Queer Times, Queer Becomings

Queer theory essays on time and becoming in the fields of literature, philosophy, film, and performance.

Queer theory essays on time and becoming in the fields of literature, philosophy, film, and performance.

If queer theorists have agreed on anything, it is that for queer thought to have any specificity at all, it must be characterized by becoming, the constant breaking of habits. Queer Times, Queer Becomings explores queer articulations of time and becoming in literature, philosophy, film, and performance. Whether in the contexts of psychoanalysis, the nineteenth-century discourses of evolution and racial sciences, or the daily rhythms of contemporary, familially oriented communities, queerness has always been marked by a peculiar untimeliness, by a lack of proper orientation in terms of time as much as social norms. Yet it is the skewed relation to the temporal norm that also gives queerness its singular hope. This is demonstrated by the essays collected here as they consider the ways in which queer theory has acknowledged, resisted, appropriated, or refused divergent models of temporality.

E. L. McCallum is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at Michigan State University and the author of Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism and coeditor (with Mikko Tuhkanen) of Queer Times, Queer Becomings, both also published by SUNY Press.Tuhkanen Mikko :

Mikko Tuhkanen is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University. His books include Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond; Queer Times, Queer Becomings (coedited with E. L. McCallum); and The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright, all published by SUNY Press.

E. L. McCallum is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University. She is the author of Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism, also published by SUNY Press. Mikko Tuhkanen is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Texas A&M University. He is the author of The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright, also published by SUNY Press.

"This book opens up new areas and new questions for queer theory by bringing together the writings of some of the most well-known and respected writers with the work of a number of exciting younger scholars regarding queer temporalities, queer experiences of time, and queer times themselves. Time deserves queering; and equally queer sexualities and styles are queer partly in virtue of their untimeliness. This wonderful collection explores the way each is bound up with and helps to complicate the other." — Elizabeth Grosz, author of Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth

"This collection offers some of the most interesting recent work in queer studies about ontology, the virtual, and temporality. Ambitious and original, these essays illuminate the contemporary stakes of becoming and un-becoming queer." — Heather Love, author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History