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  • Introduction
  • Elizabeth Freeman (bio)

When Shakespeare's Hamlet says "the time is out of joint," he describes time as if its heterogeneity can be felt in the bones, as a kind of skeletal dislocation. In this metaphor, time has, indeed is, a body. The essays collected here suggest that this sensation of asynchrony can be viewed as a queer phenomenon—something felt on, with, or as a body, something experienced as a mode of erotic difference or even as a means to express or enact ways of being and connecting that have not yet arrived or never will. Through rubrics as diverse as martyrdom, coincidence, melodrama, post-Newtonian physics, criminal motive, poetic immortality, and gesture, these works of scholarship connect the marginalized time schemes they explore to subjugated or disavowed erotic experiences, including male homoeroticism, same-sex marriage, interracial coupling, heterosexual feminine desire, mourning, incest, and pedophilia. These essays follow the lead of scholars who have broadened queer studies with theories and histories of affect, sentiment, embodiment, and sensation.

It is precisely this wide-ranging sense of what Audre Lorde calls the uses of the erotic that allows queer and temporality to touch one another across what otherwise might seem a vast conceptual gulf.1 If we reimagine "queer" as a set of possibilities produced out of temporal and historical difference, or see the manipulation of time as a way to produce both bodies and relationalities (or even nonrelationality), we encounter a more productively porous queer studies, one shaped by and reshaping not only various disciplines but also the studies of race, nation, migration, and postcolony. Indeed, this queer studies meets critical race theory and postcolonial studies in its understanding that what has not entered the historical records, and what is not yet culturally legible, is often encountered in embodied, nonrational forms: as ghosts, scars, gods.2 In this sense we are also (re)turned to a queer studies among whose definitional moves has been a turn to the "premodern," not only to moments in time before the consolidation of homosexual [End Page 159] identity in the West but also to how the gaps and fissures in the "modern" get displaced backward into a hypersexualized or desexualized "premodern." These essays, then, showcase the possibilities of a permeability and recursivity that is built into the field of queer studies at its best. By way of introduction, I want to provide some ways to contextualize the link between queer and temporality, the erotic and time, that guides this volume. To begin with a demonstration, I rethink one of queer theory's key concepts, performativity, in temporal terms. Then I provide a brief history of the temporal regimes embedded in sexuality as a field of knowledge. Finally, I review the critical influences and key debates in queer studies of temporality, before turning to the essays themselves.

How, beyond somatic changes like puberty, aging, or illness, has time come to seem so natural that we can feel it as a charge in the body, even as it is measured with external instruments? How is time part of the larger histories of sexuality and sensibility that have shaped LGBTQ studies? First, temporality is a mode of implantation through which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts. Schedules, calendars, time zones, and even wristwatches are ways to inculcate what the sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel calls "hidden rhythms," forms of temporal experience that seem natural to those whom they privilege.3 Manipulations of time also convert historically specific regimes of asymmetrical power into seemingly ordinary bodily tempos and routines. Consider, for example, how nineteenth-century workers in the United States and Europe claimed the eight-hour workday as part of a triad that included eight hours of sleep and eight hours of leisure. Yet we now understand the need for eight hours of sleep as a demand coming from our body rather than as a form of resistance to wage work. Or, in a more overtly sexual example, think of the abject phrase premature ejaculation, a twentieth-century locution that owes its existence to both the mainstream-medical norming of heterosexual intercourse and the feminist movement's insistence that women who sleep with men have a right...

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