation. As die soldier's presumably masculine, figura
tively impenetrable body is ripped by "steel md fire" ( line 2), struck in
die head, suffocated with lyddite, and shot with a Germari rifle, he enters
queer time, which makes a queer hist01y he can enter too.
Throughout tliis book, I ny to think against tl1e dominant arrarige
ment of time ar1d history that would ordinarily guide die understanding
of this poem, in which historical narrative (here, the First World War)
organizes various temporal schemae into consequential sequence (such
mat eventually, the speaker's hallucinations will be readable as harbingers
of his glorious sacrifice for this country) 3 Instead, I track die ways that
nonsequential fom1s of time (in the poem, unconciousness, hatmting,
reverie, ar1d the afterlife) car1 also fold subjects into structures of belong
ing arid duration that may be invisible to the historicist eye. This poem
prefigures my chapters in many ways. For instance, "It's a Queer Time"
jLL'-1:aposes die precise timings of milita1y incursions, perhaps die nation's
most explicit form of synching up bodies and time, witli "travers [ ing] . . .
dozing . . . struggling . . . stagger [ ing] " movements tl1at bring past ar1d
present together (lines 4, 19, 21, 29). In chapter I, I argue tlut even non
nationalist cultural belonging is a matter of affects that inhere, in many
ways, in shared timings, and I stake my claim for a counterpolitics of
encounter in which bodies, de-composed by the workings of experimen
tal film and literature, meet one another by chance, forging - in the sense
of botl1 making and cotmterfeiting - history differently. In "It's a Queer
Time;' "Elsie;' mincing along in her Victorian regalia, appears as an
anachronism both in her costuming arid in terms of the calendar. In
chapter 2, I examine a mode of campy ar1d yet yearning queer archivalism
tlut turns feminist, sometimes fat, sometimes dowdy, always unruly fe
male bodies into irreverent living nmsewns . In "It's a Queer Time;' a
cet1:ain splattering of the speaker's body causes him to jwnp die time-
11
12
13
century and beyond, but arow1d a series of failed revolutions in the 1960s
and I970S-political programs not only as yet incompletely realized but
also impossible to realize in their original mode-that nevertheless pro
vide pleasure as well as pain. I consider class revolution as it dead-ends
again and again not only in post-Fordist America but also in wayward
daughters; second-wave feminism's lost possibilities; d1e unfinished, mu
tually intertwined projects of black emancipation and gay freedom. Der
rida reminds us that with nostalgia, the return is acceptable provided that
"the rePolt, which initially inspired uprising, indignation, insurrection,
revolutionary momentum, does not come bac!C14 In dre projects I take
up here, particularly the visual texts, the 1970s appear as a "revolting"
decade in a slighdy different way: drey glimmer forth as an embarrass
ment, as something that remains to be d1ought, as the text's indigestible
material, and/or as a point of departure for resistance but not for grand
revolution. In odrer words, "uprising, indignation, insurrection, revolu
tionary momentum" reappear, but not in a one-to-one correspondence
widr dre original scenes of dissent dut inspire drem. The I 970s emerge as
the scene of mass socialist, feminist, and gay-liberationist projects reti-o
spectively loved or hated but also used as placeholders for thinking be
yond dre status quo of the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century.
A simpler way of putting this might be: all of d1e texts I analyze in this
book engage with historical "post-ness." All of dris book's visual artists
(though not all of the novelists whose work I intertwine with films and
videos) were born between 1960 and 1970, meaning that they were at
most yow1g teenagers during the height of "the sb.:ties;' the period be
tween the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965 and dre resignation of
Richard NLxon in 1974. These artists, coming of age in the afterlife of the
sixties, are the successors to mass movements whose most radical elements
were often tamed, crushed, or detoured into individualistic projects as
they were disseminated through the mainstream media. These artists are
more likely to have participated in the more pragmatic, coalitional move
ments of d1e 1980s and I990S-AIDS and queer activism, pro-sex and/or
Third World/women of color feminism, and culture-jamming-than in
projects that explicidy named capitalism as the root enemy. Their political
experience unfolded in and moved outward from the 1980s, when dre
feminist, lesbian I gay, and AIDS movements met continental dreory in
the foundation of groups like d1e feminist Guerrilla Girls and the anti
homophobic ACT UP, in mergers drat made mass culture itself the popular
front for d1e semiotic wmfare eventually known as "queering:' In pat-ricu-
14
15
16
dally, to take pleasure in tarrying, and to hold out that these activities can
allow us to look both hard and askance at the norm. But in the works I
have gathered here, close reading is a way into history, not a way out of it,
and itself a form of historiography and historical analysis .18 These artists
see any sign as an amalgam of the incommensurate: of dominant uses in
the present, of obsolete meanings sensible only as a kind of radiation from
the past, of new potential, and, more simply, of different points in time as
meanings accrue and are shed. Like the speaker of "It's a Queer Time;'
their works all seize anachronisms large and small, each of which con
stitutes a fragment of the queer past: mining towns, Hollywood weepies,
obsolete slang, macrame, women's lib, a pair of gold lame disco shorts.
They bring out the latent dreams and lost power that dwell wid1in these
silly details. Thus what I'd like to identify as perhaps the queerest commit
ment of my own book is also close reading: the decision to unfold, slowly,
a small munber of imaginative texts rather than amass a weighty archive
of or around texts, and to treat these te}..'tS and their formal work as
theories of their own, interventions upon both critical themy and histo
riography. Though I am trained as a literaty critic, my texts are not pri
marily novels - even d10ugh Benha Harris's Lover, Maty Shelley's Fran
Film and video are, in pan, a minor literature because they are still
associated with mindless ( and hence overly embodied) absorption, and
this charge holds patTicularly for the direct-to-video subgenres such as
horror movies, du-illers, tearjerkers, home movies, and pornography,
within which several of my texts traffic.19 Mobilizing both fiction and a
risl<y corporeality, the works I treat here may seem even more minor
when considered as examples of a mode of historiography: if a few die
hard academic literaty critics are still disinclined to see new media as
literature, even fewer disciplinaty historians tend to accept nondocumen
tary filmmaking as a method of doing histmy. Yet as Philip Rosen argues,
17
film and disciplinary history have several d1ings in common. As with any
writing about other times, the photographic media negotiate the rela
tionship between past and present: a photographic image consists of d1e
trace of an object and presents that object in a moment od1er than the
moment of recording. Photographic media, like works of historiography,
inevitably posit "a different JVhen from that of the spectator" and dms
"patticipate in a cultural terrain of historicity;' d1e latter term describ
ing the state of being recognizably historical to a given public.20 Rosen
stresses that as with the texts written by disciplinary historians, the domi
nant modes they write in, and d1e way these modes construct and con
catenate d1e objects of d1eir text, filmic te>.'ts aim to put past and present
into some stable relationship to one another even as the mediw11 puts
forth a model of reality as change itselfY The photographic media, in
Rosen's analysis, are unthinkable without "history" - d1e modern as
sumptions that d1e present differs from d1e past and dms d1e past must be
recorded, and the understanding of reality as protean, or at least poten
tially so. Last, Rosen claims, film intersects wid1 d1e aspect of hist01y d1at
involves collective experience. As a medium, film emerged during d1e era
of a reorganization of the social along temporal lines. There is much in d1e
mediwn dut mimics d1e segmenting and sequencing of time achieved in
the era of industrial capitalism. As an institution, the mass cinema cer
tainly borrowed the assembly line and od1er forms of rationalized time
space, but its institutionalization also depended on the corollary to or
ganized labor time - organized leisure time 22 Only when workers had
disposable income and disposable time, only when the days and weeks of
the masses were segmented into workdays and off-days, work-hours and
off-hours, could such products as the matinee or d1e two-hour feature
film become standard.
Film, d1en, creates a histodcally specific shared temporality, setting
limits on how long d1e spectator can dwell on any one object or experience
any one st01y, and thus socializing ( or, we might say, binding) the gaze. 23
Thus, to pause on a given image, to repeat an image over and over, or to
double an existing film in a remake or reshoot become productively queer
ways to "desocialize" dut gaze and intervene on d1e historical condition of
seeing itself. The "time arts" of film, video, and installation are, then, a
mode of both close reading and historiography, an optical and visceral
unconscious encoding what is at once lost and foreclosed. Yet d1is aes
thetic is not just desocializing but resocializing, as it also refuses to aban
don the terrain of basic bodily need. Deleuze and Guattari's "What Is a
18
19
20
detail that do not accede to existing d1eories and lexicons bur come into
lmpredictable contact wid1 them: close readings mat are, for most aca
demic disciplines, simply too close for comfort. 32
This commitment to overcloseness also informs my sense of anod1er
other-organizing term for this book: queer. To me, "queer" cannot signal
a purely deconstructive move or position of pure negativity. In enjoining
queers to operate as agents of dis- or de-figuration, critics like Lee Edel
man ( whose compelling No Future follows d1e Lacanian injlmction d1at
there is no sexual relationship) risk evacuating the messiest d1ing about
being queer: d1e actual meeting of bodies with od1er bodies and wid1
objects. 33 Contact with other bodies demands, and will generate, a figure,
as happens over and over in the battle scenes of "It's a Queer Time:'
Indeed, sex may w1bind selves and meanings, bur these must relatively
qwckly rebound into fantasies, or the sexual agents would perish after
only one release of energy. The fact dut me secondaty figure may be false,
or in a belated relationship to tl1e movement of desire, is less compelling
to me than me fact d1at it is often so beautiful and weird. Thus my first
book, The Wedding Complex, began wid1 my fascination over a poly
morphous white child finding the wedding, of all things, a silltable figure
and focus for her multiple vectors of longing and repulsion, particularly
in relation to her black nursemaid. 34 And TimeBinds began when I wlder
stood someone else's self-presentation as drag, if drag can be seen as the
act of plastering tl1e body wid1 outdated rather d1a.n just cross-gendered
accessories, whose resurrection seems to exceed the axis of gender and
begins to talk about, indeed talk back to, histmy. This drive to figure,
along with our drive to love, survive, and mourn, is pan of "our hist01y;'
or at least our way of becoming and being historical. As much as sexual
dissidents have suffered, lived as objects of contempt or oblivion, en
dured physical and emotional plmishment, we have also risked experi
mentation wim our bodies and d1ose of others, with affiliation, and wid1
new practices of hoping, demanding, and otherwise making claims on the
future, and this has entailed an enormous commitment to the pleasure
and power of figuration.
For instance, among all the blocks of the AIDS Memorial NAMES Qwlt,
that extraordinaty tribute to those who died from complications of
HIV
and AIDs, only one persists in my visual memmy: it said, "I had a FABu
lous time;' the word "fabulous" emerging from the label of a bright
orange bottle of laundry detergent. Queers have, it is fair to say, fab
ricated, confabulated, told fables, and done so fabulously-in fat and tl1in
21
art, and more - in the face of great pain. This is the legacy I wish to honor
here, that of queers as close enough readers of one another and of domi
nant culture to gather up, literally, life's outtakes and waste products and
bind them into fictitious but beautiful ( w) holes. Because in taking care of
our
0\\1
22
Fingers a black woman both figures and blocks the sentimental translation
of feelings across temporally disparate bodies, precisely because such time
uaveling seems to depend on white amnesia. Chapter 4, "Turn the Beat
Around:' takes up the problematic racializing logic apparent in my erato
historiographic texts by turning to Isaac Julien's eight-minute film The
Attendant ( I992) . In this work, I argue, Julien uses role-playing S/M as a
formal device for a new historiography, one that alternates between sus
pense and surprise to break up the horrif)ng tableau of the slave auction,
23
thus opening up d1e bodies of its actors toward a queer and black "bottom
historiography" in which d1ey might lay claim to the homoerotics of the
slave trade on their own terms.
Taken together, d1ese chapters are, in some ways, nothing more dun a
series of thought experiments. Looking backward, I can see how d1e
crisscrossing energies of postcolonial studies, studies in medieval and
od1er so-called premodern periods, and critical race d1eory made the
questions of time's sexual politics ( and d1e temporal politics of sex) , if not
inevitable, at least already asked in several different idioms . Since d1en,
my own work has emerged in fits and starts alongside, and often in
conversation with, many excellent red1inkings of temporality in the name
of sexual dissidence, to which I feel deeply indebted 38 It is my hope that
there's still something to say on the subject ( although as my writing
schedule lagged further and further behind my best-laid plans, I decided
that the book must somehow establish that belated is d1e new "now'') .
But what I can't offer is that which would, in any case, follow the kind of
projective logic dut queer cultural productions so often derail: a neat
translation of d1eory into policy, a program for better and more radical
living. Instead, I offer the most complicated gamble on tomorrow and
thereafter - writing. To write, after all , is only to hazard d1e possibility
that d1ere will be a future of some sort, a "Queer Time" off the batdeficld
of everyday existence, in which the act of reading might take place some
how, somewhere. This book is my bet.
24
acknowledgments
25
am
the introduction, parts of which t1-aveled to this book, and to the contrib
utors to that special issue for their ideas .
Each of these chapters owes a great deal, too, to audiences at con
ferences and imted lectures. I want particularly to thank audiences at
the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Gender and Sexuality,
especially Daniel Boyarin and Michael Lucey; Penn State University En
glish Department's "Rising Scholars" Symposium, especially S cott Her
ring; my Dartmouth Humanities Institute "Futures of American Stud
ies" plenary session, especially Don Pease; the University of Pennsylvania
Speaker Series on S eA.uality, especially Heather Love ( and Amy Kaplan
for the tough questions ) ; and the Harvard University "Sexualities across
the Disciplines" Group, especially B rad Epps and Orit Halpern;
as
well as
26
27
Ken Wissoker has been an amazing editor, w1failingly kind and effi
cient; the staff at Duke University Press has made producing d1is book a
pleasure. I also want to extend my thanks to Christopher Nealon and
another anonymous reader for Duke for rl1eir extremely helpful com
ments on the manuscript. Lauren Berlant gets credit for helping me get
over myself and approach Ken with my second book. And special thanks
to Lynn Langmade for the index.
Finally, I am lucky to have such generous friends : here in San Fran
cisco, godmamas Lori Lamma and Rachel Robson, honorary aunties Liz
Rodriguez and Melissa Green, and fellow lesbian mamas Heather Had
lock and Kad1y Vcit have saved me from any number of time binds.
Audrey Genet, Birgitte Gilliland, Emily Hilton, Daphne Magnawa, Kylie
Owen, Jenny Sagstrom-Warnes, and Lisa Schiller Tehrani have also per
formed heroic rescues and plied me with cocktails. S arah Lawton and
Alexandra Gordon have given advice and comfort. My dear Oberlin
friends A. K. Summers, Deb Schwartz, Annie Piper, and Camilla Enders
continue to inspire. Then there are those who have had the misfortune of
trying to makefa.mille wid1 me while I am on "book time:' B. J. Wray was
an early sufferer and I thank her for her fortitude. Amy Robinson re
minded me of what else d1ere was . Diane Bonder, whose life was cut short
by cancer, was a steady presence, and I miss both her and the work she
could have done. My parents and d1eir parmers, Caroline Freeman and
Glenn Hoffman, and Donald C. and Margaret Freeman, buoyed me up.
My brod1er Roger Freeman and his partner Mi-Sun gave help without
being asked. Jac Cherry deserves a medal, or at least my undying and
hw11ble thanks. And Caroline "Firefly'' Freeman-Cherry has taught me
everything I know about slowing down. To Jac and Firefly, especially, I
owe the world. And a bit more of my time.
Portions of d1is manuscript have appeared elsewhere as follows : pref
ace: "Still After;' in d1e special issue "After S ex?:' ed. Andrew Parker and
Janet Halley, South Atlantic Quarte1'/y 1 06, no. 3 (summer 2007) : 495soo; introduction : "Introduction;' i n me special issue "Queer Temporali
ties;' ed. Elizabetl1 Freeman, GLQ: A journal ofLesbian and Gay Studies I 3 ,
nos . 2 - 3 ( winter I spring 2007) : I 59-76; chapter 2 : "Deep Lcz: Temporal
Drag and the Specters of Fentinism;' in tl1e special issue "Is There Life
After Identity Politics ? ;' ed. Bill Albertini, Ben Lee, Heather Love, Mike
Millner, Ken Parille, Alice Rutkowski, and Bryan Wagner, New Lite1'ary
28
29
K. I. P.
that may or may not be his . The video opens with a series of grainy,
flickering, blurry shots of body parts flashing across the screen; eventually
it's clear that the scene shows two white men having sex. The men's
shaggy haircuts and sideburns and the low-res quality of the video images
suggest that the period is the I 970S or early r 9 8 os . For the full four
minute duration of Nguyen's piece the scene skips and stuners, with
dropouts, black frames, or smears of color occasionally interrupting the
action. The slight distortion of the images, occasional glare, and falling
static "snow" indicate that we are not seeing the scene direcdy but rad1er
through the curved glass front of an old-fashioned cathode ray tube tele
vision. Reflected on the surface of the lV monitor floats the ghosdike face
of a young male - rl1e director himself, as it turns out - expression blank,
glasses glinting a bit, mouth occasionally opening slightly, as if to eat, to
suck, to speak, or as if simply surprised ( sec figure r ) .
K. I. l'.
I.
capacity of the male body to produce them. And apparendy d1is is exacdy
what these viewers did. The temporal reshutflings particular to d1e frag
mented sex scene between the two hw1ky actors actually came from a
specific histOLy of conswnption, rad1er than solely from Nguyen's manip
ulations at the level of production, as is generally the case with experimen
tal film 2 In his notes for IU.l'. , which appear on the ovo of his complete
works, Nguyen describes finding a videotape tided "Kip Noll Superstar,
Part I" ( 1 9 8 r ) , a compilation of the then-iconic pom star Kip Noll's best
sex scenes put together by the prolific pornography director William
Higgins. 3 Nguyen's copy of the tape, which he reports renting at Tower
Video in San Francisco's Castro district, was damaged. It had apparently
been rewound too many times to the most explicit sex scene, so that tl1e
images now skipped and repeated, and entire frames were blurred or
erased. In other words, "the hottest part of the tape;' as Nguyen's note
puts it, appeared in his viewing of it as instances returning to themselves
over and over, and as a series of leaps across the bodily gestures or sexual
choreographies that we are ordinarily supposed to experience as smooth,
continuous, and natural.
K. I. l'. ,
ship : the reflected face becomes a figure for tl1e way this genre enables the
viewer to derail tl1e nomutive progression of sexual intercomse from
foreplay to penetration to clima.x
. . In fact, Nguyen's reshoot and the over
lay of an almost motionless face disconnect gesture from response, action
K. I.P.
suggests, the
tered "work time" even as they were also a product of it. So did the time
of specific bodily needs . As Eli Zaretsky writes, "The family, attuned to
the natural rhythms of eating, sleeping, and child care, can never be
wholly synchronized with the mechanized tempo of industrial capital
ism:'18 Emotional, domestic, and biological tempos are, though cultur
ally constmcted, somewhat less amenable to the speeding up and micro
management that increasingly characterized U. S . industrialization.
Time's Wow1ds
As Luciano puts it, in the dialectic between linear-national history and
wotu1ded. Thus gay men, lesbians, and od1er "perverts" have also served
as figures for history, for either civilization's decline or a sublimely fu
turistic release from nature, or both 21 Here we might cite, for instance,
the poet Renee Vivien's S apphic vampires, the novelist Djtu1a Barnes's
hybrid animal/ child I lesbian Robin Vote, or T. S. Eliot's sexually alien
ated J. Alfred Prufrock declaring himself to be "Lazarus, come from the
dead !"22 S e),.'llal dissidents became figures for and bearers of new cor
poreal sensations, including d10se of a certain counterpoint between now
and then, and of occasional disruptions to the sped-up and hyperregu
lated time of indusuy.
Freud's concept of d1e tu1conscious acknowledged exactly dlis doubled
History's Holes
Interestingly, d1e dialectic between time and histmy has been character
istic of not only Em-a-American modernity but also queer themy, or at
least one particular caricatm-e of queer themy. "Ludic" queer themy, as it
has been called, tends to align itself wid1 deconstruction, with d1e play
of signifiers and the possibilities opened up by understanding identities
as relational, constructed, and endlessly detoured to meanings outside
d1emselves 26 Insofar as deconstmction depends on the endless penetra
tion of the whole by the other, current meanings by prior ones, it has
dismanded the fiction of a time fully present to itself and accessible as
such; its detotalization of time has been useful to a queer themy con
cerned wid1 desire and fantasy. But according to some critics, ludic queer
d1eoty has not always concerned itself with history understood as a collec
tive consciousness of d1e significance, singularity, and sheer pain of ex
ploitation, or as collective agency toward relief from that pain. 27 A more
somber queer theory, on the other hand, tends to align itself with Marx
ism, with social conflict and sufferings inflicted by powerful groups, with
a politics attuned to need- with histories and even wid1 History. 28 But
this version of queer theory has not always auended to the vagaries of
temporality, as practiced and as embodied, that make new conceptions of
"d1e historical" possible.
Jacques Derrida's Specters ofMarx has been a key te>.1: for bringing d1ese
two strains of queer themy into conversation, insofar as it explicates
the "haw1tological" properties of Marxist dwught: Marx, Denida ar
gues, theorizes an ed1ics of responsibility toward the od1er across time
toward me dead or toward that which was impossible in a given historical
moment, each understood as calls for a different future to which we
cannot but answer wid1 imperfect and incomplete reparations. In this
Marx, d1e present is thereby always split, but split by prior violence and
Specters ofMarx, then, contributes to queer the01y the idea that time
can produce new social relations and even new forms of justice that cow1ter the chrononomutive and chronobiopolitical. This call for a more
sensate, sens01y historical method also appears in other important critical
theories, whether explicitly Marxist or not: Walter Benjamin's concept of
"shock;' for instance, suggests that modernity reorganizes the human
sensorium. 30 Raymond Williams's phrase "structures of feeling" suggests
tl1at social change can be felt as well as cognitively apprehended, and that
it appears alongside dominant structures in the uncanny persistence of
obsolete formations and the proleptic, partial emergence of new ones . 31
Jameson's famous dicmm tl1at "histDLy is what hurts" offers anotl1er ex
ample: in his analysis, large-scale social structures set limits on individual
desires, even as works of imaginative fiction repress the fact of those limits
and provide formal resolutions to irresolvable social confiicts 32 In Lyo
tard's formulation of tl1e differertd is yet another version of hist01y as hurt:
occurrences earn their historical evenmess by delegitimating both the
existing methods for !mowing the past and the forms that that knowledge
can take: in this sense, traw11atic experiences productively humiliate and
discombobulate the knower into new epistemologies, or at least into
feelings that intimate the possibility of new modes of apprehension. 33 Yet
none of these formulations engages with what might be called vulgar
physical pleasure. Even Derrida consistently displaces his radically po
rous ghost-host into a visual and occasionally aural economy ( seeing and
being seen, calling and responding) , and Specters ofMarx also insists tlut
the ghost can only be, at best, a prosthetic body.
Indeed, in contemporary critical theory the body itself seems an im
possible object with which or through which to think historically. Jame
son suggests that "body the01y" is actually the symptom of a certain loss
of time itself, specifically the deeply comparativist time of modernity. 34 In
the moment of modernity's emergence, he argues, prior modes of pro
duction had survived alongside industrial capitalism to produce a sense of
lhng in two different time zones . There was something to compare
modern temporality to, though Luciano's work importantly suggests that
10
Psychic Life of Power, not only to Denida but also to Freud's d1eory d1at
11
a bodily imago and eventually the ego itself emerge from raw suffer
ing. With Freud, we gain the understanding that hurt is what morpholo
gizes ; it congeals inchoate sensations into personally and culturally legi
ble forms of embodiment - we might even say that to Freud, hurt is what
histories. In "On Narcissism;' Freud describes how the libido invests in
an uncomfortable local sensation such as a toothache, by which means it
doubles back upon itself to delineate body parts as such ; Freud suggests
that the genitals are perhaps d1e most insistent locale for such hypochon
driacal fixations. 38 In "The Ego and d1e Id;' he argues that from within
tllis Mobius loop of libidinal self-auachment to sensitive areas, an in
creasingly unified sense of bodily contours emerges, and d1ese contours
materialize d1e ego that is "at first, a bodily ego;' an interconnected set of
perceived smfaces and botmdaries. 39 Opening d1ese terms out into d1e
social, we might d1ink of engroupment- the collective form of the ego
forged beyond familial ties - as engendered by d1is process as well as by,
or alongside, chrononormativity. Bodily expetiences of pain inflicted on a
population, or indeed the agony of being socially reduced to a nlisreading
of one's own body, may inform queer social contours, a wounded mor
phology of d1e social following a wounded morphology of the individual.
Individual bodily imagos, in short, are nascent collective and histori
cal formations in mat they may arise from contingent, institutionalized
forms of hurt d1at are experienced simultaneously and survive over time
yet cannot be reduced to tl1e social relations of d1e mode of economic
production. We might call d1ese collectively held morphologies the raw
material for a queerly inflected consciousness that can hold deconstruc
tionism and historical materialism in productive tension.
But why is it that even in queer d1emy, only pain seems so socially and
theoretically generative? Turning back to Freud, we might ask why physi
cal sensation, which he sees as the ground for body and psyche, must
always be unpleasant, and even why this originaty bodily displeasure is
eventually recast as the kind of tumescence or engorgement dut only
petlises experience. In order to become "ego;' dut is, Freud's wotmd
must effectively be turned inside out into a phallus : as Judith Butler puts
it, "The gaping hole in d1e mouth, the panoply of organic and hypochon
driacal ailments, are synthesized in and summarized by the prototypical
male genitals:'40 But even Buder's revision ofFreud via the lesbian phallus
only suggests that the primary tumescence from which the ego emerges
might be productively relocated onto arms, llipbones, and other sites as a
way of tl1eorizing a lesbian ego ; it doesn't challenge d1e phallicizing con-
12
13
abZ'Y visceral sense of temporal and historical dissidence dut even Denida
for the most pa-r skit-rs.
14
time as body, and "the times;' or the sphere of official politics and national
history, form a j oint: the body and the state are, rather than mere meta
phors for one another, mutually constructing.
But Hamlet the play and Hamler the Prince stick the gears of this
machine. Centered on a protagonist who eschews the marriage plot or
even its alternative, the revenge plot, Shakespeare's play freezes narrative
movement, political / histolical progression, and psychic development.
As John Hunt argues, Hamlet is a fantasia of corporeal disfigm-ement and
15
the fact that the King's body erupts in "tetters" and "crust;' also make the
transmission look venereal. The stmy of Adam and Eve has here been
transformed into a stmy of Adam and Steve, a scene of what looks vety
much like male-on-male oral or anal sex causing the royal house to faU
from health into disease, timeless glory into sordid histDLy.
Perhaps, too, Hamlet is complicit with at least part of this stDLy: given
his disinterest in manying Ophelia, obsession with Claudius, and passion
for Laertes, it's not unreasonable to read the entire play as - like K. I.l'. - a
melancholic wish for the homoerotic Eden that is this play's primal scene.
In historical terms, that lost Eden might even be the era prior to the
establishment of the Church of England, when Catholic monasteries
sheltered passions between men. For Hamlet, the time for love between
men is, indeed, out of joint, as it is for Nguyen, whose K. I.l'. imagines a
different articulation between past and present, body and collectivity.
Through K. I.l'. we might imagine a different Hamlet, in which the Prince
would have figured out a way to answer his cross-generational and same
sex desires and, as dte opening lines of Shakespeare's play put it, "stand,
and unfold yourself" toward other times ( 1.1.2 ) .
But the Shakespearean referent for
I<. I.l'. ,
sensual effects of temporal alterity and its vision of how temporal disloca
tion might produce new orientations of desire, might be less the pon
derOltS Hamlet than dte spritely A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which
nighttime and the nonsequential logic of dreams enable all kinds of iUicit
alliances. The latter play puts forth a model of time as embodied, of
bodies and their pleasures as at once tlte vessels, figures, and even causes of
temporal ( dis ) orientation. Indeed, the servant Philostrate initiates the
comedy of mistimed erotic encolmters - of people waking up suddenly
and falling instantly in love with forbidden or ridiculous objects - solely
for the purpose of speeding up tlte fom days and nights preceding The
seus and Hippolyta's wedding. Midsummer follows dte conventions of
comedic closme with a wedding near the end, where evetyone pairs off
appropriately and the fairies' blessing explicitly ensures that tlte royal
children wiU have none of the physical deformations dtat rwt dtrough
K. I.l'.,
16
( 5 . 1 .61-63 ) . In fact, me
17
dramatic conventions of pacing, d1ey live in the slow time of delay and
deferral. As Snug puts it, "I
am
18
who own ti1e means of production and people whose biggest asset is their
labor power - even as boti1 of these forms ofpower also involve time. We
might think of class as an embodied synchronic and diachronic organiza
tion. In its dominant forms, class enables its bearers what looks like
"natural" control over ti1eir body and its effects, or the diachronic means
of sexual and social reproduction. In turn, failures or refusals to inhabit
middle- and upper-middle-class habitus appear as, precisely, asynchrony,
or time out of joint. And as denizens of times out of joint, queers are a
subjugated class in the sense I have described it, even as many of us
occupy other positions of power including ti1e economic.
With queers and j of ti1e working class, too, the synchwnic aspect of
habitus out of joint meets ti1e diachronic aspect of generationality. In
other words, these two sometimes but not always overlapping subject
positions, queer and working class, also confront time longitudinally. In
"Theses on the Philosophy of History;' Walter Benjamin writes that "So
cial Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the
redeemer of future generations, in ti1is way cutting the sinews of its
greatest strengti1. This training made the working class forget boti1 its
hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for boti1 are nourished by the image of
enslaved ancestors rather than tiut of liberated grandchildren."50 Antici
pating Edelman's No Future by many decades, this passage suggests tiut
ti1e perils of reprofuturiry bear upon a more traditionally Marxist class
struggle. Unlike Edelman, Benjamin asks ti1at the working class not only
reject ti1e future but also turn back toward ti1e suffering of their forebears.
Yet, as I have argued here, suffering need not be the only food the ances
tors offer.
I<. I.P.
19
20
21
as
the public iconicity associated with the painted p01trait and toward de
picting an elusive psychic interiority, coded as highly feminine. Generally
portraying individual subjects and families posed in interior spaces sur
rounded by household items and furnishings, daguerreotypes celebrated
privacy and yet teased the viewer with d1e voyeuristic pleasure of imag
ined access to bod1 rooms and souls 3 They evoked the "timeless" spaces
of heart and heanh, the stillness of a domestic life imagined as a haven
from rather than a necessary correlate of indusuial time.
The technologies that followed may have dimmed d1e daguerreotype's
aura of singularity insofar as they allowed for multiple prints, but their
domestic users drew from d1e conventions of daguerreotypy by privileg
ing homes and family groupings. As Marianne Hirsch writes, after the
invention of the Kodak camera "photography quickly became d1e family's
primaty insuument of self-knowledge and representation - the means by
which family mem01y would be continued and perpetuated:' Smith con
tends that by d1e end of d1e nineteenth cennuy the photograph of the
child, in particular, had become a means of visualizing not just time but
the future, and not just any future but one congruent wid1 middle-class
aspirations illustrated by poses, settings, and props. Candid, infinitely
reproducible pictures of live babies and children replaced the daguerreo
type era's cult of dead children, figuring a new congruence between tech
nological reproduction and d1e saving ofd1e Anglo-American "race;' now
understood in terms of skin color as well as ancestty. In the hands of ordi
naty fathers and, increasingly, mothers, domestic photographs "uac [ ed]
the imaginative uajectory" of the family line toward continued racial
purity, physical heald1, and prosperity. 5 In this way, they insetted the
family into, and made the family into an image of, the nationalist march
of "progress:' In od1er words, domestic photography helped merge the
secularized, quasi-sacred time of nature and family with the homogenous,
empty time across which national destiny moved: representations of fam
ily made simple reproductive sequences look like historical consequence.
The spatial conventions that attended domestic uses of me visual media
also contributed to this effect. For instance, the family p01trait is often
recognizable as such because the subjects are usually posed with the elders
at d1e back ( and sometimes even portraits of ancestors on the wall behind
22
d1em) , the children in d1e front, and an adult male-female couple at the
center, flanked by their own siblings or eldest children. Individual por
traits of different family members or d1e same person are often shot or
displayed in sequences dut emphasize physical likenesses across time, as
in the living room display of family members organized top-to-bouom
and / or oldest-to-youngest, or of the child posed in front of me same tree
once a year.
But as I suggested earlier, queer time emerged from wid1in, alongside,
and beyond this heterosexually gendered double-time of stasis and prog
ress, intimacy and genealogy. While d1e antebellwn nineteend1 cennuy
was marked by a dialectic between sacred, static "women's" time and
a secularized, progressive, nominally male national-historical time, the
later nineteenth and twentied1 centuries saw a dialectic between "primi
tive;' slow, recalcitrant time and the time of speedy production, rapid
distribution, and constant novelty. This ostensible division of mutually
informing and co-constructed categories was not only gendered, as be
fore, but now also explicidy racialized and sexualized. The discourses of
racial degeneration in criminologists like Cesar Lombroso, and of neu
rotic repetition in Freud, made it possible to imagine and represent a
certain stalling of any smooth movement from past to present, stillness to
action, time to hist01y. These discourses foregrounded compulsive re
turns, movements backward to reenter prior historical moments ramer
d1an inward or outward to circumvent historical time. As film technolo
gies emerged in the late nineteenth century, they seemed to materialize
the possibility of return that subtended modernity: as Maty Ann Doane
demonstrates, d1e plots of early fictional films such as Life of an Ame1'ican
Fireman ( 1903 ) contained scenes in which the same action was shown
twice, shot from different vantage points, to emphasize spatial continuity.
Some "actuality" films depicting real events were shown backward and
forward, asking spectators to marvel in buildings that resurrected them
selves, or glasses d1at knit their fragments back up. S ome were shown in a
continuous loop, encouraging viewers to notice different details in each
showing. S ome early directors enhanced the credibility of the historical
reenactments they portrayed by beginning with establishing shots taken
on d1e day of the historical event, returning spectators to the original time
and place before latmching a reconstruction of the events that took place
d1ere. Thus, though film seemed to highlight the irreversibility and lin
earity of time through the relendess f01ward motion of the apparatus, it
also enabled a kind of mass repetition-compulsion, enabling spectators to
23
stop time or see it run backward. Whether explicitly correlated with racial
and sexual otl1erness or not, film's ability to manipulate time or to enable
historical return resonated witl1 the late nineteenth century's tendency to
align blacks, homosexuals, and other deviants with tl1reats to the forward
movement of individual or civilizational development.
Cecilia Dougherty's independent video Coal Miner's Granddaughter
( I 991 ) queers family by bringing film's work on time to the level of acting
and embodiment. At its outset, Coal Miner's Granddaughter promises a
suture between family and collectivity, representation and reproduction,
using the conventions of home video. At one point in this piece, a
working-class family sits down to dinner at their home in Lancaster,
Pe1msylvania, tl1e week before an election. 6 Among the family members is
the protagonist, Jane Dobson (Leslie Singer) , who has announced before
the story begins, "My name is Jane Dobson and tl1is is my damned stmy;'
and who will make her way up from the family dinner table and our of the
closet by the narrative's end. But by invoking both the country singer
Lorena Lynn's hit "Coal Miner's Daughter" ( 1970) and the film of the
same name ( 1 9 8 0 ) , the title of Dougherty's video suggests Jane's compli
cated relationship to her family of origin. Ostensibly, it signals that her
personal histmy includes a connection to not only extended family but
also a collective form of labor and its representational histmy. In Popular
Front, Depression-era portraits by Walker Evans, James Agee, and Dor
otllea Lange, for instance, coal miners' families have typicaUy registered
the progress or regress of an industty and the culture surrounding it;
similarly, the lyrics to Lynn's song suggest that her memories of her home
at Butcher Hollow preserve a lost way of life. Viewers of Coal Miner's
Granddaughter, then, might expect something magisterial, a female "Up
from Wage Slavery" that lends gra vitas to an indi vidual life by embedding
it in a larger collective drama of gender, sexual, and/ or class struggle.
But plain and lumpish Jane is a watered-down version of Lynn's ear
nestly gritty protagonist, half a centUty removed from the world of col
lective organizing that many now romanticize ( see figure 2 ) . Thus
"granddaughter" ironicaUy invokes a certain de-generation, of which
homose),:uality is only one aspect in tl1e video. Jane's "damned story"
involves not the rags-to-riches progress of a star but the movement from
the Depression to just plain old depression, and tl1e lesbian awakening of
an ordinary young woman who ends up in S an Francisco's early 1 990s
pro-sex queer subculture - neither of which, it might be noted, add up to
something as grandiose as damnation in tl1e religious sense of tl1e word.
24
25
26
artists and critics were already self-consciously theorizing its own emer
gence and ephemerality 8 The term "New Queer Cinema:' apparently
coined by tl1e film critic B. Ruby Rich, encompassed films that eschewed
gay identity as a point of departure or return and instead represented
s ame-sex relations in terms of acts, situations, aestl1etics, and unpredict
able historical or social collisions 9 To describe tl1e New Queer Cinema
somewhat overschematically, it generally avoided individual coming-out
narratives, realistic depictions of urban gay social milietLx, and otl1er "ex
pressive" narrative or filmic conventions that would stabilize or contain
homoeroticism, correlate particular bodies to particular desires, or reduce
erotic practice to sexual identity. 10 And crucially, the New Queer Cinema
engaged in what Rich called "a reworking of history with social con
structionism vety much in mind . . . a new historiography;' about which
less has since been written tlun one might expect.11 In keeping witl1 tl1e
New Queer Cinema's emphasis on the constructed nature of both iden
tity and history, Jane's life is memorialized on the nearly obsolete medium
of a cassette tape, the original of which cannot even be played except on a
discontinued machine. Portraying a granddaughter who is a bad copy of
Lynn's famous daughter, in a medium that is itself considered a bad copy
of film, and indeed in a low-quality version of even tlut medium intended
for children, Goa/Miner's Granddaughter is less about descent or legacy
than it is about inferior derivations and tl1e inheritance of qualities with
no value to middle-class culture. Even in its physical aspect, the video
incarnates the cliches that a lesbian is a bad copy of a man, that a queer life
leaves nothing enduring, tlut a working-class subject has, in Rita Fdski's
words, "notl1ing to declare:'12
Insofar as this video follows the generic conventions of a coming-out
story, it certainly participates in an earlier identity politics on tl1e level of
content. But what is queer about it surfaces in the formal register: mate
rially, a master tape tlut is destined to corrupt and fade, and stmcturally, a
saga that fails to be anything but utterly ordinary. These dements clearly
resonate witl1 contemporary analyses of queerness as a force tl1at distorts
or undermines tl1e logic of sequence - at one point in the film Jane says to
her brother Jon ( Glen Helfland) , "I could just stay here, go to Temple,
get married, get some kind of office job till I get pregnant . . . why don't
I just blow my head off right now?"13 But tl1e video also refuses to dis
mpt narrative sequence per se and align dissident sexuality with a simple
atdeological postmodernism: scene follows scene in relatively expected
ways as Jane fights with her family, leaves home, arrives in a gay Mecca,
27
comes back to visit Lancaster now and again. Here, queer docs not
merely oppose linearity. Dougherty herself has stated that she "wanted to
make a narrative instead of an cxpctimcntal piece . . . I'm really sick of
artsy videos . . . It looked like film was going to be the vehicle for narrative
and video was slated for documentary or experimental work. I thought
video was undcrutilizcd?'14
Dougherty's contribution to a queer politics of time is, then, more
complicated than mere posunodcrnism: like Nguyen, she blocks the
transformation of time itself into grand historical narrative, especially as
tllis metamorphosis is effected tl1rough the progress of a people depicted
visually. Bur she also blocks the transfomution of class consciousness into
Marxist Histoty-with-a-capitai-H, or tl1e proletariat's eventual triumph.
By explicitly referencing Loretta Lynn's Coal Miner's Daughter, Dough
erty suggests how key the trope of heteronormative, ex-tensive kinship is
to these two interlocking grand narratives of collective destiny. But her
play with the time of hctcronormativc family life engages an axis of tem
poral power that cannot be reduced to the generationalized class saga,
even if it functions alongside it: Coal Miner's Granddaughter, despite
the diachronic overtones of its title, engages most deeply with the syn
chronic, or tl1e power of timing to effect solidarity.
As with all legitimate groups, families depend on timing. Their cho
reographed displays of simultaneity effect a latitudinal, e::-:tensive set of
belonging to one anotl1cr: in popular rhetoric and imagcty, for instance,
the family that prays together supposedly stays together. 15 As Homi
Bhabha points out in his work on nationhood, these performances of
synchrony may seem to consolidate collective life, but the coherence they
provide is fragile . 16 Dougherty's disruption of heterotemporality, like
wise, appears less as a matter of narrative derangement or antiteleology
than as a mancr of theatrical and thcatricalizcd dccoordination, much like
that of tl1e bw11bling artisans in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Coal
Miner's Granddaughter, tl1e players are neitl1er documentary subjects nor
professional actors bur amateurs from Dougherty's evetyday life (Jane,
for instance, is played by the video artist Leslie Singer) . The production
had no script, and Doughterty's players improvised from a minimal plot
outline. Dougherty sketched out a set of sequential vignettes tlut added
up to a stDLy, tl1en gave tl1e players broad descriptions of each scene and
index cards witl1 key phrases tl1at she wanted tl1cm to usc as tl1cy acted
them our in what appear to be single takes. 17 Much of the dialogue in the
video is therefore marked by stuncrs, mismatches between tl1c tone and
28
daughter portrays r But the actors' verbal clumsiness, fiat affect, a.tld misfir
ing of dialogue md interactions constitute what I think of as this video's
"queer accent:' I mean tl1is phrase to echo and to revise Voloshinov's
themy of "multiaccentuality:' Voloshinov argues that members of dif
felent classes, though tl1ey use me s ame ideologically loaded terms, inflect
them differently, with subjugated classes deploying them toward ends
that contradict or compete with dominant ones, or stressing subj ugated
or archaic mcanings.19 This definition departs from the usual spatia
temporal way of seeing accent as a vestige of location in a particular
geographical place, as in a S outl1ern accent, or even a discrete historical
moment, as in an Elizabetl1a.t1 one. For it implies the rhythmic aspect of
tl1e word "accent" - its definition as st1'ess or, in tl1e Oxford English Diction
a1y, "a prominence given to one syllable in a word . . . over the adjacent
syllables:'20 In terms of speech, to share an accent with someone is to have
similar patterns of not only tone and phoneme but also meter. And ac
cent, as the work ofBourdieu a.tld Mauss makes clear, extends beyond the
spoken rhythm of individual words and sentences to encompass kinetic
tempos and the prosodies of interactions between people. Accent is part
of habitus, tl1at somatic effect primarily achieved in and tl1rough conven
tions of timing that feel like natural affinities. Those who can synch up
their bodily hexes and linguistic patterns, who can inhabit a culture's
particular tempos with enough mastery to improvise within them, feel as
if tl1ey belong to that culture (this is why humor, which often depends on
physical and/ or verbal timing, is so culturally specific and such a marker
of insiders and outsiders ) . Thus a class accent is not simply a matter of
ma.tmers, as witl1 television shows of the r 9 8 os like Manied with Children,
which featured a fa.tnily of perpetually broke, gum-cracking slobs yelling
at one another. Instead, it is a matter of shared timing. The Dobsons of
29
class - and more j arringly, unlike even a family - because the timing of
their interactions with one another is so imperfect. Their inadequate
mastery over time and timing registers incompetence with and insuffi
ciency to, or perhaps just refusal of, the forms of working-class solidarity
and familial intimacy. If the actors quite literally don't know how to act
together, the fan1ily gives off the impression of not wanting to act "to
gether;' even as the mother, Phyllis ( Didi Dunphy) , whines over and over
again, "We'll always be together. We'll always be happy together:'
The video's commitment to bad timing, then, queers what might odl
etwise be its univocally class-inflected accent: perhaps d1e Dobsons fail to
enact class belonging because they fail in the first place to act as a "nor
mal" family. And conversely, perhaps class complicates what would adler
wise be a more recognizably lesbian accent. Singer's acting certainly gets
better in the San Francisco scenes, which perhaps inadvert:endy suggests
that queer life fits Jane, and she fits it, a bit better than life with her family
of otigin. But d1is too gets complicated by a wholly different subplot: on
her arrival in S an Francisco, Jane finds not pure bodily liberation but,
tellingly, chronic pain in her joints. Her brod1er Jon has already said dut
the two of them should "blow this joint" and get out of Lancaster, but
Jane finds instead that her own articular smfaces are covered with myste
rious cysts. While the soundtrack plays a recurrent riff, "If you wanna
move, then move over here;' Jane learns from her doctor (Ramon Chur
ruca) that her movement will always be limited. This bodily condition, in
turn, metaphorizes her inability to become a fast-paced, sexually blase
urban dyke; for instance, in a later scene, Jane is forced to call her non
monogamous lover Victoria ( Claire Trepanier) for help with food and
chores, and Victoria impatiendy scolds Jane for messing up her other
dating plans by expecting her to come immediately. Later, when Jane's
doctor asks after her chronic pain and she replies "I d1ink I'm just getting
used to it;' he is pleased. "Ahhh . . . dut's good progress;' he intones. "You
have to learn to live like dut:' Ironically, a commitment to stasis becomes
the sign of Jane's progress.
Unbound from traditional working-class histOty, Jane finds herself
equally unjoined to queer modernity. In the video's last scene, in which
Jane is house-sitting and a neighbor (Amy Scholder) brings up some
misdelivered mail, Singer revetts to the mistimed, babbling stiffness of
the early dinner scenes. Several times, Jane offers up the lame j oke d1at the
postal carrier must be on drugs: his lunch hour, she says, must be "a
burrito and a joint:' And that is where the video ends : with a coincidental,
30
31
32
and reappear, telling stories and performing scenes set in different times.
It has no overarching plot but instead cuts between several storylines in
nonchronological order, stacking them atop one another and weaving in
fragments from saints' lives and philosophical musings from various nar
rators. In both of these works, formal experimentation takes place against
an exaggeratedly heteronormative temporalized discipline, figmed by the
mod1er-daughter relationship.
33
mother's death, to enter either the sacred time of grief and epiphany, Or
the forward-flowing time of going on with her life.
Having turned photography toward film's possibilities for reversing
temporal order, Bonder then addresses the relationship between domes
tic photography and heterosexual reproduction. Toward the end of this
set of shots a narrator says, "They were cut from the same mold ." Imme
diately thereafter comes a set of two gold frames, each encasing one of the
two stills, as if to arrest both motion and time. The images wid1in d1e
frames rapidly shift to twin images of peas in pods ( as rl1e narrator says
"like two peas in a pod" ) , a large fly ( "d1e resemblance was uncanny" ) ,
DNA helixes ( "she took after her i n every way" ) , chromosomes ("d1ey
could have been twins" ) , and then b ack to the stills, but this time a
viscous liquid spatters on the glass ( see figure 4) . As this liquid hits, the
narrator says, "You could say she was her spitting image:' This line, itself
doubling possible pronominal referents ( who is whose image ? ) sounds
twice in rapid and overlapping succession. So not only does this series of
shots eventually repudiate - literally spit upon - the likeness it seems at
first to celebrate but the echolalic last line of the segment's soundtrack also
disrupts forward movement, doubling the sentence back upon itself. Just
as the child's back- and-forth stepping in the early motion-study stills
figures a stuttering kind of time rather d1an progress toward the fmure, in
this set of images genetic reproduction fails to produce enough difference
and hence change.
34
1976.
35
introduce the names of the novel's central characters - about which more
below - the reader is presented with "a series of snapshots" depicted only
in words.25 These pictures, we are told, depict a preschool-aged child in
the 1 940s - Veronica, who will turn out to be the novel's artist and the
one with the most multiple and shifting identities. The narrator reports
that the photo of Veronica is shot from the back; two others apparently
show her standing in a lake, wearing a wool bathing suit that is appliqued
with a duck. The photos initially seem to offer the reader help in situating
Lover's large and unwieldy collection of women into a historical moment
and into generations of family: perhaps Veronica, described just before
the introduction of the photographs as sitting on a swing sucking candy
witl1 her childhood "sweetl1eart" who is also named Veronica, is a descen
dant of some sort. Yet the name Veronica itself references the first picture
of Christ - the vernicle made by the woman who held tl1e Shroud of
Twin to Jesus's face, which act signals Christianity's turn from the pa
triarchal blood family ofJudaism to a scheme of proselytizing and conver
sion ( reproduction by otl1er means) , and from an anti-imagistic theology
to one that privileged the image 26 Perhaps, then, Veronica tl1e artist is
Lover's matriarch, its Mary. But the novel's first sentence about Veronica is
that she "came out of nowhere;' in contrast to tl1e novel's otl1er main
characters, Samaria, Daisy, and Flynn, whom the opening sentences con
firm are clearly born to one anotl1er in some order or another. Veronica
seems completely unreproduced, a photo without a negative.
Veronica's photos reappear at the end of the novel, when Daisy ap
pears and tells Veronica that either she (Daisy) or her mother, Samaria,
has murdered a man. "But I say Samaria and you say m_y mothm,:' says
Veronica, "How do I know which is tl1e motl1er and which is the daugh
ter? How can I know that for sure?" ( 2 1 1 ) . Daisy tells her to "find
something to remind you of something else - perhaps a snapshot of me in
a little woolen bathing suit, a bathing suit witl1 a duck on it, and I'm
standing at the edge of a lake witl1 my feet in the water" ( 21 r, my em
phasis ) . As with Bonder's mother-daughter snapshot, here domestic
photography lmhinges memmy and sequence rather than facilitating it:
Daisy, born to S amaria, who is Veronica's lover and contemporary, could
not possibly be the child in the photo. Veronica retorts, "It could be
Samaria in that picture, not you . . . I wonder who the real one is. It might
be me. Like evetytl1ing else, one is real, the other a forgery'' ( 2 1 2 ) . Daisy
teases, ''Which is the motl1er, which tl1e forgery? My goodness, Veronica"
( 2 1 2 ) . The implication here is that domestic photography produces, or
36
37
38
39
that substituted for the working relationships that had previously con
stituted the everyday experience of family life:'34 Here we can see how
events coded as familial and photographic technologies of memmy are
practically coterminous. Family life was supposed to be like a moving
watch works, showcasing the precision of its routines and the synchronic
ity of its motions as evidence of intimacy, even as a kind of household
habitus. And domestic photography became an integral part of this shift :
as Hirsch writes, it "both chronicles family rituals and constitutes a prime
objective of those riruals:'35 Family time, as it emerged, moved a fmmerly
religious ritual time into women's domain, replaced sacred time with the
secular rhythms of capital, feminized the temporalities considered to be
outside of the linear, serial, end-directed time of history, and demanded
and depended on visual technologies that required increasingly less physi
cal effort from their users. vVhile ritual self-representation required enor
mous amounts of work on the part of a household's women, who pre
pared holiday dinners, planned and executed family activities, and so on,
the technologies for representing family time hid their own workings
behind one-touch buuons .
This secularized cyclical time, in turn, offered a new version of monu
mental time. Within the ideology of normative domesticity, the proper
maintenance of cyclical schedules and routines produces the effect of time
lessness. But only with its routines scenting to manage themselves could
the domestic sphere shelter ellis form of time: tl1e work of the household
took place within a protective casing, a temporal stasis that kept histmy at
bay. By the mid-twentieth centmy, bourgeois mothers and tl1eir behind
the-scenes servants were responsible for what Thomas Elsaesser has de
scribed as the aesthetics of the still life, a tranquil household marked by not
only visual order but also smooth transitions, recurrent rituals, and safety
from accidents and untimely intrusions from the outside world. 36 That is,
the middle-class household not only effaced d1e conditions of its own
production ( the housewifely and servant labor necessaty to produce such
order and stasis ) but also appeared as pure temporal plenitude - as a
surplus of what d1e late twentieth centmy would call "quality time:' Again,
popular visual culture both represented and partook in d1is temporal
mode. Elsassaer claims dut tl1e aestl1etics of quality time, of d1e household
as still life, reached meir apotheosis in the so-called women's films pro
duced by Hollywood studios in the I 940S and I 950S. The careful mises-en
scene of these films, their tendency to linger on household decor and
objects, and their dilatmy rhytlm1s of repressed emotional excess at once
40
stop narrative time and hyperbolize the timeless, seamless, ideal middle
class household. Time literally becomes quality; the "woman's film" dis
solves action into the clements of tcxrmc, color, meticulous placement,
telling gesture.
Physics and Lover invoke and displace this mystified form of time. As
if to hearken back to Beecher's ethos of streamlined domesticity, for in
stance, The Physics ofLove bod1 portrays and formally reiterates d1is pseu
domcchanical synchi.ng of the household. At one point on the video's
soundtrack we hear factmy noises - sanding, grinding, whirring, metallic
whining, against which background a slow tick-tick-tick becomes au
dible. Over tlus we sec an optically printed shot of a hand on an iron,
moving back and forth on an ironing board, the jlL\.1:aposition of sow1d
and image suggesting a possible congruence of household and factory
time. Bur as tl1e factmy sounds and ticks continue, a narrator reads a series
of dates and weights, from "January r4r1', r982: Weight: r641h pounds;'
through successively later dates and smaller numbers, to "Fcbmary I 2'\
41
The Bad Seed ( 1 956) , though d1e speaker's synopsis ends wid1 "she de
cides d1e only way to save her daughter is to kill her" and omits d1e
daughter's convenient dead1 by lightning. Anod1er recounts d1e stmy of
Mildred Pierce ( 1945) and ends with the mod1er's "final sacrifice as her
42
daughter begs her not to tum her in" for killing the man they both love.
In the manner of Nguyen's work with the original tape of Kip Noll, Super
Lover too trades on the plot summary to invoke and petform monu
mental time. Its inscrutable "preface" appears after the family diagram
and consists only of a synopsis of Richard Strauss's Der Rnsenkavalier,
later revealed to have been authored by Veronica. Thereafter, the novel is
divided into short sections somewhat like chapters, each of which is pref
aced by a tale of a female saint's life, printed in italics. The first one appears
atop the opening birth scenes and descriptions of photographs I have
described and portrays an encounter between two virgin martyrs : To save
hmelffrom marriage, Lucy gouged out her OJVn eyes; but Agatha appem'ed
to he1' and decla1'ed, "Thou a1't light'' ( 5 ) . Lucy is one of dozens of fe
male mystics whose lives and grisly deaths Love1' periodically recowus: we
might call them case studies of female resistance, or, more simply, of
female intensity. The typical tale of a female saint recowus her refusal to
many, her violent pw1ishment at the hands of angty men, and the mira
cles that take place at or shortly after tl1e time of her deatl1. 37 Each saint is
released from ordinary time into the eternity represented and granted by
saintl10od. In particular, tl10ugh, Agatl1a's pronouncement "Thou art
light" effects the apogee of quality time, time as a sensmy but here utterly
disembodied quality - much like the bourgeois woman's diaphanous
household (non) presence.
Moreover, "Thou an light" recalls the importance of photography and
film to tl1e production of feminized interiority, generational sequence,
43
Physics and Lover, the ways they shift between past and present, between
the stillness of photography and the motion of television, cinema, and
live petformance, suggest an alternative relation to time. These new tem
poralities, though, are anchored to the body in ways tl1at both risk and
resist essentialism : for Bonder and Harris, "queer" is a differential meet
ing of eros and time, body and timing.
44
45
pregnant. Yet both te>.'ts certainly bank on the body's persistent refusal to
cohere with or as a singular identity. Fm1:hermore, like Kristeva they
locate that stubbornness in the fact that the body is a temporal rather than
a spatial phenomenon. In fact, in these te>.'ts the body itself epitomizes the
bad timing that can comneract d1e forms of time on which both a patri
archal generationality and a maternalized middle-class domesticity lean
for their meaning.
Initially, Physics and Lover wrench d1e body from both visual econo
mics and heteronormative timings by seizing the discourse of blood. For
Bonder and Harris alike, blood indicates a body that refuses to disappear
and temporalities d1at are irreducible eid1er to genetics or to pos0110dern
freeplay with chronos and history. In d1e mother-daughter relationship
marked by differences in class and object of desire, it seems, blood neither
flows down genealogical lines nor gets displaced into warm fuzzy senti
ment but spurts, surges, coagulates, as in a wound. "My mother associ
ated me with blood, discomfort, and sacrifice;' says the narrator ofPhysics.
She describes her mod1er dragging her back to d1e scene of her own birth
by displaying a Caesarean scar: "She would show it to me occasionally, as
a reminder of my ingratitude for the physical manifestation of her uncon
ditional love. I kept waiting for it to talk, to say something, to tell me who
had done this to her. I knew it couldn't have been me. I could remember
nothing!' The mother is pure, silent body; she possesses nothing of value
to pass on to her daughter, nothing to say, nothing that allows closure
and continuation - again, nothing to declare 42 B ut though the daughter
in Physics refi.1ses memory, she is transfixed by her mother's wound, at
tached by d1e gaze to the scene of her own binh. Later in Physics, we see a
close-up of a finger, blood bubbling up out of a pinprick, wid1 another
finger touching it. We don't know if d1e finger that touches belongs to the
body of the finger mat is bleeding or to someone else: here, blood has
ceased to figure consanguinity. In fact, in most of Physics, blood is pure
anatomy, disarticulated from familial destiny. It appears in segments or
stills showing a translucent medical mannequin, a stain of platelets seen
tluough a microscope, a snippet of video showing a surging vein, an
anatomical slide wid1 labels for the major aneries.
In Lover, blood initially marks sacrifice, but d1e sacrifice is d1at of
personhood rather than of body. Flynn's grandmod1er compares her first
menstruation to men's blood in battle: "They can only die. But we are
never the same again, and that is worse .
woman. I had been exchanged for a woman " ( r o2, emphasis in original) .
46
47
each with our own rv drip pumping the life back into us. We share the
soft glow of a narcotic haze. We feel comforted, and loved, although not
by each other. Never by each other . . . It is the first thing we have shared
in years!'
This opiate fusion of women in an institutional setting looks like not
only a repudiation of biological kinship but also a savagely ironic counter
point to the sacred, monumental time of the pre- Oedipal, and to the
film's earlier retellings of melodramatic plots in which a mother merges
her identity into that of d1e daughter. In fact, the scene utterly mocks
synchrony. Here, only in the distorted time and space of the drug trip
can mother and daughter truly meet one anod1er, the "bad blood" ( as the
film puts it in an intertide) that has failed to bind them replaced by human
made liquids that succeed. The narrator goes on to dismpt d1e pre- Oedipal
scene by describing herself and her mother taking photos of one another:
"And I am caught, laughing. And guilty, full of her fluids." "Her fluids" are
neither milk nor blood; in fact, it is quite possible that the addict daughter
has stolen from her mod1er's stash of morphine. Here too, photos conceal
as much as they reveal, index difference and antagonism as much as d1ey
foreground likeness and love. Recalling the figme wid1 which CoalMiner's
48
I argued that this scene ended with a disembodied, eternal time. But
Agatha also affiliates with Lucy through nonconsanguinous blood, inso
far as both women bear gaping wounds : in Catholic iconography, S aint
Agadu is usuaUy represented holding her own chopped-off breasts on a
platter. Agadu's appearance before
out her own eyes suggests the power of blood to conjoin bodies in ways
d1at go beyond the logic of genetic inheritance so often buttressed by the
conventions of family photography, and even the ptmctming of the hy
men or the gushy fluids of pregnancy and childbirth. Indeed, as the
medievalist Karma Lochrie writes, d1e eroticized mystical transports asso
ciated with medieval virgin-saints and holy women included fantasies of
being "invite [ d] to touch, kiss, suck, and enter the wound of Christ."43
This trope invokes a feminized and punctured Christ whose wound is
open to penetration like a vagina, and the simultaneous possibility of a
hymen kept aU the more intact by d1ese vulval and oral, nonpenetrative
"sealings" between Christ and his female foUowers. Following Kristeva,
we might say d1at in the passage above and in Lochrie's account blood
confow1ds the boundary between inside and outside to figure a subject
split and made holy by temporal difference, by encountering d1e "slow
time" of d1e eternal. And this binding of profane to sacred time is emphat
ically corporeal.
49
The Physics ofLove has botl1 a visual and a verbal lexicon for encounters
between mother and daughter that exceed or eschew the familial forms of
time I have described. Its image track figures the relationship between
mother and daughter as a plate smashing on the floor, a wrecking baU
hitting a building. The narrator speaks of the pair in terms of force and
object, action and reaction, hand and striking slllface, citing Newton's
laws of inertia, acceleration, and reciprocal actions. But the final words of
the video, spoken by the narrator, suggest that these encounters do not
add up, either to a relationship or to history: "In this stmy, everyone
suffers amnesia:' Here she refers back to an earlier synopsis of an appar
ently made-up film:
[Voice-over: ] In tllis stoty a woman gets into an accident and be
comes an amnesiac. After wandering like a vagabond for many years,
she arrives and gets waitressing work in a smaU town. As she be
comes friendly witl1 the daughter of the restaurateur, she begins to
have strange and violent memories. Convinced she has done some
thing terrible to her own family, and has lost her memmy to cover it,
she attempts suicide. The young girl comes to her rescue and witl1 tl1is
act her faitl1 and memmy are botl1 restored.
Here, the amnesia trope serves to literalize the time of the maternal melo
drama and of domesticity in general, for as several critics have argued,
amnesia is popular culture's symptomatic trope for a loss of historical
memmy 46 At the same time, though, the synopsis above suggests that
amnesia also offers an escape from tl1e burden of family. As the narrator
puts it in another smnmaty that seems to refer self-reflexively to The
Physics of Love itself: "In tl1is stmy characters bounce off of one anotl1er
like atoms following independent trajectories. No action has itTeparable
50
51
neither for work nor for shopping, the vitality signaled by Bonder's mi
crotemporal reappropriations could, at least theoretically, be used for a
new physics, for the making of new life-worlds beyond the shared drug
trip (though not necessarily excluding it) .
Lover takes that project of world maldng to the nth degree, beyond any
recognizable social form: its women float in and out of several houses such
that setting is almost impossible to nail down, and their relations exceed
the categories not only of family but also of political movement or sub
culture. Interestingly, Harris traces her astonishing novel back to her
mother's differential seizure of perhaps the quintessential commodity
experience marketed to poorer women. "I was a child aesthete . . . a lonely,
anxious, skinny child;' she writes in her preface to the reissue ofLovtw. "On
a daily basis my mother compellingly described to me how worthless I
was. I had early on elected to love beauty rather than love or hate my
mother" ( xvi-xvjj ) . It turns out that this is what mother and daughter
have in common. Shortly after Harris is born, her mother moves in with a
beautician and becomes a hardcore fan of beauty pageants :
My mother told me why she'd moved in with the beauty parlor
operator: "Because I worship beaury:'
Ratl1er tl1an love or hate me, my motl1er elected to become a con
firmed aesthete; I became acquainted at Mother's knee, so to speak,
with a way to overwhelm reality that has come to be called the gay
sensibility.
( xxii )
52
attraction and desire: not only the supposedly natural continuum from
female anatomy to feminine self-identification to desire for d1e opposite
sex to pregnancy and childbirth but also d1e sequential, irreversible, teleo
logical time that orders and gives meaning to this continuum.
Harris's becoming-lover seems akin to what Audre Lorde describes in
"The Uses of d1e Erotic" ; it is an eroticized j oy in a form of creation d1at
supersedes reproduction but is still anchored in the body 47 It is also akin
to the Deleuzean body-wid1Dut- organs, whose connections across multi
ple surfaces catalyze new becomings 48 For instance, dreaming of herself
as "lover;' Flynn fantasizes dut "all she must do to maintain paradise is to
fuck women . . . Flynn gives d1em all they need; and d1ey do not burst but
multiply and Flynn increases"
( r2 3 ) .
aJ1
53
54
dips and sways. Caught in the barbed wire atop a chain-link fence, soips of
cloth and pieces of plastic bag flap tmevenly in the wind. The narrator
utters the film's last line, "In this story, evetyone suffers amnesia:' over a
shot of a clothesline on which hangs a white chemise, lit from behind,
waving gently in the breeze ( see figure 6) . The laundry returns us to the
history tl1at hurts, to the drudgery of the domestic sphere, and indeed, on
tl1e left-hand side of the screen, a small loop of clothesline hangs down like
a noose: both this and the aforementioned barbed wire suggest that the
daughter cannot fully escape domesticity. Bur the motion of fabric in these
last few shots suggests a certain openness and play, a temporal multidirec
tionahty, as things move back and forth and arow1d and arow1d. The
motif of the fold certainly suggests something about the way memory
works - that it is more tactile dun visual, more about brief and
achronological touches of one moment to another than about the mag
isterial sequence of generations in histOty. 54 T11e w1dulating fabrics, stand
ins for the earlier atomic encow1ters, also suggest someiliing about plea
sme. Casarino writes: "The fulfilled moment of pleasme would constitute
the point at which desire folds back upon itself so as to go on producing
other such points, other such moments. Pleasure is the fold of desire: it is
the immanent point of tangency between ow bodies and the force of
desire . . . It is only deep from within the folds of such a temporality that
one can begin to ask - as Spinoza does ask in the Ethics - what the body
can do, what a revolutionary and liberated body might be:'55
55
Textiles are an apt metaphor for the tactile meeting of body and desire,
even for skin itself as the body's most delicate and voltmlinous surface of
tangency. And Physics offers up the body as just such an absent presence,
or missing possibility, within its folds upon folds : its dresses and skirts
and chemises arc like skins, empty of bodies, ready for them, yet also ma
terial in and of themselves, cncotmtcring only themselves as they move.
Lover offers a bit less on the level of imagery, though Harris grants at
least a few of her characters the possibility of a bodily time released from
both hctcronormativity and, somewhat more obliquely, capitalist disci
pline. Samaria, having fallen in love with her granddaughter Flynn, es
capes by boar to an island across from the home the women all share and
stwnbles across a severed head: "Gazing on a severed head was ease; it
was rest. It took on the light of her working concentration: watching, she
sighed. Something had happened, then she - like work - had begun to
happen to the first thing" (206) . Here, Samaria moves from the object of
happening ( "something had happened [to S amaria]") , to its co-agent,
along with work ( "she . . . had begw1 to happen to [the something ] " ) .
Work makes the worker "happen" rather than depleting her. The head
Samaria gazes on belongs to a shadowy character, the male murderer of a
nameless nine-year-old, and Daisy or Samaria have murdered him in
revenge. Bur it also refracts an earlier image of Flynn, who in the novel's
beginning had attempted to separate her head from her body, harnessing
it to a machine so that she could be all brain and not subject to the
vagaries of sexual desire. The return of the severed head represents, oddly
enough, a certain restoration of Flynn to herself. For "Flynn;' d1inks
Samaria, "was no longer recognizable except as lover" ( 206) . As lover,
Flynn now has some of the artistic capacities Veronica possessed all along;
these arc made concrete in Flynn's decision to become a rope- dancer:
" [Flynn] goes back up, ready, nerveless, her arms her only balancing
pole. She puts one foot out, readies the second. Beneath her is lamplight
and space; and smells of old wood, turpentine, colors. Before she moves,
she breathes. It is as if she breathes d1c colors - yellow to blue, brown to
green to purple. Then she is into the light and gone, nearly across before
she has even begun, Veronica wrote, the end" ( 2 1 3 - I4) .
Flynn's synesd1etic breathing of colors and movement "into d1e light"
recall S aint Agadu s aying to S aint Lucy "Thou
art
56
even begun" also points toward a looped rope, a folded temporal order, a
convoluted history in which beginnings and endings touch.
As the consummate lover, though, Veronica has the last word, for the
final sentence bleeds right into ''Veronica wrote, the end;' establishing
that she has been both a character in and a writer ofLover. Throughout the
novel, she has been producing new forms of subjectivity and new types of
hwnan beings, not only seducing women into lesbianism but also forging
d1e new spatiotemporal representational orders that her "lovers" both
emblematize and require. One of d1ese is indeed the by now familiarly
posunodern order of the simulacrum: Veronica is a forger of paintings for
which d1ere are no originals, and a time-traveler who "at any moment .
can render herself again into all the creatures she started as" ( 7 ) . Indeed,
d1e novel is filled wid1 fakes ; to give only a few examples, Flynn has "be
come interchangeable with her fake . . . [ and] no-one, not even Flynn,
can teU them apart" ( 9 ) ; the novel's only two male characters, Bogart
and Boatwright, spend most of their time making a gigantic foam-rubber
doll; and of course there is d1e passage I cited earlier in which Daisy
mocldngly asks Veronica 'Which is d1e mother, which the forgety"
( zrz ) . Thus Lover certainly privileges "unnatural" reproduction, at once
denaturalizing motherhood, linking it to women's od1er creative, culture
making activities, and suggesting webs of caretaking and exchange for
which the normative kinship diagram and generational logic seem en
tirely inadequate. And d1e forgeries can be read as a postmodern rework
ing of monw11ental time insofar as they do seem to evacuate hist01y, not
into a timeless domestic order but into a kind of cubist space, with times
touching one another at odd angles. But what makes the process of "forg
ing" so interesting in d1is novel is that it is so tightly linked to sexual
pleasure. Being "lover" ultimately seems to mean being able to engage
erotically, corporeally, with tl1e fake: "When I did become a "lover -"
Flynn says, ''Veronica stopped painting me - because my face did not
seem real anymore" ( I 55) . And here, of course, we see yet again Ver
onica's link to St. Veronica, whose imprint of Christ's "real" face in deatl1
- a touch with a textile - helped facilitate a religion based on an econ
omy of imitation, replication, and metamorphosis.
This bodily contact with and enactment of forgery is where, I want to
suggest, we can perceive this novel's most counterintuitive class accent,
and tl1e meeting or syncopated simultaneity of its queer and class accents.
In r 9 8 3 , Fredric Jameson offered tl1e provocative suggestion tlut multi
national capitalism (the emergence of which he famously dates at I 97 3 )
57
58
H. U.A. c:'
59
The slogans Hayes used did not merely reiterate what had been said
in that place on some significant date. Instead, some were invented by
Hayes herself and seem proleptic as well as anachronistic: "The American
President Might Have to Call in the National Guard to Put This Revolt
Down" invokes Kent State, the L.A. riots, and the worldwide rallies
against the war on Iraq, but it also seems to incite as well as to cite mass
action. The more generic "Strike Today" and "Actions Speak Louder than
Words" (the latter held up in Manhattan's Union Square) remind us of
the labor movement gutted by Reaganism and of silent protests from
lwKhroom sit-ins in the civil rights era to ACT ur's die-ins, even as they call
for a response to current economic problems. "We Are Innocent" trans
fon11S what once might have been the slogan for prisoners' rights or the
unfairly convicted into a sinister vision of Americans' post- 9 / I I victim
mentality and naivete about our place in a global economy - especially
given d1at Hayes held d1is particular placard in Times Square. Some of
Hayes's signs hearken back to specific historical moments, asking viewers
to make connections to the present political situation: "Nothing Will Be as
Before" echoes both the sloganeering of May I 968 and the governmental
and media rhetoric after 9 I I I ; "Abolish H . U.A. c.," suggests ties between
McCarthyism and the era of the Patriot Act; "Who Approved d1e War in
Viet Nam?" links two shady executive decisions on Viet Nam and Iraq ; "I
AM A MAN" sutures the I 968 Memphis transportation strike to contempo
60
61
I'd like to call this "temporal drag;' with all the associations that the
word "drag" has with retrogression, delay, and the pull of d1e past on the
present. This kind of drag, an underdiscussed corollaty to the queenier
kind celebrated in an early 1 990s queer studies influenced by deconstruc
tion, suggests a bind for lesbians committed to feminism: d1e gravita
tional pull dut "lesbian;' and even more so "lesbian feminist;' sometimes
seems to exert on "queer:' This deadweight effect may be felt even more
strongly twenty years after the inauguration of queer theory and politics,
in rl1e wake of Queer Eye f01' the Straight Guy, legalized same-sex w1ions,
and The L Word. In many classroom, popular, and activist discussions of
the relationship between lesbian feminism and queer politics, and some
times in academic scholarship too, d1e lesbian feminist seems cast as the
big drag. Even to entertain lesbian feminist ideas seems to somehow
inexorably hearken back to essentialized bodies, normative visions of
women's sexuality, and single-issue identity politics d1at exclude people of
color, rl1e working class, and the transgendered. 5
Queer d1e01y has prhleged transformative differences not only across
gender, which is why Hayes's "r AM A MAN" looks so timely, but also, until
recently, in the name of a radical future: this is why feminism on a lesbian
can look politically anachronistic. Lesbianism and feminism are certainly
not redtmdant with one another, but there are those of us for whom
queer politics and the01y necessarily involve not disavowing, or even
having a c01nmi011ent to, feminism and its histories. The bind I describe
- and here I use this word to suggest both a problem and an attachment
- is less about group identiC)' than about time. How can we know for
certain that something is securely done with?6 How can we attend to
feminism as, as Robyn Wiegman puts it, "our most challenging other"
whose otherness is more dun simply the state of being dead and gond7
Finally, what happens if we take Sharon Hayes's lead and reconsider
"drag;' so central to theorizing the mobilit)' of gender identification and
the visible excess that calls the gender binaty into question, as a temporal
phenomenon? As an excess, rl1at is, of the signifier "history'' rather than of
'\von1a.n" or ((n1an"?
These questions might reenvision d1e meaning of drag for queer dle
OLy, asking: what is the time of queer petformativity? In her landmark
the01y of perfomutive drag, Gender Trouble, Judid1 Butler's implicit an
swer to this question seems to be that time is basically progressive, insofar
as repetitions wid1 a difference hold the most promises. In her analysis, an
identity-sign such as "lesbian" is most powerfi.1l for d1e unpredictable
62
K.I.l'.
64
the filming to found the radical feminist movement and write The Dialec
tic ofSex. These final titles put Firestone into a feminist genealogy, for they
also claim that her ideas about cybernetic reproduction anticipated many
postmodern analyses of the relationship bet\veen technology and gender.
And tl1e I 997 Shulie honors the way that Firestone herself paid homage to
her predecessors : The Dialectic ofSex is dedicated to "Simone de Beauvoir,
who endured:' while S ubrin's credits end witl1 a dedication to "Shulamith
Firestone, who has endured:' perhaps more in the contemporary feminist
poUtical w1conscious than on women's studies syllabi. But despite this
invocation of a feminist legacy, the I997 Shulie consistently undermines
the idea than an intact poUtical program has been handed down from
older women to younger ones. Further compUcating its work as a femi
nist historical docmnent, Subrin's video - like Hayes's street petformance
- is also infused witl1 tl1e vicariousness and self-conscious theatricaUty
that are so often tl1e hallmarks of queer cultural texts.
The first sequence of tl1e 1997 Shulie begins with a sign tlut condenses
the eroticism of I 990S lesbian-queer revivals of earUer butch / femme
styles, and the historiographic energies that are often unacknowledged as
a constitutive part of queer petformance. In tl1e foreground of Subrin's
first shot of mid- I 990S Chicago, we see a shabby warehouse, itself iconic
of an industrial capitalism tlut Americans are encouraged to think is
located in the past rather than offshore. The side of this warehouse reads
"New Packing Co. :' aclmowledging that tl1e video itself is a reshoot, an
old film in a new technological container ( see figure 8 ) . The phrase also
alludes to the repackaging of collective feminist activism into individu
alizing consumerist styles in the 1 98os and beyond: it might momentarily
remind Subrin's contemporaries of the cenual role that "packing" - the
wearing of dildos - had as radical separatist feminism met the feminist sex
wars of the I 98os and tl1e transgender movement of tl1e I 990S and be
yond. Finally, the warehouse sign is the sign of a historical ellipse : Subrin
has reshot a film that was Uterally warehoused because Shulamitl1 Fire
stone apparently asked its makers never to show it. 15 What the contempo
raty audience can see, instead, is a repackaging of feminist history's our
takes, which tmns our to pack a pw1eh .
The opening sequence goes on to juxtapose video cUps of the empty
streets and still buildings of I 990S Chicago with a montage of audio cUps
that invoke the late 1 96os : an announcer describing "thousands of young
people .
being beaten in tl1e streets of Chicago:' crowds shouting
"Peace now ! :' a warbUng tenor singing the Miss America tl1eme, and
66
68
69
stone's struggle to resist her position as a woman in the arts, putting her
into proleptic dialogue with the feminist artists who would follow her,
including not only Levine, Shcmun, and Kruger but also Sharon Hayes.
This time-warp effect is most evident in a scene where Art Institute in
structors critique Shulie's work ( see figure 1 o) . In The Dialectic of Sex,
Firestone wryly describes how "liberated" women turned to the arts in
order to seem like groovily occupied chicks rather than clinging, uptight
wives: "Women couldn't register fast enough: ceramics, weaving, lead1er
talents, painting classes . . . anything to get off his back. They sat in front
of their various easels in tears:'26 Here she seems to be hearkening back to
her time at the Art Institute, where her own art suggested that turnabout
is fair play: little boys and male nudes, seated figures, construction work73
ers, and civil servants crowd her canvases, all painted in a somewhat
abstract expressionist manner. Assw11ing that the paintings that Subrin
used in 1997 mimic Firestone's actual style, Firestone was clearly explor
ing tl1e fragilities and cultural distortions of male embodiment long be
fore masculinity smdies hit the academy. Or perhaps she was declaring "r
AM A MAN" before either tl1e sanitation strike a year later or the trans
gender movement decades later. Yet her teachers genericize and feminize
her work, claiming tl1at her paintings "are what they are;' and tlut "the
theme behind" her photographs is "the same . . . your interest in people,
and tl1e [ir] lives;' as if she is merely giving form to a natural womanly
concern witl1 others. If Subrin has indeed duplicated their camerawork,
even tl1e four male docw11entarians of 1 967 seem to have caught the
irony: they apparently shot Shulie painting a male figure so that she seems
to retmn the male gaze, for Soss looks back and forth at the cameraman
himself as if he were her model. Her five male teachers do not seem to
have been so bright. Dismissing her work with the male body and the
male social subject as "grotesque;' "a little on tl1e dreary side;' and "vety
indecisive;' tl1e art faculty pushes her toward filmmaking, claiming tl1at
cinema is a more direct treatment of reality. The irony of this is palpable
too, since in tl1e original film Firestone is clearly already working with and
in tile postrealist techniques made available tluough mis medium by
petforming tl1e part of the "documentaty" subject Shulie, j ust as Soss
petforms Firestone performing the part of Shulie in tl1e 1997 video.
Despite Firestone's play with what would later be recognized as tl1e
postmodern representational strategies of returning the gaze and per
forming the self, S ubrin refuses to reinstall her into a linear feminist art
histOty. In a complicated and confusing scene that follows the art critique,
Shulie herself goes on to explicitly repudiate tl1e cultural logic of repro
duction whereby "generation" is a secure figure for either continuity or
for complete rupture - and by repeating tl1is scene, tl1e 1997 Shulie com
plicates the relationship between Shulie and her reanimator, younger and
older, prefeminist and postfeminist. In tl1e reshoot, S ubrin ( who plays
the on- and off-camera part of the original documentarians) asks Shulie if
her feelings of connection to outsiders relates "to this question of being a
generation!' Coming from a man as it originally did, this question seems
narrow-minded, for it misrecognizes as a generation gap what Shulie's
attwork has aheady clearly rendered as a gender gap. But because Subrin
herself takes over tl1e role of a somewhat autl10ritarian, misguided in-
74
terlocutor, gender does not simply trump generation, linking the two
women across rime. For the scene also captures the failure of two women
to constitute a meaningful political cohort, of Second Wave and Gen
eration x to merge smoothly into some eternal Generation xx . Shulie,
sounding surprised, repeats the question about "being a generation:'
The documentarian replies, "I mean, this is something that's very strong
among so many people of your age, that they see themselves to be pan,
vety importantly, a part of an important generation:' Because S ubrin's
impatient voice comes from the 1990s, "your age" becomes ironic, sug
gesting her own slight irritation with r 96os radicals as perhaps the most
self-consciously "generational" cohort, and paying wry homage to the
fact that women from tl1e "important generation" of the r 96os now often
make major decisions about the careers of women like S ubrin herself.
Bur Shulie retotTS, "Well, I wouldn't say that there are so many who
feel alienated from it;' apparently shifting the topic from the Now genera
tion to mainstream society, and thereby dismissing even shared outsider
hood as a form of groupthink. The documentarian reiterates, "I'm saying
tlut tl1ere are many who feel part of it, not alienated, but who feel vety
much a pan of ir;' reorienting the "it" back to the Now generation. "Oh;'
says Shulie, "You said that they feel parr of it, and I said I didn't:' The
documentarian assents. Here, Shulie seems to hold out for a feeling of
alienation that might register something besides a simply chronological
generation gap, a feeling that the subsequent departure of many feminists
from the traditional left would make explicit in gendered terms. "Well;'
Shulie says, apparently giving up on pursuing her discomfort witl1 tl1e
idea of a collectivity whose main claim to politics is being born within a
few years of one another or witnessing tl1e same events together, "Yes,
you know. That's rme:' Bur she does not seem to mean this any more tl1an
she does when she gives up and agrees witl1 the cruel dismissals of her
work in her an critique.
This conversation about generations adds anotl1er layer of irony:
tl10ugh tl1e historical Firestone could not possibly feel herself literally a
part of S ubrin's generation, Subrin's address to the past suggests that
Firestone might have done better "here." For Firestone's later interest in
cyborg reproduction outside the womb as the key to feminist liberation
is more in keeping with tl1e antiessentialist theories in which Subrin
was trained in the 19 80s and 1990s tl1a.n with what critics have associ
ated with second-wave feminism. Subrin, on me other hand, seems to
75
feel herself more part of Shulie's "pre"-feminist moment than her own
"post" -feminist one: Shulie's commentaty and experiences reveal that the
prehistDLy of 1 970s radical feminism is vety like its aftermath. B. Ruby
Rich insists that Subrin's version of Shttlie "completes a certain cycle: the
first generation offeminist theory as revisited, fetishized, and worshipped
by the new generation:m Bur I am not sure that the language of worship
does complete justice to the profOlmd ambivalence of the video, which is
as accusatory as it is reverential, as much about the lack of a genuinely
transformed context for women born into d1e 1 970s and beyond as it is
about an admiration for ideas that came earlier. The cycle of social justice
for women is, Subrin's presence in the film suggests, far from complete,
and d1e video is a way of "being in time with feminism;' as Wiegman puts
it, which "is more a problem of desire d1an of history or politics:'28 In d1at
latter sense, Shttlie is a queerly lesbian-feminist film, for Subrin's desire for
an wueferenced "someming" is palpable.
If anything, Subrin refuses to solve the problem of desire for feminism
through the fetish, to disavow what is not present in her primal encounter
wid1 Shulie ( at d1e vety least, d1e "real" Firestone, a ti.Jlly available past, a
coherent origin for radical feminism, and an intelligibly political doctrine
issuing from her docwnentary subject) , to cover dut lack wid1 d1e false
totality of interviews wim Firestone's friends or successors, or to provide
explanatDLy voice-overs suturing me scenes to Firestone's biography as a
whole. Similarly, Shulie refuses to dismiss her own feelings of lack j ust
because she cannot name them in the available political terms of her
moment: speaking of her own alienation from d1e Now generation, she
says, "Well, I know that's not vety hip. I'm sony, it just happens to be
true:' The docw11entarian asks m-gendy, "Why, what's hip ? What's yow
definition of hip ? ;' as if this will finally locate Shulie in her "own" genera
tion. Shulie replies, "To live in the now:' "To live in the now ? " d1e docu
mentarian reiterates, "Where's that?"
Where, indeed? IfShttlie demonstrates the impossibility of fixing some
thing securely in d1e past, it recognizes d1e same tmlocatability of the
present, for where is the feminist, lesbian, or even queer "now" in 1 967, in
1997, or whenever you are reading this sentence? In the video's only
moment of genuine parody, Shulie signals the uselessness of"now" by rat
ding off me mantras of live-and-let-live hippiedom: "Don't wony about
tomorrow, live in the now .
Life is fun, life is pleasant, we enjoy
friends and drinking and smoking pot . . . Why should we wony about
76
77
78
79
essay about the piece, one scene at the post office looks at first like the
historical turning point of the video, which finally locates its topic firmly
in the past and its genre as a true-to-life doctll11entaty. Over shots of the
women's daily routine, Shulie suggests that the high percentage of "Ne
groes" working at the post office is because "Negroes can't get anything
except for a federal job?' She might mean that she thinks they aren't
qualified, or she might be referring to racial discrimination: the 1997
video refuses to clarify the 1 967 film's ambiguity. Shulie goes on to say
that "if you meet a Negro and you want a subject of conversation, the first
thing you ask them is: how long have you worked at the post office? And
then you have somed1ing to talk about !" She describes her "fraternity;' a
"brotherhood" of post office workers and the solidarity she feels with
d1em, equating dnt feeling wid1 having "gone to j ail wid1 them" in civil
disobedience. Her patronizing, naive, cringe-inducing attitude and d1e
outdated term "Negro" do feel, at first, like
an
anachronism of a different
sort from the sly 1990s touches - one dnt comforts today's audiences by
signaling d1e progress made since the supposedly white-dominated, ra
cist, exclusive women's liberation movement that d1e video's Shulie seems
on the surface to proleptically represent. But the terminology and Shulie's
accompa.J1)ng attitude are what Subrin calls "coded vintage discourse;'
which is to say that by refusing to change the script words to "African
Americru1;' Subtin eschews eimer a decorative difference oflru1guage mat
would signal a progress narrative, or a hmnorously untimely insertion of
today's lmguage into yesterday.40 Instead, Shulie 's "Negroes" and fanta
sized solidarities register the ways that many white feminists jertisoned
the antiracist causes that first a11imated both the suffrage movement and
women's liberation even as d1ey appropriated d1e lmguage a11d tactics of
those causes . Shulie's monologue on race also reminds us that in moder
nity's various self-representations, racial difference has operated as the
sign of anachronism tout court: however proto-posunodern Shulie herself
might be, she sees "Negroes" as stuck in that bastion of state-sponsored
inefficiency, d1e post office. As machronism's emblem, racialized black
ness seems to secme the present's modernity, its difference from rad1er
than interpenetration wid1 earlier moments : wherever "race" is, d1ere
modernity supposedly crumot be, yet. 4 1 S adly, Shulie denies to African
American activism a.J1d histDLy the disjunctive mode of historicizing mat
Firestone advocated for feminism. Bod1 d1e filmic character and d1e his
torical aud10r confine Africm America.JlS to the waiting room, or perhaps
locked post office box, of history. 42
80
81
as
used to turn
Free to Be You andMe, Schoolhouse Roclz, Amy Carter, and so on became d1e
traces of a culture that was, for at least a while, genuinely hopeful about
the relationship between cllildren and the mass media. These 1 9 90s reap
propriations of 1 970s culture were more dun mere nostalgia on the part
82
83
84
tic d1ings to young females . Finally, Riot Grrrl's earliest members them
selves now reflect that they lacked "d1e knowledge to situate [their] own
agenda in d1e history of the Women's Movement, and especially radical
feminist organizing?'57 In other words, by identifying with past personal
histories and selves, rather dun wid1 movement time - including d1e ACT
UP strategies available at the moment of Riot Grrrl's inception - at least
Shulie, like the work of Sharon Hayes, points us toward d1e identities
and desires that arc foreclosed wid1in social movements, illw11inating the
often unexpected effects of such deferred identifications. Both artists sug
gest dut mere may also be a productive afterlife to the subject-positions
dut seem foreclosed wid1in these artists' differing present tenses : second
wave feminist, girlchild of d1e 1970s. Most recently, "Deep Lez" has
arrived to explicitly reclaim the politics of regression and of what I have
called d1e prehistorical. Deep Lez, a catchphrase cum artistic vision cum
political movement, works temporal drag toward a different kind of time
- not me time of childhood but geologic time, the time of feminism and
other dinosam-s, of fossilized icons and sedimented layers of meaning.
85
86
200 5 .
Copyright Allyson Mitd1ell, 200 5 . Photo by Cat O'Neill. Counesy o f the artist.
grains and colors of wood suggest shadows, skin tones, and te:\.1:ure. It has
also included latch-hooked wall hangings such as Shebacca ( 2005) , featur
ing the Star Wars character as a reclining and masturbating female nude;
87
ll. Allyson Mitchell, "TinyTIubs #r;' 2004, cement and glass, r 8 " X
"
1 2" x 1 2 .
Copyright Allyson Mitd1ell, 2004. Photo by Nina Levitt. Courtesy of the artist.
88
hair, ample breasts and thighs, and macrame and crochet baubles dan
gling from her hands ( see figure r 2 ) . In the center of each dinner table
Mitchell set a cement "Tiny Trubs;' a similarly bu.,xom miniature nude
with wide black eyes modeled after both the putty-colored plastic Russ
Berrie "Sillisculpt" figurines of r 96os and I 970S and Margaret Keane's
big-eyed waif paintings ( see figure r 3 ) . In this installation as in Lady
Sasquatch, these female bodies and d1e staging of d1eir environments
reclaim d1e degraded crafts of sewing, woodwork, latch-hook, crochet,
amateur collecting, and od1er "folic" hobbies popular in the I 970S. The
effect is to reanimate all kinds of cultural dinosaurs : the legend of Sas
quatch, the sexually excessive racial primitive, the haity radical feminist,
d1e Wiccan icon, the home arts.
Yet the Trubs and Sasquatches are objects of longing as well as of
amusement. They suggest the d1rill and power that a discounted past
indeed, a literally "discount" past cobbled togemer from cheap te>.'tiles
and anonymous strangers' jettisoned home craft projects - can bring to a
much more slick contemporaty moment. They recast feminism's political
temporal heterogeneity in a tactile mode, as differences in "feeling:' And
feeling is crucial to Mitchell's work, where castoff pasts also offer a dif
ferential way of experiencing one's own bodily stigma. Mitchell's project,
dut is, uses temporal drag to interrogate not only feminist history but
also the fat body: she is a feminist fat activist and holds a Ph.D. from York
University, having written a disset'tation on "a feminist theory of body
geography'' that examines how women's body images change in different
conte>.'t5 66 While the emphasis on geography in Mitchell's scholarship
suggests spatial differences, her thrift-shop aesthetic suggests a more tem
poral analysis . Her artwork suggests that d1e planned obsolescence built
into commodity-time actually provides multiple historical contexts for
d1e e>.l'erience of one's own size - that cultural dwnps might mitigate a
certain dw11piness. For example, d1e installations in The FluffStands Alone
include latch-hooked figures quite different from d1e ones in Lady Sas
quatch, for d1ey reference d1e cat'toons from early issues ofPlayboy. Impor
tandy, the women in the otiginal cartoons were far more voluptuous and
curvy d1an today's supermodels. Mitchell's description of her early experi
ences with these images suggests that in them she found not only an
object of desire but also a way of feeling the desirability of her own
bodyP Wid1 tides like Rugbum #1 ( 200 3 ) , Fluffer Nutter (2003, see
figure I4) , and Venus of Nudiesque ( 2003 ) , Mitchell's two-dimensional
pieces reclaim Playboy's big-rumped and top-heavy women, their pigtails,
89
wide eyes, hot pants, and bright pink lips, albeit with more ethnic variery
than the originals had.
Mitchell also enhances most of these women's physiques with even
meatier thighs and big rolls of belly fat. To reupholster the female form in
this way is itself to relish yet another anachronism, flaunting a body
whose social status in Anglo-American cultures has fallen dramatically
since the days in which portraits of bourgeois European merchants and
their wives, and even of nobility, emphasized the portly physiques tlut
signified wealtl1.68 Within lesbian milieus, Mitchell's reclamations also
embrace the icon of the fat feminist, whose despised pull backward on the
politics of seli.Uality is supposedly equaled by the downward movement of
her own body pans : her breasts sagging from not wearing a bra, her rear
spreading as she sits in endless grassroots meetings, her belly descending
from the weight of so much navel-gazing. Mitchell's technique of putting
Playboy models in fat drag recalls Michael Moon's and Eve Sedgwick's
moving collaborative piece about the intersection of queerness and obe-
90
sity. Moon and Sedgwick use their own friendship ( technically, one be
tween a gay man and a "straight" fat woman) as a relay toward theodzing
the mock-celebrity actor Divine's figmation of "interlocking histories of
stigma, self-constitution, and epistemological complication proper to fat
women and gay men in this century?'69 The rem1 "Divinity:' which Moon
and Sedgwick name after John Waters's performance character Divine,
condenses the "emotional and identity linkages" between gay men and fat
women, that is, the dynamic common to both, between shame and pro
test, abjection and daring, htulliliation and gleeful flatulting 70 Interest
ingly, the authors do not mention ti1e fact that the stigmatic histories of
91
Copyright Allyson
Mitchell, 200 3 . Photo
credit: CanadwnArt
Magazine. Courtesy of
d1e artist.
I have implied thus far that in the lexicon of lesbian epithets, "dowdy''
might signal a certain transtemporality, or an embarrassingly belated
quality of the lesbian feminist in the queer world that is nevertheless
constitutive of subjectivity in general and of movement politics in par
ticular. "Fat;' on the other hand, generally signals a transgression of spa
tial norms ( taldng up too much space) , and emotional ones ( failing to
control the wiU) . But as Lauren Berlant argues, "fat" also suggests d1e
failure of a subject to be chrononormative. Obesity - especially when
coded as part of an epidemic, as it has been in the early twenty-first
centmy- connotes a mode of living in which a subject continuously
deteriorates, as opposed to suffering an event-centered traw11a or achiev
ing event-centered goals 72 L1 od1er words, while d1e epithet "dowdy''
names the temporal recalcitrance I have been discussing thus far as a
mode of queer historiography, "fat'' connotes a refusal of agency onward
and upward ( or perhaps, as in the far more respectable case of neurosis,
inward and downward) . Fat signals an embrace of what Berlant has de-
92
art
93
94
r 8oos, fiction has offered traces not only of unrealized pasts but also of the
unrealized past of history itself.
The conflict between rational and cmotional tmderstanding, reponage
and fiction, is visible in a rather old chesmut of both literaty and queer
theory, Mary S helley's Franlzenstein,
01;
novel is in many ways critical of both the genealogical logic and domestic
sentimental chrononormativities that Doughet1:y, Bonder, and Harris
would undermine over a century and a half later, as I detailed in chapter r .
And Frankenstein, as I will show, is also committed to the petformance of
anachrony I called "temporal drag" in chapter 2. But most impOt1:ant,
95
96
97
ber of social structures ( class, race, gender) , I'd like to consider him
queerly hybrid in a temporal sense. First, the monster embodies the wrin
kled time that marks both the gothic and, as I have argued up to this
point, the queer. As a genre, the gothic traffics in alternate temporalities
or a-rhythms that present themselves in concretely historical terms, as
dead bodies coming back to life in the fonn of vampires, ghosts, and
monsters. These undead bodies, in tmn, catalyze bodily sensations such
as skipped heartbeats, screams, shudders, tears, and swoons in gothic
characters, and presumably in some readers ( who may also laugh, admit
tedly, but this is simply another physiological effect) . Just as the mon
ster's body is composed of dead flesh touching more dead flesh, the
gothic character often experiences both a fleshly touch from the dead and
an unpredictable fleshly response to it: the monster is, in many ways, a
double for both the genre he inhabits and for the disaggregated sen
sorium of the gothic character and reader. Indeed, the literary critic Mike
Goode speculates that gothic novels themselves enacted a kind of "ec
static history:'5 That is, the genre transduced religious experiences
which always appeared at the boundaries of what could be encompassed
by earthly knowledge - into terror, hallucinations, or sexual transport,
themselves alternative or subjugated knowledge practices. In this sense,
the gothic was a kind of historical novel in ext1'emis, a register for encoun
tering the past felt precisely at the bOlmdaries of what could be encom
passed by secular, disciplinary, and even "scientific" notions of history.
And as the sociologist Avety Gordon argues, ghosts are the paradigmatic
figure for these historical limit- cases, often appearing in gothic novels as
tactile experiences not only of dead people but also of repressed events
and social formations 6 vVhile Frankenstein's monster is not a ghost, pre
cisely, his striated and heterogeneous anatomy can certainly be read simi
larly, as a figure for both the social conflicts of which history consists
and the genre in which histmy announced itself in other terms. The
monster, like Goode's and Gordon's tmdead, figures the outside of not
only the human bur also - crucially - of what can count as history and as
its proper mode of apprehension.
On the face of it, this reading of Franleenstein as a novel about the writ
ing and experiencing of histmy seems implausible. The knowledge that
Victor seeks is not historical knowledge per se but scientific knowledge
specifically, the secret of life, and the ability to create new life, which he
wishes to wrest from God and / or women. But interestingly, before he
ever touches a cadaver, Victor begins his quest for knowledge through
98
contact with the dead, for his early studies consist of reading obsolete,
outmoded scientific works. Even once he discovers the fundamental error
of this approach in college and joins the world of modern science, he
eventually turns back to past ideas and methods for imparting life to dead
nuuer. fu he begins to raid charnel-houses in order to create his monster,
he transfers his allegiance from dead authors to dead bodies . It might be
argued that Victor cannot be characterized as a histodan precisely insofar
as he reads primaty documents as if they inform him about the present, as
if they were "live:' But he is certainly what some Romantic-era historians
condemned as an "antiquarian;' someone whose obsession with d1e past
d1reatened to become an end in itself? In fact, Victor has not only the
wrong med10d but also d1e wrong relationship to knowledge. His learn
ing distracts him from auending to his family, as critics generally agree,
but dlis is not benign neglect; indeed, his love for old texts takes a per
verse turn. His passion for ancient science slides into literal contact with
the dead when he begins robbing graves, and his obsession with his
project of bringing d1is dead flesh to life substitutes for his romance with
Elizabed1 and his manly friendship wid1 Hemy Clerval. Eventually Vic
tor's own body dessicates because of both his misguided intellectual pro
gram and his ghasdy creation: Victor's studies and the monster's body are
allegories for one another insofar as the monster is not only flesh but text, a
body condensing Victor's, Shelley's, and a generation of critics' lenoJVledge.
Indeed, Franlu:nrtein is preoccupied wid1 tl1e relationship between
cognition and the body, and specifically, as I will demonstrate, between
historical w1derstanding and the male body. In this sense, the novel re
flects discussion among llistorians in the long nineteend1 centllly, who
were keenly interested in d1e question of how feelings and sensations in
the present could illuminate p ast events. 8 The idea of apprehending and
representing collective experiences from the past in avowedly embod
ied, not always painful ways might seem repugnant both to traditionalist
historicist metl10ds that rely on the principle of objective and disinter
ested analysis, and to Marxist understandings that genuine historical con
sciousness is precipitated by oppression. But this idea was absolutely vi
able in the Anglo-American eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Goode
writes that Enlightenment and Romantic-era discussions about historical
method - specifically, a debate in 1 790- 91 between Edmund Burke and
Thomas Paine - centered on how the male capacity for sensibility, figured
in terms of bodily constitution, was crucial to historical understanding 9
In Burke's account, manly somatic responses were considered a legitimate
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differences between his feelings and those of d1e past, in order to grasp d1e
larger historical differences that would make precedent more or less appli
cable. 14 In other words, the man of feeling must first feel the feelings of
the past and then feel their disruptive contact wid1 the present. Seen in
Burkean terms, then, Frankenstein's monster, deformed d10ugh he may
be, is a much bener historian dnn his creator. Victor applies his passion
for knowledge to d1e wrong te:\.1:ual corpus, learning codes of scientific
conduct from Paracelsus and Agrippa mat are absolutely inappropriate
for the present. He does not compare d1em with modern-day med10ds
and interests until he is forced to do so at college, at which point he turns
to dead bodies .
By contrast, d1e monster may wear and perform anachronistic behav
iors in the literal form of mismatched body parts, but he actually learns
vinue from precedent. He also "civilizes" himself by choosing rationally
among d1oughts and behaviors of long-past eras and fitting d1em to his
present situation. For crucially, the monster learns about hmnan cultme
and sympathy through books, including history books. Overhearing the
cottagers reading Voh1ey's Ruins of Empires to one anod1er gives him "a
cursmy knowledge of history;' but he also imitates d1eir weeping "over
the hapless fate of [America's] original inhabitants."15 Here, historical
events engender d1e proper feeling of compassion for others. Having
learned to read, d1e monster also finds a copy of Plutarch's Lives, from
which he learns "to admire peaceable lawgivers, Nm11a, S olon, and Lycur
gus, in preference to Romulus and Theseus" ( r7o ) . He remarks that "if
my first introduction to humanity had been made by a young soldier,
bmning for glmy and slaughter, I should have been imbued with different
sensations" ( I70 ) , suggesting that his character and sens01y apparatus are
malleable in exact proportion to the kind of histmy he reads. Through
imaginatively projecting himself into me lives of history's oppressed and
into d1e mindsets of the right heroes from the past, d1e monster develops
vinue, much as Burke advocated the mimetic transmission of established
manners and ethics.
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bound like a slave by chains of obligation to another past, fetters d1at have
scomged his very body. The monster, too, refers to Victor as "Slave" in his
long soliloquy at the novel's center. And d1e figure of d1e living body
shackled to dead matter also appears more pointedly near the end of the
novel, when Victor chases the monster over the Arctic ice in a dogsled:
"Once, after the poor animals dut conveyed me had with incredible toil
gained the swnmit of a sloping ice-mOlmtain, . . . one, sinking w1der his
fatigue, died .
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jects both a masculine national progress narrative and the dilettantish and
anhedonic hobbies left to female antiquarians, embracing a juicily queer
mode of seeing and writing the past. Woolf is merciless in her skewering
of disciplinaty histmy: her acknowledgments facetiously thank her hus
band, Leonard Woolf, "for the profound historical knowledge to which
these pages owe whatever degree of accuracy they may attain" and laud
"Miss M. K. Snowdon's indefatigable researches in the archives of Harro
gate and Cheltenham [which] were none the less arduous for being
vain:'2 0 Later in the novel, the narrator counterposes two fictional diaty
accounts of Orlando's coronation as Duke, in Constantinople: a bombas
tic and self-congratulatmy report from one naval officer John Fenner
Brigge on how the ceremony impresses d1e natives, and a gushing let
ter from one General Hartoppe's daughter Penelope, full of exclamation
points and comments about fashion and good-looking men. But Woolf's
predominant figure for the academic historian is the unnamed, ostensibly
gender-neutral narrator, a professional biographer. The narrator claims to
"enjoy the immunity of all biographers and historians from any sex what
ever" ( 220 ) and declares that "d1e biographer who records the life of such
a one [need never] . . . invoke the help of novelist or poet. From deed to
deed, from glmy to gloty, from office to office he must go, his scribe
following after, till they reach what ever seat it may be that is the height
of their desire" ( 14- 1 5 ) . Here, even as Woolf satirizes supposedly objec
tive and passionless history, she deconstructs its disavowed sexual basis,
jokingly implying a sodomitical relationship between biographer and sub
ject wid1 her reference to d1eir shared "seat" of desire.
In Woolf's own biography, this relationship was not sodomitical but
Sapphic. As critics from Nigel Nicolson onward have recognized, the erot
icized chase between Orlando and his / her biographer mirrors Woolf's
attempt to te;.,.tually seduce Vita S ackville-West. 21 If we read Orlando 's
biographer as historiographer, and his object Orlando as a figure for d1e
past itself, then the writing of history is also figured as a seduction of d1e
past and, correspondingly, as the past's erotic impact on the body itself.
Historiography even has the ability ( if the narrator's obsession with Or
lando's legs is any example) to seduce the seducer. Woolf's methodology,
then, centers on an avowedly erotic pleasure: an ars erotica of historical
inquiry that takes place not between the hearts of emoting men, as in
Burke, but between and across the bodies oflusting women.
Woolf's novel tells d1e stmy of young Orlando's excursion duough
English literaty and cultural history, an experience of history not only on
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bur as a body. Our hero ( ine ) lives three hundred years, waking up one
morning to find her sex changed from male to female midway d1rough
his / her journey. Of com-se, this is in part a story about the constructed
ness of gender: for instance, prose styles and costumes that are resound
ingly masculine in Elizabedun England become foppishly feminine by
d1e Restoration. But Orlando 's more interesting conceit, for my pur
poses, is d1at d1e protagonist him ; herself experiences historical change as
a set of direcdy corporeal and often sexual sensations. In a parody of d1e
kind of historiography that speaks knowingly of a given era's zeitgeist,
Woolf literalizes political or cultural climate as wead1er. The end of the
Elizabethan period announces itself by thawing the frozen River Thames ;
d1e nineteend1 century is ushered in wid1 a damp dut increases d1e birth
rate and the vegetation; d1e twentieth cennuy dries everything up. Or
lando feels these various centuries not only as fluctuations in weather but
also as reorganizations of his ; her body, succincdy captured by me narra
tor's observation that "one might see the spirit of the age blowing, now
hot, now cold, upon [ O rlando's ] cheeks" ( 236 ) .
Not surprisingly for a feminist who had read Freud, Woolf also plays
hard and fast with the motif of castration, describing three muses who, on
encountering Orlando's change from man to woman during d1e Restora
tion era, "peeped in at rl1e door and threw a garment like a towel at the
naked form which, lmfortunately, fell short by several inches" ( I 3 8 ) , the
ambiguous "which" here referring not only to d1e towel but to d1e "naked
form" and its suddenly missing inches. B ut Woolf also historicizes cawa
tion, figwing Orlando's morphing body in tem1s of the parts that become
salient at different historical moments: d1e castration complex becomes a
more generally somatic trawna in which the relation of particular body
pans to the whole body shifts from era to era. In Orlando's Elizabedun
incarnation as a man, for instance, his legs take center stage. As d1e scene
with d1e three muses suggests, the Restoration era has a rather dramatic
effect on his penis. By d1e nineteenth centmy, d1e now-female Orlando
feels historical change as finger trouble:
The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about evety fibre of our
being, d1reads the heart, pierces the liver. Though d1e seat of her
trouble seemed to be d1e left finger, she could feel herself poisoned
through and through, and was forced at length to consider the most
desperate of remedies, which was to yield completely and submissively
to d1e spirit of d1e age, and take a husband. ( 243 )
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Here, Woolf hints that not only gender but also the anatomical basis for
"sex'' itself may be historically contingent. The two-sex system in which
Orlando finds herself trapped, Woolf seems to argue, is a product of
rather than the precursor to the heterosexual-marital imperative. Castra
tion, then, centers not only on the penis but also on the left ring finger:
here, we might say, the Oedipal narrative meets the annular one.
Orlando is possessed of a radically metahistoricized body, a body like
that of Shelley's monster insofar as it incarnates the history of sexuality.
But during d1e male period of his life, he is also an antiquarian of sorts,
obsessed with artifacts of the past in ways dut echo Victor Frankenstein.
Indeed, Orlando opens with a living person disturbing a fragment of dead
flesh: we first see our hero / inc slicing at the rafters, uying to strike the
head of an Mrican "pagan" killed by one of his ancestors. In this con
tretemps, ''Africa" represents both Orlando's place in an imperial venture
and a racialized, racist trope for d1e past itself. Yet it also immediately
establishes that Orlando is, temporally speaking, as om of joint as the
desiccated head with which he parries. And as the novel progresses, Or
lando becomes increasingly compelled by dead body parts and d1en relics
in general. Several times, he visits the tomb of his noble ancestors, fon
dling their possessions and skeletal remains:
[ O rlando] would take a skeleton hand in his and bend d1e joints this
way and that. "Whose hand was it?" he went on to ask. "The right or
the left? The hand of man or woman, of age or youth? Had it urged the
war horse, or plied the needle? Had it plucked the rose, or grasped cold
steel? Had it - " but here eid1er his invention failed him or, what is
more likely, provided him with so many instances of what a hand can
do that he shrank, as his wont was, from me cardinal labour of com
position, which is excision. ( 7 1 )
The passage stages a conflict between a labile historiography and d1e
selective principles of "disinterested" academic writing evidenced by Vic
tor Frankenstein's editorial work on Walton's manuscript: in Orlando,
proper scholarship appears as "excision" or casuation of the hand. Or
lando's problem as a historian, foreshadowed by his antics with the "pa
ga.n" head and appearing more overdy in his struggles to end his long
poem "The Oak TreC:' is that he can't cut anything out. Or off. Here, his
smfeit of responses to the dead part-object in the tomb suggest what
Carla Freccero refers to as "an alternate path to the Western melancholic's
incorporation of the lost od1er and its permanent, if uneasy, entombment
108
wid1in the crypt of history?' Freccero suggests that this alternate rela
tionship to the past might take the form of "a penetrative reciprocity, a
becoming-object for an other subject and a resultant j oy or ecstasy:m Tllis
suggests a kind of bottomy historiography: the potential for collective
queer time - even queer history - to be structured as an uneven transmis
sion of receptivity rather dun aud10rity or custom, of a certain enjoyably
porous relation to lmpredictable futmes or to new configurations of the
past.23 Woolf's inside reference to "what a hand can do" aUudes to this
sort of flexible erotics between women as, also, a historiographic med1od.
Later, Orlando begins to practice erotohistodography more medlDdi
cally than his tomb fondlings suggest, for he becomes obsessed with
official history's cast-offs . Lovingly fondling Queen Maty's prayer book,
Orlando adds a flake of tobacco to the hair, bloodstain, and crumb of
pastty already stuck to its pages . These marks of use are all connected to
me body, wllich seems to variously shed, bleed, eat, and smoke a sedi
mented histmy that interests Orlando far more than the textual materials
enclosing it. Woolf here seems to gesture toward the late-eighteenm-cen
tury Burkean ideal of d1e historian as a man of feeling. B ut she also
releases the erotic energies due this ideal, in its appeal to virtuous man
hood, ultimately disavows.
Her trope for such a method is d1e hand, which redeems mat afore
mentioned aching left-hand finger. Early in the novel, Orlando is pre
sented to Queen Elizabed1, whom he encounters by way of her royal
hand; from this appendage he infers her ancient, decayed body buried
lmderneath its brocade and jewels. That night, d1e queen seduces him,
insisting that he bmy his head in her skirts. " 'This; she breathed, 'is my
victmy!' - even as a rocket roared up and dyed her cheeks scarlet" ( 25) .
This militarized orgasm, following from what looks like oral sex wid1 a
person so old she might as well be dead, prefigmes what will later develop
into an explicidy desirous relationship between me individual historian
and the materials of a collective past. For at another point d1e narrator,
struggling to piece together me facts of Orlando's life, apotheosizes the
joking possibility of a lesbian historiography: "Just when we thought to
elucidate a secret that has puzzled historians for a hlmdred years, there
was a hole in the manuscript big enough to put your finger d1rough"
( I I 9) . Here again, histmy is a hole to penetrate, but not wid1 the usual
instruments.
That Sapphic finger, in turn, has already appeared in veiled form,
in the question Orlando puts to the skeletal hand of his ancestors, of
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110
Fingen of Time, her live-in lover Ofelia kisses her and asks her to buy
coffee. Stepping out, Tucker suddenly finds herself on her own street, but
in d1e 1 990s. Meanwhile in the 1 990s, inside Tucker's former apamnent,
Drew has deleted the novel she had nearly finished and goes to meet her
friend Gorge ( S amantha Buck) , so Gorge can borrow Drew's dental
insurance card. After this meeting, Drew and Tucker bump into one
anod1er outside a bookstore, where Drew has j ust bought a vintage copy
ofTucker's now-completed novel. As the two women separate, a clipping
flutters out of the novel; Tucker picks it up, puts it in her purse, and
follows Drew into a bar. There, they introduce themselves to one another
and examine the clipping, which reveals that Tucker died of a gw1shot
wow1d in 1 9 5 3 . Isaac appears in the bar and surreptitiously asks Drew to
111
help him rescue Tucker, which he cannot do himself since he has already
lived through that moment in time once. He also explains that Tucker can
time travel because of radiation sickness, and that Ofelia murdered her in
1 9 5 3 , splattering Tucker's irradiated DNA, called Code, into other, future
souls - of whom Drew is now one. Drew, somewhat infatuated, follows
Tucker in and out of the 1990s, wid1 Ofelia fast behind her. Returning
home, Drew finds her friend Gorge inexplicably absent. Ofelia appears
and takes Drew back in time to the dentist's office, where Drew relives
another murder: Ofelia's henchmen, posting as assistants, have mistak
enly killed Gorge dunking she was Drew. Ofelia then takes Drew further
back in time to the scene of Drew's parents' divorce, mocking Drew and
then channeling her soul into a cactus. From within her cactus conscious
ness, Drew realizes that she has traveled to the scene of Tucker's murder
once already, in a "blackout" caused by her parents' final argument, and
tllis realization allows her soul to burst dnough the plant. Drew men
travels to the I9 50s, before Ofelia has broken up Isaac and Tucker, and
steals Tucker's plane tickets to Nevada, where she had planned to see the
H-bomb test that - had she arrived to see it - would have resulted in her
time-traveling abilities, and hence both Drew's and Ofelia's as well. Once
Drew has stopped Tucker's trip, she has effectively prevented anyone,
including herself, from being able to time-travel. Wtth Ofelia now pre
swnably stuck in the future, Drew and Tucker settle together in the apart
ment, and, we can assume, live happily ever after in the 1 950s.
"Fingers, why fingers " muses Tucker at rl1e beginning of The Sticky
Fingers of Time. Filled with images of hands on the keys of a manual
typewriter, a mouse, and a keyboard, the film seems obsessed with d1e act
of writing, particularly d1e writing of lesbian pulp novels and science
fiction. As with Odando, its scenes of writing are obviously conventional
postmodern devices to call attention to d1e constructedness of gender,
sexuality, and time. But the film's title suggests d1at a certain literality,
even mate1iality, gloms onto even d1e most rigorous deconstruction
that historical details may obstinately stick to or gwn up the gears of
queer theory. For Sticky Fingers' sticky fingers, digital clocks of a sort, are
explicitly connected to time-travel. In the film's opening scene, Tucker is
at the typewriter starting to write her own 1950s pulp novel, presumably
the historical parallel to Drew's unfinished one. Tucker murmurs to her
self, "Time has five fingers : one is for the present, two is for the past, three
is for d1e future?' Ofelia, who is her lover at d1is point, completes her
sentence: "And four is for what could have been, and five is for what yet
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could be?' In other words, in this film, two fingers are subjunctive. If
Tucker's and Ofelia's description of the "fingers of time" were correlated
with ordinary hand gestures, the index finger, one, would point to the
present; the middle finger, two, would indicate the past; the heterosexual
marital ring finger would correspond to the future, as it does for Woolf's
Orlando. The pinkie and the thumb, the outer limits of the hand, would
signal "what could have been" and "what yet could be;' respectively. But
Ofelia has aheady scrambled the sequence, for though the audience does
not know of these events yet, within the chronological order of the film
she has aheady kidnapped Isaac from 1 9 5 3 , reengineered him into a time
traveler by chopping off his index and middle finger and stapling pros
thetic ones to the stw11ps, and usurped his place as Tucker's lover. Ofelia's
surgety, then, has already disordered the logic of counting by hand that
Tucker depends on for her novel, making Isaac's index and middle fingers
into the agents of change: "what could have been" and "what yet could
be" are precisely the interventions into past and future that Isaac's two
primary digits allow.
One could certainly read Ofelia's act as an act of castration ( and given
Brougher's casting of an African American woman in the role of Ofelia, as
castration of white manhood by black womanhood, a particularly per
nicious cliche - about which more below) . But insofar as the prosthetic
fingers allow Isaac to hop the timeline, they are actually quite a bit better
than the originals. Then, too, Isaac's name recalls the biblical character
whose binh to an elderly and therefore preswnably infertile couple al
ready marks a certain queer fold in time, and whose status as a potential
victim of infanticide reverses the Oedipal narrative. Here, though, the
binding of lsaac is not a covenant between God the Father and Man his
son. Instead, time binds Isaac to Drew: he has aheady returned once to
the "slice of time" in which the murder has taken place and failed to rescue
Tucker, and so he finds Drew and tells her that she must do so. Thus
Ofelia's act seems less to castrate a masculine subject than to found a queer
alternative to the sequential logic of generations, a bond between subjects
who neither descend from one another nor coexist at the same moment.
The index and middle fingers may be the ones most often used for
typing ( if my own is any example) , enhancing the film's play with the idea
that writing itself is an act of intervention into time. But they are also the
ones most often used in the initial stages of lesbian sex. Thus Isaac's
stapled digits, the most literal reference to the fihn's epon)11ous "sticky
fingers;' function as a sort of temporal dildo. Or perhaps this is reductive,
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insofar as fingers are capable of but not limited to phallic activity, and in
Isaac their sexual flexibility is matched by a certain temporal flexibility.
fu time-travel devices, Isaac's fingers don't seem to register the Oedipal
drama of penis envy. For they "think" sexuality entirely outside d1e two
sex sequencing of conventional psychoanalysis, in which d1e mother is
the past and the father is the future, and history outside me two-sex
sequencing of orthodox Marxism, in which d1e mod1er is Nature on
which "man" works to produce himself and his future. Exploring and
reorganizing relations between now, then, and hereafter, these digits are a
Franlunstein in exacdy the communitarian terms that critics who see that
novel as a plea for family values might have prescribed for d1e original
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monster and his creator. Rather than escaping society on an ice floe, in
Gorge's account Drew's revised monster joins ti1e human scheme of obli
gations and dependencies, preparing ti1e earth for regrowti1 and for the
next generation. The scene Gorge describes also initially seems to follow
ti1e heterosexual, masculine logic that boti1 Shelley and Woolf would
eschew. Neiti1er Drew's novel nor ti1is part of it ever appears directiy in
the film itself, so it is unclear whether ti1e monster fertilizes the earth witi1
his blood, his rotting corpse, or both. But given ti1at ti1e remainder of ti1e
film deals with disseminative modes of transmission such as radiation, it is
fair to imagine that the monster sheds blood when he bursts his stitches.
Here, then, in a heteronormative reading, we can see the monster figura
tively inseminating ti1e littie girl. But in choosing to die for the ne;,.1: genera
tion, the monster also accrues a panicular form of Christian masculinity.
He transcends the "natural" pain of childbirth, and hence ti1e cyclical time
of reproduction, and in doing so enters into a sequential temporal scheme
ti1at is the precondition for modern, Western disciplinaty histmy. In a
secular version of ti1e Christ story that organizes ti1e meaning of empires
and nations, wounds catalyze or serve as meton)11S for batde narrative,
becoming the signs and guarantees of histmy proper. When retold across
time, wow1ds facilitate social continuity between male generations in
homosocial ways ti1at merely biological fatherhood cannot. 27
In this light, the monster merely serves dominant historiographical
modes. His body, composed as it is of cadavers, may well contain a
wow1ded soldier or two - but in his own death scene as Drew apparentiy
rewrites it, historical continuity seems at first to supersede te;,.1:uality,
taking the more corporeal form of a delayed communion at which the
little girl will presumably eat the tomatoes nourished by the monster's
blood and body. Witl1in this revised Frankenstein story, the singular and
irreplaceable event of a wotmd on a male body does indeed install the
"deep time" of at least a generational "before" and "after:' And tl1e pos
sibility tlut tl1is temporal schema might become historical appears in ti1e
scene's frame, in me form of Gorge telling this sacrifice stmy so that it
might be handed over, handed down: this scene is all tl1at is left of Drew's
novel, and Gorge dutifully preserves it. She sublimates and displaces
Frankenstein's act into a narrative fragment that might eventually cow1t
as pan of official, if not precisely national, histmy - tlut is, that might be
exchanged between men, across time. Indeed, tl1is exchange is already
partially underway, for tl1e androgynously named Gorge is speaking to
Drew, who bears a similarly gender- w1differentiated name . In shot1:, ti1e
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going to cat those lovely tomatoes. In this sense, she is both a feminine
subject and, shall we say, a sexual bottom. But in contrast to Freud's and
Butler's formulations, Frankenstein's wow1d passes over from his pain to
her pleasure, his openings to hers, witi1out necessarily having to become a
phallus at all. Flowing from multiple openings, his fluids fertilize toma
toes to nourish her tl1rough the mouth. In short, as witi1 Orlando, holes
beget holes . Here, Frankenstein's transfer of energies across time appears
not as sacrifice but rati1er as a gender-undifferentiated discharge to be
received pleasurably in ti1e future, in a future imagined as pleasure. The
great surprise of the scene, men, lies in the missing feast it suggests: ti1e
hint that erotic bliss may be as potentially "historical" as trawna.
Giorgio Agamben suggests ti1at pleasme could found ti1e new concept
of time presently missing from historical materialism : "For cvetyone
there is an immediate and available experience on which a new concept of
time could be founded. This is an experience so essential to hwnan beings
that an ancient Western myth makes it humankind's original home: it is
pleasure?'28 More problematically, he locates mat pleasure in man's "orig
inaty home;' which sounds a great deal like ti1e Kxistevian maternal body
I critiqued in chapter r . In contrast, ti1e scene from Sticky Fingers offers
neiti1er moti1cr nor fati1cr in its imagining of relations between time and
history, no original, maternal body of plentitude but only a scarred and
striated body on the one side, an absent prepubescent one on the other, a
dw11b vegetable in between, and cmcially, ti1e mouth as a tactile rather
than a verbal instrument for historical transactions, for scenes of histoti
cist binding. I have argued for tl1e body and the hand as historiographical
instruments ; let us now turn to the mouth.
In work that has been crucial for queer ti1eory, Nicholas Abraham and
Maria Torok describe melancholia in corporeal terms, as ti1c "crypting" of
a lost object, an attempt to embed the object into or make it part of the
body itself in a process they call "incorporation?'29 Incorporation is tl1e
pathological form of introjection, where the lost loved object serves as the
means through which tl1e subject reworks its originaty erotic autonomy.
In introjection, tl1e object is a placeholder for the self whom the subject
must return to loving as in primaty narcissism, and ti1is process also
creates a petmeable self capable of integrating the new. In the the01y
of introjection, time synchs up again, the uninterrupted present corre
sponds to an integrated self. Incorporation, on the other hand, is out of
synch; it produces an unintegrated, Frankensteinian body and psyche.
Interestingly, incorporation reveals itself through an oral symptom - a
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severed and remade as unpleasure or trauma; then, the object that gave
pleasure itself disappears. Affect, scene, and object reemerge in the ctypt,
to be released in the grieving subject's sudden lust. In short, as a compo
nent of melancholia, mania revisits an inappropriate sexual response from
the past.
Wid1 Torok's sense of melancholia as a lost idyll preserved, we reach
the contemporaty form of what I have been calling erotohistoriography:
a combination of femme historiography and bottom historiography, a
way of imagining the "inappropriate" response of eros in d1e face of
sorrow as a trace of past forms of pleasure. As a mode of reparative
criticism, erotohistoriography honors d1e way queer relations complexly
exceed d1e present, insisting that various queer social practices, espe
cially those involving enjoyable bodily sensations, produce forms of time
consciousness - even historical consciousness - that can intervene into
the material damage done in me name of development, civilization, and
so on. Wid1in d1ese terms, we might imagine ourselves haunted by bliss
and not just by trauma; residues of positive affect (idylls, utopias, memo
ries of touch) might be available for queer counter- ( or para- ) histo
riographies. Camp petformance, as I have described in the previous chap
ter, might be seen as a kind of historicistjouis;ance, afrisso n of dead bodies
on live ones, fading constructs on emergent ones . Or, what Annamarie
Jagose has called "d1e figure of 'histmy' - its energizing of the vety tropes
of before and after" - might be seen in queer patterns of comtship and
cruising, in sexual and more broadly tactile encounters, even in identity
fomutions such as butch / femme or FTM, all of which suggestions Sticly
Fingen makes. 32 Or- and - historicity itself might appear as a structure
of tactile feeling, a mode of touch, even an erotic practice.
In The Sticlry Pingen of Time, Drew's w1finished novel seems to have
imagined this queer version of continuity, conjuring up a way for the
dead to enter our bodies neid1er ilirough the solely psychoanalytic means
of introjection nor d1rough the mass-popular means of psychic channel
ing. Instead, the lost passage on Franlzenstein evokes Torok's notion of
incorporation, of literally consmning an object that pattakes of the lost
body and thereby preserving it. If Frankenstein's monster enacts what
seems to be a panicularly melancholic futurity, me little girl's future will
also emerge within the supposedly pad10logical delights of incorporation
as she eats the ripened tomatoes. The name of the woman who narrates
tl1is scene, "Gorge;' only makes eJ."\)licit the incorporative logic of Drew's
fantasy, for as a noun it means a natTOW passage, while as a verb it means
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to cat to d1c bursting point. 33 Following the same oral logic of historical
transmission, a d1ird character hailing from the future, Ofelia, has the
ability to transport others involuntarily across the timclinc by kissing
d1cm. And most crucially, the film's very first intervention into linear time
comes in d1c form of a murder dut takes place in a site dedicated to the
oral, if not to d1c erotic - a dentist's office.
In d1e scene where Gorge uses Drew's insurance card to have a tooth
abscess examined, the Freudian "jaw tood1's aching hole" is an opening
into the future for Gorge, insofar as she meets it in d1c form of a zombie
nurse who kills her, and/ or an opening into the past for the nurse, insofar
as she meets it in the form of Gorge. It's also an opening into the past for
Drew, insofar as Ofelia, by kissing Drew, yanks her first back to d1is scene
and then into d1c cactus and her repressed past. Here teeth seem to signify
two ways. In classical psychoanalytic terms, they operate as symbol for
me reorganization of Drew's libido in genital terms : kissed back to the
scene of a tooduchc, Drew emerges as all the more lesbian. In terms
of temporality, Derrida has described the interval between temporal in
stances as a diastema, literally a break between different kinds of tecd1. 34
In the dentist's office scene, then, teeth are a symbol for d1e collision of
historical moments at d1e mouth, itself an intersection between the exte
rior and d1e interior of the body.
But w11ike d1e Freudian toothache, Gorge's abscess never does get
reworked into the phallus. Instead, it replicates itself in any number of
references to the mouth as a temporal device. After sleeping wid1 her ex
boyfriend one last time, for instance, Drew remarks that "relapse sucks;'
condensing temporal regression and d1e oral in a single phrase. Later,
Isaac claims d1at "time is a pie. You can eat the slices in any order, but you
can't eat d1e same slice twice:' We might dms read d1c film as produc
tively, radically melancholic in some ways, insofar as melancholia is classi
cally regarded as a form of "relapse" to the oral phase in which tced1 are
absent, neither temporal spacing nor physiological boundaries are stable,
and interior and exterior are d1oroughly confused. Then, too, these fig
mes make literal Torok's model of incorporating or eating the past. They
invoke and dare to affirm the hunger for historical rcferentiality itself, that
pull toward the disappearing moment, however present we know that
moment never was .
In d1is film, orality and digitality also meet one anod1er in a specific
trope for history, one d1at makes good on Orlando's dreamy insertion of a
tobacco flake into an ancient prayer book. Sticky Fingers plays several
121
times on the film noir and pulp novel cigarette - phallic emblem, instru
ment of seduction, relay to apres-sex bliss, and dykedom's most com
pressed display of manual and labial dexterity. But it transforms that
classic cigarette scene into mutual marijuana coking. Sue-Ellen Case ar
gued quite some time ago that we must attend to specific historical for
mations of erotic couplcdom in order to expose poststructuralism's focus
on the individual subject - or, as she puts it, we must use burch-femme to
turn the Lacanian slash of self-alienation into a lesbian bar. 35 These pot
smoking scenes suggest that now it's time to turn that couple-centered
lesbian bar into an even more affiliative historical joint of d1e sort dut
Coal Mine1''s Granddaughter and The Physics of Love also suggest. For re
calling the onetime definition of a joint as "a connecting point of time;'
the film portrays Tucker and Drew getting wasted in bed twice, once in
the I990S and once in the final scquence.36 These scenes redescribe d1e
famous Shakespearean joints of time in corporeal terms not limited to the
skeletal or to a single body: locations and dislocations occur through
membranes and orifices ; as with The Physics of Love's intraveneous merg
ing of mod1cr and daughter, here inhalations and exhalations arc the very
media of temporal contact. In short, Sticley Fingers moves from lips and
tccd1 to ltmgs, conelating Drew's entry into lesbianism with a mild hallu
cinogenic drug, followed up by an increasing nmnbcr of shocks to her
sense of chwnology and temporal location. Each smoking scene hastens
the attraction between these denizens of different eras, gesturing toward
social possibilities exceeding but not canceling out the sexual: indeed, the
coking scenes rework the visual metaphor of Walter Benjamin's "profane
illumination" into somed1ing like an apostatic high. 37 Drifting d1e smok
ers across time, me joint disaniculates bodies and reorganizes subjec
tivities. Or as Benjamin himself might put it, as if to rework Freud's
narcissistic toothache, d1e dream-state of being stoned "loosens individ
uality like a hollow tood1:'38
In short, here historical and temporal disjunction, experienced as illicit
pleasure, define and enable q uccr sociability. Against a developmental and
specular logic of "coming our;' Brougher's film suggests lesbianism as an
oscillation between dreaming and waking states, and a movement among
various microtemporalities that do not add up. And smoke is not the only
way dut histOLy seeps in. The sticky substance that Tucker and Drew find
in their eyes after time traveling literalizes the transition from an ocular
logic to a tactile one; it exchanges a gay and lesbian history in which
lesbians become progressively more visible, for a teAtUral logic suggested
122
by the film's title, in which queer history both announces itself as a sug
gestively lubricated touch and clings stubbornly to the (proto - ? ) lesbian
body. Tucker also gets continual nosebleeds, a result of tl1e radiation
sickness she acquired while watching H-bomb tests in the 1 9 50s before
Drew intervened and stopped her from going. As well as needing to be
lubricated, then, time travel produces a different set of bodily fluids from
tl10se considered vital to biological reproduction, itself tl1e supposed pre
condition for an enduring humanity and thus for history Yet in tl1e face of
historical rupture, these women's bodies also do not dissolve into senti
mental tears . Instead, they discharge something else, some new form of
subjectivity neither imprisoned within nor fully free from past forms. The
oozy eyeballs and bloody noses turn the certainty of chronology and
continuity into tmpredictable temporal flows, and they move tl1e biologi
cal location of futurity away from the uterus, vaginal canal, or tear ducts,
and onto new bodily sites .
These effluvia and their sites of emergence, in turn, evoke a loss of con
trol reducible neither to genitalized orgasm nor to sentimentalism's hy
draulic release of desexualized emotions. In Sticley Fingers time, and even
tually histmy, are gathered and redispersed through the edges and breaks
of the body itself The film's various seepages suggest corporeal con
nections across bodies but beyond sex, across historical moments but
beyond generationality, across social movements but beyond concepts
of activism that relegate sex practice and erotic style to tl1e margins of
what can cow1t as political. They are examples of what, following the film
critic Laura Marks, might be called haptic historiography, ways of nego
tiating with the past and producing historical knowledge through visceral
sensations. 39
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laborious steps into one push of a button that would then trigger a
hidden sequence of automated motions. Indeed, Benjamin traces the
temporal work of the camera back to the invention of the match, suggest
ing that the profane illumination or historiographic flash he describes in
his Theses on the Philosophy ofHist01y does indeed have its literal referent in
the act of lighting up : "The invention of the match around the middle of
the nineteenth centmy brought forth a nwnber of innovations which
have one d1ing in common: one abrupt movement of the hand triggers a
process of many steps:'41 By the time of d1e movie camera, the role of d1e
index finger was paradoxical: pushing a button born stopped time, stay
ing d1e process of change and decay as it captured images one by one, and
initiated the inexorably fotward movement of frames as the film stock
scrolled d1rough. Benjamin also argued, famously, that in stopping time
film and photography possessed the power to reveal previously invisible
structural elements of a given moment in history, even as their vety appa
ratus effaced material process, labor, and duration. But in his analysis
d1ese haptic experiences of "switching, inserting, pressing, and the like"
were eventually supplanted by d1e optic experiences engendered by a city
filled with images 42 By the time Benjamin wrote "The Work of Art in the
Era of Mechanical Reproduction;' he had relegated d1e hand to a mere
metaphor, speaking of the audience's ability to "grasp" formerly inacces
sible artworks and bring d1em closer.
In contrast, The Stic/y Fingers ofTime, like Orlando, both literalizes and
lesbianizes the hand that can freeze and reorder time, yet it refuses to
develop the results of this act into a properly image-bound dialectic. To
put it more simply, Brougher's film retains its medium's commitment to
the indexical - not only to the history of the index finger, but to the
indexical as the very quality linking film to historiography. For film con
tains a trace of the light hitting an object. The film's moments of bodily
encow1ters with temporal alterit:y recall Benjamin's concept of d1e mi
metic faculty, perhaps the most direcdy corporeal of the several revolu
tionary cognitive practices he advocates. For Benjamin, mimesis com
bines similarity on the visual plane and sensuality on d1e tactile plane. In
his essay "On the Mimetic Faculty;' he traces the htunan gift of analogy
another aspect of the aforementioned analog - which relies on d1e mean
ings produced by physical contiguity. Analogy, far from being a merely
linguistic trope, consists of making and understanding likenesses, from
d1e one-to-one correspondences of children's gestural imitations, d1rough
the more abstract signs of dance, mrough representation via rtu1es and
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125
us
by tactile appropriation, that is, by the lure of lesbian sex, that Tucker
eventually draws Drew into the 1950s to fuck her forever. The film thus
moves from copy to contact, turning this latter form of contagious magic
into an encounter across time rather than just space.
In this case of tactile appropriation, history - the political tmconscious
126
consisting not only of repressed social conflict bur also and crucially in
this film of effaced or foreclosed social bonds of which lesbianism is only
one - opens up to a lesbian hand. Or, following Taussig again, "the his
tOly of mimesis flows into the mimesis of hist01y:'46 In other words, we
might think of mimetic historiography as a nomepresentational encoun
ter wid1 traces of the past or future. The very inaccessibility of other times
to touch guarantees a binding d1at cannot be reduced to the literal, d1e
physical - yet cannot be d10ught elsewise than wid1 the erotic at the
center. Mimetic historiography docs not privilege the steady cwnulation
of meaning over time bur works in fits and starts, torques and seizures.
And mimesis itself is historically contingent: as Benjamin recognized in
his description of the role of cinema as a mimetic technology and as
Taussig echoes in his phrase "d1e history of mimesis;' d1e sensorium itself
is temporally heterogeneous. Indeed, we might think of Raymond Wil
liams's "structures offeeling" not only as traces of residual, dominant, and
emerging modes of production but also as more literal assemblages of
older and newer sensations dependent on modes of reproduction - that
is, enabled or disabled by mediating technologies and social forms as they
come and go, in what I'd like to call a dialectics of feeling. To put it sim
ply, we feel through and wid1 representational, technological, and social
forms whose histories are uneven and overlapping. This, too, involves the
power of d1e analog, where edges show and make themselves felt.
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128
she had time traveled to discover Tucker's mw-dered body on d1e street in
1 9 5 3 . Thus the 1970s were inaccessible to Drew even in rl1eir own present
tense: having blacked out and gone elsewhere in time, Drew neither
remembers nor even initially experiences her mother's primal feminist
scene yet remains, like Elisabeth Subrin, Sharon Hayes, and other artists I
have discussed, haunted by it.
As Drew watches her mother's departure from the domway of the
hotel room, Ofelia stands behind her (see figure 17) . On the face of it,
d1is staging seems to put past ( the mother) , present (Drew) , and future
( Ofelia) in d1eir proper relation. But we can also read this sequence as a
rupture of the pattern in which a butch-femme or straight feminist past, a
queer 1 990s present, and a multiracial cybernetic future mutually illumi
nate one another. For insofar as Ofelia is played by an Mrican American
actress, she - like Shulie's "Negroes" - links the problem of the time
line with d1e problem of the color line. As Frances Negr6n-Muntaner
has explored in detail, Brougher's decision to cast an Mrican American
woman in the role of Ofelia has implications of which the film is not fully
in control.47 I cannot do justice to Negr6n-Muntaner's intricate, psycho
analytically informed argw11ent, which pivots on an w1derstanding of
Ofelia as the black phallus who guarantees the time-hopping d1at en
genders a white lesbian relationship. Nor do I wish to perform a racial/
racist "rescue" of the film. Rad1er, I'd like to use Negr6n-Muntaner's
critique to question rl1e terms of this chapter thus far. Is claiming pleasure
for historiography a queer act that nevertheless recapitulates the film's
erasure of a specifically black social time, or repeats its disavowal of me
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130
Erotohistoriography Noi1'
Here is one such example of what such working out might look like (the
other will follow in the ne:\.1: chapter) . In the 1970s scene I have de
scribed, Drew stands at die do01way of the hotel room, unable to enter
die past, widi Ofelia standing behind her as an augur of things to come.
Ofelia's own body thereby registers the vety future to which Drew's back
is turned like the Benjaminian angel of history. Looking backward in
time, Drew witnesses the personal catastrophes of a divorce and die social
irruption of the women's movement. But she cannot see die H-bomb, die
global catastrophe dut has made all the film's characters possible. As a
woman of color Ofelia has the only body dut even remotely registers
what the film elides - the decimation of and damage to Asian populations
in Japanese and Hawaiian nuclear test sites, of Native American popula
tions in Nevada sites, of poor and brown bodies compromised by nuclear
and odier toxic waste dtmiped into regions whose populations are politi-
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132
133
in their temporal switchings, Ofelia fits into neither and both of their
historical moments and JVears an anachronism on her body, as if to mate
rialize the meeting of history with bodies, desire, and even - insofar as
the tail is prosthetic - commodities. Yet the vestigial I futuristic tail is also
the paradoxical sign of society's longed-for maturity, what Benjamin calls
its ability to incorporate technology into its organ, except that here soci
ety, teclmology, and the social organ include the se],:ual body.
Like the body of Frankenstein's monster, like Orlando 's many fingers,
Ofelia's tail is a crucial binding device that leashes bodies to one anod1er
even across time. With her ability to literally take hold, to seize, to grasp
the past and bring it into conjunction wid1 d1e present, to rub the two
violendy toged1er, Ofelia is the sign of an embodied, frictive historical
med1od that cannot be contained even by the film's oral and manual
logics. Hers is a truly epidermal temporality, one that substitutes black
skin's tangibility for its visibility and d1e historical burden the latter has
borne. Furthermore, unlike Drew or the United States, Ofelia does not
"black out:' Though this may suggest that she does not have an uncon
scious, as Negr6n-Muntaner argues, I dunk it also indicates her status as
the film's best historiographer, d1e one who doesn't black out blackness .
Ofelia neither forgets nor repudiates the past, but she also refuses to
dissolve it into something with which she unproblcmatically identifies.
Through d1e looking-glass of Frankenstein's tale is Ofelia's tail, which
refuses d1e ( often racialized) sacrificial logic of even queer becoming. As
an erotohistoriographic tool, Ofelia's tail counts more than any other
digit and points to the way that the movement of histmy on and between
particular bodies can encode and incite collective desires.
As it turns out, Ofelia has the most pronusingly Frankensteinian body
of all the ones I have described in this chapter. First, she resembles Victor
Frankenstein in her capacity to engineer the htunan and her occasional
appearance in a white lab coat. Second, born like the monster of a scien
tific experiment ( here, in d1e form of d1e H-bomb) , Ofelia turns against
her progenitor Tucker, whose Code has created her. Possessed of a phy
sique that amalgamates flesh and teclmology, past and future, and seem
ingly chained to the past as she vengefi.1lly chases Tucker and Drew across
the timeline, Ofelia, like the monster and his creator, turns her white
masters into slaves. Her zombie nurses, her technological subordination
of Isaac, her lashing tail suggest d1at if the encounter wid1 histmy has
erotic dimensions, these must be also squared with me use of particular
bodies - black bodies, slave bodies - to motor modernity's "progress!'
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135
136
137
138
139
140
141
am
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tion, the masochist's sensations seem to alter the flow of time so that there
is an "after" to violence appearing as its "before;' a consensual might
have-been triumphing over a personal history of being victimized.
However problematically redemptive the white lesbian-feminist theo
retical move might be in Bersani's or Edelman's view, it is important for
my purposes because it restores a temporal axis to what, in the white gay
male argument, tends to be S/M's largely structural role as a force of
negation. Tllis strand of lesbian queer theory acknowledges, albeit often
implicitly, tl1at sadomasochism is a, perhaps the, set of sexual practices
mat most self-consciously manipulates time. But these tl1eorists have pre
dominantly focused on S/M's relationship to tl1e family romance, specifi
cally to incest - and thus not to the signifiers freighted witl1 a more legi
bly national and global history tint frequently mark sadomasochistic sex.
It was earlier, so-called second-wave and Third World feminists who in
meir vety condemnations actually confronted the way that sadomasochis
tic fantasies and/ or practices index national and imperial pasts .
Of course, tl1e argument tint sadomasochism's "historical" costw11es,
props, and reenactments aggrandize personal pain by connecting it to
collective suffering is not obsolete, nor is an understanding that S/M may
perform a distorted version of the statement "tl1e personal is political" by
visually suturing individual trauma to a historically specific structure of
systematic oppression. B ut whatever tl1e uses of Holocaust, slave, or
Inquisitor paraphernalia do - whetl1er one approves or disapproves of
them - they certainly enact a kind of time traveling. S/M roles move their
players back and forth between some kind of horrific then in the past and
some kind of redemptive noJV in tl1e present, allegedly in service of plea
sme and a freer future. S adomasochistic eroticism, whatever its moral
valences, depends on two linked temporal phenomena. One is a feeling of
return to an archaic and more chaotic psychic place, often allegorized as a
historical moment that is definitively over: for instance, the powerlessness
of a masochist's infancy can be depersonalized and displaced somewhat if
it is costwned as an antebellwn enslavement he did not go through liter
ally. But conversely, sadomasochism can also aim for a certain visceral
fi.Jsion, a point of somatic contact between a single erotic body in the
present tense and an experience coded as both public and past: for in
stance, a modern-day Jewish woman might participate in a reenactment
of some horror fiom the Holocaust, experiencing anti-Semitism in more
scripted and overt ways than she does in her evetyday life, testing her
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144
storyline, and characters who travel outside diegetic time. This film also
posits, extremely controversially during the last throes of the "sex wars"
of the 1 9 80s and early 1 990s, that a black British man might willingly
incorporate the iconography of the transatlantic slave trade into his sexual
fantasies and activities. When The Attendant was first shown, many re
viewers saw colonialist history as some kind of catalyst for contemporary
sadomasochism, or the latter as a reiteration of the former, and read tl1e
film as a rebuke to tl1e New Queer Cinema itself: as one reviewer de
clared, "Insofar as a passion for historical revisionism can be judged a true
rest of New Queer Cinema, Julien lets us know that he's only queer by
half. S ome histories are simply a lot harder to revise than others:'25
Yet the film's most remarkable quality for a millennia! queer audience,
almost two decades later, may be that it explores sadomasochism as a
means not of revising the past but of meeting up witl1 it in tl1e first place.
That is, The Attendant exploits rather than apologizes for the historical
excesses of some sadomasochistic practices, tl1e subject about which sado
masochism's most radical theoreticians and defenders have remained so
silent. Julien seems to recognize that sadomasochism is an unusual sexual
technique not only because its rise and elaboration can be traced to a
particular historical figure (the Marquis de S ade) and moment in time
(tl1e French Revolution) but also because it is a hyperbolically historical,
even merahistorical way of having sex. For The Attendant bravely solicits
the historiographical possibilities I have described. The film suggests
that affect and eroticism themselves may be queer insofar as tl1ey refuse
to acquiesce always and in ordinaty ways to industrial, commodity, or
"modern" time. It intimates that sadomasochism overtly engages with
tl1e dialectic between an era's dominant temporal modality and otl1er
historical moments and their temporal fields. And it gestures toward the
possibility of encountering specific historical moments viscerally, thereby
refusing these moments the closure of pastness.
In The Attendant, a musew11 guard, a middle-aged man of Mrican
descent played by Thomas Baptiste and referred to in tl1e credits only as
the Attendant, has a sexual encow1ter with a white man played by John
Wilson, called the Visitor. Their attraction to one another is fueled by,
even as it seems also to reanimate, a p ainting displayed at the musew11,
F. A. Biard's abolitionist painting of 1 840, variously titled The Slave Trade,
Scene on the Coast ofAfrica, or Slaves on the West Coast ofAfrica, depending
on the source one consults 26 This painting, the film's ve1y first image,
shows a slave market. There a white, presumably European man straddles
145
a prone, black, prestm1ably African man, as other black and white men
look on. In the periphery of this scene, more white men whip, bind, in
spect, and brand black men - though in d1e backgrotmd d1ere also ap
pears to be a black man whipping another black man, indexing the pres
ence of West African slave traders. In the musewn, this painting suddenly
and literally comes alive when, during an ordinaty day on the job, the
Attendant meets d1e seductive gaze of the Visitor. As d1e two men's eyes
connect, the painting metamorphoses into a tableau vivant of an inter
racial sexual orgy, with participants posed exacdy as they were on the can
vas, only now wearing modern S/M gear (see figme 1 9 ) . After the mu
sew11 finally closes, the Attendant and the Visitor consw11mate their lust
by whipping one another in a room off d1e main gallety - or the Atten
dant may simply imagine d1is happening; the film leaves this ambiguous.
On rl1e face of it, The Attendant is clearly a filmic response to specific
critics and intends to trouble several different early 1 990s audiences. In
the moment of its release, it questioned contemporary antiracist accusa
tions d1at interracial sadomasochism simply repeated and extended vio
lence against people of color, and instead asked black and white men to
examine the traumatic histories encoded in their interracial desires widl
out demanding that they simply cease desiring. In this respect, it also
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148
now, let me register it as simply one of many moments of the film's play
with flow and freeze.
As much as The Attendant is concerned with sexual politics, then, it
also explores the relationship between film and the static "high arts" of
painting, line drawing, and sculpture, which appeared historically prior
to the moving, popular art of film yet continue to inform it. Julien's film is
a striking meditation on the passive and active modes not only of sex but
also of perception: it explores the dialectic between contemplation and
intervention as they inflect sadomasochistic scenes and then open d1ese
scenes into h.ist01y. For d1e art forms Julien explores require different and
often competing modes of apprehension. In d1e Kantian tradition, still
art
lifts the viewer out of her historical moment and into some eternal, disin
terested realm of understanding. While film can engage this perceptual
practice to a certain extent, it also mobilizes other ways of receiving its
sens01y input. Crucially, it bod1 solicits a certain bodily mimicry in its
audiences and formally reiterates historically specific gestures and bodily
experiences. For instance, the material of the projected film negative,
segments strw1g into duration, mirrors the fact01y assembly line and
even, it has been argued, the stopwatch time ofTaylorist projects aimed at
improving human efficiency 31 To give another example of how cinematic
genres register and recapitulate d1e bodily impact of macrosocial change,
the melodrama - a genre The Attendant direcdy invokes in later scenes
engages a slow time of absorption in detail, but not precisely that of
disinterested contemplation, for melodramatic absorption is tied to the
repetitive routines of domestic labor 32 Julien's innovation is to link the
dynamics among film as a temporal medium, d1e temporalities of the
cinema's various narrative genres, and the time of still art to sadomasoch
istic practice itself.
In that The Attendant's formal properties shuttle between stasis and
motion, stopping and going, the film is not so much sadomasochistic
(dut is, it does not traffic in the real time of historically specific S/M cul
tures) as eminendy S adean. In fact, without ever referencing S ade, The
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d1cir family tics constitutes the worst offense against them. Conversely,
d1c tableau vivant also offers a queer image of aliveness, of sheer animacy
tmfcttcrcd by d1c narrative drives of biography or history, and in so doing
conjures up the possibility of a future beyond bod1 reproduction and
writing. 39
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152
moving whip and its contact with a body that will flinch. And indeed, as
Henaffhas perhaps most thoroughly explored and as Julien's piece clearly
recognizes, genuinely S adean sadomasochism plays with and literalizes
power as time. A dynamic between restraint and release shapes sadomas
ochistic sexual actions, which are syncopated by reward and sometimes
punishments ; bottoms are rewarded for physical endurance and for wait
ing ; tops for anticipating the bottom's needs and for maintaining sus
pense. In fact, one of the most powetful aspects of sadomasochism is
the way it makes the pause itself corporeal. Here we might recall Gilles
Delet!Ze's description of d1e masochistic aesthetic, turning away from
Sade and toward Sacher-Masoch. While Deleuze, like Henaff, describes
Sadean sexuality as dependent on an acceleration and multiplication that
aims to annihilate d1e object, Deleuze also claims dut the erotic writings
of Sacher-Masoch celebrate a suspension of time dut preserves rl1e object
of desire indefinitely: "The masochist is morose . . . by which we mean
dut he experiences waiting in its pure form?'45 Perhaps rl1is is simple
melancholia, a solipsistic fixation on rl1e lost object - except dut unlike
the melancholic, d1e masochist anticipates a fumre. As if to claim masoch
ism over melancholia, Julian uses S/M to "take back'' time, specifically the
suspension of black people from d1e time of history. He uses S/M to
produce a suspended temporality, dut is, a temporality of anticipation,
poise, readiness . . . in short, of attendance.
And so we can now see S/M as a dialectic between the will to speed up
and annihilate and the will to slow down and dilate. Here is where his
tory, as opposed to a more abstract or metaphysical temporality, enters
the scene. I suggested at this chapter's outset d1at sadomasochism lays
bare rl1e dynamic between a historically specific modernity ( d1e French
Revolution) and its precursor, precondition, or repressed double (fig
ured as d1e ancien regime) : d1at its temporal dialectic engages wid1 histo
ricity. In fact, Henaff too locates S adean acceleration in history, noting
that it conforms to an industrial capitalism in which exchange value is
increased by shortening the time necessary for prodt1Ction 46 In The At
tendant, d1e Biard painting registers d1e precondition for dlis shortening
of the time of production - d1e exploitation oflabor, which under slavery
did not occur in a direcdy capitalist mode of production itself but in a
feudal mode that fed d1e mechanized textile industty and was instnunen
tal in its profits 47 This exploitation, however "precapitalist'' its e},:terior
forms seemed, involved what the historian Walter Jolmson calls ",olent
acts of resynchronization" irreducible to Taylorism: d1e wresting of Jan-
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154
angels move us from spaces that secure racial purity ( the museum) to
those fostering interracial sexual contact ( the side galleries ) , from still art
to theater, from present to past, and from the quotidian to the super
natural. One ofJulian's rather campy angels carries a pitchfork, perhaps to
shovel up Benjamin's pile of historical debris, perhaps to remind us that
history is also the devil's doing.
Yet d10ugh d1ese angels
turn,
an
155
dramatic display ( and who is neither Attendant, nor Visitor, nor musewn
guest, nor obviously lifted from any painting) . The angels point d1cir
arrows down toward tllis "target:' Here, color correspondence between
the Attendant's gold watch and the gold-dad bulge has taken the place of
narrative continuity: time and sex form what Deleuze has called a ctystal
image: something that glints up from we don't know what historical
moment, even within the film's terms, to meet tl1e Attendant's present
and, possibly, the future of the film's showing. 54
The bulge corresponds to nothing we have seen so far - not to the
slave ship in the painting, not to the reanimated slave/ S/M scene, and not
to the flogging scenes between the Visitor and the Attendant. It is, in
some ways, a tongue-in-cheek response to Robert Mapplethorpe's fa
mous photograph "Man in d1e Polyester Suit" ( 1 9 8 0 ) , which shows a
black man shot from the torso down, his flaccid penis emerging from tl1e
fly of his trousers. But the bulge also recalls and makes sense of an earlier
set of images tl1at had, up to this point in the film, remained entirely
incongruous. At the begimling, just before d1e Attendant checks the Visi
tor's black lead1er bag and they exchange their first glance, we hear an
extradiegetic chorus singing "Remember me, remember me:' A close-up
of the Attendant's impassive face and steady gaze fades to a shot of him in
156
ll.
a black ttLxedo and corsage, standing in an opera box, singing and gestur
ing outward. He seems to be addressing his petformance toward the stage
below him, where another, younger black man stands with his arms our,
sunounded by black and white men frozen in various poses against a
shiny cmnin ( see figure 21 ) : these are all the same men who will later
appear in the sadomasochistic reenactment of the Biard painting. Bare at
the chest, they are dressed in metallic loincloths. The chorus the Atten
dant sings to them is the aria "When I am laid in earth;' popularly known
as "Dido's Lament;' from Henry Purcell's opera Dido andAeneas.
For several minutes as the seduction scene progresses, this operatic
moment hovers entirely outside the film's plot. As it turns out, the gold
shOLts and the bejeweled torso must belong to someone in the assembled
group on the opera stage : the figure wears pale nylons over his skin so it is
diffi cult to tell which one. The opera scene is one possible referent for the
aria's chorus, "Remember me but ah ! forget my fate:' Perhaps d1e Atten
dant is asking d1e audience to remember his pe1fonnance but to forget
mat he ends up curating the art of od1er people ramer than making his
own. Perhaps the younger mar1 in d1e loincloth represents a queer past
d1at d1e Attendant has temporarily given up. Perhaps the chorus solicits
d1e Anglo segment of Julien's audience to remember d1e role of their
157
. am
laid . . :' The Attendant's visual pause links sex not only to the abstract,
generic, Western "time" signaled by the gold watch but also to a specifi
cally national histmy. For it directs our attention toward the Attendant's
petformance of "Dido's Lament;' and tl1ereby toward Purcell's opera
Dido and Aeneas or, as Julien puts it, "anotl1er scene on the coast of
Mrica."55 Both the libretto and tl1e performance history of this opera tell a
stmy of sex and empire, but not tl1e straightfmward stmy of Mrican slave
capture tlut we might expect from the Biard painting. As Joseph Roach
argues in detail, tl1e seventeenth-centmy librettist Nahum Tate intended
158
d1eir "deep love for d1e people whose cultures they have left in flames:'59
Moreover, the opera's petformance histmy sits at d1e disavowed intersec
tion of European and African history: it premiered in r689, a watershed
year in the development of liberal democracy, when a parliamentaty act
confirmed England's first Bill of Rights. And this, in turn, was just after
James II, fleeing England in December r688, ceded to the original inves
tors the largest share of d1e Royal African Company that captured slaves
on the Guinea Coast to trade with d1e West Indies. James's flight pre
cipitated the defeat of d1e Royal African Companis monopoly over me
slave trade, which opened it up to od1er English companies, allowing the
Dutch and French to aggressively pursue trade in the region in a competi
tion d1at ultimately drove up d1e price of slaves. 60 In sum, d1e opera Dido
159
memories arc neither the scars of originaty trauma nor the proprictaty
result of long, slow cultmal inculcation like that of family heritage or
ethnic birthright: they belong to nobody and cvctybody at once and arc
detachable from the contex1: that produced thcm 62 They come from the
body's engagement in mimetic activities, participatot)' affective and sen
sory relationships that ring changes on, variously, emotions, identity, and
affiliation. (Think, for instance, of the United States Holocaust Mu
seum's technique of issuing an identity card to each muscumgocr, who is
cncomagcd to go through the exhibit without looking at the back of d1c
card for the fate of his / her historical counterpat1:, so dut his / her sensa
tions lose their at1Chor to at1y preconceived outcome. ) These changes,
however momentaty, bind at1d w1bind historical subjectivity: collective
experiences arc implanted and disseminated, such that they overflow
their containment bod1 as individual traumas and as events over and done
with. Prosd1etic memories cow1ter d1e work of me historical monument,
for they travel wid1 at1d in proteat1 sensations. It's notable, then, that
Julien chooses to stage his meditation on colonial oppression at1d sado
masochistic fantasy in what Landsberg calls the "experiential site" of a
museum fl anked by statuary ( at1d even on an operatic stage populated by
frozen actors) 63 For situating S/M fantasy in d1c museum suggests com
plex relays between sadomasochism and the pain /pleasure dynatnic of
cultural mem01y, between the ostensibly separate publics constituted
around sex at1d d1ose hailed by d1e heritage industries.
However, Landsberg asswnes that experiential sites tt)' to duplicate
the exact senSOl)' and emotional experiences of the original sufferer, with
as litde modification as possible, and certainly without cid1er humor or
eroticism as part of d1e equation: in her analysis prosthetic memoty is
essentially curative. B ut whatever is going on in a sadomasochistic scene
where players appropriate the signs of, say, the Spanish Inquisition, it
isn't exacdy d1e incorporation of these events into the participants' set of
experiential data. It's doubtful that S/M players routinely emerge from
their scenes wid1 a sense of having been through a historical process or
feeling empad1y for d1e sufferers they have imitated. Instead, and com
plicating Landsberg's analysis, even a sadomasochism dut eschews his
torical role-playing or the solicitation of personal memories openly deals
160
161
carried, and stroked its length ( here, perhaps, is the film's only dildo) .
This brief scene seems to pw1 on the historical "baggage" borne by d1e
whip, which, in d1e hands of the Visitor and the white men in d1e tab
leaux, catalyzes a historical flashback, a racial "memmy" of rl1e power of
actual or de facto ownership that white men once wielded over black
men. In d1e hands of the Attendant, however, the whip also invokes and
invites the sexual pleasure d1at white men, however much they disavowed
it, may have taken in disciplining black men : the Attendant's whip recalls
and reverses the pointing finger of d1c white man in d1e earlier tableau of
the sadomasochistic orgy. Held by the Attendant, d1e whip also indexes
the erotic energy d1at enslaved black men managed to preserve and trans
mit to their successors despite their sufferings.
The whip, like the dildo I have described, works in TheAttendant as a
power line connecting historical as well as personal pasts to the present. As
a trope it not only links sadomasochism's power I sex dynamic to slavety
but also suggests that historical memories, wherl1er those forged from
connecting personal experiences to larger patterns or those disseminated
through mass imagety, can be bumed into the body d1rough pleasure as
well as pain. This is why Julien reanimates d1e dead in sex scenes rather
than in d1e scenes of revenge or fear mongering in which a classically
Derridean "hauntology'' usually traffics 66 Julien's commi011ent to an erot
icized halliltology is, I mink, his major contribution to a queer-of-color
critique that would hold sensuality and historical accountability in pro
ductive tension. 67 Saidiya Hartman formulates the problem, and by im
plication Julien's project, succincdy: "This re-membering takes the form
of attending to the body as a site of pleasure, eros, and sociality, and
articulating its violated condition:'68 This "attending" is both rigorously
responsible and utopian, a practice of somatic critique and of carnal hope.
Julien, like Hilaty Brougher in The Stielry Fingers of Time, seems to
figure d1is mode of corporeal historical cognition - let us call it a new,
phenomenological historical materialism - in phallic terms : whips give,
penetrate, pierce. But it is Walter Benjamin and not Julien who equates
historicizing with masculine se}mal dominance. "The historical material
ist;' Benjamin writes, "leaves it to od1ers to be drained by d1e whore called
'Once upon a time' in historicism's bordello. He remains in conuol of his
powers, man enough to blast open the continuum ofhistory."69 Here, in a
metaphor reminiscent of Thomas Paine's withering claim that histoty
defiles the male body, Benjamin aligns fiction, faity tale, and myth with a
threatening female sexuality also troped in d1e commercial terms of a
162
163
argue, it can also release this knowledge for new bodily experiences in the
present tense. In his analysis the register of touch can literally open up
slavery's historical baggage and distribute its contents differendy.
As with Orlando and Stidry Fingers, TheAttendant also signals d1e vital
role of tactility in a queer-of-color historiography wid1 d1e motif of the
hand. In one scene, we see a manicured, dark-skinned hand caressing a
marble bust on its stony lips, cheek, and chin (we are later to learn d1at
this hand belongs to d1e Attendant's co-worker and live-in lover or wife,
an African American woman known as the Conservator and played by
Cleo Sylvestre) . The ne}.."t shot shows a hand in a black lead1er glove,
preswnably d1e Attendant's, caressing the hilt of a black whip that is held
in a b are white hand; no faces appear in the frame to locate these hands.
These images of bare and gloved, black and white hands appear elsewhere
in the film : at one point we see a torso ( the Attendant's ? ) wearing a suit,
hands smood1ing d10se same black lead1er gloves ; anod1er shot shows d1e
Conservator in long black opera gloves slowly applauding from a b al
cony; yet another shows d1e black lead1er gloves now on d1e white Visi
tor, who raises his gloved hands up to dab his eyes ; even d1e crotch shot
includes the actor's hands encased in nylon. This proliferation of veiled
hands suggests the kind of blind groping, the movement by instinct and
"feel;' dut queer-of-color historians have had to use as methods for find
ing and making meaningful the mosdy lmcataloged materials of their
collective pasts.
Julien's images of hands, their robing and disrobing, d1eir insistence on
touch, invoke just this kind of memorial practice: they figm-e a memOty
that is insistendy corporeal but not organic or hereditaty. These images
also remind us that S/M is at base a practice of skinplay. Its colloquial
designation "leailiersex" suggests a certain doubling and distantiation of
the skin, for even as leather hides the skin, it also is skin. It makes the idea
of skin visible, engenders a cet"tain fascination with the epidermal "once
removed": thus S/M is always, as Kobena Mercer reminds us, a racialized
practice. 71 For Mercer, both leathersex and pornographic photography
problematically figure the sheen of black skin as an eroticized and incom
mensurate difference. For Julien, I would argue, this racialized, reduplica
tive aspect of both visual media's history and the iconography of S/M is
not always racist. First, Julien transfers the "epidennal schema" from peo
ple to props : gloved hands, d1e hilt of a whip wrapped in black lead1er, the
crotch covered by gold lame . More importandy, he exploits the skin-liness
of S/M, its ability to capture the way queers polish and rub and elasticize
164
165
between the viewer and the body that shamelessly beckons us toward the
bordellos of myth and histmy, "Once upon a time;' and specific historical
moments like the disco costwnes' 1 970s, the painting's 1 840, and the
opera's r689.
The Attendant ends with a black man apparently suffused with homo
erotic and sadomasochistic desire inhabiting the role of a diasporic queen
as written by a celebrant of British imperialism. Here is where d1e tem
poral aspect of sadomasochism contributes to a different kind of histo
riography, one that may not be fully containable within the rubric of
hauntology. Roach offers one more element in what he calls his "geneal
ogy of performance" for Dido and Aeneas, an element of the vety lament
sW1g by the Attendant that obliquely illmninates the role of se}.-uality in
the cultural memmy of a conquered people. 76 He notes that the bass line
of the lament is a chaconne, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as
a now obsolete, stately dance in triple time d1at in European usage served
as the finale to a ballet or opera. 77 But Roach argues that the European
theater's grand finale apparently had its origins as a dance with sexual
meanings in Spain and, prior to d1at, in Peru, the West Indies, or Mrica,
depending on the historian one consults 78 Even as Dido prepares for
suicide, then, her body carries and transmits the historical memmy of
pleasures that exceed the parameters of her own lifetime, her individual
love affair, her geopolitical location, and her death. This memory, both a
"might have been" and a "what could be again;' is preserved in the form
of a transatlantic beat, however domesticated it has become. In od1er
words, her song petforms an even more animate "Remember me" tlun its
lyrics, an incitement to memory that appears at the level of meter and bass
line. The lament thereby raises its own dead, even as its words frame the
stmy of England's rise on the backs of dead and dying Mrican slaves. And
in fact, The Attendant's score isolates, reformulates, and elevates that bass
line from the vety beginning: the opening "Remember me" and all its
echoes tluoughour the film are accompanied by a haunting ground bass,
as violins thrum "long-short-long, long-short-long" on me same note
over and over again while d1e aria rises above them.
In putting whips into the hands of the characters who eventually sing
and hear this lament, Julien has transposed that bodily memmy back into
a beat we can see as well as feel, or perhaps that we are enjoined to feel
while we see it. The other sonic "beat" dut punctuates the film's work on
time and histmy is the aforementioned pounding heartbeat; bod1 the
chaconne and the heartbeat are slow, steady, thudding. Perhaps the heart-
166
beat and the dance are, respectively, overly organic or sentimental figures
for the feeling body whose recalci uam rhythms might dismpt the march
of national allegory. But the heartbeat, especially, suggests the visceral
effect of past history on present bodies and perhaps even vice versa. And
the Attendant's lament, floating down to the disco-themed stage, also
answers its own call: it beams the stately chaconne back toward the bodies
capable of re- enlivening it, not in its otiginal form but in living trans
formation. These bodies also fulfill - in a contemporat)' idiom - Dido's
promise to return from the dead, insofar as they register an era before
AIDS and the power that disco had to connect moving bodies back then,
and d1ey bring that era. momentarily b ack to life. The actors on stage sug
gest a literal "disco-d1eque:' a librat)' of records muvailable as written text
or even visual docmnent, but accessible in and as rhythm. The operatic
lament that eddies around them calls to mind Wai Chee Dimock's de
scription of how meaning literally re-sounds over time: "An effect of his
torical change, noise is a necessary feature of a reader's meaning-making
process. And even as it impinges on texts, even as it reverberates through
d1em, it thickens their tonality, multiplies d1eir bearable echoes, makes
d1em significant in unexpected ways:'79 Except dut wid1 sadomasochism,
"noise" is more d1an sonic; wid1in d1e practice of sadomasochism, it
becomes kinetic. Whippings, for instance, thicken the body's sensations,
multiply its felt responses, and make bodily experience significant in llll
e)..p ected ways.
It may seem here that I teeter toward a racist conception of black
bodies as the receptors or repositories of some essential beat. Honesdy, I
d1ink Julien himself may encourage dut tilt, challenging his audience's
desire not to be racist, its wish to abstract race politics from d10se of
desire, or desire from racialization. By playing with the sonic and visceral
qualities of "beats" in a film without dialogue, he also refuses us the easy
comforts of an aud1entic "voice:' But most important, Julien's association
of diasporic Mrica.n experience and sadomasochistic practices - d1e latter
of which I have argued here are grounded in rhythm - expose rhythm as
a form of cultural inculcation and of historical transmission rad1er d1a11 a
racial birthright. In fact, here rhydm1, perhaps itself d1e essence of what
Bourdieu means by habitus, becomes an imma11ent but not natural, mate
rial but not essential, replicative but not procreative mea11s ofintergenera
tional continuity despite d1e transience of the body a11d the nonsuccessive
emergence of d1ese generations. The Attendant d1ereby figures time as a
modality of power rad1er d1an a neuual substance, and the body as a
167
168
169
170
Coda
171
the United States' explicit programs for the gradual, some might say only
partial, assimilation of black people - without offering a simple respite
before a renewal of d1e same terms. But the explicitly queer te;...'ts mis
book has examined shan-circuit this current time with erotic activities
out of reach of tl1e unconscious soldier-speaker with whom I began d1is
book, and likely unthinkable in Du Bois's women's clubs : drug-taking
and drag, listing and S / M . These bodies and encounters are, themselves,
kinetic and rhytlm1ic improvisations of the social: not drives, not identi
ties, and not even collectives . They are scenes of uptake, in which capital
ist modernity itself looks like a failed revolution because it generates me
vety unpredictabilities on which new social forms feed.
I can imagine a cotmterargument to all of this : aren't all of these
practices and concepts simply fantasies of temporal and material imme
diacy, themselves retrospectively constmcted from a place of melancholia
about d1e inevitability of linguistic or semiotic mediation To which I
might reply, no, but yes . No, because it's impmtant to me not to see any
of these speculative modes of using time or doing histmy as, even in
fantasy, primal; I don't d1ink any of d1e teA.'tS I examine posit discredited,
visceral ways of knowing as only prior to dominant ones, but rad1er as
their repressed alternative. The anises I discuss acknowledge d1e affective
dimension of cognitive work in part by literalizing it as sex. But tl1ey also
understand tl1at erotic sensation is only a disavowed form of affect, and
scholars have learned to understand affect as a cultural artifact. Erotic
practices, these artists seem to be arguing, are no more immediate than
language, yet we know a lot less about how to do things wid1 sex than we
know about how to do things with words. But also: yes, risking the
fantasy of immediacy actually allows us to rethink mediation. The works I
have examined here also understand the carnal aspect of ideology; that is,
they recognize dut if ideology is common sense, "sense" must be under
stood to include botl1 emotions and physical sensations, each of which
come to "feel right" in large pat't through temporal regulation. Bodies,
then, are not only mediated by signs ; tl1ey come to "matter" tl1rough
kinetic and sensmy forms of normativity, modes of belonging that make
themselves felt as a barely acknowledged relief to those who fit in, while
the experience not fitting in often feels both like having the wrong body
and like living in a different time zone.
Thus unbinding time does not mean simply unleashing a biological
instinct or psychic drive, be it sex or dead1. Nor does unbinding histmy
mean simply showing how whatever looks like sex is actually a superstruc-
172
173
174
The Attendant
CA 94I03 USA.
Video, b / w,
1 20 n1ins.
Distributed by Video Data B ank.
I I 2 S . Mid1igan Ave . , Chicago, IL 60603 USA.
Telephone: + I ( 3 I2 ) 345- 3 5 5 0 . E-mail: info @vdb.org.
K.I.P. ( 2002, dir. Nguyen Tan Hoang) . Video, color, 4 mins.
The Physics ofLove ( I998, dir. Diane Bonder ) . Video, color, 25 mins.
Distributed by friends of the late Diane Bonder.
Contact: Kathy High, Associate Professor of Video and New Media, Arts Depart
ment, Rensselaer Polytedmic Institute. West Hall 1 04, I IO 8d1 St., Troy, NY,
I 2 I 8o USA.
Telephone: + I ( 5 I 8 ) 209-6209. E-mail: kad1y@kad1yhigh. com.
Slmlie
175
176
notes
p!!lm
I. Graves, "It's a Queer Time;' hereafter cited in text by line number.
l. See Chauncey,
Coincidence ofDesires.
Cruising Utopia;
Feeliltg Baclnvard;
Queer Child:'
ll. Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading;' 8, her emphasis.
Specters ofMarx, 3 8 .
15. The phrase "epidemic o f signification" i s Treichler's;
1. Den-ida,
in an Epidemic,
I I and passim.
relied on resignifying dominant phrases or images. See Crimp and Rolston, AIDS
DemoGraphics.
16. La Planche and Pontalis, "Binding;' so- s r . For an elegant discussion of
Freudian "binding" in relation to narrative and sexuality, see Tuhkanen, "Binding
tl1c Self'
11.
I tl1ank one of my anonymous readers from Duke University Press for this
formulation.
177
18. Lcntricchia and DuBois's Close Reading contains a good bibliography for
dose reading of d1e New Critical sort and beyond it. For a sampling of the New
Critics, whose aim was to dose off d1e text from historical context, see Ransom,
ed., Tbe New Criticism.
19. On d1e corporeal excess inde:xed by popular genres, see Williams, Hard Core.
20. Rosen, Change Mummified, 20 and 1 7 8 .
21. Ibid., xi.
22. Ibid., 99.
ll. Ibid . , 1 73 .
2. Deleuze and Gnattari, "vVhat I s a Minor Literature?"
IS. I take d1is accow1t of style's political fw1ction from Coviello's introduction to
his Intimacy in America.
178
introduction
I. Reese, "Siting d1e Avant-Garde?'
. . . painted or
l . Nguyen's liner notes t o Nguyen Tan Hoang: Complete WoriiS cite d1e
Kip Noll, Superstar: Part! ( 1 9 8 r ) , dir. William Higgins, Catalina Video.
tape as
time, with d1e "ti111e -image;' in whid1 movement reveals ti.J11 e and its hetero
geneity. See Cinema 2.
S.
One of the first activist movements to inform, shape, and intervene on queer
lands = La Frontera.
wd Anzaldtta's
Border
Writing/Gay Reading;
Rarnbuss,
The stage metaphor can be seen at work in tl1e merger of gueer tl1eory and petfor
mance studies, inflecting sucl1 1990s publications as Buder, "Imitation and Gender
Insubordination"; Robinson, "It Takes One to Know One"; Muiioz, Disidentifica
179
11. Nicrzschc, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. On rl1e
monument, sec also Luciano, Arrangi1!!J Grief, 1 69-214.
13. L1planche and Pontalis, "Deferred Acdon?' The classic essay on Naehtraglich
luit is Freud, "Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through?'
zr.. Abelove,
"End Pleasure."
are
180
lS. Ibid., 7 1 2 .
3 6 . Ibid . , 7 1 3
31. Here the work o f Bersani i s exemplary. See, especially, "Is d1e Rectum a
Grave ?"
38. Freud, "On Narcissisn1;' 64.
39. Freud,
6o.
1. Some of the stars of d1e original films from which Higgins's compilation was
made died of HIV-related infections or AID S . IU.P. can also be read as homage to
Crimp's famous essay "Mourning and Militancy;' which argues that the AID S - era
gay community ought to acknowledge its grief as well as its rage, particularly its
grief over the loss of a sexual culmre.
1,2. Freeman, "Queer Belongings;'
3. Shakespeare,
Hamlet, 1 . 5 . 1 8 8 .
297.
All lines hereafter cited in d1e body of d1e
chapter.
. Stone,
kinship as a means of forming and maintaining d1e state, see Stevens, Reproducing
the State.
S. Hum, "A T11ing of Nothing," 30-3 1 .
6.
( 1992 ) , rep.
2 2 . For a useful description o f the formal attributes and temporal politics o f die
New Queer Cinema, see Pendleton, "Out of d1e Ghetto:'
10.
It also occasionally, tliough certainly not always, revealed and troubled d1e
181
Language of Time?'
used dJe
reprinted edition published by New York University Press. For page citations from
dre novel, I have used dre original, unprefaced first edition by Daughters, Inc.
2l. On queer dykes' rebellion from drc feminist modrer, see Creer, "Daughter of
the Movement?'
2. Harris, "Introduction to Lover;' xix. Hereafter cited in text, parenthetically.
2S. Harris, Lover, s. Hereafter cited in te.xt, parenthetically.
26. I owe this insight about Christianity to Molly McGarry.
21. Kara Tirompson's prospectus for a dissertation tided "A Romance with Many
Reservations: American Indian Figurations and dre Globalization of Indigeneity"
alerted me to dre complex stn.JCtw-e of the convolute, Benjaminian and odrerwise.
28. Bouquet, "Figures of Relations."
29. Stockton, "Growing Sideways, or Versions of dre Queer Child;' 300.
30. See Kristeva, 'Won1en's Time."
ll. Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, andPenonalLife, 32. See also Brown, "Wom
en's Work and Bodies in The House ofthe Seven Gables?'
ll.
Gillis, "Malting Time for Family;' 8. See also Gillis, "Ritualization of Middle
tria/ Time.
182
Jl. Gillis, "Making Time for Family;' 8-9; on the Sunday drive, ibid., 12. On
Christmas, see N issenbaum,
the mie-en-scenel bur ies also clear that tnid-twentieth-cenntry women were en
couraged to replicate this effect in their own homes. Dana Luciano's "Coming
Around Again" alened me to the importance of this aiticle.
Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Gilles D elctJZe, Karl Marx, and Antonio Negri.
SO . Blootn, "Clinamen, or Poetic Misprision."
51.
42.
53. Negri, Marx beyond Marx, 7 1 , cited in Casarino, "Time Maners;' 200.
- On touches across time, see Dinshaw, Getting Medieval.
SS. Casarino, "Titne Matters:'
Z.
I rake this phrase of }. L. Austin from the art historian Julia Btyan-Wilson,
who uses d1e term "infelicity" to describe Hayes's texmal utteran ce., . See Austin,
Hayes:' 2 79.
183
J. The bill sat in committee and never reached the floor from 1923 to 1946
(when it failed) and 1950 (when d1e Senate passed a version so watered down d1at
supporters rejected it) ; it was finally introduced to d1e states for ratification in 1 9 72
and failed to meet the required number of state ratifications by its deadline of 1979
and extended deadline of 1982; it has been languishing in conunittee ever since . See
Mansbridge,
,
10. Wiegnun, "On Being i n Tii11e with Feminism_,, 172.
Affluence;' 322.
Be Bad.
For the purposes of clarity, in d1is dupter I use "Shulie" to designate d1e
fictive subject of bod1 d1e 1967 documentary and d1e 1997 reshoot, and "Firestone"
to designate die historical agent that die 1967 documentaty could not imagine.
Similarly, "video" refers to Subrin's reshoot, and "film" to d1e 1967 original. Wher
ever possible, I have also clistinguished between the earlier and later works widi
dates in die parendieses.
15. Elisabeth Subrin, personal conversation, fall 1999.
16. See Ross, "The Uses of Camp;' and Dyer, Heavenly Bodies.
11. Subrin, "Trashing Slmlic;' 6 6 .
1 8 . Buder,
ridge,
distinction, die most famous is de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality?' For dieo
ries of allegocy from whicl1 we might extrapolate d1e queer practices of camp and
world making, respectively, see Fletcl1er,
Al!egmy,
Trauerspiel:'
ll. Taylor, in
developed my argument before encountering her book, I diink that temporal drag
is, indeed, a repertoire for die passing down or handing over of facling gendered
and sexualized lifeways and scenarios.
184
ZJ. Some plodding remarks on tenninology: neither "lesbian" nor "dyke" cov
ers, precisely, the commim1ent to playing with age that- as I discuss fmther on
marks
Shulie
"queer" still remains frusnatingly neutral and does not do justice to the specifically
femme sensibilities also at work in some of these texts. Hence some neologisms.
October.
3I.
to Be Bad, 65-69.
lO. Ziiek writes that "a true historical break does not simply designate d1e
'regressive' loss ( or 'progressive' gain) of somed1ing, but
w!Jich enables us to measure losses andgains ( his emphasis ) : 71;e Plague ofFantasies, I 3 ,
cited in Scott, "Fantasy Echo;' 2 8 9 ; s e e also Bhabha, The Location ofCulture, 25 3-54.
in Firestone,
ix ( tul-
paginated) .
ll. Ibid., 2 r .
lB. Creet, "Daughter o f d1e Movement?'
!9. Garrison suggestively describes d1e historical transformation of feminisms as
"radio waves" rad1er than oceanic ones. See "U. S . Feminism - Grrrl Style ! "
Europe,
is from Chakrabarty,
Provincializing
8.
l. Zincs I a m d1inking o f here include I Heart Amy Carter (Tammy Rae Car
land ) ,
Snarla
(Arielle Greenberg) . Od1er 1 990s zines whose titles suggest tl1e aestlletic I am
describing can be found at tl1e Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and
Cultw-e Zine Collection at Duke University:
Reba) ,
Winky Pinky
I Kicked A Boy
sentative tl1ough not exhaustive sampling of 1 990s zines can be found in Taormina
and Green, eds . , Girl Guide to
185
5. Riot Grrrl did not initially understand its work as a politics of style, but
needless to say, d1e media potmced on Riot Grrrl fashions, ignoring dJe feminist
messages dJat d1e movement espoused. Here I hope at least to retr-anslate dJat
aesthetic back into a political language of sorts, along the lines of Hebdidge's
Subculture.
As well, it's important to note dJat Riot Grrrl d1apters still exist and
Swalww
( dir. Elisabed1 Subrin) ;judy Spots ( dir. Sadie Benning) . For a semi
nal meditation on dJe politics of mourning for lost cultw-es that nevertheless insists
on maintaining dear distinctions between generations, see Crimp, "Mourning and
Militancy?)
9. On shared parenting as a solution to what we would now call gender trou-
ble, see G illigan, In a Different Voice; and Chodorow, The Reproductwn ofMothering.
50. Firestone,
109.
r.
September 200 8 .
luminaries of d1e 1 970s and 1 9 80s lesbian folk scene wid1 dyke bands in mmually
appreciative performances and interviews
rard,
Jackson,
Lines ofActivity;
Road1,
Taussig, Mirnesis andAlterity; and Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire.
6. Reckitt, "My Fuzzy Valentine;' n.p.
65. Ibid.
66. McKay, "Allyson MitdJeU;' 48.
186
61. "Somehow a microchip in my brain got coded with the information that d1is
can be bot?' Mitchell, quoted in McKay, "Allyson Mitchell;' 47.
68. Moon and Sedgwick, "Divinity;' 2 1 6 .
6 9 . Ibid . , 2 1 8 .
1 0 . Ibid.
11. Ibid.
n. Berlant, "Slow Death?'
9. I b i d . , 79- 8 6 .
10. Ibid., 45-46. In
II.
Goode,
Sentimental Masculinity, 1 0 5 .
39.
my larger discussion.
18. For a history of "d1e spirit of the age;' see Chandler,
a n d 125.
19. I b i d . , 274.
and
23. I follow Ann Cvetkovicb's call for thinking an expansive receptivity in tem1S
of acmal l esbian se-x acts in "Recasting Receptivity:'
24. Material about the production of T7;e Sticliy Fingm of Time is taken from d1e
187
ler, we might d1ink of drag, tattooing, piercing, hmmones, and other body modi
fications up to and including phaUoplasties as ways of incorporating lost attach
ments.
30. "Erotic effusion;' Torok, "The Illness of Mourning;' 1 0 3 ; long quote, 1 10,
her emphasis.
31. Abraham and Torok, "Mouming or Melancholia;' 13 r .
32. Jagose, Inwnsequence, xi .
ll. Thanks t o Brad Epps for pushing m e t o d1ink about d1ese names.
3. Derrida, Specte1s ofMa1x, 64.
35. Case, 'Toward a Burch-Femme Aesthetic;' 295.
36.
Oxford English Dictionary online, 2nd ed. ( 1989 ) , "joint;' n. 6 ( Obs. ..are) .
ll. Chisholm, "The City of Collective Memmy;' 124. I ralce my analysis of smoke
in part from d1c Harlem Renaissance writer Bruce Nugent's short stoty "Smoke,
Lillies [sic] and Jade;' first published in 1926 in d1e journal Fi-el, and Faulkner's usc
of bread1 and dust in Absalom, Absalom! ( 1 9 3 7 ) .
38. Benjamin, "Surrealism"
- Benjamin, "Sunealism'
5. Torok, "The Illness ofMouming;' 1 1 3 .
Edelman, No Futue.
women of color: see Moraga and Hollibaugh, "What VV'c're Rollin' Around in Bed
Wid1"; Moraga's Loving in the War Years; and the oral histories in Kennedy and
188
Davis, Boots of Leatlm; Slippers of Gold. Yet the racial axis of butch-femme gender
practices disappeared from view in slightly later dassic works sud1 as Case, "To
ward a Butch-Femme Aestl1etic"; Fadem1an, Odd Girls and Th>ilight Lovers; and
Rubin, "Of Catamites and Kings:'
50. Benjamin, "The Work of Art in tl1e Age of Med1anical Reproduction;' 242.
51. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 1 2 .
51. S e e D e ry, "Black t o the Futme;'
rso.
standing of time occurred with the inception of railroads and standard times
though he may be right tl1at "modern;' secular time was not popularly understood
tl1is way in tl1e eighteentll century or in tl1e United States. See O'Malley, Keeping
Watcb.
1. Bcauvoir, <'Must We Burn S ade ? :' 43.
nist to tl1e idea of durability itself, especially in the form of the social contract, are
elegantly summed up by Ferguson in "Sade and the Pornographic Legacy:'
10. Dworkin, Intercourse; Mackinnon, Feminism Unnwdified. For criticism, see
Calilia, Public Sex.
II. For argtmlents tl1at sadomasod1ism repeats tl1e historical violence it cites, see
MiriaJn, "From Rage to All the Rage"; Reti, "Remember d1e Fire"; and Star,
"SwastU<as.''
ll. Bersani, Tbe Freudian Body, 3 8 . Bersani later revises this to describe anal sex as
tl1e consummate practice of self-shattering. See "Is tl1e Rectum a Grave ?"
ll. See Edehnan, No Future.
1. "1l1e peculiarity of Freudian analysis is to propose a history of tl1e self's struc
tme wllich indudes, as one of its stages, a solidifying of d1aracter structures . . . [it J
189
90.
11. Critiques of queer d1eo1y along d1ese lines include Morton, "Changing d1e
Terms"; Nussbamn, "The Professor of Parodi'; and Siegel, "The Gay Science:'
18. Bersani, Homos, 90.
19. See, for instance, Acker's Bwod and Guts in High School; Cvetkovicl1, An
Archive ofFeelings; and Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh .
10. Clement, The Lives and Legeuds ofjacques Laean, 1 22, cited in Hart, Between
the Body and the Flesh, 1 6 1 .
11. The concept of "feeling historical" is elaborated in Nealon, Foundlings.
11. Hartman, Scenes ofSub;ectilm, 2 1 .
Zl. Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping:'
1. Julien, "Confessions of a Snow Queen;' 120.
15. Burston, "The Attendant;' 6 5 .
16. Julien misidentifies the tide o f the painting a s Scene o n the Coast ofAfrica in his
35. Ibid.
36. H6uff, Sade, ro6.
31. Tweedie, "The Suspended Spectacle of History;' 380. Rebecca Sclmeider
speculates d1at "the 'still' in theatrical reenactment - especially d1e heritage of tab
as
1 9 . See Fleissner,
-
190
descent living under slavety can be found in Smith, Mastered by the Clock.
8. Johnson, "Time and Revolution in African America;' 1 52.
9. Ibid., I 5 3 .
SO. See Orgeron, "Re-Membering Histoty i n Isaac Julien's 71;eAttendant."
Sl. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 257.
SZ. Ibid., 262.
Sl. Ibid.
S. DeleLtze, Cinema 2, 6 9 .
55. Julien, 'Confessions o f a Snow Queen:' 120.
S6. See also Price, "Dido and Aeneas in Context?'
S1.
Specifically, the ascension of William and Mary to d1e throne. See Roach,
191
to
!Odi
Class.
192
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Sociowgical
index
1 1 8-19
Accent : theory of,
29-30
ACf UP, xiv, 6t, 84; die-ins, 59; under
standing of AIDS, XV
Activism, 67, 123; Mrican An1erican,
AID S, xiii ; feminist, 6 6 ;
So;
in, xiv
COStlllllCS of,
Africa,
in, 1 3
1980s, 66, 75; feminism in, 6r, gay
men in, 1 3 ; lesbian subculrures of,
6 r ; movetnents of, xiv; projects of,
xv; queer cinetlk1 in, 26; sex wars of,
145; style, 25; television shows of, 29
132
1 32
1 32
tion to time,
118
64;
II
59, 65
See United States
Amnesia, 5 1 , 55; historical, 1 5 8 ;
Ar11erica.
108, 1 58, I 6 6
presses of,
of,
85;
166;
as
209
1 3 3 -34;
Anachronism ( crmt. )
Anastrophe, xxii
146; causes
So; n1oven1ent, 84; organizing
and, 9 r
Anxiety ofinfluence, The ( Bloom) , 54
Ars erotica, roo, ro6, 169
Art Institute o f Chicago, 65, 67-68, 73
Asynchrony, x:xii, 19; historical, 1 3 9
Atavisrn, 1 3 3 ; fantasies o f, 86
Attendant, The ( Julien ) , xxiii-xxiv,
1 3 7, 144-69, 171
Avant-garde, xiii, 3 1
Antiracism: accusations of,
Benjamin, Walter,
of,
38;
7. See also individual
of history,
r r4; on shock,
10; tedmology and, 1 3 1, 1 34. See
also individual JJ>orks
Berlant, Lauren, 179 n. s; on fat,
92-93
Bersani, Leo : on asllesis, 45; on ego,
142;
on sadon1asocl1ism,
140-41
worlls
124-27; optical un
ss
Beckett, Samuel, xbc
92
6;
on syn
28
Biard, F. A . :
riographical,
85, 125;
d1eory
210
of,
2 1 ; pain of, r 1 5
53-55, 70, 1 22
Botudieu, l>ierre: on accent, 29 ; on
and, 92
Cil1etna, 44, 74, 1 32, 149, 1 5 1 ; Hol
1 3 0, 1 3 3 , 1 62, 164
Bmke, Edmund, 105- 6 ; on sympathy
109, 1 17
144, 145, I SO
130
Buder, Judirl1, 1 2 , u s ; o n allegmy, 70;
tive, xx
Class, 48, 98, 1 7 3 ; accent, 29, 57; billd
ing sexuality and, 5 3 ; consciousness,
See also
individual ll'Orks
working, 2 6
ClimaJc
See Orgasm
See also
as process, xvi-xvii.
riography
Closet, 24
28
CoalMiner's Granddaug!Jter
Carrl1age, 158-59
Carurl1, Cathy: on tratmJa, 142
122
Consumption, s r ; histmy of, 2; pro
duction and, 58
Casarino, Cesare: on pleasme and desire, 55; cli11an1en, themy of, 53-54
Castration, ros, 1 1 3 ; complex, 107
( Dough
Corporeality.
See Body
Counterpolitics, xi
211
Coupledom.
See Couplehood
Delay, 4, r 6 r
Deleuze, Gilles, I 5 6 ; on cinema, I 3 2 ;
o n n1asod1ism, 1 5 3
Deleuze, Gilles, and Fdbc Guattari: on
body-wid1out-organs, 5 3 ; on n1inor
Cross- dressing, 70
Culture, xi, xiv, xvi, xix, xxiii, 4, r 8, 24,
literature, xix
D'Emilio, Jolm, xx
1 6 5 , I 7r ; Mrican, I 5 9 ; Anglo
Depression, 24
S /M, 1 3 9 ,
1 4 9 ; sentin1ental, r r, 1 4 2 ; o fsinlu.la
tion, 5 8 . See also Subculrure
Dny, Mark, I 3 2
Desire, 1 3 , 42, 52-5 3, 76, 82, 84, 9 5 ;
I42
tion, 66, 75
Daguerreotypes, 2 I -22
Daughters, 3 1 , 3 3 , 3 7, 3 8 , 42-43 , 45-
Diachrony, :x.-xiii
(Firestone ) , 65-
Dido andAeneas
Grand
daug!Jter
(Purcell ) , I 57-58,
I66
Daughters, Inc., 3 I , 3 5
Difference : temporal, 3 8
Dinshaw, Carolyn, I I4
151
Decadence, 7
9I
American Fireman,
tcclmologies, 2 1
Domesticity, :n.:ii, 41, s o ; antebelltu11,
practices of, xv
Deep Lez, xxiii; definition of, 8 5 .
See
Defiguration, xxi
Degeneration, 23
22; on visual
middle-class, 3 9 - 40, 45
Domestic partnership : as privatized, 4
212
exposure, 1 3 ; n1odernity's, 1 6 9
59-
Double time, 7, 23
W. E. B . :
"Sociology Hesi
tant,' 171
of, xi
See
my of, 140
Fabulous, xi-xxii
Edelman, Lee, 1 3 0 ;
Franken
Fatnily time.
See also
Imperialism
Engels, Friedricl1, 76-77
213
theory of, 92
y,
23 ; 0n natuna, 1 1 - 1 2; unconscious,
a.rchivalist, 1 9
history, 187 n. 8
214
41
of, 97-98
theory of, 8 s
h-xii, xx
Guerilla Girls, xiv, xv
22, 3 9
Historical consciousness, 9 9 , 1 17, 1 20,
I44, I47
Historical dissidence, I4
Historical materialism, rz, r r 8, 1 62,
192 n . 67
and, 1 6 7
!02
Hamlet
126
individual works
action, 6 r
(Mon
mouth ) , r s S
Hegel, G.
W. F. :
themy of, 1 5 2
S3
Hermeneutics, xix
Heterogendered, 2 S , 39, 44, 47
tal, 8
Heterotemporality, 28
215
Histmy
(cont. )
(Torok) , I I9
"Imitation and Gender S ubordina
tion" (Butler ) , 68
Orlando
141-44, 1 5 3 , 1 6 1 , r 6 8 ; as signifier,
Capitalism
HIV:
r 8 r n . 4 1 ; drugs for, xv
mnania, roo
Homogenous time, xxii, 22, 51.
See also
89, 1 3 8
Intinucy, xxii, 2 3 , 40, 96; fan1ilial, 3 0 -
Benjamin, Walter
Homophobia, ix
3 3 , 44; synchronous, 47
See Queerness
Homosexuals. See Gays; Lesbians;
Homosenrality.
Queers
(Hayes ) , 59-6I,
on Hamlet, I S
my of time, 49
"It's a Queer Time" ( Graves ) , ix, xxi
<<It's a queer time": as refrain, ix-xi,
xiii, xvii
( Reddy) , 86
n . I3
Jan1es, Henty, 82
n. s; sexual, 27
queer tl1eory, I I
and slave1y, I 5 3
216
individual works
lence agai.trst, r I
I 1 6 ; hcteronormative> 28
also Belonging;
K.I.P.
Torok on, I I9
See
Family
(Nguyen ) , 1, 64, 1 8 1 n. 4 1 ; al
Lookingfor Langston
16-r8
(Muiioz) , 147
( Higgins ) , 2 , 1 3 , 43
Lover (Harris ) , xvii, xxiii> 3 1 - 32> 3 539, 4 I -46, 48-49, 52- 5 3 , 56-58, 70
individual works
ferend, ro
Manhood: white, I I 3
Manifest Desti.try, xi
oty, 1 59-60
Lesbian-feminism, 6 1 - 62, 8 1 , 9 1 ; be
lated quality of, 92; fi lm, 76; middle
126; black, 1 3 0
n. 67
217
I;
Modemism, 7
Moden1ity, 8, ro, 23, so, 1 39, 1 54, 1 6 1 ,
double, 1 6 9 ; Euro-Amcrican, 9 ;
also Cinema
Maternity, 3 7, 42, 57. See also Mothers
Kings ofBritain, 1 5 8
xiii
memory, 1 6 8
39
Langston, 147
Mysticism: female saints, 43, 47-49,
speare) , 1 6 - r 8, 28
Microtemporalities: of body, xii, 59;
55;
reappropriation of, 52
Mimesis, 1 24-27, 1 6 5
I 24
Mitchell, Allyson, I I 9 : art installations
218
working-class dyke, 22
Nationalistn: hon1osocial> x i ; n1odern,
2!
Nationality, 6
sadomasocltistic, r 6 r-62.
domasochism
Orlando
See also S a
!29, 1 3 4
n. 2I
xi-x
New England, 42
other, 45
historicized, 1 5 5 , 1 6 5
Penetration, 2, 4 9 , r 1 4 , I 2 8 , 1 6 3 ; end
NigJmvood
less, 9; market, 84
( B arnes ) , 3 8
Nihilism, ll
Peoplehood, 6, 2 1
Pe1formativity, 6 3 , I 9 I n. 6 2 ; fam..ilial,
82
Perversion> 47; definition of, r6o; sex
ual, r oo
tableau vi
won1en's rights
45
Photographic media, xviii, 22; middle
class domesticity and, 59
No Future
rity, 140
Noll, Kip, 2- 3 ; name, 1 3
Nostalgia: for another revolution, xvi;
and, 124
( B onder ) , xxiii, 3 r-
and, 144
! 22
219
Playboy, 89-9 1
x; youth, xv
physical, 1 0, 5 1 ; queer, r r 7; of
and, 7o
Queer politics, xix, 3, 62, 82; class
tographic, I 64
69; of time, 28
Queers, xxi-xxii, 19, 32, 1 17, I 32, I 64,
169
Premodemicy, 1 3 8, r 54
I33
68-69
Psychoanalysis, 64, 70, 125 ; conven
tional, 1 1 4
( Irigaray) , 49
5 8, ! 66
Race, so, 1 7 3 ; birthright and, 1 67; de
Queen, x, 62; drag, 68
as
220
trope, I 08
Me Roar ] ;' 86
Renan, Entest, 29
as
thin aesthetic,
xix
Reproduction, 4, 3 3 , 49, 52, I 5 I; bio
unnatural, 5 7
Reprofuturity, I 9, 2 I
r;
of
vants, 152
Sexual dissidence, xii, xxi, 27, 48, 1 7 1 ;
queer, 1 ; tetnporality and, 7
SexuaJjty, 47, 5 3 , 103, 1 14, 1 82 n. 1 3 ;
consnuctedness of, 1 1 2; dissident,
llmstein; God1ic
8 3 , 1 28-29, ! 8 5 n. 2 3
221
Uncle Tom's
Cabin, I03
57- 59
I 5 8, I 6 I
Slavery, r s r , 1 6 3 ; auction, 1 52; capital
x; lesbian, 6 I ; queer, 24
ual JVOrks
phy, 22
Surrealism, 125, 1 3 3
"Surrealism" ( B enjamin ) , I25
SJVallow
( S ubrin ) , 82, 1 8 6 n . 48
Synd1ronicity, 39-40, 96
32
Soss, Kim, 67, ? I , 74, 83
Space, xii, 22, 38, 41, 48, 53, 56- 57, 93,
163
Taussig, Mid1ael : mimesis, theory of,
126-27, 1 3 3
71, 1 84 11. 22
Technology, I IO - I I , 1 3 1, 1 34; digital,
sual, 40
Television, r, 29, 32, 43, 44
itus
Spanish Inquisition, I 3 8, I40, I60
165
Specters of Marx
( Denida ) , r o , I 3 - I4
62, 65, 78
TI-easurels
land, xi
Stic/,y Fingers ofTime, The
( Brougher) ,
XXiii,
II
Temporality, xii, xxiii-xxiv, 54- 55,
I I I - I S, 120-24, 126, 1 3 0, 1 3 3 ,
1 62, 1 6 4
r;
222
n. 3 6
Twinning, 42, 44.
( S towe ) , 103
Capitalism; Industrialization
See also
x; generational, 3 8 ; heterogeneous,
See also
Gothic
Vaudeville, 32, 44
Goa/Miner's
diaries, 8 3 ;
The
Physics ofLove, 3 3 , 3 8, 41-42, 46, so5 1 ; Slmlie, 65-68, 7 I - 72, 76-77,
as mode of dose reading, xviii;
80- 8 1
Vietnan1, 59-60; escalation o f war in,
xiv
Tongues Untied
( Riggs ) , 147
tnality, 29
bilization ) , 6r
"What Is a Minor Literature" (Deleuze and Guattari ), xviii-xix
(Beecher ) , 39-41
Tweedie, James : on tableau vivant,
I SO
Twentieth centwy, 107, r r 6, 1 3 0 ; di
alectic of time and, 22; listing and,
223
79
I9.
See also
Class
K1;stcva, Julia
JVOrflS
"Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, The" ( Benjamin ) ,
1 24
224
ISBN
1.