Valerie Rohy

In the Queer Archive: Fun Home

This essay examines figures of archives in Alisons Bechdels 2006 memoir Fun Home—the museum-like family house, the fathers home library, Alisons childhood diary, and the public libraries she frequented as a young adult—as occasions for reimagining the queer potentiality of historical narrative. While the memoir begins with a schematic distinction between fact and falsehood, nature and artifice, later chapters revise that view, in part by identifying within the queer archive the counterhistorical impulse Derrida calls archive fever. Informed by that ceaseless drive, Fun Home provides an opportunity to investigate the archives relation to identity and history.

Whitman, Lincoln, and the Union of Men

It is no secret that when Walt Whitman imagined politics and the nation he often did so in terms of affection between men. Finally unconcerned with disavowing or sanitizing Whitman’s sexual interest in other men, recent critics such as Betsy Erkkilä have explored “the centrality of Whitman’s sexual love of men to the democratic vision and experimental politics of Leaves of Grass and to Whitman’s hopes for welding the American republic into a ‘living union,’ especially in the post-Civil War period.” Indeed, Whitman often figured national cohesion as a product of male desire. When revising Leaves of Grass following the Civil War, he added a fifth Calamus poem (now known as “For You O Democracy”) in which he vowed to “make the continent indissoluble . . . With the love of comrades, / With the life-long love of comrades.” Though the poem’s speaker betrays an uncertainty about the state of the postbellum United States, which appears as yet soluble despite the end of the war, he is certain that love will suture any lingering divisions between the nation’s parts. “I will plant companionship thick as trees along the rivers,” the speaker promises; “I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks.” A caress, this poem suggests, will unite the nation’s disparate locales; mutual fondness will shore up its frailties. Whitman is clear about what kinds of bodies he imagines engaging in such politically advantageous embraces: the nation will find solidarity, he explains, “By the love of comrades, / By the manly love of comrades” (emphasis added). Indissolubility, it seems, is a

See it now: queer history and archival fantasy

ABSTRACT Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s account of journalist Edward R. Murrow’s public struggle with Senator Joseph McCarthy, includes archival footage of McCarthy, HUAC hearings, and other 1950s televised ephemera; it is in this archival footage that the film’s most obvious queerness can be found, in the figures of Roy Cohn and Liberace. This paper examines the formal and thematic effects of the film’s archival footage in view of the sexual and political issues in the whole of the film. The overt thesis of Good Night, and Good Luck is that in 2005, as in the 1950s, freedom of political dissent is under threat and must be defended. Where politics are concerned, the film suggests that very little has changed since the 1950s, yet where sexuality is concerned, both straight and gay viewers may congratulate themselves on our progress. That liberal self-congratulation belies the film’s sexual sleight of hand: only by localising gay male sexuality in the caricatured figures in archival footage can the film entertain, and even celebrate, an extraordinary intimacy among straight men – Murrow and producer Fred Friendly. Thus the archival footage is not the space of reality but of the film’s governing and pervasive fantasies.

Cinema, Sexuality, Mechanical Reproduction

Although Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings​ show a degree of male intimacy seldom seen in Hollywood blockbusters, the films also seek to forestall queer possibilities—not only by expanding the limited heterosexual elements of Tolkien’s plot, but also by shifting the focus of non-normative sexuality from object-choice to reproduction. The films both foreground the figure of the child as a sentimentalized confirmation of heterosexual love and introduce the threat of unnatural reproduction. This inhuman generation functions as a displaced site of queer sexuality which implicates the cinematic mechanism, named by Walter Benjamin as a form of “mechanical reproduction,” in the very perversity it seeks to forestall.

Exchanging Hours: A Dialogue on Time

H.D.’s Tribute to Freud, a 1956 account of her analysis in the 1930s, posits two kinds of time. One is an intractable temporality that she calls “clock-time,” the unceasing movement of history toward a traumatic future—above all, the threat of Sigmund Freud’s impending death and the encroachment of the Nazis on Vienna. Against this murderous imposition, the memoir embraces a temporality defined by brevity and contingency—we might call it momentary time or ephemeral time. As such, this queer text speaks to queer theory’s oppositions between normative and nonnormative time and their attendant modes of reading—for example, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” which compares rigid, knowing-in-advance interpretation with an affectively rich, temporally fluid hermeneutics. Reparative reading offers one way to understand Tribute to Freud, but H.D. can also hone our understanding of “Paranoid Reading” because both texts demonstrate the collapse of distinctions between ephemeral time and historical time.