Trans-Time

There are few members of the queer and LGTBI community reading GLQ who will require a review of Judith Halberstam's most recent book. Most will read this prolific theorist-critic-activist's publications as they appear, for they have proven to be landmarks in measuring the shifts and changes in U.S. queer studies today. In a Queer Time and Place, in its engagement with critical work on time, space, ethnography, and geography, departs from some of Halberstam's previous work and marks a turn in critical queer studies toward preoccupations that do not at first appear primarily to concern sex and sexualities. It also demonstrates what queer studies can do when it takes its interdisciplinarity seriously. Halberstam both addresses and comments on a veritable encyclopedia of recent theoretical writings on time and space and their queer critiques. This encyclopedic reach, which also includes a clearly discernible politics of citation (work by younger feminist and queer scholars, especially queer of color scholars), will prove invaluable for readers wanting a critical survey on the topics Halberstam treats: postmodern geographies, queer temporalities, transgendered lives and their representations in the plastic arts, film, and popular (sub)cultures (including drag, popular music, and performance).

The book makes the argument that "there is such a thing as 'queer time' and 'queer space'" (1), queer here being used as an adjective rather than a verb. It is thus not so much about what happens to time and space when they are queered, or about the action of queering them, but about what obtains if we posit the concepts of queer time and space, what artifacts in culture might be understood to exemplify them, and how our perspective shifts if we use them to rethink the canonical critical interventions on these subjects. (The book does not, however, generally include writings on time and space from the field of science and technology studies.) Halberstam makes a historical argument, claiming for queer time a post-AIDS emergence, and for queer space Foucault's 1986 statement that "the present epoch will be above all an epoch of space" (11) and a less clearly defined series of critiques of "postmodern geography" as it is theorized by David Harvey principally, but Edward Soja and Fredric Jameson as well, combined with feminist critiques of domestic space and postcolonial critiques of Western chronotopes.¹ Indeed, the book's discussion of time and temporality is more developed than the arguments about space and spatiality, though it is rather the relationship between time and space at the sites of lived bodily experience, performance, and visual representation that concerns Halberstam most. In some senses, In a Queer Time and Place reads like two separate books that have come together in a single project. In the introduction, Halberstam notes that the original project was a book on Brandon Teena, but that as the archive, or "Brandon industry," grew, she decided instead to "study the construction of Brandon in terms of some of the questions about time and space raised by queer studies" (16). Thus Brandon, the question of the transgender body, and instantiations of queer temporality and spatiality as they are manifest in the visual arts, music, and queer subcultures comprise the bulk of her study, framed by chapters that address recent thinking about time and space.

The book includes the already richly textured work Halberstam has done to draw attention to key elements of the Brandon Teena archive; a chapter that makes a nice argument about cinematic efforts to focalize the gaze through alternatively gendered bodies and subjectivities; and a survey of recent art that foregrounds the transgendered body, which includes a critique of the purported divide between late modernism and postmodernism in art by taking a "transgendered aesthetic" (105) into account. The penultimate chapter returns to some of the concerns in Female Masculinity by exploring alternative masculinities that draw upon gender-queer subcultures for their representations.² The final chapter explores popular alternative music...