Queer Times, Queer Becomings

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 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.