Suchergebnisse

Introduction : queer and not now -- Junk inheritances, bad timing : familial arrhythmia in three working-class dyke narratives -- Deep lez : temporal drag and the specters of feminism -- Time binds, or, erotohistoriography -- Turn the beat around : sadomasochism, temporality, history

In Beside You in Time Elizabeth Freeman expands biopolitical and queer theory by outlining a temporal view of the long nineteenth century. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of discipline as a regime that yoked the human body to time, Freeman shows how time became a social and sensory means by which people assembled into groups in ways that resisted disciplinary forces. She tracks temporalized bodies across many entangled regimes—religion, secularity, race, historiography, health, and sexuality—and examines how those bodies act in relation to those regimes. In analyses of the use of rhythmic dance by the Shakers; African American slave narratives; literature by Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, Herman Melville, and others; and how Catholic sacraments conjoined people across historical boundaries, Freeman makes the case for the body as an instrument of what she calls queer hypersociality. As a mode of being in which bodies are connected to others and their histories across and throughout time, queer hypersociality, Freeman contends, provides the means for subjugated bodies to escape disciplinary regimes of time and to create new social worlds.

Talia Schaffer has noted that care work needn't be joined with the feeling of care. This article extends this insight to explore medical kink ("sadomedicine") as a form of distantiated yet attuned care work that resituates the literary debates on symptomatic versus surface reading. Through the performances of Bob Flanagan, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's 1882 novel Doctor Zay, the 1991 film Misery and its source novel, and Maria Beatty's 2009 film Bandaged, sadomedicine is situated as an engagement with symptoms that delights in surfaces but that might also exacerbate symptoms, introduce them from outside the text, and/or attend to symptoms disconnected from deep pathologies. The term "parasymptomatic reading" conceptualizes this play with symptoms and the surface/depth distinction: it captures the role of the parasympathetic nervous system and its connection to surface bodily responses, the dialectic of sympathy and symptomaticity, and the meaning of the prefix "para" to indicate both proximity and error.

Through a close analysis of Isaac Julien's short film The Attendant, this essay argues that sadomasochistic sex practice ought to be understood in temporal terms, as a play of pause against surprise, suspension against shock. In The Attendant, Freeman contends, Julien rethinks S/M precisely this way, thereby linking it with the possibilities of film as a particularly indexical, intercorporeal medium for shocking and reorganizing the senses. This rethinking of screen as a kind of skin in turn enables Julien to confront sadomasochistic role playing, in which players take up the signs and tools of historically specific injustices such as the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and especially the transatlantic slave trade. Rather than condemning this kind of role playing--especially as it takes place between black and white men--Julien offers sadomasochism as an embodied way to feel historical or to engage viscerally with the past. He thereby opens up new registers for taking in and taking account of the historical, registers that refuse to concede pleasure in the name of trauma, which has been treated as the more properly political affect by most criticism.