Sam McBean

Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

beth — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

In a temporally queer attachment of my own, I was bound to Time Binds before it was even published. With versions of the preface, introduction, and three out of four chapters having already appeared in academic journals, Elizabeth Freeman’s arguments had already made an impression on me. This is not to say that Time Binds is a redundant publication. Bound together, the individual pieces only gain in strength, displaying Freeman’s commitment to theorizing the intersections of temporality, queer theory, and the body.

In what might by now be described as a new turn in queer theory—a more self-reflexive turn, a turn that seems to be a pulling back, a slowing down—Freeman is surely one of the leading voices. She describes feeling as though “the point of queer was to always be ahead of actually existing social possibilities.” Instead of this ‘kind’ of queer theory, Freeman describes her commitment to a politics of “trailing behind,” as being “interested in the tail end of things, willing to be bathed in the fading light of whatever has been declared useless.” Time Binds contains captivating and powerful arguments for the need to understand temporality as physical, history as erotic, and the body as a sight that can challenge the temporal limits of heterosexuality and capitalism.

In the first chapter, Freeman focuses on Diane Bonder’s film The Physics of Love (1998), and Bertha Harris' novel Lover (1976), two texts that explore the mother-daughter dynamic. Freeman considers these texts as they utilize the body and the body’s “bad timing” to present a queer challenge the heterogendered and class-marked temporality of familial intimacy. She unpicks how capitalism and heteronormativity depend on a certain temporality and suggest that the body and its queer pleasures may be a site to contest this keeping of time.

In the second chapter, Freeman turns to Elisabeth Subrin’s Shulie (1997) and the work of Canadian artist Allyson Mitchell to consider how ‘lesbian’ and ‘lesbian feminist’ pull on ‘queer'. She introduces and works through what she calls “temporal drag” to consider how the pasts of movements might productively surface in the present, insisting that there is transformative potential in moments that are not quite past, but not entirely present.

In chapter three, Freeman describes “erotohistoriography” as a method for encountering the past as already in the present and the body as a tool “to effect, figure, or perform that encounter.” The body, and its pleasurable responses, in Freeman’s usage, becomes a “form of understanding,” a means to do history. Through tender readings of Frankenstein and Orlando, Freeman pieces together a history of history as physical and considers how bodies in these texts become sites where history is felt—staging the “very queer possibility that encounters with history are bodily encounters, even that they have revivifying and pleasurable effect.”.

Finally, in the last chapter Freeman analyzes Isaac Julien’s The Attendant (1992), following through with her arguments to a site that, she admits, potentially poses troubling conclusions. Namely, the body in sadomasochistic practices as it iterates the past, particularly the horrors of the slave trade. However, through her reading of Julien’s work and S&M practices more generally, Freeman argues for their role as erotohistoriographic practice, and as such they present erotic means of challenging history and rewriting bodily possibilities.

Concluding her thrilling book with a new queer manifesto, Freeman stakes her claim as an influential voice in contemporary queer theory, and asks us to join her, to “use our historically and presently quite creative work with pleasure, sex, and bodies to jam whatever looks like the inevitable.”

Written by: Sam McBean, April 2nd 2011

Rape New York

beth — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Jana Leo

Feminist Press

Rape New York: Jana Leo’s title seems to defiantly ask its readers to ‘rape’ New York. It also simultaneously turns ‘rape’ into an adjective with which to describe New York City. Fascinated with this title, I pondered the difference a comma could have made. Rape, New York would then turn ‘rape’ into a borough of the city. This wordplay is not insignificant in Leo’s ultimate argument.

Leo begins the book with a straightforward and chilling narration of the day she was "non-violently raped" by a stranger in her Harlem apartment. The rest of the book narrates not only the six years following the assault but also how she came to live in New York City in the first place, and specifically how she came to live in the apartment in which she was raped. Through referencing place in the book's title, Leo locates 'rape' directly and uncomfortably beside New York, thereby exemplifying her major argument: namely, that (literal and metaphorical) location matters. Gender, poverty, and race are factors that matter in determining who rapes whom and who gets raped. These factors also contribute to one’s relationship to space, and rape and space have a close relationship indeed.

Leo considers the many ways place, particularly the places we identify as 'home', is bound up in the act of rape. Leo describes in great detail her feelings and experience of displacements following her rape. As the rape occurred in her home, Leo has nowhere to go to feel safe afterward—the rape took the security of home away from her. She insightfully considers how most rapes occur in, or in close proximity to, women's homes, and beautifully weaves this together with a critique of home as a female/feminine space.

In her systemic analysis of the factors that caused her rape, Leo focuses on the lack of security in her apartment and how and why dangerous places are both created by and uphold capitalism. She accessibly writes about the deep connections between the low-income neighborhoods filled with people of color that disproportionately fill prisons and how these neighborhoods are the ones that become gentrified locations for urban development—spelling out the way capitalism benefits from poverty and creates high crime areas in the interest of devaluing property that can then be 'developed' by the rich. That her rape occurred in a badly kept apartment on a block in Harlem under the control of a grossly wealthy, philanthropist slum landlord is no accident, explains Leo.

Leo understands the difficult line she walks (and I would argue she walks it successfully) between widening the scope of ‘blame’ from the individual who perpetrated her rape to the wider system of capitalist, racist, and misogynist societal causes. She does not deny the rapist's personal agency nor erase the choice a perpetrator makes to commit rape. In one of her most challenging conclusions, Leo writes, “The fact that rapes relate to poverty, especially the perpetrator’s poverty, makes it, to a certain extent, a default effect of capitalist exploitation and not simply the result of mental illness.” Leo fights the urge to simply pathologize the perpetrator by suing her landlord for his negligent role in her rape by failing to providing a safe and secure building in which rape (and other crimes) would less easily occur.

Leo’s powerful voice and clear minded critique make her a fine guide through the messy terrain of overlapping oppressions and sexual violence. While dealing with complicated intersections, and often adopting an academic tone, Rape New York is an accessible and extremely valuable addition to the conversation of violence against women.

Written by: Sam McBean, March 30th 2011

Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects

payal — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Christina Sharpe

Duke University Press

Christina Sharpe’s work Monstrous Intimacies is concerned with reading how the Euro-American and African-American post-slavery subjects are constructed. An academic text, and at times quite dense with analysis, this work will be of interest mostly to academics working in the fields of critical race theory, post-colonial theory, or literary and cultural theory. Through compelling and intricate readings of visual and written texts, Sharpe is concerned with unpacking the intersection between violence, sex, and subjectivity in post-slavery subjects. Sharpe’s work is a poignant reflection on historical time and convincingly deals with the ways that the horrors of the past continue to structure the present. In this, Sharpe turns away from ‘freedom’ to consider the “unfreedom in freedom”—or in other words, the way that the “desire to be free requires one to be witness to, participant in, and be silent about scenes of subjection that we rewrite as freedom.”

In the first chapter, Sharpe considers Gayl Jones’ neo-slave narrative Corregidora as a text that deals with the demands of generational witnessing to the horrors of slavery. She considers how the scenes of rape and impregnation at the hands of the slave owner Corregidora become a means of survival for the Corregidora women—the continuation of their family ensures witnesses to their trauma. Sharpe reads this as one way in which the ‘space of enslavement post-enslavement’ is reproduced.

In the second chapter, Sharpe turns to consider Saartjie Baartman or the ‘Hottentot Venus,’ a Khoisan woman who was exhibited around Britain and France in the 19th Century as a sexual oddity, and then dissected upon her death. Sharpe contests that the pleas for the return of Baartman’s remains to South Africa itself continue to objectify Baartman, as she is “once again overwritten with multiple histories and used in the service of a number of national and political agendas that involve not the emergence of history but its repression.” Thus, Sharpe examines how what is ostensibly an act to ‘right’ history, is in fact intimately connected to the monstrous treatment of Baartman under colonialism.

Her third chapter on Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant serves her purposes particularly well and gives her space to continue to flesh out how practices of historical remembrance and display interact with everyday violences of black life. Finally, in perhaps her most engaging chapter, Sharpe looks at Kara Walker’s silhouette art work and its reception to continue to read how the violence of slavery manifests itself in post-slavery subjectivity—particularly concerned with how critics have been reluctant to read Walker’s invocation of whiteness in her work.

Sharpe’s book is an eloquent and at times challenging analysis of the construction of post-slavery subjects as subjects who are by no means ‘post’ but continue to be structured by the past that is not quite past.

Written by: Sam McBean, December 27th 2010