{"id":574,"date":"2015-03-25T23:10:27","date_gmt":"2015-03-26T03:10:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/?p=574"},"modified":"2015-03-25T23:10:27","modified_gmt":"2015-03-26T03:10:27","slug":"there-then-here-now-where-is-queer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/2015\/03\/25\/there-then-here-now-where-is-queer\/","title":{"rendered":"There & Then, Here & Now: Where is Queer?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Queerness, ephemeral and inherently tied to transgression, is extraordinarily difficult to define. Sedgwick wants us to think of queerness as thing to be embodied, as a term that can only be used in the first person. Halberstam, alternatively, perceives queerness as a potential in everything that is transgressive. In this view, all things have the capacity to be queer as long as their state of being opposes what is expected and normative. M\u00fbnoz wants us to reconsider these understandings of queerness as a state to be embodied, and instead insists that genuine queerness has never been achieved. Of queerness, he M\u00fbnos writes: it \u201cis not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality\u201d (1). Between this quote and the title of his book\u2014Feeling Utopia<\/em>\u2014M\u00fbnos establishes that queerness is less of an identity and more of a societal status that has yet to be realized.<\/p>\n

Bearing this perspective of queerness in mind, I turn to Written on the Body<\/em>. From its non-chronological form to its narrator\u2019s ambiguous identities, this book is queer. The gender of the narrator is never made explicit\u2014and indeed purposefully made unclear\u2014and the variety of genders in the narrator\u2019s partners affirms the fluidity of zir sexuality. Additionally, time is problematized as a reliable, linear experience throughout the book, particularly at the end when the narrator confesses that they \u201cdon\u2019t know if this is a happy ending but where we are let loose in open fields\u201d (Winterson 190). Unlike M\u00fbnos, the novel has little certain for futurity or time of any kind\u2014it is entirely interested in queerness as an active state of being, as a lifestyle, as a means of perceiving time and space.<\/p>\n

If queerness is, as M\u00fbnos suggests, \u201cthe rejection of a here and now and an insistence on\u2026concrete possibility for another world,\u201d then this book fails as a queer endeavor (M\u00fbnos 1). Winterson\u2019s book is not about the future or the creation of a queer world, but instead about queerness as a state of being. Fortunately for Winterson, M\u00fbnos\u2019 view of queerness is an unsustainable one, it\u2019s one that will not lead to the production of community or spaces that queerness desires. Rather, this understanding of queer as \u201cutopia\u201d is one that asks queer people to continue to \u201cfeel that the world is not enough, that indeed something is missing\u201d (1). Winterson\u2019s narrator tells this story because ze cannot wait for some undefined future where zir unconventional love story can be told in a queer world to queer people. The world was missing this story, this queer experience of love and growth, and so ze brings queerness into our \u201chere and now\u201d (1). Ze is queer and that queerness is a legitimate lived experienced, whether or not we as a society have collectively \u201ctouch[ed] queerness\u201d (1). So no, we do not know if this is a happy ending yet\u2014but here we are, let loose and open, and to deny ourselves a \u201chere and now\u201d will surely do nothing but stunt \u201cour possibility for another world\u201d (1).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Queerness, ephemeral and inherently tied to transgression, is extraordinarily difficult to define. Sedgwick wants us to think of queerness as thing to be embodied, as a term that can only be used in the first person. Halberstam, alternatively, perceives queerness as a potential in everything that is transgressive. In this view, all things have the … Continue reading There & Then, Here & Now: Where is Queer?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2611,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93618],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2015-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574","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\/2611"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}