Elizabeth Freeman

THEORIZING QUEER TEMPORALITIES A Roundtable Discussion

This roundtable took place via e-mail in March, April, and May of 2006. Participants wrote in clusters of three, sending their remarks back to me to be collated and sent on to the next cluster for a total of three rounds of comments. I edited the results for continuity, occasionally shifting a remark to an “earlier” or “later” place in the conversation, cutting digressions, or adding transitions. Thus the temporality, polyvocality, and virtual space of this production are quite different than a real-time, face-to-face roundtable would have been: perhaps this is fitting for a special issue on queer temporalities. My deepest gratitude goes to all the scholars and critics who participated and to J. Samaine Lockwood and Kara Thompson for copyediting assistance. — Elizabeth Freeman

Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations

As a graduate student teaching my first solo course in Lesbian and Gay Studies in 1993, at a moment when “identity” was rapidly morphing into cross-gender identification, I told an anecdote I thought would illustrate this crossing: “I wear this T-shirt that says ‘Big Fag’ sometimes, because lesbians give potlucks and dykes fix cars. I’ve never done well at either, so ‘Big Fag’ feels more appropriate.” A student came to see me in office hours, quite upset. She was in her early twenties, a few years younger than I, but she dressed like my feminist teachers had in college. She stood before me in Birkenstocks, wool socks, jeans, and a women’s music T-shirt, and declared that she felt dismissed and marginalized by my comment, that lesbians-who-givepotlucks described her exactly, and that I had clearly fashioned a more interesting identity with her own as a foil. I had thought I was telling a story about being inadequate to prevailing lesbian identity-forms, or about allying with gay men, or perhaps even about the lack of representational choices for signaling femme. But it turned out that I was telling a story about anachronism, with “lesbian” as the sign of times gone by and her body as an implicit teaching text. Momentarily displaced into my own history of feeling chastised by feminisms that preceded me, yet aware that this student had felt disciplined by my joke in much the same way, I apologized, and a long conversation about identification between students and teachers followed. But what interests me now is the way that student’s self-presentation

Hopeless Cases: Queer Chronicities and Gertrude Stein's "Melanctha".

ABSTRACT For this contribution to the special issue on “Mapping Queer Bioethics,” the author offers a reflection on the nature of the literary, written word as the ethically fraught site of queer bioethics. By invoking the historical tendencies and tropes of the clinical case history alongside a seminal text by Gertrude Stein, the author at once asks if we should liberate a queer bioethics from biomedical discourse via mainstream narrative; or if we should see this strategy as unavoidably housed in narrative forms of storytelling because it echoes the tropes and stakes of the clinical, pathologized case history as regards queer sensibilities.

Sacramentality and the Lesbian Premodern

Once upon a time, the title of the anthology The Lesbian Postmodern seemed charmingly redundant. Lesbians seemed to be the avantgarde: we were cyborgs, hybrids, avatars of becoming, w(r)enches in existing systems of knowledge. But relative to queer, the concept lesbian has now taken on the aura of the premodern, or perhaps the pre-postmodern. If queer signals anti-normativity, critique, or semiotic play, lesbian often gets relegated to the zone of the gender-normative, the celebratory, the literal, and crucially, the conceptually rearguard to a queer enlightenment dated to around 1990.1 But as these essays all show, the premodern is a fascinating place in which and with which to tarry.