Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History by Jaclyn I. Pryor (review)

In Time Slips, Jaclyn I. Pryor (they/them/their) frames performance as a site of resistance to elucidate the connections between performance studies and queer worldmaking. Writing as a performance artist and scholar, Pryor theorizes “time slips” as “moments in live performances in which normative conceptions of time fail or fall away, and the spectator or artist experiences an alternative, or queer, temporality” (9). Operating in the same vein as scholars such as José Esteban Muñoz and Jill Dolan, Time Slips brings together affect theory and performance studies to argue for “how American ideals of racial and sexual citizenship are produced through linear, teleological, progress narratives—or ‘straight time’” (13). Pryor focuses on the American ideals that began and circulated between September 11, 2011 and 2016; Pryor asserts that this era constituted a “homeland” security state, meaning the government institutions and the narratives circulating in public became oriented around securing the nation’s borders to protect against potential terrorists. During this era, the “homeland” security state ideals urged white America to ignore or remain oblivious to the “social violence against queer and trans people, people of color, and other subaltern subjects” as it operates within the context of repeated national trauma, such as the 9/11 attacks, mass shootings, and more (13). Pryor’s work as a scholar as well as an artist means they are often interacting with individuals outside academia (i.e., the larger public), which influences their clear, narrative style. Taking the time to unpack theories and jargon, Pryor’s book becomes approachable and of interest not only to academics and students but also other (performance) artists interested in queer theory, performance studies, and resistance.

In the book’s first chapter, Pryor analyzes the performance installation Geyser Land, which was developed by Mary Ellen Strom, Ann Carlson, and members of the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Nations in rural Montana. Geyser Land transports viewers both literally and metaphorically through the countryside of Montana as well as through the colonization of the American West as it is directly indebted to advances in technology like photography, wide-spread electricity, and train travel, which allowed colonization to happen at a much quicker pace. As spectators of Geyser Land travel from Livingston to Bozeman, Montana, they interact with several tableau vivants of photographs taken during the colonization of the American West. Accompanied by video projections of films such as The Great Train Robbery and Arrival of the Train, spectators experience time slips that place the violent past of colonization of indigenous peoples and lands onto the present to illustrate how these violent histories are still being enacted.

Chapter 2 focuses on Peggy Shaw’s April 2011 performance of Must: The Inside Story in Amherst, Massachusetts. Pryor’s interest in the 2011 performance of Must comes from the added trauma Shaw faced in the aftermath of a stroke that nearly killed her three months prior to the performance. Pryor comments that the added frailty of the performance added an “eerie feeling that this could be the last time” Shaw performed (74). Through the added precarity of the performer, Pryor positions Shaw as the trans/cestor of those in the audience and is therefore able to understand the performance as a queer form of reproduction in which Shaw “seeds” the members of the audience who become her queer progeny (69). This form of queer kinship defies the normative logics of biological reproduction to instead form meaningful queer kinship bonds that are centered on the circulation of queer, subaltern knowledges. With Shaw’s trans/cestor position as well as her own frailty due to the stroke, the audience is prompted to experience the time of the performance differently, queerly, in that it might be the last time they see their “grand-butch-mother” (70).

In Chapter 3, Pryor turns the analytical lens of Time Slips onto their own performance...