{"id":2726,"date":"2025-02-27T00:39:14","date_gmt":"2025-02-27T05:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/?p=2726"},"modified":"2025-02-27T00:39:14","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T05:39:14","slug":"the-bigger-picture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/2025\/02\/27\/the-bigger-picture\/","title":{"rendered":"the bigger picture"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The constantly diminishing future [referenced by queer poet Mark Doty],” Jack Halberstam writes in his 2005 work In Queer Time and Place<\/em>, “creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now … Some gay men have responded to the threat of AIDS … by rethinking the conventional emphasis on longevity and futurity,” (2). Literature as a form of expression oftentimes relies on a rather linear understanding of plot and narrative: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement are taught as scripture to students from a young age, forging an understanding of what “good writing” is that can be challenging to dismantle.\u00a0On the contrary, Jeanette Winterson’s\u00a0Written on the Body<\/em><\/span>\u00a0takes these conventions as almost a challenge, crafting a narrative whose temporality (or lack thereof) is crucial to its composition and broader perspective on relationships.<\/p>\n

Written on the Body<\/em> presents itself as an inherently-queer work in the narrator’s ambiguous gender: they invoke past relationships with both women and men, and given the reference to secretive gay lovers, it can be reasonably inferred that queerness is othered within Winterson’s narrative world. Therefore, queerness takes on the sort of marginalized identity it does in our world, to an extent. Jack Halberstam’s reading of queer time as a direct reaction to the long history of oppression and hostility the queer community has faced, then, takes on greater credence in\u00a0Written on the Body<\/em> as an expression of a legacy larger than the narrator’s rocky love life.<\/p>\n

The thought process behind this post is not fully explored, but I believe that the implications here span beyond either In Queer Time and Place<\/em> or\u00a0Written on the Body<\/em> and moreso concern the manner in which we read queer literature. Queer literature itself emerges as a consequence of a legacy that any one of us cannot fully comprehend, and Written on the Body<\/em> exists as a stellar example of how, to use the words of Eli Clare’s The Mountain<\/em>, language is “haunted, strengthened, underscored” by the bodies which have shaped it (11).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The constantly diminishing future [referenced by queer poet Mark Doty],” Jack Halberstam writes in his 2005 work In Queer Time and Place, “creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now … Some gay men have responded to the threat of AIDS … by rethinking the conventional emphasis on longevity and futurity,” (2). … Continue reading the bigger picture<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5330,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[346812],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-class-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2726","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\/5330"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}