Notes on “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies” by Judith Halberstam
It is the first chapter of the book ‘Queer Time and
Place’
Introduces the concept ‘Queer Time’ and ‘Queer
Space’
Concept of Queer time came out in and around 20th
century- when gay communities were affected by AIDS epidemic
The author mentions two examples:
1. Mark
Doty’s poem about his lover’s death- “I have been living with a constantly
diminishing future”
The concept ‘diminishing future’-
author highlights- this says about the importance of present/ here
2. Thomas
Gunn‘s “The time of the Pague’: He talks on compressed time and impending
morality
Queer time- it is compressed as
well as completely annihilated. Not only that queer time is completely a life
where everything is unscripted.
In literatures also, these kind of new temporalities
have emerged only along with AIDS epidemic- example Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.
The
Hours
A rewriting of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. (life of Clarissa Dalloway in a day)
In this work, Clarissa had attraction towards a
female friend in her youth, but later marries a suitable man.
Clarissa also helps her friend Richard who is
isolated by the society as he is suffering from AIDS.
Later Richard suicides (jumps out of the window)
(Mrs. Dalloway does not have queer characters and
AIDS epidemic)
By rewriting the novel in this way, Cunningam has
given a queer dimension to it. Queer time is attached to the plot.
Tries to show that queer time is very short. (Here
ends in marriage or death)
Similarly
Another example is Cathy Cohen’s Boundaries
of Blackness.
This book explains how short is the lifespan of
people of color (black people) and poor people- especially people who are
marginalised, drug users etc.
Introduction of these queer time and space- if we
assess this we can see the difference that happened in twentieth century
(political and cultural change)
The author says the normal time or normativity in
time is associated with the middle class logic of marriage and reproduction- In
a heterosexual woman’s life, there is a time for marriage, reproducing child, etc.
which is established by the society. There is a biological clock for a female.
Also there is a family time (time that must be devoted to look after children).
There is a proper time for everything for a heterosexual family- a proper time
for generational inheritance as well.
Therefore, automatically, queer time is non
normative
· Queer
refers to non-normative logics and organisations of community, non-normative
sexual identity and activity.
· Queer
time is any time reference when one leaves the normal time as explained by the bourgeoisie
production of time.
· Queer
space refers to the place-making practices in which queer people engage / new
understanding of space enabled by queer counter publics
Postmodernism was a period of crisis where one could
rethink the practice of cultural production
In The Condition of
Postmodernity, David Harvey
has already said that whatever ides of time and space we have, they all are
constructions of society. Time, Harvey explains, is organized according to the
logic of capital accumulation, but those who benefit from capitalism in
particular experience this logic as inevitable, and they are therefore able to
ignore, repress, or erase the demands made on them and others by an unjust
system. And to all these constructed time like ‘family time’, industrial time’
etc, we associate some values. And therefore we feel guilty of leisure time
etc. This is in our consciousness.
Samuel Beckett's famous play Waiting
for Godot can be read, for example, as a de familiarization of time spent-
A treatise on the feeling of time wasted, of inertia or time outside of
capitalist propulsion. Waiting, in this play, seems to be a form of
postponement until it becomes clear that nothing has been postponed and nothing
will be resumed.
The meaning of space, Harvey
asserts, undergoes a double process of naturalization- first, it is naturalized
in relation to use values (we presume that our use of space is the only and
inevitable use of space-private property, for example)-but second, we
naturalize space by subordinating it to time. The construction of spatial
practices, in other words, is obscured by the naturalization of both time and space.
But he does not explain clearly how time and space are naturalised.
The author says we need a more
systematic understanding of space and time. For example, if we analyse the
feminist historians’ arguments on space , we have a clear idea as to how in
Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, space in divided
between genders.(domestic space- female more & public space- male). Racial
theories have also included spatial dimensions. For example, Barrett in his
work Blackness and Value: Seeing Double
restores the original foundations of Western thought that were used to
designate black as inhuman and white as human, black in association with
idleness, perverse sexuality, and lack of self-consciousness, and white in
association with diligence, legibility, the normal, the domestic, restraint,
and
self-awareness.
Many theorists have criticised
Harvey. Harvey's analysis, according to Anna Tsing (anthropologist and critic),
suffers first from a simplistic mode of taking cultural shifts and then mapping
them onto economic shifts; second, she claims that Harvey makes all of his
assumptions about globalization without using an ethnographic research base.
Finally, he overgeneralizes the "postmodern condition" on the basis
of a flawed understanding of the role of culture, and then allows culture to
stand in for all kinds of other evidence of the effects of globalization.
Anyhow theorists such as Fredrich
Jameson, David Harvey and Edward
William Soja have contributed much to the idea that postmodernism
is completely a gendered and racialised space.
Soja is of the opinion that it
was Foucault’s idea of heterotopia (concept that certain areas are considered
as other or disturbing- eg: cemetery,etc)
By keeping in mind what Soja said
and Harvey said, one can conclude that there are certain set of people who are
outside the normal space- sex workers, club kids, HIV-positive barebackers,
rent boys, homeless people, drug dealers, and the unemployed. Perhaps such
people could productively be called "queer subjects" in terms of the
ways they live (deliberately, accidentally, or of necessity) during the hours
when others sleep and in the spaces (physical, metaphysical, and economic) that
others have abandoned, and in terms of the ways they might work in the domains
that other people assign to privacy and family. These peple cannot change this
time as well- if they did, their life is at risk.
Postmodern geography, indeed, has
built on Foucault's speculative but powerful essay on heterotopia and on
Foucault's claim in this essay that "the present epoch will be above all
an epoch of space" (Foucault 1986, 22). Based on this insight, Soja and
Harvey argue that critical theory has privileged time/history over
space/geography with many different implications. But for both Harvey in The
Condition of Postmodemity and Jameson in "The Cultural Logic of
Postmodernism," postmodernism is a strange and even bewildering confusion
of time and space where history has lost its (materialist) meaning, time has
become a perpetual present, and space has flattened out in the face of creeping
globalization
Another thing about Harvey is
that he always says that it is inevitable to avoid capitalism. He just explains
the situation but does nothing or says nothing to change it or solve it.
One theorist who has accounted
for the possibility of "the end of capitalism" isJ. K. Gibson-Graham,
a term for two theorists Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson. Drawing on feminist
studies and queer theory, Gibson-Graham contends that capitalism has been
unnecessarily stabilized within Marxist representations as a totalizing force
and a unitary entity. If
we
destabilize the meaning of capitalism using poststructuralist critiques of
identity and signification, then we can begin to see the multiplicity of
noncapitalist forms that constitute, supplement, and abridge global capitalism,
but we can also begin to imagine, by beginning to see, the alternatives to
capitalism that already exist and are presently under construction.
Even in case of heterosexuality
and space, usually only the white gay men’s stories are discussed. One of the
best studies of sexual space that does still focus on gay men, but recognizes
the fault lines of class, race, and gender in the construction of sexual communities
is Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. The book is a
kind of travelogue where he writes down his personal experiences, write about
gay relationship cutting across different classes, races etc. He mentions about
the experiences in Porn shops, triple—X theatres as well. These places can be
called as ‘geographies of resistance’ as they are having a complete different
space and time. He also says why a town face lift has been made in the small
town city in Newyork where he visited- to eradicate the non normative spaces.
In order to create and maintain
new spaces for interclass contact, Delany asserts that we need to be able,
· first, to
imagine such spaces; we have to find out where they are, and how they can be
sustained and supported.
· Second, we need
to theorize the new spaces. It is
not enough simply to point to new sites for interclass contact but as Delany
has done here, we have to create a complex discourse around them through
narrative and the meticulous work of archiving.
· Third, we have
to avoid nostalgia for what was and what has disappeared while creating a new
formulation for future spaces and architectures.
Finally, Delany urges us to
narrate an account of the invisible institutions that prop up counterpublics,
but also to tell the story of the new technologies that want to eradicate them
through a moral campaign about cleaning up the city.
The
author says, even in Delany’s work, women are absent. He takes about different
class, race in gay relationship but women are absent.
The division between urban and
rural or urban and small town has had a major impact on the ways in which queer
community has been formed and perceived in the United States. Until recently,
small towns were considered hostile to queers and urban areas were cast as the
queer's natural environment.
____________________________________________________________
Next, the author explains how the book is
divided
· The first half
of the book considers the sudden visibility of the transgender body in the late
twentieth century against the backdrop of changing conceptions of time and
space.
· The book starts
with the murder of a transgender (Brandon Teena, a young transgender man who
was murdered in small-town Nebraska)
· Chapters 2 and 3
explore the case of Brandon Teena in detail, and I return to the questions
raised there about space, place, and identity later in my reading of Kimberly
Peirce's feature film made about Brandon in 1999- Boys Don't cry
· Chapter 4 on
queer film and the transgender look, chapter 5 on queer visual culture and
figurations of ambiguous embodiment, and to a certain extent, chapter 6 on
mainstream appropriations of gender ambiguity all examine the circuits of
influence that allow for the emergence of the transgender body as
simultaneously a symbol for postmodern flexibility and a legible form of
embodied subjectivity.
· Chapter 7 builds
on the set of questions the author asked in the Austin Powers chapter
about influence, the circulation of cultural texts, male parody, and
subcultural intensity, and the questions in chapter 5 about the avant-garde's
appropriation of subcultural material, and explores dyke subcultures as one
site for the development of queer counterpublics and queer temporalities.
· The author ends
this chapter and the book with a specific case history, the musical career of
Ferron, through which to analyze the theme of generational conflict and queer
time.
Please Note: This is the summarized note of the first introductory chapter of the book Queer Time and Place by Judith Halberstam. The author of this note does not hold any personal opinions on the works and authors mentioned . The author has not included any extra information. The intention of this note is only to make the reading of the essay easy.
Philo- Lit
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