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This text explores the concept of queering time and space, challenging normative ideas of sexuality and identity. It delves into the relational system of sexual practices and the possibility of creating a homosexual mode of life.
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Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life” How can a relational system be reached through sexual practices? Is it possible to create a homosexual mode of life? ... To be “gay,” I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual, but to try and develop a way of life.
From “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies” – Jack Halberstam The time of reproduction is ruled by a biological clock for women and by strict bourgeois rules of respectibility and scheduling for married couples. Obviously, not all people who have children keep or are even able to keep reproductive time, but many and possibly most people believe that the scheduling of repro-time is natural and desirable. Family time refers to the normative scheduling of daily life (early to bed, early to rise) that accompanies the practice of child rearing. This timetable is governed by an imagined set of children’s needs, and it relates to beliefs about children’s health and healthful environments for child rearing. The time of inheritance refers to an overview of generational time within which values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through family ties from one generation to the next. It also connects the family to the historical past of the nation, and glances ahead to connect the family to the future of both familial and national stability. In this category we can include kinds of hypothetical temporality – the time of “what if” – that demands protection in the way of insurance policies, health care, and wills.
From “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies” – Jack Halberstam A “queer” adjustment in the way in which we think about time, in fact, requires and produces new conceptions of space. ... By articulating and elaborating a concept of queer time, I suggest new ways of understanding the nonnormative behaviors that have clear but not essential relations to gay and lesbian subjects. ... “queer” refers to nonnormative logics and organizations of community, 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. “Queer space” refers to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage and it also describes the new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics.
Sarah Water, Fingersmith (2002) My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder. People called me Sue. I know the year I was born in, but for many years I did not know the date, and took my birthday at Christmas. I believe I am an orphan. My mother I know is dead. But I never saw her, she was nothing to me. I was Mrs Sucksby's child, if I was anyone's; and for father I had Mr Ibbs, who kept the locksmith's shop, at Lant Street, in the Borough, near to the Thames.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861) My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip. I give Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister,—Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, “Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine,—who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle,—I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.
Gillian Overing, Language, Sign and Gender in Beowulf. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. While we have no way of guessing at Beowulf's sexuality, or at the poet's or the hero's personal views on marriage, we cannot ignore the strength of expressed masculine desire in the poem. Intensity and passion are located in the bonds of loyalty and friendship forged between men, and marriage is vauled as an extension of this larger emotional context. In Beowulf the marriage alliance is essentially an alliance of men; Deleuze and Guattari identify "the perverse tie of a primary homosexuality," a love of, even an obsession with, the "same" as a means of avoidance of the other, in tribal negotiation for marriage partners: "Through women, men establish their own connections; through the man-woman disjunction, which is always the outcome of filiation, alliance places in connection men from different filiations" (165). That such filiation often fails in Beowulf as a result of incessant feuding does not change the fact that the woman given in marriage is perceived as the visible token of male alliance. (74)
Book of Ruth • 1:8 And Naomi said unto her two daughters in law, Go, return each to her mother's house: the LORD deal kindly (hesed) with you, as ye have dealt with the dead, and with me. In the Old Testament, hesed is generally attributed to Yahweh. In Ruth however, the three occurences of hesed are mainly connected to human characters. – Kristin Saxegaard
from the book of Ruth (KJV) • 1:11 And Naomi said, Turn again, my daughters: why will ye go with me? are there yet any more sons in my womb, that they may be your husbands? 1:12 Turn again, my daughters, go your way; for I am too old to have an husband. If I should say, I have hope, if I should have an husband also to night, and should also bear sons; 1:13 Would ye tarry for them till they were grown? would ye stay for them from having husbands? nay, my daughters; for it grieveth me much for your sakes that the hand of the LORD is gone out against me.
1:16 And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: 1:17 Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody Twentieth-century art teaches that we have come a long way from the earliest sense of parody as a narrative poem of moderate length using epic meter and language but with a trivial subject. ... The prefix para has two meanings, only one of which is usually mentioned – that of “counter” or “against.” Thus parody becomes an oppostion or contrast between texts. This is presumably the formal starting point fo rthe definiton’s customary pragmatic component of ridicule: one text is set against another with the intent of mocking or making it ludicrous.
Here files of pins extend their shining rows, Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux. - Rape of the Lock (1712)
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody However, para in Greek can also mean “beside,” and therefore there is a suggestion of an accord or intimacy instead of a contrast. ... There is nothing in parodia that necessitates the inclusion of a concept of ridicule ... Parody, then, in its ironic “trans-contextualization” and inversion, is repetition with difference. A critical distance is implied between the backgrounded text being parodied and the new incorporating work, a distance usually signaled by irony. But this irony can be playful as well as belittling; it can be critically constructive as well as destructive. The pleasure of parody’s irony comes not from humor in particular but from the degree of engagement of the reader in the intertextual “bouncing” (To use E. M. Forster’s famous term) between complicity and distance.
“Female Loyalty: The Biblical Ruth in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not theOnly Fruit,” Laurel Bollinger Unlike Ruth, Jeanette leaves her primary mother figure, but in keeping with the loyalty the Book of Ruth explores, Jeanette returns to continue the relationship. In this, Winterson creates a feminist family romance, where the development of female subjectivity and self-empowerment demands the continuation of the mother-daughter relationship, not its rejection.
