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In recent months, there’s been a lot of talk about time and what bodies do with it. “Corona time” has seemed to slow days down and stretch time out, especially for those people under strict lockdown orders, kept from mingling with friends and strangers. The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement has brought thousands out into the streets of the United States and other countries in seemingly an instant, and the dismantling of symbols of white supremacy has taken place in accelerated time after the decades or even centuries that they have loomed over our cities and towns (as I write this, the statue of John Calhoun that dominated Charleston, South Carolina, is being removed from its perch, something I never thought I’d live to see). And the eight minutes and forty-six seconds in which George Floyd’s life was snuffed out by another man’s body pressing down on his are horrifyingly long.
Elizabeth Freeman’s new book, Beside You in Time, comes at exactly the right moment to think about the biopolitics of bodies existing over time as well as across space, especially bodies existing in contiguity to each other. Freeman is especially interested in how bodies operate collectively and relationally over time, creating what she calls “queer hypersociality,” bodies that are “reducible neither to institution nor population, neither to identities nor genital sex—but in ephemeral relationalities organizing and expressing themselves through time” (7). As this quotation suggests, Freeman’s task here is to avoid both the Scylla of Foucauldian biopolitics that speaks on the register of population and the Charybdis of queer theory that focuses on the vagaries of sexuality defined through genitality and desire, finding both insufficient for the project at hand, and to steer a new route to understanding queer collectivities that find their source in knowledges and practices...