{"id":151,"date":"2014-02-19T21:27:08","date_gmt":"2014-02-20T02:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/?p=151"},"modified":"2015-01-06T11:01:00","modified_gmt":"2015-01-06T16:01:00","slug":"born-to-die","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/2014\/02\/19\/born-to-die\/","title":{"rendered":"Born to Die"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is the point of movement when movement indicates life and life indicates hope?\u00a0 I have neither life nor hope.\u00a0 Better than to fall in with the crumbling wainscot, to settle with the dust and be drawn up into someone\u2019s nostrils.\u00a0 Daily we breathe the dead” (108)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps the most obvious syntactical choice in this passage is the structure of the first sentence.\u00a0 The \u201cx begets y begets z\u201d form instantly implies unflagging forward motion. Word choices such as \u201cfall\u201d and \u201cdrawn up\u201d conjure the idea of a cycle, and the narrator\u2019s repetition of words such as \u201clife\u201d and \u201cdead\u201d lead me to believe that ze is referring to the circle of life.\u00a0 To live, we must breathe.\u00a0 However, the narrator makes the point that the air we breathe, the key to life as many would argue, consists of the dead.\u00a0 That image in and of itself it wonderfully poetic.<\/p>\n

While my explication of the passage could end there, with that dark yet beautiful image, I think that it connects really well to Judith Halberstam\u2019s piece called \u201cQueer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies.\u201d\u00a0 Halberstam introduces to us the idea of \u201cqueer time\u201d (1).\u00a0 The heteronormative timeline is generally considered to play out as follows: birth, school, job, spouse, kids, retirement, and finally death.\u00a0 However, Halberstam poses the idea of \u201cqueer time\u201d that breaks this timeline, as it focuses on \u201cother logics of location, movement, and identification\u201d rather than \u201creproduction\u201d (1).\u00a0 The narrator actually addresses this idea in a passage soon after the one I chose to analyze, listing the \u201ccharacteristics of living things\u201d that she was taught in school.\u00a0 In fact, ze goes on to say, \u201cI don\u2019t want to reproduce, I want to make something entirely new\u201d (108).<\/p>\n

Halberstam\u2019s idea of \u201cqueer time\u201d allows us to eliminate reproduction from the list of \u201ccharacteristics of living things\u201d that exacerbate the narrator (108).\u00a0 In fact, of all the aspects of life that \u201cqueer time\u201d allows us to move around or eliminate, birth and death are the only two constants.\u00a0 We will all be born, and our lives will all push forward until we die, our dust mixing into the atmosphere to sustain the new life to come.\u00a0 Beyond that, it is fair to say that nothing else is constant.\u00a0 We our slaves to our own desires, but our own desires are just that; our own.\u00a0 Just as desires vary from person to person, so should the characteristics and timelines of our lives.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps if the narrator was able to read some of Halberstam\u2019s work, ze would struggle less with how zir own wants and desires don\u2019t fit into the supposed timeline we\u2019re all supposed to follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is the point of movement when movement indicates life and life indicates hope?\u00a0 I have neither life nor hope.\u00a0 Better than to fall in with the crumbling wainscot, to settle with the dust and be drawn up into someone\u2019s nostrils.\u00a0 Daily we breathe the dead” (108) Perhaps the most obvious syntactical choice in this … Continue reading Born to Die<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2032,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93617],"tags":[93549,75711,93548,1939,93551,44272,93546,867,93502,93493],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2014-blog-post","tag-characteristic","tag-choice","tag-constant","tag-death","tag-halberstam","tag-life","tag-queer","tag-time","tag-winterson","tag-written-on-the-body"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2032"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}