Ben Davies, Jana Funke - Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture-Palgrave Macmillan (2011) PDF

Sex, Gender and Time in
Fiction and Culture
Edited by
Ben Davies and Jana Funke

Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-02
10.1057/9780230307087 - Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture, Edited by Ben Davies and Jana Funke
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Sex, Gender and Time in
Fiction and Culture

Edited by Ben Davies and Jana Funke
Selection and editorial matter © Ben Davies and Jana Funke 2011
Individual chapters © contributors 2011
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First published 2011 by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sex, gender and time in fiction and culture / [edited] by Ben Davies,
Jana Funke.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978–0–230–27547–8 (hardback)
1. Sex in literature. 2. Gender identity in literature. 3. Time perception in
literature. 4. Homosexuality and literature. 5. Queer theory. 6. Time
in motion pictures. 7. Time in art. 8. Sex in popular culture.
I. Davies, Ben, 1981– II. Funke, Jana, 1982–
PN56.S5S43 2011
809'.93352—dc22 2011001638
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
Contents

List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgements viii
Notes on Contributors ix
1 Introduction: Sexual Temporalities 1

Section 1. Backwards and Forwards: Negotiating
History and Futurity 17
2 Queer Medieval Time in Hamlet (1921) 19
Bettina Bildhauer
3 No Present 38
Stephen Guy-Bray
4 History’s Tears 53
Michael O’Rourke
5 Jeanette Winterson’s Love Intervention: Rethinking
the Future 70
Abigail Rine
Section 2. In and Out of Time: Sexual Practices,
Sexual Identities 87
6 Hymenal Exceptionality 89
Ben Davies
7 Time for the Gift of Dance 109
Sarah Dillon
8 The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer: Narrating ‘Uncertain’ Sex 132
Jana Funke
9 Transgender Temporalities and the UK Gender
Recognition Act 154
Emily Grabham
vi Contents
Section 3. (Un)Becoming: Negativity, Death

and Extinction 171
10 Unbecoming: Queer Negativity/Radical Passivity 173
Judith Halberstam
11 Difference, Time and Organic Extinction 195

Claire Colebrook
12 Busy Dying 205
Valerie Rohy
Index 220
List of Illustrations

1 Celia Johnson as Laura Jesson in Brief Encounter (1945),
directed by David Lean 2
2 Progressive advertisement showing the photograph ‘Two
Unidentified Men’ by an unidentified photographer, c.1860 4
3 Hamlet (1921): Nielsen the modern woman, Hamlet the
early modern man and Hamlet the medieval female-to-male
transvestite 24
4 Hamlet (1921): Hamlet has her eye on Horatio as soon as
they meet 27
5 Hamlet (1921): Horatio discovers Hamlet’s breasts 30
6 Hamlet (1921): Hamlet suffers at her father’s coffin 33
vii
Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the many who have made this project possible.
We are grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their
financial support of the 2008 Edinburgh–St Andrews Sexualities In and
Out of Time Conference, which provided inspiration for this collection.
We thank our editor at Palgrave, Paula Kennedy, and her assistant, Ben
Doyle, for their eagerness to publish this collection and their assistance
throughout the writing process. The anonymous reviewers of the manu-
script provided useful criticism and positive feedback. We would also
like to thank Bettina Bildhauer, Sarah Dillon, Elizabeth Freeman and
Laura Marcus for their continued support and help. Their suggestions
always proved insightful, and their enthusiasm has been greatly appre-
ciated. Personal thanks go to our families and partners.
viii
Notes on Contributors

Bettina Bildhauer is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of
St Andrews. She is the author of Medieval Blood (University of Wales,
2006). Her most recent book Medieval Film, co-edited with Anke Bernau,
was published by Manchester University Press in 2009.
Claire Colebrook is Professor of English at Penn State University. She

has published widely on continental philosophy, Romanticism, feminist
theory and gender studies. Her main publications include New Literary
Histories (Manchester University Press, 1997), Ethics and Representation
(Edinburgh University Press, 1999), Gilles Deleuze (Routledge, 2002),
Irony in the Work of Philosophy (Nebraska University Press, 2003), Gender
(Palgrave, 2005), Milton, Evil and Literary History (Continuum, 2007) and
a study of Deleuze’s relation to vitalism, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life
(Continuum, 2009). She is currently working on a book-length project
on the theory and philosophy of happiness for Manchester University
Press.
Ben Davies is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in the School of

English, University of St Andrews, where he teaches nineteenth-century,
twentieth-century and contemporary literature, literary theory and
gender studies. He is currently working on the relationship between
spatiotemporality and sex in contemporary fiction.
Sarah Dillon is Lecturer in Contemporary Fiction in the School of
English, University of St Andrews. She is author of The Palimpsest:
Literature, Criticism, Theory (Continuum, 2007) and has published arti-
cles and chapters on a range of topics from Jacques Derrida to Elizabeth
Bowen, H.D. and Maggie Gee. She is currently working on her next
monograph, entitled Future-Fiction, which focuses on contemporary
mainstream post-apocalyptic fiction.
Jana Funke is Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for Medical

History, University of Exeter. She has worked on temporality and
sexuality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and
culture. Her new research project considers uses of the past in British
and German sexology and literature in the early twentieth century. She
is also working on the unpublished short fiction of Radclyffe Hall as a
fellow at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.
ix
x Notes on Contributors
Emily Grabham is Research Fellow at the AHRC Research Centre for

Law, Gender and Sexuality (‘CentreLGS’) in Kent Law School. Her
research interrogates how ‘the body’ is deployed through, and how it
shapes, discourse on belonging and citizenship in the contemporary
UK legal and political landscape. Her most recent work investigates

law’s reliance on an epistemology of touch. She was lead editor on
Intersectionality and Beyond: Law, Power, and the Politics of Location
(Routledge-Cavendish, 2008). She has published in Body & Society,
Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Sexualities
and Social and Legal Studies. She has also been joint editor of a special
issue on gender and human rights for Feminist Legal Studies, and she
has contributed to CentreLGS’s ongoing policy response to the govern-
ment’s welfare reform proposals.
Stephen Guy-Bray is Professor of English and Head of Department at

the University of British Columbia. As well as numerous articles and
book chapters, chiefly on Renaissance poetry, but also on Renaissance
drama and prose fiction as well as on twentieth-century American
literature, he has published four books, most recently a monograph
entitled Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Poems Come From
(Toronto, 2002) and a co-edited collection of essays entitled Queer
Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (Ashgate, 2009). He has just
completed a study of difference and sameness in the Renaissance and in
contemporary Renaissance studies.
Judith Halberstam is Professor of English and Gender Studies at the

University of Southern California, where she is also Director of the
Center for Feminist Research. Her publications include Skin Shows:
Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke University Press,
1995), Posthuman Bodies (Indiana University Press, 1995), Female
Masculinity (Duke University Press, 1998) and In A Queer Time and Place:
Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York University Press, 2005).
She co-authored the photographic essay The Drag King Book (Serpent’s
Tail, 1999) with the photographer Del LaGrace Volcano. Judith is also
the series editor with Lisa Lowe for Perverse Modernities: Race, Sex and
the Break-Up of Knowledge and a member of the editorial board for GLQ:
A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Michael O’Rourke works mostly at the intersections between queer

theory and continental philosophy. He has published over thirty
articles and book chapters and has edited or co-edited several special
journal issues. In addition, he is the co-editor of Love, Sex, Intimacy and
Notes on Contributors xi
Friendship Between Men, 1550–1800 (Palgrave Macmillan 2003, paperback

2007), Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800: Siting Same-Sex Desire in the Early
Modern World (Palgrave, 2006), The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer
Theory (Ashgate, 2009) and Speculative Medievalisms (in preparation), and
the editor of Derrida and Queer Theory (Palgrave, 2010) and Reading Eve

Kosofsky Sedgwick: Gender, Sexuality, Embodiment (Ashgate, 2011). He is a
research affiliate of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Gender
and Sexuality in Europe (CISSGE) at the University of Exeter and the
Somatechnics Research Centre at Macquarie University, Australia, and is
also a member of the Queer(y)ing Psychology Collective and the BABEL
Working Group.
Abigail Rine is a PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews and a

Visiting Assistant Professor at George Fox University, where she teaches
gender studies, literature and writing. She has previously published and
presented work on French feminist theory and contemporary women
novelists.
Valerie Rohy is Associate Professor in the Department of English, the

University of Vermont. Her publications include Anachronism and Its
Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (State University of New York Press,
2009), Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature (Cornell
University Press, 2000) and American Local Color Writing, 1880–1920,
edited with Elizabeth Ammons (Penguin, 1998).
1
Introduction: Sexual Temporalities1

Based on a short story by Noël Coward, the British film Brief Encounter
(1945) depicts the thwarted affair between housewife mother Laura
Jesson and married doctor Alec Harvey, whom she meets by chance on
a train. The film is predominantly set in trains and train stations, so that
the relationship develops against a backdrop of clocks, schedules and
timetables. The control time exerts over the lives of the protagonists
is emphasized in the still (Figure 1) by the large, bright station clock,
which looms over Laura. The regulated temporality of trains and sta-
tions reinforces the idea that Laura and Alec are on the verge of deviat-
ing from the ordered, routine time line of heterosexual and marital life.
The play with temporal order is emphasized by the structure of the nar-
rative itself, which opens with the end of Laura and Alec’s relationship.
The lovers board separate trains, which take them back to their respec-
tive family lives. Laura is embedded in heteronormative time – she has
boarded the train home to her husband and children. But she is also
out of time by virtue of her aberrant desire for a married man. This
distance from the temporal trajectory of her regulated, married life is
reinforced when she withdraws from the overly talkative acquaintance
travelling with her on the train by closing her eyes and pretending to
be asleep. Conveyed through voiceover, she reiterates her desire (‘I wish,
I wish’) and imaginatively enters a different, parallel time while moving
along the parallel, binary lines of the train tracks. Laura’s experience
of sexuality and time encourages us to question the theoretical binary
of being in or out of time at the same time as it exposes the potential
queerness of supposedly straight sexual relations.
Focusing on sexualities, here understood as the nexus of physical
sex and gender as well as sexual object choice and erotic relations, the
essays in this collection seek to investigate temporal experience. By
1
2 Ben Davies and Jana Funke

Figure 1 Celia Johnson as Laura Jesson in Brief Encounter (1945), directed by
David Lean.
discussing sexualities in terms of time, the contributors are furthering

an ongoing trend in gender studies and queer theory that is associated
with the notion of a ‘turn to time’.2 This formulation raises a pair of
interrelated questions: what does it mean to turn to time and how can
we do so? These questions of cause, method and purpose are addressed
over the course of this introduction and in the volume as a whole. For
a start, the very notion of a ‘turn to time’ needs to be problematized.3
Similar to the linguistic turn of the twentieth century that was necessar-
ily articulated in language, the very notion of a temporal turn is prob-
lematic in that it underplays the constitutive role of time: it implies that
time is something that we are in the process of discovering as opposed
to something that allows us to anticipate its discovery in the first place.
It suggests the possibility of placing oneself out of time.
Consequently, we can easily be blinded to the assumptions that are
inbuilt in our very approach to time. Turning to time, we are implicitly
investing in a time to come, in visions of change and ideas of recon-
ceptualization. This turn to the future is indicative of certain interpre-
tations of temporality itself, which, for Lee Edelman, have important
Introduction: Sexual Temporalities 3
sexual connotations. He asks whether the very notion of a ‘turn toward

time’ does not ‘reinforce … the consensus that bathes the petrified river
of history in the illusion of constant fluency … [and thus] repeats the
structuring of social reality that establishes heteronormativity as the
guardian of temporal (re)production’ (Dinshaw, Edelman et al., 2007,

p. 181). Edelman implies that the idea of a ‘turn to time’ is embedded in
heteronormative time because it assumes that the present is structured
by a presumed future, which we can anticipate. In turning to time, we
are in danger of turning to the very temporality he impels us to turn
away from – a time that is linear, consequential and reproductive.
Understanding that the ‘turn to time’ already inscribes us in a cer-
tain relation to time encourages us to resist the hegemony of this too
familiar kind of temporality, ‘the regular, linear, and unidirectional
pattern’, which has come to be known as straight time (Rohy, 2009,
p. xiv). Possible forms of deviance and resistance have been acknowl-
edged in discussions of diverse temporal practices that are subsumed
under the umbrella term queer temporalities. Just what a queer relation
to time entails – and who can participate in it – has been the subject
of much critical debate in recent years. In her introduction to the GLQ
special edition on the topic of queer temporality, for instance, Elizabeth
Freeman (2007, p. 159) acknowledges the queerness of asynchrony, the
feeling of not properly belonging to the time in which one exists. While
Freeman highlights that a queer experience of time is not exclusive to
non-heteronormative sexualities, discussions of queer temporality tend
to focus on LGBT sexualities.
The lesbian, for instance, is often spoken of as an ‘endangered
species’. In popular culture, fears that she might not survive or might
already be dead are expressed in the neologism of the ‘hasbian’, a term
referring to women who used to identify as lesbian, but have since cho-
sen a heterosexual lifestyle. Similarly, the acronym ‘LUG’ (Lesbian Until
Graduation) suggests that lesbianism is only worthy of experiment,
that it is permitted as an adolescent fad and not appropriate for mature
(reproductively able) women – it deserves only a short lifespan at most.
Freeman further considers the troublesome temporality of the lesbian in
her work on ‘temporal drag’. Here, drag is not primarily a form of cross-
gendered identification, but refers to ‘retrogression, delay, and the pull
of the past upon the present’ (Freeman, 2000, p. 728). Temporal drag
can usefully describe anachronistic intergenerational relationships such
as the one articulated by Judith Halberstam, who identifies as a stone
butch and explains that she is ‘always surprised to hear that apparently
there are no stone butches anymore’, so that her identification with the
anachronistic identity category seems to delegate her out of the present

moment and into a 1950s ‘preliberation understanding of lesbianism
or queerness’ (Dinshaw, Edelman et al., 2007, p. 190). Here, a radically
fluid queer politics is presented as a possible danger to the identity
category of the lesbian, and the butch lesbian in particular, whose stoic

masculinity and stable sexual object choice might be seen as outdated
in the present.
The conflation of queer temporality and LGBT experience is also
evident in a recent print advertisement by the US insurance company
Progressive (Figure 2).4 Aimed specifically towards the LGBT community,
the advertisement capitalizes on its target group’s assumed familiarity
with asynchrony. The sepia tone photograph of the gay male couple
creates a parodic nostalgia for some imagined past time of innocence. It
promises a point of origin for a disavowed gay history and encourages
the buyer to invest in the gay genealogy it offers. The advertisement sells
the promise of synchrony, implying that – ‘generations later’ – LGBT sub-
jects have finally arrived in time: they can claim a history of their own
and establish themselves in the present. This promise suggests that it is
Figure 2 Progressive advertisement showing the photograph ‘Two Unidentified

Men’ by an unidentified photographer, c.1860. International Center of
Photography, Gift of Brian Wallis in honour of David Deitcher and Clayton
Guthrie, 2001.
the competing insurance companies who are ‘behind the time’ in their
failure to include the LGBT community. At the same time, the buyer is
invited to identify with the gay male couple, which implies that they
cannot fully be understood in present terms and have to turn to the past
to find a figure of identification. Indeed, the advertisement suggests that

Progressive is instrumental in bringing otherwise asynchronous LGBT
subjects into the present by giving them the option of buying insur-
ance coverage. In addition to being figured as ‘temporally backwards’
(Freeman, 2007, p. 162), sexually dissident subjects are also temporally
forward – they are ‘ahead of time’. The Progressive advertisement shows
that the two kinds of asynchrony are related: the gay male couple of the
past is not yet possible and can be said to anticipate a future moment of
liberation. The LGBT clientele are asked to buy (here literally) into the
future. The tagline, ‘being ahead of your time is never easy’, simultane-
ously refers to the gay couple of the past and the advertisement’s target
group, whose assumed ‘forwardness’ Progressive promises to match.
The Progressive advertisement plays on the idea that LGBT subjects
have an unusual and potentially traumatic relation to time. The insur-
ance policies Progressive seeks to sell are meant to compensate their
clientele in the case of loss, damage or death. As a compensatory, coun-
terbalancing offer, this resonates with those projects in the field of queer
historiography that have sought to restore a lost history by searching for
homosexual subjects of the past and ‘placing them on the mantel’, as the
Progressive advertisement has it: while insurance aims to counteract the
effects of death, such queer historiography offers compensation through
means of a representational afterlife. Heather Love reflects critically on
this historical desire and remarks that ‘by including queer figures from
the past in a positive genealogy of gay identity, we [queer critics and his-
toriographers] make good on their suffering’ (Love, 2007, p. 33). In turn,
we also affirm our own identities in the present, relying on the assumed
‘inevitability of their [the queer figures from the past] progress toward us –
of their place in the history of modern homosexuality’, a history that we
ourselves construct in the present (ibid., p. 40). Love, on the other hand,
focuses on ‘lost figures [that] do not want to be found’ (ibid., p. 37) and
argues that what is queer about historical desire is precisely the experi-
ence of lack or loss, an experience that cannot or should not be compen-
sated for. The Progressive advertisement drags the lost subjects we see
in the photograph into a heteronormative time, offering them a com-
pensatory history and genealogy they might not desire. By promising
insurance against loss, the company assumes that being lost is negative,
undesired and undesirable, offering a secure temporal framework from
birth to death. Paradoxically, however, given the future-oriented logic

of insurance, Progressive offers compensation for a loss that has already
occurred and that – far from being compensated for – constitutes the
very desire for history the advertisement appeals to.
Rather than buying into the rhetoric of progress that leads from the

past to the present and into a better future, we should be cautious about
Progressive’s offer of investing in the future and appeals to futurity in
general, which are not limited to the language of advertisement. Pro-
gay political discourse commonly draws on this logic. For instance, in
his 2009 Academy Award acceptance speech for his portrayal of gay
activist Harvey Milk, actor Sean Penn encouraged ‘those who voted for
the ban against gay marriage to … anticipate their great shame and the
shame in their grandchildren’s eyes if they continue that way of support’
(Penn, 2009). In proclaiming a future in which the current resistance to
gay marriage will seem backward, lesbian and gay subjects that already
understand themselves to be married in the present are projected forward
in time. The gay shame of the present is replaced by the promise of a
better tomorrow in which the tables are turned: shame will be displaced
onto those that stand in the way of gay marriage and who will, since gay
marriage is synonymous with progress, inevitably be left behind. While
such appeals might be powerful, for some queer theorists, notably Lee
Edelman, the very assumption of futurity is necessarily part of a straight
temporality, which queers should reject. In No Future: Queer Theory and
the Death Drive (2004), Edelman challenges what he calls ‘reproductive
futurism’ (2007, p. 2), the investment placed in the (ever-deferred) future,
most commonly via the figure of the child. The Progressive advertise-
ment does not explain which or whose future generation will place the
photograph of the male gay couple on the homely ‘mantel’ or how this
generation will be produced. Yet it does imply that gay men can partici-
pate in a reproductive time of the family, that they can have a lineage
and a legacy that propels them into the future. This future is negated by
Edelman, as the queer does ‘not intend a new politics, a better society, a
brighter tomorrow’ (ibid., p. 31). For Edelman, the child does not only
bind us to a future to come, it also structures our sexual behaviour – the
teleology of straight time is projected onto the sex act, which displaces its
own meaning, significance or indeed non-significance for the production
of the future. To oppose this enforced temporality, Edelman promotes
inconsequential moments of jouissance that are experienced without
regard to a future. For instance, gay and straight subjects exercising the
sexual practice of barebacking reject futurity and instead embrace the
death drive Edelman theorises.
Even the excitement and thrill of barebacking is dependent on the

awareness of potential dangers in the future, which shows how difficult
it is not to consider the future. This is a point raised by Halberstam, who
adopts a different approach to futurity. Halberstam’s work remains criti-
cal of reproductive futurity, but looks for specific configurations of queer

time that do not necessarily negate all futures. Drawing on the idea of
a ‘stretched out adolescence’ (Halberstam, 2005, p. 153), for instance,
she describes modes of queer life that insist on expanded moments lived
with heightened intensity and urgency. This form of queer temporality
is made possible by the refusal to rush towards a future; expanding ado-
lescence and delaying maturity does not do away with the concept of
futurity altogether. For Halberstam, the future remains important, not
least for political and ethical reasons. She challenges Edelman’s polemical
position, arguing that it can only work
for certain subjects in certain social locations. For others, that place
of pure critique might constitute epistemological self-destruction,
and so I would argue for a kind of counterintuitive critique, one that
works against the grain of the true, the good, and the right but one
that nonetheless refuses to make a new orthodoxy out of negativity.
(Dinshaw, Edelman et al., 2007, p. 194)
Instead of rejecting all possible futures, Halberstam attempts to envi-

sion a future beyond and outside hetero- and homonormativity. This
approach acknowledges that, to some degree, both heterosexual and
non-heterosexual subjects are governed by futurity, both biologically
and economically. In terms of economics, the ‘pink dollar’ attests to
the capitalist investment in the LGBT community, as evidenced by
the Progressive advertisement. It is hard to imagine a practical way for
queers to live outside of economic production and reproduction, even
if many do not literally reproduce tomorrow’s workforce. The very real
political struggles for gay marriage and gay adoption rights are proof of
non-heterosexual desires to achieve regeneration and futurity. Ascribing
these desires to a hegemonic ‘false consciousness’ forbids us to question
the assumption that reproduction is always necessarily heterosexual. It
blinds us to the fact that sex can be used for future investment by all.
Moreover, queer theorists like José Esteban Muñoz or Michael D.
Snediker work against Edelman’s negativity and claim that ‘queerness is
primarily about futurity and hope’ (Muñoz, 2009, p. 11). These recent
texts on queer futurity resonate with some of queer theory’s earlier form-
ative works, which were crucially dependent on evocations of the future.
In 1997, David Halperin, for instance, argued that ‘queer describes a

horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope
cannot in principle be delimited in advance’ (p. 62). Similarly, in her
1996 introduction to queer theory, Annamarie Jagose defines queer as
‘a way of pointing ahead without knowing for certain what to point at’

(p. 131). Even Judith Butler’s work, despite its emphasis on negativity, is
fundamentally indebted to the idea of future potentiality, the “becoming
possible” of previously unthinkable forms of human life. This is most
explicit in Undoing Gender (2004), where she affirms that ‘norms do not
exercise a final or fatalistic control, at least, not always’ (p. 15). Thus,
‘when the unreal lays claim to reality, or enters into its domain, some-
thing other than a simple assimilation into prevailing norms can and
does take place’ (ibid., pp. 27–8). Here, queer comes to be defined as the
not-yet; queer is what is not yet possible, not yet thinkable or legible. In
other words, queer is understood in terms of a present of disavowal and
a future of possibility. Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture shows
that the relationship between sex and time is not about a simple choice
between a future endowed with hope or Edelman’s disdain of the heter-
onormative investment in that time to come. The future implied by the
‘turn to time’ need not be one that is straight or queer; it can be both or
neither, open or, as Derrida argues, monstrous:
all experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to wel-

come the monstrous arrivant, to welcome it, that is, to accord hospi-
tality to that which is absolutely foreign or strange … All of history
has shown that each time an event has been produced, for example
in philosophy or in poetry, it took the form of the unacceptable, or
even of the intolerable, or the incomprehensible, that is, of a certain
monstrosity. (Derrida, 1995, p. 387)
If queers and heterosexuals alike are implicated in the experience of

futurity, this implies that definitions of queer and straight time have to
be detached from hetero- and homonormative classifications of sexual
practices or identities. Just as Derrida’s theorization of the monstrous
entails a turn to history, the focus given to temporality in this volume
also urges us to turn our attention towards the problematic conceptions
of ‘present’ and ‘past’. Instead of looking exclusively towards the future
for original sexual temporalities or for innovative gender relations, we
can reconsider the temporality of the past(s) and their relationship to
the present and future to articulate alternative ways of understanding
sexualities and gender roles. Freeman usefully suggests that the concept
of queer time invites us to view ‘“queer” as a set of possibilities produced

out of temporal and historical difference, or [to] see the manipulation of
time as a way to produce both bodies and relationalities (or even nonre-
lationality)’ (Freeman 2007, p. 159). Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval:
Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (1999) has illustrated

how understanding affective relations in and across time can help to
unsettle the queer/straight binary and expose sex as ‘heterogeneous and
indeterminate’ (p. 13). Dinshaw focuses on transhistorical identifications
that unsettle present-day classifications of queer and straight sexuality
such as the obsessive identification of a young gay man with medieval
mystic writer Margery Kempe, described in Robert Gluck’s 1994 novel
Margery Kempe (Dinshaw, 1999, pp. 143–82). According to Dinshaw, such
affective relations across historical and sexual boundaries give evidence
of ‘a queer historical impulse, an impulse toward making connections
across time between, on the one hand, lives, texts, and other cultural
phenomena left out of sexual categories back then, and, on the other,
those left out of current sexual categories now’ (ibid., p. 1). Her theory
illustrates that heterosexual and heteronormative subjects can partici-
pate in what is known as queer time.
Taking up this line of inquiry, it is possible to argue that the moment
of jouissance Edelman champions is not an exclusively homosexual
phenomenon. For instance, Laura in Brief Encounter is hesitant to move
on from her relationship with Alec even though she acknowledges that
it has no future:
this can’t last … this misery can’t last … nothing lasts really, not
happiness nor despair, not even life lasts very long. There’ll come a
time in the future when I shan’t mind about this anymore. When
I can look back and say quite peacefully and cheerfully how silly
I was. But no, no, I don’t want that time to come ever. I want to
remember every minute. Always. Always to the end of my days.
Anticipating the future moment in time in which she will have

overcome her feelings for Alec, Laura rejects a straight trajectory of
marital life and love. Rather, she finds pleasure in a desire that can-
not offer long-term fulfilment. It is limited to a moment of satisfac-
tion, a brief encounter. More generally, detached from its reproductive
function, sex can be envisioned as a subjective escape from a future
pull that seems inevitable. For instance, heterosexuals can refuse to
engage with the future through intense joyful fucking. They can look
for experiences of the temporal that are not future-oriented – many
non-queer subjects prolong adolescence and delay maturity. Birth con-

trol provides a further example of a deferral, even refusal, of reproductive
futurity. Moreover, the heterosexual body is not always reproductively
active. The heterosexual female lives through monthly cycles of repro-
ductive capability and more lengthy stages of fertility, menopause and

infertility. Is she deemed queer once sex is more than a concern for the
future, whether by choice or biology? And does the uncritical equation
of reproduction, linearity and futurity not underestimate the radical
temporal disruptions that characterize living with and raising a child in
the first place? Engagement in reproductive time does not necessarily
erase the possibility of living in and for the present all of the time. It is
possible – and arguably more lively, more experientially exciting – to
experience both reproductive and non-reproductive temporal orders,
synchronically or sequentially. It is time, then, to move beyond the
weak dichotomy between normative futures and queer (non-)futures.
Often too readily equated with heteronormativity, linearity has
become the straw man for a challenging, exciting and indeed necessary
queer time. Asynchrony and (non-)futurity can help us to think outside
of a strictly linear and straight(forward) experience of time with which
many subjects do not always identify. To be temporally backwards or
forwards, to delay or defer the future, to expand or dilate the moment –
all of these practices can be understood as resistances against a time
that marches forward and connects past, present and future in a straight
line. Tom Boellstorff (2007, p. 229) even suggests that ‘slowing down,
stopping, or reversing … [this] linear trajectory’ is not enough and that
we need to abandon it altogether, for instance, by exploring a time of
coincidence. Queer time may embrace all of these temporal experiences,
but this does not mean that normative heterosexuals and homosexuals
are necessarily excluded from cycles, ruptures, the moment or fleeting
jouissance. For instance, affairs – consummated, or, as in Brief Encounter,
attempted and fantasized about – a mainstay of much hetero- and
homonormativity, provide the opportunity to experience parallel sexual
times, one inside and one outside of a stable partnership or marriage. It
is misleading to propose a normative temporality in which everything
is experienced as linear, governed by a logic of purpose, attainment
and goal. Life – queer or straight – does not unfold in a strictly linear
fashion; it too is rendered by temporal bumps, nicks, cycles, reversals
and cuts. Reproductive time, which is often presented as normative and
linear, calls for more detailed analysis. Far from demonstrating strict
linearity, it plays out cyclically, through trimesters. Baby rearing – seen
as a necessary heteronormative stage in reproducing the capitalist
workforce – also disrupts routines, as the newborn’s rhythms, wants

and needs dictate the times of others. The introduction of a baby also
brings into play a newly embodied temporality, which is more generally
the case in all human interaction. We encounter multiple embodied
temporalities all the time. Normative is not always already straight; nor

is it simply linear or singular.
Despite such examples of non-straight heterosexual time, discus-
sions of queer time continue to centre on forms of sexual identity and
practice that are queer in the sense that they are non-heteronormative.
These interventions are important and have influenced the work pre-
sented in this volume. For instance, in her discussion of the transgender
body and dyke subculture, Halberstam (2005, p. 1) has shown to what
degree queer uses of time are ‘develop[ed], at least in part, in opposition
to the institution of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction’. The rea-
son for this is that, as Rohy (2009, p. xiv) reminds us, ‘straight time …
has, in tandem with reproductive futurism, served systematically to
devalue queer subjects’ by presenting non-heteronormative sexual
practices and identities as primitive, backward and barren. Many of
the essays presented in this collection continue to engage with such
non-heteronormative forms of identity and sexual expression. The
contributors discuss how gay and lesbian as well as intersex and trans-
gender subjects relate to time to show how these queer identities and
practices can be said to participate in a queer temporality. The essays
also seek to reveal the extent to which queer identities and practices
can be informed by a straight temporal logic. To complement this work,
other essays in the collection deal with heterosexual identities and
expressions that have a queer temporal dimension. As a whole, the
collection aims to illustrate the uses of straight and queer time while
problematizing the equation of heterosexuality with straight time and
queer sexualities with queer time. The individual contributions show,
explicitly and implicitly, that the binary of queer versus straight time
needs to be worked apart in order to provide a productive framework
for the study of gender, sex and sexuality. This does not mean that we
wish to abandon its terms, which this introduction and some of the
essays continue to use. Rather, we hope to show that queer and straight
time intersect and relate to sexualities in complex and sometimes unex-
pected ways.
Through their heterogeneous approaches and theoretical frameworks,
the essays presented in this volume argue for time’s crucial, pervasive
(and, at times, unsettling) significance. Working with, in, against and
through time enables us to think differently and look forward, allowing
us to speculate about the future of gender and sex. It also forces us to

rethink again (even unthink) the past, just as it makes us reconsider the
present.
The contributors in the first section, ‘Backwards and Forwards:
Negotiating History and Futurity’, engage productively and critically

with concepts of history, the past and futurity. They question the relation
between the past, present and future to reconfigure our understanding
of queer and straight temporalities. The first two essays look backwards.
Arguing for the disruptive and productive potential associated with queer
time, Bettina Bildhauer’s essay, ‘Queer Medieval Time in Hamlet (1921)’,
shows how we can rethink the concept of linear time through a double
challenge to heteronormativity and modernity. Bildhauer identifies
four ways in which straight sexuality enforces straight time and shows
how they are frequently disturbed in ‘medieval film’: the performance
of gender, the association of cross-temporal affective links with queer-
ness, the melancholic assumption of gender and the normative concept
of patrilineal succession. Stephen Guy-Bray’s essay, ‘No Present’, shows
that queer studies often continues to be underwritten by a linear and
teleological view despite all protestations to the contrary. Queer histori-
ography in particular tends to privilege the present so that the past may
appear to matter only as that which leads to our own time. To unsettle
the tyranny of the present and the narrative imperative, Guy-Bray theo-
rizes a ‘lyrical historiography’, which would allow us to think about both
‘then’ and ‘now’ as moments in time to be considered for their own sake,
free from any fetishization of narrative or use value. Turning away from
the past, for queer critics like Edelman it is not specific uses of futurity,
but the very concept of the future itself that imposes restrictions on
the present and should therefore be rejected. Going beyond this queer
imperative of ‘no future’, the two final essays of this section investigate
how past and present (queer or straight) continue to be defined against
the future, or multiple futures, and examine the possibility of queer
uses of futurity. Michael O’Rourke’s contribution presents a critique of
queer historiographical approaches that, in keeping with Edelman’s anti-
social thesis, negate teleologies and relationality, and thus work against
an open-ended queer future of possibility that, as O’Rourke maintains,
is central to a queer ethico-political project. Turning to the works of
Derrida and John Caputo instead, O’Rourke develops an affirmative
and optimistic understanding of historicity, temporality, relationality
and the event that opens itself up to the future. Like O’Rourke, Abigail
Rine’s essay investigates Edelman’s polemic claims regarding the futility
of queer futurity in the context of Jeanette Winterson’s novel, The Stone
Gods (2008). While Winterson echoes Edelman’s concept of the future

as fatal repetition, her novel also manages to resist Edelman’s futility
by multiplying the future. Rine argues that Winterson problematizes
distinctions between queer/straight futurities and suggests how future(s)
can be envisioned beyond the confines of ‘reproductive futurism’.

The essays in the second section, ‘In and Out of Time: Sexual
Practices, Sexual Identities’, examine the relationship between tempo-
rality and erotics, time and sexual identity. The contributors look at
temporality in gender relations and erotic (inter)action, demonstrating
how time is manipulated through sex and bodily relations between gen-
dered subjects and vice versa. They show how queer and straight sexual
interaction can result in a non-concurrence with familiar time schemes
and thereby problematize common notions of queer and straight time.
In his essay ‘Hymenal Exceptionality’, Ben Davies turns to the recent
work of Giorgio Agamben on the state of exception, Derrida’s ‘The
Double Session’ (1972) and Foucault’s ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1984) to theo-
rize the exceptional spatiotemporality of the hymen. In a close reading
of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2007), he argues that the absent pres-
ence of the hymen drives the narrative and marks the honeymoon as
exceptional. In his theory, the hymen provides a figure through which
we can deconstruct the in/out, straight/queer temporal binary. In ‘Time
for the Gift of Dance’, Sarah Dillon addresses the role of time in under-
standing sexual difference through the play of dance in Derrida’s decon-
struction of this difference. She demonstrates how the relation between
dance, time and sexual difference works through a close reading of Peter
Chelsom’s film Shall We Dance? (2004). Dillon’s reading analyses the way
in which the film plays with different conceptions of time. In particular,
she turns to various asynchronic moments, which problematize notions
of queer and straight time in relation to desire, sexual difference and
the figure of dance. While the queer time of dance is indeed associated
with the camp subculture of ballroom dancing, Dillon argues, this is
not a world that cannot be inhabited by the heterosexual subject. Jana
Funke’s reading of the memoirs of German-Jewish Karl M.[artha] Baer
(1907) investigates how, and at what cost, the dysteleological develop-
ment from girl to man can be aligned with governmental sexological
narratives of sexual development. Drawing on gendered and racialized
perceptions of temporal consciousness in early twentieth-century cul-
ture and science, and focusing on the genre of the autobiographical case
history in particular, Funke argues that it is precisely the anachronistic
quality of Baer’s narrative that confirms his masculinity, so that present-
day binary understandings of queer and straight time are unsettled.
In her essay on contemporary transgender politics, Emily Grabham

presents a critical reading of the UK’s Gender Recognition Act (2005),
which maintains that the individual has to remain in the chosen gender
post-transition. Grabham problematizes the permanence of gender tran-
sitions and focuses on the work that temporal concepts of permanence

and certainty perform in relation to the governmentality of gender rec-
ognition. She further shows how an analysis of time as social action can
provide small-scale and incremental accounts of transgender becomings
in a way that simply juxtaposing transtemporalities with heteronorma-
tive temporalities cannot achieve.
The essays in the final section, ‘(Un)Becoming: Negativity, Death
and Extinction’, turn to modes of temporal undoing. In her essay
‘Unbecoming: Queer Negativity/Radical Passivity’ Judith Halberstam
addresses the problematic relationship between identity politics and
queer temporality by charting a genealogy of an anti-social and anti-
humanist queer feminism. Her close reading of Yoko Ono’s 1965
performance ‘Cut Piece’ examines the gendered, sexual and racial
dimensions of this temporal and spatial unperformance. This leads to a
reconsideration of sado-masochism as radical passivity, understood as the
resistance to an active engagement with time. Claire Colebrook’s essay,
‘Difference, Time and Organic Extinction’, engages with a closely related
set of questions. According to Colebrook, the prospect of human extinc-
tion that has begun to dominate the early twenty-first century adds a
new queer twist to the transtemporal. Talk of the anthropocene era has
prompted imaginary and theoretical texts to consider human life within
history, no longer coinciding with history as such. This, in turn, has
been figured through new concepts of sexuality – no longer as continu-
ation of the gene line by way of individuals but as proliferating beyond
self-maintenance and reproduction, and eventually beyond organic life
as such. The final essay, Valerie Rohy’s ‘Busy Dying’, provides an apt
ending as it addresses why queer theory is concerned with historicity
and time now at this particular historical moment. Looking at the his-
tory of queer theory, Rohy works through different narratives and closes
by calling for us not to defend queer theory. By allowing it to be lost or
abused by retrospective histories or those who challenge its present-day
validity, queer theory will remain open, negative and indeterminate.
Taken together, the essays collected here analyse and question time,
the timely and untimely. They provide individual temporal moments,
which cause us to challenge interrelated ideas concerning time, tempo-
rality and sexuality. They suggest how the past, present and future inflect
gender and sexuality, simultaneously problematizing this conventional
tripartite temporal schema. The collection illustrates how the temporal

affirms or undermines the constitution of gender and the sexed body,
how it is conceived and represented in light of the act(s) of sexual inter-
course. Significantly, the collection also provokes the reverse question:
how, and to what effect, do conceptions and representations of gender

and sexuality impact on the way time is theorized? By addressing such
problematics, the volume offers new ways of thinking time beyond a
stabilizing straight or queer binary, prompting us to rethink the inter-
relationship between sexuality and temporality.
Notes
1. We would like to thank Bettina Bildhauer and Sarah Dillon for their invalu-
able comments and suggestions about this introduction.
2. The ‘Queer Temporalities’ special edition of GLQ (2007) edited by Elizabeth
Freeman was the first collective response to the growing interest in the topic.
The edition provides a diverse and highly original exploration of queer time
understood as a set of non-normative temporalities. Two important issues
raised, but not discussed exhaustively, in the GLQ edition are the relationship
between straight time and queer time on the one hand, and the relationship
between heterosexual sexualities and queer time on the other. The present
volume seeks to investigate further these problematics.
3. See Freeman’s ‘Introduction’ to the special edition of GLQ (2007) for an
insightful overview of the genealogical origins of the ‘turn to time’.
4. The advertisement was part of a series of ‘gay friendly’ advertisements by
Progressive, which were, for instance, published in the US LGBT magazine The
Advocate.
Works Cited
Boellstorff, T. (2007) ‘When Marriage Falls: Queer Coincidences in Straight Time’,
GLQ, 13(2/3), 227–48.
Brief Encounter (1945) Directed by D. Lean (UK: Eagle-Lion).
Butler, J. (2004) Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge).
Derrida, J. (1995) Points – Interviews 1974–1994 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press).
Dinshaw, C. (1999) Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and
Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
Dinshaw, C., Edelman, L., et al. (2007) ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities:
A Roundtable Discussion’, GLQ, 13(2/3), 177–95.
Edelman, L. (2007) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC and
London: Duke University Press).
Freeman, E. (2000) ‘Packing History: Count(er)ing Generations’, New Literary
History, 31(4), 727–44.
Freeman, E. (2007) ‘Introduction’, GLQ, 13(2/3), 159–76.
Halberstam, J. (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural
Lives (New York: New York University Press).
Halperin, D. (1997) Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford

University Press).
Jagose, A. (1996) Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University
Press).
Love, H. (2007) Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press).

Muñoz, J. E. (2009) Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
(New York: New York University Press).
Penn, S. (2009) ‘Actor in a Leading Role Acceptance Speech’, The Oscars, http://
www.oscar.com/oscarnight/winners/?pn=detail&nominee=Penn%20 Sean%20-
%20Actor%20Leading%20Role%20Nominee (accessed 19 June 2009).
Rohy, V. (2009) Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (Albany:
State University of New York).
Snediker, M. D. (2008) Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitious
Persuasions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Section 1
Backwards and Forwards:
Negotiating History and Futurity
2
Queer Medieval Time in Hamlet
(1921)

Bettina Bildhauer
At the moment, queer studies are much concerned with time. Rather
than claim that gay people experience time differently, a surge of recent
sophisticated theories of ‘queer time’ are uncovering the ‘queerness’,
the sexual and temporal instability, inherent in all concepts of straight
or linear time. There is clearly more than a contingent link between
straight sexuality and the idea that time flows linearly from one moment
to the next. This linear conception of time is so deeply entrenched that
even people working in queer studies often still take it for granted
rather than rethink it or explain its links to sexuality. As Tom Boellstorff
observes:
the most fundamental and consequential limitation of conceptions

(and thus practices) of queer time to date is that they share with
dominant, heteronormative temporalities the assumption that time
is ultimately linear – indeed, that it is ‘straight’. Their intervention
lies in slowing down, stopping or reversing that linear trajectory,
rather than calling it into question. (Boellstorff, 2007, p. 229)
Boellstorff attempts to analyse this reliance on linear time further in

order tentatively to imagine alternatives. He rightly hypothesizes that
‘straight time is shaped by linked discourses of heteronormativity,
capitalism, modernity, and apocalypse’ (ibid., p. 228). While he focuses
mostly on how apocalyptic fears and capitalist needs for productivity
have created a strong emphasis on linear time in recent discussions
about gay marriage, he skims over his fourth element, modernity. This is
precisely the baton this chapter picks up, in order to attempt to under-
stand better how straight, linear time and straight sexuality are linked,
19
20 Bettina Bildhauer
and to help to rethink the concept of linear time through a double chal-
lenge to heteronormativity and modernity.
This chapter aims to rework our understanding of linear time by bring-
ing into play the premodern, because the discourse of modernity relies on
setting itself apart from the premodern in a linear narrative of progress.

The period immediately preceding modernity, the Middle Ages, is imag-
ined as a millennium of stasis that lasted from about 500 to 1500 without
major changes, which nevertheless miraculously prepared the ground for
an entirely new period with a different mentality. Medieval people alleg-
edly also perceived time to be quite static, as so little changed from one
generation to the next and they never believed the future to bring much
change as the end of the world was always nigh – or so the persistent
stereotype goes.1
But it is precisely this linear narrative of historical progression that
allows creative thinkers and artists to imagine non-linear time by
embracing and exploiting the postulated alterity of the medieval period.
This has been done nowhere more influentially than in films about the
Middle Ages. One of the defining characteristics of ‘medieval films’ is
precisely their playful resistance to linear time. Setting a story in the
Middle Ages seems to give film makers the licence to question the lin-
ear progression from the Middle Ages to modernity by imagining other
links to the past, and to envisage alternative ways in which medieval
people might have experienced time. It is no coincidence that this sub-
version of linear time in film often goes hand in hand with a challenge
to heteronormativity, because – as I argue here – straight sexuality is one
of the bases of straight time.2 Specifically, this chapter discusses four
major ways in which straight sexuality enforces straight time, and their
disruption in medieval film: the performance of gender; the association
of cross-temporal affective links with queerness; the normative concept
of patrilinear succession; and the melancholic assumption of gender.
Many medieval films subvert and expose these structures through tem-
poral and gender drag only to revert to normative order in the end. But
the film under discussion here goes further than most – the German
silent film Hamlet, directed by Svend Gade and Heinz Schall in 1920 and
released in 1921, which features a cross-dressing Asta Nielsen as Hamlet.
The Danish actress Asta Nielsen was one of the biggest stars of the silent
film era, and well known for experimenting with androgynous and
cross-dressing roles. She set up her own production company in Berlin
(where she spent most of her career) in order to make this film. Hamlet
got mixed reviews – ranging from horror at its blatant deviations from
Queer Medieval Time in Hamlet (1921) 21
Shakespeare to admiration for Nielsen’s acting – but was a great popular

success.
Drag: The Reliance of Linear Time on Heteronormativity

Elizabeth Freeman (2007) begins her introduction to the GLQ special
issue on queer time by citing Hamlet’s remark that ‘time is out of joint’
(Act I, Scene 5). She reads ‘joint’ somewhat forcedly as knee or wrist in
order to make the point that time lapses can be felt in the body. It is
no coincidence that she invokes Hamlet, however briefly. Hamlet has
long been felt to display both queer sexuality and resistance to linear
time.3 More precisely, the play exposes the extent to which time relies
on the performance of gender. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler famously
formulates that gender is ‘an identity tenuously constituted in time’
(1999, p. 179, my emphasis). Usually, this is interpreted as showing that
gender is not as stable as it appears: the illusion of a consistent identity
emerges only if gendered behaviour is repeated over time.4 What is
never questioned is that time is the stable flow that joins these repeated
moments into a continuous identity.
In a Foucauldian inversion, I would here like to take time not as the
given, but as also constructed by gender. What if it is the seeming stability
of gender that creates the illusion that time flows in a constant line? The
repeated moments of gendered behaviour would then suggest that there
is such a thing as stable gender, and also as linear time. This is why drag
performances can be seen to subvert both gender and time. They show
that the seeming continuity of gender cannot be taken for granted, but
can be interrupted. Usually, the temporal disjuncture in gender perform-
ance through drag, cross-dressing or transgender is interpreted away by
separating a biological female essence from male behaviour, but, as Butler
has shown, it is impossible to clearly demarcate what – bodily shape, gen-
italia, brain patterns, hormone levels and habitus – is still part of biologi-
cal essence and what is acquired. (This chapter uses the term biological
gender because the film in question still holds onto this distinction and
for ease of reference, but I always bear in mind that it is a construct.) A
good analogy is the way in which film itself creates the illusion of a linear
flow of time out of what is in reality a series of still images each followed
by a black screen. Drag exposes some of the mechanics behind creating
the impression of a consistent gender, and thereby a continuity of time.
Nielsen’s Hamlet exploits film’s potential for revealing the performative
nature both of gender and of time. The drag in a temporal sense begins
even with its frequent use of irises (black masks that frame the image and
are opened or closed slowly to fade in or out of a scene, often leaving
the screen blank). The plot is further interrupted by being separated
into a prelude and six acts, each of which is introduced by a title card
announcing its beginning and wrapped up by a title card announcing

its end. These visual breaks and delays draw attention to the disconti-
nuities of the film images underneath the apparent sequence. But most
importantly, the film is centred on Nielsen’s disruptive ‘drag’ perform-
ance as a cross-dressing woman. Nielsen could justify casting herself as
Hamlet by pointing to a tradition of comic drag roles in Shakespearean
theatre: most actors were male in Shakespeare’s time, and his comedies
often exploit the fact that even the female roles were played by men
when they feature humorous temporary cross-dressing within the plot –
male actors played women who dressed up as men. Besides, Nielsen is
also indebted to a long heritage of women playing Hamlet in theatre
and even in film, where Sarah Bernhardt was the first screen Hamlet in
the two-minute recording The Duel Scene from ‘Hamlet’, shown at the
Paris Exposition of 1900.5 But this is never understood as cross-dressing
in the plot, as the actors’ female gender is discounted rather than made
explicit. Nielsen, however, goes beyond both of these traditions by
doing a serious drag act: being a woman playing a woman living as a
man, and exploring the consequences for this person’s identity rather
than laughing them away. The film manages to do so by resorting to an
1881 book by an American amateur scholar, Edward P. Vining, which
had been translated into German and popularized by the psychoanalyst
Ernest Jones.6 As the film’s initial title cards explain, Vining argues that
Hamlet was in fact a woman in the ‘original’ medieval Hamlet legends
on which Shakespeare drew. To Vining, this explains Hamlet’s weak
and hesitant behaviour as well as his close relationship to Horatio and
his lack of interest in Ophelia (for Vining, it goes without saying that
Hamlet the woman is heterosexual).
Nielsen’s version begins with a preamble to the Shakespearean plot.
Just as the Danish queen Gertrude gives birth to a girl, she is told that
her husband, Old Hamlet, has died in battle. She decides to pass the
baby off as male in order to have an heir. When it emerges that the news
of Old Hamlet’s death had been premature, it is too late for Gertrude
to reveal the princess’s true gender without unmasking herself as a liar,
so Hamlet is brought up as a boy. The plot then follows Shakespeare’s
play in its outlines with some significant modifications: Hamlet attends
Wittenberg University with Horatio and Laertes, son of the royal
adviser Polonius, and in the film also with young King Fortinbras of
Norway, emphasising more than Shakespeare the younger generation’s

friendship over the adults’ strife. Meanwhile, Old Hamlet’s younger
brother, Claudius, has an affair with Gertrude (made more explicit than
in Shakespeare), poisons Old Hamlet, marries Gertrude and claims the
crown. As in the play, Hamlet cannot quite bring himself to avenge

his father by killing Claudius, and feigns madness to gain time. The
relationship between Horatio, Hamlet and Ophelia turns into a love
triangle in the film: Polonius tries to get Hamlet interested in his soon
infatuated daughter Ophelia, but Hamlet only has eyes for Horatio,
who in turn falls in love with Ophelia. When Hamlet kills the eaves-
dropping Polonius, Ophelia goes mad and drowns. Fortinbras gains a
more important role in the film’s dénouement than he has in the drama:
Claudius sends Hamlet to Norway to be killed by Fortinbras, but Hamlet
foils the plot, and Fortinbras supports his university friend against
Claudius. Hamlet returns and in another non-Shakespearean episode
kills Claudius through arson. In the final sequence – again somewhat
closer to Shakespeare – Hamlet kills Ophelia’s brother Laertes in a duel,
but is himself poisoned by Gertrude and dies immediately afterwards,
while Fortinbras is left to ascend the throne.
Unusually, Hamlet here is both a man and a woman (and I shall use
both ‘he’ and ‘she’ in the following). The first shot of the adult Hamlet,
sitting outside Elsinore castle, allows the audience to get used to this
particular gender ambiguity (Figure 3). The person we see on the one
hand is a man: a typical ‘man in tights’ (as we expect in medieval film),
wearing a tunic and stockings with a Prince Valiant haircut; the man
we know Shakespeare’s Hamlet to be; and the man as which Hamlet is
passing, according to the plot. On the other hand, we see a woman:
a typical 1920s modern woman in a minidress and tights with a bob
haircut; the biological woman the plot has told us that this is; and the
quite obviously female actress. Many viewers, at least at the time, would
also specifically recognize Asta Nielsen, whose star image always looked
very much like the stylish, irreverent, androgynous persona we see here.
So the figure on the screen is at the same time Nielsen the woman,
Hamlet the woman and Hamlet the man.
This combination of two genders in one person is made possible by a
resistance to linear time that shows both genders simultaneously rather
than sequentially. The very fact that the film is explicitly set in the Middle
Ages rather than the Renaissance is a further play with chronology that
allows the film makers not only to deviate from Shakespeare, but also
to imagine a world with a different sense of time and gender. Nielsen’s
Hamlet claims to be based on ‘the original medieval legends’ (like Saxo

Figure 3 Hamlet (1921): Nielsen the modern woman, Hamlet the early modern
man and Hamlet the medieval female-to-male transvestite.
Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, written in the thirteenth century but prob-

ably emerging from an older oral tradition) rather than on Shakespeare’s
version.7 The set also looks very medieval, using the thirteenth-century
imperial residence at Goslar (heavily restored in the nineteenth century)
as the main location for the outdoor scenes. In this medieval world,
modern assumptions about time as linear no longer apply. Boellstorff
(2007, p. 232) argues that straight, linear time ‘cannot conceive of
co-presence without incorporation’: one object cannot exist in the same
place at the same time as another without subsuming it. But in the 1921
Hamlet, modern spectators have to get used to the co-presence of differ-
ent points in time that are visualized by the different genders. The fact
that the actress does not have the same gender as the character she plays
emphasizes that the two are not identical, but exist at different points
in time (one actual, one re-enacted). The fact that the character, despite
being one of the most famous men in theatre history, is a woman play-
ing a man as in medieval legends introduces another point in time and
further gender oscillation. The figure on the screen is at the same time
Nielsen the androgynous modern woman, Hamlet the early modern man
from Shakespeare’s play and Hamlet the medieval woman-as-man from

the ‘original’ stories. The ‘transgendered’ nature of this Hamlet cannot be
separated into an easy temporal progression in Hamlet’s life from female
to male (because she never fully becomes male) or in the reception of
the legend from Shakespeare’s original to the film’s copy (because the

film claims to be based on other originals).
Queer Desires into the Past
As soon as a partner is involved, drag and cross-dressing disturb tradi-

tional gender roles and conceptions of time as well as straight sexuality.
This offers viewers of different genders and sexual orientations – lesbians,
gays, straight men, straight women and those in between – opportunities
for identification and deviation from their usual preferences. Hamlet’s
flirtation with Ophelia in this film can be seen as lesbian on account
of Hamlet and Nielsen’s biological gender, or as heterosexual as regards
Hamlet’s assumed and traditional male gender. His intimacy with Horatio
can be interpreted as male gay insofar as Hamlet is traditionally a man
and here cross-dresses as one, or as heterosexual as regards his biological
femaleness. Or, more accurately, the categories of straight or gay (and
male or female) do not make much sense any longer. Whether spectators
fancy Hamlet, Ophelia or Horatio, they will see the object of their desires
involved in homo- and heterosexualized acts that may stretch their usual
sexual preferences. The fact that all these relationships end tragically and
are thus temporarily limited may encourage audiences to step out of their
comfort zone in this way (especially if they expect this to be a tragedy
from their previous knowledge of Shakespeare or from film publicity).
This thinking of co-presence of a 1920s woman and a 1200s female-
to-male transvestite is also queer in relation to the third point in time
involved here, that of the viewer. In Getting Medieval: Sexualities and
Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (1999), Carolyn Dinshaw describes
‘queerly historical acts’ found in academic historical work, which ‘cre-
ate a relation across time that has an affective or erotic component’
(p. 50). Not all affective links to the past are necessarily seen as queer:
heteronormative communities like nations, churches or towns also
rely on creating admiration, pride or even love for one’s forebears.
But sexual and romantic affection should, according to the norm,
always be limited to partners from the same generation, and certainly
to living ones. Dinshaw can thus be read to argue that any sexual and
romantic links to the past are queer in themselves, irrespective of the
genders involved. If one wants to limit the term ‘queer’ to same-sex
relationships, then loving or fantasising about dead people as potential

partners (erotic or not) is at least deviant.
But films often work against the prohibition of cross-generational love
by creating empathy and sexual desire in the spectators across time and
space, at least in the realm of fantasy. Cinema functions on the basis that

audiences suspend disbelief to allow several distinct points in time to
blur into one: the time in which the story is set, the time of the shooting
and the time of the viewing. Events filmed in the past and set at any
possible point in the past, present or future seem to unfold before our
eyes. Normally, films gloss over this conflated chronology, in order to
sustain the pleasurable illusion of letting audiences partake in the action
as it happens. Nielsen’s Hamlet, however, takes the opposite approach
of drawing attention to the differences between these points in time by
marking them through differences in gender. Spectators are constantly
reminded that they are seeing the historical moments of the cross-
dressing male Hamlet in medieval Denmark as well as the female Nielsen
in 1920s Germany simultaneously rather than in temporal succession.
But they are also encouraged to make affective links from their present
to these points in the past, to desire Nielsen as well as Hamlet. Hamlet
is staged as an object for viewers’ affections and empathy through being
the likeable protagonist ill-treated by a corrupt world, and erotically
desired by and engaged with Ophelia and Horatio (Figure 4).
Nielsen is also shown from her most appealing side through flattering
cinematography, lighting, make-up and costumes, and a performance
that makes her look sexually desirable. But as the object of desire has
more than one gender and is situated in the medieval, early modern
and early twentieth-century periods, these feelings cannot be limited
to straightforward hetero- or homosexual desires. What we may feel
for this figure is a queer affection in the sense both of reaching into
the past – the distant past of the character as well as, for twenty-first
century viewers, the distant past of the filming – and of the gender of
its object, which is constantly blurring. Most subversively, metalepses –
the crossings between different historical eras – are not glossed over,
but identified as such and yet encouraged, allowing us to transcend
chronological progression: the point of time of viewing, filming and the
plot are brought into direct contact in the response of the viewer.
Resistance to Patrilinear Succession
Besides claiming gender to be an essence independent of performance

in time, and cross-temporal desire to be queer, the third way in which

Figure 4 Hamlet (1921): Hamlet has her eye on Horatio as soon as they meet.
heteronormativity supports the concept of linear time is through the

patrilinear system. Within this system, power is passed from father to
son (or son-in-law) through giving daughters or sisters away as brides. In
Gayle Rubin’s (1975) classic analysis of gender in this ‘traffic in women’,
it is not gender as a pre-given essence that causes this exchange, but
vice versa: the exchange creates the gender of its participants inso-
far as the subjects of the exchange are defined as male, its objects as
female. A man can only be regarded as fully masculine if he has the
right to exchange women. Women in this way convey status and the
entitlement to exchange objects to men and thereby make them mas-
culine; in Lacanian terminology, women are the phallus (the symbolic
power of masculinity, the right to possess a woman). But they do not
themselves hold this power to exchange people, they cannot have a
phallus. Even in this critical analysis, linear time – the temporal succes-
sion from one generation to the next – is usually seen as the stable pole
around which gender is then created. I suggest here again a Foucauldian
move to explore the issue of time further. What if this system creates not
only gender on the basis of linear time, but linear time out of gender?
A gendered system of generational progression consolidates both het-

eronormativity and also linear time; and resistance to it – like that
found in Hamlet – disturbs gender and sexual roles as well as temporal
flow.
Both Shakespeare and Nielsen’s Hamlets fail to partake in the pat-

rilinear system of exchange and thereby deviate from straight time as
well as traditional gender roles and straight sexuality. The crown (an
important symbol of inherited power in Shakespeare’s play as in real
monarchies) in the film takes a central role in embodying the progres-
sion of patrilinear time: the transfer of power from father to son or from
older to younger brother, which ensures temporal continuity. Like the
Lacanian phallus, this crown can only be possessed by men, but is trans-
ported through a woman – through possessing Gertrude as either a wife
or a mother – and thereby sutures one generation to the next. Claudius
compresses and usurps the usual sequence of succession from father to
son by claiming the crown for himself (‘now the crown is mine!’ reads
the intertitle), and doing so as soon as he has the serpent’s poison to kill
his older brother. As in Shakespeare’s tragedy, the funeral is not sepa-
rated from the coronation and wedding by a decent mourning period.
Hamlet rushes back immediately when he has received the news of his
father’s death in Wittenberg, but when he arrives in Elsinore in the
next scene, the wedding feast is already under way, and Old Hamlet’s
wife and crown are passed to Claudius. Three intertitles emphasize this
telescoping of the normal sequence of events: for example, ‘prince, you
have come just at the right time. Up there it’s the funeral and wedding
feast at once.’ (To some extent, Claudius’s haste only highlights how the
normal succession is somewhat cruel as it entails a betrayal of the previ-
ous generation’s memory, a point I take up in the next section.)
Hamlet, by contrast, slows down and blocks chronological succession,
always remaining the youngest generation.8 That he is out of step with
his time of inheritance is suggested even by the timing of his birth, just
too late insofar as the false news of his father’s death means that she
cannot be raised as a girl; and just too early insofar as the news that
Old Hamlet has recovered means that she cannot become his successor.
Again, this disruption of patrilinear succession is intimately tied to the
disruption of gender: it is at least in part because he is a woman that
Hamlet cannot succeed his father. As far as we can tell from Gertrude’s
acts, a female heir would not have been allowed to claim the throne, and
her gender’s weakness means that she cannot reclaim her power after
Claudius has usurped it. This is again symbolized by a displaced crown.
When Gertrude is told that her baby is a girl, her first thought is: ‘woe!
The crown is lost!’ Hamlet continues to be both too slow (in his killing
of Claudius and Laertes) and too hasty (in his killing of Polonius and his
rushing ahead of Fortinbras from Norway) to become king. Instead, he
unmasks the crown as the status symbol it is: in his feigned madness, he
forms a crown from clay and squashes it, explaining to Claudius that it

holds no guarantee of temporal continuity: ‘with nimble fingers a crown
can easily disappear in Denmark’.
Patrilinear succession also depends on the pursuit of heterosexual part-
ners in the ‘traffic in women’, and again Hamlet is not part of this chain.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet emphasizes the link between love and speedy
progression when he wishes that he ‘with wings as swift as meditation
or the thoughts of love may sweep to my revenge’ (Act I, Scene 5). But
Nielsen’s Hamlet instead is a bird with ‘clipped wings’, as the intertitle
has it. She cannot chase and possess women as she is secretly a woman
herself. At Wittenberg, she is reduced to giving money to Laertes so
that he can run into the street to dally with the girls, while she has to
remain alone standing by the window. The shadow of the window frame
that falls onto her and the wall behind her like the bars of a prison makes
her look like a caged bird, too; the static camera lingers and allows him
no escape.9 Money, the ability to ‘buy’ and entertain women, like the
crown and the phallus, only passes through women. Hamlet can only
forward her father’s money to Laertes; she cannot use it herself. This
Hamlet cannot be swept up in the linear time of heterosexual desire; her
thoughts of love are not swift but cut short.
The image of broken wings returns in the final scene in front of the
throne (another symbol of the continuity of patrilinear power). When
Hamlet lies dead with her chest pressed out and arms by her side at
the foot of the throne, he looks like a dead bird with broken wings.
Fortinbras sums up: ‘I wanted to help you onto the throne, but even
its steps have broken your wings.’ Through her queer gender, queer
sexuality and queer time, Hamlet escapes the role she would have to
play as a man and an heir in the patrilinear economy. Only Fortinbras
is left to ensure some kind of succession, even if not from father to
son or son-in-law. It is only when Hamlet lies dead that Horatio hap-
pens to touch his chest and works out that he is a woman (Figure 5).
Only now can he admit his love for her, as the title card informs us:
‘only death betrays your secret to me. Your golden heart was that of a
woman, Too late, beloved, too late.’ In this way, heteronormativity is
reinstated: Hamlet’s ‘true’ (that is, biological) gender is unveiled and
Horatio’s love is therefore heterosexual. But it is, as Horatio said, too
late; this brief conservative ending not so much undoes the queer plot

Figure 5 Hamlet (1921): Horatio discovers Hamlet’s breasts.
as underscores it.10 The dominant impression the film gives is that of a

disruption of gender and sexual roles and of temporal succession, rather
than the re-establishment of order.
The Melancholic Co-Presence of Gender
Finally, the fourth way in which linear time and heteronormativity are
based on each other is the suppression of the melancholic standstill
underneath the ostensibly straight, linear time of gender assumption.
Freud famously postulated that in the Oedipal drama, a boy has to
relinquish his mother as a love object. But as Butler points out, Freud
does not even mention that the boy also has to renounce his father as
a same-sex love object. In Butler’s analysis, this entirely unacknowl-
edged lost same-sex love object is incorporated into the body to create
the boy’s masculinity. This happens because the loss of the father is
an unconscious loss. In psychoanalytic theory, any lost love object
is initially incorporated into the body (through appropriating the
loved one’s clothes, gestures and bodily habits). In a normal process of
mourning, the bereaved person would eventually recognize the loss as
such, realize that the incorporation was merely symbolic and gradually
expel the lost object through talking. But due to the taboo on homosex-
uality, the loss of the same-sex love object remains totally unconscious
and the lost object is literally sustained in the body rather than expelled;
the bereaved person – everyone – remains stuck in what Butler calls a

‘state of disavowal and suspended grief’ (1999, p. 86, my emphasis). It is
this melancholic lost love object through which gender is constituted;
the boy takes on the behaviour, habits and bodily style (or habitus) of
his father and thereby becomes masculine; the girl takes on those of her
mother and thereby becomes feminine. Gender is thus to some extent
always stagnation rather than moving forward in linear time.11
In the medieval and early modern periods, however, the incorporation
of a lost loved one is not conceived of as merely symbolic. According to
Boellstorff, as cited above, modern people cannot think co-presence with-
out incorporation or absorption. But medieval people, as far as can be
gleaned from their literary representations of mourning, understood even
incorporation as co-presence: the lost or dead love object was perceived
as physically residing in the bereaved person without being replaced or
subsumed by him or her.12 In this conception, both lover and object
existed in the same point in space and time: precisely what Boellstorff
would call co-presence rather than incorporation. Because this was seen
as a physical reality, it was not believed that the lost object could be
expelled symbolically through the talking cure, but only literally through
revenge: through creating another dead body in another person. As if
there were only one pain and one loss to pass around, the pain and the
lost object were transferred onto another person through revenge, and
thereby removed from the avenger. Melancholia in the modern sense is
only a symbolic taking in of one’s lost love object, but this premodern
understanding is a physical co-presence of two people in one spatiotem-
poral spot.
In Shakespeare’s drama, Hamlet’s loss of his father as same-sex love
object is revisited when his father actually loses his life and reappears
as a ghost. Hamlet incorporates the lost object without absorbing it, or
as Stephen Greenblatt (2002, p. 229) says in Hamlet in Purgatory, ‘it is as
if the spirit of Hamlet’s father has not disappeared, it has been incorpo-
rated by his son’.13 But Hamlet then does not want to avenge Old Hamlet
and thereby expel this lost object, but instead wishes to keep it present in
himself (because in the premodern understanding, revenge would be an
expulsion of the lost object, transferring the loss onto another person).
That this hesitation to avenge has little to do with attempting to pro-
tect others from pain is clear when Hamlet rather coldly kills Polonius
without regard for Ophelia’s or Laertes’s feelings. Instead, he seems to see

it as his duty to remember the past rather than forget and get over it.14 In
the premodern sense of revenge, the ghost’s twin commands to ‘revenge
his foul and most unnatural murder’ and to ‘remember me’ (both Act I,
Scene 5) are contradictory, because the first would mean forgetting and

moving on. Indeed, in the play, Hamlet’s memories of his father seem to
fade despite his best intentions as soon as he attempts to take revenge
by stabbing Polonius. Hamlet’s melancholic reaction to his bereave-
ment, wanting time to stop and no loss of memory to occur, re-enacts
and thereby makes visible the initial melancholic sustenance of the lost
same-sex love object in one’s gender.
Insofar as he draws attention to the importance of same-sex love and
the melancholic standstill that underlies all gender identification, there
is thus something queer even in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He also does
not live a traditional heterosexual life-cycle according to the demands
of inheritance, marriage, procreation and eventually death. As arch-
ditherer, he finds many reasons not to avenge his murdered father,
not to marry his girlfriend Ophelia and to stay close to his male friend
Horatio. Hamlet is always too late, a king-to-be already doomed never to
become king. In this context, the ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy acquires a
new meaning: ‘to be’ in the future sense of whether he is to be someone,
whether he has a future, or not. He forgoes his future by rejecting patri-
linear progression and by refusing to forget the dead, and thus chooses
co-presence with the past over future orientation.
Nielsen’s Hamlet achieves a different kind of co-presence. Even as an
infant, she has already had to incorporate her father and assume the
male gender in a way that makes it co-present with her own female per-
sonhood. So when Old Hamlet dies, this does not repeat the melancholic
loss of the same-sex love object for her. Young Hamlet takes on the task
of remembering her father in the film, too, grieving at length at his coffin
(Figure 6). She would not betray him by taking revenge, as she would still
incorporate him in her assumed masculinity, and she does attempt to do
so. But she is ultimately not allowed to avenge him, because this would
in the last consequence mean getting over the incorporation of the
male object and expelling it. This could unmask her as a girl, or worse,
androgynous, which is not possible for reasons of state. Even less so than
for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, there is no linear chain from loss to incorpo-
ration to expulsion in revenge for her. It is no coincidence that when
she does finally take revenge and stands up for herself, she dies and is
unmasked as (or becomes) a woman, because she has now expelled the

Figure 6 Hamlet (1921): Hamlet suffers at her father’s coffin.
male gender that she has incorporated. By showing that generational

progression is impossible to achieve except through traditional gender
identity and heterosexuality, this film reveals to what extent straight
time relies on straight sexuality. Hamlet’s famous ‘to be or not to be’
conundrum has consequently become a different dilemma formulated
as an intertitle: ‘I am no man and must not be a woman’. For Nielsen’s
Hamlet, the question of whether she is to be someone or not, whether
she has a future or not, is inextricably bound up with her gender; and
a future is clearly impossible for her because of her ambiguous gender
and sexual orientation. For her, the progression into the future has been
replaced by a co-presence of her lost homosexual as well as heterosexual
love objects within herself.
Of course, it is as impossible to imagine non-linear time as it is to step
out of culture and language. But the 1921 film version of Hamlet subtly
exposes the gaps in our concept of linear time, and in particular dem-
onstrates several ways in which it needs straight gender and sexuality as
its support. By exploiting premodernity as an alternative, it queers not
only sexuality and gender, but time as well. This use of the Middle Ages
to destabilize notions of linear time was prevalent in Weimar cinema.15
One could speculate about the links between on the one hand a notion
of time (and of gender roles and sexual behaviour) that was challenged
by the rapid modernization of German society during this period, and
on the other hand the development of film technology that could
represent time in non-linear ways ever more impressively.16 However,

such use of the Middle Ages to rethink time is not specific to the 1920s,
but emerges as a dominant issue in filmic representations of the medi-
eval past throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While
some films clearly appropriate the Middle Ages as an escapist fantasy
that allows placing any deviance from temporal linearity safely in the
past, others, like Hamlet, bring such deviance right into the present of
the viewers.
Notes
1. On medieval time as static see, for example, Gurevich (1992, pp. 65–89),
Le Goff (1988, pp. 165–94) and, in the context of medieval film, de la Bretèque
(2004, pp. 47–8); more critically, Haskins (1927, especially p. 4) and Oexle
(1994).
2. See also Boellstorff (2007), Freccero’s (2006) argument that queerness and
medievalism often come together and Kelly and Pugh’s (2009) observation
that they particularly do so in cinema.
3. For queer readings of Hamlet, see, for example, Chedgzoy (1995) and Burt
(1998); on delay and disjointed temporality in Hamlet, see, for example,
Turner (1971), Greenblatt (2002) and Sedinger (2007).
4. On Butler’s analysis of gender as melancholic incorporation of one’s same-
sex parents, and how this raises the issue of the anachronism of emulating a
previous generation’s gender performance, see Freeman (2000).
5. On Hamlet in silent film, see Ball (1968), Rothwell (2002) and Buchanan
(2009); on female Hamlets, see Howard (2007). There was also a queer and
cross-dressing tradition in Weimar German cinema, about which see Kuzniar
(2000, especially pp. 21–56) and Dyer (2003, especially pp. 23–62).
6. On the film’s use of Vining, see Thompson (1997). Ernest Jones (1948) used
Hamlet as a model for the Oedipal drama. See also Chedgzoy (1995, pp. 34–6).
7. Shakespeare is seen rarely as a continuator of this medieval heritage, but more
often as a pioneer of the new early modern era of the Renaissance. When
Nielsen’s Hamlet claims to be based on the medieval tales, it reorganizes the
sequence of preliminary sources, ‘original’ and ingenious Shakespeare and
derivative adaptation. On medievalist settings in other Hamlet performances,
see Cook (2009). Buchanan (2009, pp. 235–6) and Howard (2007, pp. 148
and 155) view Hamlet as a modern figure removed from the period setting,
adding another layer of anachronism. Starks (2002) argues that Hamlet’s
double gender marks a return of the repressed past – not that of the Middle
Ages but the First World War.
8. J. Lawrence Guntner (1998, pp. 96–7) points out that throughout the film
the innocent, conciliatory world of youth to which Hamlet, Horatio and
young Fortinbras belong is portrayed much more positively than the violent,
lustful adult world into which Hamlet is forced and which kills him.
9. On the gendering of this and other spaces in this film, see Seidl (2002).
10. For a positive reading of the film and its ending, see Petro (1989, pp. 153–60),
Thompson (1997, p. 222) and Howard (2007, especially p. 155). Lawrence
Dawson (1992/3) doubts the film’s liberating potential.

11. This also includes an element of generational succession. See Freeman (2000).
12. See the analysis of mourning in the Song of the Nibelungs about a widow
who physically takes her dead husband into her heart and then expels him
through revenge in Bildhauer (2008). A similar process of physical incor-
poration and eventual expulsion of a lost object is depicted in Chaucer’s
Prioress’s Tale.
13. On Hamlet’s love for her father expressed through her touching of his coffin
in this film, see Koebner (1997, p. 132).
14. On Hamlet’s perception of his duty of memory, see also Sedinger (2007).
15. My forthcoming monograph Filming the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion,
2011) explores film’s use of the Middle Ages to imagine alternative tempo-
ralities in Weimar and later cinema.
16. On the relationship between film and a modern sense of time, see Doane
(2002); on Weimar cinema as a response to the ‘electrification’ of 1920s
Germany, see Guerin (2005).
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Themes in Some Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon).
Vining, E. P. (1881) The Mystery of Hamlet: An Attempt to Solve an Old Problem
(Philadelphia: Lippincott).
3
No Present

Stephen Guy-Bray
In his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Lee
Edelman could be said to have undermined the future as the goal to
which our labours tend and in whose name we work. His target is the
narrowing of political and critical discourse effected by the fetishiza-
tion of human reproduction, which he calls reproductive futurism.
This reproductive futurism seeks to establish the perpetuation of the
bourgeois family and of the complex of ideas associated with it as the
standard against which all efforts must be evaluated. It is thus not so
much that there is or should be no future at all but rather that there
is no future for queers in acceding to the demands of this ideology, in
conceiving the future through conception. Edelman’s ideas would leave
us with the present, but the concept of the present is itself problematic.
In reproductive futurism, for example, the present is chiefly important
as that which will produce the Child. In literary analysis, however, the
present is evaluated by how it differs from and improves upon the past.
In both cases, what is paramount is the sense of history as a narrative
that Edelman has called ‘the poor man’s teleology’ (p. 4). In this chapter,
I aim to free the past from the tyranny of the present.1
Edelman argues that queer theory provides a way to resist the tele-
ological understanding of history and of the present. I would argue that
this resistance is potential rather than actual, as queer theory, at least
in its literary applications, has tended to perpetuate teleology by sub-
jecting the past to an analysis in which what is important is the past’s
contribution to us. This is part of a larger shift in literary studies, one
that has changed the meaning of the term ‘literary history’: while this
term once meant the history of literature, it now, in effect, means history
done through literary texts. For many literary critics, the discipline of
literature must have the teleological value of leading to the discipline of
38
No Present 39
history. What is more, some literary critics feel that by analysing litera-
ture they are also being teleological in that their analyses can actually
change history. In this view of things, literary critics who concentrate
on literature are insufficiently serious, while literary critics who look
beyond literature are contributing to the greater good. Perhaps the most

obvious example of this tendency is Alan Sinfield, who says in his book
on Shakespeare and cultural materialism that:
it is hardly the moment to abandon the goal of political responsibil-

ity in literary and cultural studies. This project is ambitious but not
absurdly grandiose. Change to the social organization is registered
and effected partly through cultural contest, in which rival formu-
lations strive to substantiate claims to superior explanatory power.
The negotiations among these discourses contribute, in minute and
indirect ways, to the maintenance and challenging of ideologies.
(Sinfield, 2006, p. 5)
This view of the literary critic as the Dorothea Brooke of social activism
has a wistful appeal, but it is a flimsy and unconvincing justification for
a life spent in the study. We should instead consider the possibility that
our academic careers do not have and may not even require a justifica-
tion dictated by the teleological imperative.
Within literary studies, the teleological imperative is felt most heav-
ily in areas associated with identity politics. Queer critics have tended
to feel that their scholarly work should be a form of activism and
should consequently be evaluated by the extent to which it helps the
cause. As Heather Love has pointed out, these feelings have had the
effect of restricting the kinds of conversations we have about texts:
‘the premium on strategic response in queer studies has meant that
the painful and traumatic dimensions of … texts (and of the experi-
ence of reading them) have been minimized or disavowed’ (Love, 2007,
pp. 3–4). Moreover, if our criticism must be strategic according to the
real or perceived needs of a real or perceived cause, then literary criti-
cism must be part of a teleology: it must have a clear use. Queer work
on literature written before the end of the nineteenth century has been
further restricted by our contemporary stress on difference: the past was
different, it turns out; past sexuality was really different; to say otherwise
is to be anachronistic. Thus, while queer critics have been encouraged to
identify with contemporary queer agendas, this very identification has
made it impossible for them to identify with the past eras they study –
or, at least, it has led them to see this second kind of identification as
40 Stephen Guy-Bray
embarrassing. Near the beginning of her study of female homoeroticism

in Renaissance literature, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern
England, for instance, Valerie Traub says that her aim was to steer a
middle course, ‘assuming neither that we will find in the past a mirror
image of ourselves nor that the past is so utterly alien that we will find

nothing usable in its fragmentary traces’ (Traub, 2002, p. 32). I do not
intend any criticism of Traub’s superb book, but I find it remarkable
that so astute a critic feels both the pressure to be the same by insisting
on difference and the pressure to justify her discussion on the basis of
use value.
Both the issue of difference and sameness and the related question
of what sorts of identifications scholars in the present can legitimately
make with the texts and people of the past have become central to
recent historiography in literary studies. One of the main functions
of the term ‘Early Modern’ (a term that has largely replaced the older
term ‘Renaissance’) is to insist on an identification of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries with our own present, rather than with either the
classical or the medieval past.2 As the medievalist Lee Patterson bitterly
remarked in an essay published twenty years ago, most of the leading
Renaissance critics today ‘are not interested in historical change at all.
What they want to establish is the modernity of their enterprise’ (1990,
p. 99); he also notes that this identification ‘rejects the Middle Ages as by
definition premodern’ (ibid., p. 92). This sort of identification, in which
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are seen as to some extent the
same as the contemporary period, is tacitly permitted, is indeed a nec-
essary part of Early Modern studies; other kinds of identification have
not been so fortunate. For instance, the identification of many gay and
lesbian scholars with the Renaissance has been carefully policed: from
the beginning of what is now called ‘queer work’ in Renaissance studies,
people have said that as sexual identities are different now than they
were then, this sort of identification is naïve and unscholarly. In a way
that is only too drearily predictable, the equally valid caution about
heterosexuality has only recently been issued.
It is not my purpose to argue against identification altogether; instead,
I want to consider the extent to which identification is different from
itself. In Oneself as Other (1992), Paul Ricoeur usefully distinguishes
two major meanings of ‘identity’ … depending on whether one

understands by ‘identical’ the equivalent of the Latin ipse or idem …
Identity in the sense of idem unfolds an entire hierarchy … In this
hierarchy, permanence in time constitutes the highest order, to
No Present 41
which will be opposed that which differs … Identity in the sense of

idem implies no assertion concerning some unchanging core of the
personality. (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 2)
While idem-identity implies that both the identifier and the thing with

which he or she identifies are part of a coherent narrative (the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries become the present and are thus ‘Early
Modern’, for instance), ipse-identity means only that at a particular point
a resemblance between one thing and another exists. This second kind
of identification can include both difference and sameness and should
be one of the models for scholars investigating the past. This assertion is
controversial, because the accepted wisdom, as I have already remarked,
in both medieval and Renaissance studies is that the past is different (so
very, very different) and that to think differently about this difference is
to be a bad scholar. But perhaps being a bad scholar can be a good thing.
Carolyn Dinshaw (1999, p. 35) suggests that ‘appropriation, misrecogni-
tion, disidentification: these terms that queer theory has highlighted
all point to the alterity within mimesis itself, the never-perfect aspect
of identification’. Our way of being bad scholars might serve to point
out that scholarship depends on identification of various sorts, none of
which is entirely satisfactory.
Other critics have contested the contemporary fetish of sexual differ-
ence as a basic belief of research into sexual history. In the introduction
to their collection of essays on medieval sexualities, Louise Fradenburg
and Carla Freccero engage with ‘the debate about the (hetero) norma-
tive “split” between identification and desire’ by asking ‘how does the
“same” – even, or especially, a constructed, adopted, performed “same” –
in the figure of “same-sex” love … align itself with respect to the deep
reserve about the construction of sameness operative elsewhere in cul-
tural studies’ (Fradenburg and Freccero, 1996, p. xvi). More recently,
in a discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Ligeia’, Valerie Rohy (2006, p. 67)
has argued that ‘the rhetoric against anachronism begins to sound like
the theories that have historically labelled homosexuality regressive
and premature, belated and derivative’. As these writers suggest, the
prohibition against looking for sameness in the past is unpleasantly
close to the prohibition against looking for sameness in genitals. I want
to resist this unwelcome intrusion of heteronormativity into the area
of historical sexology; in doing so, I follow Madhavi Menon’s point
in her book Unhistorical Shakespeare (2008). Menon argues that queer
work on Renaissance sexuality has been hampered by the fact that it
‘continue[s] to operate from within a teleological paradigm in which
42 Stephen Guy-Bray
“their” sexuality is not only knowable and different from “ours,” but
is also a precursor to our own, both unlike and like us. Rarely, if ever,
does it suggest that the idea of a consequential continuum might itself
be problematic’ (Menon, 2008, p. 47). The tacit assumption intended
to guide and restrict our work on the sexuality of the past is thus both

heteronormative and teleological. In fact, it is doubly teleological as it
asserts both that the sexuality of the past should lead to our own sexual-
ity and that the sexuality of the past should have a readily identifiable
use value. Menon calls this sort of attitude ‘heterotemporality’.
Unfortunately, it is easier to identify heterotemporality than to com-
bat it, but one resource is suggested by the American sociologist Andrew
Abbott in his remarkable essay, ‘Against Narrative: A Preface to Lyrical
Sociology’ (2007), in which he calls for a lyrical sociology. With its insist-
ence on its own relevance and its belief that tabulating statistics will lead
to social change, sociology is an obvious, if unacknowledged, model for
much historicist literary criticism. What Abbott wants, however, is a
sociology that would focus on the lyrical, on the instant, rather than
on the outcome. As Abbott remarks, the stance of the lyrical sociologist
is ‘engaged, rather than distant, and the engagement is an emotional
one, an intense participation in the object studied, which the writer
wants to recreate for the reader’ (ibid., p. 74). What is more, the lyric
‘is momentary. This above all is what makes it non-narrative. It is not
about something happening. It is not about an outcome’ (ibid., p. 75).
For me, this is part of the value of this approach, as too many historicist
analyses of Renaissance literature are about, precisely, the something
that happens, the outcome, and this happening and this outcome are
far too often our own present day. The danger with a lyric approach, as
Abbott admits, is that ‘readers are … often unwilling to read the lyrical
text as anything but a failed narrative’ (ibid., p. 95). To translate this
observation into the terms appropriate for our own field, we could say
that the tendency in recent literary work has been to read the literary
text as a failed history and that literary critics have seen their role as not
merely historicist but also historicizing, seeking to correct what they see
as merely literary.
Abbott’s call for our dealings with what we study to be lyrical and
emotional is both welcome and long overdue. A lyrical and emotional
criticism would be less concerned with facts and external evidence and
more focused on the texts themselves and on the reader’s experience of
them. I see this as the most useful theory for dealing with the literature
of the past, but in wanting scholars to have a personal engagement with
this literature I want to make it clear that I am not advocating what is
No Present 43
often called presentism. As I see it, presentism has two main forms: one
is preoccupied with the question of use – as the passage from Traub
quoted above suggests, many critics hope to find material in the litera-
ture of the past that will help them in political struggles today. While
this is in many ways a reasonable and even admirable goal, we should

be careful about evaluating the literature we study in terms of its use
value. The insistence that everything have a use and that everything
should at least potentially be capable of being turned to account is
central to heterotemporality. My point is not that things should neces-
sarily be useless, but that thinking about either sexuality or textuality
or both in terms of use may have a deleterious effect. For one thing, it
will tend to prevent an engagement with the historical context of the
literature of the past. In this regard, this first kind of presentism is like
the second, in which, for instance, American scholars use Renaissance
texts to talk about current American events. Apart from the danger that
these current events rapidly become historical footnotes and the pre-
sentist analyses of the early 1990s may thus appear more distant than
the texts of the early 1590s, both forms of presentism install the present
day as the telos towards which the past must tend. A lyrical engagement
with the literature of the past, on the other hand, can preserve both
the sameness and the difference of the past, without, as Menon (2008,
p. 47) puts it, placing it on a ‘consequential continuum’.
It should be clear by now that the ideal model for scholars of past
sexuality is Narcissus, the man whose desire was conspicuously unpro-
ductive, who was unable to distinguish sameness and difference, and
who both did and did not identify with himself. Narcissus perfectly
encapsulates the tension between an unknowable difference and an
unknowable sameness and the difficulty of knowing what either differ-
ence or sameness is, and is thus the ideal model for the contemporary
scholar. I propose to use him to talk about how we might approach the
study of sexuality in the literature of the past without completely sub-
merging the past in the present. For my purposes, the most important
part of Ovid’s version of the story comes when he says of Narcissus that
‘se cupit imprudens et qui probat ipse probatur’ (Ovid, 2004, III.425). The
first point to make about this almost untranslatable line is that the word
‘imprudens’ means, among other things, both ignorant (not necessarily
in a way that reflects poorly on Narcissus) and unaware of the future.
The line stresses his ignorance of the truth of the situation, and most
commentators on the story have chosen not only to class themselves as
knowing better than the youth but to chastise him for his vanity, when
the fact that Narcissus was ignorant of the reflective power of water
44 Stephen Guy-Bray
shows that he was not vain at all. As well, much of the recent commen-
tary on the story of Narcissus has censured him for his homoeroticism;
while recent queer commentators on the story have not seen a man’s
desire for another man as something culpable, they have also been
reluctant to use this story as a precedent for ways to talk about same-sex

desire.
In Ovid, homoeroticism is not an issue and, as the line I quoted above
indicates, it is by no means clear that we are intended to see Narcissus as
foolish, although he is clearly unfortunate. In contrast to the tradition
of commentary on this myth, Arthur Golding’s version in his transla-
tion of the Metamorphoses from the mid-1560s nicely captures the ambi-
guity of the situation: ‘He is enamored of himselfe for want of taking
heede. / And where he likes another thing he likes himselfe indeede’
(Ovid, 1612, III.533–4). Whether this couplet captures the ambiguity
or creates it I could not positively say, but I choose to take Golding’s
lines as indicating a characteristically Renaissance conflation of the self
and the other, a conflation often expressed in precisely these terms:
finding sameness where one expected difference or difference where
one expected sameness. While Ovid says that Narcissus desired himself
(‘se cupit’), Golding says that Narcissus did indeed desire ‘another thing’;
unfortunately for him, that other thing was also ‘himselfe’. What I see
as the most important difference between Golding’s version and Ovid’s
original is Golding’s recognition of the alterity that Narcissus desires
in himself. In his version, Narcissus contributes an insight rather than
an error. Another way in which this example might help us is to get us
to consider the extent to which translation, whether in the strict sense
of changing Latin into English or in the perhaps more metaphorical
sense of looking at the sixteenth century from the twenty-first century,
is always a process that involves the coexistence of both sameness and
difference.
In The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative (1998), Dorothy
Stephens locates a conflation or confusion of self and other similar to
Narcissus’s at the heart of male erotic subjectivity: ‘the interiority that
would later develop into the modern private self was first conceived by
male authors as a female figure who resided … somewhere inside of and
yet prior to the man’s own formation’ (p. 9). Thus, for the male poet to
look into himself would be to find difference (as well as sameness) and for
him to look at a woman would be to find sameness (as well as difference),
and both the difference and the sameness would be experienced through
gender. In other words, the sexual difference that is our basic difference,
and the one that arguably subtends all other differences, does not operate
No Present 45
in an entirely intelligible fashion – a good object lesson for those of us

who do Renaissance gender studies. One corollary of Stephens’s point is
that it no longer makes sense to privilege gender difference in our sexual
taxonomy since any form of eroticism, even autoeroticism, is simulta-
neously homosexuality and heterosexuality; as a result, our relation of

difference to sexuality would be subtler and wider-ranging. Furthermore,
Narcissus’s experience of love, although fatal for himself, is much less
strange than we might think. It may in fact be our own experience of
love: perhaps we all see difference and sameness as aspects of each other
rather than as opposites. I believe that our practice as scholars should be
to identify and appreciate both sameness and difference in the texts of
the past.
There is another aspect of the story of Narcissus that I want to consider
here, an aspect that is especially relevant for me as a literary specialist.
In one important sense, Narcissus was not mistaken after all. That is, he in
fact desired not himself but rather his reflection. The subject’s reflection
in the mirror is an obvious example of something that is both the same
as one and not the same as one. We could say that Narcissus provides a
proleptic commentary on Ricoeur’s (1992, p. 18) statement that ‘never,
at any stage, will the self have been separated from its other’. Narcissus’s
particular insight is to see this connection as erotic, and what matters
most for me is that the difference in the story between the man and the
man he loves is that the latter is not only not another man but in fact
not a man at all: Narcissus desires a representation of a beautiful man.
It is in this respect that he best provides a model for us as scholars. To
some extent we all look for people like ourselves in the past, and what
it means to be like ourselves will depend on our various identifications:
as gay or straight, female or male, as a citizen of a particular country, or
any number of possible identifications. But of course, we are not really
looking for people at all, but rather for representations, in whatever
medium or genre. While the approaches I have criticized in this chap-
ter are typically premised on the belief that they can provide access to
the real, whether the real of past lives or the real of present political
considerations, my approach would combat heterotemporality by per-
mitting scholars to see their work as an expression of their desire for
representations.
I now look at Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ (1681), a poem
that also unites opposites, that focuses attention on representation and
that contains an interesting allusion to Narcissus. This is a poem built
on differences: between the noble family and the humble tutor, between
Catholics and Protestants, between inside and outside, between the
46 Stephen Guy-Bray
built environment and the natural environment, and so on. But when
the speaker moves into the fields and woods that surround the house,
difference gradually becomes indistinguishable from sameness. To some
extent, the speaker’s journey into the woods is the traditional retreat to a
locus amoenus for contemplation, but it is also a search for sex, and for a

different kind of sex from that we might expect. Furthermore, this sex is
not the culmination of this journey, as it would be in most love poems,
but rather is only one experience among many. For instance, consider
these lines from stanza 74:
The Oak-Leaves me embroyder all,

Between which Caterpillars crawl:
And Ivy, with familiar trails,
Me licks, and clasps, and curles, and hales.
Under this antick Cope I move
Like some great Prelate of the Grove. (Marvell, 1971, 74.3–8)
Here, we find a coming together of a number of activities and catego-

ries that we are accustomed to think of as separate, as the dichotomies
around which Marvell has structured the first half of ‘Upon Appleton
House’ no longer operate.
What may appear most unusual in this passage, at least for readers of
Renaissance poetry, is that the opposition between nature and art can
no longer be maintained. The oak and ivy here are both the familiar and
iconic plants of classical art and the real plants of the English country-
side. The oak leaves are both a natural covering – like that first garment
of fig leaves – and art: they are embroidery and, in conjunction with the
caterpillars (at once the everyday caterpillars of Yorkshire and the exotic
caterpillars that produce silk, a material mentioned several times in the
poem and which is itself simultaneously artificial and natural) and the ivy,
produce a very fancy and splendid garment, an ‘antick Cope’ that appears
to suggest the speaker’s elevation in the woods to the position held by
Lord Fairfax in the house. Like the caterpillars, ivy is both natural –
insofar as it is a plant – and artificial – insofar as it is commonly found
covering buildings as a kind of architectural feature: in this sense, the
speaker has become like Lord Fairfax’s house. What is probably most
memorable about this passage is that the ivy, familiar in being everyday,
in being intimate and in the now obsolete meaning of the quality of a
plant that makes it adapted to relations with something, initiates what is
perhaps the best sex scene ever written in iambic tetrameter.
No Present 47
In this stanza, then, sex comes from clothing rather than from naked-
ness and cannot be distinguished from the poetic and social ambitions
that are important to the poem throughout. What is more, the scene
is not one of man discovering nature and thus affirming his distinctness
from it, but rather one of man merging with nature. All these themes are

also present when the speaker addresses the plants a few stanzas later:
Here in the Morning tye my Chain,

Where the two Woods have made a Lane;
While, like a Guard on either side,
The Trees before their Lord divide;
This, like a long and equal Thread,
Betwixt two Labyrinths does lead.
But, where the Floods did lately drown,
There at the Ev’ning stake me down. (78.1–8)
Now, the speaker wants to be forcibly confined in the wilds, which are
no longer wild but have, at least in his eyes, produced a natural order
that mimics the perfect and harmonious proportion of the great house.
Instead of surveyors and workers putting a road through a forest, he
sees the woods themselves as having made the lane: as was the case
with the ivy, for instance, this vision of nature confounds the normal
picture of man as active and nature as acted upon – as, of course, does
the speaker who wants to be tied up in the morning by the woods and
in the evening by the meadow. The important actor in this part of the
poem is not the speaker, who desires passivity, but the river. We learn
that the river has turned the meadow into art: it is ‘fresher dy’d’ (79.2)
and resembles ‘green Silks’ (79.4). As well, the river is not only like an
artificer but also like a lover: it holds the meadow in ‘wanton, harmless
folds’ (80.1) and licks the ‘yet muddy back’ (80.3) of the fields until they
become like a ‘Chrystal Mirrour slick’ (80.4).
For me, the mirror is the crucial part of this passage as it leads to the
reference to Narcissus. But this mirror is not, or not exactly, the kind of
mirror in which we recognize our reflection or, as in Lacan, in which we
recognize our selfhood and against which we form our identity; instead,
it is a mirror that blurs the seemingly indispensable distinction between
the self and the reflection or between the original and the copy. This is
a mirror ‘Where all things gaze themselves, and doubt / If they be in it
or without’ (80.5–6). Rather than returning an image of oneself against
which one can define oneself, this mirror undermines our sense of
48 Stephen Guy-Bray
primacy and reality. The reflection in the mirror is already an example of

something that is both the same (my own face) and different (not really
my own face), but Marvell increases this ambiguity so that we no longer
know where either difference or sameness resides. As it happens, this
happens not just to us but to ‘all things’, even to the sun: ‘And for his

shade which therein shines, / Narcissus like, the Sun too pines’ (80.7–8).
Marvell thus heightens our confusion by beginning the stanza with
one oxymoron (the bends of the river are both wanton and harmless)
and ending with another (the shade that shines). The latter oxymoron
is underwritten by a further one in which the sun represents not the
clarity of light but the darkness of ignorance. The sun is in error here,
of course, but it is an error shared by ‘all things’: in Marvell’s version of
the story, Narcissus is no longer a foolish or vain youth but someone
whose perplexity is the rule rather than the exception.
Admittedly, Marvell’s version of the story of Narcissus is odd; what is
more, it is only one of the many odd passages in a very odd poem. In fact,
‘Upon Appleton House’ as a whole exemplifies precisely the confusion of
sameness and difference (between past and present and between subject
and object) that I have been discussing throughout this chapter. In many
ways, the poem presents itself as being recognisable and therefore intel-
ligible: it is a country house poem, a georgic poem, a poem that compares
nature and art, a poem about poetic vocation. Nevertheless, I would argue
that all these generic markers actually serve only to increase our perplexity:
where we expect to find sameness, to find a poem whose resemblance to
similar poems we have read helps us to understand, we find difference.
In other words, to read ‘Upon Appleton House’ is to become Narcissus,
and to cease to be able to distinguish sameness and difference, or at
least to be forced to experience them together. Marvell’s Narcissus might
seem distanced from us by the temporal separation – insofar as it is the
seventeenth-century version of a classical tale – and by the obvious
unreality, even surrealism, of ‘Upon Appleton House’, but however distant
it may be, it is a distant reflection. At the end of the poem, the appear-
ance of Maria Fairfax, the girl whom the speaker is paid to teach, recalls
him to his duties and the coming darkness prompts people to return to
their homes, but while the absence of the sun means that there can be no
reflections, it also eliminates the light that makes distinctions possible,
and Marvell’s final image, in which the speaker and the girl he is paid to
teach see fishermen carrying their boats on their heads, signals that same-
ness and difference are still confused categories: ‘the dark Hemisphere /
Does now like one of them appear’ (97.7–8). Things, it turns out, are still
like other things that are not themselves.
No Present 49
My main point about ‘Upon Appleton House’ is that throughout

the poem Marvell collapses the distinctions that turn the world into a
relatively easily readable (and socially meaningful) system of differences
and samenesses. In the poem, it is not always clear where to situate
oneself: male or female; inside or outside; human or animal; human

or vegetable; big or small; the real thing or the reflection of that thing.
What becomes difficult in this poem is identification, both in the sense
of being able to tell what something is – one kind of bird rather than
another – and in the sense of recognising an answering sameness in
something else – identifying with another person because, however
different that person may be from ourselves, we share certain qualities
with that person or are in a similar situation or have similar experiences.
In the first of the senses I have just mentioned, we make the bird in
question the same as other birds of that kind; in the second, we make
the person in question the same as ourselves. What I see as the most
salient and, for the purposes of this discussion, the most useful feature
of ‘Upon Appleton House’ is the way in which it simultaneously leads
us to make identifications (in both senses) and makes those identifica-
tions problematic and provisional. My argument is that this should be
taken as a model for what we do in our work on Renaissance literature:
rather than keep sameness and difference distinct, we should consider
that an example of one could also be an example of the other.
Narcissus is obviously the perfect example of the first of these prob-
lems with identification. He is unable to identify the reflection in the
water as himself: where we think he should see sameness, he only
sees difference. Even once he realizes that what he sees is a reflection,
Narcissus is unable to move on and transfer his desire to objects we
might consider more importantly or more differently different. Focusing
on the fact that Narcissus and the reflection he sees are the same in that
they are both men, commentators of all kinds have ignored the fact that
what is at issue could be the extent to which an individual is the same
as himself. The story of Narcissus raises the possibility that we may iden-
tify more with – be in important ways the same as – others than with
ourselves. And this is called love. In the second sense of identification,
in which we see others as being at least in some respects the same as our-
selves, Narcissus can serve as an example for scholars of the Renaissance;
and perhaps the desire to see the representations of the past as in some
important ways as the same as ourselves could be called love. Rather
than promoting sameness among ourselves as scholars (insisting that we
are all committed to the same goals and use the same methodologies)
and difference in our relation to what we study (insisting that the past
50 Stephen Guy-Bray
is ultimately unknowable and the epistemic break between us now and

them then cannot be bridged), we should see both relations as combin-
ing both sameness and difference.
It should be clear by now that it is not my intention to argue against
scholarly identification with the past. In fact, I feel that this kind of

identification is not something to be avoided and that our research into
the literature of the past should embrace sameness as well as difference.
Admittedly, this will to some extent put us into the position of Narcissus,
vainly trying to embrace his reflection in the water. By way of conclu-
sion I want to return to my comments on Narcissus as a model for us
as scholars. In making this point, I did not mean that we should go as
far as he did, withering away beside the water. We should see better
than he did and realize that this embrace is ultimately impossible, but
we should also see better than has as a rule been the case. The lesson
I think Narcissus teaches us – a lesson taught at his own expense – is not
the usual lessons that are extracted from his story, which are that love
should be directed at that which is different, and that difference and
sameness are different from each other, but rather that sameness and dif-
ference are simultaneously the same thing and different things and that
our response to a text from the Renaissance can combine the two. To
return to Marvell’s description of the sun, what we see when we look is
at once a shade, a lesser form of the original, and something that shines,
that gives off light and makes reflections of all sorts possible.
The story of Narcissus was, of course, very useful to twentieth-century
theorists of sexual development, as they were able to replace Ovid’s
reading of the story, in which Narcissus’s problem was that he saw him-
self and thought he saw someone else, with an interpretation in which
the problem is that men desire men when they should desire women.3
This view depends on a remarkably crude idea of difference and same-
ness in which all men are the same as each other and all men are dif-
ferent from all women, despite such different differences and different
samenesses as race, class, age and religion. My point is thus not just that
we should endorse Narcissus’s choice insofar as it presents sameness as
erotic, but also that we need a more complex and thorough sense of
what difference and sameness really are and of how hard it often is to
tell one from the other. To some extent, that is, Narcissus’s error is our
own, and just as he provides the ideal model for scholars today, so his
story can be a good beginning for us in our attempts to engage with
the past. To censure Narcissus for his bad object choice – the standard
reaction to his story – is to present ourselves as smarter than he and,
by extension, smarter than the past we study, a past in which people
No Present 51
were always stupidly refusing to become us. To see his love of himself
as instructive is to refuse the superior position and to seek to see with
Narcissus that sometimes sameness and difference – in the context of this
chapter, the sameness and difference between then and now – cannot
be distinguished and that our proper response may not be to assess the

utility of the situation or to ask what it will produce but rather to desire
both Narcissus and his desire.
Notes
1. Here I have been influenced by numerous thoughtful attempts to develop a
queer historiography; I cite in particular Goldberg (1992), Dinshaw (1999)
and Freccero (2006).
2. I focus on the Renaissance partly because it is my field and partly because the
combination of historicism and queer theory has been especially volatile.
3. For a good discussion of narcissism and Freud, see Warner (1990).
Works Cited
Abbott, A. (2007) ‘Against Narrative: A Preface to Lyrical Sociology’, Sociological
Theory, 25, 67–99.
Fradenburg, L. and Freccero, C. (1996) ‘Introduction: Caxton, Foucault, and
the Pleasures of History’, in L. Fradenburg and C. Freccero (eds), Premodern
Sexualities (New York: Routledge).
Freccero, C. (2006) Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
Goldberg, J. (1992) Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press).
Marvell, A. (1971) The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth,
revised by P. Legouis and E. E. Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Clarendon).
Menon, M. (2008) Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature
and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).
Ovid (1612) The Fifteene Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso; Entituled Metamorphoses, trans.
A. Golding (London).
Ovid (2004) Metamorphoses, ed. R. J. Tarrant (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Patterson, L. (1990) ‘On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and
Medieval Studies’, Speculum, 65, 87–108.
Ricoeur, P. (1992) Oneself as Other, trans. K. Blamey (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press).
Rohy, V. (2006) ‘Ahistorical’, GLQ, 12, 61–83.
Sinfield, A. (2006) Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural
Materialism (London: Routledge).
52 Stephen Guy-Bray
Stephens, D. (1998) The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional

Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Traub, V. (2002) The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Warner, M. (1990) ‘Homo-Narcissism or, Heterosexuality’, in J. A. Boone and
M. Caddon (eds), Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism

(New York: Routledge).
4
History’s Tears1

Michael O’Rourke
To be offered, or to receive the offer of the future, is to

be historical. (Nancy, 1993, p. 164)2
In a 2005 issue of PMLA, Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon

revisited some of the terrain charted in Goldberg’s groundbreaking
Queering the Renaissance (1994) in an effort to alter the ways in which we
do the history of sexuality. The challenges they pose to historiography
in that article will have, or ought to have, if they have not already, seri-
ous ramifications, both within and beyond the field of early modern or
Renaissance queer studies. I also have no doubt that the methodological
propositions Goldberg and Menon make will be enormously produc-
tive for those historians who seek to queer the past, and to undo the
history of homosexuality. My worry, and it is a major concern, is that
the kind of anti-teleological project they propose may only be useful
for queering the past and challenging ‘the notion of a determinate
and knowable identity, past and present’ (Goldberg and Menon, 2005,
p. 1609, my emphasis). That is to say, Goldberg and Menon’s essay
closes off the future, refuses an ethical opening onto the queer future,
says fuck the future in much the same way that Lee Edelman does in
his polemical book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004).
What I wish to argue is that Goldberg and Menon have fallen under
the sway of Edelman’s anti-social thesis and that this move represents a
dangerous turn not just for queer historiography, but for queer ethico-
political thought more generally. Because, from its very ‘beginnings’,
queer theory has, like deconstruction, been turned towards the future,
a theory permanently open to its own recitation, resignification and
revisability, it has always been a hopeful theory. From its earliest incar-
nations in the AIDS activism of ACT UP and Queer Nation, both of
53
54 Michael O’Rourke
which are privileged by the utopian political thought of Michael Hardt

and Antonio Negri in Multitude (2004) as promising an unmasterable
future, and the ‘foundational’ theorizations of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
and Judith Butler (among others), queer theory has always already been
of, for and promised, given over to, the future, to futurality as such. It

has curved ‘endlessly toward the realization that its realization remains
impossible’ (Edelman, 1995, p. 346). In the early 1990s, Edelman him-
self was able to celebrate the utopic negativity and asymptotic, incal-
culable futurity of queer thinking as a site of permanent becoming.
But what his No Future has almost single-handedly instaurated is a turn
away from the future, or what he more recently has called the ‘Futurch’
(Edelman, 2006, p. 821), embodied in the figure of the Child. In the
wake of Edelman’s book, there has been an almost universal rejection
of, a resounding fuck you to, the future, and what has come to be called
the ‘anti-social thesis’ now dominates the post-political, post-futural,
anti-relational landscape of queer studies. On the one side, the side
of anti-utopianism and hopelessness, you have figures like Edelman,
Goldberg and Menon, and Judith Halberstam (2006), for whom hope is
imbued with and undislodgeable from a heteronormative logic. Theirs
is a project calculated to give up on hope and by extension to refuse
both the political and the futural. On the other side, the side of affir-
mation, utopianism and socio-political hope, we have figures such as
Tim Dean (2009), Michael Snediker (2009), Sara Ahmed (2006) and José
Esteban Muñoz (2009).3 These theorists, a little bit in love with queer
theory as lure, return us to the affirmative, revolutionary potential of
queer studies, and seek to reimagine a hopeful, forward-reaching, world-
making queer theory that matters as the future, as the telepoietic queer
event, as the always already not-yet of the democracy to-come and the
justice to-come.
To refuse queer theory as future-dawning promise is to refuse a cer-
tain spirit of Derridean deconstruction that has always animated queer
thought, to give up on a Derridean understanding of the event as prospec-
tive and to remain in thrall to an onto-chrono-temporality. This chapter
suggests that we need to avoid this wrong turn by mobilizing a Derridean–
Caputoan understanding of historicity, temporality, relationality and
the event, as that which ruptures onto-chrono-phenomenological tem-
porality and is faithful to, or welcomes, that which arrives but which
cannot be known or grasped in advance. This theoretical gesture, a
reparative one, is in the service of queer theory as a weak force, queer
theory as revolt. Julia Kristeva in Revolt, She Said (2002) understands
the event as revolutionary, emphasizing there the etymological roots
History’s Tears 55
of the word revolt, meaning ‘return, renewing, returning, discovering,

uncovering, and renovating’ (p. 85). Kristeva considers ‘thinking as
a revelation, an exploration, an opening, a place of freedom’ (ibid.,
p. 114) and Muñoz (2009, p. 1) sees queerness as ‘a structuring and
educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the

quagmire of the present’. For Muñoz, ‘queerness is also a performative
because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future’
(ibid.), and as Kristeva has it, ‘I revolt, therefore we are still to come’
(2002, p. 42, my emphasis).
I would like to suggest, however, that Goldberg’s debts to Edelman
and the anti-social thesis as well as his own turn away from Derrida and
the problems they bring, both for the politicality of the political and
the futurality of the future, could be averted by re-turning to Derrida’s
Specters of Marx (1994), a book that came out in the same year as Queering
the Renaissance. It was, of course, Derrida’s Politics of Friendship that Alan
Bray (2003, p. 322) argued would become the new political charter,
rather than Foucault’s History of Sexuality: Volume One (1976), for an anti-
identitarian queer ethical project, one that does not block off the pos-
sibilities of differently imagined futures, as sketched by Jacques Rancière
in the perverse historiography of The Names of History (1994). However,
Specters of Marx lays the foundations for many of the concepts developed
further in Politics of Friendship (1996) two years later: mourning, spectral-
ity, messianicity, hauntology, impossibility and the perhaps. And so it
is to the earlier text, at once a brilliant reading of Marx and a virtuoso
philosophical reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that I turn to find philo-
sophico-historical concepts that might help us produce a queer histori-
ography that bears a responsibility to the past, the present and the future
(to-come). No future for queer theory without Derrida.
But before coming to Derrida, let me first briefly introduce some of the
useful concepts Goldberg and Menon develop in their article ‘Queering
History’ (2005). The first is ‘unhistoricism’, which they set up in opposi-
tion to ‘a historicism which proposes to know the definitive difference
between the past and the present’ (p. 1609). Rather than embracing
ahistoricism, as Valerie Rohy does in ‘Ahistorical’ (2006), they argue
against a prevailing historicism (misidentified by them as to be found
in the work of David Halperin and Valerie Traub) that emphasizes
alterity over sameness/continuism.4 In refusing the way that ‘history
has come to equal “alterity’”, Goldberg and Menon choose instead to
practise what they call ‘homohistory’ (2005, p. 1609). Homohistory is
set up in opposition to ‘a history based on hetero difference’ (ibid.).
This is not a history of homos but rather this history would be ‘invested
in suspending determinate sexual and chronological differences while

expanding the possibilities of the nonhetero, with all its connotations
of sameness, similarity, proximity, and anachronism’ (ibid.).5 The
third concept they propose in their neologism-rich piece is ‘idemtity’,
invoking the earliest usage of the word in 1570 in opposition to what

has come to be sedimented in what we call identity, usually in the con-
crete formulation identity politics. They say that pursuing ‘the project
of queering under the rubric of idemtity rather than either identity or
alterity, then, might productively push categories – in this instance, the
categories of sameness and difference that serve congruent normalizing
purposes in both the field of history and the domain of sexuality’ (ibid.,
p. 1610). Finally, Goldberg and Menon reject what they term ‘heterotem-
porality’ or the compulsory heterotemporality that bedevils historicism,
whether it ‘insists on difference or produces a version of the norma-
tive same’ (ibid., p. 1616). They set the historian two challenges: first,
a deheterochronologization that would seek ‘to resist mapping sexual dif-
ference onto chronological difference such that the difference between
past and present becomes also the difference between sexual regimes’
(ibid., p. 1609); and, second, ‘to challenge the notion of a determinate
and knowable identity, past and present’ (ibid.).6 So far so good, but for
all this emphasis on différantial history, or homohistory, and resistance
to the strictures of knowability and possibility, Goldberg and Menon
still remain teleologically bounded to the past and the present. By this,
I mean that Goldberg and Menon’s unhistoricism, and also to some
extent Rohy’s ahistoricism, fail to actualize the full potential of present
time’s non-contemporaneity with itself; they depotentialize virtuality
and the actualization of the absolutely new. While their historicities
emphasize a time that is asynchronous and disarticulated, they only
seem to be able to think about what or who can be thought to be in the
present and the past, but not in the future to-come. Unhistoricism is,
then, a kind of backward projection but not a forward glancing one. To
put this in the context of current debates around optimism and anti-
utopianism in queer theory, it is worth noting that for Muñoz queerness
occupies the space of the not-yet, is always promissory, horizonal. He
begins Cruising Utopia by saying ‘queerness is not yet here. Queerness is
an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch
queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon
imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness
exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used
to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain’ (Muñoz, 2009,
p. 1). I am not suggesting that it is easy to unmoor ourselves from linear
temporalities, far from it, but would like to draw attention to the way in
which this capitulation in the end refuses and forecloses – is a little bit
spooked by the promise of – the future.7
Lest it sound as if I am being too suspicious, let me trace this resistance
to futurity back to Goldberg’s earlier collection of essays, Shakespeare’s

Hand (2003), where he acknowledges his enormous debt to Derrida
but admits his growing impatience with the politics of deconstruction,
claiming that deconstruction ‘is itself a politics of a kind of patience
that risks maintaining the status quo in the belief that the divisions and
differences that make any moment or regime non-self-identical are the
resources of futurity’ (p. xviii). It is hard to see how one can square this
with the projects of homohistory or the new unhistoricism laid out in
the co-authored piece with Menon, which closes with the statement:
‘such an act of queering, we venture to conclude, would be rigorously
historical, though not as we – subject as we are to the routinized knowl-
edges of the academy – understand the term historical today’ (Goldberg
and Menon, 2005, p. 1616). This, as we shall see shortly, sounds rather
like the Derrida of Specters of Marx. In Shakespeare’s Hand, Goldberg
goes on to reject his own Derridean past much more emphatically in
ways that sound distinctly Edelmanian. He says, ‘I do not agree with
the stance of biding one’s time that seems to go along with a certain
“proper” philosophical attitude, and I have even less tolerance for the
notion that some spectral regime may some day herald a future worth
waiting for’ (Goldberg, 2003, p. xviii).8 Shakespeare’s Hand was written
one year before No Future, in which Edelman argues that heteronorma-
tivity and compulsory heterotemporality are imbricated with reproduc-
tive futurism (something Michael Warner (2006) had already argued
years before with the brilliant coinage ‘reproteleology’). Edelman fur-
ther explains how homosexuals and homosexuality come to figure the
death drive, something he urges queers to embrace (how teleological –
as opposed to impossible – is that? Freud’s death drive is after all about a
return to origins, a determinable endpoint) when faced with the fascist
figure of the Child.9 He coins the neologism sinthomosexual based on the
Lacanian term sinthome to designate an an-archic resistance to meaning,
which unsettles any (literal) belief in the subject (maybe that should be
Subject) or in futurity. I am all for the first but not for the sinthomo-
sexual’s unethical refusal of the future, which amounts to a Žižekian
disdain for all the ‘democracy-to-come-deconstructionist-postsecular-
Levinasian-respect-for-Otherness suspects’ as he calls liberals like Butler
and Derrida in The Parallax View (Žižek, 2006, p. 11).10 In her own
article ‘Spurning Teleology in Venus and Adonis’ (2005), Menon reads
Adonis’s refusal of heterosexual reproductivity in Shakespeare’s poem

and his embrace of failure in terms that implicitly recognize him as
what Edelman would call a sinthomosexual. What Edelman, Goldberg
and Menon seem to be arguing for is a veering away from intelligibility,
a refusal of literality and meaning in the direction of a sinthomosexual or

homohistorical embrace of ‘the logic that makes it [the sinthomosexual
as pure sign] a figure for what meaning can never grasp’ (Edelman,
2004, p. 107).11 This is a move Edelman, Goldberg and Menon never
make because it would give us over to futurity, to the telepoietic, to the
event as surprise, to the promise of a kind of religio-political redemp-
tion, to what Derrida (1994, p. 75) calls the emancipatory messianic
promise.
In Specters of Marx, Derrida writes that deconstruction has from its
very ‘beginnings’ destabilized an archaeo-onto-theological concept of
history in ‘order to think another historicity that does not neutralize
or cancel itself’ (Enns, 2000, p. 175). Derrida (1994, p. 75) advocates
an ‘affirmative thinking of the messianic and emancipatory promise as
promise: as promise and not as onto-theological or teleo-eschatological
program or design’. In opposition to the sinthomosexual, which is
only implicitly ethical and in Edelman and Žižek explicitly unethical,12
I propose what I would like to call the phantomosexual or more properly
and in less identitarian fashion, phantomohistory (fantôme is French for
spectre or its synonym, ghost), a queer history which is haunted by the
past, the endlessly contested and contestable present, and the undecida-
ble and unmasterable future to-come. Phantomohistoriography, in stark
opposition to Edelman and Žižek’s positions, would also be what I would
term, a little awkwardly, historiopitality, an ethico-affective history that
is not about exorcizing the ghosts of/or the past but to make them, as
Derrida (1994, p. 175) puts it in Specters of Marx, ‘come back alive, as
revenants who would no longer be revenants, but as other arrivants to
whom a hospitable memory or promise must offer welcome-without
certainty, ever, that they present themselves as such. Not in order to
grant them the right in this sense but out of a concern for justice’. This
is not an end to history; it is not an ahistoricism or even an anhis-
toricism, nor for that matter is it Goldberg and Menon’s unhistoricism.
Rather, akin to Nancy’s finite history, it is ‘a matter of thinking another
historicity – not a new history or still less a “new historicism”, but
another opening of event-ness as historicity that permitted one not to
renounce, but on the contrary to open up access to an affirmative think-
ing’ of historicity structured as promise, of another heading for history
(Derrida, 1994, pp. 74–5).
Now, I turn very briefly to conjure the specters, or phantoms, of

Derrida. From ‘Force of Law’ in 1989, Derrida’s first explicit foray into
the juridico-ethico-political sphere, his work has taken on an ethico-
political cast, is marked, or structured, by what he calls a certain ‘religion
without religion’ (Derrida, 1995, p. 49), a kind of political messianism

or what he has continually called a ‘messianicity without messianism’,
‘a certain experience of the promise that one can try to liberate from
any dogmatics and even any metaphysico-religious determination, any
messianism’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 89).13 Derrida’s political messianism
involves a Levinasian–Blanchotian aporicity, a crossing of the uncrossa-
ble, a passing through the impassable (or an experience of the impossible),
an infinite responsibility before and ex-posure to the Other, or as he
puts it in The Gift of Death, ‘all the other others’ (Derrida, 1995, p. 68)
(both living and dead), to what Levinas calls ‘the widow, the orphan,
and the stranger’, the least among us.14 This religious (without religion)
political demand to recognize the singularity of the tout autre, the wholly
other, entails a messianic waiting without waiting for the (in)coming of
the wholly other, making way for an incalculable, undeconstructable,
abyssal, khoric justice, for the democracy to-come (just as queer theory
is always coming, never arriving, as such). The queer event is absolutely
to-come, coming from a future that is irreducible to the horizon of
waiting, but that nevertheless cannot wait. The democracy to-come,
the justice to-come makes a demand on us in the here and now but the
present, as Nancy and Derrida aver, is always unpresentifiable. Nancy
asks (2007, p. 81) ‘is it or is it not possible to assume the nonfoundation
of the beginning as the reason – thus as the good – of the historical proc-
ess itself? … Is it possible … to make history, to begin again a history –
or History itself – on the basis of its nonfoundation?’ If Derrida answers
by re-thinking historicity anew as promise, Nancy, for his part, sets out
to denature history in a propheticity without propheticism that awaits
(without waiting) the advent of, perhaps, a new future, the sur-prising
event (Nancy, 2000).15 The event sur-prises in that it seizes us or holds
us excessively; it is at once what shatters our horizons of expectation and
what excessively puts us under pressure, in the imminence and urgency
of the here and now.
By structuring historicity as emancipatory promise, as sur-prise, and
the monstrous arrivant of/as justice as ‘the very dimension of events
irreducibly to come’, Derrida (1992, p. 27) stubbornly refuses to program
the future, choosing instead to tear up chrono-phenomeno-temporality
(to tear up Being/Dasein and Time).16 This tearing, these abrupt breaches,
these ruptures are ‘the condition of a re-politicization, perhaps of another
concept of the political’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 75). (In fairness to Edelman

he never does set out a political programme and this opens up the
ethical possibility of reconfigured futures even if he disavows them.)17
If this sounds like an untimely politics (Chambers, 1999), then that is
because, for Derrida, the time is ‘out of joint’ and this temporal unhing-

ing and disjoining is closely aligned to what Derrida calls the spectre,
the phantom or the ghost. In Derrida’s ana(r)chronic view of historicity
and temporality, the radical untimeliness of the spectre signifies both
an event of the past and an event of the future: ‘it figures both a dead
man who comes back and a ghost whose expected return repeats
itself, again and again’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 10). It skews the chrono-
temporal dimensions of past event and future-to-come as ‘a specter is
always a revenant and thus it begins by coming back’ (ibid., p. 11).18 The
phantomohistory or spectrohistoriography (or even ‘evental historiogra-
phy’; Wright, 2008) I am arguing for is marked by similar circulations,
reiterations and returns of differential or differàntial repetition (here
Deleuze meets Derrida) and like Derrida’s hauntology, it ‘dislodges any
present out of its contemporaneity with itself’ and thereby determines
‘historicity as future-to-come’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 73).19 Spectrality in
Derrida’s ethico-political-messianic scheme is similar to homohistory
and idemtity in Goldberg and Menon’s, but differs (and defers) insofar as
it encompasses the infinite ethical relationship and the political precisely
as messianic future-to-come, or what Nancy calls finite history. Infinite
ethical responsibility to the other is also an infinite openness or respon-
siveness to the event, a metaperformative letting-be, a Heideggerian
Gelassenheit (Caputo, 1987, pp. 288–93), even what Jean-Luc Marion
(2007) calls a deep erotic passivity.20 As Derrida himself puts it, ‘there is,
then, a certain “yes” at the heart of the question, a “yes” to, a “yes” to
the other, which may or may not be unrelated to a “yes” to the event,
that is to say, a “yes” to what comes, to letting-it-come’ (Derrida, 2007,
p. 443). At the ‘end’ of Specters of Marx, Derrida encourages others to join
him in lending an ear to the spectres that hover around him and us and
prophetically warns us that ‘if he loves justice at least, the “scholar” of
the future, the “intellectual” of tomorrow should learn it from the ghost’
(Derrida, 1994, p. 176).
One scholar prepared to learn from ghosts is John Caputo, who argues,
following Benjamin and Levinas, that the historian’s cultural responsi-
bility is to the past, the present and the future. In his article ‘No Tear
Shall be Lost: The History of Prayers and Tears’ (2004), Caputo maintains
that history and justice come too late for the dead but that the
irreparability of the past goes hand in hand with the open-endedness

of the future, with the radicality of the to-come, so that the more
intensely we experience the tension and intensity of the past, the
prayers and tears of the past, the more radically we pray and weep
on their behalf for a future to come, the more radically we pray and

weep ‘viens, oui, oui, viens!’ (Ibid., p. 115)21
Caputo’s understanding of the event is promissory (come, come, yes,

yes), prospective, is faithful, maintains a Badiouian fidelity to that
which cannot be known or grasped in advance, the queer event as
a weak force.22 This is a concept of futurity, resistant to dominant
reproductive logics, that figures natality as radical contingency and
unanticipatibility. In ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, Derrida writes:
I say these words with my eyes turned, certainly, towards the opera-
tions of childbirth, but turned too toward those who, in a society from
which I do not exclude myself, are still turning them away before the
still unnameable that is looming and which can only do so, as is neces-
sary every time a birth is at work, in the species of the non-species, the
formless, mute, infant and terrifying form of monstrosity. (Derrida,
1978, p. 293)23
To end (although we might note that it is precisely this monstrous

notion of childbirth that leaves teleology with no definable telos, pulled
up just short of itself, short of its end, and giving it a future, absolutely
predictable and absolutely uncertain at the same time), I want to stage
with Caputo a deliberately counter-polemical, unashamedly glucocentric
and lachrymose argument for the future to-come as it is embodied in the
spectral figure of the child, merely to highlight the unethical trap into
which queer historians who follow Edelman, as I think Goldberg and
Menon do, will fall. Here is Caputo, accepting compassion’s compulsion,
on the ethics of history:
the child is the future, the other that is the same and not the same,
the one to whom past and present generations are asked to give
without return. The child is no less a paradigm for the historian,
for the children are the ones to come in history no less than in the
family. History is being written for the children, to children, and it
is to the children that we call ‘come’, for whom we pray and weep,
viens, oui, oui. The historian writes in the time between the dead
and the children, between irreparable suffering and hope for the
unforeseeable to-come. (Caputo, 2004, pp. 115–16)24
To finish then, but not to have done with all these ghosts, I am arguing
that the term queer, in its very spectral indeterminacy, anessentiality,

beyond phenomenality and beyond being, makes way for historio-
graphical practices that do justice to the (r)even(an)tal effects of the
irreparable past as they live on in the present and to the spectres/reve-
nants who will come in the unanticipatable future-to-come. For, as
Derrida says:
it is a proper characteristic of the specter, if there is any, that no one

can be sure if by returning it testifies to a living past or to a living
future … A phantom never dies, it remains always to come and to
come back … The thinking of the specter … contrary to what good
sense leads us to believe, signals toward the future. (Derrida, 1994,
p. 99).
What I am calling phantomohistory is a phantomalization of queer

history or what Carla Freccero in Queer/Early/Modern (2006a, pp. 79–80)
describes as a ‘fantasmatic historiography’, a spectro-poetic-historiography
that extends hospitality and justice to the wholly Other, living or dead,
dreams of, prays and weeps over, the messianic time. In a recent article,
‘The Gap that God Opens’, Caputo asserts:
God does not bring closure but a gap. A God of the gaps is not the
gap God fills, but the gap God opens. The name of God makes the
present a space troubled by an immemorial past and an unforesee-
able future. ‘Good, good,’ indeed very good. That is not a declaration
of fact, but a promise on which we are expected to make good. And
nobody is guaranteeing anything. (Caputo, 2010)
God for Caputo names not so much a being as a call, an event, an

interruption, an urgent insistence. Caputo’s theology of the event, his
prophetic messianism without messianism, shares much with the argu-
ment I have been advancing here for queer theory as a weak force, for
queer time as a metanoetic immemorial current, and for queerness as a
khoral deontology with an eye on the unforeseeable future. Queering
history, tearing (it) up, guarantees nothing, but it does promise to open
up a gap for the time of what Goldberg (1996) was once able to call ‘the
history that will be’. And that messianic promise, that queer suspension
of history, is one we ought to try to make good on, here and now, even
as we move inexorably towards what remains to-come.
Notes

1. This essay began life as a presentation entitled ‘Unhistoricism, Homohistory,
Identity and Heterotemporality: On Learning to Live with Ghosts (with
Derrida and Goldberg)’, for ‘Queering History: A Roundtable Discussion’,
which I organized at the School of English and Drama, University College
Dublin, March 2006. I would like to thank Goran Stanivukovic for his com-
ments on that version and for his own inspiring essay ‘Beyond Sodomy:
What is Still Queer About Early Modern Queer Studies’ (2009). A later version
appeared with the present title, ‘History’s Tears’, at the medieval studies blog
In the Middle at the invitation of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. I would like to express
my gratitude to all those who commented on the post, especially Jeffrey,
Eileen Joy, Michael Uebel and Holly Crocker. Madhavi Menon also very gen-
erously responded to what is, I must admit, an often ungenerous reading on
my part of an essay, ‘Queering History’, that I deeply admire.
2. What Nancy means by finite history shares certain affinities with what
I take to be a de-essentialized or khoric queerness: ‘finite History is, from its
beginning, the presentation of being through (or as) the process of time: the
“resorption of history”. It is history maintaining its end and presenting it,
from its beginning (either as a catastrophe or as an apotheosis, either as an
infinite accumulation or as a sudden transfiguration). Finite history is the hap-
pening of the time of existence, or of existence as time, spacing time, spacing
the presence and the present of time. It does not have its essence in itself,
nor anywhere else (for there is no “anywhere else”). It is then “essentially”
exposed, infinitely exposed to its own finite happening as such’ (Nancy, 1993,
p. 157). For a fuller treatment of these issues, see Nancy (2003).
3. A thinker such as Heather Love falls somewhere in the middle but I don’t
think an optimistic queer theory can afford to dwell for very long on loss,
melancholia or trauma at the expense of feeling forward.
4. For Traub’s response to Goldberg and Menon, see her essay ‘The Present
Future of Lesbian Historiography’ (2007). In what could be read as a compan-
ion piece to this one, I offer a reading of Traub’s ‘cycles of salience’ alongside
Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ (O’Rourke, 2010).
5. Nancy makes a similar point about the contemporary suspension of history.
He says, ‘first of all, history is suspended, or even finished, as sense, as the
directional and teleological path that it has been considered to be since the
beginning of modern historical thinking. History no longer has a goal or a
purpose, and, therefore, history no longer is determined by the individual’
(Nancy, 1993, p. 144). See also Keith Jenkins (1991).
6. For a strong critique of Goldberg and Menon, see the letter from the medi-
evalists Carolyn Dinshaw and Karma Lochrie to the editor of the PMLA and
Madhavi Menon’s response (Dinshaw et al., 2006).
7. This is perhaps why the logic of the spectre is so important. As Ernesto Laclau
(1995, p. 87) reminds us, ‘anachronism is essential to spectrality: the specter,
interrupting all specularity, desynchronizes time’.
8. Goldberg goes further: ‘methodologically, I still think that deconstructive

destabilization is a necessary tool and that differences always exist in a sup-
plementary relationship to each other. But I now also think it important to
recognize that historical limits impinge upon theoretical possibility and that
these cannot be translated into merely theoretical impasses to be worked
through or, even more insidiously, to be seen as indistinguishable sides of

an always double-sided coin. In retrospect, it is possible for me to see now
what was not evident to me once: that the valuable task of deconstruction
has often foundered on its inability to recognize the differences between the
kinds of solidifications that one must resist and those that one must desire
and further. While I believe that the past is not as monolithic as some his-
torians make it out to be – and that, indeed, the future lies in realizing pos-
sibilities that are not merely utopian and that must, therefore, be historically
available – it seems crucial to recognize, nonetheless, that the indifference of
difference, while a fine theoretical point, will not explain prevailing power
differences or give one much leverage in taking up a side or claiming stakes’
(Goldberg, 2003, p. xviii). A similar problem to the one I am anatomizing
in ‘Queering History’ emerges in his 2007 essay ‘After Thoughts’, a stunning
attempt to align the philosophy of Michel Serres with the history of sexual-
ity, in which he also forecloses (or super-represses) the future. He describes
his project as having ‘multiple investments in the past and present (and in
multiple moments in each of those time periods)’ (p. 504), but Goldberg’s
theory of ‘multitemporality’, virtuality and the ‘multiple present’ (p. 505) dis-
appointingly fails to swerve towards the future. A more promising, and more
recent essay, which further explores a Lucretian materialism, is ‘Conversions:
Around Tintoretto’ (2008), in which Goldberg takes up Agambenian and
Badiouian understandings of the event – while carefully parsing the differ-
ences between them – which don’t (if you see, as I do, Derrida, Agamben
and Badiou as being rather close to one another on these issues) eschew the
future.
9. For a more detailed reading of No Future in the context of Early Modern
Queer Studies and the work of Alan Sinfield in particular, see O’Rourke
(2009).
10. A careful reading of perceptible shifts in Žižek’s own political position might
well illuminate some of the dangers I am trying to flag here. In his early work
Žižek argued for a reform of socio-sexuo-symbolic institutions and advocated
a radically democratic traversal of the fantasy, which would free up the desire
of the subject. In his later work, however, Žižek has embraced, like Edelman,
a revolutionary position of identification with the sinthome. As Matthew Sharpe
and Geoff Boucher explain, this is a difference between desire and drive. They
say that for the later Žižek ‘the political subject rejects all symbolic identifica-
tions and institutional rituals, and regards themselves as the waste product of
symbolization, an outcast from the political community. Žižek holds that this
opens up the possibility of tapping into the unprecedented power of the sub-
ject to transform the world’ (Sharpe and Boucher, 2010, p. 13). On sinthomic
ethics, see also Molly Anne Rothenburg (2010, pp. 191–229).
11. For a discussion of the sinthome’s irreducibility to meaning, see Carla
Freccero’s review essay, ‘Fuck the Future’ (2006b).
12. A companion essay to Edelman’s ‘Compassion’s Compulsion’ (2004,

pp. 67–109) and ‘No Future’ (ibid., pp. 111–54) is (unsurprisingly) Žižek’s
‘Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence’ (2005), which
critiques Butler on the human and engages (as Edelman does) the questions
of the neighbour, ethics, the inhuman and the sinthome. Žižek’s main prob-
lem with Butler seems to be the same as Edelman’s problem with her – she is

too liberal, too Levinasian, too much given over to the other, the vulnerable,
the neighbour, too full of love, responsibility, respect, compassion for the
other – and Žižek dismisses her attempts to plasticize the human: ‘Butler’s
elementary move is the standard Derridean turn from condition of impossi-
bility to condition of possibility: the fact that a human subject is constrained
in its autonomy, thrown into a pregiven complex situation which remains
impenetrable to him and for which he is not fully accountable, is simultane-
ously the condition of possibility of moral activity, what makes moral activ-
ity meaningful, since we can be responsible for others only insofar as they
(and we) are constrained and thrown into an impenetrable situation’ (Žižek,
2005, p. 137). Žižek’s conclusion in the article, which dazzlingly shimmies
through Butler, Levinas, Kierkegaard, Levinas, Agamben, Deleuze, Kafka
and others as well as the usual mix of Lacan-Hegel-Marx-pop culture-dirty
jokes, ultimately boils down to this: ‘the true ethical step is the one beyond
the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of the face, the one
of choosing against the face … justice is emphatically not justice for – with
regard to – the neighbor’ (ibid., pp. 183–4). We should recall here Edelman’s
step in his reading of North by Northwest, which immediately precedes his
critique of Butler on Antigone and his embrace of the inhuman over against
(as a slap in or smashing of) the face of the human: ‘against the promise of
such an activism [for a better tomorrow], he [the sinthomosexual] performs,
instead, an act: the act of repudiating the social, of stepping or trying to step,
with Leonard, beyond compulsory compassion, beyond the future and the
snare of images keeping us always in its thrall’ (Edelman, 2004, p. 101).
13. On the religious (without religion) structuration of Derrida’s thought see
John D. Caputo (1997). See also, Derrida’s ‘Marx & Sons’ (1999).
14. See the essays collected in Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (2009). On
the Levinasian ethics of the face to face and responsibility towards the other,
which both Edelman and Žižek disdain, see Caputo (1993, 2007) and note
12 above.
15. See also Jean-Paul Martinon (2007).
16. See Claire Colebrook (1998).
17. Nicholas Royle seizes on this reading of No Future and asserts that ‘Edelman’s
polemic is, I think, considerably closer to Derrida than it may initially appear.
For the force of his argument is in fact bound up with what I have just been
referring to as the deconstructive optative: what is at issue is not so much
“no future” as it is a thinking of the future in terms of a wilful commitment
to “disturbing, [or] queering, social organisation as such” (p. 17), in terms of
“embrac[ing] this as precisely the impossible” (p. 109), an “impossible project”
that we “might undertake” (p. 27 [the parenthetical page numbers are Royle’s
references to Edelman’s text]). No “no future” without deconstructive desire’
(Royle, 2009, p. 125).
18. On the anarch-ivic and Derridean temporalities, see Benjamin Hutchens

(2007).
19. Here, Deleuze meets Derrida, as the iconoclastic historian Sande Cohen rec-
ognizes. See Chapters 6 and 9 (on Derrida and Deleuze respectively) of his
History Out of Joint: Essays on the Use and Abuse of History (2006). My essay
is heavily influenced by Cohen and his understanding of what he terms

Derrida’s ‘historiospectography’ (p. 177). Cohen notices that both Derrida
and Deleuze return to, give back to, events their capacity to disturb. The
ramifications for historiography of their continuous politicizations of the
past in an a-chronological present make a space for a radicalized, queer his-
toriography that opens the present’s own insistencies and intensities on to
the question of the future, to monstrous arrivance. This is the swerve one
wishes Goldberg and Menon had made.
20. Marion’s erotic phenomenology, his love beyond being, is a surprisingly
queer one and ought to be read alongside Leo Bersani on self-shattering and
Sara Ahmed (2006) on slantwise orientations.
21. See also Chloé Taylor (2006).
22. See John D. Caputo (2006).
23. There is a great deal more that could be said about Lyotard on infancy and
the event and also about Marion on the child and erotic phenomenology,
but space does not permit.
24. The child is a privileged figure for the other throughout Caputo’s work. To
take one other example: ‘what would a political order look like, were the
Kingdom able to be reinvented and transformed into a political structure?
What would it be like if there really were a politics of the bodies of flesh
that proliferate in the New Testament, a politics of mercy and compassion,
of lifting up the weakest and most defenceless people at home, a politics of
welcoming the stranger and of loving one’s enemies abroad? What would
it be like were there a politics of and for the children, who are the future’
(Caputo and Keller, 2007, p. 106).
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5
Jeanette Winterson’s Love
Intervention: Rethinking the

Future
Abigail Rine
Is there a future? More specifically, is there a future for the queer? Queer
theorists have recently been wrestling with the question of futurity,
and two polarized positions are emerging from the fray: the anti-social
thesis with its emblem of ‘no future’, and the perspective of queer
utopianism, which conversely asserts that ‘queerness is primarily about
futurity’ (Muñoz, 2006, p. 826). This chapter investigates the debate
regarding queer futurity in the context of Jeanette Winterson’s novel
The Stone Gods (2008). A foray into possible futures, The Stone Gods both
affirms and defies a queer temporality characterized by the disavowal
of a redemptive future. While Winterson echoes the anti-social concept
of the future as fatal repetition through her depiction of repeating,
self-destructive worlds, her novel also manages to resist the futility of
this perspective by offering the possibility of a love intervention that
disrupts the replication of the past. In describing how Winterson prob-
lematizes distinctions between queer/straight futurities, this chapter
also contributes to the ongoing debate regarding the ‘queerness’ of
Winterson’s work.
Queer Futurity
Lee Edelman is arguably the most prominent voice of the anti-social

thesis, and his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004)
has become its manifesto. In this work, Edelman describes a ‘com-
pulsory narrative of reproductive futurism’ (p. 21), which, through
the ideal of the Child, guarantees the continual reproduction of the
heteronormative social order and locates human purpose in a never-
realized, idealized future. According to Edelman, the queer can have
no place within the optimistic ‘Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism’
70
Jeanette Winterson’s Love Intervention 71
(ibid., p. 4), which follows a relentlessly heterosexual trajectory. The

queer, in fact, is society’s death drive, always signifying the undoing and
destruction of heteronormativity. Queerness, for Edelman, is essentially
negative and can never evoke a positive identity; it can only ever dis-
rupt or ‘disturb’ (ibid., p. 17) identity.

By situating queerness in direct opposition to the socio-political
order, Edelman forecloses the notion of a queer future, arguing that any
future dreamed up by this order can have no place for queers, whose
only viable option is to abandon the notion of futurity altogether.
The future, for Edelman, is always already heterosexual, symbolized
by the embodiment of (heterosexual) procreation: the figure of the
innocent Child that ‘seems to shimmer with the iridescent promise of
Noah’s rainbow, serving like the rainbow as the pledge of a covenant
that shields us against the persistent threat of apocalypse now – or later’
(ibid., p. 18). For queers, this future is nothing more than ‘mere repeti-
tion and just as lethal as the past’ (ibid., p. 31), and the only solution
(which is no solution at all) is to embrace negativity. Edelman is careful
to assert that accepting the role of the death drive is a fundamentally
hopeless gesture, one that evokes no ‘hope of forging thereby some
more perfect social order’ (ibid., p. 4). Instead, queers must ‘refuse the
insistence of hope itself’ (ibid.). Queers, simply by being queer, threaten
the social fabric, and the only ‘value’ of queer negativity lies in its
rejection of value itself, as defined by the social order. According to the
anti-social thesis as voiced by Edelman, queer theory should refuse the
ideal of futurity and its inescapable connection to and investment in
the existing social order; to do otherwise is to ‘prostrate’ oneself before
the heteronormative ‘Futurch’ (2006, p. 821).
Edelman’s polemic account of the anti-social thesis has, unsurprisingly,
generated a fair amount of criticism, and an alternative perspective on
queer futurity has emerged in response, prominently voiced by theorist
José Esteban Muñoz. Muñoz’s primary criticism of the anti-social thesis
is its anti-relationality, which asserts sexuality as the ‘singular trope of
difference’ (Muñoz, 2006, p. 825) and distances queerness from other
forms of difference and marginalization, such as gender, race, and
class:
I have been of the opinion that antirelational approaches to queer

theory were wishful thinking, investments in deferring various
dreams of difference. It has been clear to many of us, for quite a while
now, that the antirelational in queer studies was the gay white man’s
last stand. (Ibid.)
72 Abigail Rine
In addition to criticizing the undue privileging of queer difference and

the reduction of queerness to sexuality, Muñoz also challenges what he
sees as naïve ‘ontological certitude’ and uncritical futility in the anti-
social perspective, which by forgoing the future offers a ‘totalizing and
naturalizing idea of the present’ (ibid.). Both Muñoz and theorist Mari

Ruti interpret the anti-social thesis as fundamentally uncreative; Muñoz
regards anti-relationality and anti-utopianism as ‘failures of imagina-
tion’ (ibid., p. 826), and Ruti asserts that Edelman’s anti-sociality ‘drains
the subject of agency, meaning, and creative capacity’ (Ruti, 2008,
pp. 116–17). Tim Dean, in his criticism of Edelman, goes as far as saying
that the ‘alignment of queerness with the death drive’ is ‘homophobic’,
and that ‘the antisocial thesis originates not in queer theory but in
right-wing fantasies about how “the homosexual agenda” undermines
the social fabric’ (Dean, 2006, p. 826).
In place of Edelman’s nihilistic anti-sociality, Muñoz (2006, p. 826)
argues for the approach of queer utopianism, which is basically an
‘anti-antiutopianism’. For Muñoz, queerness – rather than anathema
to the future – is ‘primarily about futurity’ (ibid., p. 825). Queerness is
not located unflinchingly in the present; it is an ‘ideality’ that is ‘not
yet here’:
queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of

the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that
lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is
missing … Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and
now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for
another world. (Muñoz, 2009, p. 1)
Queerness, in the utopian view, is not about embracing inevitable nega-

tivity in the present, but about desiring and imagining a future that is
not mere repetition of the same. For Muñoz, hope represents not an
investment in an idealized heterosexual future, but resistance ‘to the
stultifying logic of a broken-down present’ (2006, p. 826). According to
queer utopianism, the task of queer studies is not to embrace negativity
and antisociality, but to ‘dream and enact new and better pleasures, other
ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds’ (ibid., p. 1).
Winterson’s Queer ‘Problem’?
Before proceeding to explore what Winterson contributes to the debate

regarding futurity in queer theory, perhaps it is fair to assess whether
her work is relevant in the first place – can/should Winterson’s work be

labelled ‘queer’? In a 2006 article, critic Jago Morrison explores what he
calls ‘the problem of Jeanette Winterson’ (p. 169), noting that though
Winterson has often been cast by critics primarily as a lesbian feminist
and/or queer writer, Winterson’s work exceeds and defies these catego-

rizations. Morrison’s account of critical responses to Winterson reveals
a growing trend of dissent among critics about the queerness of her
work. As Morrison (2006, p. 173) notes, Winterson’s first novel, Oranges
Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), was greeted with ‘widespread academic
celebration of Winterson’s assault on patriarchal heteronormativity’.
With what Gabriele Griffin calls a ‘defiant lesbian hero’ and unapolo-
getic account of lesbian sexuality, Oranges seemed to reveal a writer
eager to carry the queer banner into a head-on confrontation with
heteronormativity (quoted in Morrison, 2006, p. 173). Laura Doan, in
her work on the lesbian postmodern, affirms this picture of Winterson,
reading Sexing the Cherry (1989) as disclosing a lesbian ‘feminist political
strategy of resistance’ (quoted in Morrison, 2006, p. 174). Winterson’s
subsequent works, however, cast some doubt on this portrayal, as her
writing fails to reflect an unequivocally queer and subversive role.
Patricia Duncker, for one, criticizes Winterson’s Written on the Body
(1994), with its ambiguously gendered narrator, as ‘a lost opportunity
to present a more affirmative and liberatory figure of same-sex desire’
(Morrison, 2006, p. 173). Because Winterson’s narrator could be a man,
so the reasoning goes, this novel can ostensibly be read as yet another
heterosexual romance. Morrison’s own reading of Winterson continues
to problematize the notion of her work as subversively queer; he argues
that ‘the overall thrust’ of Sexing the Cherry ‘is away from the interro-
gation and overturning of heterosexual normativity which Doan and
others would like to see’, and that in her recent fiction, ‘Winterson is
abandoning her erstwhile engagement with lesbianism, feminism and
postmodernism’ and turning towards a post-Christian aesthetic that is
more concerned with disembodied agapeic love than queer erotic love
(ibid., p. 176). According to Morrison, though fans and critics continue
to enclose Winterson in the realm of ‘queer postmodernism … the
writer herself seems to be engaged in an escape attempt’ (ibid., p. 171).1
This ‘escape attempt’ is voiced by Winterson herself in the essay ‘The
Semiotics of Sex’ (1995), in which she resists the ‘lesbian writer’ label:
‘I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who hap-
pens to write’ (Winterson, 1995, p. 104). Here, Winterson criticizes how
‘in any discussion of art and the artist, heterosexuality is backgrounded,
while homosexuality is foregrounded’ (ibid., p. 103). No critic, she
74 Abigail Rine
asserts, seems interested in Iris Murdoch’s sex life, yet all are interested
in hers – and for Winterson, this amounts to ‘harassment by the back
door’ (ibid.).
The aim of this chapter is to engage these two ongoing discussions:
first, the debate between the anti-social thesis and queer utopianism;

and, second, the disputed queerness of Winterson’s writing. While I can
corroborate Morrison’s account of the ‘problem’ of labelling Winterson,
I would like to suggest that our expectations of queer writing have become
too restrictive, too fixed – to the point where we, as critics, have unduly
rigid expectations of what Winterson the Queer (and all queers, for that
matter) should write. I would argue that the queer quality of Winterson’s
work lies not in Winterson’s lesbianism, but in its ability to engage and
exceed the fixed boundaries of the established order, to express the for-
bidden and to confound the gay/straight binary. Winterson’s explicit
engagement with temporality can be seen as a queer move in and of
itself, as it challenges essentialized understandings of heterosexuality
and homosexuality. Articulating the possibility of a queer future beyond
lethal repetition, Winterson offers the transformative potential of poetic
language as a vision of reproduction beyond the heteronormative. Not
only, then, can Winterson’s work be called queer, I will also suggest that
The Stone Gods, Winterson’s first venture into the realm of science fiction,
makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about futurity in
queer theory, as she manages to marry the cynicism of Edelman with the
hopefulness of Muñoz.
Repeating Worlds
Winterson’s futurity as presented in The Stone Gods shares a key paral-

lel with Edelman’s as the future is seen as ‘mere repetition and just
as lethal as the past’ (Edelman, 2004, p. 31). The novel begins on the
planet Orbus, which is on the brink of environmental disaster with a
‘projected remaining lifespan of around fifty years’ (Winterson, 2008,
p. 32). The protagonist, Billie Crusoe, is a civil servant employed in
one of the seemingly endless bureaucratic departments of the ‘Central
Power’, an ostensibly democratic government (ibid., p. 5). Orbus appears
to be a futuristic vision of Earth, and this idea is affirmed when, in a
speech, the President of the Central Power quotes ‘The Sun Rising’ by
John Donne and references past explorations of the Arctic Circle and the
Americas. Yet Planet Blue, a new world that the Central Power plans to
colonize, also bears a startling resemblance to Earth: it is fertile, capable
of sustaining human life, inhabited only by dinosaurs and eventually
struck by an asteroid that triggers an ice age. On the mission to colonize

Planet Blue, Billie encounters Captain Handsome, who describes flying
through a ‘bookstorm’ and netting the complete works of William
Shakespeare, collections of romantic poetry and Captain Cook’s jour-
nal, among other works. Billie asks where the books came from, and he

replies: ‘a repeating world – same old story’ (ibid., p. 49). Orbus, then,
is in Earth’s future as well as Earth’s past; The Stone Gods is the story of
a repeating world that always ultimately destroys itself. The novel takes
place in three distinct times and places; first on Orbus, then on Easter
Island and lastly on Earth in the near-future of the twenty-first century.
Each setting features a set of main characters named Billie and Spike
(or Billy and Spikkers, in the Easter Island section), and each recounts
the self-destruction of a world. Orbus destroys itself through unchecked
technology and exploitation; the people of Easter Island ravage their for-
ests to build the stone gods and then tear them down; Earth, struggling
to recover from a nuclear Third World War, is on the brink of becoming
another Orbus. As a collection of stories of repeating, self-destructive
worlds, Winterson’s novel seems to exhibit severe pessimism concerning
the possibility of futurity.
The Stone Gods opens on Orbus – a world with no future, only a para-
lysed present. Unchecked technological advances on Orbus have resulted
in ‘State-approved mass illiteracy’ (ibid., p. 11); this society has embraced
techno-friendly means of communications with ‘voice and pictures’
rather than ‘written words’, and students are taught ‘single-letter recog-
nition’ only (ibid., p. 13). Orbus is digitized, computerized and deperson-
alized, a world run largely by robots, and this dependence on technology
gives the Central Power unrestricted control over citizens’ lives. Literacy
and personal freedoms are not the only casualties on Orbus; technol-
ogy has advanced to the point where people no longer grow older, but
instead have themselves ‘genetically Fixed’ (ibid., p. 9), frozen in a partic-
ular time of life and unaffected by the process of ageing. This newfound
ability to defy growing older has far-reaching consequences, particularly
for women, who ‘feel they have to look youthful’ and therefore ‘Fix’
themselves at progressively younger ages (ibid.). This trend is embodied
in the character Pink McMurphy, a woman who has been ‘Fixed’ at age
twenty-four, but wants to be genetically reversed into pre-pubescence to
satisfy the paedophiliac urges of her husband. Pink is inspired by Little
Senorita, a pop star who has ‘Fixed’ herself at the age of twelve, so she
can ‘live in the moment for as long as she can’ (ibid., p. 16).
Winterson’s portrayal of genetic fixing reveals the grotesque side of
a society ‘fixed’ in the here-and-now. Living in the moment takes on
76 Abigail Rine
new meaning on Orbus, as each individual can select a present that will
last indefinitely and immunize themselves against growth, change and
becoming. Orbus, the planet with no future, is all present – and the
present is not pretty. Difference is slowly being obliterated because the
unified standard of sameness is dangerously attainable. Billie remarks

that ‘we all look alike’ (ibid., p. 19), that ‘everything has become the
same’ (ibid., p. 17). This dissolution of difference ironically results in a
‘global crisis’ of sexual perversion; everyone is ‘bored to death with sex’,
so they are ‘all perverts now’ (ibid., p. 19). The sex industry consists of
‘freaks and children’ (ibid.), many of whom are trafficked from foreign
cultures. It is not a leap for Billie to imagine ‘a world where there are no
grown women at all’ (ibid., p. 22):
so this is the future: girls Fixed at eight years old … or will they
want women’s minds in girls’ bodies and go for genetic reversal?
The future of women is uncertain. We don’t breed in the womb
anymore, and if we aren’t wanted for sex … But there will always be
men. Women haven’t gone for little boys. … Surrounded by hunks,
they look for the ‘ugly man inside’. Thugs and gangsters, rapists and
wife-beaters are making a comeback … So this is the future. F is for
future. (Ibid.)
Winterson emphasizes how, on Orbus, women’s bodies are changed

to accommodate men’s desires and needs, so this widespread ‘perver-
sion’ does have a heteronormative quality that is illustrated through
Pink McMurphy, as well as Billie’s run-in with a giantess in a ‘perverts
bar’ (ibid., p. 19). This woman has been altered to be able to ‘take four
men at one time’: each of her large breasts has a mouth, and one of her
legs has been removed for ‘easier access’ to her ‘front’ and ‘rear’ (ibid.,
p. 20). Though the giantess propositions Billie, her artificial deformi-
ties are clearly meant to please and accommodate men. Yet same-sex
relations are hardly transgressive on Orbus; Manfred, Billie’s boss, has a
boyfriend and fixes himself at an older age to appeal to the ‘gay toyboys’
(ibid., p. 9). In Winterson’s (non)future, there is no queerness in the
sense of tabooed, perverse, non-reproductive sexuality because all sex
is non-reproductive, and so-called perversion is mainstream. On Orbus,
the Child functions not as a symbol of hope and heteronormative pos-
sibility, but as a sex object. People do not want to have children; they
want either to be children or to have sex with children. So the question
is: does Winterson, by using paedophilia to construct a bleak vision of
the future, fall into the trap described by Edelman? Is Winterson, who
depicts a nightmarish world where innocent children are endangered,

thereby affirming reproductive futurism, or is she perhaps subverting the
opposition between queerness and reproductive futurism?
I would argue the latter, that Winterson is recasting the relationship
between queerness and futurity. On Orbus, a world run almost entirely

by robots where the line between the human and the non-human is
murky, it is the boundaries of the human that are policed, rather than the
boundaries of the heteronormative. Billie is a queer heroine, not because
she is a lesbian (though she is), but because she transgresses fundamen-
tal norms: she refuses to be ‘Fixed’, but continues to age naturally; she
breaks the only sexual taboo still existing on Orbus – inter-species sex –
by falling in love with the female Robo sapiens, Spike, and she seeks out
relational intimacy rather than mere sexual pleasure. Queerness, for
Winterson, is not simply non-heterosexuality, but that which intention-
ally challenges and exceeds the constraints of the normal. This model
of queerness aligns more with Muñoz’s vision than Edelman’s, as it
intersects other forms of marginalized difference, such as gender, and
questions how societal definitions of the human have been naturalized
and enforced.
In the third arc of Winterson’s novel, which takes place on Earth after
a Third World War, she uses the figure of the Child actually to represent
the queer. This third Billie and Spike pairing leaves the boundaries of
Tech City, the ‘official part of town’, to enter the ‘No Zone’, where the
laws and regulations of the established order have no authority (ibid.,
p. 151). The No Zone is populated by people who were ‘unable to live a
normal life’ (ibid., p. 155) before the war, and after the war escaped to
a separate space where ‘anything can happen’ (ibid., p. 157). This No
Zone, I would argue, is an explicitly queer space, a ‘landing-place’ for
those who refuse to conform to the dominant social order (ibid., p. 169).
In this queer space, which sits beyond the geographical boundaries of
mainstream society, as well as beyond its values, categories and laws,
alternative communities are able to form and flourish. Deep in the No
Zone, Billie encounters two children – a boy and a girl – who are hair-
less, toothless and covered in sores. A resident of the No Zone explains
to her that the children are ‘Tech City’s big secret’, kept sequestered and
hidden from the rest of society; they are ‘toxic radioactive mutants’,
born from women just after the nuclear Third World War (ibid., p. 171).
Here, Winterson uses the figure of the Child explicitly to problematise
the heteronormative order. As she puts it, these malformed mutant
children are the ‘kids from nuclear families’ (ibid.). This pun highlights
that she is talking about the children not simply as victims of nuclear
78 Abigail Rine
war, but as victims of heteronormative society. These children are born

into the dominant order, but their mutations push them beyond the
constraints of the normal, so they are banished to the margins and
their existence is ignored. By using the figure of the Child to represent
the queer, Winterson deconstructs the opposition that Edelman takes

for granted.
Winterson’s novel exhibits parallels with Edelman’s anti-social thesis,
but she is concerned with queerness as marginalization, as that which
is excluded by the boundaries of the normal, and her novel challenges
the oppositional relationship between queerness and futurity. While
Winterson echoes Edelman’s concept of the future as fatal repetition
through her depiction of repeating, self-destructive worlds, her pessi-
mism about the future does not lapse into nihilism. Unlike Edelman, she
does not view the lethal repetition of the past as inevitable, but presents
the possibility of a love intervention that can disrupt the endless replica-
tion of the past, thereby queering the future.
A Love Intervention?
Recurrently throughout The Stone Gods, Winterson characterizes the

universe as a space of infinite possibility, a space that is neither deter-
mined (‘fixed’) by internal laws nor completely random. Human beings,
according to Winterson, have the potential to affect the course the uni-
verse takes, but as can be seen in her depiction of endlessly repeating
worlds, this potential remains unrealized:
every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those
possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse – there is more than
one reading. The story won’t stop, can’t stop, it goes on telling itself,
waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.
Love is an intervention. (Ibid., p. 68)
the problem with a quantum universe, neither random nor deter-

mined, is that we who are the intervention don’t know what we’re
doing.
Love is an intervention. (Ibid., p. 183)
a universe of potentialities, waiting for an intervention to affect the

outcome.
Love is an intervention.
Why do we not choose it? (Ibid., p. 205)
Winterson repeatedly asserts the need for an ‘intervention’ that will dis-
rupt the ceaseless, lethal repetition of the social order. But in what way is
love an intervention? In the section that follows, I will read Winterson’s
love intervention as twofold: first, she presents love as a renewed form
of relationality that is not constrained by the dominant order, one that

seeks mutuality and intimacy rather than appropriation and objectifica-
tion; second, Winterson also suggests the possibility of a love between
reader and text that opens new worlds, new potentialities.
Each arc of Winterson’s novel does not merely recount the self-
destruction of a world; each arc recounts a love story. Billie Crusoe the
nonconformist and Spike the Robo sapiens fall in love on Orbus, as well as
on twenty-first-century Earth; Billy Crusoe and Spikkers, the castaways
on Easter Island, likewise become lovers. The way each couple relates to
each other stands in stark contrast to the societies in which they live. On
Orbus, people have reduced one another to objects of narcissistic pleas-
ure. Sex is ubiquitously present, but love and emotional intimacy are
all but absent. All difference conforms to sameness; even the so-called
freaks, such as the four-holed, one-legged giantess, are altered to fit the
needs of the normal. Just as people have become either sexual predators
or mere objects of sexual fulfilment, the planet itself has been reduced
to an object for the use and pleasure of humankind. Billie and Spike, in
contrast, develop a relationship that thrives on the differences between
them; Billie describes Spike as ‘the strange I am beginning to love’ (ibid.,
p. 88) and embraces the fact that she is ‘unknown, uncharted, differ-
ent in every way from me, another life-form, another planet, another
chance’ (ibid., p. 74). Here, Winterson again underscores the parallel
between how individuals think of and act towards each other, and the
way humankind as a whole acts towards the planet. Each couple is able
to engender a renewed love-relation with the other, both as lover and as
world, a relationship that does not appropriate or objectify. These love
stories are queer love stories, not merely because they depict same-sex
love and desire, but because each couple’s relationship transgresses the
values and taboos of the social order, which prizes sameness and con-
formity at the expense of difference. Interrogating the ways we interact
with one another and our world, Winterson advocates a radical form
of relationality characterized by: ‘love without thought. Love without
conditions. Love without promises. Love without threats. Love without
fear. Love without limits. Love without end’ (ibid., p. 121). This is a
love beyond ‘romance’ or ‘sentimentality’ that does not conquer or
consume, but allows the other to flourish (ibid., p. 183). For Winterson
this love has the potential to shift the trajectory of the present, to act as
80 Abigail Rine
‘a force of a different nature from the forces of death that dictate what
will be’ (ibid.). Or, to use Edelman’s terminology, this love can disrupt
the lethal repetition of the normative order and queer the future.
Although Winterson emphasizes the transformative potential of love,
it is important to address that each of the queer love stories in the

novel ends tragically, with one or both of the lovers dying. Winterson’s
notion of love is clearly connected with loss, and this has interesting
implications when compared with Edelman’s reading of loss as inescap-
ably negative. Edelman’s anti-social thesis is grounded in the Lacanian
notion of the split subject, a subject constituted around a fundamental
lack. This split occurs when the subject enters the realm of the symbolic,
submitting to the law of the signifier, and the perceived wholeness of
the imaginary is lost. In this pre-oedipal, pre-verbal imaginary, self and
other are one, but entering the realm of culture and language – the
realm of the symbolic – necessitates experiencing oneself as separate
from the other. This separation creates a negativity or lack at the centre
of the subject, who then experiences unconscious, incessant desire for
what has been lost.2 Thus, ‘the Lacanian subject is always born out of
the loss of love’ (Ruti, 2008, p. 118). According to Edelman, the sym-
bolic suppresses the drives, energies and jouissance of the real to create
and maintain the social order, and he aligns queerness with the real,
with what is suppressed and excluded by the symbolic. His anti-social
thesis, which presents an inevitable opposition between the queer and
the social order, reflects the opposition between the symbolic and the
real. Ruti, in her article ‘Why There Is Always a Future in the Future’
(2008), takes issue with Edelman’s reading of Lacan, and her analysis
offers another way of reading split subjectivity, one that I see reflected
in Winterson’s narrative of love and loss. Ruti argues that ‘Edelman’s
account of queer anti-sociality drains the subject of agency, meaning,
and creative capacity, allowing it to be overtaken by the mindless and
mechanical (inhuman) pulsation of the death drive’ (ibid., p. 117). The
queer subject, then, has no alternative but to embrace radical negativ-
ity and anti-sociality, because there is no hope for change, no hope for
a future beyond lethal repetition. According to Ruti, ‘interpreters like
Edelman tend to see the symbolic as a monolithic monster’, without
recognizing that, although entry into the symbolic creates a lack-in-
being, it also endows us with language, and the capacity to ‘engender
new forms of meaning’ (ibid., p. 118). Ruti’s reading of Lacan asserts
that although the subject undoubtedly experiences and is constituted
by lack, this lack gives rise to creativity. Furthermore, access to language
enables us to ‘play with meaning’, to ‘take a poetic approach to the
world’ and see it as a ‘space of possibility’ (ibid.). Edelman, in contrast,

leaves ‘no room for non-hegemonic forms of signification’; his queer
subject has no creative capacity to generate meaning, but can only
attempt to sabotage the monolithic symbolic’s power to make meaning
(ibid., p. 119). For Ruti, this perspective is overly simplistic, as ‘the signi-

fier does not invariably obey the dictates of the normative symbolic’, but
‘is capable of poetic and innovative interventions’ (ibid., my emphasis).
I emphasize the word intervention here, because this is precisely the term
that Winterson uses to convey much the same idea.
Winterson’s characters lend themselves to a Lacanian reading of split
subjectivity, particularly the Billie of post-nuclear war Earth, who begins
her story by describing the loss of her mother. She recounts being born –
‘shipwrecked on the shore of humankind’ (Winterson, 2008, p. 123) –
and experiencing a profound sense of oneness with her mother, who
abandons her a month after birth. This loss never ceases to haunt her:
‘you never stop looking. That’s what I found, though it took me years
to know that’s what I’ve been doing. The person whose body I was,
whose body was me, vanished after twenty-eight days. I live in an echo
of another life’ (ibid., p. 124). Through Billie’s narration, Winterson
describes the Lacanian split of self from other, which leaves a funda-
mental lack at the centre of one’s being: ‘the lost and found/found and
lost is like a section of our DNA’ (ibid., p. 125). This loss is ‘in the spiral
of us’; it is a ‘story we tell in single lines, separated from one another
not by neat spaces, but by torn-out years’ (ibid.). Yet unlike Edelman,
Winterson does not assume that this loss precludes agency and creative
potential. Reflecting Ruti’s analysis, Winterson depicts a distinct con-
nection between the experience of loss and creativity:
twice turned out – once from the womb-world, once from her, and for
ever – banishment became its narrative equivalent, a story I could tell.
But because of this I know that inside the story told is the story that
cannot be told. Every word written is a net to catch the word that has
escaped. (Ibid., p. 127)
The loss of her mother is what gives Billie desire and what allows her
to write as an expression of that desire. The splitting of the subject is
not the only effect of entering the symbolic; the realm of the symbolic
is also the realm of language, and as both Ruti and Winterson suggest,
the experience of loss and access to language gives rise to unlimited
creative potential. Edelman reads the split subject as unable to signify
meaning, but Ruti argues that our inability to fulfil our lack, our loss,
82 Abigail Rine
is what ‘sustains us as creatures of becoming and what allows us, over

and again, to take up the inexhaustible process of signifying beauty’
(Ruti, 2008, p. 119). The capacity to, as Ruti puts it, generate ‘poetic
and innovative interventions’ that disrupt the ‘normative symbolic’
(ibid.) reveals another facet of Winterson’s love intervention. Not only

can human beings, on an individual and communal level, create new
worlds through love; Winterson’s novel also suggests that the love
between reader and text can likewise open new worlds.
Winterson’s dying, self-destructive worlds share several commonali-
ties, but perhaps the most significant is that they have all abandoned
poetic language. On Orbus there is mass illiteracy, and language has
been reduced to mere functionality; no one writes, and no one reads. As
mentioned earlier, Captain Handsome, in his trek from Orbus to Planet
Blue, encounters a ‘bookstorm’ of abandoned works of great literature
that have been jettisoned into the vacuum of space. On ‘post-3 War’
Earth, ‘feelings are out of fashion’ (Winterson, 2008, p. 142); only what
is practical and purposeful is seen as valuable, so excess consumerism is
obsolete – but so is art and literature. Billie has to leave Tech City and
enter the No Zone to find books, as normative society has completely
abandoned ‘book culture’ (ibid., p. 162). These dying worlds have lost
their connection to poetic language and art – they have forgotten how
to imagine beyond the world of the present, to create new worlds
through language. This is as much a destructive influence on Orbus and
Earth as nuclear war and environmental devastation; without creativity,
an intervention is not possible.
The notion that poetic language can intervene in the repetition of
the social order also appears in the essay ‘The Semiotics of Sex’, where
Winterson emphasizes the transformative potential of literature by
describing reading as a love-relation between reader and text:
learning to read is a skill that marshals the entire resources of the

body and mind. I do not mean the endless dross-skimming that
passes for literacy, I mean the ability to engage with a text as you
would another human being. To recognize it in its own right, sepa-
rate, particular, to let it speak in its own voice, not in a ventriloquism
of yours. To find its relationship to you that is not its relationship to
anyone else. To recognize, at the same time, that you are neither the
means nor the method of its existence and that the love between you
is not a mutual suicide. The love between you offers an alternative
paradigm; a complete and fully realised vision in a chaotic unrealised
world. (Winterson, 1996, p. 111)
The love that Winterson is depicting in The Stone Gods, the love that
has the potential to intervene in the ceaseless, lethal repetition of the
social order, is a love that is radical enough to let the other exist fully
and autonomously. This love is possible not only between two people,
but between a work of literature and its reader. When this love is fer-

tile enough, it can open an ‘alternative paradigm’; it can intervene in
the (re)production of the normative order. Muñoz expresses a similar
connection between loss, creativity and transformative potential when
he defines queerness as that which ‘lets us feel that this world is not
enough’, that ‘something is missing’, and asserts that ‘we can glimpse
the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the
aesthetic’ (Muñoz, 2009, p. 1). This notion of a love-relation between
text and reader that enables the conception of alternative paradigms
expands the idea of reproduction beyond the heteronormative Child.
While Edelman depicts the future, the social order and reproduction
as resolutely heterosexual, by allowing for the possibility of non-
normative signification, Winterson leaves open the possibility of a queer
future that is not merely lethal repetition and affirms an idea of non-
heteronormative reproduction through the creative and transformative
potential of language. As the first incarnation of Billie and Spike are
waiting to die on Planet Blue, Billie says that it will be millions of years
before another poem is written, but that poem will be a love poem,
‘because it will happen when someone finds that the stretch of the
body-beloved is the landmass of the world’ (Winterson, 2008, p. 91).
Winterson is arguing that the creative capacity of love should not be
reduced to heterosexual reproduction; love makes poetry, and poetry
can change the world.
Conclusion
In this manifesto of possible futures, Winterson exhibits commonalities

with both the anti-social and utopian queer perspectives. Like Edelman,
Winterson depicts subjectivity as founded on loss and displays consider-
able cynicism regarding humanity’s capacity to realize a future that is
not mere repetition. However, Winterson stops short of Edelman’s futil-
ity by illuminating the connection between loss and love, between lack
and creativity, and offering the possibility of a love intervention that
could alter the course of the unfolding future. Rather than affirming
anti-sociality and anti-relationality, she locates the hope of humankind –
minimal though it may be – in forging new kinds of love-relations that
cultivate and thrive on difference, relations characterized by mutuality,
84 Abigail Rine
intimacy, creativity and change. Winterson’s account of futurity aligns

with Muñoz’s in many ways, but labelling her work utopian seems a
misnomer. Though Winterson does present the possibility of a love
intervention, she expresses severe pessimism about humankind’s ability
to choose to intervene.

Perhaps Winterson’s most significant parallel with Muñoz is her
refusal to confine queerness to sexuality. I would argue that this refusal
is what creates the so-called ‘problem’ of Winterson’s critical categoriza-
tion. Morrison (and Edelman for that matter) equates queerness with
sexuality and the erotic, and Winterson unflinchingly questions this
assumption.3 Her three pairs of Billie/Spike are queer in the sense of
same-sex desire, but it is not only their sexuality that places them out-
side the normative order. The third couple, in fact, does not have a sex-
ual relationship as much as a friendship that develops as they flee from
normalcy to live in the abject Wreck City. They are queer because they
resist the constraints placed upon them, develop identities beyond the
norm, take a critical stance toward repetitive, destructive social forces
and develop love relations that exceed the categories and temporalities
of the normative order. This queerness does not foreclose eroticism, but
is not reduced to eroticism, either. I would argue that the critics who
think Winterson’s work is not ‘queer enough’ have a restrictive notion
of queerness that is confined to the erotic and always unquestion-
ingly opposed to heterosexuality. Furthermore, Winterson’s refusal to
construct or accept an oppositional queer identity as a writer gives her
work a queerer quality than works that seem unable to complicate the
gay/straight binary.
Winterson is a queer writer, not simply because she is a lesbian, but
because she confronts the fixed boundaries of the established order
and expresses what is marginalized and forbidden. Though Winterson’s
ability to do this effectively is not determined by her sexuality, it is
enriched by it. In ‘The Semiotics of Sex’, Winterson asserts that gay
men and lesbians ‘learn early how to live in two worlds; our own and
that of the dominant model’, so ‘why not learn how to live in multiple
worlds? The strange prismatic worlds that art offers?’ (Winterson, 1996,
p. 110). According to Winterson, then, those who exist in the margins
of the social order, who are forced to occupy two worlds, are in some
ways better equipped to cultivate love-relations that welcome difference
and to create poetic interventions that envision new possible worlds.
Rather than arguing, like Edelman, that queers have no possible future,
Winterson’s writing suggests that humanity’s only tenable future –
a future beyond mere repetition – is a queer one.
Notes
1. For more on critical receptions to Jeanette Winterson’s oeuvre, see Merleau
(2003), Ellam (2006), Andermahr (2007) and Detloff (2007).
2. For readers unfamiliar with Lacan, a helpful introduction is Grosz (1990).
3. In ‘“Who Cares About Gender at a Time Like This?” Love, Sex and the Problem

of Jeanette Winterson’, Morrison primarily locates queerness in representations
of sexuality and the erotic, and presents queerness as always oppositional to
heterosexuality. For example, Morrison criticizes Winterson’s love scene in
the novel Lighthousekeeping (2004) for being full of ‘heterosexual clichés’ and
argues that Winterson exhibits a ‘seemingly total capitulation to a Lawrencian
imaginary’ (Morrison, 2006, p. 178). However, by not disclosing the gender
of one of the lovers, Winterson is clearly destabilizing the gay/straight binary;
she is displacing stereotypically masculine and feminine sexual roles from het-
erosexuality. Yet for Morrison, because Winterson does not explicitly present
lovemaking that is directly oppositional to heterosexuality, this love scene is
not sufficiently queer. This illustrates how Morrison, as well as other critics,
seems unable to read queerness beyond the gay/straight binary.
Works Cited
Andermahr, S. (2007) Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide (London:
Continuum).
Dean, T. (2006) ‘The Antisocial Homosexual’, PMLA, 121, 826–8.
Detloff, M. (2007) ‘Living in “Energetic Space”: Jeanette Winterson’s Bodies and
Pleasures’, English Language Notes, 45(2), 149–59.
Edelman, L. (2006) ‘Antagonism, Negativity, and the Subject of Queer Theory’,
PMLA, 121, 821–2.
Ellam, J. (2006) ‘Jeanette Winterson’s Family Values: From Oranges Are Not the
Only Fruit to Lighthousekeeping’, Critical Survey, 18(2), 79–88.
Grosz, E. A. (1990) Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge).
Merleau, C. T. (2003) ‘Postmodern Ethics and the Expression of Differends in the
Novels of Jeanette Winterson’, Journal of Modern Literature, 26, 84–102.
Morrison, J. (2006) ‘“Who Cares About Gender at a Time Like This?” Love, Sex and
the Problem of Jeanette Winterson’, Journal of Gender Studies, 15(2), 169–80.
Muñoz, J. E. (2006) ‘Thinking Beyond Antirelationality and Antiutopianism in
Queer Critique’, PMLA, 121, 825–6.
Ruti, M. (2006) Reinventing the Soul: Posthumanist Theory and Psychic Life
(New York: Other Press).
Ruti, M. (2008) ‘Why There Is Always a Future in the Future’, Angelaki: Journal of
the Theoretical Humanities, 13(1), 113–26.
Winterson, J. (1995) ‘The Semiotics of Sex’, in J. Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on
Ecstasy and Effrontery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).
Winterson, J. (2008) The Stone Gods (London: Hamish Hamilton).
Section 2
In and Out of Time: Sexual
Practices, Sexual Identities
6
Hymenal Exceptionality1

Ben Davies
In Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001), the piercing of Cecilia’s hymen

marks a decisive break, a literal snap in the narrative. When she and
Robbie have sex for the first time, they are described as having ‘held
their breath before the membrane parted’ (McEwan, 2001, p. 137). This
rupture signifies what Derrida (2004, p. 219) describes in ‘The Double
Session’ as ‘the confusion between two’: Cecilia and Robbie are ‘stilled
not by the astonishing fact of arrival, but by an awed sense of return –
they were face to face in the gloom, staring into what little they could
see of each other’s eyes, and now it was the impersonal that dropped
away’ (McEwan, 2001, p. 137). In this scene, ‘between the two, there is
no longer difference but identity’ (Derrida, 2004, p. 219), and Cecilia and
Robbie are said to exist in timelessness: ‘they were beyond the present,
outside time, with no memories and no future’ (McEwan, 2001, p. 136).
In contrast to the overt presence, consummation and breaking of
the hymen in Atonement, McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2007) focuses on
failed wedding-night intercourse. Set in England in the early 1960s, the
five-part novel tells the story of Edward and Florence’s honeymoon and
their attempt at first-time sex. The heterodiegetic narrative portrays the
wedding-night anxieties of the young couple, with a series of analeptic
sequences that relate their personal histories and the period of their
courtship. Edward is a recent history graduate, Florence a talented
musician. He is the son of a village school headmaster and mentally
ill mother; she is the daughter of an Oxford don mother and business-
man father. In and at the centre of the diegesis is Florence’s untouched,
intact hymen. Initiating wedding-night sex, Florence draws Edward’s
penis towards her, but it never goes beyond ‘just touching her labia’
(McEwan, 2007, p. 104). It never enters her. The couple do not have
penetrative sex. Overly aroused, Edward ‘emptie[s] himself over her in
89
90 Ben Davies
gouts, in vigorous but diminishing quantities, filling her navel, coating

her belly, thighs, and even a portion of her chin and kneecap in tepid,
viscous fluid’ (ibid., p. 105). Florence is not penetrated, neither she nor
Edward is sexually satisfied and she is left ‘doused in fluid, in slime’
(ibid.). After Edward’s premature ejaculation and the couple’s subse-

quent confrontation on Chesil Beach, the narrative resembles little
more than a summary of their later lives. This highly elliptical ending
almost completely focuses on Edward’s life and perspective, with only
minor brief references to Florence.
In this chapter, I read On Chesil Beach alongside Foucault’s ‘Of Other
Spaces’ (1986) and Derrida’s ‘The Double Session’ to theorize what
I call the heterotopic hymen. I argue that the failure of penetrative sex
between Edward and Florence emphasizes the hymen as an absent pres-
ence, and that the very unbroken and intact state of Florence’s hymen
symbolizes the possibility of spatiotemporal exceptional sex. My theori-
zation of exceptional spatiotemporality is built upon the recent work of
Giorgio Agamben, and accordingly I use ‘exceptional’ to mean neither
in nor out of time and space. In his biopolitical conceptualization of the
state of exception, Agamben theorizes a spatiotemporality in which ‘in’
and ‘out’ become indistinguishable. In Homo Sacer, Agamben writes:
the state of nature and the state of exception are nothing but two
sides of a single topological process in which what was presupposed
as external (the state of nature) now reappears, as in a Möbius strip or
a Leyden jar, in the inside (as state of exception), and the sovereign
power is this very impossibility of distinguishing between outside
and inside, nature and exception, physis and nomos. The state of
exception is thus not so much a spatiotemporal suspension as a com-
plex topological figure in which not only the exception and the rule
but also the state of nature and law, outside and inside, pass through
one another. (Agamben, 1998, p. 37)
In his theory of exception, the prepositional signifiers ‘in’ and ‘out’ are
no longer interpreted as binary, allowing for a reconceptualization of
spatiotemporality. Despite his dismissal of the concept of suspension,
Agamben repeatedly returns to it. The combination of spatial models
and temporal abeyance shows how his theory explicitly involves both
time and space; the indistinction between in and out applies to both time
and space – they are mutually implicated. The interrelationship of time
and space is essential to all three of the theorists I am working with in
this chapter. In ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1986), Foucault expressly emphasizes
Hymenal Exceptionality 91
this relationship when he writes: ‘it is not possible to disregard the fatal
intersection of time with space’ (p. 22). The exceptional spatiotemporal-
ity of the hymen deconstructs the division of time into ‘straight’ (linear,
sequential, routine) and ‘queer’ (non-linear, intricate, asynchronic), the
division of being ‘in’ (straight) or ‘out’ (queer) of time. It deconstructs

this binary division by conceptualizing the hymen as occurring simulta-
neously, and therefore indeterminately, both inside and outside of time
and space. The heterotopic hymen is a spatiotemporal threshold between
interiority and exteriority, desire and satisfaction, childhood and adult-
hood, the future and the past. My theorization of the heterotopic hymen
offers an exceptional interpretation of this membrane and provides
a spatiotemporal metaphor through which to interpret literary time and
space, distinct from traditional metaphors of the female vagina, womb
and, more recently, clitoris.2 Through my theorization, the figure of the
hymen moves our conception of sex and time beyond recent work on
queer temporalities, as it deconstructs the in/out, straight/queer configu-
ration, and proposes spatiotemporality – not identity or a queer negation
of identity – as a means through which to analyse sexual behaviour.
The Heterotopic Hymen
In ‘Of Other Spaces’, Foucault theorizes a spatial category he names

‘heterotopia’. He defines heterotopias as ‘counter-sites, a kind of effec-
tively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that
can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, con-
tested, and inverted’ (Foucault, 1986, p. 24). Asserting that ‘places of this
kind are outside of all places’ (ibid.), Foucault’s heterotopias foreshadow
Agamben’s dislocated state of exception and resonate with Derrida’s
theory of the hymen, which the latter describes as being simultaneously
real and non-real, there and not there. In ‘The Double Session’, Derrida
argues that the hymen is ‘the consummation of differends, the continu-
ity and confusion of the coitus’ (2004, p. 223). He stresses the spatial
importance of the hymen by characterizing it as a ‘protective screen,
the jewel box of virginity, the vaginal partition, the fine, invisible veil
which, in front of the hystera, stands between the inside and the outside
of a woman’ (ibid.). Derrida returns to the spatiality of the hymen in
the interview ‘Choreographies’ (Derrida and McDonald, 1982), where
he says of a ‘constellation of terms’ including ‘hymen’ that they ‘could
perhaps be considered … a kind of transformation of [sic] deforma-
tion of space’ (p. 74). This ‘filmy membrane’ (Derrida, 2004, p. 223)
is a spatiotemporal barrier, which problematizes difference: inside and
92 Ben Davies
outside are indeterminable. The hymen’s exceptional spatiotemporality

challenges spatial demarcations and our concept of real spaces. It can,
therefore, be understood as a heterotopia. Indeed, the hymen is often
seen as a mythic space, which allows it to be used for multiple readings
including my own. Far from mythologizing the hymen for regulative

or restrictive purposes, both Derrida’s theory of the hymen and the one
I put forward here open up this spatiotemporality to rework the rela-
tionship between sex, space and time.
In a description that suggests a parallel with the hymen, Foucault
(1986, p. 26) says that heterotopias ‘always presuppose a system of
opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetra-
ble’. He problematizes this system by arguing that such places are ‘not
freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory …
or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications’ (ibid.).
Foucault’s conceptualization of entrances marks a cleavage between
those who have entered and those who have not. Drawing upon
multiple meanings of the French ‘entre’, such as ‘between’, ‘within’,
‘among’, ‘in’, ‘into’ and ‘through’ (Atkins, Duval, et al. [1995], 1996,
p. 304), Derrida also focuses on cleavage, emphasizing how thresholds
both separate and bring people together. In On Chesil Beach, the lack of
penetration and hymenal rupture connotes ‘between’ and ‘among’: the
threshold literally remains between Edward and Florence.
For Foucault, ‘heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time –
which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake
of symmetry, heterochronies’ (p. 26). Developing this idea, he adds:
‘the heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at
a sort of absolute break with their traditional time’ (ibid.). Foucault’s use
of the word ‘men’ here does not exclude women from the concept of
heterotopia. As I shall show, Foucault often draws directly upon women
and their experiences to provide examples of heterotopias, and Derrida’s
logic makes it explicit that confrontation with the membranous, unde-
cidable hymen represents a temporal break for both men and women.
Foucault distinguishes two types of heterochronies, the first of which
are ‘heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time’ (ibid.). He gives
the examples of museums and libraries for such heterotopias, describ-
ing how they ‘have become heterotopias in which time never stops
building up and topping its own summit’ (ibid.). They demonstrate
‘the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs’ (ibid.). Foucault’s
description of these spaces suggests how these sites are exceptional.
Their being neither in nor out of time is reiterated when he describes a
place of this type as ‘constituting a place of all times that is itself outside
of time and inaccessible to its ravages’ (ibid.). These places are part of
‘the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite

accumulation of time in an immobile place’ (ibid.). The second type of
heterotopia is linked to ‘time in its most fleeting, transitory, precarious
aspect, to time in the mode of the festival’ (ibid.). This latter type is
‘not oriented toward the eternal, [it is] absolutely temporal [chroniques]’

(ibid.). By way of example, Foucault offers ‘the fairgrounds, these mar-
velous empty sites on the outskirts of cities that teem once or twice a
year with stands, displays, heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snakewomen,
fortune-tellers, and so forth’ (ibid.). Having delineated these separate
temporalities, both of which entail the exceptional quality of being
neither in nor out of time, Foucault proposes a third type of heterotopia
that brings these distinct temporalities together. Discussing a certain
kind of holiday complex, he says:
quite recently, a new kind of temporal heterotopia has been invented:

vacation villages, such as those Polynesian villages that offer a com-
pact three weeks of primitive and eternal nudity to the inhabitants of
the cities. You see, moreover, that through the two forms of heteroto-
pias that come together here, the heterotopia of the festival and that
of the eternity of accumulating time, the huts of Djerba are in a sense
relatives of libraries and museums. For the rediscovery of Polynesian
life abolishes time; yet the experience is just as much the rediscovery
of time, it is as if the entire history of humanity reaching back to its
origin were accessible in a sort of immediate knowledge. (Ibid.)
By incorporating both types of heterotopia, this third type is explicitly

exceptional. It involves both temporal accumulation and negation. As
I shall argue, the hymen likewise incorporates temporal accrual and
cancellation at the single moment of its rupture.
In his theorization of the hymen, Derrida brings time and space
together by problematizing both spatial and temporal difference. For
instance, he writes:
the hymen, the confusion between the present and the nonpresent,
along with all the differences it entails within the whole series of
opposites … produces the effect of a medium (a medium as element
enveloping both terms at once; a medium located between the two
terms). It is an operation that both sews confusion between opposites
and stands between the opposites ‘at once’. What counts here is the
between, the in-betweenness of the hymen. The hymen ‘takes place’
in the ‘inter-’, in the spacing between desire and fulfilment, between
perpetration and its recollection. (Derrida, 2004, p. 222)
94 Ben Davies
This conceptualization of the hymen underscores its spatiotemporal

exceptionality by articulating its indeterminability, especially the indis-
tinction between exterior and interior, anterior and posterior. Drawing
attention to the hymen’s temporality, Derrida writes: ‘within this
fusion, there is no longer any distance between desire (the awaiting of

a full presence designed to fulfil it, to carry it out) and the fulfilment of
presence’ (ibid., p. 219). He configures the hymen as being between the
past, present and future, outside sequential and historical time:
what is marked in this hymen between the future (desire) and the
present (fulfilment), between the past (remembrance) and the present
(perpetration), between the capacity and the act, etc., is only a series of
temporal differences without any central present, without a present of
which the past and future would be but modification. (Ibid., p. 220)
Here, it becomes clear that Derrida’s theory of the hymen is tempo-

rally exceptional; the hymen’s structure is at once temporal and non-
temporal, being marked by temporal differences but without sequential
or historical relation. As an ahistorical inter-presence, it is between
past, present and future, between desire and fulfilment, remembrance
and perpetration. Continuing with the idea of the in-between, Derrida
writes of this membrane: ‘what takes place is only the entre, the place,
the spacing, which is nothing, the ideality (as nothingness) of the
idea. No act, then, is perpetrated (“Hymen … between perpetration and
remembrance”)’ (ibid., p. 224). In ‘Choreographies’, Derrida returns to
the hymen’s non-existence, its ideality and conceptuality, saying:
‘hymen’ and ‘invagination’, at least in the context into which these

words have been swept, no longer simply designate figures for the
feminine body. They no longer do so, that is, assuming that one knows
for certain what a feminine or masculine body is, and assuming that
anatomy is in this instance the final recourse. What remains unde-
cidable concerns not only but also the line of cleavage between the
two sexes … One could say quite accurately that the hymen does not
exist. Anything constituting the value of existence is foreign to the
‘hymen’. And if there were hymen – I am not saying if the hymen
existed – property value would be no more appropriate to it for rea-
sons that I have stressed in the texts to which you refer. How can one
then attribute the existence of the hymen properly to woman? Not that
it is any more the distinguishing feature of man or, for that matter, of
the human creature. (Derrida and McDonald, 1982, p. 75)3
Derrida deconstructs the concept of the hymen by reconfiguring its

(non-)ontological status – its lack of existence – and its (non-)relation
to property and the proper. Through this deconstructive move, Derrida
opens up the possibility of interpreting the hymen beyond biology and
outside of women’s bodies. His deconstruction of the hymen’s ontology

and property value permits the temporal and spatial reading I carry out
in this chapter. As I shall show, hymenal times and spaces influence
both Edward and Florence. The hymen exists between them, between
their desires, anxieties and frustration, and they are caught up in various
hymenal spatiotemporalities. Related to the hymen’s ontology, Derrida
writes how the hymen is marked by absence or non-happening:
with all the undecidability of its meaning, the hymen only takes place
when it doesn’t take place, when nothing really happens, when there is
an all-consuming consummation without violence, or a violence with-
out blows, or a blow without marks, a mark without a mark (a margin),
etc., when the veil is, without being, torn, for example when one is made
to die and come laughing. (Derrida, 2004, p. 223)
The absence of happening Derrida describes here is played out liter-

ally in On Chesil Beach. In contrast with Cecilia’s ruptured hymen in
Atonement, McEwan accentuates the ‘presence’ of Florence’s hymen
through failed penetration. Rather than being pierced, effaced and
destroyed, Florence’s hymen remains; literally, her ‘hymen … is located
between present acts that don’t take place’ (ibid., p. 224). The diegesis
concerning the couple’s wedding night is marked by absence: despite
expectation on behalf of both the characters and the reader, sexual
intercourse does not occur. Correlatively, the hymen’s presence in the
narrative is predicated upon absence. Edward’s desire to rupture it and
Florence’s growing sexual awareness repeatedly emphasize its signifi-
cance: the reader is made aware of its significance through its silence
(it is never mentioned) and its non-representation (it is never depicted).
The concept of presence – and absence – is conceived through the
modalities of space and time.
Hymenal Spatiotemporality
In On Chesil Beach, the exceptional time and space of the hymen is

inextricable from the societally exceptional time and space of the
honeymoon, which provides the major focus of the principal diegesis.
The honeymoon is a societal construction that removes the couple
96 Ben Davies
temporally – albeit temporarily – from society to consummate their

marriage. The wedding night is a hymenally exceptional time, between
the future and the present, desire and fulfilment. In ‘Of Other Spaces’,
Foucault (1986, p. 24) names ‘the honeymoon trip’ as an example of
‘crisis heterotopias’. He defines these heterotopias as ‘privileged or

sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in rela-
tion to society and to the human environment in which they live, in
a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women,
the elderly’ (ibid.). The crises Foucault lists here are all linked to bod-
ily time – becoming adult, periods, reproduction, and ageing or dying.
Foucault’s characterization of this space foreshadows Agamben’s state
of exception by bringing to the fore the ideas of the biological body,
the sacred and the forbidden. Foucault includes within his list of
crisis heterotopias the nineteenth-century boarding school and mili-
tary service, ‘as the first manifestations of sexual virility were in fact
supposed to take place “elsewhere” than at home’ (ibid.). For him,
‘the young woman’s deflowering could take place “nowhere” and,
at the moment of its occurrence the train or honeymoon hotel was
indeed the place of this nowhere, this heterotopia without geographi-
cal markers’ (ibid., pp. 24–5). This ‘nowhere’ signifies the un-located
and dis-located heterotopia, its separateness from ‘real’ societal places
and times. In the novel, the space of the honeymoon suite, its
importance and significance, is emphasized through its demarcation
as a quasi-self-contained, separate space, with its isolation contested by
the outside world, the waiting staff and the noise of the other guests.
The honeymoon suite is a heterotopic ‘elsewhere’ and ‘nowhere’,
a socially created exceptional place, neither fully in nor out of time and
space.4
A heterotopic elsewhere, the honeymoon suite is an exaggerated form
of the Victorian parental bedroom Foucault characterizes in The Will to
Knowledge (1976). At the beginning of this work, he writes:
a single locus of sexuality was acknowledged in social space as well

as at the heart of every household, but it was a utilitarian and fertile
one: the parents’ bedroom. The rest had only to remain vague; proper
demeanour avoided contact with other bodies, and verbal decency
sanitized one’s speech. (Foucault, 1998, p. 3)
In On Chesil Beach, the honeymoon suite is a special, unique place

for sex. Even more than the parental bedroom, it is a space set aside,
a heterotopia specifically designated for first-time, socially sanctioned,
sex. Importantly, the entire action of the principal diegesis takes place
within the two rooms that comprise the couple’s suite or outside on the
beach, and the move from suite to beach marks a shift from heterotopia
to named, societal time and space.
The threshold between hotel and beach represents the division

between heterotopia and societal time and space.5 To mark this sepa-
ration, the narrator presents the outside of the hotel as a particular
region, somewhere specific: ‘so they were eating in their rooms before
the partially open French windows that gave onto a balcony and
a view of a portion of the English Channel, and Chesil Beach with
its infinite shingle’ (McEwan, 2007, p. 4). The narrative stresses the
difference between the two locations by contrasting the designated
beach with the unnamed hotel. The division between the two spaces
is, however, imperfect and the spatiotemporal exceptionality of the
honeymoon suite is compromised as it is drawn into the specific,
named space of the beach. As the couple look out, the outside enters
through the breeze. This two-way movement illustrates the imperfect
separation of the room from the world outside, problematizing the
dichotomy between in and out, as with/in the hymen and the state of
exception:
they could see a luminous grey smoothness that may have been the
silky surface of the sea itself, or the lagoon, or the sky – it was difficult
to tell. The altered breeze carried through the parted French windows
an enticement, a salty oxygen and open space that seemed at odds
with starched table linen, the corn-flour stiffened gravy, and the
heavy polished silver they were taking in their hands. (Ibid., p. 18)
Through this seductive breeze, the external world becomes internal and
affects the couple’s interior space:
the rising mist continued to unveil the nearby trees, the bare green
cliffs behind the lagoon and portions of a silver sea, and the smooth
evening air poured in around the table, and they continued their
pretence of eating, trapped in the moment by private anxieties.
(Ibid., pp. 25–6)
While states of exception are characterized by a spatiotemporality that

confuses inside and outside, in the novel the invasion of exteriority into
the honeymoon suite eventually breaks this complexity and roots the
characters fully in time and space, not indeterminately inside or outside.
98 Ben Davies
They literally end up outside on Chesil Beach, the ‘real’ named space of
the principal diegesis.
Through the juxtaposition of the demonstrative and possessive pro-
nouns, exceptional temporality is figured in the novel’s opening words:
‘they were both young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wed-

ding night’ (ibid., p. 3). The specificity of the night is substantiated by
the caesura, which syntactically and figuratively marks it as temporally
distinct. The night’s temporality and significance is made clear in
Edward’s anticipation and excitement: ‘all he wanted, all he could think
of, was himself and Florence lying naked together on or in the bed next
door, confronting at last that awesome experience that seemed as remote
from daily life as a vision of religious ecstasy, or even death itself’ (ibid.,
pp. 19–20). Edward expects sex to be temporally isolated, removed from
the everyday and as something outside of time, like religious experience
or even death. His desired rupturing of the hymen represents the divi-
sion, break in time, or as he envisages it, the ‘dividing line of experience’
(ibid., p. 28). This clichéd metaphor evokes the membranous hymen,
drawing together its spatial and temporal qualities. The filmy membrane
is – culturally speaking – fundamentally connected to the significance
of first-time sex. The hymen separates and, through being pierced, joins
childhood and adulthood, sexual immaturity and maturity. The wedding
night, and the build-up to sexual climax, bring together the two seem-
ingly contradictory temporalities Foucault says constitute heterotopias –
‘the accumulation of time’ and ‘time in its most fleeting’ (Foucault,
1986, p. 26). It is concerned with both the transitory, the momentary
present, as well as ‘quasi-eternity’ (ibid.). The latter aspect of the com-
plex temporality in play here corresponds to a seemingly endless time.
In the hymenal moment, the accumulation of time (the years of sexual
desire and anticipation before sex is experienced) is ruptured; a build-up
of time – marked by the cultural significance of virginity – is destroyed
in a fleeting instant. The rupture occurs at the inter-, the between of
before and after, without sequential temporal relation. It happens and
does not happen (as nothing really happens), in and out of time.
In the novel, the anticipation and significance of hymenal rupture
is iterated by the repetition and manipulation of the words ‘moment’
and ‘momentous’. Early in the novel, for instance, Edward is happy that
‘they faced this momentous occasion … together’ (McEwan, 2007, p. 28).
Signifying hymenal exceptionality, the repetition of ‘momentous’ and
‘moment’ configures a complex temporality, made up of Foucault’s two
heterochronies. A ‘moment’ is ‘an indefinite (usually short) period of time’
(The Oxford English Dictionary, 2010). It can be ‘too brief for its duration
to be significant; a point in time, an instant’, but it is also ‘marked by a par-

ticular quality of experience or by a memorable event’ (The Oxford English
Dictionary, 2010). The combination of instant and the memorable, or the
particular, marks temporal indeterminability: the instant is freed from
temporal connection, whereas the memorable and particular are demar-

cated through these very connections.6 The ‘momentous’ is ‘of a thing or
an event: of moment; of great weight, consequence, or importance’ (The
Oxford English Dictionary, 2010). At once too brief, of great importance,
simultaneously transitory, non-sequential and indeterminable, together
the moment and the momentous articulate temporal exceptionality.
Anticipation and anxiety are both configured through the temporal-
ity of the moment. The reader is told that during Florence and Edward’s
marital dinner, ‘they continued their pretence of eating, trapped in
the moment by private anxieties’ (McEwan, 2007, p. 6), and fearing
forced hymenal rupture, Florence reasons: ‘to survive, to escape one
hideous moment, she had to raise the stakes and commit herself to
the next, and give the unhelpful impression that she longed for it
herself’ (ibid., p. 33). Ultimately, Florence does not believe that she
can escape by endless postponement and her entrapment is empha-
sized by the double movement of confrontation: ‘the final act could
not be endlessly deferred. The moment was rising to meet her, just
as she was foolishly moving towards it’ (ibid.). Beyond the imagery
of an erect, agitated and agitating penis, this two-way movement
reinforces the pressure created by the coming moment and the speed
of its arrival: Florence moves towards time as it comes towards her.
Trapped by her anticipation of the moment, Florence perceives sexual-
ity as a temporal series of advances, submissions and failures, which
she is unable to subvert: ‘the bride was not hurried in her movements –
this was yet another of those delaying tactics that also committed her fur-
ther’ (ibid., p. 79). Due to her inability to escape, it is as if Florence ‘move[s]
in a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exception and rule,
licit and illicit, in which the very concepts of subjective right and juridical
protection no longer made any sense’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 170).
While Edward desires hymenal rupture but is unable to experience it,
in the honeymoon bedroom Florence becomes conscious of her own
hymenally exceptional temporality and, for the first time in the narra-
tive, is aware of her sexuality, which is characterized as a sensitivity to
the moment:
behind Edward’s head extended a partial view of a distant past –

the open door and the dining table by the French window and the
100 Ben Davies
debris around their uneaten supper – but she did not let her gaze
shift to take it in. Despite the pleasing sensation and her relief, there
remained her apprehension, a high wall, not so easily demolished.
Nor did she want it to be. For all the novelty, she was not in a state
of wild abandonment, nor did she want to be hurried towards one.

She wanted to linger in this spacious moment, in these fully clothed
conditions, with the soft brown-eyed gaze and the tender caress and
the spreading thrill. (McEwan, 2007, pp. 88–9)
Florence momentarily experiences both pleasure and relief as Edward

unknowingly strokes a ‘disturbed follicle of pubic hair’ (ibid., p. 87),
but she does not wish to break down her ‘high wall’ of apprehension,
wanting instead to exclude Edward and retain the spatiotemporality
of her hymen for herself; it is within her body and cannot be accessed
without her consent, or, if this is not given, only by forced entry – rape.
The ‘spacious moment’ emphasizes the spatiotemporality of the hymen,
of which Florence becomes aware. Florence is desperately holding onto
this moment, a particular spatial inter-present, exceptionally inside
and outside of time. Abandoned to Edward and the law of marriage,
Florence is unable to abandon herself in the idiomatically sexual sense.
She is anxious to preserve the ahistorical temporality of the hymenic
moment, simultaneous presence and non-presence: ‘she was trying not
to think of the immediate future, or of the past, and she imagined her-
self clinging to this moment, the precious present’ (ibid., p. 99).
As a counterpart to Florence’s wish to save this particular present
moment, Edward desires only to break (through) her hymen. His desire
reiterates the hymen’s significance and his failure to penetrate it pro-
vides a literal – and somewhat humorous – reconfiguration of Derrida’s
claim that
nothing happens and the hymen remains suspended entre, outside

and inside the antre. Nothing is more vicious than this suspense,
this distance played at; nothing is more perverse than this rending
penetration that leaves a virgin womb intact. But nothing is more
marked by the sacred … more folded, intangible, sealed, untouched.
(Derrida, 2004, pp. 226–7)
Anticipating the two spatiotemporal concepts that are central to

Agamben’s theory of the state of exception – the topological complexity
of being simultaneously inside and outside, and the idea of temporal
suspension – Derrida’s characterization of hymenal occurrence can be
seen as exceptional. Despite Edward’s desire and his use of force, he fails
to penetrate Florence’s hymen and ejaculates prematurely. This untimely
arrival ruptures the exceptional moment and ruins the possibility of the
momentous, the time between desire and satisfaction, presence and
non-presence, as Edwards fails to rupture the hymenal membrane itself.

Edward and Florence fall short of the momentous hymenal temporal-
ity, which contrasts with Cecilia and Robbie’s sexual experience in
Atonement: ‘the son of Grace and Ernest Turner, the daughter of Emily
and Jack Tallis, the childhood friends, the university acquaintances, in
a state of expansive, tranquil joy, confronted the momentous change
they had achieved’ (McEwan, 2001, p. 137). Edward and Florence expe-
rience frustration and hurt, while for Cecilia and Robbie ‘the moment
itself was easy’ (ibid.).7 Far from an easy moment, Florence retains pos-
session of her physical hymen and Edward is excluded from her specific
hymenality. Her hymen remains between the couple, and her exit from
the honeymoon suite figuratively removes both of them from the pos-
sibility of this transitory hymenal moment, from their particular het-
erotopia with its exceptional spatiotemporality. They are put back into
time and the specific space of the beach.
Exceptional Rupture
In his review of On Chesil Beach, Colm Tóibín (2007) contrasts the

novel with McEwan’s earlier work by looking at their use of history. He
writes:
both works [The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983) and On Chesil Beach]

exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since The Child in Time (1987),
of Britain itself, its recent history and its public life, as an anchor in
the narrative. Carefully researched moments in real time help to res-
cue the novels for seriousness, at times for earnestness, to move them
away from the timeless and delicious cruelties of McEwan’s first four
books, which were wonderful explorations of what he called in his
introduction to the published script of The Ploughman’s Lunch ‘the
dangers, to an individual as well as to a nation, of living without a
sense of history’. (Para. 3)
Tóibín’s comments can be seen within the larger critical convention

of analysing the novel in terms of its portrayal of the historical period,
the impact of mid-twentieth-century repression, the so-called 1960s
‘sexual revolution’ and the couple’s psychological makeup in relation
102 Ben Davies
to this historical setting.8 In distinction to this convention generally

and Tóibín specifically, I shall explore the opposite danger to the one
he highlights – Edward and Florence’s heightened historical awareness.
Their sensitivity to historical time works against the exceptional tem-
porality of the hymen. Being bound to history, they are fully in time,

which is partly articulated by the combination of narrative structure,
person and focalization. The narrative structure entails many analeptic
returns, which tell how the couple meet, their different upbringings
and their courtship. This structure, which repeatedly returns to past
moments, opposes itself to hymenal temporality, which has no relation
to a past or future. The analeptic moments work performatively to
interrupt the narrative, and they parallel the disruptive influence of
the past in Edward and Florence’s pursuit of exceptional hymenal spa-
tiotemporality. As part of Edward’s retrospective regret about Florence’s
untimely offer of a semi-open relationship, the influence of the past is
most intensely felt in the novel’s final sequence:
when his life came under pressure from all the new excitements and
freedoms and fashions, as well as from the chaos of numerous love
affairs – he became at last reasonably competent – he often thought
of her strange proposal, and it no longer seemed quite so ridiculous,
and certainly not disgusting or insulting. In the new circumstances
of the day, it appeared liberated, and far ahead of its time, innocently
generous, an act of self-sacrifice that he had quite failed to under-
stand. (McEwan, 2007, pp. 160–1)
Aside from analepsis, the heterodiegetic narrator stresses the impor-

tance of the particular time of the diegesis – the early 1960s – and its
social and political upheavals, and the couple’s focalizations illustrate
their inability to lose their historical awareness.9 Despite being a history
graduate with research ambitions, Edward believes that happiness is
dependent on a certain ahistoricality. During their attempts at intimacy,
Edward mentally rebukes Florence and himself for overhearing a radio
news broadcast from the downstairs bar of the hotel and being ‘bound
to world events [such as nuclear armament and communist refugees]
by their own stupidity!’ (ibid., p. 26). Edward’s attitude is distinctly
Nietzschean. In ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’
(1874), Nietzsche writes:
it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness: the abil-
ity to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the capacity to
feel unhistorically during its duration. He who cannot sink down on

the threshold of the moment and forget all the past, who cannot
stand balanced like a goddess of victory without growing dizzy and
afraid, will never know what happiness is – worse, he will never do
anything to make others happy. (Nietzsche, 2007, p. 62)

Nietzsche separates historical feeling from the experience of the
moment, arguing that the two are mutually exclusive. Nietzsche’s claim
is characteristic of exceptional temporality – to think unhistorically
one must be out of time, while being in time experiencing the tem-
poral moment. Approaching the threshold of the hymen, the couple
must be able to forget, which they are unable to do. Their thoroughly
historicized natures place them in time, disrupting and ultimately ruin-
ing the possibility of hymenal exceptionality. They cannot make each
other happy, and their unhappiness is maximized as it is experienced
through the intensity of sexual relations. The relationship between
history, time and unhappiness is reiterated when Florence reflects on
Edward’s advances:
her hope was that in whatever was to come, she would regain some
version of that spreading, pleasurable sensation, that it would grow
and overwhelm her and be an anaesthetic to her fears, and deliver
her from disgrace. It appeared unlikely. The true memory of the
feeling, of being inside it, of truly knowing what it was like, had
already diminished to a dry historical fact. It had happened once,
like the Battle of Hastings. (McEwan, 2007, p. 100)
Florence believes that a return to an earlier moment will anaesthe-

tize her to the present. She feels displaced, fully in the present, while
wishing to escape it. Florence does not wish to remember, but wants to
move back inside a past time. Her lack of sexual excitement is suggested
by the reference to dry history, which is given greater significance when
we remember Edward’s historical interests.
During the elliptical ending of the novel, Edward becomes less his-
torically aware as he enjoys the sexual freedoms offered to him after
his relationship with Florence. We are told how he ‘wandered through
those brief years like a confused and happy child reprieved from a pro-
longed punishment, not quite able to believe his luck’ (ibid., p. 161).
Childlike, he loses his historical awareness. Had the honeymoon couple
been less aware of their historical moment, less historically preoccupied,
they might have been able to experience hymenal exceptionality. The
104 Ben Davies
lack of hymenal rupture also signifies the failure to consummate the

marriage, which will be given as grounds for divorce. In ‘The Double
Session’, Derrida (2004, p. 219) writes: ‘“hymen” (a word, indeed the
only word, that reminds us that what is in question is a “supreme
spasm”) is first of all a sign of fusion, the consummation of a marriage,

the identification of two beings’. The relationship between the hymen
and marriage is substantiated by etymology. The Greek ‘Yμήν’ and Latin
‘hymen’ refer to the god of marriage, and the Greek ‘ύμέναιος’ denotes
wedding hymn (The Oxford English Dictionary, 1989).10 The ruptured
moment – not the hymen – is replicated by the narrative structure, as
the end of the marriage signals the end of the principal diegesis. In her
essay ‘Not Wanting Things’, Jane Miller (2009, p. 153) correctly says
of the ending: ‘we know nothing, though, of [Florence’s] sexual life’.
The feminist critic Natasha Walter takes a similar position and criticizes
the novel’s swift ending. Falling back on a much overused literary dis-
tinction, she writes: ‘I felt that the last passages of the novel suffered
from their brevity. We are told, rather than shown, how Edward’s life
progressed, or regressed, after their stay on Chesil Beach’ (Walter, 2007,
para. 12). Rather than being a detraction from the narrative structure,
the lack of detail keeps open the possibility that Florence retains her
hymen or loses it away from the oppressive spatiotemporality of the
honeymoon. It also comparatively emphasizes the importance of the
wedding night, which is allocated much more narrative time and space.
Within this heavily elliptical and truncated ending of the narrative, we
are told that Edward goes on to have a series of love affairs. It is there-
fore possible that Edward himself experiences hymenal exceptionality,
but there is no narrative evidence to support such a reading. Rather, the
brevity of the final section of the narrative, combined with Edward’s
regrets, suggests that his sex life is transitory and unexceptional.
Significantly, he goes on ‘to live snugly in the present’ (McEwan, 2007,
p. 161, my emphasis); he is explicitly in time. Without experiencing
spatiotemporally exceptional sex himself, Edward wishes to fix Florence
within pre-hymenal time for ever:
he did not want to see her photograph and discover what the years
had wrought her, or hear about the details of her life. He preferred to
preserve her as she was in his memories, with the dandelion in her
buttonhole and the piece of velvet in her hair, the canvas bag across
her shoulder, and the beautiful strong-boned face with its wide and
artless smile. (Ibid., p. 165)
Distinct from exceptional spatiotemporality – the condition of being

neither fully in nor out of time and space – Edward fixes Florence in his-
torical time. By mentally placing her in a specific time, Edward relegates
Florence from the exceptional temporality offered by hymenal rupture, a
spatiotemporal figure through which we can rework our understanding

of sex and time beyond the binaries of in or out, straight or queer.
Notes
1. I am extremely grateful to Sarah Dillon and Jana Funke for their comments
and criticisms of this essay. I would also like to thank those who responded
to an early version of this chapter, which I presented at the Edinburgh–
St Andrews Sexualities Conference 2008, and to the undergraduates at the
University of St Andrews, with whom I had the pleasure to discuss the novel
in the spring of 2010.
2. For an insightful account of the legal, social and biopolitical effects of the clitoris
and the practice of clitoridectomy, see Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak (1981).
3. In 2009, RFSU (the Swedish National Association for Sexuality Education)
published a pamphlet entitled ‘Vaginal Corona: Myths Surrounding Virginity –
Your Questions Answered’. RFSU argues that instead of a hymen every woman
possesses a vaginal corona. The text still employs mythologizing language when
describing the corona, despite criticising the use of ‘“breaking the hymen” and
“deflowering”’ (p. 12). For instance, ‘petals of a rose’ and ‘carnation-shaped’, are
employed alongside ‘jigsaw piece’ and ‘half-moon’ (p. 6). While RFSU stresses
‘the vaginal corona isn’t a brittle membrane’ (p. 9), it still admits the possibility
of ‘minor ruptures in the mucous folds that hurt, and sometimes … a little bleed-
ing’ (p. 9). Most significantly, RFSU claims: ‘what’s actually there, is the vaginal
corona, consisting of elastic folds of mucous tissue, which can’t be ruptured by
a penis or by any other object inserted into the vagina. When the mucous tissue
is stretched, minor ruptures sometimes develop and may smart a little. These
soon heal, usually within 24 hours’ (pp. 12–13). In relation to my argument,
the vaginal corona would diminish the significance of first-time sex, but would
allow multiple ‘hymenic’ or ‘coronic’ spatiotemporal moments, resulting in
repeated ruptures. Women could experience more than one personal hymenic
moment. Far from undermining the concept of hymenic exceptionality, this
breakthrough in female biology suggests the possibility of a freshly nuanced spa-
tiotemporality. In contrast to the possibility of repeated coronal moments, the
American television series True Blood featured a storyline focusing on the pain
and anguish caused by hymenal re-growth. In the eighth episode of series two –
‘Timebomb’ (dir. John Dahl, 2009) – two virgins experience sex for the first
time. While the human male experiences the pleasure this entails, the female
vampire is made to feel the pain associated with first-time vaginal intercourse.
Worse still, as a vampire, she repeatedly heals. Consequently, she can never
go beyond this painful experience and is subjected to the physical hurt of
virginal intercourse. Despite the interesting possibilities opened up by RFSU’s
research and the True Blood storyline, I retain the metaphorical concept of
106 Ben Davies
the hymen and the idea of virginal sex for this chapter, as the narrative of On
Chesil Beach specifically concerns first-time sex and the implications of that
moment.
4. The temporal and spatial significance of the honeymoon is articulated in
Michèle Roberts’s recently published short story, ‘Honeymoon Blues’ (2010).
Told in poetic, fragmentary prose, the narrative focuses on the protagonist

Maud’s return trip to her honeymoon hotel bedroom. It is many years after
the honeymoon, and the reader later learns that Maud’s husband is now
dead. In a trancelike, agitated sate, Maud experiences both the anguish of her
loss and the recollected moments from their honeymoon. In a passage that
metanarratively characterizes the story’s style, the reader is told how Maud
‘holds a thousand words inside her, all dancing up and down. Disorderly
sentences. All the words ever spoken. All the words of her past long as a
corridor big as a hotel. Inside her outside her. Bits of lost time flow back
to her, envelop her. Wrap her up. The hotel feels abandoned, hushed. Held
in a trance of silence. As though swathed in gauze’ (Roberts, 2010, p. 83).
Maud’s relationship to words is exceptional, and the spatiotemporal meta-
phor of the corridor of her past reiterates the significant interrelationship of
time and space in relation to the honeymoon. Sensitivity to sexual time is
further evident in the narrator’s vignette of the traditional European siesta,
here a temporal break within the exceptional time of the honeymoon: ‘after-
lunch siestas are euphemisms for sex. Sweat-perfumed sex, bump of the head-
board against the wall, creak creak of the springs, crying out into the pillow
so as not to disturb the guests next door’ (ibid., p. 90).
5. Unsurprisingly, many critics see the setting of the beach as significant. For
instance, in ‘On Chesil Beach: Another “Overrated” Novella?’ (2009), Dominic
Head writes: ‘in common with the way many short stories and novellas depend
upon a single strong symbolic setting or motif, On Chesil Beach uses the idea of the
seaside as a liminal space to embed, symbolically, its central idea: that one failed
wedding night in 1962 can be taken as emblematic of the dividing line between
the liberation of the 1960s and the repression that preceded it. Specifically,
Chesil Beach, that long stretch of pebbles that separates the English Channel
from the Fleet Lagoon, is made to symbolize this epochal change. As the scene
of confrontation on the wedding night, after the disastrous sexual encounter of
newly-weds Edward and Florence, the beach – immensely difficult to walk on,
like all pebble beaches – embodies their separation and failure to communicate’
(p. 118). Comparing On Chesil Beach with John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s
Woman (1969), Lynn Wells (2010, p. 93) says: ‘Fowles’s seaside setting of Lyme
Regis, with its harbour wall The Cobb extending into the sea, along with the
lover’s promontory in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach [1867]”, is echoed
in McEwan’s choice of Chesil Beach as the locale for his characters’ solitary
confrontation. This remote 22-mile long spit … and the couple’s room in the
nearby Georgian inn serve as isolated stages on which Edward and Florence
play out their difficulties in talking freely about sex … McEwan says that
“it’s as if they stand on a kind of shore, as it were, a beach, a beachhead of
change”’.
6. In Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy (2003), the French philosopher Anne
Dufourmantelle gives time a significant and toxic – albeit inconsistent – role
in the relationship between sex and philosophy. In the first of three sections
on jealousy, she writes about a ‘time that behaves as if it did not exist at all,
time that has been given the lovely name instant. Between an instant and
eternity, there is grace. Sex wants it, right away, now. Maximum intensity
in “no time at all”. Eternity procured by an instant of grace. Time canceled
out or wholly given over. At once instant and aion, full time, accomplished

time. Considered in this light, sex answers to our anguish at being in time
through the rediscovered grace of instants miraculously spared from any
duration’ (Dufourmantelle, 2007, pp. 37–8). Dufourmantelle’s theorization
of the instant may appear at first glance to articulate exceptionality, as a
time that does not act like time at all: something happening instantane-
ously could be interpreted as occurring neither in nor out of time. However,
Dufourmantelle’s reading of sex is presented in behaviourist terms. She sees
sex as a response to our being in time, which gives the impression that sex
can take us out of time. Rather than the notion of being in and out of time,
or temporal indeterminability, Dufourmantelle formulates the sexual instant
through intensity and grace. Her introduction of full and accomplished time
suggests a divine, eschatological temporality – the end of time. Somewhat
inconsistently, Dufourmantelle then explicitly writes that neither sex nor
thought is outside of time. Dufourmantelle sees sex as being specifically in
time, in particular human time and also space. Ultimately, Dufourmantelle
posits sex as time, which becomes clear when she writes about the Greek
temporality, kairos. For Dufourmantelle, ‘sex is another name for the kairos,
for that event of a pure present, of pure presence’ (ibid., p. 42). It is a one-
off moment, freed from any temporal relations. Sexual pleasure arises, she
argues, from this singular moment combined with the desire sex has always
to repeat itself. As time, sex is the kairos of desire becoming embodied; it is
the temporal transposition from desire to coital actualization.
7. In his review of McEwan’s recent fiction (Amsterdam [1998], Atonement,
Saturday [2005] and On Chesil Beach), Patrick Henry sees moments as being
particularly significant. He writes: ‘the novels capture characters in moments
from which they are unlikely to escape’ (Henry, 2008, p. 78).
8. See, for example, Al Alvarez (2007), Peter Kemp (2007), Lionel Shriver
(2007), Natasha Walter (2007), Patrick Henry (2008), Dominic Head (2009),
Jane Miller (2009) and Lynn Wells (2010). Making a generic comment about
the novel’s presentation of sex, Randy Kennedy writes: ‘many reviewers of
Mr. McEwan’s book have noted that to put sex back in its old perch among
literature’s most momentous plot elements (alongside truth, money, family,
honor and God) the author set his story in 1962. Of course this is the year
just before the one that the poet Philip Larkin established sarcastically (but
with some reason) in his oft-quoted “Annus Mirabilis” as the all-important
dividing line’ (Kennedy, 2007, para. 5).
9. In his review, Kemp compares the novel with McEwan’s earlier Saturday
(2005), writing: ‘On Chesil Beach, also portraying a couple in a room over-
looking the English Channel, is likewise concerned with individuals’ rela-
tionship to their times’ (Kemp, 2007, para. 4).
10. On the etymology of ‘hymen’, also see Derrida and McDonald (1982,
p. 71).
108 Ben Davies
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7
Time for the Gift of Dance

Sarah Dillon
It might appear strange that a contribution to a section of chapters

that examines temporality in gender and erotic relations in order
to reconceptualize sex and gender relations as non-linear and non-
(hetero)normative would chose as its subject a film from that generic
bastion of heteronormativity, the Hollywood romantic comedy: Peter
Chelsom’s remake of Masayuki Suo’s acclaimed Japanese original Shall
We Dansu? (1996), Shall We Dance?, hit the big screen in 2004, star-
ring Richard Gere, Jennifer Lopez and Susan Sarandon.1 What is not so
strange is that the choice of text is a film. As Elizabeth Freeman observes
in her introduction to GLQ’s 2007 special issue on queer temporalities,
articulations of queer temporality are effectively achieved through a
focus on the moving image, since ‘the time-based art of film … offers
so much metacommentary on time and, indeed, makes temporality
visually apprehensible’ (Freeman, 2007, p. 176, n. 30). This chapter
demonstrates that Shall We Dance? does not so easily conform to the
irreducible heteronormativity assumed of its genre. At the same time,
my reading participates in what Roger Hallas regards as queer spectator-
ship, which includes ‘a rejection or neglect of narrative linearity and
trajectory; a fetishistic preoccupation with the moment, the detail, the
fragment; and a performativity that contributes to identity formation’
(Hallas, 2003, p. 93).2 Importantly, the queering effect here is one per-
formed by the viewer, not a queerness necessarily inherent in the text
itself. By focusing on key moments and details in the film, this chapter
argues that the film demonstrates the way in which the time of dance
provides an escape, or break, from the monotony of quotidian time,
as well as a revitalization of it. In doing so via Derrida’s theories of
dance and the gift, the chapter also shows how dance provides a meta-
phoric and actual model for an alternative way of being in the world
109
110 Sarah Dillon
and of relating to others (sexually or otherwise), one determined in the

time of each and every evental moment of relationality.
Quotidian Time

Grit your teeth and strike a blow against tedium
We could be happy if we struck a happy medium
I haven’t a clue where spontaneity went
But we are never impulsive to the same extent
Once upon and way back when I use to be keen
But now I need a break from the old routine. (Oui 3, 1993)
Shall We Dance? opens with a camera shot from the front of a moving
train. The shot draws the eye along a strikingly straight railway track.
Once the eye has followed that line, however, it is caught by the top
centre-left of the frame, in which the rising sun reflects brightly off a
tall skyscraper. While only lasting a moment, this opening shot of the
film quickly replaces the potential symbolism of the linear train track
with that of the sun, representing as it does the cyclical temporality of
quotidian time. In the opening montage of the film, the viewer wit-
nesses the protagonist, John Clark (Richard Gere), along with millions
of others, going through the repetitive motions of his daily routine:
his journey to work by train while the sun is still rising; his day at his
desk, his boredom indicated by his slumped figure and idle playing with
his pen; and his return home retracing his morning train journey. The
final shots of this montage find him sitting on the train, staring out of
the window, looking tired, worn out and dejected; and then returning
to the affluent family home, the porch light blazing his welcome. This
opening montage is accompanied by a voice-over, narrated, the viewer
presumes, by the character himself:
a million and a half people ride the ‘L’ trains everyday. Over twenty
years I’ve written wills for about eight thousand of them. I’ve sat with
them as they’ve combed through their assets, figured out which kid
gets the painting over the fireplace, which one gets the antique spoon
collection. Last thanks, parting shots, confessions, people try to fit
it all in. And once I’ve finished, another life has been summed up,
assets and debts tallied and zeroed out. You initial here and there, you
sign at the bottom, and if you’re like most clients, you look up, smile,
and you ask the question I’ve heard for twenty years: ‘Is that it then?’
‘That’s it for the paperwork,’ I tell ’em. ‘The rest, is up to you.’
Time for the Gift of Dance 111
The verb ‘ride’ in the first line of this opening voice-over determines
the initial semantic interpretation of the ensuing ‘written’, which, in
Gere’s accent, sounds to the viewer like ‘ridden’ – it is only the following
word, ‘wills’, that retroactively corrects the viewer’s misunderstanding.
This aural, if mistaken, link between ‘written’ and ‘ridden’ connects the

repetitive motions of the multitude’s daily routine with the writing of
one’s will – an act that anticipates one’s death and guarantees the inher-
itance of one’s property. This aural connection identifies the monotony
of quotidian time, represented in the visuality of the opening mon-
tage, with the temporality of ‘family, inheritance, and child rearing’
(Halberstam, 2005, p. 2), those qualities that script the kind of time and
life from which Judith Halberstam hopes ‘queer time’ can escape. In
fact, in defining the time of inheritance – ‘an overview of generational
time within which values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through
family ties from one generation to the next’ (ibid., p. 5) – Halberstam
specifically refers to wills, part of that subcategory of ‘hypothetical tem-
porality – the time of “what if” – that demands protection in the way of
insurance policies, health care, and wills’ (ibid.).
The time of inheritance, along with the time of reproduction and
family time, are those temporalities to which, in A Queer Time and Place
(2005), Halberstam opposes the related concepts of ‘queer time’ and
‘queer space’. These, she asserts, ‘develop, at least in part, in opposition
to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction’ (ibid.,
p. 1). The opening voice-over establishes John’s dissatisfaction with
these institutions and their associated temporalities. It does so through
the device of the interior monologue, in which, as Mary Ann Doane
(1980, p. 42) argues in ‘The Voice in the Cinema’:
the voice and the body are represented simultaneously, but the voice,
far from being an extension of that body, manifests its inner lining.
The voice displays what is inaccessible to the image, what exceeds
the visible: the ‘inner life’ of the character.
John’s interior monologue provides access to his dissatisfaction with

the life he is leading, showing that he feels that quotidian time, with
its pervasive repetitive monotony and petty investment in insignificant
legacies, is lacking, that there could be something more – ‘the rest is up
to you’.
The connection between quotidian, family and reproductive time is
reinforced when John’s voice-over ends and is replaced by the voices
of his family singing ‘Happy Birthday’ – these sound-in over the final
112 Sarah Dillon
shot of him on the train and continue as we see him return home.3
They provide another aural link, this time between the film’s opening
montage and the narrative proper, between the monotony of quotidian
time – exemplified on an annual scale with the yearly repetition of one’s
birthday – and the heterosexual family unit: John’s wife, Beverly, enters

from the kitchen with a birthday cake as the family get to the ‘dear Dad’
part of ‘Happy Birthday’. The professional man whom we have been
watching until now, and to whose internal thoughts of dissatisfaction
we have been privy, is now identified as a father, seated at the head of
the table and the family of wife and two teenage children who surround
it. Confirming this connection between quotidian and heteronorma-
tive time, the viewer receives a clear shot of Beverly’s wedding ring as
she places the birthday cake down in front of John and kisses him on
the cheek. To do so, she makes an odd movement with her left hand
which has to come around in front of John’s body and twist to cup his
face on his left-hand side while she kisses his right cheek. Given the
position of the two – Beverly to John’s right – it would have been a
much more natural movement to use her right hand to cup the left side
of his face, but this of course would exclude the shot’s deliberate fore-
grounding of the wedding ring, that universal symbol of heterosexual
commitment. This foregrounding is reinforced with two subsequent
shots of John’s wedding ring, one when he throws his hands in the air
after blowing out his candles, and then again in a close-up of his left
hand placing his toothbrush down.
For Halberstam (2005, p. 5), ‘the time of reproduction is ruled by a
biological clock for women and by strict bourgeois rules of respectability
and scheduling for married couples’; ‘family time refers to the normative
scheduling of daily life (early to bed, early to rise) that accompanies the
practice of child rearing’ (ibid.). In addition to the evocation of the time of
inheritance in John’s professional legal practice, we see both the time
of reproduction and family time in the opening of this film. After the
birthday tea, we view the couple routinely preparing for bed, their life so
organized that Beverly is placing Post-It notes on the bathroom mirror
to remind her of the next day’s activities – Beverly is in fact repeatedly
seen throughout the film compiling lists, writing on calendars, remind-
ing John of family activities and even presenting him with his mother’s
birthday card to sign. She plans and schedules the couple’s family life
with a rigour that is both effective and unrelenting. When John returns
home from work the next day, it is all family business as usual: he
tells her that his workout has been ‘the same’; she tells him that she’s
‘ordering the spring line at the store, yada, yada’, she is on her way out
to a fundraiser at the school, his dinner is in the oven and the girls have
already eaten. John, however, wants to escape these family rhythms:
‘can we go see a movie some time?’ he asks her as she leaves. She turns
and looks back at him, seemingly genuinely shocked by the question,
which she decides to treat as a joke in the ludicrousness of its assump-

tion that they would have time to get off the treadmill of family time
in order to do such a thing: ‘yeah, or at least we could look at the ads
in the paper together,’ she laughs. In a moment of tenderness, she does
realize that there may be something more serious to the request: ‘how
you doin’?’ she asks, kissing him on the lips as she returns to hand him
his dry cleaning; ‘fine,’ he replies, although clearly he is not.
The metaphor of the treadmill is literally realized in John’s workout
scene, in which both he and a colleague are running on treadmills while
watching the game on the gym television. An addition to the first to-
and-from-work pattern, this scene offers a visual metaphor for John’s
life – he is going nowhere, trapped on the treadmill of quotidian tem-
porality, looking for an opportunity to get off. In the bathroom scene,
Beverly has apologized for the mundanity of his birthday present –
a bath robe – ‘I think the problem is,’ she says, ‘that you never really
want anything.’ John insists that he wants what he has – ‘what you
gave me tonight: Evan coming home, everyone’s at dinner, that cake
you make’. In fact, John wants more than this, he wants a break from
the time of inheritance, family and reproduction. This desire, despite
John’s heterosexuality, is, according to the logic of Halberstam’s argu-
ment, a queer one:
‘queer’ refers to nonnormative logics and organizations of commu-

nity, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time.
‘Queer time’ is a term for those specific models of temporality that
emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames
of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and
inheritance. (Halberstam, 2005, p. 6)4
‘Queer’ then, according to Halberstam’s definition, is not connected

to ‘an essential definition of homosexual embodiment’ (ibid.); while
‘reproductive time and family time are, above all, heteronormative time/
space constructs … all kinds of people … will and do opt to live outside
of reproductive familial time as well as on the edges of logics of labor
and production’ (ibid., p. 10). John desires to be one of these people,
he wants to move in a queer time and space that develops ‘according
to other logics of location, movement, and identification’ (ibid., p. 1)
114 Sarah Dillon
than those that currently contain and curtail him. Halberstam argues
that this freeing queer time and space is to be found in ‘queer sub-
cultures’ that ‘produce alternative temporalities by allowing their
participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to
logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience –

namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death’ (ibid., p. 2). It can
also, however, be found in other ‘willfully eccentric modes of being’
(ibid., p. 1), such as those offered in the film: adolescence; adultery; and,
perhaps the most obviously queer of these alternatives since it retains a
clear but not essential link to gay subjects, ballroom dancing.5
Adolescence
The film swiftly and derisively dismisses the first of these possibilities,
the one to which Halberstam is partial. Halberstam offers, as an alterna-
tive to family and reproductive time, the idea of a stretched-out adoles-
cence achieved through subcultural involvement:
the notion of a stretched-out adolescence … challenges the con-

ventional binary formulation of a life narrative divided by a clear
break between youth and adulthood. … Subcultural involvement,
by delaying the onset of reproductive adulthood, challenges … the
‘institutions of intimacy’ through which heteronormative culture
secures its ‘metacultural intelligibility’. (Ibid., p. 153)6
In the second homecoming of the early part of the film, John peeps in
at the door of the den, in doing so provoking shrieks from the teen-
age girls, including his daughter, gathered therein. In response to his
question, ‘what are they doing in there?’, Beverly smoothly jokes about
rebellious adolescence:
‘tattooing “I love Satan” on their foreheads, piercing their belly

buttons, stuff like that.’
‘Great, what did you say about that?’
‘I said don’t get any blood on the couch.’
Beverly’s flippant humour indicates a disbelief in the power of such

subcultural activities to disrupt her home and family. Beverly seems to
grasp intuitively the limits of the potential of Halberstam’s concept as
a disrupting and freeing queer time, since stretched-out adolescence
does not provoke a disembarkation from the treadmill but rather only
a pause or delay in its operations – adolescence is stretched out but

only to a point at which it becomes so etiolated that it disappears and
reproductive and family time resumes.7
Adultery

The second alternative to reproductive and family time offered by the
film is that of adultery. In Exceptional Intercourse: Sex, Time and Space, Ben
Davies (2010) offers a reading of John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius
(2000) which argues that, in that text, ‘adultery provides the possibil-
ity for Gertrude to embrace the dangerous, bewildering present and
jouissance of a time unanchored from the linearity of past and future’.
For Gertrude, adultery is a ‘duplicitous time and space’ that ‘creates a
temporality running simultaneously with, and parallel to, but elsewhere
from, outside of, her “monotonous days”’. Davies argues that Gertrude’s
adultery creates two parallel times, ‘multiple worlds’ (Updike, 2000,
p. 155) as the text has it, that allow her to ‘experience pleasure through
her periodic escape’.8 After the opening of Shall We Dance? has estab-
lished the quotidian time of John’s monotonous days, it too suggests the
possibility of adultery as an escape from them.9 As we shall see, how-
ever, while it carefully sets up this possibility, it does so only to discredit
it in this instance, offering in its place the queer time and space of the
subculture of ballroom dancing. John’s entry into this world offers him
the same escape that Gertrude finds in adultery, but without the actual
betrayal of his wife – the film retains a strong affirmation of marriage, its
value and pleasures. In John’s dancing, it demonstrates that parallel times
of alternative pleasure can run alongside, coexist with and, crucially,
enrich quotidian and family time, without threatening or destroying
them.10
The second time John travels home from work on the train, he looks
up out of the train window and catches sight of a beautiful young
woman high above, looking out of the window of a dance school. The
colours of the film change from the predominant greys and beiges of
its opening to a pinky red light, cast by the seemingly pink street lamp
against the red brick building, and by the pink back lighting of the
dance school’s neon sign: ‘Miss Mitzi’s Dance School’. This colouring,
and the positioning of the woman at the window, create the atmosphere
of a red light district and the viewer is therefore led to suspect that the
family home is going to be threatened by the archetypal whore. This is
merely the beginning, however, of the film’s misdirection regarding the
nature of the time and space to which John will escape. The woman at
116 Sarah Dillon
the window – Paulina, as she turns out to be called – is placed directly

above the ‘dance’ in the school’s sign and although it appears to be she
who catches John’s attention, his real love will turn out to be for the
dancing written large in neon letters below her.
On the same journey home from work the next day, John is now

anticipating the view of Paulina at the window. She is there again, and
this time we receive a close-up of her and her mournful expression.
Sensing, or desiring, some familiarity between them, John moves to
wave at her, despite the clear futility of this gesture – he is only one of
a commuting multitude on a train that passes swiftly below her. John’s
interest has been piqued, however, and he returns home to perform
secretly a Chicago ‘ballroom dance’ city search. At this point in the
narrative, his interest in the dancing is intimately bound up with his
unspoken attraction to the mysterious young woman – both therefore
prompt the same actions of concealment: as the website’s music kicks
in, he quickly reduces his computer volume and looks around hurriedly
in case he has been discovered. After viewing the website on mute for
a few moments, he shuts down his computer, shakes his head, silently
chastising himself for being so silly, and goes to bed. It is at this point
that he responds to his wife’s earlier comments that he does not want
anything – ‘Bev, it’s not true that I don’t want anything,’ he says, but his
sleeping wife does not hear him. In the words of Oui 3, what he wants
is a ‘break from the old routine’.11
The next day, John initiates this break by literally getting off the tread-
mill of his daily grind, stepping sideways off the train that takes him to
and from work, getting off at a station that is not his stop. Returning
home from work the next day, we get the same shot of John sitting on the
train, but this time he is looking positively shifty and clutching his brief-
case. We get the same shot of the dancing school’s windows – Paulina is
there, but, significantly, this time we also see a couple dance past, arms
in ballroom hold. John’s decision to get off the train is thus prompted
by both the view of Paulina and the sight of the dancing couple. To a
soundtrack that starts to speed up, the music getting faster with staccato
elements that anticipate action, John jumps from the train as the ‘doors
closing’ announcement is made. For the first time in the film he is off his
beaten track – he does not know where he is going or what he is doing:
‘Oh my god, what are you doing? What are you doing?’ he says to him-
self. After seeing Paulina again at the window of the school his decision is
made: ‘You know what, I’m gonna just go in. Screw it,’ he says and, after
checking to see if he is being watched, he enters the building, declaring
‘Oh my god’ as he goes in.
The potential adultery plot-line insinuated in the double meaning

of ‘screw it’ – that John might simply be discarding his worries about
doing something different and unusual and/or that he might actually be
seeking to ‘screw her’ – is reinforced in his first encounter with Paulina.
When he enters the dance school she comes over to help him and, to

cover his interest in her, he fabricates an interest in dance lessons. She
asks him, ‘Are you registering as a couple or as a single?’ and he replies,
‘Single. I mean not that I’m … single. Yeah, just me.’ When he enters
the world of the dance school, John loses his married status, making
more possible a betrayal of that institution, and of his wife. Despite
his gentle efforts to flirt, however, Paulina remains aloof and business-
like and instead of securing a date with her he ends up enrolled in the
beginners ballroom class, which, of course, happens to start there and
then. As John sits alongside the two other men in his class – big African-
American Verne and Latino butch Chic – the dance strand of the film’s
storyline begins. For the first parts of this storyline, the adultery option
is maintained as a possibility in the representation of John’s continuing
attraction to Paulina: while practising in the main studio of the dance
school, John’s eye is continually caught by Paulina teaching dance, or
practising her own dance, in the school’s rear studio, which is divided
from the main room by windowed folding doors. Moreover, it is clear to
John’s new friends that the reason he is dancing is Paulina. The adultery
plot-line remains, however, as Paulina does in the spatial demarcation of
the dance school, in the background.
Unlike in Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius, for instance, in Shall We
Dance? the adultery is not committed, nor is its possibility treated
with any real seriousness. In the first instance, Paulina’s impervious-
ness to John’s attention prevents his attraction leading to anything
more. Rather than fulfilling the stereotype of the young beautiful home
wrecker, Paulina remains upright and firm in relation to John’s tenta-
tive advances: ‘Mr Clark, I take dance very seriously. Miss Mitzi’s is a
school not a disco, and I hope you didn’t join class with me as your
goal because you’d be wasting your time. Don’t dance, if that’s what
you’re after.’ In the second instance, alongside John’s dancing storyline
runs the one of his wife’s suspicions about his new secret. This provides
a wonderfully comic subplot in which the only character actually the
subject of adultery – Beverly’s colleague – is a figure of pity but also of
fun. Her experience is the cue to Beverly’s suspicions, alongside all the
clues that John leaves regarding his new passion that could of course be
interpreted as evidence that he is having an affair: his daughter notices
that he seems different, happier; he is late home from work, and his
118 Sarah Dillon
alibi does not check out; his shirts smell of perfume. In the end, Beverly
hires a private detective agency – Devine Investigations – their office
located, like the dance school, at the top of a steep flight of stairs. John’s
journey up the dance school stairs is a vertical movement different from
the horizontal train journey of his normal routine, which signals his

movement into a different time and space, possibly a time and space of
adultery. In the same way, Beverly’s journey up these stairs leads her to
discover, of course, that John is dancing, not cheating, but it also brings
her into contact with the strangely attractive Mr Devine. When Beverly
no longer needs his services, they meet at a bar in a scene that is again
designed to be suggestive of extramarital activity: Beverly arrives in a
sexy tight-fitting, low-cut dress; Mr Devine has ordered her favourite
drink and admits that his marriage ended because of his own infidelity.
But, just as John never commits a sexual act of betrayal, neither does
Beverly – the climax of the scene is not her infidelity but a passionate
defence of marriage:
‘all these promises that we make and we break. Why is it, do you
think, that people get married?’
‘Passion?’
‘No … because we need a witness to our lives. There’s a billion
people on the planet, I mean what does one life really mean? But in a
marriage, you’re promising to care about everything, the good things,
the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things, all of it, all
the time, every day. You’re saying: your life will not go unnoticed
because I will notice it. Your life will not go unwitnessed because
I will be your witness.’
These lines are so poorly written, however, that even Susan Sarandon
has trouble delivering them convincingly. While the film does vindicate
and support marriage, and dispense with the option of adultery as an
escape from its constraints, it does so not in this pat Hollywood speech
but in an exploration of the way in which dance and dancing can fun-
damentally alter one’s being in the world.
Dancing
Mother can not tell us who we are.

Mirrors can not tell us who we are.
Only time can tell for every moment
We are choosing what to be. (Tepper, 1998, p. 26)
When Beverly discovers what her husband is actually up to, her

response is one of puzzlement: ‘dance lessons, my husband is taking
dance lessons. … What would make a man who’s done the same thing
for the last twenty years suddenly do something so completely out
of character, just out of the blue?’ she asks Mr Devine. Mr Devine’s

erudite and philosophical young assistant, Scotty, proffers as an
answer Thoreau’s observation that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet
desperation’ – ‘Maybe,’ he suggests, in this instance, ‘the desperation
can’t be quiet anymore.’12 As we have seen above in the section on
quotidian time, with regard to John, of course, Scotty is quite right. The
gift that John discovers, the one that Beverly cannot give him, is the
gift of dance. As the film follows John and his new friends’ preparation
for the Chicago Tattinger trophy, it shows the way in which the time
and space of dancing revitalizes all of their lives and relationships. In
The Newly Born Woman (1986), Catherine Clément envisions a mad
dancer who ‘exemplifies a classic psychoanalytic model of the hysteri-
cal woman who displays her transgression – her desire for more from
the world, the desire to move in it – in a fit of dancing that releases her
emotions but also insures her eventual reincorporation into the web of
society’ (Albright, 1995, p. 165).13 In the same way, dancing provides
John with both a break from his quotidian time and a revitalization of
it: he still goes to work, but now his feet are dancing under the desk;
he still travels by the ‘L’ train, but now he dances while waiting on the
platform.
After Paulina has firmly closed down the adultery narrative possibil-
ity, John has to decide on his future being in the world, and whether
it will include dancing or not. Appropriate to this pivotal moment of
internal turmoil, the voice-over resumes, again superimposed on foot-
age of him travelling on the train:
‘The rest is up to you,’ I tell my clients, ‘the rest is up to you.’ Every

few years they come back, so I have these snapshots in my head
of how they’ve changed over the years. The ones who’ve changed
the most finally bought that boat, moved to that island. Those
who haven’t changed, I suppose they take comfort in knowing
what course their lives are on. They like to believe they know what
lies ahead.
John is left wondering what type of person he will be – one for whom
things stay the same, or one who changes things, one who embraces an
uncertain future. The earlier scene when John first leaves the train to
120 Sarah Dillon
go to the dance school is repeated here with John getting off the train,
hesitating and going to get back on as the doors close. He then runs
to the dance class, pauses, has a moment of indecision at the bottom
of the stairs (one that mirrors the first time he comes here), turns to
leave and leaves. In this repeated scene, the buxom whirlwind that is

the character of Bobbie no longer arrives to bundle John upstairs with
her – the decision has to be his alone, and he decides in the negative.
However, on leaving the dance school, John bumps into his son Evan,
who takes him to a club in order to meet the girl he is dating. While
watching his son dancing with his girlfriend, John is reminded of the
joy its bodily movement can bring and his reverie is interrupted by a
request from one of Evan’s friends:
‘Mr Clark, Mr Clark, do you want to dance?’

‘Yes, yes I do.’
‘OK.’
‘Could you say goodbye to Evan for me, thank you.’
Leaving the young lady perplexed, John runs, literally skipping and
dancing, back to class.
John’s decision to continue dancing constitutes a step off the treadmill
of quotidian time into the time and space of ballroom dance: quotidian
time is characterized by repetition and monotony, and is connected –
in this instance, though not necessarily in all – with family and repro-
ductive time; the time of dance, in contrast, is the time of the gift and of
the event, and is connected – in this instance, though not necessarily in
all – with the queer time and space of ballroom dancing. Elsewhere, read-
ing Jacques Derrida’s ‘Choreographies’ (1982) alongside ‘Women in the
Beehive’ (1984), I have carefully traced the intimate connection between
the gift and dance.14 For Derrida, the randomness and chance of the gift
is also the randomness and chance of the dance: both provide models
of (sexual) relationality as ‘an incessant, daily negotiation – individual
or not – sometimes microscopic, sometimes punctuated by a poker-like
gamble; always deprived of insurance, whether it be in private life or
within institutions’ (Derrida and McDonald, 1982, p. 69). Rejecting
private or public insurance (such as, for instance, the wills John writes),
Derrida’s idea of the time of dance and the gift is explicitly opposed
to the urgency to guarantee the future that characterizes Halberstam’s
(2005, p. 5) description of ‘hypothetical temporality … that demands
protection in the way of insurance policies, health care, and wills’.
Instead of this need to secure the future, in the event of the gift or the
dance, in each moment of relationality, sexual or otherwise, one must

embrace the past, present and the future: ‘each man and each woman
must commit his or her own singularity, the untranslatable factor of his
or her life and death’ (Derrida and McDonald, 1995, p. 69).
In Derrida’s thought, the gift and dance function as deconstructive

counternarratives that rewrite both the abstract and the concrete reali-
ties of sexual difference and heteronormativity. They do so primarily in
their capacity as temporal events during which, each time, one’s sexual
and gender relationality is redefined anew. As Sandra Kemp observes in
‘Conflicting Choreographies: Derrida and Dance’,
however well you may be acquainted with the history of, say, the
dance piece (every technique involved in it, the choreographic
design), at the time of watching, something else is at stake. This
‘something else’ exists in the moments of the dance as they happen.
It doesn’t exist before or after, and is not susceptible to existing
forms of critical analysis. … To take time and space as self-evident
phenomena, as so often happens in dance, is to fail to perceive that
movement creates its own time and space, that time and space are
not containers which movement fills to varying degrees. (Kemp,
1993, p. 95)
The climactic late-night tango between John and Paulina is the film’s
key gift event of dance. In place of an adulterous sexual consum-
mation of their relationship, John and Paulina engage instead in a
passionate tango. The dance is introduced in the same way that sex
might be: Paulina leaves John to prepare, ‘Give me one hour,’ she says;
when he enters the dance school she orders him to ‘leave the light’;
as they begin, she insists, ‘Don’t say anything, and don’t think … and
don’t move unless you feel it.’ The dance, in the end, though, is not a
sexual betrayal of Beverly – in the moment of dancing together, John
and Paulina each come into their own passionate being in the world,
but this emergence is negotiated through the event of the dance, not
through their engagement with each other. Although they are both
sweating by the end in the same way they might be after vigorous
sex, the dance has both brought them together and held them apart –
they have shared in this intense moment of sexual revitalization but
the result is not a union but an invigorated return to their own lives:
John takes his new passion back to his marriage; Paulina returns to the
professional dancing she loves. ‘Be this alive. Be this alive tomorrow,’
Paulina urges John.
122 Sarah Dillon
John and Paulina’s tango is a gift in Derrida’s sense in that it refuses

the necessity of exchange. For Derrida, the gift is distinguished from
exchange by a rejection of the idea of destination and of the notion of
the existence of predetermined subjects who are givers and receivers.
‘In as much as a gift has an assignable destination,’ he says, ‘it is an

exchange – therefore, it is not a gift’ (Derrida, 1984, p. 198):
if there is, from the man to the woman, or from the woman to the
man, a destination of whatever kind, of an object, of a discourse, of
a letter, of a desire, of jouissance, if this thing is identifiable as passing
from subject to subject – from a man to a woman, or from a woman
to a woman, or a man to a man, etc., etc. – if there is a possible
determination of subject – at that moment, there is no longer a gift.
(Ibid.)
In the tango, nothing is passed from John to Paulina – not even desire –
and neither are their identities predetermined in advance: John is not
the extramarital-affair-seeking man; Paulina is not the beautiful young
home-wrecking woman. Nor, importantly, is their sexual relationality
determined in advance. In the earlier scene in which John comforts
Paulina after her coat has been ruined and asks her to dinner, they are
already precisely determined in advance in these roles and in a poten-
tially adulterous sexual relationship. In that scene, John gives Paulina
his handkerchief, which she accepts in a moment of weakness. This is
not a gift, however, but the first gesture in an exchange that desires her
reciprocation – an acceptance of his advances. Paulina quickly realizes
this and symbolically returns the handkerchief – ‘You know I shouldn’t
have taken this from you, erm, I’ll buy you a new one.’15 In contrast,
in the tango no exchange is enacted, no reciprocation is demanded.
Rather, both are given to the event of the dance, which happens, as
Mark Franko (2004, p. 118) explains, by ‘passing through the body
without the body’s ability to contain, bind, or channel its energy’.16
The power and time of the dance are the power and time of the event
and the gift:
Derrida began his first seminar on the gift in 1979–1980 at the École
Normale Supérieure, with this quote from Heidegger: ‘Die Zeit ist
nicht; es gibt die Zeit.’ (‘There is no time; time is given.’) The power
of the event is its giveness as it arrives, which power is sustained by
the secretiveness surrounding its original intention (it is ‘concealed
in unconcealedness’). (Ibid., p. 117)
Whatever John’s original intention in entering the dance world – and

the film never actually makes it explicit that he is seeking an affair – the
consequence is a reinvigoration of his marriage. In dancing, he renews
himself in each temporal event, and he takes this vitality back to his
relationship with Beverly. As Derrida (1984, p. 200) argues, the perfor-

mative act of the gift ‘produces the giver and the receiver, who at that
time become determined, determine themselves as such. It happens all
the time, when one says “yes” in marriage for instance.’ Marriage is not
an economic structure of exchange but Derrida’s prime example of the
taking place of a mutually disclosive belonging together by and through
which subjects become determined, again and again. This act, the ‘yes’
of marriage, must be repeated, daily: on the treadmill of quotidian time,
it is easy to forget this; dancing causes John to remember. After Beverly
confronts him over his betrayal – not a sexual infidelity but the keeping
secret of his new passion – John stops dancing. She recognizes, however,
the gift it has been to him and she encourages and embraces his return
to it – she suggests that he teach her to dance and she literally gives
him the gift of a pair of dance shoes.
In a Hollywood moment that parodies itself – the tearful cuckolded
shop assistant acting as jealous comic witness – the real climax of the
film is John’s stunning arrival at Beverly’s place of work in full dinner
suit and bearing a single red rose:
‘To dance you need a partner. My partner is right here. Beverly, dance
with me?’
‘I don’t know how.’
‘Yeah you do. Yeah. You’ve been dancing with me for nineteen
years.’
‘But I don’t know the steps.’
‘I’ll teach you.’
‘Here?’
‘Right now.’
The film, then, unashamedly affirms marriage. But here, marriage is

not a stultifying heteronormative institution that binds its participants
to the monotonous repetition of quotidian, reproductive and family
time. Instead, marriage is the ultimate gift, one which, if it is to sur-
vive, must keep on giving. ‘In every production of this gift situation …
all of us could appear as something different’ (Questioner in Derrida,
1984, p. 202); in each repeated yes to, and in, marriage, its participants
are continually renewed. In marriage, then, as in any gift event, the
124 Sarah Dillon
types of (sexual) relationalities are ‘in the order of the incalculable’

(Derrida, 1984, p. 199); to remain married, its participants must con-
tinually ‘invent incalculable choreographies’ (Derrida and McDonald,
1982, p. 76).17
For Derrida, the gift, as a figure of (sexual) relationality, is not a struc-

ture that is sexually indifferent but one that allows us to think ‘sexuality
completely out of the frame, totally aleatory to what we are familiar
with in the term “sexuality”’ (Derrida, 1984, p. 198). In this sense, the
gift can figure an ‘indefinite number of sexes’ (ibid.) and sexual rela-
tions, heterosexual, homosexual and beyond:
at that point there would be no more sexes … there would be one sex
for each time. One sex for each gift. A sexual difference for each gift.
That can be produced within the situation of a man and a woman,
a man and a man, a woman and a woman, three men and a woman,
etc. (Ibid., p. 199)
Throughout ‘Choreographies’, dance functions for Derrida as a figura-

tive analogy of the gift; in Shall We Dance? this metaphoric power is
literalized. In the film, actual dancing makes possible an indefinite
number of sexes and sexual relations, heterosexual, homosexual and
beyond. As we have already seen, in heterosexual terms it figures a non-
adulterous extramarital affair, and a marriage, but the film also features
other key dances in which characters’ identities – women and women,
men and men – sexual and otherwise are produced.18
We have, for instance, the breathless rumba between Paulina and
Bobbie, performed in order to demonstrate to John how it should be
done. As Paulina (in the role of the man) moves Bobbie (in the role of
the woman), she narrates the sexual passion behind the dance:
the rumba is the vertical expression of a horizontal wish. You have

to hold her, like the skin on her thigh is your reason for living. Let
her go like your heart’s being ripped from your chest. Pull her back
like you’re going to have your way with her, right here on the dance
floor. And then finish like she’s ruined you for life.
Although neither character is otherwise associated with lesbian desire

as we would ordinarily understand it, the dance enables the women
nevertheless to interact in a sexual way. When Paulina finishes her
demonstration, the camera pans down to reveal Bobbie breathless on
the floor, dishevelled, her hair over her face, cleavage exposed, looking
nothing other than post-coital: ‘See, why can’t you just do it like that?’
she asks John; ‘Anyone else care for a glass of water?’ asks Miss Mitzi.
Although, of all dance, ballroom has perhaps the strictest roles for
‘men’ and ‘women’, these roles do not have to be inhabited by male
and female bodies. Offering an illuminating comparison to Paulina and

Bobbie’s dance, in ‘Incalculable Choreographies: The Dance Practice
of Marie Chouinard’ (1995), Albright explains the effect of Chouinard
taking the place of the male dancer in her 1987 version of Nijinski’s La
faune (1912):
by actually – physically – dancing across sexual difference, Chouinard’s

La faune severs any essentialist bonds between a biological body and
its appropriate sexuality. On the other hand, by being physically
present in this performance, Chouinard also refuses the slippery
poststructuralist notion of difference which, in its most absolute
manifestation, seems never to reside in any body. Chouinard’s cho-
reography stretches the theoretical terms of our discourse and forces
us to recognize that it is not the fact of her body (or its absence) on
which we must focus our attention, but rather it is how that body is
dancing which is critical here. (Albright, 1995, p. 179)
Citing Derrida, Albright concludes that Chouinard’s dance – and, I would

add, Paulina and Bobbie’s too – embodies his dream for a ‘choreography
[that] can carry, divide, multiply the body of each “individual”, whether
he be classified as “man” or as “woman” according to the criteria of
usage’ (Derrida and McDonald 1982, p. 76).
Albright (1995, p. 160) argues that ‘if sexual difference can be con-
ceived as physical motion rather than a set of stable ideological posi-
tions, the resultant narratives of desire might then be choreographed
more imaginatively’. As always, crucial to this mode of space and
motion is also a mode of time: sexual difference and identity are daily,
even momentary, negotiations taking place in each event of dancing
relationality. Understanding them in this way causes us to revise too
simplistic reductions of time, space and desire to either heterosexual or
homosexual, straight or queer. The character of Link (Stanley Tucci), for
instance, is forced to adopt the persona of a football-loving butch male
in order to disguise his otherwise anomalous place in conventional –
hetero and homo – structures of desire and identity. Link has been rum-
baing since he was eight years old, ‘and you know what the worst of it
is?’ he asks John, ‘I’m not gay. Can you imagine how much easier my
life would be if I were? I mean a straight man who likes to dance around
126 Sarah Dillon
in sequins walks a very lonely road, I got news for you.’ Conforming
to neither heterosexual nor homosexual models of normativity, Link’s
‘dream’, echoing Derrida’s dreaming at the end of ‘Choreographies’,
‘is to be able to dance free and proud, under my own name, for all the
world to see. That’s my dream.’

The Dance of Being
In the ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities’ roundtable discussion included

in the GLQ Queer Temporalities special issue, Annamarie Jagose (2007,
p. 186) expresses her doubts about ‘the ease with which we reify queer
temporality, that adjectival “queer” throwing a proprietary loop around
properties or characteristics that have long been theorized as at the
heart of “time” or, for that matter, “history”’.19 These doubts do not, of
course, mean that one has to relinquish a concept of queer time. Rather,
it needs to be elaborated with care, especially when it is theorized in
relation to an oppositional ‘straight’ time. As I hope to have shown in
this discussion of the queer time of dance in opposition to the quotid-
ian time of heteronormativity in Shall We Dance?, such a theorization
must be contextual and it must carefully analyse, not presume, the
details of each of the temporalities at play.
I conclude this chapter by taking a small step away from, or beyond,
these concerns, to suggest that dance forces us to reconsider not just
our heterosexual and homosexual determinations of time, but also our
anthropocentric ones. In What is Dance? (1983), Roger Copeland and
Marshall Cohen explain that
dance is sometimes defined as any patterned, rhythmic movement in

space and time. A broad definition of this sort, which refuses to distin-
guish between human and nonhuman motion, enables us to describe
as ‘dances’ the movement of waves or the orbits of the heavenly bodies.
In addition, this usage enables biologists … to describe the movement
patterns of non-human creatures, like bees, as dances. (p. 1)
Although Copeland and Cohen go on to reject this definition as too

broad, and to make a case for the specifically human quality of dance,
their initial observation remains important since it reminds us that
neither dance nor time is exclusively the property of the human. ‘There
is no time; time is given.’ ‘The rubric of time’ does indeed, as Elizabeth
Freeman observes, ‘offer the possibility of unmaking the forms of
relationality we think we know’ (in Dinshaw, Edelman et al., 2007,

p. 188), but it would be ethically and politically irresponsible to reduce
these relationalities only to those between humans, gay or straight, man
or woman. ‘There is no time; time is given.’ We dwell in time, alongside
the non-human world, animate and inanimate. As Donna Haraway

observes in The Companion Species Manifesto (2003, p. 8),
the scripting of the dance of being is more than a metaphor; bodies,

human and non-human, are taken apart and put together in proc-
esses that make self-certainty and either humanist or organicist
ideology bad guides to ethics and politics, much less to personal
experience.
We dwell in time, in ‘the conjoined dance of face-to-face significant other-

ness’ (ibid., p. 41), in which we must permanently ask ‘just who is at
home’ (ibid., p. 50): ‘the recognition that one cannot know the other
or the self, but must ask in respect for all of time who and what are
emerging in relationship, is the key’ (ibid.). Haraway may be talking
about dog agility in this strange text, but her mandate tasks each of us,
gay or straight, man or woman, human or non-human animal, to dwell
responsibly in the world and in time:
the task is to become coherent enough in an incoherent world to

engage in a joint dance of being that breeds respect and response
in the flesh. … And then to remember how to live like that at every
scale, with all the partners. (Ibid., p. 62)
Notes
1. Peter Chelsom went on five years later to direct none other than the American
heteronormative teen staple Hannah Montana – The Movie (2009). It is not the
intention of this chapter to provide a comparative analysis of the Japanese
original and the American remake. Suffice it to say that the original is perhaps
less interesting in relation to dance, since, as Chelsom has noted in interview,
‘the Japanese movie relied on that taboo about ballroom dancing per se. If
there was to be a taboo in the American story, it was that if you’re living the
American dream there’s a kind of shame involved in raising your hand and
saying, “Actually, this is not enough. I’m not happy.” Or to put it another
way, it’s possible to have everything and be lacking something’ (Chelsom,
2005). Not simply a cultural taboo in the USA, ballroom dance therefore plays
a more complex role in Chelsom’s remake.
2. I am indebted here to Dana Luciano’s ‘Coming Around Again: The Queer
Momentum of Far From Heaven’ (2007) for this reference to Hallas’s essay.
128 Sarah Dillon
3. In this respect, the film follows the classic pattern in which, as Doane
explains, ‘the voice-over very often simply initiates the story and is subse-
quently superseded by synchronous dialogue, allowing the diegesis to “speak
for itself”’ (Doane, 1980, p. 41).
4. José Esteban Muñoz (2007, p. 365) supports Halberstam’s definition, stating
that ‘queerness should and could be about a desire for another way of being

in both the world and time, a desire that resists mandates to accept that
which is not enough’. Interestingly, Muñoz’s wording here echoes Chelsom’s
explanation of the film in the interview cited above.
5. Halberstam (2005, p. 6) says that by analysing queer time she wants to ‘sug-
gest new ways of understanding the nonnormative behaviours that have
clear but not essential relations to gay and lesbian subjects’. Bluntly call-
ing attention to the irreducible campness associated with ballroom dance,
Chelsom observes that ‘it’s for poofs! It’s true. I mean it’s not regarded as a
particularly masculine sport’ (Chelsom, 2005). The film demonstrates how
queer subcultures can, nevertheless, be inhabited by both homosexual and
heterosexual subjects, and those who do not conform to either normativity:
for example, the character of Link (Stanley Tucci).
6. Halberstam is citing here from Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s ‘Sex in
Public’ (1998, p. 553).
7. Interestingly, although the film dispenses with the concept of a stretched-
out adolescence, it retains the symbolism of the den as the space of excep-
tion within the family home: it is the space in which John practises his
dancing when at home, as well as, later, where Beverly is seen teaching
herself to dance from a book; moreover, Beverly’s colleague who discovers
her husband is having an affair does so by over-hearing him whispering on
the telephone in her family’s den.
8. No page numbers are included here as Davies’s provocative doctoral thesis is
pending submission at the time of going to press.
9. In this sense, adultery counts as one of the ‘subjugated or disavowed erotic
experiences’ that Freeman (2007, p. 159) states are the subject of the essays
in the GLQ Queer Temporalities collection.
10. As we shall see, the film demonstrates that it is keeping secret these alterna-
tive times that threatens marriage, not the alternatives per se.
11. Oui 3’s 1993 UK hit single provides a productive intertext for Shall We
Dance?: the lyrics, sung by South London rapper Trevor Miles, concern
precisely the same entrapment in quotidian, family and reproductive time
with which the film is concerned. Moreover, the accompanying music video
repeats the train symbolism of Shall We Dance?, opening with a shot of
Miles standing in front of a moving London underground train and then
continuing with shots from the camera rapidly moving down the centre of
the train.
12. In the section of Walden (1854) entitled ‘Economy’, Thoreau (2004, p. 12)
writes: ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
resignation is confirmed desperation. … A stereotyped but unconscious
despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements
of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a
characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things’.
13. In ‘Incalculable Choreographies: The Dance Practice of Marie Chouinard’,

Ann Cooper Albright (1995, p. 165) observes that as well as being about
dance, Clement and Hélène Cixous’s The Newly Born Woman is also ‘an
authorial pas de deux’ between the two writers. Albright’s essay also contains
a beautiful description of Derrida’s tango with Blanchot in Parages (1986)
(Albright, 1995, p. 173).

14. See chapter 4 of my book Infidelity: Derrida, Fiction, Film (forthcoming 2012),
on Derrida and the question of ‘woman’.
15. In using the token of the handkerchief in relation to marital and suspected –
but not performed – extramarital relations the film puts into play here all the
symbolism of William Shakespeare’s Othello (1622), in which the handker-
chief, given to Othello’s mother by an Egyptian charmer, guarantees fidelity
and security in marriage. To give it away is an act of betrayal that prompts
infidelity: ‘if she lost it / Or made gift of it, my father’s eye / Should hold
her loathed and his spirits should hunt / After new fancies’ (3.4.58–61). It
is of course Desdemona’s ‘loss’ of the handkerchief (actually the theft of it
orchestrated by Iago) that fires Othello’s jealousy. I am grateful to the editors
for calling my attention to this intertextual connection.
16. See Franko’s ‘Given Movement: Dance and the Event’ (2004) for an
interesting discussion and performance of the importance of Derrida’s
deconstruction to dance studies. In the same vein, see also André Lepecki’s
‘Inscribing Dance’ (2004b) and Albright’s ‘Incalculable Choreographies’
(1995). For a study of the relationship between dance and philosophy more
broadly see André Lepecki’s three-part series Dance Composes Philosophy
Composes Dance in The Dramatic Review (2006, 2007a, b). Note that both
Lepecki and Albright discern the limit of Derrida’s relevance to dance studies
in the question of the actualization of his imagined incalculable choreogra-
phies in staged dance. While the onus here would seem to be on choreogra-
phers to reify Derrida’s philosophy, it is also important to note that Derrida’s
use of dance remains, ultimately, metaphorical and that, for him, dancing
denotes an evental relationality both within dance and beyond.
17. In less philosophical terms, in the bonus material beginner’s ballroom sec-
tion on the UK DVD, the choreographer Joanne Jansen observes that dance
‘adds a little mystery back into relationships. You know, even if you’ve been
with somebody for how many years, I can guarantee you, the minute you
take your husband or your wife, if you’ve been together for twenty years and
you do this, and you have to concentrate on each other to make it happen,
you rediscover why you fell in love with the person.’ Susan Sarandon ech-
oes this, explaining in the behind-the-scenes section that the film is ‘about
really deciding that you’re going to dance through your life’. She continues
that through dance, John and Beverly ‘find a way of looking at each other
anew’ and that ‘you definitely have hope that they’re going to continue to
dance through life together until a very old age’.
18. Interestingly, the back of the UK DVD box foregrounds these moments,
including as it does a still of Paulina and Bobbie’s dance, as well as one of
John and Link practising with each other, alongside the requisite picture
of John and Paulina’s tango, a professional dance couple and a shot of
Sarandon as Beverly.
130 Sarah Dillon
19. Jagose continues that paying attention to, for instance, postcolonial scholar-
ship, Derrida’s ideas regarding spectrality, or Lacanian theory, to name but
a few, ‘might make us hesitate to annex the queerness of time for ourselves’
( Jagose, 2007, p. 186). Carla Freccero agrees, urging the necessity to ask
‘what the specificity is of “queer” in relation to temporality, since I agree that
not all nonlinear chronological imaginings can be recuperated as queer’ (in

Dinshaw, Edelman et al., 2007, p. 187).
Works Cited
Albright, A. C. (1995) ‘Incalculable Choreographies: The Dance Practice of Marie
Chouinard’, in E. W. Goellner and J. S. Murphy (eds), Bodies of the Text: Dance
as Theory, Literature as Dance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).
Berlant, L. and Warner, M. (1998) ‘Sex in Public’, Critical Inquiry, 24(2), 547–66.
Chelsom, P. (2005) Interview with Stella Papamichael. BBC Online, http://www.
bbc.co.uk/films/2005/02/17/peter_chelsom_shall_we_dance_interview.shtml
(accessed 5 July 2010).
Copeland, R. and Cohen, M. (1983) ‘What Is Dance?’, in R. Copeland and
M. Cohen (eds), What Is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press).
Davies, B. (2010) ‘Exceptional Intercourse: Sex, Time and Space’, PhD disserta-
tion, St Andrews: University of St Andrews.
Derrida, J. (1984) ‘Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida’, in
A. Jardine and P. Smith (eds), Men in Feminism (New York and London:
Routledge, 1987).
Derrida, J. and McDonald, C. (1982) ‘Choreographies’, Diacritics, 12(2), 6–76.
Dillon, S. (2012) Infidelity: Derrida, Fiction, Film (in preparation).
Dinshaw, C., Edelman, L. et al. (2007) ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities:
A Roundtable Discussion’, GLQ, 13(2/3), 177–95.
Doane, M. A. (1980) ‘The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and
Space’, Yale French Studies, 60, 33–50.
Franko, M. (2004) ‘Given Movement: Dance and the Event’, in André Lepecki
(ed.), Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press).
Lives (New York and London: New York University Press).
Hallas, R. (2003) ‘Aids and Gay Cinephilia’, Camera Obscura, 52, 84–127.
Haraway, D. J. (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant
Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press).
Kemp, S. (1993) ‘Conflicting Choreographies: Derrida and Dance’, New Formations,
19, 91–102.
Lepecki, A. (2004a) ‘Introduction’, in A. Lepecki (ed.), Of the Presence of the Body:
Essays on Dance and Performance Theory (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press).
Lepecki, A. (2004b) ‘Inscribing Dance’, in A. Lepecki (ed.), Of the Presence of
the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press).
Lepecki, A. (ed.) (2006) ‘Dance Composes Philosophy Composes Dance’, TDR:

The Dramatic Review, 50(4).
Lepecki, A. (ed.) (2007a) ‘Dance Composes Philosophy Composes Dance, Part II’,
TDR: The Dramatic Review, 51(2).
Lepecki, A. (ed.) (2007b) ‘Dance Composes Philosophy Composes Dance,
Part III’, TDR: The Dramatic Review, 51(3).

Luciano, D. (2007) ‘Coming Around Again: The Queer Momentum of Far From
Heaven’, GLQ, 13(2/3), 249–72.
Muñoz, J. E. (2007) ‘Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black
Traditions, and Queer Futurity’, GLQ, 13(2/3), 353–67.
Oui 3 (1993) ‘Break from the Old Routine’, single (UK: MCA).
Shakespeare, W. (2008) The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, in S. Greenblatt,
W. Cohen, J. E. Howard and K. E. Maus (eds), The Norton Shakespeare (London:
Norton).
Shall We Dance? (2004) Directed P. Chelsom (USA: Simon Fields).
Shall We Dansu? (1996) Directed M. Suo (Japan: Altamira).
Tepper, S. S. (1998) Six Moon Dance (New York: Avon).
Thoreau, H. D. (2004) Walden (London: CRW).
Updike, J. (2000) Gertrude and Claudius (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).
8
The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer:
Narrating ‘Uncertain’ Sex1

Jana Funke
In 1907, Berlin witnessed the publication of a curious book entitled

Aus den Mädchenjahren eines Mannes (Of a Man’s Maiden Years), written
under the pseudonym N. O. Body. The book was immensely popular:
it quickly went through several editions and was even adapted twice
to film, in 1912 and 1919.2 Despite the seemingly self-effacing pseudo-
nym, it was well known that Of a Man’s Maiden Years were the memoirs
of German-Jewish Karl Baer, born in 1885 with hypospadias, a com-
paratively common birth defect resulting in the displacement of the
urethra on the penis.3 Because of his unusually shaped genitals, Baer was
raised as a girl, Martha, despite the fact that he was hormonally and, in
accordance with present-day knowledge, genetically male.4 At the age of
twenty-one, Baer decided to change sex and live as a man after he had
fallen in love with a married woman.5 He consulted a number of medi-
cal experts in the German capital and, like many other individuals who
were classified as cases of ‘uncertain’ or ‘mistaken’ sex, was soon referred
to the Institute for Sexual Research, led by eminent German sexologist
Magnus Hirschfeld.6 Having been examined by several of Hirschfeld’s
colleagues, including Iwan Bloch, Baer was diagnosed as a male pseudo-
hermaphrodite, to draw on the terminology used at the time, and was
allowed to change sex legally.
Baer’s memoirs were published together with a foreword by Rudolf
Presber, a popular author, journalist and editor, and an epilogue by
Hirschfeld himself.7 The foreword provides insight into the personal
motivation behind the production of the memoirs. Presber describes
how he met Baer before and after his sex change. Even though Baer’s
‘true’ sex had been established at the time of their second meeting,
Presber expresses doubts regarding Baer’s masculinity and indicates that
132
The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer 133
he appeared to ‘pass’ more convincingly as a woman. Baer seemed to

lack certainty and comfort in his new male role, which inspired Presber
to give him the following advice:
if you wish to begin a new life, give yourself and others an account

of what lies behind you. … And with every honest line you write,
a rusty fetter that cuts into your flesh, a sad piece of the past that
oppresses you will fall away.
And on the path of this first task that you perform as a man, you
may find your way to a new profession, a new lifelong purpose, for
which you are now searching, hemmed in by all the strangeness,
the unaccustomed and embarrassing things, still timid and without
proper confidence. (Presber, 2006, pp. 5–6)
Instead of affirming Baer’s medically diagnosed sex as truth, Presber

draws attention to the constitutive significance of the memoirs: giving
an account of himself becomes the first task of Baer’s new life as a man;
it is through narrative that he can construct his male self.
This raises the question of the demands Baer’s sexual development
from girl to man place on the narrative construction of a stable sexual
self. As one of the aims of autobiographical writing is to reconcile object
and subject, to bridge the temporal gulf that makes self-reflection pos-
sible in the first place, Baer’s position as a male narrator looking back on
a female self is a difficult one. Indeed, the very title of the memoirs, Of
a Man’s Maiden Years, reveals the author’s dysteleological and irregular
sexual development, which cannot easily meet the ideals of narrative
and sexual coherence. The breaks in narrative order resulting from Baer’s
sexual transition can be read as a sign of gender trouble as they reveal sex
to be a construct rather than an essential truth (Thorson, 2009, p. 158).
However, I argue that this reading takes away agency from the indi-
vidual by denying his masculinity. It also fails to acknowledge how early
twentieth-century gendered and racialized models of temporal conscious-
ness influence the process of writing the self in ways that problematize our
understanding of straight and queer time. Valerie Rohy defines straight
time as ‘regular, linear, and unidirectional’ and points to the significance
of anachronism as a means of subverting, or queering, these patterns
(Rohy, 2009, p. xiv). As my discussion shows, Baer’s narrative follows
a straight(forward) trajectory, but it is also shot through with anachro-
nisms. The relation between straight and queer time that emerges in the
text is not one of simple oppositionality. It is through his complex use
134 Jana Funke
of straight and queer time that Baer’s narrative constructs a stable and
coherent heterosexual masculinity that nevertheless leaves space (and
time) for alternative readings.
Sex as Narrative

According to Annamarie Jagose (2002, p. 24), the ‘production of sexu-
ality as a sequential effect’ was sexology’s ‘definitional project’. This is
an important insight, as it is sometimes assumed that the sexological
belief in the congenital basis of sexual inversion resulted in a lack of
interest in developmental questions, which lay at the heart of Freud’s
non-congenital model of homosexuality. However, sexology and psy-
choanalysis shared a preoccupation with the temporal ordering of sexual
development through narrative. Sex (understood here, in keeping with
early twentieth-century ideologies, as a complex of gender, sex and sexu-
ality) was not always already clearly defined or at least visible, but devel-
oped over time. The paradoxical understanding of sex as always already
present and yet delayed or suspended in its realization is expressed in
the first edition of Sexual Inversion (1897), where Havelock Ellis describes
inversion as ‘an inborn impulse, developing about the time of puberty’
(Ellis, 2008, p. 201). Here, sexual instinct is always already present and
yet delayed until a future moment of expression. Sexual latency helped
to facilitate the narrative construction of the sexual self, as sex came to
be seen as an ongoing process, as a form of development.
Historically, this shift was facilitated by the turn away from the
gonads as static sexual markers and towards an endocrinological and
thus processual understanding of sex. At the turn of the twentieth
century, the growing interest in internal secretions, or hormones, and
their impact on the organism over the course of the individual’s life, an
interest shared by Freud and the sexologists, contributed to the fasci-
nation with the interplay of sex and time. As the gonads ceased to be
seen as static determinants of sex, they were refigured as sex glands that
produced sex over time.8 The temporalization of sex was potentially
liberating, as it allowed for sex to change over the course of time. Due to
the rise of the autobiographical case history, an important genre in the
context of sexological discourse, individuals like Baer could use personal
narratives to justify a change of sex.
Critical attention has been paid to the way in which autobiographical
case histories came to shape the discipline of sexology in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. However, there is a marked tendency to focus
on case histories written by and about individuals who would nowadays
be classified as homosexuals. Harry Oosterhuis’s (2000) comprehensive

study of Krafft-Ebing’s case histories, for instance, focuses exclusively on
homosexuality. This emphasis on homosexuality does not do justice to
the diversity of sexual experiences that were commonly subsumed under
sexological umbrella terms such as ‘sexual inversion’ or ‘sexual interme-

diacy’. According to Jay Prosser, the tendency to take sexual inversion as
a misnomer for homosexuality has resulted in the disregard for questions
of physical difference and embodiment, which are often viewed as side
effects of a pathologizing understanding of homosexuality that sought to
project inversion onto the physical body (Prosser, 1998, p. 117). Since the
terminology we use today to differentiate strictly between homosexuality,
transsexuality and intersexuality was not available at the time when the
case histories were produced, the way in which we come to understand
who is speaking to us in these personal accounts also depends on what
we are reading them for. By moving away from reductive understandings
of sexual inversion or sexual intermediacy, it becomes possible to pay
closer attention to cases like that of Baer that often blur the lines between
present-day categories.
What cuts across these identity categories is the way in which tem-
poral order came to affect the narration of sexual experience in the case
history. Translating lived experience into narrative involves not only
the selection but also the sequential ordering of events, thoughts and
feelings. This means that the autobiographical case history, like other
forms of autobiographical writing, raises questions of temporal order. In
cases of uncertain or mistaken sex, on which this chapter focuses, tem-
poral anomalies of suspense and delay as well as literary devices like the
turning point are particularly easy to identify. However, the question of
how temporal order relates to constructions of the self affects individuals
across the borders of present-day identity categories and, as we shall see,
problematizes rather than affirms the queer/straight binary.
Puberty and the Turning Point
Autobiographical narratives of the self influenced how sexologists came

to understand human sexuality and were, in turn, regulated by the
sexological scripts of sexual development.9 Sexual development was
understood as processual, but it was not aimless: puberty emerged as
the decisive moment, a turning point, in which the truth of the self
would be revealed.10 With regard to cases of uncertain sex, like Baer’s,
the awakening of sexual instinct during puberty often contributed to
the desire to change sex, so that it becomes difficult to distinguish
136 Jana Funke
between sexual object choice and gender identity. In addition, altera-

tions in hormonal production would sometimes lead to unexpected
physical developments of virilization or feminization that called into
question the individual’s assigned sex. As a result, sexologists realized
that there might be cases in which sex determination had to be sus-

pended until the individual had reached puberty and the secondary
sex characteristics and sexual instinct had developed. By the time the
gonads had thus ‘expressed’ themselves, the patient had also reached a
level of maturity that allowed him or her to speak for himself or herself.
In this sense, the construction of puberty as turning point and the delay
of sexual truth helped to facilitate the emergence of the personal narra-
tive in a sexological context.
To allow for the suspense of sex determination until puberty,
Hirschfeld – in a prescient move that anticipates present-day demands
articulated by intersex or DSD (disorders of sex development) activists –
argued that individuals who were born with ambiguous genitalia should
be allowed to choose their own sex at the age of eighteen. Franz Ludwig
von Neugebauer, one of the most eminent experts on hermaphroditism
in the early twentieth century, shared Hirschfeld’s opinion. He proposed
that when confronted with ‘a new-born child of doubtful sex it is bet-
ter to reserve one’s decision than to risk a mistake’ (Neugebauer, 1903,
p. 244). Hirschfeld, on the other hand, preferred the more pragmatic
option of assigning a ‘strategic sex’ for both the sake of the child and
the sake of the parents. In a specific case where no decision regard-
ing the child’s sex could be made on a scientific basis, he advised the
parents to register their son as Paul Martin, but add Paula Martha in
brackets to the birth certificate (Hirschfeld, 1921–8, p. 71). Hirschfeld
justified this suspension of judgement by arguing that the body needed
time to mature so as to reveal its glandular secrets. This emphasis on a
freedom of development formed part of Hirschfeld’s general liberation-
ist project. Hirschfeld believed that society would be best served by
granting the greatest possible freedom to the play of forces. … The

self-regulation of nature provides the best guarantee for the well-
being of the individual as well as of the whole. At least, it is far more
reliable than artificial rules and prohibitions imposed by human
beings. (Hirschfeld, 2006, p. 111)
Hirschfeld’s views on sexual development appear dynamic, but the

‘free play of forces’ has to be understood within a rigid temporal frame-
work that anticipates a moment of maturity. Puberty enables the ‘free
play of forces’, but it also takes on the burden of decision. For James
Kincaid (1992, p. 125), puberty is monstrous, ‘an awesome catastrophe’,
precisely because it allows for latency and suspense, but in doing so
‘take[s] on the responsibility for releasing all that pent-up pressure’.
The delay of sexual difference in childhood is possible only because

the period is temporally limited. Registering the child as both Paul and
Paula, sex determination is delayed, but only in anticipation of a future
moment of certainty, a turning point that will reveal sexual truth.
The ‘free play of forces’ Hirschfeld affirmed was possible only under
the condition of an anticipated goal of development that replaces
change and fluidity with permanence and stability.11
The ‘monstrous’ quality of puberty and the anxieties it produced are
expressed in Neugebauer’s description of the moment of sex discovery
in a case of uncertain sex:
in the majority of cases the true sex, even when indeterminate at

birth, declares itself spontaneously at puberty. … When about 16
the young person notices erections of the clitoris, and complains to
her mother of emissions of viscous fluid. The voice changes, and the
mother wonders that the menses do not appear. … All in contact
with the youth are struck by the appearance presented, which is
rather that of a boy disguised in petticoats than that of a real girl.
The parents for many years have had doubts as to the sex of their
child, and now … at last recognise the error of sex. Or under other
circumstances, unbalanced by the effect of voluptuous dreams, the
youth may … finally attempt sexual intercourse as a woman; and
so, the sexual instinct … may cause the disclosure of the error of
sex. Or again, all doubt may be dissipated by a female friend already
versed in sexual life, or by a doctor consulted by the girl herself, or
by the mother, in order to know why at the age of 18 the catame-
nia [menstruation] have not appeared, and whether the girl is fit to
marry and bear children, &c. Often enough the doctor … by the aid
of the microscope will be able to decide whether the fluid ejaculated
is semen with or without spermatozoa, or otherwise. (Neugebauer,
1903, pp. 242–3)
Neugebauer lists all the possible ways in which the youth can go astray
only to confirm that all of these detours ultimately lead to the rec-
ognition of a singular, true sex. A couple of sentences later, however,
Neugebauer adds: ‘but though in the majority of cases the true sex
can be determined at puberty, in a certain number the task before the
138 Jana Funke
medical man is a much more difficult one’ (ibid., p. 242). This aside is
telling in that it indicates that the unruly, overproductive and leaky
pubescent body might not so easily be contained within a safely cir-
cumscribed temporal period. Puberty as a temporal framework might be
prone to leakage itself. The considerable length of Neugebauer’s quota-

tion as well as the searching tone of his description, which is anything
but affirmative, undermines the faith in puberty he is trying to convey.
Rather than providing a single moment of certainty, puberty has to
accommodate a bewildering contingency and it ultimately opens up the
possibility that this transitional phase might never come to an end. As a
turning point, puberty can confirm a latent truth that has been there all
along at the same time as it can destroy all sense of coherence.
Health, Coherence and Literariness
If sexological narratives of sexual development were undercut by a

potentially disruptive turning point, how did this affect the way in
which subjects came to present themselves in personal narratives? To
begin, it is important to point out that the turning point is a central
trope in autobiographical tradition from Augustine to the Romantics
and beyond. According to Patrick Riley (2004, p. 3), the turning point
in autobiographical discourse ‘provides an anchor and source of intel-
ligibility for autobiographical narrative, [but] also serves to disrupt any
stable self-definition’. Writing about Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s cases,
Oosterhuis maintains that case histories tend to consist of teleological
narratives culminating in the discovery and establishment of the true
self. Even though self-knowledge is only obtained later in life, usu-
ally during puberty, it is often implied that this self ‘had always been
there but was hidden and had to be traced’ (Oosterhuis, 2000, p. 225).
Latency comes to motivate the narrative drive towards the turning
point, which is always already anticipated. As a result, narrative coher-
ence is achieved even in the face of disruption. In cases of uncertain
sex, the unsettling quality of the turning point is more prominent
than in cases of homosexuality, as the discovery of the ‘new’ sex often
involved medical intervention and a change of legal and social status.
Nevertheless, the same narrative strategies of suspense and anticipation
are used in order to incorporate the turning point into a continuous
narrative.
What is at stake in the production of narrative coherence is the repres-
sion of sexual dissidence: a period of latency is overcome in favour of
a single true sex, or a stable sexual identity, which is, furthermore,
retrospectively projected onto the past. In his introduction to the mem-

oirs of Herculine Barbin, Foucault (1980, p. x) famously blames medical
authorities for forcing ‘young people … [to] recall that every one of you
has a sex, a true sex’. While it is true that sexological discourse failed to
deconstruct sexual dimorphisms and often maintained binary under-

standings of heterosexuality and homosexuality, it is also important
to question what other purposes narrative coherence served. Because
of their political and humanist agenda, Ellis and Hirschfeld were keen
to oppose degenerative understandings of homosexuality and sexual
dissidence more generally. For Ellis, the case histories could prove the
health of the sexual invert. In the third edition of Sexual Inversion, he
emphasizes that ‘inverts seem to find the highest degree of success
and reputation’ in the field of literature (Ellis, 1915, p. 341). Similarly,
Hirschfeld (1991, p. 141) describes transvestites as ‘intelligent, consci-
entious people who have diverse interests and a broad education’. He
explains that this intelligence ‘is also seen in their descriptions, which
I reproduced here verbatim in part to give an image of their intellectual
abilities beside the depiction of their emotional life’ (ibid.). Pointing
to the ‘intellectual abilities’ of the subjects of their case histories, Ellis
and Hirschfeld tried to disprove degenerative interpretations of their
work. They were keen to show that the subjects of their cases were
physically different yet at the same time not morbidly degenerate.
Because degenerative models conflated physical and intellectual devel-
opment, intelligence – the very ability to structure and present thoughts
coherently and sensibly – could be read as a sign of physical and mental
health.12
Hirschfeld also maintained that first-person patient narratives would
be more accessible to the general public and more likely to evoke feel-
ings of sympathy than the more neutral and sterile medical reports. In
contrast to Krafft-Ebing, who would publish parts of his work in Latin
to limit his readership, and Freud’s case studies, which were meant
to prove psychoanalytic theories largely to a professional audience,
Hirschfeld believed that personal accounts could serve a more direct
didactic purpose and sought to make them accessible to a general audi-
ence.13 Because of its didactic and emotive force, the autobiographical
case study was viewed as instrumental in the struggle for the social
acceptance of sexual dissidence. In the foreword to Baer’s memoirs,
Presber argues along similar lines when he asserts that Baer’s story
will serve a didactic purpose and help to enlighten those ‘standing at
the gravesides of youths who have killed themselves’, as well as those
about to commit ‘the terrible mistakes in child rearing’ that would
140 Jana Funke
drive children like Baer to suicide in the first place (Presber, 2006, p. 5).
Baer himself stresses in the final sentence of his memoirs that he wrote
the text as ‘a contribution to modern psychology … in the interest of
science and truth’ (Baer, 2006, p. 108). Presber and Baer are thus keen
to legitimize the publication of the memoirs by emphasizing not only

their veracity, but also their didactic function.
One of the underexplored connections between sexology and psy-
choanalysis is that both disciplines draw on a similar understanding of
health as related to coherent narrative.14 According to Stephen Marcus
(1990, p. 61), Freud believed that
a coherent story is in some manner connected with mental health. …

On this reading, human life is, ideally, a connected and coherent
story, with all the details in explanatory place, and with everything
(or as close to everything as is practically possible) accounted for, in
its proper causal or other sequence. And inversely, illness amounts at
least in part to suffering from an incoherent story or an inadequate
narrative account for oneself.
If Freud did maintain the ideal of a coherent narrative, he was also

clearly aware of the fact that narrative coherence could only remain
a laboriously constructed fiction. To be sure, Freud did not expect his
patients to narrate their lives in a coherent fashion. In the case history
of Dora, he comments on a female patient who delivered a story that
‘came out perfectly clearly and connectedly in spite of the remarkable
events it dealt with’ (Freud, 2001, n. 17). Freud concluded that the
woman was healthy and did not need psychoanalytic treatment. In
contrast to Ellis and Hirschfeld, who wanted to give evidence of their
patients’ health through narrative, Freud believed that only individuals
who struggled to narrate their lives coherently should be patients in
the first place. Psychoanalysis and sexology thus both equate narrative
coherence with health, but choose the subjects for their case histories
based on opposite criteria. Indeed, Freud would place the burden of
constructing a coherent narrative on the analyst, not the analysand. It
was the psychoanalyst who had to create meaning out of the incoher-
ent narratives his or her patient delivered. Of course, the Freudian case
studies generally fail to achieve the semblance of coherence and Freud
himself would draw attention to the open-ended nature of his writing
(Moi, 1981, p. 63). Because of the fragmented nature of Freud’s cases,
they are often read as literary rather than scientific texts. While Freud’s
rhetoric merits the critical attention it has received, reading his case
histories purely as literature can also, as Laura Marcus (1994, pp. 84–5)
maintains, underplay the remaining tension between literature and
science and obscure the fact that Freud continued to be invested in the
referential and therapeutic function of narrative.
If readings of Freudian case histories tend to come down in favour

of literary analysis, the literary dimension of sexological case histories
is often ignored. According to Angus McLaren (1999, p. 87), however,
sexology ‘was as much a literary as a scientific undertaking’. Hirschfeld,
Ellis and John Addington Symonds were actively involved in the liter-
ary culture of their time and allusions to literary works abound in sexo-
logical publications. Moreover, many of the case histories, especially
in Sexual Inversion, were themselves written by professional writers like
Edward Carpenter or Symonds, and Hirschfeld’s patients were often
highly educated, too. In addition, sexologists shared an understand-
ing that literariness could point to a useful flexibility of expression. In
Transvestites or the Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress (1910), Hirschfeld explicitly
links the autobiographical case study to the realm of literary production
by affirming the ‘excellent connection of the erotic with the literary
(and, on a broad scale, artistic) invention of stories’ (Hirschfeld, 1991,
p. 78). The reason behind this positive attitude towards literary writing
can be explained by the tendency to move away from fixed categorical
schemes and towards more open models such as Hirschfeld’s Sexuelle
Zwischenstufen (sexual intermediacy). Instead of trying to make diverse
bodies fit a narrow scheme, the explosion of sexological vocabulary
pointed to a more complex and multifaceted understanding of sex.
While early sexological writings by the likes of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs
and Krafft-Ebing are famous for their overabundance of taxonomical
neologisms, the absurdity of these ever more elaborate classificatory
systems was recognized by Ellis and Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld’s model of
sexual intermediacy (potentially comprising, according to his calcula-
tions, 43,046,721 different combinations of sexual types) offered a
much more flexible framework that did away with the need for overly
elaborate terminological classification (ibid., p. 227). Affirming that
‘there are more emotions and phenomena than words’, Hirschfeld
hoped that a literary and not strictly referential employment of words
could ‘stretch’ language so as to accommodate those intermediate sub-
jects that could not easily be positioned in pre-established categories
(ibid., p. 17). This means that the ‘success’ of a case history was not
measured in terms of a dogmatic adherence to sexological terminol-
ogy, but was open to more flexible and inventive approaches. If many
sexological case histories read more ‘smoothly’ than Freud’s, this is not
142 Jana Funke
necessarily because sexology enforced more rigid rules but because it did
not attempt to subsume a variety of diverse life histories under a single
theoretical dogma.15
Surprisingly, this emphasis on individual freedom did not lead
Hirschfeld to challenge the assumption of a ‘true’ sex, which was

posited as the telos of sexual development. It is the joint demand of a
single sex and a coherent narrative that necessitated a great degree of
literary skill from individuals like Baer. Like many of the individuals
who provided case histories for Ellis and Symond’s Sexual Inversion, Baer
was widely read and highly educated. In fact, Martha had been active in
the women’s movement and had worked as a journalist before her sex
change. This biographical detail is important as I am interested in the
manipulation of narrative and, by extension, temporality that facilitates
Baer’s construction of self in the memoirs. As Rohy (2009, p. xiv) points
out, literary analysis draws attention to ‘the artificial temporality of nar-
rative form [and] alerts us to the fictional dimension’ of time lines that
might otherwise be assumed to be ‘natural’ or ‘obvious’. The turning
point itself is a literary device, which Baer can use to his advantages
due to his wide knowledge of literature and journalistic expertise.16
Through the narrative manipulation of temporal order and the evoca-
tion of gendered models of temporal consciousness, Baer succeeds in
producing a sense of coherence that works with rather than against the
discontinuities of his life story.
Proleptic Masculinity
Throughout the memoirs, Baer emphasizes the latency of his masculin-

ity by using the narrative strategy of anticipation or prolepsis, which is
commonly found in autobiographical writings. First-person narrative,
Gérard Genette (1980, p. 67) argues, ‘lends itself better than any other
to anticipation, by the very fact of its avowedly retrospective character,
which authorizes the narrator to allude to the future and in particular to
his present situation, as these to some extent form part of his role’. On
the opening page, Baer (2006, p. 7) states: ‘I was born a boy, raised a girl’.
In doing so, he confirms his masculinity despite the fact that its medical
affirmation is delayed until the end of the narrative. As a result, Baer’s
female past is determined by the implied viewpoint of his future male
self so that Martha Baer’s ‘boyish’ interests, her desire for other girls and
her pressing urge to go to university and obtain an education are reduced
to premature expressions of a belatedly affirmed masculinity. In fact,
the majority of events and information Baer chooses to include in his
narrative point to his future sense of self, so that the memoirs become
the very archive of an always already anticipated masculinity. Baer’s
rhetoric is essentialist, as he describes that the awareness of his as yet
unconfirmed masculinity was ‘stronger than all logic’ (ibid., p. 89). The
deterministic trajectory of the narrative is expressed on the opening page

of the memoirs: ‘the fabric of my life was twisted from tangled threats
until, with a mighty blow, the inner nature of my masculinity tore apart
the veil of half-truths that upbringing, habit, and vital necessity had
spun about me’ (ibid., p. 7). The image Baer employs juxtaposes gradual
and organic growth with an artificially imposed cocoon, a cultural
straitjacket of femininity that his masculinity has finally penetrated. He
asserts a material knowledge that provides stability at the same time as it
is changing and evolving. This paradox is resolved through the turning
point, which determines the direction of change and gives coherence to
the narrative as a whole. Importantly, the essentialist logic of the mem-
oirs not only insists on sexual dimorphism, but is also heteronormative.
Baer describes again and again that girls are drawn to him and implies
that this is because they instinctively react to his masculinity.
Since the proleptic structure of the narrative leaves no room for dissi-
dent sexualities, the reader of the memoirs finds himself or herself in an
ethical and methodological dilemma. In her reading of the David Reimer
case, Judith Butler (2004, pp. 57–74) describes this problem in terms of
‘doing justice to someone’.17 Can we do justice to Baer by affirming
his masculinity? Or do we have to assume that this masculinity was
violently inscribed by rigid sexual – and narrative – norms, so that we
can only do justice to Baer by unravelling his narrative and undoing the
masculinity he claims? Rather than attempt to offer a universal solu-
tion to this problem, I show that Baer himself invites a reading of his
memoirs that opens up an important critical space, which allows us to
go beyond his masculine identification without denying it.
In his narrative, Baer often seeks to draw attention to the difference
between the self in the present, which knows that he is male, and the
self in the past, which lacks this certainty. In the following passage,
which describes the feelings of his former female self (Martha, at the
age of nine), the clash between the knowledge of the present and the
knowledge of the past is strongly pronounced:
being brought up as a girl, being called by a girl’s name had had

a suggestive influence on me. I … was entirely convinced that I was a
girl, just a bit different from most, which did not appear at all strange
to me. Since my nature was different from all theirs, why should my
144 Jana Funke
body not be so, too? … And then, all at once, I became conscious:
yes, the others, down there, they were certainly very different! And
a nameless fright took hold of me. (Baer, 2006, p. 31)
Baer transitions from a knowing point of view of the present to the

more ambivalent feelings of his past self. Believing herself to be a girl,
Martha nevertheless has an awareness of the fact that she fails to fulfil
the norms of femininity. Because the narrative is not overdetermined by
Baer’s belatedly affirmed masculinity here, the girl lacks the language to
express herself – her feelings remain ‘nameless’. In keeping with Baer’s
use of pseudonymy, Martha Baer is ‘no body’. In Butler’s words, she is
‘the human in its anonymity, as that which we do not yet know how
to name or that which sets a limit on all narrating … the human as it
speaks itself at the limits of what we think we know’ (Butler, 2004, p.
74). Martha’s unspeakable and unknowable feelings present a rupture in
Baer’s narrative and threaten to undermine its continuity.
This sense of confusion increases during puberty. The physical and
emotional changes do not produce a self-knowing subject, but instead
cause a deepening sense of desperation. This anxiety is again con-
veyed through passages that are not structured through prolepsis. Baer
describes, for instance, how at the age of fifteen,
the old doubts began anew. Whatever could I be? Boy or girl? If I was
a girl, why were my breasts not growing? Why did I alone remain
childish and undeveloped? … If I was a boy, why, then, this girl’s
name? All the deep suffering, which I had thought was behind me,
began again and tormented me dreadfully. (Baer, 2006, p. 55)
The pubescent Martha has found a language to describe her own ambiv-
alence, which is no longer nameless: she is either a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl’.
The struggle of self-discovery is here mapped more explicitly onto the
pubescent body. Martha does not menstruate, but she cannot yet read
this absence as an affirmation of her masculinity. Instead, she believes
that she suffers from consumption and is doomed to die. Martha lapses
into self-effacement and becomes ‘no body’, as she lacks the necessary
knowledge to signify her body successfully in the present.
Baer’s memoirs do describe the turning point at which his ‘true’ sex
is discovered and Martha’s feelings are retrospectively accounted for.
However, the ending of the narrative unsettles rather than affirms
Baer’s masculinity. Baer subverts the turning point, as he implies that
his masculinity is not fully established through the medical diagnosis.
His physical sex has been affirmed as male, but he has yet to overcome
serious practical obstacles that keep him from functioning successfully
as a man in society. He stresses, for instance, that finding employment
will be difficult for ‘Norbert O. Body’ because all of his ‘certificates or
testimonials’ are issued to ‘Nora O. Body’ (ibid., p. 106). While Baer’s

narrative reads as if his future is decidedly that of a man, a closer con-
sideration reveals that this future masculinity is never actually obtained,
but merely anticipated. His masculinity is deferred into a future that
lies outside of the text so that he is not quite male yet; he is on the
threshold of becoming a man. As Mark Currie (2007, p. 20) points out,
in most written fictional narratives, the future is already-there and has a
structuring role in the sense that it can be anticipated, driving the plot
by providing a straightforward goal of development. In his memoirs,
Baer does not avail of the option of presenting a stable masculine future.
In delaying the affirmation of his masculinity beyond the ending of the
narrative, he also problematizes its proleptic reach, as his masculinity
is never secured. It is possible to argue that the breakdown of narrative
structure results from the fact that the prescriptive narrative of the case
history cannot do justice to the complexities of lived experience, but
the point is that Baer could have invented a stable masculinity and did
not do so, choosing an open-ended narrative instead.
The question that arises is why Baer would choose to subvert the logic
of anticipation that seems to determine the success of his narrative and,
by extension, masculinity. Interestingly, we know that Baer did not
only allow for the memory of Martha Baer to persist in his memoirs.
Hermann Simon has uncovered important information about Baer’s life
after the sex change. Baer maintained the letter M. to refer to his second
name, as he still wanted to be associated with the articles he had pub-
lished as Martha Baer, for instance. While he would sometimes explain
that the ‘M.’ stood for Max or Meir, it nevertheless remained as a legible
trace of Martha (Simon, 2006, p. 115). At the very least, this suggests
that Martha did not interfere with Baer’s masculinity and that he did
not, at all cost, try to obscure the memory of his former female self.
Drawing on gendered figurations of temporal consciousness at the
turn of the twentieth century, it is possible to argue that the memory
of a former female self could have allowed Baer to affirm rather than
undermine his male identity. This reading becomes available through
the misogynistic evolutionary logic that characterized gendered and
racialized discourses on memory and maturity in the early twentieth
century. Femininity was seen as a hierarchically lower and tempo-
rally earlier stage of development. This stage could be overcome
146 Jana Funke
via the employment of man’s synthesizing memory and intellectual

ability. Presber’s invocation of the ‘male’ task to construct a meaningful
narrative in the foreword reminds us of this connection between mascu-
linity and memory that emerged in highly influential texts such as Otto
Weininger’s Sex and Character, first published in German in 1903 and in

English in 1906.18 Weininger presents the argument that woman is inca-
pable of memory, whereas man has the ability to be ‘omnireminiscent’,
to remember everything and synthesize it in a coherent narrative:
this essential continuity, which alone can fully assure a human being
that he is alive, that he exists, that he is in the world … is totally
absent in women. When a woman contemplates her life … it does not
appear to her under the aspect of an inexorable, incessant thrust-
ing and striving, but she continually gets stuck at individual points.
(Weininger, 2005, p. 109)
Weininger believed that women are ‘stuck’ in time and cannot progress,
as they are determined by sexual instinct and reproductive function.
Through this biologization of feminine time, woman is positioned in
a past that precedes male consciousness and individualization. She
emerges as the predecessor of a self-conscious and temporally complex
male subject, who recognizes the disparity of life but can still produce
a continuous narrative.
Taking into consideration how gender came to inflect understandings
of temporal consciousness, it is possible that Baer kept his middle name
and published his memoirs under a gender-ambiguous pseudonym
precisely because he wanted to remind us of the femininity he had left
behind. In this sense, the pseudonym ‘N. O. Body’ does not only signify
effacement, but rather reminds us of the past Baer has overcome.19 It
is only by virtue of his masculinity that he can rise above a position of
uncertainty, remember and begin to align the memory of the girl he used
to be with the knowledge of the man he is in the present. The fact that he
would choose an English pseudonym for the articulation of his German-
Jewish self is not only an expression of displacement, but also, as Helga
Thorson (2009, p. 151) maintains, a sign of worldliness and education
that further underlines his ability to work together elements that are
usually thought of as oppositional. The final deferral of a future certainty
can also be read as an attempt to emphasize temporal consciousness. By
‘failing’ to conclude his narrative, he proves himself capable of recogniz-
ing the continuous quality of time. He anticipates an open-ended future
against which the will of the male subject can be measured in the first
place. If Baer breaks away from the coherent structure of the case study
to emphasize the distance between the man he is and the woman he
was, it is not because he wishes to undermine his masculinity; nor is it a
revolt against sexological norms. Instead, the ability to write coherently
about the self is proven in the face of the discontinuity of his life story, of

which he reminds us. In doing so, Baer proves not only his intelligence
and his health, but also his masculinity.
Sex and Character would have held particular significance for the
German-Jewish Baer, because of Weininger’s preoccupation with the
figure of the male Jew.20 In Weininger, the individual’s ability to memo-
rize and narrate the past, and to arrive at a coherent sense of self, carried
implications with regard to not only the sexualized, but also the racial-
ized Jewish body. Weininger, who was Jewish himself, maintained that,
like women, Jews were incapable of memory and self-reflection. His
writings are an example of the way in which temporality is often used to
reinforce sexualized and racialized ideologies: for instance, through an
association with the primitive.21 Sander L. Gilman (2006b, pp. xix–xxiv)
has shown how Baer obscures his Jewish identity in the memoirs, while
still maintaining an outsider status: for instance, by describing his line-
age as Catholic and French. Gilman argues that Baer’s Jewish identity
further problematized Baer’s masculinity, as the Jewish body was per-
ceived as effeminate because of negative cultural interpretations of cir-
cumcision and the myth of male menstruation, which was specifically
targeted towards the figure of the male Jew.22 If Baer censored his
Jewish identity in the memoirs, he certainly did not share Weininger’s
anti-Semitism. Quite the contrary, Gilman argues that the affirmation
of Baer’s masculinity helped him to overcome the hatred of the Jewish
body and to embrace his own identity as that of a ‘healthy, Jewish male’
(ibid., p. xxiv). Indeed, on the last page, Baer (2006, p. 108) describes
himself as ‘a lonely wanderer [who] found the right path’. The effemi-
nate figure of the wandering Jew is here overcome by turning towards
a masculine identity. Since Baer’s masculinity remains anticipatory, he
refigures the instability of the displaced Jewish self in positive terms
by defining it against an atemporal femininity. His displacement sets
him apart from an image of woman as the eternally self-same, who,
according to Rita Felski (1995, p. 41), has never left or lost her home.
Remembering Martha
If the narrative construction of Baer’s masculinity is achieved through

misogynist figurations of time, we also need to acknowledge that
148 Jana Funke
Martha Baer was a feminist and there is no evidence that Baer sought to
distance himself from his earlier belief in women’s rights at any point
of his life. Quite the contrary, the fact that he chooses the name ‘Nora’
for his female alter ego is telling, as it is a direct reference to Ibsen’s
New Woman play The Doll’s House (1879) (Thorson, 2009, p. 157). It is

indeed ironic that Martha’s desire to escape the restraints of her gender
role would lead to the effacement of her femininity. Moreover, as a
result of Baer’s masculinity, Martha’s erotic feelings for other women
are translated into a heteronormative framework. Baer’s masculinity is
predicated upon the overcoming of his former female self, to which he
draws attention by creating breaks in his otherwise coherent narrative.
Even though these nicks are motivated by a reductive understanding of
feminine time, they offer a glimpse of masculine, women-loving Martha
Baer – without doing injustice to Karl Baer’s masculinity.
The relationship between Baer’s former female and current male self
can be described using Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of ‘temporal drag’.
Temporal drag, applied to Baer’s memoirs, is not only a form of cross-
gendered identification, but describes ‘retrogression, delay, and the
pull of the past upon the present’ (Freeman, 2000, p. 728). Temporal
drag allows us to think about the way in which the past weighs upon
the present in the course of individual development. We can consider
post-operative transsexual bodies, which, according to Sandy Stone
(2006, p. 230), fail to achieve the invisibility often desired by the trans-
sexual subject because of the ‘(inter-)textual violence inscribed in the
transsexual body’. The technically altered transsexual body that does
not ‘pass’ is an anachronism in that it carries traces from a past that is
seemingly incompatible with the present. Similarly, Butler draws atten-
tion to the surgical intervention that is supposed to constitute the nor-
mality of the intersexed body. Rather than producing ‘normal’ bodies,
however, Butler suspects that ‘these bodies, precisely because they are
“inconceivable”, [are] subjected to medical machinery that marks them
for life’ (Butler, 2004, p. 64). Here, the scars of surgical intervention act
as physical reminders that the body is not a ‘blank slate’ in each suc-
cessive moment of interpellation, but should instead be viewed as an
intertext or palimpsest that continues to carry the traces of the past
into the present. In this reading, the gender constituted in the present
moment is not radically new but constructed anachronistically: that
is to say, through an engagement with the past. What is interesting
about Baer’s memoirs is that, in the temporal economy of the text,
remembering Martha is not a sign of a failed masculinity, but a means
of affirming his masculine (and Jewish) identity. Baer uses the queer
temporal mechanisms of anachronism to straight ends – straight in the

double sense of affirming a heteronormative masculinity and producing
a coherent narrative of emergence despite anachronistic leaps.
In the context of the present-day discourse of queer temporality, Of
a Man’s Maiden Years poses a double challenge. First, the text reminds

us of the need to pay heed to the historically specific constructions of
time, which are often gendered and racialized, and which can serve to
further question and enrich our understanding of queer and straight
temporalities. Second, Baer’s memoirs take us beyond one-sided under-
standings of relations to time that inscribe the individual in either a
queer or a straight temporal logic. After all, the anachronistic moments
in which Martha can be remembered are only queer (in the sense
of strange or odd) if we hold on to a set of related fictions: that of a
straight self, which is self-identical over time, and that of a queer self,
which either embraces radical fluidity and temporal fragmentation, or
desperately tries to efface the pull of the past that renders it anachro-
nistic. It is because Baer’s narrative does not fit neatly into any of these
categories that his case allows us to rethink the relation between sex
and time.
Notes
1. I am very grateful to Laura Marcus for her help with an earlier draft of this
chapter. I also thank Ben Davies and Sherri L. Foster for their comments and
criticism. Ideas used in this chapter have been presented in several confer-
ence papers; I am grateful for the suggestive feedback I have received on these
occasions. In addition, I would like to thank Hermann Simon, who has been
very generous in sharing information about Baer’s life and making published
and unpublished materials available to me.
2. See Simon (2004) for a discussion of the filmic adaptations of Baer’s
memoirs.
3. See Brenner (1998) for a discussion of the reception history of the text.
4. I am using male pronouns throughout. This is partly for the sake of conven-
ience and readability, but also to underline my affirmative reading of Baer’s
masculinity.
5. For more biographical information on Baer, see, for instance, Gilman (2006b),
Simon (2006) and Thorson (2009).
6. I am using the term sexology to refer to a variety of medical and psychological
discourses on gender and sexuality that emerged during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.
7. Hirschfeld would use Baer as a case study in several of his own publications.
For example, Baer appears as Anna Laabs in Hirschfeld’s Sexualpathologie
(1921–8, pp. 44–8) and is also referenced in Transvestites (Hirschfeld, 1991,
p. 63) as N. O. Body. See Thorson (2009, pp. 155–6) for a comparative discus-
sion of Baer’s memoirs and Hirschfeld’s case studies.
150 Jana Funke
8. Dreger (2000) has argued that the gonads emerged as the key marker of sex
towards the end of the nineteenth century and maintains that the age of
gonads ended in 1915. Even though sexologists like Krafft-Ebing explicitly
questioned the gonadal criteria at least ten years earlier, Dreger is right in
pointing out that, at least theoretically, the gonads were central in discussions
of sexual determination over the course of the late nineteenth century.

9. Following Foucault’s discussion of enforced sexual confessions in History of
Sexuality, Volume 1 (originally published in 1976), the case history had, for
a long time, been seen as a purely regulatory genre. However, more recent
work has drawn attention to the more interactive relationship between
patients’ voices and sexological authority. See, for instance, Oosterhuis
(2000).
10. I am using the term ‘puberty’ rather than the more discursive alternative,
‘adolescence’, to point to the tension between physiological changes that
could not yet be regulated hormonally in the early twentieth century, and
cultural constructions of human development.
11. What becomes apparent here is a more fundamental problem with
Hirschfeld’s model of sexual intermediacy. In principle affirming a multi-
plicity of sexual possibilities, Hirschfeld never successfully challenged the
categories of masculinity and femininity and remained committed to the
ideology of sexual dimorphism that required individuals to ‘settle’ into a
masculine or feminine identity after a period in which sexual determination
could be delayed (Sengoopta, 2006, nn. 251–2).
12. Ivan Crozier’s (2008, pp. 54–5) discussion of the letters exchanged between
Edward Carpenter and Ellis in the 1890s shows that both sexologists were
aware of this important apologetic function of the case study.
13. See, for instance, Hirschfeld’s comments on the ethical dimension of the
case history in his chapter on hermaphroditism in Sexualpathologie (1921–8,
p. 25).
14. See, for example, Herzer (1992, pp. 153–97) for a detailed overview of the
relationship between Hirschfeld’s sexological project and psychoanalysis.
15. Of course, considerable tension between the sexological framework and
the case histories remained. See, for instance, Hill (2005) for a discussion of
Transvestites.
16. It should be noted that all autobiographical writing, be it queer or straight,
demands narrative manipulation if the result is to be a coherent story. The
only difference with regard to Baer’s memoirs is that, as Presber’s foreword
implies, his masculinity is dependent on the success of his narrative.
17. Born in 1965 as a boy, David Reimer suffered a botched circumcision and
was raised as a girl under the supervision of Johns Hopkins University psy-
chologist John Money. At the time, the Reimer case was presented as proof of
the social construction of gender. However, not knowing that he was born a
boy, Reimer later rebelled against his assigned gender role and decided to live
as a man before committing suicide in 2004. The Reimer case is often used
in nature versus nurture debates regarding gender assignment, particularly
in the context of transgender and intersex studies.
18. There is no hard evidence of Baer’s familiarity with Weininger’s book, but
since it was one of the most influential texts of the time and Baer was
intimately familiar with psychological and sexological discourses, there is
little doubt that he would have read Weininger. Moreover, Weininger did not
produce his study in a cultural vacuum and many of the ideas he expressed
were also found in other contemporary texts.
19. Brenner (1998) also argues in favour of an affirmative reading of Baer’s
memoirs.
20. Baer’s Jewish identity and its significance in the memoirs has been discussed

in detail by Gilman (2006a, 2006b) and Thorson (2009).
21. Even though Rohy (2009) does not mention Weininger in particular, she
offers an insightful discussion of the intersections of race, sex and time in
early twentieth-century thought.
22. See Gilman (2006a, pp. 122–4) for a discussion of the significance of male
menstruation and Jewish identity in Baer’s memoirs.
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Weininger, O. (2005) Sex and Character (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
9
Transgender Temporalities and
the UK Gender Recognition Act

Emily Grabham1
Transsexuality consists in entering into a lengthy,

formalized, and normally substantive transition: a
correlated set of corporeal, psychic, and social changes.
(Prosser, 1998, p. 4)
Both the state and the market produce biopolitical status

relations not only through borders, the establishment
of public and private zones, and other strategies of
spatial containment, but also and crucially through
temporal mechanisms. (Freeman, 2005, p. 57)
This chapter focuses on the question of how time connects to legal regu-
lation. Specifically, it investigates how ideas about time work as tech-
niques of governance to create embodied legal subjects with particular
histories, trajectories and futures. It traces the temporal mechanisms at
play in one UK rights project in particular: the Gender Recognition Act
2004 (GRA). The GRA came into force on 4 April 2005 and allows trans
people to apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate, which grants the
legal rights, obligations and disadvantages of their ‘acquired’ gender. It
is the result of sustained activism by trans groups in the UK such as Press
for Change, and it follows and responds to decisions in the European
Court of Human Rights, which held the UK in breach of the European
Convention on Human Rights for failing to recognize trans people
in their ‘reassigned’ gender and for not granting trans people the right
to marry.2
As a governmental regime that seeks to ratify ‘acquired’ gender, the
GRA stands in contrast to other possible legal ‘solutions’ for the problems
associated with binary gender classification systems. In the United States,
154
Transgender Temporalities and the UK GRA 155
for example, an incremental approach is taken, state by state, for deter-

mining bureaucratic policy on gender assignment (Spade, 2008). In
Spain, laws are in place that allow trans people to change their name on
identity documents, but that do not meet wider social demands by trans
activists (Platero, 2008). Dean Spade has pointed out that simple reclas-

sification systems, such as the GRA, ignore the very instability of gender
as a category of identification and prevent more in-depth analyses of
why governments use gender to classify at all (Spade, 2008, p. 804). A
connected issue in the context of Spade’s argument is the question of
how reclassification systems, such as the GRA, actually work. My argu-
ment in this chapter is that as a method of (re)classification, the GRA
inflicts a fresh type of bureaucratic violence on trans people, this time
through the requirements for certification in one’s so-called ‘acquired’
gender.
Section 2(1)(c) of the GRA requires applicants to undertake that they
will remain in their ‘acquired’ gender ‘until death’. While narrowly
framed, the requirement may not appear to be a wholly surprising
move on the part of the UK government. Law and policy in the UK
and USA tend to present gender as stable, a notion that conflicts with
work in queer theory and feminist theory that challenges cohesive,
biological understandings of sex.3 Furthermore, the requirement fits
with an administrative or bureaucratic logic that prioritizes permanence
and stability. Within this logic, if citizens are to ‘change gender’, then
this transition should be final, irreversible and sanctioned by the state
through applicants meeting a number of pre-agreed criteria.
However, while gender has long been theorized within queer and
feminist theory as performatively produced (drawing on Butler, 1990,
1993), the lived reality of gender transitions as an ongoing set of
grounded, corporeal experiences should remind us of the dangers inher-
ent in positioning trans subjects at the vanguard of supposed gender
‘flexibility’. One of the damaging effects, therefore, of section 2(1)(c) of
the GRA is that it positions trans subjects as potentially ‘too fluid’ for
citizenship and in need of some kind of gender restraint. The moment of
recognition is a gender ‘arrival’, intelligible within citizenship discourse
as a point of inclusion and accession. It is, however, also a gender fixing.
It requires trans citizens to perform gender permanence in a way that
is not required of non-trans citizens. As Jay Prosser (1998, p. 32) has
pointed out in a different context, the elision of transgender with this
sort of exceptionalized flexibility allocates the ‘naturalness of sex’ to
non-transgendered people. This elision not only denies the aspiration of
many trans people ‘quite simply, to be’ (ibid.), it also avoids the lived,
156 Emily Grabham
embodied becomings that permeate the experience of sexed embodi-

ment in trans, and non-trans, people’s lives.
This chapter therefore has two aims. The first is to provide critical per-
spectives on the work that temporal concepts of permanence, certainty
and stasis perform in relation to the governmentality of gender recogni-

tion in the GRA. The second is to investigate how these temporal con-
cepts interact with the futurescape of trans subjects, drawing on Pierre
Bourdieu’s Pascalian Meditations (2000). Bourdieu’s theory of temporality
as it relates to gender formation is useful in that it emphasizes the role of
forward-looking, embodied action in the generation of time. In the first
section of the chapter, I outline Bourdieu’s social concept of time. I then
use Bourdieu’s work to critique the apparent ‘common sense’ of the per-
manence provision, and subject it to critique on its own administrative
terms. My argument is that even within its own apparent logic of gen-
der certainty and population management, the provision is superfluous
and unnecessary. Teasing apart some of the temporal constructs at play
in the GRA – concepts of permanence, certainty, stasis and infinity –
it is possible to show how these concepts attach trans recognition to
recent UK ‘social inclusion’ rhetorics, disciplining both trans legal
subjects and racialized outsiders. Finally, drawing on Bourdieu’s work,
I argue that a productive notion of ‘trans becomings’ provides alternative
perspectives on the ideas of futurity found in the GRA. Conceptualizing
time as embodied action offers a more incremental, and less abstract,
way of understanding the temporalities of gender transitions.
Bourdieu’s Embodied Production of Time
Bourdieu analyses social action and social agency through the concepts
of habitus (dispositions and systems of perception) and field (social
spaces and the normative structures attaching to these spaces). Habitus,
in particular, offers routes into thinking about the incorporation of
norms (including, for these purposes, temporal norms) into bodies in
a non-reductionist fashion, while also allocating sufficient weight to
the force or pull of social structures. Habitus reacts to field (or social
space) through a series of strategies, which, despite being generative, are
also limited by existing and historical conditions. Past experiences are
inscribed on the body through habitus; the relationship between field
and habitus therefore has corporeal effects (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 138).
Bourdieu’s theories therefore provide useful tools for investigating
durable gendered and classed systems of power, as well as the moments
when these systems ‘misfire’.4 What is relevant for the purposes of this
chapter is Bourdieu’s theory of the social construction of time, because

of the way it brings together social action, agency and corporeality.5
Bourdieu uses the notion of ‘temporalization’ to describe how practice
makes human time, in contradistinction to a metaphysical account
through which actors exist within, and act upon, empty time (ibid.,

p. 206). Bourdieu’s notion of the social practice of time is heavily
dependent on his account of how habitus (including the soma) responds
to field, or how situated agents orient themselves in relation to social
space. So, in describing the ways that agents produce the social by acting
in and on the world, Bourdieu centralizes a temporalized account of
habitus through its sense of the forthcoming:
habitus constructs the world by a certain way of orienting itself

towards it, of bringing to bear on it an attention which, like that of
a jumper preparing to jump, is an active, constructive bodily tension
towards the imminent forthcoming (allodoxia, the mistake we some-
times make when, waiting for someone, we seem to see that person
in everyone who comes along, gives an accurate idea of this tension).
(Ibid., p. 144)
The ‘jumper preparing to jump’, or the embodied sense of the forth-

coming, is an orientation to future action, but this orientation is
grounded in the present (ibid., p. 207), and is unconnected with rational
assessment of choices (ibid., p. 211). The practical sense of the forth-
coming resides within the interplay of habitus and field to the extent
that one is able to achieve a successful coincidence between what one
expects or aims for, on the one hand, and what the world delivers, on
the other (ibid., p. 208). It is therefore intricately linked with power and
the way that power acts on and in habitus and social space. The sense
of the forward motion of time is dependent upon agents having the
capacities to invest in the field. Or, in other words: ‘the practical rela-
tion to the forth-coming, in which the experience of time is generated,
depends on power and the objective chances it opens’ (ibid., p. 223).
In Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu uses the model of time as social
action to account for the particular relationship to time and the social
world found among the unemployed (the ‘subproletarian’), whose
engagement in the economic world is, he argues, restricted through lack
of economic and cultural capital (ibid.). He also points out that absolute
power operates through making oneself unpredictable, and that lesser
forms of power might take shape in making other people wait, or by
delaying, deferring, rushing into something, taking someone by surprise
158 Emily Grabham
or adjourning plans (ibid., p. 228). Elizabeth Freeman (2005, p. 57) picks

up on this strategic play on time when theorizing the effects of temporal
mechanisms in the management of populations. Waiting implies submis-
sion: the interested aiming at something greatly desired durably – that is
to say, for the whole duration of the expectancy – modifies the behaviour

of the person who ‘hangs’, as we say, on the awaited decision’ (Bourdieu,
2000, p. 228). If trans subjects are left to ‘hang’ on the decision of the
Gender Recognition Panel, then they are also required to foreclose their
future gender expressions through the permanence provision. As a form
of what Freeman (2005, p. 57) would term ‘chronopolitics’, therefore,
these provisions in the GRA link rights projects to biopolitical concerns.
It is these concerns that I want to unpack in the following sections.
Bureaucratized Transitions
Time is expressed, and lived out, through an imminent sense of the forth-
coming, but it is also the subject of power relations through which agents’
engagement with the field can be directed or shaped. The legislated wait-
ing periods contained in the GRA (two years of living in the appropriate
gender; the period that elapses while the panel makes a decision, for
example) exemplify the type of administrative ‘socially expected dura-
tion’ to which Bourdieu (2000, p. 230, citing Merton) explicitly refers
when theorising the politics of waiting. To the extent that it forces trans
subjects into regulated periods of gender performance (as opposed to
performativity), and also into ‘down-time’, while administrative deter-
minations are made about official gender, it is possible to argue that the
GRA displays the temporal characteristics of many types of contemporary
legislation and is not, on this basis, unique or exceptional. Nevertheless,
it is still worth emphasizing the point that administratively determined
time pervades the GRA. As a legislative response to the bureaucratic vio-
lence of gender classifications, the GRA shapes trans subjects’ experiences
of their own temporalized orientations in relation to future plans.
However, unlike the durations and waiting periods outlined above, the
permanence requirement does appear exceptional as a form of temporal
mechanism. While techniques of the type outlined above – durations,
waiting periods, as well as other types such as age limits – can be found
in many types of legislation, injunctions to remain in a particular state
‘until death’ are relatively rare. Furthermore, even within the logic of
administrative necessity, the legislative history of the GRA suggests that
the provision is surplus to requirements. As such, while it would be
expected that the GRA would contain temporal mechanisms that shape
trans subjects’ encounters with legal and bureaucratic bodies, the con-
tent of the permanence provision raises more questions than usual.
The requirement of gender permanence takes on a significant, yet
largely unexplained, role in the context of the policy statements and
debate around the GRA (previously, the Gender Recognition Bill). To

recap, section 2(1)(c) of the Act states that applicants intend to live
in their acquired gender ‘until death’. This is apparently an important
component of the gender recognition process, necessitating a statutory
declaration, yet it is given no mention (apart from merely being stated)
in the explanatory notes to the Act (Grabham, 2010). The ‘common
sense’ argument for the permanence requirement might be that the
government needs to know that trans people are not generally going
to change their recognized gender more than once for reasons of iden-
tification in relation to tax, national insurance, pensions, benefits,
health services and more. Yet, working within the apparent logic of the
GRA itself, and within the logic of administrative certainty, there are a
number of factors that undermine the need for such a declaration.
First, the Act already requires a wide range of detailed evidence from
every applicant on their diagnosis of gender dysphoria, any treatments
they have had in connection with gender transition and the extent to
which they have been living in their ‘acquired’ gender and for how
long. Against this array of documentary evidence (which takes consid-
erable time and effort to gather, and which itself is based on the policy
assumption that gender transitions rectify ‘mistakes’ of gender), the
requirement that an applicant make a declaration that they intend to
remain in their ‘acquired’ gender until death is arguably superfluous.
Second, the statutory declaration of intended gender permanence pre-
sumably has little effect on whether an applicant would ever transition
again. If the applicant decided later on to follow official procedures and
obtain a further certificate, then they would have to follow the same
process, giving the same degree of evidence, only this time in relation
to another gender. Third, government authorities can cope with people
changing other intrinsic aspects of their identity fairly often: they
respond to changes of address, people being born and dying, people
ageing and therefore becoming eligible and ineligible for benefits. They
also respond to people changing their marital or civil partnership status,
their motor vehicle, their employer (for purposes of tax and national
insurance) and their name.6 Gender transition, in purely administrative
terms, is no more a burden than any other of these life events. The pos-
sibility of gender transition happening more than once is not as much
of an administrative problem as the Act makes it seem.
160 Emily Grabham
The Governmental Logic(s) of Permanence
Unsurprisingly, there is an ideological as well as an apparent ‘common

sense’ element to the GRA’s permanence requirement. Unpacking the
language and rhetoric around trans citizenship further, a distinction
can and should be made between the logics of ‘permanence’, found

in government statements around trans inclusion, ‘certainty’, found
in an influential report of the UK Joint Committee of Human Rights
(JCHR), and the phrase ‘until death’, which is used in the legislation.
Permanence has three generally accepted uses: (a) something staying
the same; (b) something that happens all the time (it is repeated con-
tinuously); and (c) something existing always and forever (a reference
to time, as well as the permanent object, being infinite and without
bounds). Certainty, on the other hand, is linked with cognition. It
denotes a state of being in which the subject has no doubt about a given
set of facts. It also implies confidence. One difference between certainty
and permanence is therefore that certainty refers to a person’s or an
authority’s ability to distinguish, or rely on, another person’s gender
status, whereas permanence refers to the apparently enduring nature of
that gender identification. Government statements referring to ‘perma-
nence’, and the legislation itself, therefore go beyond the usual concern
with merely certifying identity, or matching the person to the passport,
for example. They figure as their trans object someone whose gender
identification is ‘forever’, not merely beyond uncertainty.
In this sense, the annexation of permanence (as opposed to certainty)
to the GRA, as well as its expression in the phrase ‘until death’, goes
beyond any administrative rationale of assisting in the identification
of post-recognition trans citizens. Further than that, it arguably pitches
the embodied trans subject into a vague and expansive temporal frame
that is usually reserved for marriage (‘until death do us part’) or abstract
invocations of patriotism and nationalism (‘forever England’). This
frame resonates with heteronormative or nationalistic faithfulness and
monogamy, as well as the (Christian) god-given right for a citizen,
a country or a nation state to self-identify and exist. The abstract future-
space of the post-GRA trans citizen is therefore not simply a mere
mechanism of certifying a person’s identity or status (remaining ‘the
same’ in order to be identified), and nor is it just recognition of what
a trans subject may always have felt about their gender. It invokes, and
works in conjunction with, two of those supposedly eternal constructs
that are thought to be most affected by trans recognition: the institution
of marriage, and, more relevant for the purposes of this chapter, the UK
as a nation, which ‘includes’ trans people and grants them rights to live
in their ‘acquired’ gender.
The temporal mechanisms contained in the GRA should therefore be
read in the context of the work that the GRA, as a national inclusion
project, performs in the current political moment. And it is at this point

that the GRA, in this particular manifestation and at this particular time,
could usefully be read as an example of what Jaspir Puar (2007, p. 2)
terms ‘homonationalism’. Homonationalism refers to the mutual inter-
relationship of queer recognition, across government policy and cultural
spheres, with processes of the ‘un-nationalization’ of racial others (ibid.,
p. 10; see also Jin Haritaworn, 2008). Any account of the GRA as a trans
recognition project should therefore bear in mind the broader flows of
nationalistic rhetoric in which many recent sexual citizenship initia-
tives operate. Putting this to work in the context of the GRA’s perma-
nence requirement, I am interested in how shared vocabularies of ‘social
integration’ and ‘social cohesion’ were circulated or relayed through UK
government policy statements on immigration and ‘race relations’, on
the one hand, and trans recognition, on the other, between 2000 and
2004. From examination of government policy statements from this
period, it becomes apparent that the ‘social inclusion’ of trans people
is represented synonymously with ‘cohesion’, ‘assimilation’ and ‘toler-
ance’. In parliamentary speeches and government statements, trans
people are characterized as a vulnerable ‘minority’ deserving of rights
and, importantly, protection.7 This ‘minority rights’ argument can be
found, first, in Rosie Winterton’s 2002 ‘Announcement on Transsexual
People’, in which she states that ‘society may reasonably be expected to
tolerate a minority of individuals living in dignity and worth in accord-
ance with the identity they are driven to assume’. It can also be found
in a similar announcement by Lord Filkin in 2003 referring to the gov-
ernment’s commitment to ‘understanding and recognising the needs
and aspirations of those members of society who are in a minority’.
And, finally, it can be found in David Lammy’s invocation in the House
of Commons debates on the Bill of a tradition in the UK of responding
to the ‘concerns and needs of minority groups’ (Hansard, 23 February
2004, col. 48).
Characterizing trans people as a minority clearly has important gen-
dering and discursive effects. However, in invoking ‘minority rights’
rhetoric, government statements also draw on, and reiterate, circuits of
meaning that traverse gender recognition and racialized rhetoric about
immigration and community cohesion. Indeed, Winterton expressly
connects minority rights arguments with the language of belonging
162 Emily Grabham
and assimilation. In her ‘Announcement on Transsexual People’, she

states: ‘we are committed to facilitating, as fully as possible, transsexual
people’s assimilation into the gender to which they feel they belong’.
For trans people, therefore, gaining rights means assimilation into
‘appropriately’ gendered society, with assimilation carrying the seman-

tic genealogy of racialized incorporation into a white Christian nation
state. Significantly, the Gender Recognition Bill’s third reading in the
House of Commons in February 2004 happened at the same time as
the Home Office was devising the Strength in Diversity consultation,
eventually published in June 2004. This consultation, which marked a
further step in the government’s juxtaposition of multiculturalist dis-
course with the discourse of social cohesion, aimed to secure support for
a cross-government race equality strategy for a ‘successfully integrated
society’ (Cheong et al., 2007, p. 26).
The conceptual shift in government rhetoric towards racialized cohe-
sion in the early 2000s should be tracked for its effects on legislated
trans inclusion, and vice versa. If in 2004 the New Labour government
was attempting to forge a culturally integrated (read: normatively
white, western and Christian) British society based on ‘shared’ morals,
a ‘shared’ concept of the future and commitment to family and com-
munity, then its social inclusion rhetoric also racializes trans inclusion
in important ways.8 Furthermore, when read alongside the culturally
white/western normative basis for ‘social inclusion’, the procedure
through which trans people gain recognition, or ‘citizenship’, begins
to resonate with an increasingly racially charged government rhetoric
around immigration. Trans people’s ‘inclusion’ is achieved, in the
GRA, through practices of recognition that form part of a broader
governmental paradigm of cohesion, racializing trans subjects through
gender/citizenship tests, identity tests and declarations of permanence
or allegiance. Evidently, the impact of this paradigm differs according
to relative positions of power, and this is where it could be argued that
the recognition of a normatively white trans subject explicitly through
racialized inclusion practices masks the racist functions of social cohe-
sion in queer recognition policies.
As a project of inclusion, assimilation and tolerance, the GRA works
symbolically to fold normatively white trans subjects into a racially
cohesive nation at a time when tolerance discourse is being used to
pathologize the UK’s religious and racial others.9 The symbolic effect
of ‘inclusion’ rhetoric that circulates ‘away’ from immigration ‘into’
gender recognition policy is therefore to downplay the centrality of race
to any cohesion project. Homonationalism works in this way across
apparently separate spheres of UK policy discourse to adopt gender ‘out-

siders’, through projects of sexual citizenship, into racialized processes
of ‘social inclusion’ and ‘social cohesion’. Beyond that, the existence of
trans subjects in projects of inclusion represents ‘social cohesion’ policies
from this period as not being ‘about race’. While the figure of the ‘bogus

asylum-seeker’ is very different from the figure of the ‘gender imposter’
that was evident in the House of Commons debates on the Gender
Recognition Bill, systems of race and gender recognition currently at
play in the UK contain mechanisms of legitimation that, in their reli-
ance on commitment to an ‘acquired’ gender, or commitment to citizen-
ship, are held in place by the normative weight of permanence.
Governmental Futurescape and Trans Becomings
Another significant problem with this racialized permanence provision

is obviously its effect in denying or obfuscating the lived futurity, and/
or becoming, of post-recognition trans subjects. Some trans citizens can
and will undoubtedly live with a sense of gender certainty, perceiving
both transition and the legal rights attached to gaining recognition
under the GRA as providing certainty for themselves in relation to
state bureaucratic structures. Certainty can therefore work both ways.
Furthermore, given the daily effects of bureaucratic and other violence,
the apparent normality gained from an officially sanctioned ‘crossing’
provides a significant degree of safety. However, within the logic of the
GRA, the injunction to demonstrate a ‘secure’ and permanent gender
identity ‘until death’ does not admit gender becoming post recognition.
It presents an arrival into citizenship as gender closure.
Paradoxically, this could be attributed to the familiar assumption
that trans subjects are more flexible (or gender variant) than non-trans
subjects. Governmentally, trans subjects are still perceived in terms
of fraud, mistaken identity or pathology, and non-trans subjects are
constructed as ‘natural’ and easily identifiable.10 Furthermore, if even
supposedly critical circles are annexing gender flexibility particularly
to trans people, then ideas of flexibility are likely to have an impact on
apparently progressive legislative initiatives, with varying effects. Judith
Halberstam (2005, p. 18) points out that ‘the transgender body has
emerged as futurity itself, a kind of heroic fulfilment of post-modern
promises of gender flexibility’.11 As she puts it:
transgenderism, with its promise of gender liberation and its patina of

transgression, its promise of flexibility and its reality of a committed
164 Emily Grabham
rigidity, could be the successful outcome of years of gender activism;

or, just as easily, it could be the sign of the reincorporation of a
radical subculture back into the flexible economy of post-modern
culture. (Ibid., p. 21)

If the neo-liberal response to queer rights claims is to promise citizen-
ship in return for responsibility and discipline, it is hardly surprising
that the GRA has alighted on the apparent flexibility of transgendered
people as a potential threat and a locus for discipline.12
The fact that trans subjects are being positioned in the GRA as inher-
ently flexible, and in need of being reminded of the responsibility
that officially sanctioned gender ‘crossings’ entail, provides further
evidence of how critical concepts of gender can be refracted into
more normative outcomes through engagement with law reform.13
However, it also reminds us to look for the temporal constructs that
underpin rights and citizenship projects.14 Working in an apparently
emancipatory mode, the GRA poses the act of claiming recognition as
a monumental, one-off event, which (a) freezes (otherwise ‘flexible’)
trans subjects in their ‘acquired’ genders, and non-trans subjects into
their ‘natural’ genders, and (b) pitches trans citizens into a becalmed
futurity. This temporal mechanism, as well as having nationalistic and
racialized effects, also refuses the continued practice, the continued
‘being otherwise’, of trans, as well as non-trans, subjectivities. As Paisley
Currah and Lisa Jean Moore (2009, p. 3) put it, writing in the context
of sex designations in New York City: ‘hailing trans-gender individuals
for resisting the classifications of M or F implies that there is no need
for non-trans people to oppose the classifications, to protest the impo-
sition of these classifications on their identity documents by burning
them’. The challenge, therefore, is to think through the permanence
requirement – its governmental significance and effects - without
positioning trans subjects at the vanguard of gender flexibility. This
requires an analysis of trans subjects’ incremental embodied practices
of becoming. Trans subjectivities are intelligible within future-oriented,
even linear, ideas of time to the extent that many trans subjects focus
on the process of ‘becoming’ that will result in more liveable gender
practices (Lamble, 2008). While clearly based on a narrative of pro-
gression, these processes of ‘becoming’ often depart from dominant
understandings of sexed physical maturation and the normative life
course. Recent work on queer temporalities provides useful perspec-
tives on this. While the influential work of Lee Edelman – particularly
his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) – critiques
a heteronormative politics of hope based on reproduction, other

theorists trace apparently queer temporal orientations that reframe the
demands of social and cultural reproduction by conceptualising the
future in novel ways. Nguyen Tan Hoang, for example, frames his inves-
tigation of queer temporalities around the transmission of queer experi-

ence from one generation to the next outside of the heteronormative
family model (Dinshaw et al., 2007, p. 183), while Halberstam (2005)
focuses on the temporalities of queer subcultural practices.
An orientation to the future, or to embodied becoming, is the means
by which social action, change and generation come about, and it is
therefore politically loaded. Taking this on board, therefore, it is also
important to work out how governmental mechanisms shape an agent’s
experience of the forthcoming. Trans subjects in the UK no doubt orient
themselves, somatically and otherwise, with varying degrees and types
of action in relation to the cluster of regulations connected with the GRA
(medical bureaucracies, legal requirements, the shaping and disciplining
of one’s gender presentation), depending on what they come to expect
from the field. That is to say, their sense of the forthcoming – their
expectations of the field and their social experiences of time – are shaped
by the histories (classed, racialized) already inscribed on the habitus. The
effects of this gender recognition project therefore manifest themselves,
arguably, through particular, gendered, somatic and behavioural traits
at the point of a subject’s engagement with the GRA. The GRA shapes
bodies and behaviours not through a top-down exercise of power, but
instead by influencing the field in such a way that the majority of trans
subjects in the UK, whatever their gender politics, need to orient them-
selves in relation to the regulations.
In this context, durations, waiting periods and down-time written
into the GRA could serve to intensify the somatic experience of gender,
‘hot-housing’ normative gender expressions and negotiations of identity
into particular moments or time spans, and concentrating the social
expression of particular gender ideologies. Prescribed periods of time
are conceptually linked with high pressure, and it is this spatiotemporal
experience of intensity through the bureaucratic processes of the GRA
that helps to move trans subjects ‘forward’ to a legally ratified transi-
tion. With these perspectives in mind, it is possible to conceptualize
trans becomings as embodied practices, dispositions and knowledges,
which are oriented to what is yet to be, and which contain within them-
selves (in the present moment) a ‘practical sense of the forthcoming’
(Bourdieu, 2000, p. 144). Governmentally managed and produced, this
practical sense emerges through the processes of measuring, providing
166 Emily Grabham
evidence, consulting medical and legal practitioners and making state-

ments of gender permanence that I have just highlighted.
On the other hand, intersecting and operating in conjunction with
governmental mechanisms are generative agentive and material cor-
poreal practices, which augur social change in tension with norma-

tive gender discourse. As trans becomings, these practices include an
extremely wide range of corporeal and social techniques, including sur-
geries, modes of socialising, dress and behaviour, through which gender
is inhabited in meaningful ways.15 All of these techniques constitute
incremental material and embodied dispositions with which agents
alter gender norms and live their gender transitions, through orienta-
tions to future action. It is in this context that the restorative practices
of trans surgeries make sense. As Prosser (1998, p. 83) puts it:
surgery is made sense of as a literal and figurative re-membering,

a restorative drive that is indeed common to accounts of reconstruc-
tive surgeries among nontranssexual subjects and perhaps inherent
in the very notion of reconstructive surgery.
If the ‘jumper preparing to jump’ can be governmentally shaped into cer-

tain gender outcomes through legal/bureaucratic mechanisms, then the
surgeries and other practices that go into the lived experience of sex and
gender can also create new and restorative becomings for trans subjects.
Surgeries and other practices of transition are therefore the locus for regu-
lation and discipline within transgender rights projects (Irvine, 2008),
but they simultaneously achieve what Bourdieu describes: an empowered
orientation to the forthcoming. Since the habitus works in critical ten-
sion with the social, it is possible to argue with Bourdieu that the embod-
ied habitus contains within it the productive possibilities of social life
more broadly defined. In other words, while subjects’ relationship with
power can be regulated through temporal mechanisms, the embodied
practice of a sex/gender identity provides the means for engaging with a
range of queer forthcomings, which ease trans subjects’ engagement with
the social field.
Concluding Remarks
Tracing the genealogies and effects of temporal mechanisms, such as

the permanence provision, can highlight the disciplinary structures
shaping and constraining trans legal subjects. However, opposing, or
at least providing alternatives to, this constricted future-space cannot
be discursively, or materially, challenged by reference to gender inde-

terminacy or trans marginality. Instead, what is needed is an account
of gender becomings that are grounded in social action and envisage a
productive orientation to the future. These becomings might, but need
not necessarily, draw on queer modes of conceptualising the future –

queer modes of anticipation. It is for this reason that accounting for
anticipation within social practice and transgender agency becomes
a central aspect of theorising the governmental effects of neo-liberal
‘inclusion’ projects such as the GRA. These smaller scale, more diffuse,
yet temporally expanded understandings of lived trans embodiment
provide alternatives to the ‘either/or’ time of the GRA. A ‘practical sense
of the forthcoming’ (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 144) is an attitude to the future,
which is rooted in the present and achieved through engaging with
others and with oneself – that is, it is achieved relationally as well as
individually.16 It is therefore less individualized than merely a personal
transition, more specific and localized than defining transitions by
means of a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, and many worlds away from stating
that one’s ‘acquired’ gender is to be maintained ‘until death’.
Notes
1. I would like to thank Davina Cooper, Paisley Currah, Sarah Lamble and the
reviewers for this publication for extended and insightful comments. Any
errors are my own. An earlier version of this chapter has been published in
the journal Social and Legal Studies (Grabham, 2010).
2. See Goodwin v. United Kingdom and I v. United Kingdom (2002), 35 EHRR 447,
engaging the European Convention on Human Rights Articles 8 (the right
to private and family life) and 12 (the right to marry). See also the decision
of the House of Lords in the case of Bellinger v. Bellinger (2003), 2 WLR 1174,
HL, which declared UK law incompatible with ECHR Articles 8 and 12 for
failing to recognize as valid the marriage of a trans woman to her husband.
3. See, for example, Cowan (2005, p. 72) and Currah and Spade (2007, p. 1).
4. See, for example, Lovell (2000), Adkins and Skeggs (2004) and Skeggs
(2004).
5. See also McNay (2003).
6. See further Spade (2008).
7. See David Lammy, Hansard, 23 February 2004, col. 53.
8. New Labour refers to the UK Labour Party’s reincarnation in the 1990s as
a ‘third way’ party – that is to say, a party that treads a line between neo-
liberal, pro-business policies and socialism. See further Levitas (2005).
9. See Fortier (2005), Yuval-Davis et al. (2005), Cheong et al. (2007) and Brown
(2008).
10. See further Currah and Moore (2009).
11. See also Prosser (1998).
12. See Stychin (2004).
168 Emily Grabham
13. See further Williams (2009).

14. See further Shapiro (2000).
15. See Prosser (1998).
16. See further Bourdieu (2000) and McNay (2004).
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Section 3
(Un)Becoming: Negativity, Death
and Extinction
10
Unbecoming: Queer
Negativity/Radical Passivity

Judith Halberstam
It goes without saying that to be among the callous,

the cynical, the unbelievers, is to be among the win-
ners, for those who have lost are never hardened to
their loss; they feel it deeply, always, into eternity.
(Kincaid, 1997, p. 3)
Utopias have always entailed disappointments and

failures. (Hartman, 2008, p. 46)
Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-

constitution and object-formation, the figure of the
woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness,
but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced
figuration of the ‘third-world’ woman caught between
tradition and modernity. (Spivak, 1988, p. 306)
Beginning with the injunction to ‘lose your mother’ and building

towards a conclusion that will advocate a complete dismantling of self,
this chapter explores a feminist politics that issues not from a doing
but from an undoing, not from a being or becoming woman but from a
refusal to be or to become woman as she has been defined and imagined
within western philosophy. We will trace broken mother–daughter
bonds towards an anti-Oedipal feminism that is nonetheless not a
Deleuzian body without organs. This feminism, a feminism grounded
in negation, refusal, passivity, absence and silence, offers spaces and
modes of unknowing, failing and forgetting as part of an alternative
feminist project, a shadow feminism that has nestled within more
positivist accounts and unravelled their logics from within. This shadow
173
174 Judith Halberstam
feminism speaks in the language of self-destruction, masochism, an

anti-social femininity and a refusal of the essential bond of mother
and daughter that ensures that the daughter inhabits the legacy of the
mother and, in doing so, reproduces her relationship to patriarchal
forms of power.

The tension between memory and forgetting tends to be distinctly
Oedipal, familial and generational but, we might ask, are there other
models of generation, temporality and politics available to queer culture
and feminism? The Oedipal frame has stifled all kinds of other models
for thinking about the evolution of feminist and queer politics. From
women’s studies professors who think of their students as ‘daughters’ to
next wave feminists who see earlier activists as dowdy and antiquated
mothers, Oedipal dynamics and their familial metaphors snuff out the
potential futures of new knowledge formations. Indeed, many women’s
studies departments currently struggle with the messy and even ugly
legacy of Oedipal models of generationality. In some of these depart-
ments, the Oedipal dynamics are also racialized and sexualized in that
an older generation of mostly white women might be simultaneously
hiring and holding at bay a younger generation of, often queer, women
of colour. The whole model of ‘passing down’ knowledge from mother
to daughter is quite clearly invested in white, gendered, heteronorma-
tivity; indeed the system inevitably stalls in the face of these racialized
and heterosexualized scenes of difference. And while the ‘mothers’
become frustrated with the apparent unwillingness of the women they
have hired to continue their line of inquiry, the ‘daughters’ struggle to
make the older women see that regulatory systems are embedded in the
paradigms they so insistently want to pass on. The pervasive model of
women’s studies as a mother–daughter dynamic ironically resembles
patriarchal systems in that it casts the mother as the place of history, tra-
dition and memory and the daughter as the inheritor of a static system
that she must either accept without changing or reject completely.
While Virginia Woolf’s famous line about women from A Room
of One’s Own (1929) – ‘we think back through our mothers if we are
women’ (1989, p. 76) – has been widely interpreted as the founding
statement of a new aesthetic lineage that passes through the mother
and not the father, the crucial part of the formulation concerns the
conditional part of the sentence. In fact the phrase ‘if we are women’
implies that if we do not think back through our mothers then we
are not women, and this broken line of thinking and unbeing of the
woman unexpectedly offers a way out of the reproduction of woman
as the other to man from one generation to the next. The texts that
Unbecoming: Queer Negativity/Radical Passivity 175
I examine in this chapter refuse to think back through the mother. They
actively and passively lose the mother, they abuse the mother, they
love, hate and decimate the mother, and in the process they produce
a theoretical and imaginative space that is ‘not woman’ or that can only
be occupied by unbecoming women.

Psychoanalysis situates the figure of the woman as an incomprehensible,
irrational and even impossible identity. Freud’s question ‘what does a
woman want?’ (quoted in Jones, 1955, p. 468) is not simply evidence
that, as Simone de Beauvoir (1953, p. 66) famously commented, ‘Freud
never showed much concern with the destiny of woman’. Instead, it
asks of women why they would want to occupy the place of castration,
lack and otherness from one generation to the next. While answering
the question of what men might want is quite simple in a system that
favours male masculinity, what women want and get from the same
system is a much more complex question. If, as Freud asserts, the little
girl must reconcile herself to the fate of a femininity defined as a failed
masculinity, then that failure to be masculine must surely harbour its
own productive potential. What do women want? And moreover how
has the desire to be a woman come to be associated definitively with
masochism, sacrifice, self-subjugation and unbecoming? How might
we read these avenues of desire and selfhood as something other than
failed masculinity and the end of desire?
In this chapter, I chart a genealogy of an anti-social, anti-Oedipal,
anti-humanist and counterintuitive feminism that arises out of queer,
post-colonial and black feminisms and that thinks in terms of the
negation of the subject rather than her formation, the disruption of
lineage rather than its continuation, the undoing of self rather than its
activation. This queer feminist genealogy could be said to stretch from
Gayatri Spivak’s meditations on female suicide in ‘Can the Subaltern
Speak?’ (1988) to Saidiya Hartman’s idea of a politics that exceeds the
social conditions of its enunciation in Scenes of Subjection (1997). We
might find the narratives of this version of feminism in Toni Morrison’s
ghosts or among Jamaica Kincaid’s anti-heroines, and we must track it
through territories of silence, stubbornness, self-abnegation and sac-
rifice. Ultimately, we find no feminist subject but only subjects who
cannot speak, who refuse to speak; subjects who unravel, who refuse
to cohere; subjects who refuse ‘being’ where being has already been
defined in terms of a self-activating, self-knowing, liberal subject. If we
refuse to become women, we might ask, what happens to feminism? Or,
to pose the question another way – can we find feminist frameworks
capable of recognizing the political project articulated in the form of
refusal? The politics of refusal emerges in its most potent form from
anti-colonial and anti-racist texts and challenges colonial authority by
absolutely rejecting the role of the colonized within what Walter D.
Mignolo (2000) has called ‘coloniality of power’.
Postcolonial feminists from Spivak to Saba Mahmood have shown how

prescriptive western feminist theories of agency and power, freedom and
resistance, tend to be, and both have proposed alternative ways of think-
ing about self and action that emerge from contexts often rejected out-
right by feminism. While Mahmood focuses on Islamic women engaged
in religious practices in the women’s Mosque movement in Egypt to
flesh out a critique of feminist theories of agency, in her famous essay
‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Spivak used the example of nineteenth-
century bride suicide (after the death of the husband) to demonstrate a
mode of being woman that was incomprehensible within a normative
feminist framework. Both theorists argue in terms of a ‘grammar of con-
cepts’, to use Mahmood’s term (2005, p. 180), and both consider speech
to be something other than the conventional feminist trope of breaking
silence. At the heart of Mahmood’s book, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic
Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005), is a concept of ‘woman’ that does
not presume the universality of desires for freedom and autonomy and
for whom resistance to patriarchal traditions may not be the goal. At
the centre of ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ is a notion of womanhood that
exceeds the western feminist formulation of female life. Spivak ends
the essay on the perils of intellectual attempts to represent oppressed
peoples with an extended meditation on sati, the ritualized burning of
Hindu widows, and Mahmood concludes her book with an exploration
of the meaning of feminine piety within Islam. Both theorists use pat-
ently anti-feminist acts and activities to point to the limits of a feminist
theory that already presumes the form that agency must take.
Spivak explores the role of the British attempt in 1829 to abolish
Hindu widow burning in relation to the self-representation of colonial-
ism as benevolent intervention and she places this argument against
the claim advanced by nativist Indians that sati must be respected as
a practice because those women who had lost their husbands actually
wanted to die. Spivak (1988, p. 296) uses sati to illustrate her claim that
colonialism articulates itself as ‘white man saving brown women from
brown men’, but also to mark the complicity of Western feminism in
this formulation. Again, in a move that echoes Spivak’s counterintuitive
break from even poststructuralist feminisms, Mahmood explores women
in the Mosque movement and their commitments to piety in order to
ask: ‘does the category of resistance impose a teleology of progressive
politics on the analytics of power – a teleology that makes it hard for

us to see and understand forms of being and action that are not neces-
sarily encapsulated by the narrative of subversion and reinscription of
norms?’ (Mahmood, 2005, p. 9).
‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ sets up a contradiction between different

modes of representation within which an intellectual proposes to speak
for an oppressed other, and Spivak accuses Foucault and Deleuze as well
as western feminism of sneaking a heroic individualism in the back door
of discursive critique: ‘neither Deleuze nor Foucault’, writes Spivak (1988,
p. 275), ‘seems aware that the intellectual within socialized capital,
brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international
division of labor’. For Spivak, the intellectual, like the poststructuralist
feminist theorist for Mahmood, by imagining herself or himself to be a
transparent vector for the exposure of ideological contradictions, can-
not account for his or her own impact upon the processes of domina-
tion and instead always imagines herself or himself in the heroic place
of the individual who knows better than the oppressed masses about
whom he or she theorizes. The very notion of representation, Spivak
claims, both in terms of a theory of economic exploitation and in terms
of an ideological function, depends upon the production of ‘heroes,
paternal proxies and agents of power’ (ibid., p. 279), and it harbours ‘the
possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitu-
tion of the Other as the self’s shadow’ (ibid., p. 280).
This idea that intellectuals construct an otherness to ‘save’ in order
to fortify a sovereign notion of self applies also to liberal feminism.
And so, in the context of the Hindu widow’s suicide, for example, the
western feminist can only see the workings of extraordinary patriarchy
in motion, and she also believes in a benevolent British colonialism
that steps in to stop a brutal and archaic ritual. For Spivak, feminism is
complicit in the project of constructing the subaltern subject it wants
to represent and then heroically casting itself as the subaltern’s salva-
tion. What if, as Spivak seems to ask in her enigmatic final sentence,
feminism was actually able to attend to the nativist claim that women
who commit sati actually want to die? Spivak writes: ‘the female intel-
lectual as an intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not
disown with a flourish’ (ibid., p. 308). Leaving aside the ambiguity of
the double negative here (‘must not disown’), the meanings of ‘female’,
‘intellectual’ and ‘circumscribed task’ are all up for grabs, especially since
Spivak has already contended that sati makes an essential link between
unbeing and femininity. This problem clearly informs and influences
Mahmood’s questions about whether we have become wilfully blind to
forms of agency that do not take the form of resistance. In her Derridean
deconstructivist mode, Spivak is calling for a feminism that can claim
not to speak for the subaltern or to demand that the subaltern speak in
the active voice of western feminism, but she imagines on the distant
horizon a feminism born of a dynamic intellectual struggle with the

fact that some women may desire their own destruction for really good
political reasons even if those politics and those reasons lie beyond the
purview of the version of feminism for which we have settled. Spivak’s
call for a ‘female intellectual’ who does not disown another version of
womanhood, femininity and feminism, indeed, for any kind of intellec-
tual who can learn how not to know the other, how not to sacrifice the
other on behalf of his or her own sovereignty, is a call that has largely
gone unanswered. It is this version of feminism that this chapter seeks
to inhabit, a feminism that fails to save others or to replicate itself,
a feminism that finds purpose in its own failure.
A more accessible text makes the very same point. In one of my favourite
feminist texts of all time, the epic animated drama Chicken Run (2000),
the politically active and explicitly feminist bird, Ginger, is opposed in
her struggle to inspire the birds to rise up by two other ‘feminist sub-
jects’. One is the cynic, Bunty, a hard-nosed fighter who rejects utopian
dreams out of hand, but the other is Babs, voiced by Jane Horrocks, who
sometimes gives voice to feminine naïveté but at other moments points
to the absurdity of the political terrain as it has been outlined by the
activist Ginger. Ginger says, for example, ‘we either die free chickens, or
we die trying’. Babs asks naïvely, ‘are those the only choices?’ Like Babs,
and indeed like Spivak and Mahmood, I am proposing that feminists
refuse the choices as offered – freedom in liberal terms or death – in order
to think about a shadow archive of resistance, one that does not speak
in the language of action and momentum but instead articulates itself in
terms of evacuation, refusal, passivity, unbecoming, unbeing. This could
be called an ‘anti-social feminism’, a form of feminism preoccupied with
negativity and negation. As Roderick Ferguson (2005, pp. 136–7) puts it
in a chapter on ‘The Negations of Black Lesbian Feminism’ in Aberrations
in Black: ‘negation not only points to the conditions of exploitation. It
denotes the circumstances for critique and alternatives as well’. Ferguson,
building upon Hortense Spillers, is trying to circumvent an ‘American’
political grammar that insists upon casting liberation struggles within
the same logic as the normative regimes against which they struggle.
A different, anarchistic type of struggle requires a new grammar, possibly
a new voice, potentially the passive voice.
When feminist freedoms, as Mahmood shows, require a humanistic

investment in both the female subject and the fantasy of an active,
autonomous and self-activating individualism, we have to ask now
about who the subjects and objects of feminism might be, and we need
to remember that, as Spivak (1988, p. 278) put it, to speak on behalf of

someone is also to ‘restore the sovereign subject within the theory that
seems most to question it’. If speaking for a subject of feminism offers
up choices that, like Babs, we are bound to question and refuse, then
perhaps a homeopathic refusal to speak serves the project of feminism
better. Babs’s sense that there must be more ways of thinking about
political action or non-action than doing or dying finds full theoretical
confirmation in the work of theorists like Saidiya Hartman. Hartman’s
investigations in Scenes of Subjection (1997) into the contradictions of
emancipation for the newly freed slaves propose not only that ‘liberty’
as defined by the white racial state enacts new modes of imprisonment
but also that the very definitions of freedom and humanity within
which abolitionists operated severely limited the ability of the former
slaves to think social transformation in terms outside of the structure of
racial terror. Hartman (1997, p. 115) notes that ‘the longstanding and
intimate affiliation of liberty and bondage made it impossible to envi-
sion freedom independent of constraint or personhood and autonomy
separate from the sanctity of property and proprietal notions of self’.
Accordingly, where freedom was offered in terms of being propertied,
placed and productive, the former slave might choose ‘moving about’
or roaming in order to experience the meaning of freedom. Hartman
writes: ‘as a practice, moving about accumulated nothing and it did
not effect any reversals of power but indefatigably held onto the
unrealizable – being free – by temporarily eluding the constraints of
order’. She continues: ‘like stealing away, it was more symbolically redo-
lent than materially transformative’ (ibid., p. 128). There are no simple
comparisons to be made between former slaves and sexual minorities,
but I want to join Hartman’s deft revelations about the continuation
of slavery by other means to Leo Bersani’s, Lynda Hart’s and Heather
Love’s formulations of queer histories and subjectivities that are better
described in terms of masochism, pain and failure rather than mastery,
pleasure and heroic liberation. Like Hartman’s model of a freedom that
imagines itself in terms of a not-yet realized social order, the maps of
desire that render the subject incoherent, disorganized and passive pro-
vide a better escape route than those that lead inexorably to fulfilment,
recognition and achievement.
Bersani names as ‘masochism’ the counter-narrative of sexuality

that undergirds the propulsive, maturational and linear story installed
by psychoanalysis: he suggests that the heroic, organizing narrative
defines sexuality as ‘an exchange of intensities between individuals’,
but the masochistic version constitutes a ‘condition of broken negotia-

tions with the world, a condition in which others merely set off the
self-shattering mechanism of masochistic jouissance’ (Bersani, 1986,
p. 41). It is this narrative that Love turns to in Feeling Backward when
she examines ‘moments of failed or interrupted connection’ or ‘broken
intimacies’ in order to take the impossibility of love ‘as a model for
queer historiography’ (Love, 2009, p. 24).
In what follows, I propose a radical form of passivity that not only
offers up a critique of the organizing logic of agency and subjectivity
itself but also opts out of certain systems built around a dialectic between
colonizer and colonized. Radical forms of passivity and masochism,
moreover, step out of the easy model of a transfer of femininity from
mother to daughter and actually seek to destroy the mother–daughter
bond altogether. For example, in the work of Jamaica Kincaid, the
colonized subject literally refuses her role as colonized by refusing to be
anything at all. In Autobiography of My Mother (1997), the main charac-
ter, Xuela Claudette Richardson, removes herself from a colonial order
that makes sense of her as a daughter, a wife and a mother by refusing
to be any of the above and even refusing the category of womanhood
altogether. At the novel’s beginning, the first-person narrator tells of the
coincidence of her birth and her mother’s death and suggests that this
primal loss means that ‘there was nothing standing between me and
eternity’ (Kincaid, 1997, p. 3). She continues: ‘at my beginning was this
woman whose face I had never seen, but at my end there was nothing,
no one between me and the black room of the world’ (ibid.). Obviously,
the loss of her mother and the ‘autobiography’ of that mother that
ensues constitute an allegorical tale of the loss of origins within the
context of colonialism and the loss of telos that follows. But rather than
nostalgically searching for her lost origins or purposefully creating her
own telos, Xuela surrenders instead to a form of un-being for which
beginnings and ends have no meaning. With no past to learn from, no
future can be imagined, and with a present tense that is entirely occu-
pied by colonial figures, language, logics and identities, the colonized
self has two options: she can become part of the colonial story or she
can refuse to be part of any story at all. Obviously, the narrator chooses
the latter and Autobiography of My Mother is the un-story of a woman
who cannot be anything but the antithesis of the self that is demanded
by colonialism. The narrator, Xuela, tells neither her own story of

becoming nor her mother’s story, and by appropriating her mother’s
non-story as her own (Autobiography of My Mother), she suggests that the
colonized mind is passed down Oedipally from generation to generation
and must be resisted through a certain mode of evacuation.

While Xuela’s relationship to her mother is mediated by loss and
longing, her relationship with her half-Scottish, half-Caribbean police-
man father is one of contempt and incomprehension. She despises
her father’s capitulation to colonialism, to the law and to his own
mixed heritage, and she tries, through the writing of this narrative,
to root out his influence and inhabit completely the space of her
absent Carib mother. Xuela comments: ‘and so my mother and father
then were a mystery to me; one through death, the other through
the maze of living; one I had never seen, one I saw constantly’ (ibid.,
p. 41). Choosing death and absence over a colonized life, Xuela avoids
becoming a mother herself, aborting a child at one point, she avoids
love, family and intimacy and she disconnects herself from all of those
things that would define her. In her refusal of identity as such, Xuela
models a kind of necropolitical relation to colonialism: her refusal
to be is also a refusal to perform the role of other within a system
that demands her subjugation. ‘Whatever I was told to hate’, says the
narrator, ‘I loved most’ (ibid., p. 32).
In an interview about Autobiography of my Mother, Kincaid was told:
‘your characters seem to be against most things that are good, yet they
have no reason to act this way – they express a kind of negative free-
dom. Is this the only freedom available to the poor and powerless?’
Kincaid answers:
I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with
an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to
take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending. Perversely,
I will not give the happy ending. I think life is difficult and that’s
that. I am not at all – absolutely not at all – interested in the pursuit
of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am
interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not
happiness but its opposite. (Kincaid and Snell, 1997, p. 2)
Kincaid’s novels do indeed withhold happy endings and she adds the
fine shading to the narrative of colonialism by creating characters who
can never thrive, never love and never create precisely because colonial-
ism has removed the context within which those things would make
sense. Kincaid concludes the interview by saying: ‘I feel it’s my business

to make everyone a little less happy’ (ibid., p. 2).
Kincaid’s commitment to a kind of negative life, a life lived by a
colonized character that refuses purpose and that as a result leaves the
reader unsettled, disturbed and discomforted, represents a Fanonian

refusal to blindly persist in the occupation of categories of being that
simply round out the colonial project. Where a colonized subject finds
happiness, Kincaid after Fanon seems to say, she or he confirms the
benevolence of the colonial project. Where a colonized woman bears
a child and passes on her legacy to that child, Kincaid insists, the
colonial project can spread virus-like from one generation to the next.
Refusing to operate as the transfer point for transgenerational colo-
nization, Xuela inhabits another kind of feminism, again a feminism
that does not resist through an active war on colonialism, but a mode
of femininity that self-destructs and in doing so brings the edifice of
colonial rule down one brick at a time.
Another example of a novel where the female protagonist literally
unravels is Nobel prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek’s novel The Piano Teacher
(1983). Here, the refusal to be is played at the other end of the scale
of power – in The Piano Teacher, Erika Kohut, the main character, is an
unmarried Austrian woman in her thirties living with her mother in
post-Second World War Vienna and giving piano lessons in her spare
time at the Vienna Conservatory while colluding with her mother in a
certain fantasy about music, about Austria, about high culture and about
cultural superiority. Many days Erika leaves the house and indeed the
bedroom that she shares with her controlling mother and she wanders
the city as if searching for some way out of the claustrophobic life of
professional boredom and petty quarrels with her mother. Some nights,
Erika visits peep shows in the Turkish part of town or follows amo-
rous couples to their cars and watches their sexual struggles furtively.
Such is her life until a new student comes to her class, the handsome
young Walter Klemmer. Klemmer sees his prim teacher as a potential
conquest, starts to romance her and soon they begin a secret sexual
relationship.
When Erika meets Klemmer, it seems as if the narrative of incestuous
mother–daughter collusion must surely reach its end and cede to a
more appropriate intergenerational kind of desire – the desire of the
young man for his older teacher. Klemmer’s courtship of Erika consists
of him trying to charm her while she insults him in return. He asks
her on a date, she ‘feels a growing repulsion’ (Jelinek, 1999, p. 79). He
walks her and her mother home, she wishes he would leave them alone.
And when finally the brash young man does head off into the Vienna
evening, Erika returns home to her maternal cocoon and locks herself
up in the bathroom to cut away at her private flesh with a shaving
razor.
When finally Klemmer and she begin an explicitly sexual relation-

ship, Erika writes him a letter and demands that he sexually abuse and
mistreat her, break her down, starve her and neglect her. She wants to
be destroyed and she wants to destroy her own students in the process.
From Klemmer, Erika demands sadistic cruelty: ‘I will writhe like a
worm in your cruel bonds, in which you will have me lie for hours on
end, and you’ll keep me in all sorts of different positions, hitting or
kicking me, even whipping me!’ (ibid., pp. 215–16). Erika’s letter says
she wants to be dimmed out under him, snuffed out: her well rooted
displays of obedience require greater degrees of intensity. Erika’s letter
is, as Klemmer puts it, ‘an inventory of pain’ (ibid., p. 217), a catalogue
of punishments that he is sure no one could endure. Erika wants the
young man to crush her, torment her, mock her, gag her, threaten her,
devour her, piss on her and ultimately destroy her. Klemmer reads
the letter in her presence, refuses outright to meet her demands and
withdraws into the night only to return later to obey the letter in its
direction to dismantle and abuse her.
While the narrator of Kincaid’s novel pulls herself and her mother
back from the narratives that colonialism would tell about them, Jelinek
exposes her mother/daughter duo to intense and violent scrutiny
and locks them in a destructive and sterile incestuous dance that will
only end with their own deaths. The novel ends with the protagonist
fighting with and then kissing her aged mother in their shared bed, and
then wounding a young female student who is preparing for a recital.
Finally, she wounds herself with a knife, stabbing herself, trying not
to kill herself exactly but to continue to chip away at the part of her
that remains Austrian, complicit, fascist and conforming. Here, Erika’s
passivity is a way of refusing to be a channel for a persistent strain of
fascist nationalism and her masochism or self-violation indicates her
desire to kill within herself the versions of fascism that are folded into
being – through taste, through emotional responses, through love of
country, through love of music, through love of her mother.
Cutting
Cutting is a feminist aesthetic proper to the project of female

unbecoming. As Erika Kohut walks along the streets of Vienna at the
end of The Piano Teacher, she drips blood onto the pavement. The cut
she has made in her shoulder, which repeats a number of other cuts she
has applied to her own skin and genitalia at other times, represents her
attempt to remake herself as something other than a repository for her
mother, her country and her class, but it also crafts a version of woman

that is messy, bloody, porous, violent and self-loathing; a version that
mimics a kind of fascist ethos of womanhood by transferring the terms
of Nazi misogyny to the female body in literal and terrifying ways. Erika’s
masochism turns her loathing for her mother and her Austrianness
back onto herself. With the notable exception of work by Linda Hart
in Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism (1998) and
Gayle Rubin’s early essays on S/M, power and feminism, masochism
is an underused way of considering the relationship between self and
other, self and technology, self and power in queer feminism. This is
curious given how often performance art of the 1960s and 1970s pre-
sented extreme forms of self-punishment, discipline and evacuation in
order to dramatize new relations between body, self and power. It may
be illustrative to turn to Freud, who refers to masochism as a form of
femininity and as a kind of flirtation with death; masochism is in fact,
he says, a by-product of the unsuccessful repression of the death instinct
to which a libidinal impulse has been attached. While the libido tends
to ward off the death drive through a ‘will to power’, a desire for mastery
and an externalization of erotic energy, sometimes, libidinal energies
are given over to destabilization, unbecoming and unravelling – this is
what Bersani (1996, p. 94) refers to as ‘self-shattering’, a shadowy sexual
impulse that most people would rather deny or sublimate; if taken
seriously, unbecoming may have its political equivalent in an anarchic
refusal of coherence and proscriptive forms of agency.
Following up on the act of cutting as a masochistic will to eradicate
the body, I want to use the example of collage, a cut-and-paste genre,
to find another realm of aesthetic production dominated by a model of
radical passivity and un-being. Collage precisely references the spaces
in between and refuses to respect the boundaries that usually delineate
self from other, art object from museum and the copy from the original.
In this respect, as well as in many others, collage (from the French
‘coller’ – to paste or glue) seems feminist and queer. Collage has been
used by many female artists, from Hannah Hoch to Kara Walker, to bind
the threat of castration to the menace of feminist violence and both to
the promise of transformation not through a positive production of the
image but through a negative destruction of it that nonetheless refuses
to relinquish pleasure.
To apprehend the violence implied by collage, one only has to think

of the work of Walker, an African-American artist who has used cut
paper and the silhouette form to convey the atrociously violent land-
scape of the American racial imagination. The collage, by maintaining
a constant tension between the elements of the painting or work, asks

us to consider the full range of our experience of power – productive
power, power for, but also negative power or power to un-become.
Hijacking the decorative silhouette form, Walker glues black life-size
cutout figures to gallery walls to produce a puppet show version of the
sexual life of slavery. In both the black figures and the white spaces in
between, Walker manages to convey both the myriad ways that the
human body can be opened up, ripped apart, penetrated, turned inside
out, hung upside down, split, smashed, fractured and pulverized, and
the nearly limitless archive of the human violent imaginary. Despite
the flatness of the silhouette form, Walker creates an illusion of depth
sometimes by projecting light onto the dioramas she creates but also
by making the whole gallery into a canvas and then gluing cutouts,
sketches and paintings all over its walls; in other pieces, she also writes
letters to her detractors and enemies, and refuses the readings of her
work as simply confirming stereotypes.
The array of discourse that chatters from the walls of the museum
in Walker’s recent retrospective and that dialogues with the silence of
the black characters in the cut pieces implies that institutions of art
are themselves catalogues of both racial violence and the erasure of
such violence through the theoretical association of art with beauty.
The title of Walker’s show, ‘Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy,
My Oppressor, My Love’ (2007), names the sado-masochistic terrain of
speech and silence, and makes clear that in a world engendered by sex-
ual violence and its bastard offspring, a world where the enemy and the
oppressor are also the lover, the victim and the subjugated are choosing
between not action and passivity, freedom and death, but survival and
desire – in such a world, sex will be the name for war by other means.
In the horrified responses to her work (charges mainly of creating
a new archive of racist imagery), many of which are pulled into her
textual collages, Walker draws out the anxieties that she also represents.
Using art as bait and deploying the female body in particular as a site for
the negative projection of racial and colonial fantasy is simply a modern
technology. But using the same technology, like a funhouse mirror, to
turn racism and sexism back upon themselves is a part of what I am
calling feminist negation. In fact, in 1964, Yoko Ono used her own
body as a battleground to draw out the sadistic impulses that bourgeois
audiences harbour towards the notion of woman. Ono’s 1964 perform-

ance Cut Piece is in no simple way a ‘collage’, but the elements of the
performance – cutting, submitting, reversing the relations between
figure and ground, audience and performer – do conform to the defini-
tions of collage that I am using here. What is more, in the dynamics

that Ono explores between stillness and motion, production and recep-
tion, body and clothing, gender and violence, she allows for a complex
and fascinating discourse on feminism and masochism to emerge at
the site of the cut or castration itself. Ono’s nine-minute-long perform-
ance Cut Piece involves the artist sitting on stage while members of an
audience come up and cut off pieces of her clothing. The act of cutting
here is assigned to the audience rather than to the artist, and the art-
ist’s body becomes the canvas, while the authorial gesture is dispersed
across the nameless, sadistic gestures that disrobe Ono and leave her
open to and unprotected from the touch of the other. The audience is
mixed in terms of gender, but as the performance unfolds, more and
more men come to the stage and they become increasingly aggressive
about cutting her clothing until she is left, semi-nude, hands over her
breasts, her supposed castration, emotional discomfort, vulnerability
and passivity fully on display. How can we think about femininity and
feminism here in the context of masochism, gender, racialized display,
spectatorship and temporality?
In a brilliant analysis of Cut Piece, Julia Bryan-Wilson acknowledges
the reading of Ono’s performance within a meditation on female maso-
chism, but, she proposes, most often these readings fix Ono’s mute and
still female body within a closed system of female submission and male
aggression. As she puts it, ‘there is little possibility in these interpreta-
tions that the invitation Ono proffers might be positive – no space for
Cut Piece to be a gift, a gesture of reparation, or a ritual of remembrance’
(Bryan-Wilson, 2003, p. 103). Locating Ono’s peformative offering
of her clothes, her body and her silence against the backdrop of the
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bryan-Wilson places the piece
within a global imaginary. Calling it a ‘reciprocal ballet’ (ibid.) in terms
of its gesture of generosity and a ‘tense pantomime’ (ibid., p. 107) in
terms of the way Ono stages her own vulnerability and brings her flesh
close to strangers wielding scissors, Bryan-Wilson refuses to sever Ono’s
remarkable performance from either post-war Japanese art or the rest
of her oeuvre; nor is Bryan-Wilson content to rescue the piece from
its own self-destruction or resign it to what she calls ‘solipsistic maso-
chism’ (ibid., p. 116). Instead, she situates the work firmly within the
activity of witnessing and casts Ono as a master of the art of sacrifice.
I am absolutely convinced by Bryan-Wilson’s reading of Cut Piece and

I see this reading as definitive on many levels. Yet, while I want to build
upon the situating of Ono’s work within the context of photographs
of torn clothing taken after the atomic blasts in Japan in 1945, I also
want to return to the ambivalent model of female selfhood that the

performance inhabits.
Bryan-Wilson notes the strange temporality of Cut Piece and com-
ments upon the ambivalent optimism in the gesture of allowing people
to cut pieces of Ono’s clothing as souvenirs, and she speaks of the way
that in this performance and in Promise Piece (1992) where a vase is
smashed and its shards handed out, there is always the possibility and
indeed the probability that the fragments of the whole will never be
reunited. Indeed, I would emphasize this commitment to the fragment
over any fantasy of future wholeness and I want to locate the smashing
and cutting gestures in Ono’s work in relation to this other anti-social
feminism that resists conventional modes of femininity by refusing to
remake, rebuild, reproduce and that dedicates itself, completely and
ferociously, to the decimation of self and other.
Bryan-Wilson notes the tendency to group Cut Piece with Marina
Abramovich’s Rhythm 0 (1974) and Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971), but she
quickly dismisses Abramovich’s performance as unscripted and marked
by ‘complete surrender’ and is similarly critical of Burden’s work, which
she sees as an attempt to ‘manage and engineer aggression’ and as ‘a
far cry from the peaceful wishes of Ono and Lennon’ (Bryan-Wilson,
2003, p. 117). Male masochism, certainly, stakes out a very different
territory from that of female performances of unravelling. While the
male masochist inhabits a kind of heroic anti-heroism by refusing
social privilege and instead offering himself up Christ-like as a martyr
for the cause, the female masochist’s performance is far more complex
and offers a critique of the very ground of the human. A remarkable
amount of performance art – feminist and otherwise – from the 1960s
and 1970s experimental scene explored this fertile ground of masochis-
tic collapse. In Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the
1970s (1998), Kathy O’Dell writes about masochistic performance art of
the 1970s as a performed refusal of wholeness and as a demonstration
of Deleuze’s claim that ‘[the masochist’s] apparent obedience conceals
a criticism and a provocation’ (Deleuze quoted in O’Dell, 1998, p. 52).
O’Dell’s psychoanalytic account of masochism provides a nice sum-
mary of the genre and places pieces by Burden, Cathy Opie and others
into interesting conversation with one another, but ultimately, O’Dell
wants to make masochism into something from which we can learn,
through which we can recognize the invisible contracts we make with

violence and with which we can negotiate relations with others. But
there is a problem in trying to bind masochistic critiques of the subject
to humanistic renegotiations with selfhood. In many ways, this recon-
figuring of masochism as a way of grappling with and coming to terms

with violence rewrites the dilemma I identified at the start of this chap-
ter in terms of a feminism that needs to rescue other ‘women’ from their
own destructive tendencies. Performances like Cut Piece and Rhythm 0,
but also like Faith Wilding’s Waiting (1972), do not necessarily want to
rescue the woman; instead they hang her out to dry as woman.
While obviously none of these performances immediately suggests
a ‘feminist’ act, I want to think about feminism here in terms of an
ongoing commentary on fragmentariness, submission and sacrifice.
Ono’s dismantling performance presses us to ask about the kind of self
that comes undone in nine minutes for an audience. Is such an act,
and such a model of self, feminist? Can we think about this refusal of
self as an anti-liberal act, a revolutionary statement of pure opposition
that does not rely upon the liberal gesture of defiance but that accesses
another lexicon of power and speaks another language of refusal? If we
understand radical passivity as an anti-social mode with some connec-
tion to the anti-authorial statements made within postcolonial women’s
theory and fiction, we can begin to glimpse its politics. In a liberal realm
where the ‘pursuit of happiness’, as Kincaid might say, is both desirable
and mandatory and where certain formulations of self (as active, vol-
untaristic, choosing, propulsive) dominate the political sphere, radical
passivity may signal another kind of refusal, the refusal quite simply
to be. While many feminists from de Beauvoir to Monique Wittig to
Kincaid have cast the project of ‘becoming woman’ as one in which the
woman can only be complicit in a patriarchal order, feminist theorists
in general have not turned to masochism and passivity as potential
alternatives to liberal formulations of womanhood. Carol J. Clover
famously cast male masochism as one explanation for the popularity of
horror films among teenage boys in Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender
in the Modern Horror Film (1992), and we might similarly view female
masochism as the willing giving over of the self to the other, to power;
in a performance of radical passivity, we witness the willingness of the
subject to actually come undone, to dramatize unbecoming for the
other so that the viewer does not have to witness unbecoming as a func-
tion of her own body. Here, Joseph Roach’s formulations of culture as
a combination of projection, substitution and effigy making come into
play. Indeed, radical passivity could describe certain versions of lesbian
femininity. Queer theory under the influence of Judith Butler’s work

on the ‘lesbian phallus’ argues for the recognition of the potentiality
of masculine power in a female form but this still leaves the feminine
lesbian unexplained and lost to an anti-phallic modality.
In fact, if one form of phallic queerness has been defined by the repre-

sentation of the body as hybrid and assembled, then another takes as its
object the dis-appearance of the body altogether. In an explicitly queer
use of the collage, the tension between the rebellious energy of gender
variance and the quiet revolt of queer femininity comes to the fore.
J. A. Nicholls’s work has mostly involved figuration and has evolved
around the production of work in stages, the building of an aesthetic
environment through representational strata that become progressively
more flat and more painterly at the same time. This movement works
precisely against the three-dimensional aspirations of collage, which
build up from the canvas and transform the dialogue between paint
and canvas into a multivocal discourse through the importation of
‘external’ materials. In her process, Nicholls first creates a small col-
lage of the figure she wants to paint, and she literally constructs the
figure, Frankenstein-like, out of a myriad of parts and materials. Next,
she paints a version of the collage onto large canvases and then tries to
capture the quality of the pieced-together materials through a painting
that composes the figure as an assemblage of moving and static parts,
anatomically correct limbs and cartoon-like stumps, motion and still-
ness, identity and facelessness. Some of her figures recline like classical
nudes, but many of them, gender ambiguous figures all, are suspended
in time, space, water or paint. They are glued together, the sum of their
parts, and they twist and turn in and out of wholeness, legibility and
sense.
In new work (2006–10), Nicholls turns to landscapes and she empties
the landscape of figures altogether – she turns from gender variance as
assemblage to queer femininity as startling absence. What had been
a backdrop becomes a stage; what had constituted ground becomes
figure; what had been secondary becomes primary. The landscape
emptied of figures, when considered in relation to her other paintings
of figures, still does speak about figuration. Only here, figuration, as in
Walker’s art, is absence, dis-appearance and illegibility. In Here and Now,
the landscape becomes graphic and dramatic, vivid and emotional.
The figure’s psyche is spread horizontally across the meeting of ocean
and land rather than encased vertically in an upright body, and the
relationships between inside and outside, the primary drama staged by
the collage, are cast here as sky and land, vegetation and waves, blue
and green, with a barely transparent fence marking the non-boundary

between the two. Time and space themselves collide at this boundary,
here and now, and the immediacy and presence of the emotional land-
scape announces itself in the startlingly dynamic waves in the middle-
ground. In Higher Ground and New Story, the canvases are more marked

by stillness and fixity and the landscape becomes much more of a
backdrop waiting for a figure. These new paintings attempt to represent
femininity as a blurring of the female form with the natural landscape
and as a violent cutting out of the figure altogether. The surreal and
often hyper-artificial landscapes represent queer femininity as a refusal
of conventional womanhood and a disidentification with the logic of
gender variance as the other of normativity.
Appropriately, given the new subject matter, Nicholls also uses a new
form of collage here that challenges the viewer to consider the meaning
of collage in the age of digital graphics. Nicholls works forward from a
photograph and scans it into the computer, where she uses Photoshop
to cut and paste different elements and materials onto the photo. Once
she is finished, she prints the image and paints from it onto a canvas.
The three media – photography, digital imaging, painting – become sites
for elaborate and complex digital collage, and where in traditional col-
lage by Picasso and others we might have found newspaper pieces pasted
onto paint, here we find graphic elements grafted through software
onto a photograph and then transformed into a painted canvas.
In a contemporary performance piece that picks up where these art-
ists left off, a 55-minute performance piece titled America the Beautiful
(1995–8), Nao Bustamente combines avant-garde performance with
burlesque, circus act and escape artists’ antics. The solo performance
marries banality, the rigours of feminine adornment, to high wire
tension, the trembling and wobbly ascent of the bound body up a lad-
der, and it combines the discipline of physical performance with the
spectacle of embodied uncertainty. The audience laughs uncomfort-
ably throughout the performance, watching as Bustamente binds her
naked body with clear packing tape and clumsily applies makeup and
a raggedy blonde wig. Sentimental music wafts smoothly in the back-
ground and conflicts noisily with the rough performance of femininity
that Bustamente stages. In her blonde wig and makeup, with her flesh
pulled tight, she displays the demands of racialized feminine beauty; to
confirm the danger of such beauty, she bends and sways precariously
as she dons high-heeled shoes atop a small ladder. Finally, Bustamente
ascends a much larger ladder carrying a sparkler and threatening at any
moment to fall from her perch.
This performance, along with a number of others in Bustamente’s

portfolio, confirms her as what José Esteban Muñoz has called a ‘vul-
nerability artist’ (Muñoz, 2006). In his inspired essay on Bustamente’s
performance practice, Muñoz calls attention to the ways in which
Bustamente ‘engages and re-imagines what has been a history of vio-

lence, degradation and compulsory performance’ (ibid., p. 194); her
engagement with the dangers attached to the subject position of ‘woman
of colour’ make her vulnerable, and infuse her performances with the
frisson of potential failure, collapse and crisis. At a poignant moment
in America the Beautiful, for example, while perched precariously atop a
large tripod ladder, Bustamente turns her back to the audience and uses
the stage lights to create a puppet show with her hands. The flickering
shadows that she creates on the backdrop refuse to cohere into another
theatrical space and merely mirror her blurry status as puppet, man-
nequin and doll. But the moment is compelling because it reveals the
mode in which Bustamente becomes her own puppet, ventriloquizes
herself, constructs her body as a meeting point for violent discourses of
beauty, profit, coherence, race, success.
In an interview with Muñoz, Bustamente addresses the improvisa-
tional quality of her work and she clearly and brilliantly engages both
the thesis that there is no such thing as improvisation in performance
and the idea that ‘fresh space’ always exists (Bustamente, 2003).
Something of the balance between rehearsed improvisation and the
unpredictability of ‘fresh space’ marks Bustamente’s work as a rigorous
refusal of mastery. Muñoz terms this positively as ‘amateurism’ in
their interview, commenting in particular on the ladder performance
in America the Beautiful. Bustamente concurs, but elaborates: ‘the work
that I do is about not knowing the equipment, and not knowing that
particular balance, and then finding it as I go’ (Bustamente, 2003,
p. 5). As she says, each night, the ladder is positioned slightly differently
on the floor, or it is a different ladder, the wobbling occurs differently,
has a different range, and her body must respond on the spot and in
the moment of performance to the new configurations of space and
uncertainty.
Conclusions
The anti-social dictates an unbecoming, a cleaving to that which seems

to shame or annihilate; and a radical passivity allows for the inhabiting
of femininity with a difference. The radical understandings of passivity
that emerge within Ono’s work, Nicholls’s paintings and Bustamente’s
performances all offer an anti-social way out of the double bind of

becoming woman and thereby propping up the dominance of man
within a gender binary. Predicting master/slave couples in Walker’s
work, and the disappeared figures in Nicholls’s landscapes, Ono’s non-
act of evacuation and performance stripping implicates the frame in

the aesthetic material – just as Spivak cautioned us to consider the
role of the intellectual in all representations of the subaltern. In all of
these pieces, the frame – globalization, the canvas, the gallery walls,
academia – binds the perpetrator to the criminal, the torturer to his
victim, the corporate raider to the site of pillaging; collage shows the
open mouth, the figure in distress, the scream and its cause; it glues effect
to cause and queers the relations between the two. In the end, there is
no subject, no feminist subject, in these works – there are gaping holes,
empty landscapes, split silhouettes – the self unravels, refuses to cohere,
it will not speak, it will only be spoken. The passive voice that is the true
domain of masochistic fantasy (‘A Child Is Being Beaten’) might just be
a transformative voice for feminism. Freud (1919) himself said he could
not really understand the final phases of the feminine masochistic fan-
tasy, which progressed from ‘my father is beating the child’ to ‘I am being
beaten’ and finally to the boys are being beaten by the school-teacher
(Freud, 2001, pp. 185–6). But this final phase of the masochistic fantasy
transfers punishments definitively away from the body of the subjugated
and onto the body of the oppressor. Masochism, finally, represents a
deep disruption of time itself – reconciling the supposedly irreconcilable
tension between pleasure and death, the masochist tethers her notion of
self to a spiral of pain and hurt. She refuses to cohere, refuses to fortify
herself against the knowledge of death and dying and she seeks instead
to be out of time altogether, a body suspended in time and space.
While obviously Ono’s performance in particular does not immedi-
ately suggest a ‘feminist’ act, it does allow us to think about feminism
in much the same way I was talking about queerness earlier, namely in
terms of an ongoing commentary on fragmentariness, submission and
sacrifice. Can we think about this refusal of self as an anti-liberal act,
an anarchist statement of pure opposition that does not rely upon the
liberal gesture of defiance but addresses power and refusal in different
ways? Ono’s performance, racially inflected as it was in 1965 by her sta-
tus as an Asian woman within the imperial imagination, asks in terms
that Hartman might recognize whether freedom can be imagined sepa-
rately from the terms upon which it is offered. If freedom, as Hartman
shows, was offered to the slave as a kind of contract with capital, then
moving about, being restless, refusing to acquire property or wealth flirts
with forms of liberty that are unimaginable to those who offer freedom
as the freedom to become a master. Here, Ono sits still, waits patiently
and passively and refuses to resist in the terms mandated by the structure
that interpellates her. To be cut, to be bared, to be violated publically, is a
particular kind of resistant performance and in it Ono inhabits a form of

un-acting, unbeing, unbecoming. The stillness of Ono, punctuated only
by an involuntary flinch seven minutes into the event, like the maso-
chistic cuts in The Piano Teacher and the refusals of love in Autobiography
of My Mother, offer quiet masochistic gestures that invite us to unthink
sex as that alluring narrative of connection and liberation and think it
anew as the site of failure and unbecoming conduct.
Works Cited
Bersani, L. (1986) The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia
University Press).
Bersani, L. (1996) Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Bryan-Wilson, J. (2003) ‘Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece’, Oxford Art Journal,
26(1), 99–123.
Bustamente, N. (2003) ‘An Interview with José Esteban Muñoz’, RISK/RIESGO
Felix, 2(3), 120–7.
Chicken Run (2000) Directed by P. Lord and N. Park (UK and USA: Pathé and
DreamWorks Pictures).
Clover, C. J. (1992) Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
De Beauvoir, S. (1953) The Second Sex (London: Jonathan Cape).
Ferguson, R. (2005) Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique
Freud, S. (2001) ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’, in J. Strachey and A. Freud (eds), The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume
XVII (London: Vintage).
Hart, L. (1998) Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism
(New York: Columbia University Press).
Hartman, S. V. (1997) Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press).
Hartman, S. V. (2008) Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
(New York: Farrah, Strauss and Giroux).
Jelinek, E. (1999) The Piano Teacher (London: Serpent’s Tail).
Jones, E. (1955) Sigmund Freud: Life and Work. Years of Maturity 1901–1919,
Volume II (London: Hogarth Press).
Kincaid, J. (1997) Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Plume).
Kincaid, J. and Snell, M. (1997) ‘Jamaica Kincaid Hates Happy Endings’, Mother
Jones, http://motherjones.com/politics/1997/09/jamaica-kincaid-hates-happy-
endings (accessed 21 June 2010).
Love, H. (2009) Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge,
Mahmood, S. (2005) The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist
Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Mignolo, W. D. (2000) Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press).
Muñoz, J. E. (2006) ‘The Vulnerability Artist: Nao Bustamente and the Sad Beauty
of Reparation’, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 16(2),

191–200.
O’Dell, K. (1998) Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s
Spivak, G. (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds),
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois
Press).
Woolf, V. (1989) A Room of One’s Own (San Diego: Harvest Books).
11
Difference, Time and Organic
Extinction

Claire Colebrook
How, today, might the question of time and sexual difference be articu-
lated? It might appear, at first, as though the mode of this question has
always been sexual (or at least gendered) and that this engendering of
the question of time has impeded any fruitful understanding: time has
been regarded either as the time taken for forms to come into being
and pass away (a premodern Aristotelian notion) or as the neutral
abstract ‘container’ within which changes occur (modern Cartesian
time) (Deleuze, 2005, p. 4).1 In both cases, one could argue that time has
been conceived organically and anthropomorphically. Either the world
is composed of proper forms that it will take time to unfold – so that
here the earth is one bounded whole, reaching fulfilment through time,
with time as a delay in the realization of an end, and ‘man’ as that being
blessed with reason capable of intuiting the forms of time. Or there is
one general substance in extended space, and time measures the move-
ment from any one point to another. Time is the series of equivalent
‘nows’ and man, no longer analogous to (or a lesser form of) a God who
sees the reason of the world, charts movements from a point of view
that is purely calculative.
Such a modern understanding of time as the abstract container
within which movement takes place, time as a general substrate that
is not man’s own, nor privileged in any way, marks a certain under-
standing of human sexuality and sexuality as human. ‘Man’ is a being
whose sense is determined by a general temporality of life: because he
is a historical animal, going through the time of evolution, cultural
developments and linguistic formations, his being in the present bears
a density that is not immediately transparent to his own intentional-
ity (Foucault, 2002, p. 139). For psychoanalysis, this meant that there
would be the sense of a lost (maternal) plenitude that the subject would
195
196 Claire Colebrook
be able to read within himself. Woman would figure as the lost pre-
linguistic origin, an origin that can only be fantasized, ex post facto,
as that which must have been abandoned in order for man to enter a
communal, rational history (Brennan, 1993). Even if we no longer hold
to such psychoanalytic mythographies, it is possible to discern this gen-

dered figuration of time today in various critical reactions to man’s own
modernity: in the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock, for example, the
Cartesian notion of the world as extended and external matter is cor-
rected in favour of the figure of a single organism of life (Lovelock, 1988).
Man is no longer an active (historical, temporal) subject set over against
a passive and lifeless matter; there is one web of life, with all beings
connected through a non-linear temporality. Time is no longer a series
unfolded from some theological (humanoid) origin, nor a series mapped
by man, but the real condition in which life generates life. Such an
understanding of time has, however, reinforced rather than annihilated
the traditional humanization of time. If ‘we’ wish to live on, we need to
become aware of a time – ecological, geological – beyond our own, pay-
ing our due to an existence that we failed to recognize as our own.
In no movement is this more apparent than in eco-feminism. Queer
theory may have remained within the Oedipal and human axes of
recognition (albeit critically, with Butler (2004, p. 161) arguing for
self-constitution and mourning processes devolving on the face), but
ecofeminism has sought to retrieve a time and spirit beyond man and
calculation, beyond the human reproductive cycle of time, towards a
time of a broader organic and spiritual wholeness (Warren, 2000). But
is extending the figure of organic time beyond human bounds – to the
point where life in general becomes one unified, self-creating, auto-
poetic and fruitful whole – the most thoughtful way of approaching
what, with further thought, we might consider to be the question of
the present? How might we, today, confront the increasingly insistent
though increasingly foreclosed question of the temporal short-circuit
of man’s existence? In the most literal terms, the more overwhelming
the evidence that human life has shortened the time of the planet, the
greater the degree of denial: climate change appears to be irreversible
and catastrophic, but as its seriousness increases so does its repression.
More generally, as temporality discloses itself as less and less human, and
less and less gendered – not following the model of man’s imposition of
temporal mapping on a passive nature (in the manner of subject/object,
active/passive, male/female) – figures of the organic and human nature
of time appear to be resurgent. One may cite here not only the already
mentioned redemptive figures of life as Gaia (a goddess whose being
Difference, Time and Organic Extinction 197
man may now recognize for the sake of his living on), and not only the
policy rhetoric of climate change that supposedly deals with the anthro-
pogenic shortening of time, for this rhetoric addresses only man’s living
on through time by adapting and mitigating his own being. There is
also a broader imaginary re-humanization of time in contemporary

theory, concerned increasingly with the sense that any life or world we
have can be considered only from the point of view of the reproductive
and self-productive organism.2 (This is discerned in the return to living
systems and in the emphases – following Agamben and others – on
the retrieval of the political, precisely when the polity is not the site
in which conflicts take place so much as that which precludes us from
thinking the very conflict of a time that takes place beyond human and
organic frames.3) What needs to be considered, I would suggest, is a
sexual time, where sexuality is taken in its non-organic and truly sexual
sense, as that which drives beyond the organism’s needs and figura-
tions, and as that which opens thought beyond its own command and
measure. Such a time might be engendered, opened from all the modes
of life (organic and non-organic) that produce distinct and intercon-
nected rhythms, but would not be gendered, could not be figured within
the norms of man or his others. Time is essentially sexual, and sexuality
is essentially temporal. Yet these two intertwined essences subvert and
preclude any proper thought or thought of propriety.
The Temporality of Sexuality
What makes an event or movement sexual? The answer cannot lie in

reproduction, precisely because there are non-sexual modes of repro-
duction (in the non-human, non-mammalian world), and human
reproductive futures that may well take place outside of sexual differ-
ence (including sperm production from stem cells, cloning and the
possible extinction of the Y-chromosome) (Bainbridge, 2003; Sykes,
2003). One of the answers to this question is Oedipal, or at least has to
do with human sexuality and a mediated relation to biological repro-
duction. The subject occurs as a gap between organic need and a desire
that is tied to the signifier or language. The attachment between infant
mouth and maternal breast meets the fulfilment of organic need, or
at least maintains the relative stability of biological being. It is this
figure of the organism before desire, language and difference that, I will
argue, already ruptures the coherence of time and sexuality, and is an
effect of sexuality’s retroactive time. What happens, though, when the
action or connection through which sustenance is made breaks with,
or slips away from, the aim of meeting metabolic needs? A macro ver-
sion of such slippage may be evidenced in the life of humanity. Man is
coupled with the earth for his own survival. He nevertheless intensifies
the processes of this coupling (processes of consumption, production,
resource depletion and capitalization) to the point where the process

itself becomes the aim: capital generation for its own sake, consumption
for its own sake, production so excessive that one requires advertising
to manufacture needs and gaps.
This inherently sexual nature of slippage from organic need was
already theorized by Freud in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905). The sucking of the breast becomes sensual sucking – the mouth
enjoying its own material dynamism, feeling itself feel, establishing a
relation not to alimentary goals that fulfil an economic imperative of
meeting a need that can be determined quantitatively (input of fuel
for so much expended energy) (Laplanche, 1976). Sensibility occurs
for its ‘own’ sake, even if the very possibility of ‘ownness’, the self or
‘mineness’, occurs only with this sensuality. The mouth that feels itself
feeling can then mark itself as locus of desire, as a zone to be felt for
its own sake. It is at that moment of slippage from (or propping onto)
organic need that something like temporality emerges. Strangely, it is
in the uncoupling of organisms that a relation to a virtual otherness
opens: mouth and breast are not connected as two parts in a single proc-
ess, for each organ’s connection opens its own line of pleasure. There
are always three terms, at least, in any sexual relation, for part relates
to part through an anticipation that exceeds determinable quantities
(Lacan, 1985). What occurs in the rupture of alterity, where relations
are no longer determined intrinsically (by the meeting of a metabolic
deficit calculable in advance) but extrinsically, is that relations become
external to terms: the production of desire and events can no longer
be grounded in an originating event, or proper relation. The organism
cannot master or determine those forces it encounters, or the forces by
which it is transformed. There is no longer a simple unfolding of pos-
sibilities from what an organism is (as though time were grounded in
natural becoming). A non-presence, or what the organism can feel but
not know and command, now marks all anticipation, all futures.
This non-presence that seems to disturb the linear time of metabolic
quantities – where a deficit can be restored by the input of quantities,
returning to constancy – does not arrive from without, accidentally.
Instead, the syncopation that enables time – the pulsation that marks
out a space and distribution – exposes the illusory status of the organ-
ism. The notion of the bounded body that maintains itself by meeting
its needs, going through a time that is nothing more than the time
taken to restore quantities to their natural and proper equilibrium: this
is a myth, a sexual myth of the organism. It is only after the emergence
of desire, whereby the mouth effects a relation to what is not present
(the feel of the breast, lips, fluid, sucking) that something like a before

and after, or here and there, inner and outer, self and other, can be
established. There is a production of the temporal, of anticipation,
retention and maintenance, only through the sexual: it is not with
elements that are fully given, actualized and existing with complete
internal relations, that one is given time.
If a being or entity is sufficient to itself, and if its relation to what it is
not is also already fully given, then there is nothing to be played out. One
can think here of a certain notion of God, for whom all future events are
foreknown. And it is from the possibility of a God to whom all things
are immediately and fully present that one can also consider Leibniz’s
monad. The monad’s individuation is constituted by all predicates being
fully explicated; we know what a being is if we know all the events that
have befallen and will befall it, and all the relations it bears to every other
monad. I am who I am because of all the encounters that make up my life,
including all the events that precede and follow me. This logic of internal
relations is given more specifically in the familial and Oedipal figure of the
organism. The organism – as in organicist aesthetics – is a bounded whole
in which each part possesses the identity it does because of its participation
in a living whole, and in which the whole is not a collection of disparate
atomic parts but the dynamic result of interconnected, mutually self-con-
stituting and autopoietic relations. The whole is not composed of parts, for
it is nothing more than the consequence of relations that are given only in
the productive activity of each part’s relation to every other.
The child is therefore perhaps the perfect figure in organicist aesthet-
ics: what Freud referred to as ‘His Majesty the Baby’ (Freud 1959, p.
49). Gazed upon by the parent as an image of utter integrity and self-
enclosed completeness, the child is a world unto himself, a bounded
whole – not yet corrupted, self-conscious or seduced by a world of
surmise and suspicion. One always imagines and mourns this child that
one must have been prior to the repressions and anticipations of adult
subjection, prior to the alienation, prohibition and otherness of a world
of external relations (Leclaire, 1998). And this figure of the child as pure
presence unto itself is crucial in the imaginary of time and sexuality.
Sexuality occurs as a slippage, gap or intrusion in organic self-presence.
The child’s autopoeitic and organic self-maintenance is possible only
through a relation to otherness that precludes any linear temporality
or economy of self-regulating equilibrium. The relation to what is not

the organism’s own becomes sexual through a time of disturbance and
non-presence. The mouth that sucks sensually is oriented not to the aim
of restoring a need, returning to quiescence, but to a contact and touch
displaced from the order of organic sustainability. The look towards the

other who will meet my needs becomes one of sexual desire when the
other’s world is neither given nor readable (Laplanche, 1999). When
the organism is oriented beyond itself to the signifier – or towards that
which is not determined from an internal relation of the organism’s
own system – then temporality is truly generated as sexual. For time is
not the existence of a series, but the potentiality of relations not given
in, or unfolded from, the present. The organism is timeless, determining
relations from itself. Sexuality is time, the exposure to the non-present,
the anticipated, the deviation and potentiality of an open.
Time Is Sexuality
So far, this discussion has negotiated sexuality as a deflection from

organic need and plenitude, and has considered time as this radically
passive synthesis of relations not determined from the will, intentional-
ity or a sense of the living body. But can this time of sexuality, and the
sexuality of time, be approached less anthropically, less Oedipally? So
much would already be implied from within the Oedipal figure of the
self-contained pre-linguistic infant. The fantasy of a pure presence to
self in which a being goes through time (a time of its own) is generated
ex post facto from the position of submission to a time of desire in which
neither the anticipated future nor the retained past is present, owned
or lived. That is, the timelessness of the self-contained ego can be given
only after dispersed syntheses have constituted a point of relative sta-
bility. The original, pre-Oedipal plentitude of the pre-linguistic infant
is an effect, not the ground, of temporal distribution. Time in general,
or what we might begin to imagine as ‘time in its pure state’, can be
imagined perhaps only through sexuality. But sexuality, in its radically
temporal mode, can only begin to be approached beyond the human
and the organic.
The time of the organism, so we are constantly reminded today, is
homeostatic and autopoietic: the world is always a lived world, and the
lived world is the organism’s own. The living body’s ‘outside’ is given
only as the disturbance of equilibrium; its range of anticipation and
retention is enabled only by the degree to which its needs entail projec-
tion into a future and maintenance of a past. The organism itself is the
effect of syntheses that are neither centred (on life) nor oriented towards
maintenance. The organism is, after all, the effect of multiple series of
irreversible annihilations. Literally, carbon-based life only emerges from
a radical disturbance of earlier milieux in which oxygen was toxic. At
the level of thought and life, the organism’s bounded unity occurs

at the expense of an openness to inorganic and inhuman rhythms.
Such pulsations would be sexual. Life and time beyond ‘conscious’
bodies pay no heed to organic demands and identities; time operates
through a profound erotics, if eros can be thought of as a style of cou-
pling of potentialities that may pass through the striving of organisms
but pulses beyond the organism’s interests. Time must be inhuman –
a rhythm irreducible to the syntheses enabled by ‘our’ sensory-motor
apparatus. And this inhumanity must be sexual, creative (or creatively
destructive) and productive of encounters whose forces and relations
cannot be determined in advance, either by the intentionality of needs
or the figures – organic, human, Oedipal, communal – that render time
and desire perceptible.
Sexuality and Extinction
From the foregoing, we could suggest that there is an essentially sexual

quality to extinction, and an extinguishing tendency to sexuality:
sexuality occurs as deflection or deviation from replicating production,
and the productions of sexuality are not only discontinuous with the
organisms from which they emerge but open onto the non-organic in
general. Consider, in this respect, the sexuality of consumption: beyond
organic needs, or even with the organism’s (illusory) figuration of its
needs, there exists a persistent and insistent process of ingestion that
is blind to the (supposedly) proper and organizing limits of the living
body. This is especially so if we consider the original proper living
organism to be not the located finite human individual, but life as a
whole, the organism of Gaia. The very processes that originated from
the striving of organic maintenance – eating, reproducing, producing –
have pushed the organism to (self-)annihilation. One should not be too
quick to attribute this to a distinct death drive that would have split
itself off from sexually creative processes – where the forward and pro-
gressive creativity of sexual time would be deflected into a return to qui-
escence. For sexual time as creative time – opening out beyond organic
normativity – is creative and destructive at once: creative precisely in
its destruction of bounded identities and normative wholes. Gender
would also have this creative and destructive ambivalence, for genders
act as ideals, norms or figures that are never attuned to the individua-
tions of bodies. The ideality of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ can be understood
both as deflecting life from its organic normality, creating a disjunction
between immediate existence and a received notion, and as productive
of destructive modes of consumption: the libidinal investments in the

figure of man as Homo faber have alone been responsible for ecological
havoc, but so too has been the figure of woman as earth mother, carer,
redemptive other or attuned body. Are not human organisms and their
modes of consumption tied to rhythms and motifs that are not that of
their own survival? Does not the very existence and weary persistence
of gender testify to a rigid death in life, or archaism, that at once pre-
cludes a pure future, yet also inserts a perverse unpredictability?
How, then, does this barely witnessed time come to intrude on our
all too organic present? We live in an era of intensely organic self-
maintenance, with individuals enclosing ever more around the privacy
of consumption – private video screens, personal digital music players,
‘radio’ stations tailored to individual playlists, fast foods designed to
meal times outside communal ritual dining and cooking, personal train-
ers, phones that use GPS to monitor distances that we have walked,
flexible work-time and technologies no longer demanding common
work spaces and rhythms and, most importantly, a dissolution of
any seeming distinction between consumption and production. Our
‘private’ consumption of television, amusement services, sexuality and
leisure – even the gender-critical industries of popular feminism, iden-
tity politics, activist movements and theory – is already a market organ-
ized around the desexualization of time. Theory has, after all, been one
of the industries to maintain the humanism and forward movement of
time, a time of emancipation, of a maintained left, of a ‘we’ who will
recognize justice in a time to-come. Time is rendered not profligate but
profitable, not dilatory but capitalizable. This increasingly privatized,
localized and autopoietic time (engineered to the body’s rhythms of
self-maintenance) at once intensifies a broader rhythm of creative anni-
hilation – a dissolution of humanity to make way for what is unknown –
yet isolates the organism from the intensity of inorganic life. It is the
increasing organicism and desexualization of time – the enclosure of
human perceptive life into its private bubble geared entirely to self-
maintenance without profligate squandering – that will lead to the end
of organic time and life.
If, however, one could think about the sexuality of time in its
capacity to create syntheses and productions beyond those of organic
striving, two events might follow. First, even if the organism would not
alter its spatial extensive trajectory (for it may now be too late to halt
the destruction of habitable earth within an already predictable time
period), there might be an intensive opening to a counter-ethics. No
longer focused on an ethos of abode – a morality grounded upon where
we dwell – and certainly not a logic of sustaining or rendering ourselves

viable, we might ask (finally) what life is, what life might do, beyond
organic self-enclosure. This would be an intensive and sexual question:
intensive, because it would not take life as it actually exists and seek
to extend its range (by rendering animals more human, by hoping
that humans might live longer), for it would take those aspects of life
that are not fully actualized – problems, questions, disturbances – and
seek to maximize their force. This problem would also be sexual: not
grounded upon the organism’s self-recognition but extending its powers
of mutation (especially those mutations that occur through unintended
encounters). Second, if we alter the logic of living on, of sustaining,
extending, adapting, mitigating or justifying the human as it currently
is, then something like a sexual life – a life open to the forces of its own
destruction – might be given a chance.
Notes
1. On this topic, see Julia Kristeva’s classic essay, ‘Women’s Time’ (1981), which
reinforces a distinction between a mathematical linear time of the rational
subject (‘man’) and a time that goes beyond the subject. Luce Irigaray (1985,
p. 252) has also argued that the supposed subjectivity of time, whereby time is
the synthesized ground through which man represents and orders the world,
is a ‘pass’ time or dead time – not time at all so much as the displacement of
temporality by the figure of the self-sufficient organism. Paul De Man, also
critical of the natural, organicist and human figures of time, has insisted on
the catastrophic nature of temporality in contrast with the ways in which it
has been figured as human, all too human (De Man, 1996, p. 134).
2. I refer here to the widespread uptake of the work of Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela (1992), whose highly influential theory of embodied cogni-
tion and living minds stresses that the world is never neutral matter to be rep-
resented but is always the world of this or that coupled living system; further,
living systems are always already coupled with a milieu that is irreducibly
their own. Maturana and Varela’s work has been extended, valorized and even
further humanized (through a stress on the lived body of phenomenology) by
digital media theorists (Hansen and Clarke, 2009) and philosophers working
in cognitive science (Thompson, 2007), political theory (Protevi, 2009) and
cultural theory (and its proclamation of the ‘affective turn’: Clough and
Halley, 2007).
3. Giorgio Agamben’s The Open (2004) is most explicit about the ways in which
the world is always the world for this or that living being, even if ‘man’s’ world
is marked by its capacity to break with its actualized range and live itself in a
potentiality beyond that of mere life. The intensification of the political, and
its thorough immanence to living labour, is presented by Micheal Hardt and
Antonio Negri (2000) as the proper trajectory of a thoroughly human life.
Works Cited

Agamben, G. (2004) The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press).
Bainbridge, D. (2003) The X in Sex: How the X Chromosome Controls Our Lives
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
Brennan, T. (1993) History After Lacan (London: Routledge).
Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London:
Verso).
Clough, P. T. and Halley, J. (eds) (2007) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
Deleuze, G. (2005) Cinema 1: The Movement Image (London: Continuum).
De Man, P. (1996) Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Foucault, M. (2002) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(London: Routledge).
Freud, S. (1959) ‘On Narcissism’, in J. Riviere and J. Strachey (eds), Collected
Papers: Vol. 4 (New York: Basic Books).
Freud, S. (2000) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, ed. J. Strachey (New York:
Basic Books).
Hansen, M. and Clarke, B. (2009) Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on
Second-Order Systems Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press).
Irigaray, L. (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press).
Kristeva, J. (1981) ‘Women’s Time’, Signs, 7(1), 13–35.
Lacan, J. (1985) Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne
(London: Norton).
Laplanche, J. (1976) Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press).
Laplanche, J. (1999) Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge).
Leclaire, S. (1998) A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
Lovelock, J. (1988) The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (New York:
Norton).
Maturana, H. and Varela, F. J. (1992) The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of
Human Understanding (Boston: Shambhala).
Protevi, J. (2009) Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press).
Sykes, B. (2003) Adam’s Curse: A Future without Men (New York: Bantam Press).
Thompson, E. (2007) Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap).
Warren, K. (2000) Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and
Why It Matters (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield).
12
Busy Dying

Valerie Rohy
Near the end of Isaac Julien’s film Looking for Langston, police and thugs
burst into a gay club only to find the revellers gone, vanished so utterly
that the smoke hanging, illuminated, in mid air comes to figure all that
is not visible in the sudden stillness. Finding no one, the intruders are
confounded. But the effect of the scene, the shock of that empty room,
may also strike the queer observer as an uncanny missed encounter.
When the club’s occupants escape to another place – or as likely, in
the logic of this film, to another time – the scene turns swiftly from
anticipation to belatedness, as if its temporal register did not permit a
present tense. As such, it could allegorize the impossibility of history
even within the historical inquiry that is the film’s project: our recur-
rent missed encounter with the past. Dedicated to the recovery of black
gay history from the Harlem Renaissance and the articulation of that
era’s anachronistic resonance with the film’s 1980s, Looking for Langston
offers a theory of queer temporality avant la lettre. But while queer and
LGBT communities have always been concerned – albeit in different
voices – with questions of history, only recently have queer scholars
shown a sustained engagement not merely with the historical record
but also with time as such; in the past decade a remarkable surge of criti-
cal interest in temporality, to which the present volume contributes,
has considered time’s contingencies, consequences, narrative forms and
affective burdens.
Why, one might ask, has queer theory been consumed by ques-
tions of historicity at this historical moment? Why is now the time
to ask about time? One answer might note the waxing and waning
of historical methodologies in literary studies and other disciplines,
since the advent of sustained scholarship in gay and lesbian stud-
ies in the 1980s coincided with the arrival of New Historicism, and
205
206 Valerie Rohy
with the move, informed by Foucault, from essentialist to construc-

tivist notions of sexual identity. These developments prompted new
sensitivities to the alterity of the past, which like all critical methods
became reified by repetition, eventually inviting critique both within
and beyond queer theory. A more speculative answer, however, might

begin with the history of LGBT/queer theory, now in its third decade
and well into its third generation of scholars: something in our his-
tory has prompted us to rethink history, or to vibrate differently to its
chords. Now it is true that when warned to historicize, I have taken
that, like all sensible cautions, as a law made to be broken. But I want
to address the question ‘why time at this time?’ by tracing, in broad
strokes, three more or less conventional histories whose convention-
ality itself reflects key problematics of queer theory. Consider them
three untrustworthy narratives, three stories connected by their tem-
poral imbrication in the decade after the year 2000. The first tells of a
marked change of tone in queer theory; the second records increasing
scholarship on queer temporality; and the third charts the recent rise
of ‘sexuality studies’. Asking what it means that now is the time for
queer time, I hope to exert some critical pressure on the ostensible
coherence of these narratives, these converging lines of queer theory’s
history.
It is not insignificant that the extraordinary attention to queer tem-
poralities in the past decade coincides with queer theory’s own shift
from anticipation to retrospection – a turn so acute as to elide the
present tense. Indeed, I suggest, queer temporality studies answer the
past decade’s proclamations of queer theory’s demise, questioning (if
unconsciously or unintentionally) both that morbid conclusion and
the arc of its arrival. While my first two narratives examine queer tem-
porality studies’ resistance to chronology, my third considers a case in
which retroactive projection, not calendar time, enables heteronorma-
tive appropriation. This story concerns how recent accounts of sexuality
studies strangely locate queer theory (along with gay, lesbian, bisexual
and transgender studies) on the side of historical specificity, and the
straight universal in the realm of anachronism. It need hardly be said
that in the context of queer temporality studies, the truth of linear his-
tory is suspect; it is perhaps less apparent that the alignment of queer-
ness with aberrant temporalities, and such temporalities with challenges
to heteronormativity, also merits question. Whatever form it may take –
precocity, syncopation, nostalgia, repetition, Nachträglichkeit, disconti-
nuity, belatedness – anachronism has no essential politics. Temporality
studies, then, may sustain queer theory against time, but they cannot
Busy Dying 207
assume that non-normative time will ally itself with perversion against
the Law.
Present Tense

Though many stories might be told, and have been told, about the
development of LGBT studies and queer theory as academic disciplines,
the story I want to tell has to do with mood or tone, expressed by cer-
tain tropes that track, over time, changes in attitudes towards time. As
Looking for Langston indicates, we have been talking about temporality
for as long as we have been talking about sexuality, long before the cur-
rent intensification of interest in queer time nudged our engagement
from the figural toward the thematic. Poised between forward and
backward glances, the title of Bonnie Zimmerman’s 1981 essay on the
lesbian literary tradition, ‘What Has Never Been’, suggests how a sense
of historical dispossession can fuel investment in the future. From the
urgency of that self-invention come readings that take the someday as
an object of desire, but not for the most part until in the 1990s, the era
of queer theory.1 Writing in 1995, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner
observe that queer theory ‘has been radically anticipatory, trying to
bring a world into being’ (p. 344). In 1996, Annamarie Jagose ends
her overview of queer theory and its antecedents by invoking ‘the
ambivalent reassurance of an unimaginable future’ (p. 132). Even Lee
Edelman, whose later work will pit negativity against utopianism, writes
in 1995: ‘utopic in its negativity, queer theory curves endlessly toward a
realization that its realization remains impossible’ (p. 348). And Joseph
Boone’s introduction to the collection Queer Frontiers, published in
2000, employs millennial rhetoric, conjuring the ‘utopian horizons of
desire and possibility’ (p. 4) promised by a queer theory that ‘remains
to be fully discovered’ (p. 10). As recently as a decade ago, one strand of
queer theory operates in the mode of anticipation, looking to the future
for its realization. Then something changes – not with the clarity of an
event, but as a palpable shift in a critical centre of gravity, a revision of
queer theory’s prevailing assumptions – as the language of beginning
gives way to talk of ending.
Even as publications remain strong – and as queer theory, LGBT studies
and sexuality studies make significant institutional inroads, formalizing
programmes and curricula – after 2000 the tone turns from anticipation
to belatedness. As if responding to a larger temporal anxiety, the expect-
ancy of queer theory dissipates as quickly as Y2K plans and millennial
fantasies. Or rather, its promised future alters, as the prediction of
208 Valerie Rohy
greatness becomes a foreboding of ruin. Stephen M. Barber and David

L. Clark write in 2002, ‘it is not especially surprising to hear that the
survival of queer theory has been questioned or its possible “death”
bruited, however questioningly’ (p. 4). In 2003, Judith Halberstam
reports: ‘some say that queer theory is no longer in vogue; others

characterize it as fatigued or exhausted of energy and lacking in keen
debates; still others wax nostalgic for an earlier moment’ (p. 361). In
2004, Heather Love notes the whispers that ‘queer theory is going
downhill’ (p. 259). And in 2007 a special issue of SAQ entitled ‘After
Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory’ asks, among other things, what
it means to find oneself ‘“after” queer theory’ (p. 422); as editors Janet
Halley and Andrew Parker (p. 421) note, ‘we’d been hearing from some
quarters that queer theory, if not already passé, was rapidly approaching
its expiration date’. All this may not be as dire as it seems: such death
threats preserve the gesture of anticipation, if in a negative spirit (queer
theory has been approaching death for years, but seems asymptotically
never to get there), and their frequent reliance on rumour (‘some say’;
‘we’d been hearing from some quarters’) bespeaks many authors’ reluc-
tance to endorse such claims.2 Nonetheless, there is a manifest reversal.
Outside the academy, more cynical observers would take the death of
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on 12 April 2009 as an occasion to assess the
state of queer theory. Writing in the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler
suggests that ‘Sedgwick’s radical challenge to heteronormative ways of
reading and living may seem quaint’ today.3 (Sedgwick herself acknowl-
edged, in 1993 (p. xii), that ‘the queer moment’ might succumb to ‘the
short shelf-life of the American marketplace of images’, but insisted that
queerness itself was ‘inextinguishable’.)4
In a few short years after 2000, the dominant rhetoric of queer theory
turns from expectation to ending, rushing past the present tense. In The
Wake of Deconstruction, Barbara Johnson (1994, p. 17) quotes Vincent
Leitch’s 1980 remark: ‘no longer busy being born, deconstruction is busy
dying’. To judge from its own rhetoric, the formula could describe queer
theory as well.5 That space, brief as a comma in Leitch’s assessment,
becomes in queer theory a precipitous leap from future to past. Still
contemplating its critical rapprochement with presentism, queer theory
leaves the present tense a site of anything but presence. Calling for ‘a
more various sense of what might constitute the present’, Jonathan
Goldberg (2007, pp. 502, 503) has suggested that we ‘have yet to imag-
ine the possibility of writing a history that attends to the possibility of
the non-self-identity of any historical moment’. In the absent fulcrum
of its own narrative, queer theory registers that difference as a tension
Busy Dying 209
of the present tense. More specifically, we might understand this tem-

poral gap as an effect of queer theory’s eternal deferral – of meaning,
of identity, of satisfaction. As Jagose (1996, p. 1) notes, ‘its definitional
indeterminacy, its elasticity, is one of its constituent characteristics’.
In fact, an indeterminacy, a certain impossibility of the present, may

have determined the queer rhetoric of anticipation from its earliest
moments; what change, then, are the ways in which that impossibil-
ity is articulated. Edelman’s No Future (2004) invites us to imagine the
absent present of queer theory’s history as one aspect of queer negativ-
ity, which is to say, ‘a refusal – the appropriately perverse refusal that
characterizes queer theory – of every substantialization of identity,
which is always oppositionally defined, and, by extension, of history
as linear narrative’ (p. 4). As a force that resists identity, politics, and
the temporal structures that subtend them, queer theory is always else-
where, elsewhen; it cannot coincide with itself.
Lie Against Time
It is significant to find a major critical engagement of queer temporali-

ties concurrent with the notion of queer theory’s death, and the story
of that engagement – the emergence of an intense scholarly attention
to time – forms my second narrative. Though LGBT/queer scholarship
has long reflected a concern with history, the queer theory of the 1990s
undertakes a substantial reappraisal of historicity and historical meth-
odologies, with Jonathan Goldberg’s 1995 discussion of ‘the history
that will be’, Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero’s 1996 introduc-
tion to Premodern Sexualities, Scott Bravmann’s Queer Fictions of the Past
(1997), and Carolyn Dinshaw’s 1999 introduction to Getting Medieval.6
Profoundly concerned with time, such studies form the foundation of
today’s temporality studies, yet the transition from ‘history’ to ‘tem-
porality’ carries more than semantic weight. After Dinshaw, studies
framed in historical terms, as questions of relations to the past, also
move towards the systemic study of temporality as an ideological
formation. By the time of queer theory’s turn from possibility to dis-
enchantment, any accounting becomes arbitrary: the past decade has
seen important work by Elizabeth Freeman, David Halperin, Annamarie
Jagose, Lee Edelman, José Esteban Muñoz, Christopher Nealon, Valerie
Traub, Jonathan Goldberg, Madhavi Menon, Judith Halberstam and
Heather Love, among many others. Recognition of their subject fol-
lowed apace, and in 2007 GLQ devoted a special issue to studies of queer
temporality.
210 Valerie Rohy
Thus at the same time that queer theory faces reports of its demise,
studies of queer temporality become increasingly vital. The broadening
of historical questions to problems of temporality as such both unmoors
readings from the past and enables analyses of time’s systematicity,
addressing precisely the temporal ideologies that subtend the supposed

death of queer theory. This intersection of two kinds of queer time may,
of course, be contingent, not causal, but even contingencies allow inter-
pretation. A contingency, like a coincidence, offers meaning that lacks
meaning, a hermeneutic obstacle defended by the danger of logical fal-
lacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc. I would not argue that the notion of queer
theory’s death caused scholars to investigate queer temporalities (the
latter, after all, may have preceded the former); but those investigations
have also shown the limitations of the causal narrative, the logic of
before and after. The juxtaposition of these two discourses about queer
time may not have a cause, but it has effects nonetheless. Whether in
literary terms, where intention falters, or in psychoanalytic terms, where
the unconscious dwells, it cannot not signify. In this sense, the arrival
of queer temporality as a major critical subject constitutes a response
to queer theory’s vertiginous turn from anticipation to retrospection
and the temporal anxieties attending that turn. Answering the claims
of queer theory’s death by questioning the temporal logic on which
such claims rely, it shows queer theory wrestling with its own historic-
ity. In this effort, queer scholars’ focus on deviations from normative
time function as a collective resistance to the linear narrative of queer
theory’s birth, growth, decline and death. Barber and Clark (2002, p. 5),
for example, maintain that ‘the potency of “queer” as a political term
is indebted to certain temporal disorientations … other-than-punctual
(or: -chronological; -sequential) temporalities’. While Harold Bloom
(1982, p. 59) famously declares poetry ‘a lie against time’ – tacitly
reading time as truth – queer temporality studies have been inclined,
instead, to declare time a lie. Its efforts complicate the story of queer
theory’s rise and fall, even as it reflects the tensions of its moment: told
that its time is up, queer theory questions the authority of time itself.
Compelling as this counter-formation may be, it does not follow
that any temporal anomaly is therefore queer. As Kate Thomas (2007,
p. 617) observes, most queer temporality studies presuppose that
‘malformations of temporal sequencing … are particularly queer
formations’ where queer signifies opposition to heteronormative
orthodoxy. Jagose (2002, p. 102), for example, compares ‘the regula-
tory technologies of sequence’ to the lesbian’s ‘perverse anteriority’;
Goldberg and Menon (2005, p. 1609) maintain that ‘history as it is
Busy Dying 211
hegemonically understood is inadequate to housing the project of

queering’; and Freeman (2007, p. 159) asserts that the queer studies
of temporality connect ‘marginalized time schemes … to subjugated
or disavowed erotic experiences’. Though such claims are persuasive,
the celebration of queer time and queer sexuality as co-conspirators

against heteronormativity should not occlude the ways in which, as
I have argued elsewhere, anachronism can and does serve disciplinary
regimes.7 Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, to take a well-known example,
describes the belated production of a heterosexual disposition as original
(Butler, 1990, p. 57) by a law that both proscribes homosexual cathexes
and erases evidence of that proscription ‘to disguise its own genealogy’
(ibid., p. 64).8 In the retroactive construction of the subject’s ‘natural’
sexuality, its ostensible state before cultural intervention, the distortion
of temporality does not enable, but forecloses, queer possibilities in the
name of the heteronormative Oedipality. So although temporality stud-
ies have vigorously resisted the time line in which queer theory runs
out of time, the same temporal anomalies such studies take as their own
can also, as my last example will suggest, structure the erasure of queer
theory’s most vital work.
Retro
My third narrative, meant to complicate the equation of non-normative

temporal modes with queerness, concerns the evolution of ‘sexuality
studies’. Before roughly the year 2000, the term referred variously to
clinical practices such as sexology and psychoanalysis, and to individual
research in such disciplines as anthropology and sociology, whether
qualitative or quantitative: Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, Margaret
Mead and Alfred Kinsey produced sexuality studies. This usage continues
into the twenty-first century, even as a new concept of sexuality studies
as an academic field akin to gender studies appears, and the term comes
to designate an interdisciplinary practice committed to examining both
homosexuality and heterosexuality from an anti-heteronormative per-
spective.9 Today, sexuality studies is what queer theory is often called
in institutional settings: queer theory in its domesticated form.10 As
LGBT curricula find an academic home as ‘sexuality studies’, and as
‘women’s studies’ programmes, acknowledging that addition, become
programmes in ‘gender and sexuality studies’, the term has gained a
new place in the academy.11 The move to sexuality studies from LGBT
studies can be compared to the shift to ‘gender studies’ from women’s
studies, fuelled by the important recognition that sexuality, like gender,
212 Valerie Rohy
is a relational system in which the smallest recalibration of the homo

is felt by the hetero, and vice versa – and in which the definitional
clarity of homo and hetero is never more than a conservative fiction.12
Compared to an identitarian LGBT studies, sexuality studies also prom-
ises a more nuanced recognition of cathexes, fantasies and acts that

precede the formation of modern sexual identities in the nineteenth
century. But along the way, it has come to rewrite a different past, by
colonizing or obliterating studies of gay and lesbian sexuality by gay
and lesbian scholars.13
Indeed, if sexuality studies purports to offer a less presentist view of
the past, it must account for some peculiar historical problems. In one
recurrent narrative, ‘sexuality studies’ replaces ‘gay and lesbian studies’;
thus Susan Stryker (2004, pp. 212–15) states that ‘queer theory was born
of the union of sexuality studies and feminism’ – that is, presumably,
gay and lesbian studies and feminism.14 This substitution must explain
an assertion in the introduction to The Masculinity Studies Reader: ‘in
the 1980s, social historians such as Jeffrey Weeks and John D’Emilio
set the agenda for an emerging field of sexuality studies by examining
the changing relationship between sexual practices and sexual sub-
jects’ (Adams and Savran, 2002, pp. 6–7). True enough, if by ‘sexuality
studies’ the authors mean ‘gay and lesbian studies’, which did emerge
in the 1980s, and to which Weeks and D’Emilio were prominent con-
tributors.15 Even arguments against gay and lesbian studies rename their
subject as sexuality studies, blunting the force of their critique. One text
asserts that ‘over the course of the 1980s, a substantial current of gender
and sexuality studies withdrew to a narrow, disengaged, and frequently
idealistic notion of social constructionism’ (Lancaster and Di Leonardo,
1997, p. 4) – a transposition that does not flatter sexuality studies, which
played no part in the constructionist models embraced by gay and les-
bian studies in that decade.16 If some accounts insert sexuality studies
into a past it never knew, others repackage its foundational research as
their own fresh insights, as does the home page of the Department of
Women and Gender Studies at the University of California, Davis:
over the past decade, Sexuality Studies has become increasingly

influential … Previous formulations of sexuality couch it as either
something deeply private and personal or, in the case of sexual
minorities such as lesbians and gay men, as a benign aberration of
normal physical or psychological development … Much of the work
in the new field of Sexuality Studies, by contrast, interrogates con-
temporary systems of sexual classification, such as ‘heterosexuality’
Busy Dying 213
and ‘homosexuality,’ and questions their taken-for-granted or purely

biological nature. (UC Davis, 2010)
Promoting the denaturalization of sexual identities and their recogni-

tion as social formations, such rhetoric claims for sexuality studies

the accomplishments of a queer theory it largely fails to mention. In
Handbook of the New Sexuality Studies (2006), the editors assert that
in the past few decades, there has been a revolution in the study of
sexuality. Sex is today understood as fundamentally social. … This
deep sociology of sexualities is what we call the new sexuality stud-
ies. The reader is left to ponder how a decades-old ‘revolution’ can
also be ‘new’, and what exactly is new about such questions as ‘how
is it that certain body parts become sexualized?’ (Seidman et al.,
2006, pp. x, xi)17
One possible response to this phenomenon is, no doubt, already

evident in my survey of sexuality studies’ odd usages. With the past of
queer theory and the future of sexuality studies at stake, who would
not seek to remedy error with truth? Not content to supplant LGBT
studies/queer theory, sexuality studies erases the fact of their existence
in narratives that either usurp their historical place or expropriate
their labour. In the history offered by the Handbook of the New Sexuality
Studies, no Foucault, no Rubin, no Butler questions a ‘taken-for-granted’
sexual identity; gone are Sedgwick, Freud, queer theory and its interdis-
ciplinary foundations. Before sexuality studies, it seems, darkness was
upon the face of the deep. In suppressing the history of queer theory
and gay and lesbian studies, sexuality studies assumes the heterosexual
privilege of universality. William B. Turner, whose Genealogy of Queer
Theory provides a sustained critique of this logic, writes: ‘unexam-
ined, “heterosexuality” functions as ideal signification, as a purport-
edly universal category beyond the contingencies of history’ (2000,
p. 72). But the opposite is also true: unexamined, any universal, neutral
or generic category will default to the meaning of the privileged class,
as human does to man and sexuality does to heterosexuality. That is
why, as Carole-Anne Tyler (2003, p. 11) notes, ‘common humanity’
is ‘not common but particular: white, bourgeois, masculine, and het-
erosexual. It constitutes and is constituted by a point of view, values,
and practices that masquerade as nature, a zero degree of representa-
tion and subjectivity’. When sexuality studies takes the place of gay
and lesbian studies, the efforts of the homosexual minority, once
214 Valerie Rohy
strenuously resisted, are either aggrandized by the straight majority as its

own general knowledge or effaced by heteronormative criticism-as-usual.
Of course, the misuse of a term by some does not preclude its proper
use, but as long as sexuality studies cribs from its classmates, it may not
have a proper meaning. Its colonizing tendency, which ‘accidentally’

erases the queerness of past research, has real consequences at a time
when queer theory has been devalued in a critical market place still rife
with heteronormative and transphobic readings. Far more than the spu-
rious ‘community’ and ‘belonging’ of gay identity politics, the apparent
inclusivity of sexuality studies depends on appropriation, arrogating for
the straight universal what was once the distinctly gay.
After the Fact
There is, however, another response. The preceding paragraphs offer a

historical argument, tracking erroneous assertions and seeking to extri-
cate sexuality studies from its retroactive expropriation of the homo-
sexual past. But there is no small irony in this approach, which renders
‘queer’, once denounced as unduly nebulous, the more specific term
and the more historically stable. Through a curious role reversal, the
retroactive projection of sexuality studies into the past seems to place
queer theory on the side of historical fact. But as Jagose (1996, pp. 4–5)
notes, queer theory has its own retroactive effects: ‘queer’s powerful
refiguring of lesbian and gay studies is evident in the way in which it is
able to install itself retrospectively at the heart of that project’; that ret-
roaction is not necessarily retrogressive: ‘in a movement simultaneously
forwards and backwards, queer is designated as not only the evolution-
ary extension of a more conventional lesbian and gay studies but also its
bent progenitor’. Halperin (2003, p. 341) concurs, suggesting that queer
theory ‘had to be invented after the fact, to supply the demand it had
evoked. (The two texts that, in retrospect, were taken to have founded
queer theory, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, were written well before anyone had ever
heard of it.)’.18 Unlike that of sexuality studies, the retroactive gesture
of queer theory does not erase homosexuality. But the similarity of one
to the other casts chronology in a new light, suggesting that aberrant
temporalities can as readily uphold the norm as subvert it. It is not that
‘malformations of temporal sequencing … are particularly queer forma-
tions’ (Thomas, 2007, p. 617); instead, temporal modes have no inher-
ent political valence, despite how closely they may adhere to particular
perverse or hegemonic narratives.
Busy Dying 215
In view of this, to defend queer theory – that is, to defend a queer

theory worth defending – would mean to cease defending it, at least
by conventional means, through recourse to proper histories. Indeed,
we can keep queer theory as our own only by giving it up, or rather by
being willing to give it up before it can become a calcified monument

to some historical truth. To ask this is to ask the impossible, as we can-
not wilfully decathect a field that has for many of us defined our work
and lives. But the alternative may be to see it become what it has always
opposed. Slavoj Žižek (1997, p. 15) remarks that in Paradise Lost, ‘Adam
loses X [jouissance] by directly choosing it, aiming to retain it’. This fate
could be that of queer theory, which stands to lose its critical force pre-
cisely by trying to retain it. Accepting the prospect of its loss, through
misprision or otherwise, is the only way to retain what is most valuable
about queer theory: its negativity, its indeterminacy, all the ways in
which it cannot occupy its own present tense. When Sedgwick (1993,
p. xii) considers the possibility that queer theory may be ‘gone tomor-
row’, it is precisely that motility that enables its persistence as ‘a contin-
uing moment, movement, motive, recurrent, eddying, troublant’. Like
any oppositional project, queer theory may fail through its own suc-
cess, ceding its radicality to institutionalization, or losing to history its
negativity, contingency and surprise – in short, all that Edelman (2004,
p. 4) describes as its refusal of the ‘substantialization of identity …
and, by extension, of history as linear narrative’. Paradoxically, then, to
defend the cultural visibility of homosexuality against the false univer-
sal of an always presumptively straight ‘sexuality’ may betray what has
been most valuable in queer theory.
If we need not defend queer theory against the encroachment of
sexuality studies, perhaps we also need not resist the death of queer
theory, or not in the way one might think. Responding to Leitch’s mot –
‘no longer busy being born, deconstruction is busy dying’ – Johnson
(1994, p. 17) asks ‘what does it mean to personify deconstruction as
animate only by treating it as dead, giving it life only in the act of
taking that life away?’. While it is ironic that queer theory should also
be enlivened by prophecies of its death, especially in the tacit conversa-
tion between queer temporality studies and models of time whose telos
must be death, there is no reason why that conversation should not
continue. If we choose to accept the humanizing trope that gives life
to queer theory, it must therefore be dying, like all of us: after all, the
condition of life is its ending. And if so, the question becomes how long
and how richly queer theory can live that dying, busy with the work of
its time.
216 Valerie Rohy
Notes
For their comments and assistance, I thank Paul Deslandes, Liz Fenton, Beth
Mintz, Ben Davies and Jana Funke.
1. This delay is surely overdetermined, but for many in the 1980s the possibil-
ity of anticipation was annulled by the traumatic capacity of the HIV/AIDS

crisis to alter time, producing the accelerated, compromised temporality of,
for example, Paul Monette’s 1988 memoir Borrowed Time. Lesbian feminist
criticism also follows its own time line; beginning earlier, it turns earlier to
nostalgia. In 1997, Bonnie Zimmerman still names her project ‘utopian’, but
she sees the ‘old fashioned feminism’ of the 1970s threatened by the queer
theory of the 1990s (p. 166). While her argument for lesbian specificity seems
to resemble the case for homosexual specificity in the face of universalizing
sexuality studies, Zimmerman’s claims are rooted in the identity politics that
queer theory seeks to resist.
2. Reading queer theory through the notion of messianic futurity, Michael
O’Rourke rightly notes that in death queer theory shows a stubborn vitality; if
so, he concludes, ‘it must then be a revenant, a spectre, a ghost’ as in ‘Derrida’s
hauntological discourse’ (O’Rourke, 2005, para. 25). Yet the lines from Edelman,
Butler and Halperin that he cites as evidence of queer theory’s claim to futurity
were published between 1993 and 1997, making them relics of the anticipatory
attitude that preceded claims of queer theory’s decline (paras 27–9).
3. Several days later, the New York Times returns to Sedgwick’s field of study.
Unable to decide whether queer theory merits the past or present tense, the
article concludes in the mode of retrospection: ‘as far as its own fate was con-
cerned, queer theory was uncannily prescient’ (Cohen, 2009, p. 5).
4. Queer theory is not, of course, univocal, as shown by recent futurist work
such as José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009). Insofar as such texts
respond to Edelman’s No Future, they represent not so much the persistence
of an old critical futurism as the emergence of a new one within and defined
by the discourse of the past decade.
5. As Johnson (1994, p. 17) notes, it is by no means obvious that a critical theory
should be regarded as a living organism, ‘an entity capable of death – that is,
capable of life’. What does the anthropomorphizing effect of this figural ani-
mation mean for a queer theory that, at its most radical, refuses hegemonic
notions of the human?
6. A significant early text on non-historical queer temporality is Judith Roof’s
study of queer narratology, Come As You Are (1996).
7. I discuss the politics of anachronism further in Anachronism and Its Others
(Rohy, 2009, pp. xiv–xvi).
8. Indeed, Butler (1990, p. 74) continues, the ‘narrative of gender acquisition
requires a certain temporal ordering of events which assumes that the nar-
rator is in some position to “know” both what is before and after the law’,
yet that narrative itself, as an effect of the law, ‘proceeds from a belated and
retrospective point of view’.
9. Annemarie Jagose’s Queer Theory: An Introduction (1996) surveys a century of
gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer scholarship without encountering sexuality
studies.
Busy Dying 217
10. If the coincidence of the rise of temporality studies with ‘death of queer
theory’ rhetoric cannot help but signify, so too must the coincidence of
sexuality studies with that rhetoric. A more detailed account would consider
that intersection in relation to the institutionalization of queer theory in the
academy, with the gains and losses this accomplishment must entail for any
oppositional criticism.

11. Proponents of sexuality studies do not to my knowledge address its omission
of the transgender issues that queer theory, if imperfectly, includes.
12. Queer theory stands outside the developmental analogy in which an iden-
titarian practice gives way to a more systemic gender or sexuality studies;
arguably, then, its proper counterpart is not women’s studies but feminist
theory, whose continuing relevance demands only its conceptual agility.
13. I am aware that sexuality studies often functions benignly; my quarrel is
not with the field as such but with some of the narratives produced in its
name.
14. Christine Beasley (2005, p. 119) similarly projects sexuality studies into
the past, saying that it ‘gathers steam … in the 1960s and 1970s’. Kevin
Kopelson (2008, p. 31) makes a similar gesture when he recalls that in the
mid-1980s, ‘having read Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s monumental The
Madwoman in the Attic, I felt sufficiently “imbued with otherness” to imagine
myself doing for sexuality studies what these collaborators … had done for
feminism’.
15. Even when such accounts of sexuality studies also acknowledge LGBT/queer
studies – Adams and Savran, for example, cite Sedgwick’s work – the retroac-
tive effect of the term cannot be undone.
16. Another text notes Biddy Martin’s ‘critique of sexuality studies that exclude
gender from their theoretical fields of vision’ despite the fact that ‘sexuality
studies’ appears nowhere in Martin’s essay; in fact, she opposes what she
sees as queer theory’s betrayal of lesbian feminism (Lochrie et al., 1997,
p. xviii). Here the authors perform on behalf of sexuality studies precisely
the displacement for which Martin faults queer theory – a generalizing ten-
dency that erases signal differences – only on a grander scale.
17. The book’s introduction credits ‘feminists and gay and lesbian activists’
with developing ‘the beginnings of a social view of sexuality as part of their
politics’, but it does not see these activists as scholars, and locates their work
only before the moment in the 1970s when sociologists, they claim, began to
view sex as social (Seidman et al., 2006, p. xi).
18. The same retroactive priority extends to Foucault, particularly the first vol-
ume of his The History of Sexuality.
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Index

adolescence, 7, 10, 114–15, 128, Deleuze, Gilles, 60, 65, 66, 173, 177,
134–8, 144, 150 187, 195
adultery, 1, 10, 115–18, 128, 129 Derrida, Jacques, 55, 57, 61, 65, 66
Agamben, Giorgio, 64–5, 90–1, 96, arrivant, 8, 58, 59
99, 100, 203–4 dance, 120–6, 129
anachronism, 34, 41, 56, 63, 133, gift, 120–4
148–9, 206, 211 hauntology, 58–60, 62
anti-colonial, 175–7, 180–2, 185, hymen, 89–95, 100–1, 104
188 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 9, 25, 41, 63, 209
anti-social, 12, 53–4, 55, 70–2, 74, drag, 21–2, 25
78, 80, 83, 174, 175, 178, 187, see also temporal drag
188, 191–2
asynchrony, 3–5, 10 economics, see capital
autobiography, 133–5, 141–2, 150 Edelman, Lee, 2–3, 6–8, 38, 53–4,
57–8, 60, 61, 64, 65, 70–2, 74,
Baer, Karl M.(artha) (N.O. Body), 78, 80–1, 83–4, 207, 209, 215,
132–5, 140–51 216
Benjamin, Walter, 60 see also anti-social; death; future
Berlant, Lauren, 128, 207 erotics, see adultery; masochism; time;
Bersani, Leo, 66, 179–80, 184 virginity
Boellstorff, Tom, 10, 19, 24, 31
Bourdieu, Pierre, 156, 158, 165, 167 Felski, Rita, 147
Brief Encounter, 1–2, 9–10 feminism, 202, 212, 216, 217
Bustamente, Nao, 190–1 ecofeminism, 196
Butler, Judith, 8, 21, 30–1, 34, 54, 57, and passivity, 173–93
65, 143–4, 148, 155, 189, 196, femininity
211, 213, 214, 216 primitive, 145–7
and unbecoming, 173–93
capital, 7, 10, 19, 157, 177, 192, 198, Foucault, Michel, 55, 139, 150, 177,
202 195, 206, 213, 217
Caputo, John, 60–2, 65, 66 heterotopia, 90–93, 96, 98
Chicken Run, 178 Freccero, Carla, 34, 41, 62, 64, 130,
Child, the, 6, 10, 38, 54, 57, 61–2, 66, 209
70–1, 76–8, 83, 103, 199 Freeman, Elizabeth, 3, 5, 8–9, 21, 109,
continuity & discontinuity, 21, 28–9, 126, 128, 148, 154, 158, 211
55, 138, 144, 146, 201 see also temporal drag
Freud, Sigmund, 134, 175, 198, 211,
dance, 118–31 213
see also Derrida (anti-)oedipal, 30, 34, 173–5, 181,
death, 5–6, 98, 111, 178, 202 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 211
death drive, 57, 71–2, 80, 178, case history, 139–42
180–1, 184, 192, 201 masochism, 184, 192
of queer theory, 208–10, 215 see also death drive
220
Index 221
future, 2–3, 5–10, 32, 33, 38, 43, Jagose, Annamarie, 8, 126, 130, 134,
53–66, 70–84, 94, 119–20, 156–8, 207, 209, 210, 214, 216
163–7, 197–203 Jelinek, Elfriede, 182–3
anticipation, 5, 98–9, 137, 138,
142–5, 167, 198–200, 205–10, 216 Kincaid, Jamaica, 173, 175, 180–2,
deferral, 10, 60, 71, 99, 134–7, 183, 188

145–6, 157, 209 Kristeva, Julia, 54–5, 203
reproductivity, 3, 6–7, 9–11, 38, 58,
61, 70, 76–7, 111–15, 196–7 Lacan, Jacques, 27–8, 47, 57, 80–1,
Utopianism, 54, 56, 70–2, 83–4, 91, 130, 198
178, 207, 216 Laplanche, Jean, 198, 200
see also Child, the lesbian, see time
Levinas, Emmanuel, 57, 59, 60, 65
gender, see femininity; masculinity; linearity & non-linearity, 3, 10–11,
time 19–34, 56–6, 91, 109–10, 115,
genealogy, 4–5, 211 130, 133, 164, 180, 196, 198–9,
Goldberg, Jonathan, 53–8, 60–3, 64, 203, 206, 209, 210, 215
66, 208, 209, 210–11 Looking for Langston, 205, 207
GRA (Gender Recognition Act), Love, Heather, 5, 39, 63, 179–80, 208,
154–6, 158–67 209
Halberstam, Judith, 3, 7, 11, 54, marriage (straight and gay), see time
111–14, 120, 128, 163, 165, 208 Marvell, Andrew, 45–50
Halperin, David, 8, 55, 214, 216 masculinity, 4, 30, 32, 132–4, 142–9,
Hamlet (film, 1921), 19–35 150, 175
see also Shakespeare, William masochism, 173–93
Hardt, Michael, 54, 204 maturity, 7, 10, 98, 136, 145
hermaphroditism, see intersex McEwan, Ian, 89–107
heterosexuality, see time melancholia, 30–4, 63
historiography, 5, 40, 53, 55, 58, 60, Menon, Madhavi, 41–3, 53–8, 60, 61,
62, 66, 180 63, 66, 210–11
history, 4–6, 8, 38–51, 53–63, 64, modernity, 19–34, 35, 40, 44, 63, 195–6
101–3, 174, 196, 205–6, 208–10, pre-modern, 20, 31–2, 40, 195
213, 215 post-modern, 73, 113, 163–4
see also genealogy Muñoz, José Esteban, 7, 54–6, 70–2,
Hirschfeld, Magnus, 132, 136–42, 149, 74, 77, 83–4, 128, 191, 216
150
HIV/AIDS, 53, 216 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 53, 58, 59–60, 63
homonationalism, 161–3 Narcissus, 43–51
homosexuality, see time negativity, 7–8, 54, 71–2, 80, 173–93,
hymen, 89–107 207, 209, 215
see also Derrida see also anti-social; future
Negri, Antonio, 54, 204
identification, 3–4, 5, 9, 25, 32, 39–41, Nicholls, J.A., 189–92
45, 49, 50, 64, 143, 155, 160
see also sexual identity Ono, Yoko, 185–8, 191–3
identity politics, 39, 56, 212, 214, 216
critique of, 55, 58, 174–93, 212 post-colonial, see anti-colonial
intersex/DSD, 132, 135–6, 148, 150 primitive, see femininity
222 Index
Prosser, Jay, 135, 154, 155, 166 generational, 3, 26–30, 33, 111,
puberty, see adolescence 174–5, 182; see also temporal drag
lesbian, 3–4, 188–9, 207, 210, 216
queer time, see time marital, 1, 6, 7, 9–10, 19, 32,
96–100, 104, 109–27; 128, 160;
race/racialization, 50, 71, 145–7, 149, see also adultery

151, 161–5, 174, 179, 185–6, masculine, 142–7, 203
190–2 medieval, 20, 24, 31, 34
Renaissance, 23, 34, 40–51 (non)organic, 195–203
Ricoeur, Paul, 40–1, 45 parallel, 1, 10, 115
Rohy, Valerie, 3, 11, 41, 55–6, 133, queer, 3–4, 7–11, 15, 19, 21, 70,
142, 151 91, 109, 111–15, 120, 126, 128,
133–4, 149, 164–5, 205–11, 215,
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 54, 208, 213, 216
214, 215, 216, 217 queer & straight, 1–15, 70, 74, 84,
sex, see erotics; sexual difference; 85, 91, 105, 125–6, 133–4, 149,
sexual identity; time 206
sexology, 132–49, 150, 211 straight, 3, 6, 8, 11, 15, 19–20, 28,
sexual difference, 44–5, 121–5, 137, 133, 149
195 see also anachronism; asynchrony;
sexual identity, 11, 138–9, 206, 213 capital; Child, the; continuity &
narrative construction of, 132–49 discontinuity; future; genealogy;
see also identification; identity linearity & non-linearity;
politics modernity; temporal drag
Shakespeare, William, 22–34, 58, 75, transgender, 11, 21, 25, 150, 132–49,
129 154–67, 206, 217
see also Hamlet (film, 1921) see also GRA
Shall We Dance? 109–27, 128 Traub, Valerie, 40, 43, 55, 63
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti, 105,
173, 175–9, 192 virginity, 91, 98, 100, 105–6
teleology & dysteleology, 6, 38–9, Walker, Kara, 184–5, 189, 192

41–2, 53, 56–7, 61, 63, 138, Warner, Michael, 51, 57, 128, 207
176–7 Winterson, Jeanette, 70–85
temporal drag, 3, 20, 148 Woolf, Virginia, 174
time
feminine, 145–7 Žižek, Slavoj, 57–8, 64, 65, 215

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Sex, Gender and Time in

Fiction and Culture

Ben Davies and Jana Funke

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1 Introduction: Sexual Temporalities 1

Section 3. (Un)Becoming: Negativity, Death

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Claire Colebrook is Professor of English at Penn State University. She

Ben Davies is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in the School of

Jana Funke is Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for Medical

Emily Grabham is Research Fellow at the AHRC Research Centre for

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Stephen Guy-Bray is Professor of English and Head of Department at

Judith Halberstam is Professor of English and Gender Studies at the

Michael O’Rourke works mostly at the intersections between queer

Friendship Between Men, 1550–1800 (Palgrave Macmillan 2003, paperback

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Abigail Rine is a PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews and a

Valerie Rohy is Associate Professor in the Department of English, the

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discussing sexualities in terms of time, the contributors are furthering

sexual connotations. He asks whether the very notion of a ‘turn toward

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anachronistic identity category seems to delegate her out of the present

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Figure 2 Progressive advertisement showing the photograph ‘Two Unidentified

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birth to death. Paradoxically, however, given the future-oriented logic

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Even the excitement and thrill of barebacking is dependent on the

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Instead of rejecting all possible futures, Halberstam attempts to envi-

In 1997, David Halperin, for instance, argued that ‘queer describes a

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all experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to wel-

If queers and heterosexuals alike are implicated in the experience of

of queer time invites us to view ‘“queer” as a set of possibilities produced

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Anticipating the future moment in time in which she will have

non-queer subjects prolong adolescence and delay maturity. Birth con-

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workforce – also disrupts routines, as the newborn’s rhythms, wants

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us to speculate about the future of gender and sex. It also forces us to

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Gods (2008). While Winterson echoes Edelman’s concept of the future

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In her essay on contemporary transgender politics, Emily Grabham

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tripartite temporal schema. The collection illustrates how the temporal

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Halperin, D. (1997) Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford

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the most fundamental and consequential limitation of conceptions