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Carla Freccero

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 13, Number 1,

2007, pp. 143-145 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/glq/summary/v013/13.1freccero.html

Access provided by University of California @ Santa Cruz (15 Jun 2014 14:11 GMT)
 BOOKS IN BRIEF 143

sent from, curiosity about, irony toward, or longing for the world they inhabit,
rather than their simple repetition of it or escape from it. Attention to style is, in
Coviello’s book, a form of queer historical materialism, a way of witnessing the
queering of what will eventually become official history.
Intimacy in America is a very smart book, but it is also a beautiful and pas-
sionate one. It reminds us that nationality is as much a matter of longing — even
disavowed sexual longing — as it is of belonging. It insists that just as sex informs
domains that do not look like they have anything to do with the erotic life, the
energy of political change may gather in registers that do not look properly histori-
cal. It risks seeming effete or obsolete by asking us to attend to the smallest of rhe-
torical details, with the payoff being a sweeping story of cultural change and the
reaction of specific artists to it. And not incidentally, almost every one of Coviello’s
sentences is a stylistic masterpiece of its own.

Elizabeth Freeman is associate professor of English at the University of California,

Davis.
DOI 10.1215/10642684-2006-024

Trans-Time

Carla Freccero

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

Judith Halberstam
New York: New York University Press, 2005. viii + 213 pp.

There are few members of the queer and LGTBI community reading GLQ who
will require a review of Judith Halberstam’s most recent book. Most will read this
prolific theorist-critic-activist’s publications as they appear, for they have proven
to be landmarks in measuring the shifts and changes in U.S. queer studies today.
In a Queer Time and Place, in its engagement with critical work on time, space,
ethnography, and geography, departs from some of Halberstam’s previous work
  144  GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES

and marks a turn in critical queer studies toward preoccupations that do not at
first appear primarily to concern sex and sexualities. It also demonstrates what
queer studies can do when it takes its interdisciplinarity seriously. Halberstam
both addresses and comments on a veritable encyclopedia of recent theoretical
writings on time and space and their queer critiques. This encyclopedic reach,
which also includes a clearly discernible politics of citation (work by younger fem-
inist and queer scholars, especially queer of color scholars), will prove invaluable
for readers wanting a critical survey on the topics Halberstam treats: postmodern
geographies, queer temporalities, transgendered lives and their representations in
the plastic arts, film, and popular (sub)cultures (including drag, popular music,
and performance).
The book makes the argument that “there is such a thing as ‘queer time’
and ‘queer space’ ” (1), queer here being used as an adjective rather than a verb. It
is thus not so much about what happens to time and space when they are queered,
or about the action of queering them, but about what obtains if we posit the con-
cepts of queer time and space, what artifacts in culture might be understood to
exemplify them, and how our perspective shifts if we use them to rethink the
canonical critical interventions on these subjects. (The book does not, however,
generally include writings on time and space from the field of science and technol-
ogy studies.) Halberstam makes a historical argument, claiming for queer time a
post-AIDS emergence, and for queer space Foucault’s 1986 statement that “the
present epoch will be above all an epoch of space” (11) and a less clearly defined
series of critiques of “postmodern geography” as it is theorized by David Harvey
principally, but Edward Soja and Fredric Jameson as well, combined with feminist
critiques of domestic space and postcolonial critiques of Western chronotopes.1
Indeed, the book’s discussion of time and temporality is more developed than the
arguments about space and spatiality, though it is rather the relationship between
time and space at the sites of lived bodily experience, performance, and visual
representation that concerns Halberstam most. In some senses, In a Queer Time
and Place reads like two separate books that have come together in a single proj-
ect. In the introduction, Halberstam notes that the original project was a book on
Brandon Teena, but that as the archive, or “Brandon industry,” grew, she decided
instead to “study the construction of Brandon in terms of some of the questions
about time and space raised by queer studies” (16). Thus Brandon, the question
of the transgender body, and instantiations of queer temporality and spatiality as
they are manifest in the visual arts, music, and queer subcultures comprise the
bulk of her study, framed by chapters that address recent thinking about time and
space.
 BOOKS IN BRIEF 145

The book includes the already richly textured work Halberstam has done
to draw attention to key elements of the Brandon Teena archive; a chapter that
makes a nice argument about cinematic efforts to focalize the gaze through alter-
natively gendered bodies and subjectivities; and a survey of recent art that fore-
grounds the transgendered body, which includes a critique of the purported divide
between late modernism and postmodernism in art by taking a “transgendered
aesthetic” (105) into account. The penultimate chapter returns to some of the con-
cerns in Female Masculinity by exploring alternative masculinities that draw upon
gender-queer subcultures for their representations. 2 The final chapter explores
popular alternative music, from punk and the queer dance mix to lesbian and
queer punk, slam poetry, and, finally, surprisingly, to genealogy, where Halber­
stam both honors the (folk) forebears of current dyke music — which, she argues,
itself pays homage to the inherited legacy of “women’s music” — in the figure of
Ferron and explores how generational succession can be seen to produce queer
community. Some will argue that this chapter — like the chapter on contemporary
visual art — covers territory too rapidly and in too short a space, given that entire
books could easily be written on each of these topics. However, if Halberstam’s
project is to establish a queer archive of “primary materials” for further study,
and to provide an encyclopedic guide to that archive while simultaneously offer-
ing an appreciative précis of recent critical queer and queer of color “secondary
sources,” In a Queer Time and Place succeeds admirably.

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16 (1986): 22.
2. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1998).

Carla Freccero is professor of literature, feminist studies, and history of conscious-

ness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
DOI 10.1215/10642684-2006-025