Description
Book SynopsisTime Binds is a powerful argument that temporal and sexual dissonance are intertwined, and that the writing of history can be both embodied and erotic. Challenging queer theoryâ??s recent emphasis on loss and trauma, Elizabeth Freeman foregrounds bodily pleasure in the experience and representation of time as she interprets an eclectic archive of queer literature, film, video, and art. She examines work by visual artists who emerged in a commodified, â??postfeminist,â? and â??postgayâ? world. Yet they do not fully accept the dissipation of political and critical power implied by the idea that various political and social battles have been won and are now consigned to the past. By privileging temporal gaps and narrative detours in their work, these artists suggest ways of putting the past into meaningful, transformative relation with the present. Such â??queer asynchroniesâ? provide opportunities for rethinking historical consciousness in erotic terms, thereby countering the meth
Trade Review“
Time Binds is an elegant book bristling with intelligence and wit. A fascinating blend of the familiar and the new, it will have a major hand in opening up queer theory, to its own repressed, to its own dreams, to take its chances.”—
Carolyn Dinshaw, author of
Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern“Blazing and brilliant. Elizabeth Freeman forges claims with texture, rigor, relevance, and grace, giving her masterful, original study a voice of unusual tenderness and depth. Clearly, Freeman stands at the forefront of where queer theory needs to go: into the strangeness, the utter queerness, lying inside the beats of time.”—
Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of
The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century“Despite the queer academy’s distance from corporeality and the promotion of more transcendental approaches to historiography, Freeman boldly outlines history as an erotic, embodied experience. . . . Without cleansing their hands of the complicatedness of history’s racial legacies, these theorists explore the messiness of queerness. Freeman’s book is centered on queer time and queer history’s exciting and, at times, (corporeally) violent moments. . . . Fierce indeed.” -- Lizzy Shramko * Lambda Book Report *
“Positive but not celebratory, exploratory but rigorous, grounded in the messy referentiality of bodies and texts but compellingly speculative,
Time Binds is a pathbreaking book that will have multifarious impacts upon queer and feminist studies.”
-- Guy Davidson * Australian Feminist Studies *
“In addition to elegant and radical close readings,
Time Binds gives us a way to think about pleasure and temporality in combination. . . .
Time Binds provides us with close readings of experimental works of film and literature while simultaneously exposing the political stakes of temporality by foregrounding pleasure and the body on both an individual and collective level.” -- Amber Jamilla Musser * Reviews in Cultural Theory *
“In the end, Freeman offers us a queer future in which close reading remains both a practice and a pleasure we might repurpose for our own sexual–textual encounters, as well as a method of doing queer history through which we are able to feel in touch with, and touch, the social. For making pining for pleasurable encounters with the past, lingering over texts and bodies, and ‘lesbian’ sex hot again in a ‘new now’ kind of way, Freeman’s book rightly demands we take pause via the sensory, and the sensual, to feel the queerness in this.” -- Gino Conti * Textual Practice *
"
Time Binds is perhaps the most compelling argument for the ways non-normative relationships with time and history can be particularly generative for queer politics." -- Craig Jennex * TOPIA *
Table of ContentsPreface ix
Acknowledgments xxv
Introduction: Queer and Not Now 1
1. Junk Inheritances, Bad Timing: Familial Arrhythmia in Three Working-Class Dyke Narratives 21
2. Deep Lez: Temporal Drag and the Specters of Feminism 59
3. Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography 95
4. Turn the Beat Around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History 137
Coda 171
Appendix: Distributors for Films and Videos 175
Notes 177
Bibliography 193
Index 209
