Queer Times, Queer Becomings

Description

Queer theory essays on time and becoming in the fields of literature, philosophy, film, and performance. If queer theorists have agreed on anything, it is that for queer thought to have any specificity at all, it must be characterized by becoming, the constant breaking of habits. Queer Times, Queer Becomings explores queer articulations of time and becoming in literature, philosophy, film, and performance. Whether in the contexts of psychoanalysis, the nineteenth-century discourses of evolution and racial sciences, or the daily rhythms of contemporary, familially oriented communities, queerness has always been marked by a peculiar untimeliness, by a lack of proper orientation in terms of time as much as social norms. Yet it is the skewed relation to the temporal norm that also gives queerness its singular hope. This is demonstrated by the essays collected here as they consider the ways in which queer theory has acknowledged, resisted, appropriated, or refused divergent models of temporality. “This book opens up new areas and new questions for queer theory by bringing together the writings of some of the most well-known and respected writers with the work of a number of exciting younger scholars regarding queer temporalities, queer experiences of time, and queer times themselves. Time deserves queering; and equally queer sexualities and styles are queer partly in virtue of their untimeliness. This wonderful collection explores the way each is bound up with and helps to complicate the other.” — Elizabeth Grosz, author of Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth “This collection offers some of the most interesting recent work in queer studies about ontology, the virtual, and temporality. Ambitious and original, these essays illuminate the contemporary stakes of becoming and un-becoming queer.” — Heather Love, author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History