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Arch Sex Behav (2007) 36:755757 DOI 10.1007/s10508-007-9224-x
BOOK REVIEW
In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives
By Judith Halberstam, New York University Press, New York, 2005, 213 pp., $19.00.
Toni Brennan
Published online: 10 July 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007
This book starts with a clear declaration of intentions: [to make] the perhaps overly ambitious claim that there is such a thing as queer time and queer space (p. 1).
Queer temporality challenges the hallowed human-istic assumptions on time and life stages that posit the responsible adult individual as emerging into maturity from the confusion of adolescence, preparing for marriage and reproduction, with emphasis on inheritance and continuity from one generation to the next. Queer time is time outside the framework of reproductive time, something thrown into focus at the end of the 20th century by the AIDS epidemic that saw many lives telescoped into a few years of urgency and risk. Halberstam notes that, if on the one hand, the AIDS crisis brought about a foreshortened future, it also opened up possibilities for scripting ones life outside the normative conventions of family and reproduction. People who live outside familial time often live outside capitalist (re)production and in marginalized or abandoned spacesthey are ravers, club kids, HIV-positive barebackers, rent boys, sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers, and the unemployed (p. 10). Although these are all queer subjects in that they live outside the (hetero)normative organization of space and time, the trans-gender body is the subcultural/queer subject par excellence because it is within and between embodiment, place and practice (p. 5).
Two chapters (and a substantial part of a third chapter) of the book examine the Brandon Teena story, as rendered in the 1998 documentary by Musk and Olafsdottir and in
the Hollywood lm it inuenced, Boys Dont Cry, and propose alternative readings. Halberstam recognizes the danger of adding to the growing Brandon industry but sees in Brandon, as a gure who represents both anachronism (an earlier model of gay identity as gender inversion) and dislocatedness (a person who chooses the rural over the urban as his theater for staging his gender), [someone] literally and guratively out of time and out of place (p. 16), an ideal catalyst for asking questions about queer time and place.
The story of three young people shot to death, execution style, on 31 December 1993 in a small town in Nebraska elicited much interest from mainstream America and beyond because one of the youngsters was a white person who had been born female, but had lived as a male and formed relationships with local girls. The readings that emerged from the media vortex, including the documentary and the lm, used readily available stereotypes of white trash and rural communities to geographically locate transphobic and homophobic violence, with the concomitant assumption that queer lives can ourish only in an urban setting. A rhetorical appeal to common sense is made with the prescriptive injunction to leave the small-town/rural Midwest: it is as if Brandon refused to know his place even after being harassed by the police and raped by those who would eventually murder him. Halberstam sees the metronormative, what-do-you-expect attitude (p. 43) adopted by a large number of LGBTQ individuals, including herself, when she rst engaged with the Brandon archive, as too simplistic and damaging, in that it elides non-urban accounts of queer lives, inter alia a long tradition of passing women in rural North America. As to passing, Halberstam deconstructs the notion of Brandons masculinity as being counterfeit, like a parallel of his involvement in a credit
T. Brennan (&)
Department of Psychology, School of Human Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH, UKe-mail: [email protected]
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card scam, as it was represented in some narratives. Queer gender embodied in the transgender body shows the fault-lines in the carefully crafted economy of (gender) authenticity. Brandons former girlfriends interviewed for the documentary The Brandon Teena Story commented on his kindness, politeness, and generosity. In many ways, he presented an ideal(ized), courteous masculinity that these young women knew was far from what they could expect from the local farm boys. Mainstream writers, such as Smith (1997), who ctionalized the story in The Illusionist, and Dunne (1997) see Brandons masculinity as unthreatening and a deceit that could be sustained only because his girlfriends were immature and gullible. This sounds patronizing and anxious, given how clearly threatened all the men involved in this case obviously were (p. 68). According to Halberstam, these mainstream readings of Brandons masculinities are typical of the representation of a trans-gender life by nontransgender people, characterized by a normalizing project that casts transgender life as weird and pathological or rationalizes it by giving a reasonable explanation for behavior (e.g., a woman passing as a man for economic reasons) and/or trivializes it.
In the next chapter, Halberstam highlights how these strategies are deployedin Neil Jordans The Crying Game as well as in Boys Dont Cryand she contrasts this normalizing project with the queer universe of the subcultural By Hook or by Crook. For all its good intentions and occasional glimpses of life through the transgender gaze, Boys Dont Cry offers a rather conventional narrative in that it attempts to x (in both senses of the word) the transgender subject: Brandons masculinity is ultimately considered a product of immaturity and confusion, on the part of both Brandon and his girlfriends, or a form of false consciousness. A few hours after the rape, Lana sees Brandon, and they talkand, all of a sudden and out of synch with the lm up to that point, Lana sees Brandon as female. Brandon says that he has been untruthful about many things in his past, and his confession sets up the expectation that he will now appear before Lana as his true self (pp. 8990). When the two characters move towards each other to have sex, it is a lesbian sex scene, although it is mostly hinted at, courtesy of a Hollywood dissolve, in contrast with previous, graphic sex scenes. The transgender body has been completely defused: a butch lesbian (with the anachronistic stereotype of gender inversion) is something that can be understood and classied within normative, dichotomous parameters. Even more disturbingly, this scene seems to send the message that it takes the rape to reassign Brandons identity to the natural female body hitherto repudiated.
In By Hook or by Crook, the directors, Harriet Dodge and Silas Howard, make no attempt to explain to their audience being gay or being queer, or that queer
characters are, after all, normal! The characters live in a queer world, they live their everyday lives without ever being taken to task for being butch; it is maybe a utopian vision of the world, one created by hook or by crook, by the transgender gaze, with no apologies or explanations. The theme of the utopian transgender body that refuses to apologize and bow to conventional narratives is central to the next chapter/essay, Technotopias: Representing Transgender Bodies in Contemporary Art. The life and work (or ph/autographyto use Jay Prossers pun) of transgender photographer Del LaGrace Volcano provide a living and morphing illustration of possibilities of resistance. In Matrix, a Jenny Saville painting of Del LaGrace Volcano, the models body lies naked, seen from an unattering angle that suggests discomfort, and the viewers eye travels from a large thigh to female genitals, to a female torso and breasts, to be confronted by a bearded face, and back again. As Halberstam notes, with a reversal of anachronistic discourses of inversion and of gender trapped inside the wrong body, here the viewer contemplates the image of a man trapped outside a womans body (p. 111). The painting does not just dare viewers to make their mind up if they will, but it rather hints at the futility of such an exercise in the age of hybridity. Such notion of hybridity is very reminiscent of Haraways cyborgs and, in general, although not cited by Halberstam, Haraway is like a presence presiding over the Technotopias chapter.
Hybridity goes with utopialiterally, from the Greek for no placeas resistance to normative, expected spatial conguration.
In I probably want perfection in everything and a little more. Maybe thatll be my downfall, an installation/video by Brian Dawn Chalkley, Halberstam identies a (trans-gender) queering of temporal conguration. The only image is a partly undressed transgender body lying on a bed of fallen leaves in the woods with the back to the camera, and the sound offers the dialogue of a transgender person and a john in a pick-up joint making small talk before leaving together. Both characters are voiced by the artist, who makes no attempt to do gender by making his voice more high-pitched when speaking as the transgender person. There are no concessions to normative, narrative temporality with beginning, development, and conclusion: the outcome of the encounter, probably violence, literally lies in front of the viewers eyes right from the start. The spatio-temporality of movement is also challenged: video, a medium that normally records movement, is used here to produce a still, or, rather, stilled life/image.
The chapter Oh Behave! (the catchphrase of Austin Powers in the eponymous lms) considers the appropriation of the transgender gaze by mainstream visual culture; in particular, Halberstam examines how mainstream lms like Austin Powers and the 1997 British box ofce hit The
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Full Monty owe a debt to drag king performances of masculinities. Austin Powers is camp, but his nonphallic, emphatically prosthetic, and endearingly cloddish attentions to women make his sexual identity look butch or kingy rather than faggy (pp. 143144). In The Full Monty, out of work steel workers reinvent themselves as a troupe of exotic dancers/strippers modeled on the Chippendales. To effect this transition, they are forced (and so is the viewer) to reect on constructions on masculinities, to see masculinity as denaturalized, as a construction. The decline of heavy industry and consequent unemployment have posed a challenge to traditional, working class, naturalized notions of masculinity as agency: the breadwinner who calls the shots and casts the (predatory) gaze is as constructed as the dance routine and is now the object of the female gaze. Halberstam argues that the masculinity presented to such a gaze is a composite of minority masculinities (like kinging), a performance of gender: the injunction to the masculine subject is not to be but to behave (p. 151).
This chapter is arguably the boldest in the bookand Halberstams argument is quite compelling; however, at times it seems quite forced/stretched. Having made clear that minority forms of masculinities have shown that masculinity goes beyond and is independent of the economy of absence/presence of the phallus, Halberstams analysis continues to show a singular preoccupation with this economy. Maybe this explanatory fervor is called for in the present cultural climate in order to reach a wider reader-ship that may not be familiar with an argument that is still counterintuitive to the mainstream.
In the last chapter, Halberstam examines again the relation between mainstream culture and liminal, trans-gender subcultures. In the postmodern era, the recognition, visibility, and ultimately absorption of the subcultural into
the mainstream has enabled the marginal(ized) to make inroads into the dominant culture, but at a high price, namely voyeurism and sensationalism, mostly for the benet of large media conglomerates. In other words, when television stations show an interest in a dyke subculture like drag kings, this is cause for both celebration and concern (p. 156). This nal chapter considers the relationship between dominant culture and queer subculture with particular reference to music, from the riot grrrl phenomenon to lesbian punk and slam poetry to country. Halberstam concludes that, like in Ferrons song Shadows on a Dime, fame and fortune are very eeting and, ultimately, not important for subcultural artists, who understand themselves to be engaged in a collective project that is rewarded not by capital and visibility, not by the market, but by an affective connection with those people who will eventually be the vessels of memory... (p. 187).
This book also constitutes a vessel of memory, an archive of queer readings; it calls for a reection on the role of the academic participating in this project with her cultural production while maintaining a foothold in the establishment (with tenure, etc.). On present evidence, with books such as In a Queer Time & Place, and academics like Halberstam, there seems to be some potential for creating a queer spatiotemporality to resist the normalization of culture produced by mainstream academia.
References
Dunne, J. G. (1997, January). The Humboldt murders. New Yorker,4562.
Smith, D. (1997). The illusionist. New York: Scribner.
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