This Social Text: Periscope dossier arises from a two-day intensive seminar, Queer Temporalities: Reading Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds’, a collaborative event co-organised by The(e)ories: Critical Theory and Sexuality Studies, which was held at University College Dublin, Ireland in November 2011 . On the first day of the seminar, Freeman presented a paper arising from her current research, ‘Theorizing the Chronic’, in which she unfurled some of her new thinking around chronicity, disability and the work of Gertrude Stein . The second day of the seminar featured three panels each with three short responses to Freeman’s book, with a focus on discussion, and Freeman herself engaged with and contributed to our conversations with great generosity. In addition to this editors’ introduction and Freeman’s response to the responses, this dossier features five short papers selected from the Dublin seminar, each of which takes up Freeman’s work creatively, critically and expansively from different disciplinary positionings and political perspectives, demonstrating the vital importance of Time Binds for contemporary queer studies and for our thinking about temporality . In addition, the dossier, we hope, provides a window on to the vitality, range and specificity of contemporary queer studies in Europe and elsewhere given that the respondents come not from the hegemonic location of US queer theory (with the exception of Freeman herself, of course) but from Ireland (Ann Mulhall, Maria Mulvany, Michael O’Rourke, Eve Watson), the United Kingdom (Ben Davies) and Australia (Jessica Robyn Cadwallader).
I want to “linger, to dally, to take pleasure in tarrying” over Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of slow reading. Indeed, I want to read slowly, to take time, to take my time. Ever since the advent of New Criticism in the … Continue reading “Slow Reading”
Susan Stryker’s 1993 performance piece, “Transgender Rage” later became “My Notes to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (Rage). Sometime later, after queer theory had been declared dead, resurrected, dismembered and sutured together again several times, … Continue reading “Trans Forming Time”
Analyzing the sexual citation of chattel slavery in interracial S/M role play, Freeman reaches a hopeful conclusion from what might seem unpromising material, given the structural racism that has endured into the present as one legacy of colonial dispossession and … Continue reading “Dead Time: Queer Temporalities and the Deportation Regime”
Elizabeth Freeman admits that in this book she is committed to overcloseness, to an overreading practice as overdetermined as queerness itself. She explains that “’Queer’ cannot signal a purely deconstructive move or position of pure negativity” because that would “risk … Continue reading “Time’s Tangles”
I’d like to begin with Ben Davies’s concept of “slow reading” as a way of marking the deep pleasures, anxieties, and inspiration I felt reading these responses to Time Binds. “Through reading slowly,” Davies writes, “we put ourselves at risk … Continue reading “Response”
