Written on the Body really made me think about the perception of time. Since Antiquity, human beings have kept trying to measure time, and it has become materialized through institutionalized rituals, such as obtaining job, marriage, raise of children, retirement… As a heterosexual girl who grew up in a heterosexual family, I never had the opportunity to think “outside the box” and unconsciously assumed that I was meant to follow “those paradigmatic markers of life experience – namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.” (Halberstam, 2) Up until this class, I had never thought that there could be a queer time, which would distinguish itself from the time forged by capitalized society.
“The constantly diminishing future creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now, and while the threat of no future hovers overhead like a storm cloud, the urgency of being also expands the potential of the moment” (Halberstam, 2)
This quote by Halberstam sums up exactly the spirit of Written on the Body. Prior to Louise’s arrival in the narrator’s life, he/she seemed to be living only “on the here, the present, the now”. This is conveyed by the fact that he/she used to live at the pace of her/his conquests. There is no mention of his/her everyday life, just names of people with whom he/she was in a relationship. As far as the reader knows, the narrator is not suffering from AIDS and is therefore not threatened by “no future”. But Louise is. Indeed, she has cancer, and that alters the narrator’s perception of his/her relationship with his/her lover. It seems that the narrator’s time evolves according to the one he/she loves: the fact that she has little time to live increases the narrator’s love for Louise. Moreover, the ending is ambiguous: whether they are both dead and meeting in Heaven, or they meet again in real life, it seems that the narrator is setting his/her own time with Louise. Indeed, there seems to be no constraints (“reach the corners of the world” Winterson, 190), no socially defined pattern to follow.
This post really helped me to understand queer time. I liked how you talked about your own experiences, being heterosexual in a heterosexual family, and how you had never questioned the “paradigmatic markers of life experience.” I too had this experience and I never questioned these markers of life experience either until now. You made a great discovery that the narrator seems to have a concept of time that is entirely dominated by with whom he/she is sleeping. Additionally, your comment about how the narrator seems to fall deeper and faster in love with Louise when he/she founds out Louise has cancer really supported your initial claim. Overall, your blog post really helped me to further refine my understanding of queer time and Halberstam’s piece.
I feel too that the narrator is altering their time around Louise or or the individual that the narrator happens to love/like at the time. This makes me think about real life though where sometimes we make sacrifices or plans around other people. However, never I feel to this extent hopefully because it seems unhealthy to not have time for oneself. This was a really cool realization that I never thought of in this way.
I also write about queer time in my blog post. Before the narrator finds out that Louise is sick, they seem to constantly allude to an inevitable end describing Louise’s bones turning to dust or the earth covering their bodies. In addition, the narrator recounts the disintegration of many of their relationships, most of them being emotional rollercoasters. But with Louise, the narrators seem to involve themself in the passage of time; what happens to Louise will happen to the narrator. Do you think the narrator has always existed/operated in queer time and this is the first time it has affected them personally or is it Louise that has brought them into this realm?