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Sedgwick’s Twisted Temporalities,“or even just reading and writing”
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Sedgwick’s Twisted Temporalities, “or even just reading and writing” Jane Gallop The word “queer” . . . comes from the Indo-European root—twerkw, which also yields the . . . Latin torquere (to twist). . . . —Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “T Times” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is widely recognized as one of the founders, one of the leading lights, of queer theory. Courses in queer theory can be expected to include a text by Sedgwick, and that text is almost always Epistemology of the Closet (in its entirety or in excerpt). My focus here, however, will not be on that landmark text but rather on another book by Sedgwick, one that claims to be nearly a twin to the more prominent Epistemology. In 1993, Sedgwick published Tendencies. The foreword talks at length about the relation between the two books: “Most of these essays are concurrent with my work on another book, Epistemology of the Closet (1990). . . . Tendencies ought to make sense to people who haven’t read Epistemology of the Closet; but the intimate adhesion between the books meant that I couldn’t afford to be too embarrassed about some few pages of overlap. . . . The writing of Tendencies was almost coterminous with that of Epistemology of the Closet—with a couple extra years added on to the end” (xii, xiv). The two books are “almost coterminous,” “concurrent,” written during the same time period. In the foreword’s articulation of the relation, the stress is on how close the two are—“almost coterminous,” “overlap,” “intimate 47 48 JANE GALLOP adhesion.” The little drama of embarrassment (“I couldn’t afford to be too embarrassed”) draws our attention to the overlap. It sounds as if Sedgwick were worried that these books might be too close. While the foreword thus lays its emphasis on the overlap, I’m interested in the way this emphasis minimizes the differences between the two books. While the overlap seems to be about content (“some few pages”), the minimized difference involves temporality. I’m interested in the discrepancy between “coterminous” and “almost coterminous.” The “almost” refers to what the foreword specifies as “a couple extra years added on to the end.” Calling those years “extra”—like calling the writing “almost coterminous,” mostly “concurrent”—suggests that this is essentially the same time period, suggests that those “couple years” beyond the overlap don’t make any difference , don’t matter much. Epistemology was published in 1990, Tendencies in 1993; the couple years from the earlier date to the later in fact represent a significant period in Sedgwick’s writing. While the foreword to Tendencies claims that “most of these essays were concurrent with . . . Epistemology,” the volume includes at least half a dozen essays written in 1990 or later.1 The pieces from those years—rather than from the period of overlap—are, to my mind, the very heart of this 1993 volume. More importantly, Sedgwick’s writings from those years are, as I will show in this essay, the site of an uncanny encounter with temporality. Tendencies’ foreword is not only from this same period but is actually all about time. Subtitled “T Times,” it opens by discussing various T-shirts seen at the 1992 gay pride parade in New York. The T in the subtitle presumably refers to these “T-shirts”; after her survey of the T’s, Sedgwick concludes “It was a QUEER time” (xi, the all-caps here quoting from the shirts). Echoing this declaration, the next paragraph states: “I suppose this must be called the moment of Queer” (xii). More emphatically than anywhere else in her oeuvre, here in the opening to Tendencies’ foreword, Sedgwick announces “Queer,” loudly proclaims (all-in-caps) “QUEER.” This proclamation of queer is, it would seem, inextricably temporal—“a QUEER time,” “the moment of Queer.” The queer moment is here located somewhere around June 1992, thus within the couple years after the publication of Epistemology, in the very period that a page or two later in the same text she will minimize almost out of existence. [3.17.128.129] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 21:52 GMT) 49 SEDGWICK’S TWISTED TEMPORALITIES This seeming incongruity about the significance of this particular moment is not the only one to be found in the foreword. Closely reading Sedgwick’s proclamation of a queer moment, Stephen Barber and David Clark remark the peculiarity of what she actually says: “even the ingenuously jubilant claim . . . ‘It was a QUEER time,’ comes to us by way of the past tense, and for all the mounted...