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8. Queerness and Futurity in Superbad
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Chapter 8 Queerness and Futurity in Superbad Michael DeAngelis Cinematic “queerness” was for quite some time thought to be a matter of representation, confirmed by such evidence as the fact that a film featured gay or lesbian characters as central protagonists, or that it dramatized the relationship between such characters. Since the start of the new century, however, many critics and filmmakers have striven to expand the definition of queerness in cinema beyond matters of representation, such that “queerness” has now come to encompass filmmaking strategies that challenge many of the narrative structures and expectations that mainstream Hollywood cinema has established and sustained as natural or “normal.” As early as 1993, American filmmaker Todd Haynes had begun to articulate the notion of a “gay” cinematic structure directly opposed to the conventions of Hollywood: I have a lot of frustration with the insistence on content when people are talking about homosexuality. People define gay cinema solely by content: if there are gay characters in it, it’s a gay film. It fits into the gay sensibility, we got it, it’s gay. It’s such a failure of the imagination, let alone the ability to look beyond content. I think that’s really simplistic. Heterosexuality to me is a structure as much as it is a content. It is an imposed structure that goes along with the patriarchal, dominant structure that constrains and defines society. If homosexuality is the opposite or the counter-sexual activity to that, then what kind of a structure would it be?1 214 Michael DeAngelis Several recent theoretical works have explored such structural components of queerness as a way of being and living in the world— one that is opposed to the principles of what has come to be described as “heteronormativity.” And some of the most radical and challenging queer theorists have focused their opposition to the demands of the heteronormative by proposing differences between the straight and the queer experience of time, focusing especially upon the relationship between the present and the future. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, for example, Lee Edelman proposes that heteronormative conceptions of the future are invariably linked to the figure of the child, who “has come to embody for us the telos of social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust.”2 Disrupting this notion of heteronormativity , Edelman theorizes a future that rejects the demands of generation, lineage, and legacy and operates through the embrace of a queer resistance and refusal of identity, of meaning making, and of the logical historical progression that secures the seeming integrity of any heteronormative version of time. In Cruising Utopia: The There and Now of Queer Futurity, Jose Esteban Muñoz reverses the polarities of present and future to distinguish between a “straight time that tells us that there is no future but the here and now of our everyday life” and an “ecstatic time” of queerness that “is essentially about the rejection of the here and now and an insistence on the potentiality or concrete possibility of another world.”3 Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure suggests a clinging to “immaturity and a refusal of [the demands of] adulthood”4 as a queer means of correcting the “inevitable force of progression and succession ”5 that structures a heteronormative conception of time that is characterized by notions of responsibility and definitions of success . In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman theorizes a heteronormative “chronobiopolitics” that structures time teleologically as a sequence of key “events and strategies of living” that includes marriage, the accumulation of wealth, reproduction , child rearing, and death.6 And Dustin Goltz examines how popular cultural representations of gay males regularly (though not exclusively) remain complicit with the linear progression of straight time as well as the ideologically enforced connections of parenthood and reproduction with notions of futurity.7 [18.116.239.195] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 19:55 GMT) 215 Queerness and Futurity in Superbad This chapter examines how such theoretical concepts of futurity, straight time, and queer time can help illuminate the strategies that some contemporary bromances use to embrace and explore the homosocial , and even the potentially homoerotic, connections between their male protagonists. If, at the level of representation, the contemporary bromance most often asserts the incontestable heterosexuality of its central protagonists while simultaneously making them entirely obsessed with all things “gay,” theories of queer futurity offer a...