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Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks
Gender
Time
KARIN SELLBERG, EDITOR

COPYRIGHT 2018 Macmillan Reference USA, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning WCN 02-200-210
Gender
Time
Gender
renée c. hoogland EDITOR IN CHIEF
Nicole R. Fleetwood and Iris van der Tuin ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Judith Lakämper ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR IN CHIEF
Gender: Sources, Perspectives, and Methodologies

renée c. hoogland, editor
Gender: Animals
Juno Salazar Parreñas, editor
Gender: God
Sı̂an Melvill Hawthorne, editor
Gender: Laughter
Bettina Papenburg, editor
Gender: Love
Jennifer C. Nash, editor
Gender: Matter
Stacy Alaimo, editor
Gender: Nature
Iris van der Tuin, editor
Gender: Space
Aimee Meredith Cox, editor
Gender: Time
Karin Sellberg, editor
Gender: War
Andrea Pet}
o, editor
Other Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series:

Philosophy
Donald M. Borchert EDITOR IN CHIEF
James Petrik and Arthur Zucker ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Religion
Jeffrey J. Kripal EDITOR IN CHIEF
April D. DeConick and Anthony B. Pinn ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Gender
Time
Karin Sellberg
EDITOR
Gender: Time ª 2018 Macmillan Reference USA, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning
Karin Sellberg, Editor ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced
or distributed in any form or by any means, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law, without the
Project Editor: Alja Kooistra prior written permission of the copyright owner.
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Cover photograph: Cleaning women punching in on time clock in office building.

Walter Sanders / Getty Images.
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 22 21 20 19 18
Editorial Board
EDITOR IN CHIEF
renée c. hoogland
Professor of English, Wayne State University,
Detroit, MI
Author of A Violent Embrace: Art and Aesthetics
after Representation (2014); Lesbian Configurations
(1997); and Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in
Writing (1994)
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Nicole R. Fleetwood
Associate Professor, Department of American Studies,
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
Author of On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public
Imagination (2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance,
Visuality, and Blackness (2011)
Iris van der Tuin

Associate Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences,
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Author of Generational Feminism: New Materialist
Introduction to a Generative Approach (2015) and
co-author with Rick Dolphijn of New Materialism:
Interviews and Cartographies (2012)
ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR IN CHIEF
Judith Lakämper
PhD, Department of English,
Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
Contents
Series Preface xi
Introduction xiii
PART I. THEORIES
Chapter 1: Queer Temporalities.............................................................................................. 3
Elizabeth Freeman
Professor, Department of English
University of California, Davis
Chapter 2: Evolution .............................................................................................................. 19

Jamie Freestone
PhD Candidate, School of Communication and Arts
University of Queensland, Australia
Chapter 3: Affective Futurity................................................................................................. 37

Rebecca Coleman
Reader, Sociology Department
Goldsmiths, University of London
Chapter 4: Generational Time............................................................................................... 53

Sam McBean
Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary American Literature
Queen Mary University of London
PART II. HISTORIES

Chapter 5: Feminist Historiography ..................................................................................... 67
Paige Donaghy
PhD Candidate, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
Karin Sellberg
Lecturer in Humanities, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
vii
CONTENTS
Chapter 6: A History of Gender ..............................................................................................85

Cassandra Byrnes
PhD Candidate, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry
Lisa Featherstone
Senior Lecturer in History, School of Historical and
Philosophical Inquiry
Chapter 7: The Gendering of History...................................................................................103

Ian Hesketh
ARC Future Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
Chapter 8: First-Wave Feminism ..........................................................................................117

Lena Wånggren
Research Fellow, Department of English Literature
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
PART III. BODIES

Chapter 9: Biopolitics ............................................................................................................137
Paige L. Sweet
PhD Candidate, Sociology
University of Illinois, Chicago
Chapter 10: Normality ...........................................................................................................155

Elizabeth Stephens
Australian Research Council Future Fellow
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
Chapter 11: The Body and Legal Discourse .........................................................................169

Kamillea Aghtan
Independent Researcher
Brisbane, Australia
Chapter 12: Menstruation and Coming of Age ....................................................................185

Ursula Potter
Honorary Research Associate, Department of English
University of Sydney, Australia
Honorary Associate Investigator
Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for
the History of Emotions
viii MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS
CONTENTS
Chapter 13: Academic Time ................................................................................................ 201

Ash Tower
PhD Candidate, School of Art, Architecture, and Design
University of South Australia
Ingrid Hoofd
Assistant Professor, Department of Media and
Culture Studies
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
PART IV. IDENTITIES

Chapter 14: Colonialism ...................................................................................................... 219
Marie Draz
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy
San Diego State University, California
Chapter 15: Intersectional Temporalities ........................................................................... 233

Barbara Tomlinson
Professor of Feminist Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara
Chapter 16: Memory Studies ............................................................................................... 249

Linda Tym
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Southern Adventist University, Collegedale, TN
Chapter 17: Diaries .............................................................................................................. 267

Anne Freadman
Professor of French, School of Languages and Linguistics
University of Melbourne, Australia
PART V. NARRATIVES
Chapter 18: Poetics and Aesthetics ..................................................................................... 285
Douglas Clark
Lecturer in Early Modern Literature, School of Arts, Languages,
and Cultures
University of Manchester, United Kingdom
Chapter 19: Literary Temporalities..................................................................................... 301

Karin Sellberg
Lecturer in Humanities, Institute for Advanced Studies
in the Humanities
GENDER: TIME ix
CONTENTS
Chapter 20: Art, Becoming, and Affect.................................................................................317

Katve-Kaisa Kontturi
Research Fellow, Gender Studies
Academy of Finland / University of Turku
Honorary Fellow, Victorian College of the Arts
University of Melbourne, Australia
Chapter 21: Transgender Temporalities...............................................................................335

Natasha Seymour
Independent Researcher
Australian National University, Canberra
Glossary ........................................................................................................................... 349

Index ............................................................................................................................... 359
x MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS
Series Preface
The Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender studies is an extraordinary

project. A handbook traditionally is a treatise on a special subject, often a concise reference
book that comprehensively covers a particular subject. Small enough to be held in the hand,
intended to be carried around at all times, a handbook can be referred to as a vade mecum, the
Latin phrase for ‘‘go with me.’’ This project exceeds the traditional definitions of the
handbook in practically all respects.
Most obviously and immediately, a series of ten full-length book volumes on gender
studies is not likely to be traveling with any one human being at all times, not even on a small
handheld device in the form of e-books. Secondly, and more significantly, this series of
handbooks does not aim at an all-embracing treatment of its central subject, gender. Thirdly,
and relatedly, the series refutes the idea that gender is something that can be conceptualized,
analyzed, or experienced fully, outside of—and thus in distinction from—the multiple
intertwining frameworks (social, political, critical, theoretical, historical, philosophical,
hermeneutical, and economic) in which it functions, sociohistorically and culturally as a
concrete, material, dynamic force, and as a signifying framework in and of itself. Although
breadth and depth are critical aspects of this series of handbooks, comprehensiveness is not,
nor can it be.
Indeed, rather than adopting an approach to gender questions from within a variety of
distinct disciplinary frames, or thinking of gender in relation to demarcated modes of socio-
cultural expression, praxis, and signification (e.g., gender and religion, gender and science,
gender and health), each volume seeks to shake up such (undoubtedly valuable) perspectives on
gender by taking on the challenge of ostensibly universal themes. Cutting through and across
the specific and shifting contexts and configurations in which they operate, both historically
and in the present moment, such all-embracing themes organize and naturalize gender in its
interrelations and intersections with other forms of differentiation, such as sexuality, race,
ethnicity, class, age, and able-bodiedness. Any form of universal conceptualization is also
inevitably and fundamentally informed by (questions of ) gender, which to some extent
explains and effectively sustains the universalizing power of, for instance, notions of Time,
Space, God, Nature, and the grand narratives subtending them. While offering an extra-
ordinary range of topics, perspectives, critical approaches, and theoretical models central to the
mature field of gender studies in the twenty-first century, at the same time and as a result of its
overall structure and organization, the series critically interrogates and challenges such power
so that questions of gender can be asked otherwise.
The entire set of handbooks includes an introductory volume, which orients readers to a
broad range of gender theories and practices in and across a variety of (inter)disciplinary
fields. The subsequent nine volumes are dedicated to the following themes: Time, Space,
xi
SERIES PREFACE
Laughter, War, Animals, Love, Matter, God, and Nature. The titles of the volumes are
defined in such broad conceptual terms not only to open up their universalizing power to
gendered critique but also to allow for the incorporation of a variety of critical, theoretical,
and disciplinary perspectives on the themes, individually and collectively, that characterizes
the field of gender studies. The series simultaneously offers an appealingly wide-ranging and
inspiring palette of perspectives to the users of each individual handbook, whether students
or instructors.
Two features make this series of gender handbooks innovative. First, most (if not all)
other handbooks on gender are organized from within or around a particular disciplinary
field—for example, gender in/and media, feminist science studies, and queer literary
criticism—or, alternatively, appear in the form of readers with abbreviated versions of
previously published work and/or classics. This series chooses a conceptual approach that
encourages a thoroughly cross-, trans-, and interdisciplinary exploration of purportedly uni-
versal themes that raise the seminal questions feminist scholars and scientists typically address,
as they are problematized and interrogated from a range of gender and sexually sensitive critical
perspectives. Second, all the chapters making up the individual volumes have been newly
commissioned and thus are based on fresh, topical research and address debates from a variety
of fields—philosophy, anthropology, literature, art, social sciences, media (old and new),
history, law, management, economics, digital humanities, rhetoric, politics, science, critical
race studies, postcolonial studies, religion, and so on.
The target audience for the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender
studies consists of undergraduate college students who have had little or no exposure to
gender and sexuality studies. The handbooks provide an introduction to the overall theme
and varied explorations of that theme from a gendered/sexual perspective. In addition, each
volume contains a glossary, bibliographies with suggestions for further reading, annotated
filmographies, and an index—all to encourage students to explore both the theme and the
critical approaches further. In other words, each handbook combines some features of an
introductory textbook with some features of a reference resource. Collectively, the volume
chapters familiarize readers with the moments, movements, theories, and problems promi-
nent within feminist and queer thinking on the volume’s theme. Authors employ an
interdisciplinary lens that exhibits the potential of gender and sexuality studies to contribute
to the values and concerns that animate everyday human life. The interdisciplinary lens
comprises all the various areas listed above and serves to frame the topic of a chapter in a way
that makes it accessible and engaging to novices in gender and sexuality studies. The eminent
scholars who have authored the chapters in the series have strived to make their discussions
comprehensible to undergraduates and at the same time respectable in the eyes of gender and
sexuality studies majors and scholars.
As editors of the series, we believe that the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks
series on gender studies provides an exceptional opportunity for many people, especially
undergraduate students, to become more familiar with the usefulness and joy of ‘‘doing
gender and sexuality studies.’’
rene´e c. hoogland
Editor in Chief
Nicole R. Fleetwood and Iris van der Tuin

Associate Editors
xii MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS
Introduction
Time is a central aspect of our everyday lives and experience. We organize our days around our
calendars—work, school, train, meal, and other schedules—and when we fail to fall into step
with the temporal organizing principles of our surroundings, we find ourselves out of time and
thus out of sync with society as a whole. Yet time does not work in the same ways on or for
everybody. The way we experience and live time critically depends on our positions in society.
Age is an important differentiator in this context: children and retirees tend to live according to
very different time schedules than students and working adults, for instance. Other factors play
into the lived experience of time as well. The United Nations Statistics Division has for many
years been collecting data on how individuals ‘‘spend,’’ or allocate, their time over a specified
period, usually twenty-four hours or a week. The data consistently show a huge gender gap
between the amount of time women and men spend doing paid and unpaid work, respectively,
with women around the world still bearing the brunt of most of the unpaid care and domestic
work while also increasingly taking on the role of breadwinner, traditionally considered a male
prerogative or obligation.
Gender, sex, age, as well as racial, ethnic, class, and national identities all play their roles in
the ways in which time is lived, valued, and experienced in variously regulated modern
societies around the world. The very idea of a standard time, however—the time of a region
or country that is established by law or general usage as civil time, measured and defined by
the clock—is a relatively recent phenomenon. The first mechanical clocks were invented in
Europe in the early fourteenth century and became the standard timekeeping device until the
pendulum clock was invented in 1656. British sociologist Barbara Adam (1945–) suggests
that the invention of clock time, or the division of time into seconds, minutes, and hours that
are organized into days, weeks, months, and years, has furthered the homogenization of
modern society and therewith its socioeconomic effectiveness and, by extension, the very
possibility of a twenty-four-hour global economy in our postmodern times. Clock time,
however natural it may feel, is something that we have learned to take for granted, that has
become naturalized, and that has to a large extent disconnected us from the actual natural
time that we continue to live alongside the regulations of the clock: the embedded time of the
cycles of nature, the rhythmic returns of the seasons, the dis/continuous cycles of life and
death. Yet, as Adam (2003) points out, this natural, or embedded, time may have become
largely invisible, may have been negated, but that does not mean that it has disappeared.
Time as it is lived today is a complex convergence between a natural, or embedded, time,
marked by variance and context dependency, and social time, the precise, linear, and
context-independent time of the clock.
Gender: Time, part of the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbook series on gender,
explores this very complexity as well as some of the cultural, social, and philosophical
xiii
INTRODUCTION
perspectives that allow for the interrogation of the interrelations between gender and time as
at once and equally actual lived realities and naturalized concepts that function to organize
society. The volume is divided into five parts (‘‘Theories,’’ ‘‘Histories,’’ ‘‘Bodies,’’
‘‘Identities,’’ and ‘‘Narratives’’), each representing a distinct angle of approach to the inter-
action and interrelations between time and gender. Chapters appearing in the section
‘‘Theories’’ introduce different philosophical, political, and sociological theoretical
approaches of temporality with which queer and feminist critics explore questions of identity
in its past, present, and future dimensions. The section on ‘‘Bodies’’ interrogates how
differently marked bodies have been shaped, named, and evaluated in and over time in
relation to modern biological, political, and legal discourses. The chapters collected in
‘‘Identities’’ focus on the ways in which the temporal operations of gender (identities) are
intersected by larger historical events and developments as well as on the more intimate,
private functions of history and memory in identity formation. The sections ‘‘Histories’’ and
‘‘Narratives’’ share a joint focus on the ways in which both histories and narratives themselves
are an intrinsic part of the organization of both time and gender processes. The chapters in
these sections show that storytelling and historiography are both political acts, involving
choices about what modes of meaning and being can be recorded and acknowledged and
thus become ‘‘real’’ and what modes of meaning and being are (deliberately) left out,
obscured, or erased.
The volume’s division into parts does not mean that there is no connection among its
individual chapters. On the contrary, despite their distinct critical foci, many chapters in the
volume cross-reference one another and/or speak to topics and theoretical perspectives they
share with contributions across the various sections. Ian Hesketh’s chapter, ‘‘The Gendering
of History,’’ for instance, shows that history (as a discipline and scholarly pursuit) was
designated a decidedly masculine undertaking as early as the nineteenth century, when
scholarly disciplines were generally invented. Female historians were accused of bias and
intellectual simplification and hence were not considered capable of producing reliable and
historically accurate accounts of the past. Paige Donaghy and Karin Sellberg’s ‘‘Feminist
Historiography,’’ in turn, explores the different ways in which feminist historians have
attempted to disrupt normative organizations of historical time and to invent alternative
ways of collecting and recording communal memories, so as to develop practices of
specifically feminine/feminist historiography. Building on the idea that nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century forms of historiography predominantly present the history of white
heterosexual middle-class men to the exclusion of all ‘‘others,’’ Cassandra Byrnes and Lisa
Featherstone show, in ‘‘A History of Gender,’’ how a gender-specific perspective can open
the way and has generated new and alternative histories. While applauding such feminist
‘‘retellings’’ of history, the authors point to the limits of focusing on only one aspect of
women’s lives, when race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity play equally determining roles in
defining both these lives and the past itself. Barbara Tomlinson’s ‘‘Intersectional
Temporalities,’’ Marie Draz’s ‘‘Colonialism,’’ and Linda Tym’s ‘‘Memory Studies’’ offer
different critical approaches that allow for the production of such multidimensional and
intersectional (life) narratives and histories.
Time is not merely something we can mark on our calendars or map out in history
books. American gender theorist Elizabeth Freeman (2010) suggests that time is as much
about the connections we construct between one time period and another or between one
situation and another as it is about relations between one person and another. Thinking
about the past and imagining the future produces feelings. We strive to find connections
xiv MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS
INTRODUCTION
between the present and moments in the past as much as we seek continuities moving from
the present into potential futures. In her chapter, ‘‘Queer Temporalities,’’ Freeman explores
the ways in which the forging of such ‘‘time binds’’ have been used in queer and LGBTI
(lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, intersex) studies to, among others, create alternatives to
dominant, heterosexist figurations of time and to develop queer theories of futurity. Natasha
Seymour’s chapter, ‘‘Transgender Temporalities,’’ pursues a similar line of argument to
counter the normative conceptions of gender and time that reduce the process of gender
transition to a conventional model of narrativization, with a beginning, middle, and end,
and thus ignore the much less linear and contrary ways in which transgender subjectivity
evolves. In ‘‘Literary Temporalities,’’ Karin Sellberg in her turn explores the ways in which
relations among past, present, and future have been alternatively articulated in queer and
transgender narrative cultures, while Douglas Clark’s ‘‘Poetics and Aesthetics’’ traces the
ways in which time and gender can be seen to function as foundational elements of poetic
composition in the work of two seventeenth-century poets, in order to question the power
dynamics and gender plots of the period.
Rebecca Coleman elaborates on the affective aspects of time and temporality in her
chapter, ‘‘Affective Futurity,’’ by exploring the function of affect in feminist and queer
theories of the future as both potentiality and a question of intense affective investment. In a
rather different fashion, Paige L. Sweet’s ‘‘Biopolitics’’ connects the body with temporality by
defining both it and life/liveliness itself as political concepts. Her chapter centrally engages
the notion of biopolitics, that is, the ways in which life, the body, and matter acquire political
importance—in, for example, discourses about health, reproduction, and age—and critically
interrogates the gendered implications of such technologies of (bio)power. Kamillea
Aghtan’s ‘‘The Body and Legal Discourse’’ continues a related series of considerations,
focusing, in particular, on Euro-American laws that police the appearance of the naked
human body in time and space and the ways in which legal discourse and law enforcement
both curtail and constitute a body and its conditions or modes of being.
A key aspect of modernism and modernity is the idea of history as progressive devel-
opment, founded in a notion of time in linear terms. Such a concept of history is teleological:
each period is seen as a stepping stone toward a better and technologically more advanced
present. Because this notion of history has primarily served the interests of patriarchal power
and phallocentric knowledge structures, feminists have been careful not to perpetuate its
logic, which favors the present over the past and which denies the continued operations of
nonlinear or embedded time in the experience of everyday life. In ‘‘Generational Time,’’ Sam
McBean explores the connotations and consequences of dominant readings of the feminist
tradition in linear terms and considers challenges to the notion that feminism moves in line
with a teleological generational model of time as well as attempts to rethink feminist timing
‘‘outside’’ such temporal figurations.
Time is central to considerations of the human body, the larger realm of nature, and
matter and organic life itself. Living or simply existing always involves some form of
temporal duration. Everything that exists ages. Australian American feminist philosopher
Elizabeth Grosz (1947–) hence proposes that the sexed body not be considered as a stable
phenomenon but rather as a process or duration opening onto space and time. In his chapter,
‘‘Evolution,’’ Jamie Freestone explains Grosz’s and several other feminist philosophers’ turn
to evolutionary science as attempts to erase the sharp dividing line between nature and
culture and to posit the two processes (body and time) as mutually constitutive. Despite its
presumed theoretical potential, evolutionary science has a dark history. Elizabeth Stephens’s
GENDER: TIME xv
INTRODUCTION
chapter, ‘‘Normality,’’ explores the ways in which evolutionary principles were used in the
period following World War II to ground a model of the normal that excluded everyone and
everything that did not fall within the dominant categories of white, heterosexual, middle-
class normality. Stephens’s chapter shows that the normal is neither natural nor given but
rather a historically specific construction that served—and continues to serve—the interests
of white racial and (hetero)sexual purity.
If modern conceptions of time are inextricably linked to bodies and physical matter, so are
they firmly bound to economic interests. Capitalist notions of time as something we (do not)
possess is one of the cornerstones of modern society and culture. We save time, spend time, buy
time, waste time, and experience ourselves as time-rich or time-poor. Time is money, and the
economy of time in some respects runs parallel to capitalist economies. If you are time-poor,
you are assumed to be money-rich. Lena Wånggren’s chapter, ‘‘First-Wave Feminism,’’
explores the ways in which feminist movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
were concerned with the ownership and distribution of women’s time and with the division of
domestic and professional labor. As we have seen, the unequal division of domestic and other
forms of unpaid labor remains a central concern today. As Barbara Adam points out, ‘‘The
cliché of ‘women’s work is never done’ exemplifies the incompatibility with a work time that
comes in finite units’’ (1995, 95). In ‘‘Academic Time,’’ Ingrid Hoofd and Ash Tower explore
the ways in which the economy of women’s and nonheteronormative white men’s work, as well
of the labor of nonwhite people of either gender, is negotiated in the contemporary neoliberal
academy, especially if it conflicts with the operations of normative clock time, usually to the
detriment of those who cannot or do not conform their lives to the dominant model of
regimented temporality and productivity.
Taken together, the twenty-one chapters in Gender: Time offer an interdisciplinary
and multidimensional perspective on the relations among gender, the sexed/sexualized/
racialized body, and the elusive concept (or set of concepts) of time and temporality. While
they do not seek or offer ultimate answers and absolute conclusions, the chapters explore
the complexity of time as lived every day in its intricate interrelations with bodies, politics,
science, and economics. As such, the volume itself constructs a number of ‘‘time binds,’’
tying together a wide range of feminist and gendered perspectives through a shared focus
on temporality.
This handbook would not exist without its authors; we are extremely grateful for
their willingness to participate in the project and for working with us throughout an
occasionally challenging editorial and production process. We also owe a great debt to one
of the series associate editors, Iris van der Tuin, from whose keen eye and broad
perspective most contributions have benefited substantially. Judith Lakämper, assistant
to the editor in chief, once again proved indispensable in the all-but-final stages of the
editorial process. Finally, without Alja Kooistra to keep the project on track, negotiating
its moving parts with great grace and patience, the project might not have reached its
conclusion.
renée c. hoogland
Professor of English
Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
Karin Sellberg
Lecturer in Humanities
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
xvi MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS
INTRODUCTION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adam, Barbara. ‘‘Reflexive Modernization Temporalized.’’ Theory, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (2003):
59–78.
Adam, Barbara. Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010.
‘‘Gender Statistics.’’ United Nations Statistics Division. 2016. https://unstats.un.org/unsd/gender/timeuse/.
Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2004.
GENDER: TIME xvii

CHAPTER 1
Queer Temporalities
Elizabeth Freeman
Professor, Department of English
University of California, Davis
Time is often thought of as a neutral medium, such as air, through which people move
from life to death, but it is human made and deeply political in ways that matter greatly for
queer theory and activism. Several social justice movements and their related scholarship
focused on questions of time earlier than did queer theory and activism, but they often
acceded to heterosexist constructions of temporality. For example, in early labor activism,
nonwork time was often imagined in terms of family; in narratives of social change,
progress has been figured as a masculine attribute; and in nationalist movements,
women have been understood as closer to nature or as the bearers of tradition. Scholars
in queer studies—broadly defined here as the critique of European-American sexual and/
or gender norms and inquiry into the lives, cultures, and practices of people who do not
fully adhere to these norms—have therefore had to both learn from these sites of inquiry
and question their ideas about time.
This chapter identifies the ideas that have been most important for thinking about
temporality in queer terms as well as investigates how contemporary thinkers and activists in
the Marxist, postcolonialist, and feminist traditions have used and expanded these ideas. It
surveys the institutions, techniques of power, and forms of knowledge that have produced
heterosexist figurations of time—nationalism and capitalism; anthropology, colonialism,
and racism; psychoanalysis; and the AIDS crisis—and identifies the key thinkers and
concepts in these critiques. Finally, the chapter turns to the most important queer theories
of futurity, the death drive, growing sideways, and utopian thinking.
FOUNDING THEORIES OF TEMPORALITY: MARXISM,

POSTCOLONIAL THEORY, AND FEMINISM
Since at least the Industrial Revolution, thinkers engaged with social justice have under-
stood time as political. Marxism, for example, has offered important ways of thinking
about profit as the theft of time. In battles between labor and management, capitalist
managers regulate the time of workers as thoroughly as possible to ensure maximum
efficiency: as labor organizer Joe Kenehan says to his fellow workers in Matewan (1987),
‘‘You ain’t men to the coal company, you’re equipment.’’ Workers, meanwhile, mobilize
to get their time back in the form of eight-hour workdays, overtime pay, paid leaves, and so
on. Labor movement issues have traditionally been framed in terms of patriarchal and
3
Chapter 1: Queer Temporalities
heterosexual notions of family (the ‘‘family wage,’’ e.g., was based on the idea that men
would support nonearning wives, and ‘‘family leave’’ is not always available to members of
households structured on principles other than marriage and parent/child relations). The
emotional labor and caretaking that women and gay men do is rarely calculated in terms of
monetary value. Thus it has been difficult to conceptualize and argue for the temporal
rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning (LGBTQ) people in
the traditional workplace or the home. Gay marriage provides one solution but hardly
answers to the needs of, for example, someone who requires leave time to help a roommate
who is recovering from trans surgery.
Time also figures in social justice movements when previously colonized nations
become sovereign. Decolonization has involved, among other things, indigenous and
colonized people struggling against being seen as stuck in time, as more primitive or less
developed, or even as lacking history altogether. Postcolonial nationalist rhetoric has often
failed to fully contest colonial thought by continuing to cast ‘‘progress’’ in terms of
reproduction and normative gender roles, with men as the avatars of modern, rational,
nation-making thought and women described as the bearers of indigenous traditions. One
example of the latter is a billboard for the 2004 ‘‘India Shining’’ campaign that showed a
woman in a sari playing cricket with a little boy dressed in Western clothing; the caption
describes women’s economic interests in terms of household budgets and home buying.
Meanwhile, queer subjects have only been admitted to the promises of nationhood as either
tourists to newly ‘‘modernized’’ countries such as Vietnam or as figures for a country’s
cosmopolitanism and liberal democratic ideals, as in Israel.
In a third social justice arena pertinent to queer theory and activism, the fight for
women’s rights, women have had to protest being cast as less valuable or as outside of
modern progressive time because they are bound to the repetitive rhythms of domestic labor,
childbirth, and parenting. In seeking equality with men in the paid workforce, mothers in
particular are stuck ‘‘leaning in,’’ trying to balance the time of paid work in late capitalism
with the more cyclical demands of housework and family caregiving. Feminism based on
women’s difference from men, however, has often generated a concept of Woman that is
timeless, ahistorical, and tied to heterosexual notions of women as complementary to men.
For example, the classic second-wave feminist treatise on spirituality, Mary Daly’s Gyn/
Ecology (1978), cast women’s strength in terms of the traditional home craft of spinning and
in terms of an inborn closeness to nature. Queer lives, however, are often illegible in terms of
the conflict between paid work and reproductive domesticity or in terms of heterosexual
notions of the feminine.
Recent work on queer temporality has taken its cue from these Marxist, postcoloni-
alist, and feminist theoretical and practical battles over time and timing, both drawing
from and critiquing the temporal paradigms they depend on. Theories of queer tempo-
rality have explored how time is arranged by institutions and governance strategies in ways
that are heterosexist, and how sexual dissidents have lived and thought time otherwise. As
this chapter contends, the discourses that produce heterosexist time have historically
included nationalism, capitalism, anthropology, colonialism, some versions of feminism,
psychoanalysis, and discourses surrounding HIV/AIDS. Even as these sites of institutional
power and knowledge-construction have controlled time in ways that seem to render queer
lives unthinkable or unlivable, they have also provided queers with powerful ways to
reimagine daily life, the past, and the future, and to articulate queer practices of
temporality.
4 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS
CAPITALIST AND NATIONALIST TIME
The essay ‘‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’’ (1967) by British historian
E. P. Thompson (1924–1993) is a foundational text in temporality studies, for it reveals that
changes in how people feel time are deeply connected to changes in the economy. Scholars
have contested and complicated Thompson’s classic formulation that capitalist time—
hourly wages, workweeks, weekends, and ‘‘time off’’—usurped agricultural and religious
rhythms, but the essay’s importance lies in the way it portrays time as malleable and arranged
by those in power. In addition to disrupting earlier patterns of sleeping and waking,
worshipping and resting or celebrating, and so on, capitalism introduced what the German
Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) calls ‘‘homogeneous, empty time’’
(Benjamin 1968, 261). This is time imagined as a neutral background against which humans
move inexorably and simultaneously forward. In Imagined Communities (1991), political
theorist Benedict Anderson (1936–2015) clarifies how this form of time arose: global trade,
the circulation of newspapers, and eventually the rise of the novel allowed people to identify
with others who spoke their language and read about the same events as ‘‘a people’’ who
operate synchronously even if unknown to one another and spread out across vast spaces.
Such national-capitalist time, or the time of ‘‘modernity,’’ seems universal and permanent in
the early twenty-first century but is actually a product of changing patterns in production,
new technologies such as the printing press, and new genres such as the novel.
QUEER CRITIQUES
Marxist scholarly critiques of this constructed modern time have made it possible to
understand that there are different forms of time lived out by different populations, not
because these populations are inherently different but because their modes of production,
technologies, and genres of experience are different. Denaturalizing time in this way has
also illuminated the fact that managing a population, especially a nation-state, might
involve engineering its sense of how long things should take, what order things should
come in, when it is appropriate to do what, and so on. Queer temporality studies
following this tradition have homed in on the question of how this engineering has
depended on and furthered heterosexism. The cultural critic Jack (Judith) Halberstam,
for example, argues in In a Queer Time and Place (2005) that ‘‘straight’’ time involves a
sharp distinction between work and domestic time, a focus on daytime productivity, and
an investment in ‘‘maturity’’ as signaled by marriage, ownership, and child rearing. Queer
time, in contrast, might involve the artist’s life of working at home and going out at night,
a focus on clubbing, and attachments to activities that mainstream culture considers
juvenile, such as fandom or collecting—regardless of the sexual orientation of those who
participate in these lifestyles.
Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds (2010) has explored the ways that having a life legible
to both dominant culture and law involves the mandatory participation in and right ordering
of birth, marriage, reproduction, and death, as well as the inculcation of cultural rhythms—
for example, when we sleep and wake or how long we pause in conversations—that seem just
like ordinary and natural things that bodies do. In Time Binds, this latter form of power is
called chrononormativity: the way that populations are controlled by temporal rules and
regulations so subtle as to seem inborn. Chrononormativity is deeply tied to class: middle-
class respectability often means being ‘‘on time’’ in myriad ways, whether this involves
showing up for a meeting punctually or knowing how long to hold on during a handshake.
GENDER: TIME 5
Chrononormativity is a local and customary form of what the literary critic Dana
Luciano (2007) calls chronobiopolitics. This term refers to the way that institutions, partic-
ularly nation-states, arrange the time of life of whole populations, of which the right ordering
of birth, marriage, reproduction, and death mentioned above is only one example. Chrono-
biopolitics are felt in everyday life, too; for example, when in the past women, relegated by
law to the domestic sphere or to service jobs that approximate it, were in charge of the daily
rhythms of mealtimes, bedtimes, and so on. This domestic time is a site not only of
oppression but also of power, for it provides a counterpoint to the rhythms of capitalism
and feels more like the earlier, task-based temporality that Thompson argues was superseded
by industrialization. Luciano explores women’s use of domestic time, particularly the time of
funerals, wakes, mourning clothes, and other cultural expressions of grief, as a seeming
bulwark against the linear-progressive time of the nation and the sped-up time of capital. By
invoking and fostering ritualized, sacred time, these cultural expressions temporarily remove
mourners from the bustle of progress. However, Luciano argues, the ‘‘pause’’ offered by
mourning rituals and more broadly by domesticity actually served both of these dominant
times by renewing the male citizen-laborer so that he could go back out into the world and
participate in politics and the economy. That is, rather than reforming national-progressive
and capitalist-productive times, domestic time actually strengthened them.
Chronobiopolitics is also tied to race and culture, insofar as the quasi-sacred time of
home and family that Luciano describes is de facto white. The recurrent and eternal domestic
time produced by chronobiopolitics is that of heterosexual white women, for it depends on
the family wage paid to men. Within this economy of time, to have a serene and relaxing
home life, men must earn enough money to ensure that their female relatives do not have to
work outside the home. Because nonwhite men are valued less for their paid labor, racialized
populations are often cast as being chronically lazy or unkempt because they are unable to
produce the form of domesticity that offers rest and renewal. Finally, chronobiopolitics is
not only implicitly and structurally racialized but also directly so. It is as much a product of
anthropological thinking about nonwhite cultures and of colonial governance strategies as it
is of state policies and everyday customs.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL, COLONIAL, AND RACIAL TIME
Anthropology offers yet another means to see time as cultural and political, in ways that
would eventually be taken up by postcolonial theory. In their fieldwork, early anthropolo-
gists noticed that different cultures organized time differently. British anthropologist E. E.
Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) famously described the African Nuer people’s units of time,
vocabulary, and perception of how time passed (Evans-Pritchard 1939). Netherlands-based
anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1937–), in Time and the Other (1983), clarified how
anthropology contributes to a politics of time wherein non-European cultures were
described as if they existed prior to European ones. Fabian calls this the ‘‘denial of coeval-
ness’’ (coeval meaning having the same date), a perception that is a result of the way colonial
governments cast the indigenous people they oppress as existing in a prior stage of develop-
ment and in need of Christianity and capitalism to become modern (1983, 25). This denial
continues, of course, in contemporary figurations of so-called underdeveloped or Third
World countries in need of Western-style democracy and economic progress. In turn,
modernizing a nation has meant, among other things, acceding to Western kinship structures
such as monogamous marriage and the nuclear family and accepting Western conceptions of
same-sex eroticism as homosexual and therefore taboo.
Early theories of decolonization countered this problematic formulation of modernity
with models of incipient nationhood that often cast women as the bearers of valuable
traditions and men as the arbiters of progress, reproducing the heterosexism of colonial
government. For example, the essay ‘‘Algeria Unveiled’’ (1959) by Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)
offers complex meditations on national consciousness that reproduce heterosexualized gender
stereotypes (McClintock 1995). Later postcolonial theorists, understanding that virtually all
knowledge about colonized people was inflected by this gendered and heterosexualized
developmental model, have sought to clarify that modern time is itself a construction. Far
from being a given, modern time has been built in contradistinction to an imagined pre-
colonized time that is variously backward, primitive, decadent, ancient, and so on, qualities
that are generally characterized as feminine. Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said’s
(1935–2003) Orientalism (1979) focuses on the West’s construction of the East as static,
timeless, and feminine. US-based historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe
(2007) advances the possibility of alternative modernities in India, tied to extralegal networks
and languages of friendship, worship, and belonging in contrast to the tempos of global
capitalism and the kinship relations it fosters. Chakrabarty’s model is important for queer
theory because it suggests that nonfamilial patterns of exchange and obligation have temporal
patterns of their own and generate temporalities that refuse to ‘‘keep up’’ with modernity.
QUEER CRITIQUES
Scholars working in feminist and queer postcolonial theory have had to clarify the degree to
which colonization depends on imposing heteronormativity and its temporal aspects onto
indigenous populations and the extent to which even liberatory notions of decolonization can
be heterosexist or heteronormative. Imperial governments, these scholars argue, have regulated
the time of labor and family, encouraged the gendered separate spheres that Luciano frames as
temporal regimes, and imposed monogamous, reproductive marriage, with all of its notions of
inheritance and futurity, onto subjugated populations. Native American studies scholar Mark
Rifkin’s book Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination
(2017), for example, shows how settlers produce a gendered, heterosexualized ‘‘modernity’’
into which they expected colonized subjects to assimilate. Rifkin shows how indigenous
temporalities—a simple example of which might be centering US history on the Dakota
War of 1862 rather than the Civil War—are negated by the temporal frameworks of the
settlers. Rifkin warns, however, that the ideal of seeing colonized people as ‘‘coeval’’ with their
colonizers, as Fabian advocates, imposes a singular temporality, making indigenous histories
and ways of organizing time secondary and illegible. In another illustration of how even
progressive ideas about indigeneity are framed by straight time, postcolonial-feminist scholar
Gayatri Gopinath points out in Impossible Desires (2005) that even the seemingly resistant
notion of a diaspora is predicated on heterosexist notions of home and family. A diaspora
consists of people presumed to be scattered afar from the country of their birth or ancestry, a
concept that makes genealogy the key to collective identity.
The highly abstract regimes of temporality enforced by colonial governments and
legitimated even by anticolonialist work are felt viscerally by those whose time schemes are
rendered illegible or dysfunctional. The premodern time that is cast as the point of departure
from (and threat to) modern time is also understood as carnal, as literalized and embodied in
GENDER: TIME 7
blackness and black people. Racist discourse has been foundational to colonialism, and one
of its bases is the characterization of black people in particular as the antithesis of modern,
progressive time. One can go back at least as far as the Lectures on the Philosophy of World
History (1837) by the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) to see formula-
tions of Africa as without time or history, an idea that affected the way that anthropologists
and ‘‘scientists’’ of race who researched physical differences among humans described
people of color.
Scholars in feminist, queer, and critical race theory, most notably the literary critic
Siobhan Somerville in Queering the Color Line (2000), have demonstrated that the late
nineteenth-century disciplines of race science and sexology especially depended on anthro-
pological conceptions of non-European cultures as primitive, developing from the theory of
‘‘degeneration.’’ According to this theory, people of color were in an earlier stage of develop-
ment, as evidenced by their lack of sexual differentiation and propensity for sex beyond
reproduction, and civilization was always endangered by atavism, or a return to more
primitive ways. Somerville shows that in sexology, which drew directly from so-called race
science, the homosexual, an identity newly invented by European scientists in the mid-
nineteenth century, was understood as at once a product of atavism and a sign that
civilization had gone too far, or had become decadent in ways that threatened devolution.
Thus the discourse of sexuality from the mid-nineteenth century onward was a discourse of
race that was deeply saturated by ideas about time. In sexological writing, the homosexual
was a temporal paradox, at once a throwback and a sign of hypermodernity, a primitive being
acting according to base instincts and a sign of the decline of the overcivilized white race.
PSYCHOANALYTIC TIME IN FEMINISM, DECONSTRUCTION,

AND QUEER THEORY
Thus far this chapter has clarified how women, LGBTQ individuals, and people of color
have been figured as living in several times at once. In addition to the capitalist and
modern time into which all populations are expected to assimilate, they also exist in a
‘‘time out of time’’ or domestic time, as represented by white women’s practices of
homemaking, worshipping, and mourning, and they represent the time of degeneration,
atavism, and lack of heteronormativity that is perceived to threaten modernity. Although
these multiple and simultaneous temporalities may seem to suggest that the goal of queer
theory should be to subjugate them into a singular, revolutionary one, theories of queer
temporality have instead drawn from the power and paradox of coexisting temporalities.
The field of psychoanalysis and the concepts it has produced have informed queer theory
and activism in this regard.
Psychoanalysis, the study of how the unconscious mind affects behavior, also
denaturalizes heterosexuality, insofar as it posits gender normativity and heterosexuality as
accomplishments achieved over time rather than as innate human characteristics. These
accomplishments are tenuous, for as psychoanalysis demonstrates, the sexual experiences of
early childhood continually haunt the adult sexual being to produce behavior he or she does
not control. Psychoanalysis has produced a concept of hybrid temporality—a time where
past and present are indistinguishable—and has thus denaturalized not only gender and
sexuality but also time. Therefore, theories of queer temporality must give attention to the
psyche and particularly to how the human subject is constantly undermined by events that
took place in infancy—a process called the Freudian unconscious after the Austrian psycho-
analyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).
The earliest work in feminist theory on the politics of time—and certainly some of the
most important—draws on postcolonial theory’s sense of multiple temporalities and on the
psychoanalytic terminology of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), but eventually
leads back to the extraordinary temporal formulations of Freud. The essay ‘‘Women’s Time’’
(1979), by Bulgarian French philosopher Julia Kristeva (1941–) and foundational to the
work of Luciano, argues that progressive-linear time is coded as masculine and associated
with the movement of nations through history. Cyclical time and the monumental or eternal
time of the sacred, however, are associated with women. Kristeva identifies the first phase of
feminism with the desire to enter masculine-rational time and national history—or what
Lacan called the Symbolic. She identifies the second phase with an interest in the uncon-
scious, or what Lacan called the Imaginary, the realm where body parts seem to be detachable
and recombinant, and eroticism flows freely among them. ‘‘Essentially interested in the
specificity of female psychology and its symbolic realization,’’ Kristeva writes, ‘‘these women
[of the second phase] seek to give a language to the intra-subjective and corporeal experiences
left mute by culture in the past’’ (1981, 19). The promise of this second kind of time for
queer critique lies in being ‘‘outside the linear time of identities’’ (19), that is, outside the
time of progress, development, coming-to-consciousness, and arrival. Its peril lies in falling
back into identity politics, such that women and the Imaginary are overidentified with each
other, and women are cast as outside of culture and history.
Locked into conflict with the symbolic order, feminists of Kristeva’s second phase (not
to be confused with American second-wave feminists), such as Luce Irigaray (1930–) and
Hélène Cixous (1937–), risk violence, incoherence, and ahistoricism. Yet the Freudian
unconscious is slightly different from the Lacanian Imaginary and has been deeply produc-
tive for feminist and queer thinking about temporality. If the Freudian unconscious has ‘‘no
time,’’ as the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875–1961) famously put it (1977, 287), this is
less because it refuses to accede to the Symbolic order and more because it preserves traces of
our earliest experiences. These experiences reappear in distorted and displaced forms in our
present, waking life as repetitive activities and symptoms. The Freudian term for this is
Nachträglichkeit, often translated as ‘‘afterwardness.’’ The unconscious not only refuses
order, sequence, progress, narrative, and closure but also insists on a certain double-time,
in which whatever we do and whomever we think we are, the past returns to haunt us, albeit
never in a form that allows us to immediately recognize and remember past events. We are
always already stuck in time, our neuroses pointing toward moments we can never return to
but of which we continue to feel the impact.
THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE TIME OF DECONSTRUCTION

The Freudian model of the unconscious has had a powerful influence over theories of queer
temporality, not only by way of deconstruction but also by way of melancholia theory.
Describing deconstruction in full, or even its influence on queer theory, is far beyond the
scope of this chapter. Primarily it is a literary-critical technique initially developed by French
philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). Deconstruction understands language, partic-
ularly the signifiers that make up a common vocabulary, as consistently pointing to mean-
ings other than what they seem to denote, just as in psychoanalysis symptoms and dreams
point to a vast network of symbols, terms, and meanings. A central tenet of deconstruction is
that there can be no exact repetition of a term: any reiteration contains the potential for
GENDER: TIME 9
a different meaning to emerge, including meanings that are archaic, obsolete, or repressed.
Feminist philosopher Judith Butler’s (1956–) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity (1990) combined this aspect of deconstruction with another linguistic model, the
performative (a term denoting pronouncements that do what they say, as in ‘‘I now
pronounce you man and wife’’) to demonstrate the theory of gender performativity.
Human performances of masculinity and femininity, she argued, seem to reach into the
past to cite an original, timeless model of masculinity and femininity. Those very citations,
however, actually install the fantasized original that they seem to draw from: thus gender
performativity is a temporal operation, a twist in time. Interestingly, Butler’s model suggests,
in the psychoanalytic mode, that the past is never accessible as such and is retroactively
constructed rather than available to be recovered.
Butler returns more explicitly to the Freudian unconscious and more rigorously to the
question of pastness in The Psychic Life of Power (1997). She argues that Freud’s theory of
melancholia, the neurosis that appears when a mourner cannot let go of the person he or she
has lost, is another example of the power of the unconscious, the pressure of the past on the
present. Freud, in ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’ (1917), claims that melancholia is con-
stitutive of the formation of all egos and not just damaged ones. Butler draws from this
model to suggest that queer lives and loves have been cast in dominant culture as ‘‘ungriev-
able’’ and as historically nonexistent or negligible, and therefore dominant culture ‘‘acts out,’’
in the psychoanalytic sense of the phrase, losses it cannot acknowledge. Same-sex desire has
not only been repressed, or removed from conscious memory, but actually foreclosed; that is,
same-sex desire has never been thinkable in the first place, as anthropology’s supposedly
universal incest taboo makes clear (the prohibition against sex with the opposite-gender
parent depends on sex with the same-gender parent never even being imaginable). All
subjectivity, Butler argues, is therefore forged through a complex form of melancholia, in
which what cannot be loved and grieved—the past unrealized—is the material for present-
tense gender identity. According to Butler, gender-normative people perform, in the very
‘‘symptom’’ of their ordinary masculinity or femininity, the impossible homosexual love of
infancy, the love that precedes even the incest taboo. In other words, a cisgender woman (an
anatomically female-born woman who identifies as a woman), having failed to grieve the
desire she felt for her mother because that very desire was unthinkable, incorporates her
mother’s gender in and as her very own.
QUEERING PSYCHOANALYTIC TIME

Freud was not entirely neglectful of collective experiences and shared histories, however. He
suggests that we can also become melancholic for a country or an abstract ideal, of our own or
of our people’s. Drawing from European anthropologists and historians of the nineteenth
century, Freud was also influenced by the concept that humanity was developing from
primitive to civilized. German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s (1834–1919) theory (1899) that
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, or that the organism’s stages of development will resem-
ble stages in the evolution of the species—also called ‘‘recapitulation theory’’—shaped
Freud’s description of sexual development in children. Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory
of Sexuality ([1905] 2000) saw infants as polymorphously perverse, but he insisted that their
stages of development (oral, anal, and genital) would properly succeed and give way to one
another as the child moved from animal to more human desires. To Freud, then, homo-
sexuals (then called inverts) were stuck or lost on this path, subject to ‘‘archaic constitutions
and primitive psychic mechanisms’’ (12). Thus Freudian developmental theory provides
another point of departure for studies of queer temporality.
Literary critics Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009) and Kathryn Bond Stockton
(1958–) have been the most passionate and playful queer critics of Freud’s temporal schema
for human development. In Tendencies (1993), Sedgwick notes that adult queer subjects
attach to their own shamed childhoods as almost endless resources for imaginative and
political change, reversing the trajectory from polymorphous child to properly heterosexual
adult. Grown-up queers, she suggests, have promises to keep to their own humiliated child-
selves, and part of this promise-keeping is creating worlds that their former selves could have
more expansively inhabited. Stockton has focused on the discourse of ‘‘growing up,’’
exploring and exploiting the paradox that children are presumed to be born heterosexual
but in the Freudian model struggle to achieve normative heterosexuality. In Stockton’s The
Queer Child (2009), the phrase ‘‘growing sideways’’ captures the way that children make
metaphors, attaching laterally to objects and people in ways that help them spread out
beyond a heterosexual teleology.
Among the fiercest psychoanalytic theorists of queer temporality as it pertains to child-
hood has been American literary critic Lee Edelman (1953–), who turns to Lacan rather than
Freud. A basic Lacanian premise is that the subject can only know itself by misunderstanding
an alienated object as ‘‘itself’’: all self-recognition is, therefore, misrecognition. In No Future
(2004), Edelman turns this lens toward queer politics, arguing that the figure of the Child—
symbolic of wholeness, purity, and the future of life itself—has animated a homophobic US
politics in which queer subjects figure as anti-reproductive, as child molesters, and as
representatives of death because of their association with AIDS. Edelman argues for the
force of destruction inherent in queerness, analogizing queers with the Freudian uncon-
scious’s death drive, the power of which lies in its consistent destruction of the coherence and
meaning inherent in consciousness. Queers, then, disrupt the platitudes and symbols that
animate ordinary politics. To Edelman, they are the avatars of anti-time, for they thwart all
movements toward the future. The signal importance of Edelman’s work lies in how it
transforms the most virulently homophobic responses to the early AIDS epidemic into a
structural analysis of the force of queerness in contemporary culture.
THE TIME OF AIDS
In celebrating the Freudian death drive, Edelman takes his cues from academic and activist
responses to the AIDS epidemic. He is also responding to the ways that HIV-positive gay
men were vilified by the mainstream media as having a death wish and as spreading
morbidity and disease, as they were portrayed in, for example, the American journalist
Randy Shilts’s (1951–1994) book And the Band Played On (1987). It is arguable that the
most explicit and violent experiences of queer temporality (at least for white gay men) were
the deaths of people in their thirties and forties from a virus that, until the mid-1990s when
effective treatments were developed, progressed rapidly into the full-blown, usually fatal
complications called AIDS. Edelman draws his ‘‘anti-social’’ thesis that queers are best
thought in terms of destruction and negation from literary critic Leo Bersani (1931–).
Bersani argues in ‘‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’’ (1987) that during the AIDS epidemic the
rectum was treated as if it were a grave; anal sex signified death itself. Bersani advocates that
queers embrace the self-shattering aspects of anal sex, seeing a ‘‘death wish’’ as a form of
cleansing the self of the ego’s false certainties. He articulates this in the spatial terms of the
psyche’s structure, not in terms of time, but the formulation certainly relies on an immediate
embrace of what humans usually wish to defer as long as possible.
GENDER: TIME 11
After the AIDS crisis no longer centered on gay

and mostly white men, when HIV treatment became
more widely available in the mid-1990s, many queer
people had the strange experience of witnessing AIDS
patients no longer die but return to relatively normal
health, resurrections that also belied the idea that dying
is a linear process. In the early twenty-first century, the
generation of gay men most affected by the AIDS crisis
is sparser than it should be by hundreds of thousands,
whereas mainstream America seems to have complete
amnesia about the early AIDS epidemic and AIDS
activism, adding another temporal dimension to the
AIDS crisis. The ‘‘post-AIDS’’ period of the early
twenty-first century feels haunted by the deaths of so
many people, by the eventual dwindling of activist
groups such as ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to
Unleash Power, formed in March 1987), by the
trauma of a generation, and by the disappearance of
AIDS from national history. The 1993 play Angels in
America, written by the US playwright Tony Kushner,
captures the sense that AIDS haunts the meaning and
history of the United States. This was also made into
an award-winning HBO miniseries, directed by Mike
Nichols in 2003.
Butler’s work on melancholia in particular has
spoken to the post-AIDS historical moment and has
produced a powerful strain of what might be called a
‘‘negative’’ theory of queer temporality that focuses on
loss. Literary critic Christopher Nealon’s Foundlings
Playbill for Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, 1993.
Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play in two parts depicts the (2001) is an early example of this. Nealon describes
time of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s through the stories of two queers prior to the 1970s gay liberation movement as
couples. PHOTOFES T stranded in history, illuminating how their popular
and literary works turned to other historical moments
to weave an alternative, fantasized genealogy for queer
life: for example, gay physique magazines often celebrated the male nude by invoking
ancient Greece. Literary critic Heather Love’s Feeling Backward (2009), a powerful work in
this vein, demonstrates how for some lesbian and gay subjects in the early twentieth
century, the advent of ‘‘homosexuality’’ as a concept was not enabling but restrictive,
causing them to cling ferociously to seemingly archaic models of gender and eroticism. For
instance, Love describes British author Radclyffe Hall’s (1880–1943) attachment to the
outmoded medical model of the man trapped in a woman’s body in The Well of Loneliness
(1928). Another example, Ghosts of Futures Past (2012) by historian Molly McGarry
(1964–), focuses on the spiritualists of the nineteenth century, for whom contact with
the dead constituted a refusal of gender norms and the heterosexual and reproductive
imperatives. These works celebrate a certain refusal to let go of the past, to get over it in the
way that Freud advocated a healthy mourner should do, as the basis of queer subjectivities
and communities.
QUEERING HOPE
Yet not all theories of queer temporality have dwelt implacably upon loss, haunting, and
shame. Queer theorists have always been interested in how queers thrive beyond mere
survival, how they make worlds out of what society has cast off or refuses to see in the first
place. Edelman’s call for ‘‘no future’’ is an intellectually rigorous paradigm, but for many
scholars it does not account for the persistence of queer lives and cultures, which tend to
persevere in the face of great odds and which generate models of specifically queer political
striving, cultural transmission, and hope.
If futurity is always suspect, how is political work possible? Edelman points out that
teleology, an orientation toward a future imagined as postlapsarian and whole, often
produces a politics of purity. Scholars doing ‘‘queer of color critique,’’ combining queer
and critical race theory, however, have been quick to point out that repudiating the future is
not nearly as appealing an option for populations who have historically been cast as stuck in
the past or not worth reproducing. In contrast to a politics of a future predicated on the end-
stage of a restored and pure identity, many of these scholars have advocated a Deleuzian
politics of becoming. Becoming, according to French philosophers Gilles Deleuze
(1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992) in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), depends on
the concept of an assemblage, which is a collection of interacting materials occurring within a
specific context. What is important for queer temporality studies about this concept is that
these interactions occur at continually changing speeds, intensities, and switch points, with
materials plugging into and unplugging from one another within an assemblage or across
more than one. When one element is drawn toward another in a new way, their mutual
influence changes the value of each, and the assemblage or assemblages will change accord-
ingly. A simple model of an assemblage might be boiling water, where hydrogen and oxygen
molecules change from liquid to gaseous states at slightly different rates and join the
surrounding air. The water becomes warmer and reduces in volume; the air becomes
moist; the state of becoming is the point at which liquid turns into gas. An example of
political becoming might be the moment in the late 1980s during which members of the Gay
Men’s Health Crisis became galvanized by anger at a neglectful US government rather than
just compassion for the sick and dying and formed ACT UP, bringing a political dimension
to health care and transferring grassroots health care paradigms into protest strategies.
‘‘Becoming’’ is concerned with contact, convergence, and rearrangement rather than
arrival and certainty. As cultural critic Jasbir Puar clarifies in Terrorist Assemblages (2007), the
tendency to relegate the Other to the past, or to a different temporality signaled by random
coincidence, is undone by contiguity or proximity. Linearity and permanency, two other
dominant forms of temporality, are also undone. Instead, contact proliferates sometimes
fleeting ways of being and belonging beyond reproduction and thus at least momentarily
extends what exists, but not as a repetition of the same. This form of nonidentical
regeneration is what becoming means. The work of Freeman has articulated this slightly
differently, suggesting in the essay ‘‘Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory’’
(2008) that practices of caretaking—by which is meant not just tending to the sick, elderly,
and infantile but also teaching and mentoring, lending one’s clothes, passing on verbal
expressions, dance moves, and so on—rather than genealogical and legal ties are the material
of kinship. These practices renew and regenerate bodies beyond the simple transmissions of
genetics and inheritance. Both Puar and Freeman seek to capture the ways that queer life
inevitably burgeons, dilating and extending time in unpredictable directions.
GENDER: TIME 13
This queer world-making has involved not only movements forward and from side to
side but also movements backward. As this chapter has already indicated, theories of queer
temporality have compellingly engaged the past in terms of grief, haunting, loss, fore-
closure, and melancholia. Yet not all reaching backward is suffused by negative emotions
and affects. Theories of queer temporality have also taken up the question of whether
nostalgia, antiquarianism, amateur history, and other discredited practices of apprehend-
ing the past might be ways of pleasurably queering historiography. For example, literary
critic Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval (1999) describes the productive thrill of what
she calls ‘‘touches across time,’’ when material from the past comes into contact with the
present and changes the meaning of each in a process of historical ‘‘becoming.’’ Dinshaw is
particularly interested in how present communities misappropriate medieval history,
sometimes in the service of heteronormativity but other times in the service of expanding
possibilities for contemporary affinity and community. For example, she argues that the
anti-sodomitical discourse of the Lollards, a medieval religious movement, actually antici-
pates the work of the term queer by blurring distinctions between the seemingly opposed
Catholics and heretics. Freeman’s Time Binds (2010) has expanded this idea to formulate
two concepts, temporal drag and erotohistoriography. Temporal drag describes the pull of the
past on the present, especially in gender performance. It draws from Butler’s work on
melancholia and on performativity to theorize drag performance and camp as archiving
practices, stagings of obsolete but beloved gender forms on the present-tense body in ways
that call the naturalness of contemporary gender norms into question. Erotohistoriography
describes the kind of pleasurable contact with the past that is invested in creating erotic
possibilities for the present. A simple example of this might be the way lesbians of the
1990s mined 1950s butch/femme culture, appropriating highly gendered 1950s styles like
the pompadour or the bustier to expand the terrain of possible gender expression between
women.
But the most powerful recent exploration of the power of positive queer affect, and of
the ways queer people make the future for ourselves, is definitely the Cuban American
performance theorist José Esteban Mun~oz’s (1967–2013) Cruising Utopia (2009). Mun~oz
is centrally concerned with the power of hope and with the making of utopias. He follows
the German philosopher Ernst Bloch’s (1885–1977) principle of ‘‘concrete utopias’’
(1995, 17), which are the anticipatory illuminations that are available within art and
other cultural productions. Surveying avant-garde art and performance in contemporary
and late twentieth-century downtown New York, Mun~oz argues that one can see in these
objects and acts the contours of a better life, even the outlines of things currently lost to
consciousness but available as traction for critique of the present. ‘‘Queerness,’’ Mun~oz
writes, ‘‘is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on poten-
tiality or concrete possibility for another world’’ (2009, 1). He also re-theorizes queer
performativity. Whereas for Butler that term referred primarily to the fact that contem-
porary gender norms are citations of fantasized originals installed into the ‘‘past’’ by
repeated performance, and for Freeman performativity invokes the wearing of past genders
on the body as a mode of intervening in contemporary ones, for Mun~oz performativity is a
matter of ‘‘doing’’ into the future, of making the future visible on the body in the present,
through gesture, costume, song, and word. He rethinks one of the foundational terms of
queer theory to lay claim to the queer project of making worlds that are imaginable and, at
least momentarily, inhabitable in real life.
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Tage in dem verödeten Schloß geblieben ohne genügende Arbeit, so
wäre ihre ganze Graulichkeit verdoppelt wiedergekommen. Nun
ließen wir sie viel bei uns sein; immer, wenn in den Stunden etwas
vorgelesen oder erzählt wurde und auch bei den Religionsstunden,
die ganz einzig sind bei Fräulein Arnholdt. Sie weiß so genau den
Ton zu treffen, den die Kinder verstehen. Mehrere Male habe ich
nachher mit Line über das gesprochen, was wir durchgenommen,
und gemerkt, wie ihr alles vollständig neu war. Ist das nicht zu
merkwürdig? Nachdem sie solange Schule gehabt! Mir scheint, als
wenn diese Kinder, was die Begriffe anlangt, furchtbar lange wie im
Schlafe leben. Niemand macht sich die Mühe, sie zu wecken. Line
zeigt oft denselben Grad von Verständnis wie der zehnjährige Alfred
Rantzau, und dabei ist sie durchaus kein dummes Mädchen.
Fräulein Arnholdt ist so munter; Du solltest bloß sehen, wie schnell
und sicher sie jedes an seinen Platz befördern kann. Wir mochten so
gern allein, ohne die kleinen Jungen, mit ihr in den Wald gehen, um
ungestört über vieles mit ihr sprechen zu können. Dann setzte sie
Line mit einem Strickzeug zu Fred und Heini, damit sie die Gesänge
und Geschichten auch lerne, die die Jungen aufhatten.
Es sind übrigens reizende Kerlchen, die ordentlich Leben ins Haus
brachten – eine große Hilfe gegen trübe Gedanken.
Montag reisten sie wieder heim, und nun fängt der Winter an, mit
ihm auch meine Kinderschule. Ich will keine Zeit ungenützt vergehen
lassen. Durch Line ist mir noch viel klarer geworden, wie nötig es ist,
sich früh um die Kleinen zu kümmern. Am Sonnabend ist der
Anfang. Ich schreibe Dir, wie es geht. Immer Deine Hanni.«
13. Kapitel.
Advent und
Weihnachtszeit.
»Schönfelde, 1. Dezember.
Meine liebe Käte! Könnte ich Dich doch heute hier haben, damit
Du auch einmal solchen stillen, friedlichen Wintersonntag auf dem
Lande erlebtest! Vorstellen kannst Du Dir diese Ruhe und
Feierlichkeit kaum.
Der Sonntag beginnt eigentlich für mich am Sonnabend
nachmittag um sechs Uhr. Dann sind meine kleinen Schülerinnen mit
ihrer Arbeit fertig. Die kleinsten, die am anderen Tisch sitzen und
spielen, müssen ihre Sachen zusammenpacken, und ich hole die
Pfeffernüsse vom Büfett, zu denen sie schon viele verstohlene
Blicke hingeschickt haben.
Gestern fing nun die schöne Vorbereitung auf Weihnachten an. Du
freutest Dich doch immer so an unserem Adventsbäumchen in der
Tiergartenstraße. Ebenso eins steht hier wieder neben dem Klavier,
und durch das kleine Transparent scheint die Lampe.
Die Kinder sahen furchtbar erstaunt – Du würdest sagen
›angedonnert‹ – zu allem aus. Das hätte mich früher sehr gestört.
Aber dann denke ich an Odas Schmerz über ihre unüberwundene
Verlegenheit, und gleich geht es besser.
Auch die Handarbeiten brachten mich zuerst in die größte
Verwirrung. Aber Tante Ida weiß zu allem Rat. Sie setzt sich jetzt mit
ihrem Strickzeug in die Fensternische, wo man sie vor den großen
Blattpflanzen kaum sieht. Dann merkt sie, wenn ich nicht recht
durchkomme oder wenn ein Strumpf ganz formlos werden will, und
kommt still herbei, den Schaden auszugleichen.
Nun war ich aber beim Adventsbäumchen. Ich hatte unseren
Dienstmädchen gesagt, falls es ihnen Freude mache, sollten sie
doch auch in den Saal kommen und singen helfen. Die
Kinderstimmen allein würden etwas dünn klingen. Punkt sechs
kamen sie alle herein, sogar Mamsell, was mich riesig ehrte, und zu
Tante Idas Begleitung sangen wir mehrere Lieder. Die Eltern saßen
nebenan in Muttis Stube am Kamin und hatten die Tür während des
Singens geöffnet. Als wir fertig waren, kam Mutti mit einem großen
Korb voll Äpfel und Nüsse herein und sagte: ›Das klang ja
wunderhübsch. Nun müßt ihr auch alle zusammen eine Belohnung
haben.‹ Zu nett waren die vergnügten Gesichter anzusehen, und
nachher hat Lisbeth mir erzählt, sie möchten so furchtbar gern
singen und Klavier hören und hätten gemeint, dies sei wie ein
Festtag gewesen! Ist das nicht rührend? Sie sehen und hören ja
sehr wenig hier auf dem Lande und sind für die geringste
Abwechslung dankbar.
Ist bei Euch auch so wunderbares Winterwetter? Dieser zarte
Rauhreif auf den Tannen ist wie ein Märchen. Jetzt möchte ich Ernst
wohl mal mit in den Garten nehmen. Mich freute so sehr, daß Du
schreibst, er sei viel munterer und zuversichtlicher.
Erzähle mir doch nächstes Mal auch ein bißchen von Eurer
Schule. Macht Herr Matz noch immer solche Sprünge, wenn er die
Formel an die Wandtafel schreibt? Unsere Stunden sind oft sehr
hübsch und interessant, aber die lustigen Zwischenstunden fehlen
mir doch recht.
Ade, meine liebe Käte; es ist noch viel zu tun bis Weihnachten.
Immer Deine Hanni.«
»Schönfelde, den 22. Dezember.

Liebe Käte! Nun steht das Fest dicht vor der Tür, und die Pakete
sind alle weg. War das eine Wirtschaft gestern! Mutti und Tante Ida
haben den ganzen Tag gepackt und gekramt. Der lange Eßtisch im
Saal war bedeckt mit Sachen.
Bist Du neugierig, was in der Kiste war, auf der
›Schönebergerstraße‹ stand? O, Du wirst Augen machen!
Sag doch Ernst, mit dem Harzer Baukasten könnte er lauter
verschiedene Instrumente zusammensetzen. Sogar eine
Feuerspritze mit aufziehbarer Leiter hat der geschickte kleine Franz
Löber neulich daraus gemacht, als ich ihm die Sachen zum
Ausprobieren gab. Er war begeistert – und ich hoffe, es wird auch
Ernst Freude machen. Sind nicht die beiden Bären für Max und
Moritz wonnig? Nächstes Jahr kriegt jeder von diesen großen ein
kleines Zwillingspaar als Kinder. Ich sah sie im Laden – einfach zum
Auffressen!
Gestern also sind nun alle Schlachtpakete gepackt; die Würste
mußten ja erst fertig sein. Anfang der Woche war die große
Schlachterei. – Unter uns gesagt, Käte, ein schauderhafter Anblick,
wenn die ganze Küche mit riesigen Speck- und Fleischstücken
vollgetürmt liegt! Ich sollte Mamsell etwas bestellen, floh aber, so
schnell meine Füße mich tragen wollten, vor den Gerüchen davon.
Weißt Du, Schmalzkessel, in denen ein dreijähriges Kind ertrinken
könnte! Zu Tante Ida darf ich darüber aber nichts sagen. Sie findet
es albern und kann beinahe ärgerlich werden, wenn man sich
›anstellt‹ über solche ›ganz natürliche und nützliche Dinge‹.
Die Würste, die nachher aus diesem Fegefeuer hervorgehen, sind
ja auch nicht zu verachten. Sie werden Euch sicher gefallen. Es geht
immer nach der Größe, und die zwei gleichen von jeder Sorte
heißen Max und Moritz. Es war rührend, wie sorgfältig Mamsell sie
alle geformt hat und sie dann stolz auf einem Brett in den Saal trug
zum Einpacken.
Das Zubinden aller Pakete fiel mir zu, und ich habe jedesmal
einen hübschen Tannenzweig mit Lametta obenauf befestigt, was
Tante Ida zuerst etwas unnötig und zeitraubend fand. Als aber alles
fertig dastand, war sie ebenso entzückt wie ich.
Aber ich rede mich fest, und muß doch noch all unsere Sachen für
die Weihnachtsbescherung der Dorfkinder zusammenholen. Der
Schrank in Nr. 6 ist schon beinahe voll. Früher hat Tante Ida nur
jeder Mutter ein Paket ins Haus geschickt, aber dies Jahr dürfen alle
Kinder, die laufen können – es sind 49 – Heiligabend um fünf Uhr auf
die Diele kommen, und für jedes wird ein Platz gemacht. Es war gar
keine Kleinigkeit für mich, die Namen und das Alter von allen
festzustellen, aber dabei haben meine Nähkinder geholfen. – Aber
ganz schnell ade! Grüße alle. Deine treue Hanni.«
»Schönfelde, den 1. Januar.

Meine liebe Käte! Dies war das wunderschönste Weihnachtsfest,
was ich je erlebt. Erzählen läßt es sich gar nicht, Du hättest es
sehen müssen. Die eifrige Arbeit den ganzen 24.! Endlich, um vier
Uhr, war die Bescherung auf der Diele fertig. Unsere schöne Krippe
mit den geschnitzten Figuren aus Oberammergau hatte ich in einer
Ecke aufgebaut, wo alle Kinder sie gut sehen konnten. Die festliche
Tafel entlang standen die Teller mit Äpfeln, Kuchen und Nüssen, und
daneben für jedes Kind seine Geschenke. O, dies Glück!
Solange sie ihre Weihnachtslieder hersagten, sahen sie freilich
noch beklommen und schüchtern aus. Nach und nach wurden aber
besonders die Kleinen ganz lebhaft und strahlten vor Freude. Und
denk Dir: alle Mütter, die mitgekommen waren, dankten mir nachher
herzlich dafür, daß die Kinder jetzt so viel schöne Lieder singen
könnten, und für das, was ich den Kleinen sonst an den
Sonnabenden beigebracht. In den letzten Stunden hatte jedes Kind
goldene Ketten, Rosen und Lilien aus Papier gemacht, die ihre
kleinen Bäume zu Hause schmücken sollten. Ich hatte nämlich
nachgefragt, ob auch alle einen Baum kriegten, und aus den
ungewissen Antworten gemerkt, daß das nicht so ganz sicher sei.
Nun hatte Vater mir versprechen müssen, vom Gärtner für jede
Familie eine kleine Tanne aus dem Walde holen zu lassen. Ich hatte
ihnen Lichter kaufen dürfen, und die Kinder hatten den Schmuck
besorgt.
Die Leute leiden ja nicht Not. Was sie gebrauchen, haben sie,
aber für die Freuden des Lebens sind sie nicht gewohnt, Geld
auszugeben, und Vater sagt, das sei ganz recht. In der Stadt
machten die Leute das häufig umgekehrt: verjubelten das Nötige. –
Kinder aber haben doch in aller Welt gar zu gern etwas Hübsches,
auch wenn es nicht gerade nützlich ist; und die Eltern freuen sich an
ihren glücklichen Gesichtern.
Nun war ich ganz selig, als Frau Niemann – Du weißt, die mit den
vielen dicken Kindern – mir beim Abschied sagte: ›Solch schönes
Weihnachtsfest, wie dies Jahr, hätten sie noch niemals gehabt. Das
meinten sie im ganzen Dorf.‹ Ist es nicht zu schön, wenn man mit
seinen armen, schwachen Kräften doch ein klein winziges Eckchen
in der Welt heller machen kann? Ach, es gibt so viel, viel Dunkel.
Wollen nicht wir, die das Licht kennen, alles daran setzen, es auch
anderen zu zeigen?
Aber nun denkst Du vielleicht, ich sei so selbstlos geworden, daß
ich für mich selbst gar keine Wünsche mehr gehegt? Leider doch
nicht!
Freilich, als die Diele von Menschen leer war und ich meinen
heißen Kopf einen Augenblick draußen abkühlen wollte, vergingen
mir alle Gedanken an die äußeren Zutaten der Weihnachtsfeier.
Nein, Käte: der Sommer mit seinem Grün und Duften ist wohl schön,
aber die Herrlichkeit von so einer feierlichen, glitzernden Winternacht
übertrifft alles. Es war so atemlos still, daß man die Stille hörte. Die
Flocken fielen leise zur Erde, jedes Zweiglein war zauberhaft
umsäumt von den feinen Rauhreifkristallen. Das Flimmern der
Sterne und der zarte Schein der kleinen Mondsichel beleuchteten
märchenhaft und geheimnisvoll den blendenden Schnee, die hier
und da durchschimmernden dunkelgrünen Tannenzweige und das
rotbraune Laub der Hainbuchen. Die Wege sahen verschlafen aus
unter der überirdisch reinen, weißen Decke. Es war einem wirklich,
als hörte man leise, himmlische Glocken und die Stimmen der Engel.
Fast zur Gegenwart wurde es mir, daß in dieser Nacht die ganze
Kreatur Sprache habe, daß die Pflanzen und die Tiere des Waldes
reden können, und ich verstand gut den Volksglauben, daß in den
heiligen Stunden kein Gottesgeschöpf dem anderen wehtun könne –
kein Marder eine Taube töten – kein niederfallendes Felsstück ein
Mäuslein erschlagen. Kaum konnte ich mich losreißen von all dem
Zauber, und es wurde mir fast schwer, zu unserer Feier
hineinzugehen.
Aber dann war’s wunder-, wunderschön. Das einzelne kann ich Dir
heute leider nicht mehr schildern, weil ich eben Schlittenglocken
höre. Pastors kommen, um mit uns Neujahr zu feiern. Viele, viele
Grüße und die allerbesten Wünsche fürs neue Jahr von Deiner
Hanni.«
»Berlin, den 1. Januar.

Meine alte Hanni! Ich wollte Dir recht noch einmal im alten Jahre
die Hand drücken und mit Dir gemeinsam einen Rückblick halten auf
all das Viele, was es uns gebracht und auch genommen.
Aber daraus wurde nichts, und meine guten Wünsche nimmst Du
sicher auch heute noch an. Übrigens hast Du auch schon welche
mitbekommen in dem Dankbrief, den ich neulich an Deine rührende,
geliebte Mutter schrieb.
Wer mich gestern am Schreiben hinderte, war Ilse, die sich zu
Hause trostlos einsam fühlte. Ihre Eltern hatten in eine offizielle
Silvestergesellschaft gemußt, da suchte sie nun bei uns Zuflucht.
Das arme Ding hat wirklich ein trübes Leben. Ich bin zuweilen in
Versuchung, zu meinen, wir entbehrten dies und das. Aber wenn ich
sie ansehe, fühle ich mich überreich in meinem warmen Nest. Das
Allerschlimmste ist, daß ihre Eltern nicht so ganz gut miteinander
stehen. Sie spricht natürlich nicht davon, aber ich merkte es an
mancherlei Äußerungen, als ich die letzte Zeit häufig mit ihr
zusammen war.
Ich habe auch den Eindruck gewonnen, als wenn bei ihr das
Wertlegen auf Mode und Eleganz ziemlich obenauf liegt und aus
Langeweile entsteht. Sie verfällt auf solche Dinge, wenn ihr nichts
Besseres in den Weg kommt – und auch, weil ihre Mutter
dergleichen sehr wichtig nimmt. Ilse selbst ist riesig gutmütig.
Ich muß Dir doch erzählen, wodurch wir jetzt soviel
zusammenkamen: es war eigentlich der reine Zufall, wenn man
etwas, was soviel Folgen hat, Zufall nennen kann.
Sie begleitete mich von der Schule nach Hause. Da sahen wir in
der ärmlichen Nebenstraße, durch die wir der Abkürzung wegen
gingen, ein kleines Mädchen jammervoll weinend etwas auf der Erde
suchen. Ilse fragte, was ihm fehle, aber vor Schluchzen konnte das
Wurm gar nicht sprechen. Endlich kriegen wir raus, daß sie einen
Groschen verloren hat, für den sie – falle nicht um – für sich und ihre
beiden kleinen Geschwister Mittag kaufen sollte. Ein kleines Brot
gäbe es dafür! Nun würden die Kleinen den ganzen Nachmittag
weinen, ihr täte auch der Magen schon weh; und am Abend würde
Mutter sehr böse sein, wenn sie vom Waschen nach Hause käme.
Ilse war starr. – Ich habe schon oft von Mutti und auch von
unserem Mädchen gehört, wie kümmerlich es manche Leute haben.
Aber Ilse war das ganz neu. Sie wollte durchaus sehen, wo die
Kinder lebten, und die Kleine sollte uns hinführen. Ich sagte, ohne
Brot, nur so aus Neugier, könnten wir unmöglich hinkommen. Zum
Glück fand Ilse in ihrer Manteltasche noch das Geld, was sie am
vorigen Tage nicht für die Eisbahn gebraucht hatte, weil ›das
verwünschte Tauwetter‹ gekommen war. Wie froh war sie jetzt über
das Mißgeschick! Wir erhandelten drei kleine Brote dafür – drei
Mittagessen für ein Schlittschuhlaufen – und nun ging die Reise los.
Beim Gehen überlegte Ilse: ›Dies trockene Brot muß den Krabben ja
im Halse stecken bleiben, wenn sie nichts dazu haben.‹ Das hörte
die Kleine.
›Unten bei uns ist ein Milchladen. Wir mögen so gern einbrocken –
aber das kostet zu viel.‹ Auch in meinem Federkasten fand sich
noch ein Groschen, und wie der Wind war die Kleine vorauf, einen
Topf zu holen. Vorsichtig tasteten wir dann die schmalen, nach oben
dunkler werdenden Treppen hinauf. Oben ward uns ein rührender
Anblick. In einem sehr ärmlich aussehenden Stübchen standen zwei
magere, blasse, kleine Kinder – Junge und Mädchen – angefaßt und
die kleinen Gesichter gegen die Fensterscheibe gedrückt,
sehnsüchtig auf die große, sechsjährige Schwester wartend.
›Was ist es für ein Glück, daß wir gerade durch die Querstraße
gingen,‹ sagte Ilse sehr ernst. ›Denk doch bloß, diese kleinen
Jammerbilder hätten bis zum Abend hungern müssen!‹ Sie sah ganz
verstört zu, wie gierig die Kleinen das Brot aßen, was die über ihre
Jahre verständige Schwester ihnen in die Milch brockte.
Endlich erinnerte ich daran, daß wir zu spät zum Mittagessen
kommen würden. Ilse konnte sich gar nicht von den Kindern trennen
und sagte, sie käme nächstens wieder und brächte ihnen was
Schönes mit. Wir merkten uns genau Haus und Straße.
Am anderen Morgen kam Ilse empört in die Schule. ›Denk bloß,
wie engherzig Mama ist! Ich habe ihr von unserem Abenteuer
erzählt. Willst du glauben, daß sie entsetzt war über meine
Unvorsichtigkeit, ein fremdes Haus zu betreten, und mir aufs
strengste verbot, je wieder zu solchem ›Gesindel‹ in die Stube zu
gehen! Sie irrt sich aber sehr, morgen gehe ich wieder hin.‹
›Aber Ilse, das wirst du sicher nicht tun gegen ihren Willen,‹ sagte
ich. ›Auch meine Mutter war erschrocken, als sie von unserem
Besuch eines wildfremden Hauses hörte. Aber sie sagte, da wir in
der besten Absicht hineingegangen wären, durften wir auch auf
Gottes Schutz rechnen. – Nun will sie sich heute nach dem Näheren
umsehen.‹ Mit vieler Mühe brachte ich Ilse zu dem Versprechen,
nichts gegen den Willen ihrer Mutter zu unternehmen.
Als ich zu Hause von unserer Unterredung erzählte, konnte Mutti,
wie so oft, schon die Schwierigkeit lösen. Sie war bereits in der
Wohnung gewesen und sagte, die Straße sowie das Haus sei so
anständig, daß wir ohne weiteres hingehen könnten, den Kindern
eine Freude zu machen. Sie hätte beim Wirt erfahren, daß die Mutter
der drei Kleinen eine äußerst brave, fleißige Frau sei, die schwere
Mühe hätte, für sich und die Kinder immer das Nötige zu erarbeiten,
da sie schon seit der Geburt des Kleinsten Witwe wäre. Mutti mußte
doch der Frau von Herder am Nachmittag eine Visite machen wegen
einer anderen Angelegenheit. Dann wollte sie auch erzählen, was
sie erlebt, und hoffte, für Ilse die Erlaubnis für fernere Besuche zu
erwirken. Du hättest Ilses Glück am nächsten Tage sehen sollen!
Ihre Mutter hatte sich – freilich mit vieler Mühe – erweichen lassen,
ihr den Gang zu erlauben. Nun brachte sie ein ganz unförmlich
dickes Paket herbei und freute sich beinahe ebenso wie die arme
Frau und die Kinder, als die alten, noch sehr guten Kleider,
Strümpfe, Schuhe, Brötchen, Äpfel und was nicht noch alles zum
Vorschein kamen. Ja, ein halbes Pfund Butter brachte sie mit; einen
Schatz, den die kleinen Würmer gar nicht genug bewundern
konnten.
Und nun denk, was sie seither jede Woche treulich tut: sie spart
alles zusammen, was sie selber entbehren kann – von der Mutter
nimmt sie nichts dazu – und packt es in einen Kasten. Manchmal
sind da Äpfel, Kuchenstücke, Brötchen, Kleidungsstücke,
Bilderbücher und Spielsachen. Und immer ein Stück Butter. Weil sie
sie so liebt, jammert sie dies Entbehren der Kleinen am meisten.
Nun nimmt sie selber morgens nie mehr welche zum Frühstück. Und
wenn dann die Woche um ist, holt sie sich aus der Küche so viel, wie
sie wohl meint, erspart zu haben. Frau Berger ist unendlich dankbar
und erfreut und sagt, seit ihr Mann tot sei, habe sie noch keine so
gute Zeit gehabt. Sie käme immer ganz schön aus und brauchte sich
nicht mehr so vor dem Tage zu ängstigen, wo sie Miete zahlen
müßte.
Ist es nicht eigen, zu denken, daß mit dem, was so ein junges
Ding erübrigt, einer ganzen Familie zu helfen ist? – Ilse kriegt ja ein
ziemlich großes Taschengeld – und seit unserem Abenteuer hat sie,
glaube ich, noch weder neue Glacéhandschuhe gekauft, noch so
große, seidene Haarschleifen. Kleinigkeiten kann ich ja auch immer
beisteuern; aber naturgemäß sind die Abfälle bei Herders größer als
bei uns.
Auf Weihnachten hat Ilse sich ja sonst nie sehr gefreut. Ihre
Wünsche werden das ganze Jahr lang im Übermaß erfüllt – die
Geschenke haben also keinen besonderen Reiz; und weiter ist es
nicht viel mit der Feier bei Herders. Dies Jahr strahlte ihr Gesicht
ordentlich, als ich sie in der Christvesper sah. Sie kam eben von den
armen Bergers, die ganz glücklich gewesen waren über all ihre
Geschenke. – Das Nähen verabscheute doch Ilse so – jetzt hat sie
mit ihren steifen Fingern alles mögliche für die Kleinen zustande
gebracht. Ihre nette Berta hat ihr dabei geholfen.
Nun wolltest Du noch hören, wie es in der Schule geht.
Besonderes ist nicht zu berichten. Die Aufstände in der
Zeichenstunde werden immer toller. Aber großartig ist der neue
Geschichtsprofessor; dessen Schilderung der Freiheitskriege solltest
Du hören – einfach begeisternd! – Aber jetzt in den Ferien liegt mir
das sehr fern. Ein andermal mehr davon. Nun muß ich wieder in die
Weihnachtsstube; Ernst wartet ungeduldig mit seinen aufgestellten
Truppen.
Tante Else mußt Du noch von mir sagen: jeden Tag streichle und
liebkose ich ihren Arbeitskasten mit den vielen Fächern und packe
alles aus und ein. Die Perlmuttereinlagen zwischen dem hellblauen
Sammet sind einfach zum Entzücken. – Tante Idas Ekkehard hat die
erste Nacht unter meinem Kopfkissen geschlafen; aber sie soll sich
keine Sorgen machen, daß ich im Bett lese. Was ich versprochen
habe, halte ich. Und damit ade! Immer Deine Käte, im alten wie im
neuen Jahre.«
»Schönfelde, den 1. Januar.

Liebste Käte! Neulich machten die Schlittenglocken meinem Brief
vorzeitig ein Ende. Heute muß ich Dir nun schildern, was für einen
strahlenden Anfang das neue Jahr nahm. Es war zu hübsch! Was
ich hörte, war nicht allein Schellengeläute, sondern klar und deutlich
erklang die Melodie: ›Das alte Jahr vergangen ist.‹ Ich traute meinen
Ohren nicht und glaubte, mitten im Sommer zu sein und von Admiral
Kählers Tannenhügel her die Töne zu hören.
Denk Dir, Klaras Vetter, Karl, erzählte doch schon im Herbst, daß
er so gern Waldhorn blase; nun hat er zu Weihnachten ein eigenes
bekommen und spielt es wunderhübsch, noch viel besser als Hertas
Bruder.
Das Allerschönste kam aber nach dem Abendessen. Klärchen und
ich wollten ein bißchen in der Veranda auf und ab gehen, weil uns
drinnen bei all den Lichtern die Köpfe warm geworden waren. Da
flammte auf einmal eine Feuersäule drüben hinter dem
Wasserrosenteich in die Höhe. Brennende Glut bis in die letzten,
kristallenen Spitzen der Buchen und Linden. Über jede
Beschreibung! Wir schrien erst laut auf und wußten gar nicht, was
wir davon halten sollten. Aber als die Großen herbeikamen, sahen
wir an Vaters Gesicht, wer sich diese Überraschung für uns
ausgedacht, und auch des Gärtners und seines Burschen dunkle
Gestalten, die draußen hin und her huschten, lösten uns das Rätsel.
Schon flammte ein bengalisches Licht hinter dem anderen Teich und
links in der Grotte auf – grünliche und rote Flammen – und jetzt
begann vom Berge her, langgezogen und feierlich: ›Es ist ein’ Ros’
entsprungen.‹ Die glockenhellen Töne weckten einen Widerhall in
dem klingenden Schnee. Käte, schildern kann ich Dir gar nicht, wie
es war; – Du mußt Dir dies Klingen und Flimmern in der stillen Luft
vorstellen!
Alles, was wir an unseren schönen Sommerabenden miteinander
beim Heimgang vom schwarzen See gesungen, kam an die Reihe:
›Es liegt eine Krone im tiefen Rhein‹, ›Sah ein Knab’ ein Röslein
stehn!‹. Zuletzt auch wieder: ›Morgen muß ich fort von hier‹.
Schade, schade, daß es dann zu Ende war, und daß in drei Tagen
auch die Ferien zu Ende sind.
Nun kommen die langen, gleichmäßigen Wochen zwischen
Weihnachten und Ostern, die ich mir etwas eintönig vorstelle. Aber
Tante Ida behauptet, daß sie gerade die extra liebe. Es würde einmal
alles fertig, was man sonst beiseite schöbe. Und die Gedanken
könne man auch mal gründlich aufräumen. Na, soviel zu räumen
finde ich da vorläufig nicht. Ich möchte glühend gern, Du wärst ein
paar Wochen bei mir. – Grüße alle in der Schule, die noch an mich
denken, und küsse Max und Moritz auf ihre dicken Backen! Wenn
wir doch auch noch so ein Pärchen hätten! Deine Hanni.«
14. Kapitel.
Bittere Enttäuschung.
»Schönfelde, den 15. April.

Liebe gute Käte!
Wenn der Frühling kommt und auf die Berge steigt,
Wenn der Schnee im Tal und von den Hügeln weicht,
Wenn die Knospen schwellen und die Bächlein quellen,
Dann wird mir so wohl, so weh!
Kennst Du die süße Melodie? Die klingt mir den ganzen Tag in
den Ohren. Die kleine Quelle am Ende des Buchenganges sprang
auch gar zu lustig über die hellen Kieseln – die Schneeglöckchen
drängen sich in so dicken Büscheln unter dem braunen Laube vor –
in jeder Hecke zirpt und zwitschert es, an jedem Busch werden die
hellen Spitzen sichtbar, wie kleine Funken und Lichter, wenn die
Sonne darauf scheint. Es ist ein Drängen und Wachsen, ein
Herauswollen aus der Enge, ein in die Höhe streben, in die Weite
sehnen, daß man selbst gar nicht ruhig dabei bleiben kann!
Ich war nicht imstande, meine englische Übersetzung fertig zu
machen, als die Sonne mir trotz meines Wegrückens immer wieder
auf den Blättern der Hefte herumtanzte. Unaufhaltsam bohrend,
tropfte – trip, trip, trip – das Wasser vor meinem offenen Fenster auf
das Verandadach. Nachts waren noch ein paar Eiszapfen gefroren,
jetzt lösten sie sich schnell vor den Strahlen auf, und jeder Tropfen
rief: ›Komm mit, komm mit! Wir können auch nicht mehr still sitzen
oben am Dach! Es geht hinaus zu den anderen – ins Bächlein – über
Steine und Moos – immer weiter, bis zuletzt das Weltmeer uns
aufnimmt!‹
Sag, wo wir wohl mal hinkommen, du und ich? Was für Schicksale
wohl auf uns warten? Ob wir in der Heimat bleiben sollen oder
einmal die lockende Ferne sehen? Ob eine große, schöne Arbeit auf
uns wartet oder unsere Flügel beschnitten werden? O, nur das nicht!
Recht hinaus ins Leben! Viel Arbeit, viel Gelingen, viel Lernen und
Begreifen! Zusammenschluß mit großen, berühmten Menschen,
deren Einfluß in die Weite reicht! Ach, recht, recht viel erleben
möchte ich zu gern!
Manchmal verstehe ich nicht, daß Tante Ida die Ruhe und Stille so
liebt. Mir liegt viel mehr daran, was Neues zu erfahren, Menschen
kennen zu lernen, zu sehen, was jenseits der Berge wohl sein mag!
Nun ist’s nur noch ein Jahr, bis wir konfirmiert werden. Bleibst Du
bei Deinem Plan, dann gleich ins Seminar zu gehen? Ich weiß noch
gar nicht, wie es mit mir wird. Vater möchte am liebsten, daß ich
gründlich Haushalten lernte; aber mir kommt es vor, als wenn ich
davon bereits eine ganze Menge verstehe. Letzthin habe ich sogar
schon geholfen, einen großen Koffer voll Garn leer zu packen, und
das feinere für Handtücher, das dickere für Bettzeug auszusuchen.
Der Weber war da und brachte das, was vorigen Winter gesponnen
und nun gewebt war; lauter dicke, schwere Rollen. Tante Ida und
Mutti waren begeistert, was ich von mir nicht sagen kann, denn
hübsch ist was anderes – es sah grau und unscheinbar aus.
Ich muß gestehen, ich möchte viel lieber hinaus und etwas lernen,
was ich noch nicht kenne, am liebsten eine fremde Sprache im
Ausland. Aber dazu werde ich sehr schwer der Eltern Erlaubnis
kriegen! Wieviel leichter wäre das, wenn noch sechs andere Mädels
da wären, sie über mein Fernsein zu trösten! – Ja, dann!
Aber ich will mich nicht unnötig sorgen, sondern geduldig warten,
wie es kommt. Weihnachten sorgte ich, die Zeit bis Ostern sei gar zu
lang – sie ist mir verflogen im Handumdrehen. – Wenn’s mir gut ist,
die Welt kennen zu lernen, wird sich schon ein Weg finden.
Nun noch etwas Betrübtes: Denke Dir, Muttis Kopfschmerzen sind
jetzt, statt sich in der Landluft zu bessern, viel schlimmer als je. Der
Arzt sagte neulich, so ginge es nicht weiter. Man wolle noch ein
Weilchen warten, ob es vielleicht die Frühlingsluft sei, die es so
verschlimmere. Wenn es aber nicht anders werde, müsse etwas
Ernstliches geschehen. Hoffentlich geht es vorüber! Grüße Deine
Mutter schön von Deiner Hanni.«
»Berlin, den 10. Juni.

Liebste Hanni! Schon neulich waren wir bekümmert über das, was
Du von Deiner lieben Mutter Befinden schriebst, und nun brachte
Dein langer gestriger Brief große Aufregung und Kummer hervor.
Also sie ist gar nicht wohl und soll in ein Sanatorium? Ich kann mir
denken, wie der Plan Dich betrübt; Du bist noch niemals wochenlang
von ihr getrennt gewesen. Aber trotzdem sagt Mutti, sie verstände es
durchaus, daß Du nicht mit solltest. Da ist es eigentlich nett, daß Du
zu Pastors kommst. Ich denke mir, Euer Zusammensein kann auch
ein rechter Spaß für Dich werden.
Mutti läßt sagen, sie fände es zu lieb von Deinen Eltern, auch an
uns gleich zu denken. Sie glaube aber, es sei besser, wenn wir in
diesem Jahre von vornherein auf den Plan, zu Euch zu kommen,
verzichteten. Selbst wenn Deine Mutter zu den Ferien zurück sein
könne, sei ihr doch wahrscheinlich die größte Ruhe nötig. Da wollten
wir lieber die Einladung von Onkel Alfred nach Rügen annehmen.
Wir seien dort gut aufgehoben und Ihr solltet Euch keinen einzigen
Gedanken weiter über die Sache machen.
Liebe Hanni, das ist leicht gesagt, aber es ist schwer getan! In
meinem Herzen schreit und heult es laut, wenn ich an all die
Seligkeiten denke, die uns verloren gehen. Onkels Wohnort ist
gegen Schönfelde ein Loch, und das ganze Rügen kann mir
gestohlen werden, wenn ich an Euch denke.
Aber da will ich nun zu Carlyles Heldenfiguren eine neue
hinzufügen und mich darstellen als ›Der Held als Backfisch‹! Ich will
stumm leiden – nicht klagen –, will Mutter helfen, Ernst trösten, den
Onkel erheitern und Max und Moritz klarzumachen suchen, daß ihre
Pferde und Borkenschiffe selbst nächstes Jahr noch an ihrem Platze
liegen!
Na, nun Schluß! Solange ich hiervon spreche, muß ich Tränen
runterschlucken, und das macht mir auf die Dauer
Magenschmerzen. Die Hauptsache ist, daß Deine gute, geliebte
Mutter wieder gesund wird. Immer Deine Käte.«
* *
*
Für alle unsere Freunde bekam der Sommer ein sehr anderes
Gesicht, als sie im vorigen Jahr beim Scheiden gedacht. Frau Gerloff
hatte eine langwierige Kur durchzumachen, und ihr Mann besuchte
sie von Zeit zu Zeit. Dauernd von Hause fortgehen konnte er wegen
der großen Wirtschaft nicht. Hanni war ins Pastorat übergesiedelt,
und es interessierte sie über die Maßen, einmal tagelang in dem
munteren Kinderkreise zuzubringen. Alle waren entzückt von der
plötzlich hinzugekommenen großen Schwester, die viel mehr Zeit
und Lust hatte, mit ihnen zu spielen als die verständige, etwas
nüchterne Klara. Am allerliebsten beschäftigte sich Hanni mit der
Kleinsten, die erst ein Vierteljahr alt war und die reizendsten
Versuche machte, ihr Dasein durch Krähen und Lachen zu
bekunden.
Aber unfaßlich erschien ihr die Ausdauer und Leistungsfähigkeit
der Frau Pastorin. So etwas hätte sie nie für möglich gehalten. Vom
frühen Morgen ging es bis in die Nacht. Wenn alle Kinder sauber in
den Kleidern waren und ihr Frühstück verzehrten, hatte die Mutter
schon ein wirkliches Stück Arbeit hinter sich. Dann begann der
Unterricht. Um zehn Uhr schlug Sophie an die große Glocke. Herr
Pastor kam mit den Tertianern aus seinem Zimmer, Frau Pastorin,
die französische Schweizerin war und alle Sprachstunden gab, mit
den großen Mädchen aus der Wohnstube. Meist kamen die beiden
kleinen Mädchen vom Schulhause herübergesprungen, wo sie dem
Studium der Fibel oblagen, und der zweijährige Bruno, der vor der
Küchentür auf dem Sandhaufen gekrabbelt, war selig, nach der
langen Einsamkeit wieder einmal mit allen lachen und scherzen zu
können. Man ging mit den Butterbroten im Flur und Garten auf und
nieder und hätte zu gern auch das Baby in die allgemeine Heiterkeit
hineingezogen. Da verstand aber die Frau Pastorin keinen Spaß.
Das kleine Heiligtum stand still und nur von fern bewundert in
seinem Körbchen unter dem Nußbaum und vergnügte sich mit
seinen eigenen Händchen und Füßchen. Nie durften unberufene
Hände es herausnehmen und seine Ruhe stören. Es war eben in
keiner Weise ein Spielzeug.
Nach dem Mittagessen mußte für ein Stündchen vollkommene
Stille sein, darauf hielt der Pastor aufs strengste. Niemand durfte die
Mutter stören, die dringendsten Anliegen wurden verschoben. Aber
um drei Uhr versammelte sich alles in der Weinlaube hinterm Hause.
Nach schnell eingenommenem Kaffee war mit Nähen und Stopfen,
Gemüseputzen, Beerenlesen und den vielen anderen nötigen
Arbeiten soviel zu tun, daß man gar nicht merkte, wo die Stunden bis
zum Abendessen blieben, was der Einfachheit halber alle
miteinander um sieben Uhr bekamen. Wer von den Kindern mit
Schulaufgaben fertig war, half bei den leichten häuslichen Arbeiten.
Tischdecken und Abräumen war das ständige Geschäft der kleinen
Mädchen, und Klärchen lag es ob, alle Kinder, bis auf das kleinste,
was die Mutter wusch und auszog, ins Bett zu befördern.
Obwohl nun die Mutter immer freundlich und unverzagt von einer
Arbeit zur anderen eilte, so entging es doch Hannis aufmerksamem
Blick nicht, wie müde sie seit diesem Frühling oft war und wie tiefe
Schatten sich manchmal unter ihren Augen zeigten. Als Hanni
einmal mit Tante Ida zusammensaß, die sie ab und an in ihrer
Einsamkeit besuchte, sprach sie ihre Besorgnis aus, und es fand
sich, daß die Tante ganz dieselbe Beobachtung gemacht hatte.
»Wenn doch Frau Pastorin einmal ordentlich ausschlafen, ein paar
Tage stillsitzen könnte! – Ich merke manchmal, wie es ihr
Überwindung kostet, die Treppe zu steigen. Ihre Füße wollen einfach
nicht vorwärts. Wenn es uns nachmittags einmal glückt, über die Zeit
alles still zu halten, so daß sie länger schläft als sonst, dann sieht sie
nachher ganz anders aus, ordentlich klar aus den Augen. Sie ist,
glaube ich, immer müde. Das kann doch nicht gut sein.«
Der Nachmittagspostbote kam gerade und brachte einen langen
Brief von Hannis Mutter mit ausführlicher Schilderung ihres Lebens
im Sanatorium. Zum Schluß kam die Mitteilung, der Arzt wünsche
dringend, sie noch vier Wochen länger als geplant, dort zu behalten
und knüpfte daran die Hoffnung auf völlige Besserung. Sie solle von
jetzt ab mehr Freiheit genießen, täglich Spaziergänge in den Wald
machen. »Wenn man nur nicht so schrecklich einsam wäre!« fuhr sie
fort. »Manchmal wünschte ich meine Hanni hierher. Dann aber sage
ich mir doch, dies untätige Leben wäre gar nichts für sie. Wenn ich
jemand Liebes hätte, der sich auch erholen und ruhen müßte und zu
meinen erbärmlichen Kräften paßte!«
Tante und Nichte sahen sich an. Sie hatten denselben Gedanken.
Wenn man doch Frau Pastorin dorthin zaubern könnte! Wie sehr
würden beide ein solches Zusammensein genießen! Wie würde der
abgearbeiteten Frau die Ruhe und Erholung wohl tun!
»Aber sie geht ja sicher nicht weg; wer sollte auch ihre Arbeit tun?
Und dann glaube ich, kostet es eine Masse Geld, nicht, Tante? Frau
Pastorin ist sehr sorgsam mit jeder Ausgabe – erst gar, wenn es sie
selber betrifft.«
Hin und her wurde beraten. Schließlich fand Tante Ida, wie immer,
den nötigen Ausweg. Sie setzten sich miteinander in den
Ponywagen, der im Schatten der Linden gewartet hatte, und nach
einer Viertelstunde war man im tiefsten Gespräch in Herrn Pastors
Studierzimmer.
»Ich habe eine große Bitte auf dem Herzen, meine liebe Frau
Pastorin. Versprechen Sie mir, sie zu erfüllen, wenn es irgend
angeht!«

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Handbook of Qualitative Health Research for Evidence

Contrastive Analysis of Discourse pragmatic Aspects of

A Student Handbook for Writing in Biology 5th Edition

Shipping and the Environment Improving Environmental

The Oxford Handbook of Care in Music Education (Oxford

Women and Migration in Rural Europe: Labour Markets,

Financing for Gender Equality: Realising Women’s Rights

Experiencing time 1st Edition Prosser

KARIN SELLBERG, EDITOR

Gender: Sources, Perspectives, and Methodologies

Other Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series:

Cover photograph: Cleaning women punching in on time clock in office building.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2017959267

Gale, a part of Cengage Learning

This title is also available as an e-book.

Iris van der Tuin

ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR IN CHIEF

Chapter 2: Evolution .............................................................................................................. 19

Chapter 3: Affective Futurity................................................................................................. 37

Chapter 4: Generational Time............................................................................................... 53

PART II. HISTORIES

Chapter 6: A History of Gender ..............................................................................................85

Chapter 7: The Gendering of History...................................................................................103

Chapter 8: First-Wave Feminism ..........................................................................................117

PART III. BODIES

Chapter 10: Normality ...........................................................................................................155

Chapter 11: The Body and Legal Discourse .........................................................................169

Chapter 12: Menstruation and Coming of Age ....................................................................185

viii MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

Chapter 13: Academic Time ................................................................................................ 201

PART IV. IDENTITIES

Chapter 15: Intersectional Temporalities ........................................................................... 233

Chapter 16: Memory Studies ............................................................................................... 249

Chapter 17: Diaries .............................................................................................................. 267

Chapter 19: Literary Temporalities..................................................................................... 301

Chapter 20: Art, Becoming, and Affect.................................................................................317

Chapter 21: Transgender Temporalities...............................................................................335

Glossary ........................................................................................................................... 349

x MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

The Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender studies is an extraordinary

Nicole R. Fleetwood and Iris van der Tuin

xii MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

xiv MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

xvi MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

GENDER: TIME xvii

FOUNDING THEORIES OF TEMPORALITY: MARXISM,

4 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

CAPITALIST AND NATIONALIST TIME

ANTHROPOLOGICAL, COLONIAL, AND RACIAL TIME

6 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

PSYCHOANALYTIC TIME IN FEMINISM, DECONSTRUCTION,

8 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE TIME OF DECONSTRUCTION

QUEERING PSYCHOANALYTIC TIME

10 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

THE TIME OF AIDS

After the AIDS crisis no longer centered on gay

12 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

14 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

»Schönfelde, den 22. Dezember.

»Schönfelde, den 1. Januar.