Queer Narrative Theory and the Relationality of Form

PMLA ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 136 (5) ◽  
pp. 711-727
Author(s):  
Tyler Bradway
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Narrative Theory ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Conservative Form ◽  
Relational Form

AbstractThis essay contests the antinarrative foundations of queer literary studies. Antinarrativity understands narrative as a conservative form that abets heteronormativity by imposing a coherence and linearity on subjectivity and meaning. By contrast, this essay reframes narrative as a relational form rife with affordances for figuring and sustaining queer bonds. I trace these affordances through contemporary queer kinship narratives, including Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie, Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, and Renee Gladman's Calamities. These texts reveal unexpectedly queer potentials within address, contiguity, closure, and even linearity, which queer theory misses when it defines narrative as inherently teleological and when it locates queerness primarily in transgressive ruptures. This essay discovers queerness instead within mundane and messy attachments that endure across time and space. Queer narrative theory thus emerges in this essay as a relational formalism well-suited to debates about the shapes queerness takes now.

Narrative

2021 ◽  
pp. 272-293
Author(s):  
Ingela Nilsson
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Theory ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Methodological Tool ◽  
Historical Investigation ◽  
And Function ◽  
Meaning And Function ◽  
Opening Section

This chapter aims to offer the reader a basis for how to approach narrative both as an object of historical investigation and as a modern methodological tool. It addresses the meaning and function of narrative form and technique in Byzantine literature, examining them through specific examples of the Byzantines’ own constant and explicit interest in narrative. The chapter contains an opening section on narrative theory and “proto-narratology,” followed by three analytical sections on characterization and focalization; time and space; narrator and narrative, author and audience. Byzantine texts under discussion include progymnasmata, the Patria, and Timarion. The chapter is concluded with some ideas for future research in the field.

‘Beside myself’: touch, maternity and the question of embodiment

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-155
Author(s):  
Nicolette Bragg
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
The Body ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Embodied Subjectivity ◽  
Feminist And Queer Theory

This article uses the surprising bodily effects of a period following birth to unsettle the reproductive narrative that circumscribes the maternal relation. Drawing on scholarship on skin and touch within philosophy and feminist and queer theory, ‘Beside myself’ demonstrates how an intensely intimate relationship can throw into relief modes of embodiment that trouble the temporality and space presumed of reproduction. Doing so, it calls attention to the limits of materialist discourses of embodiment. With reference to Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body, it describes an embodied subjectivity that exceeds the material contours of the body. A sense of being ‘beside’ oneself and ‘beside’ another stretches the time and space of the body, not only creating fractures within the reproductive frame, but also putting pressure on matter and possession as conditions for subjectivity.

Commentary I: ‘It’s a hijra!’ Queer linguistics revisited

2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 634-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kira Hall
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Sociocultural Linguistics ◽  
Language And Social Interaction ◽  
Queer Linguistics

In a review of contributions to a special issue of Discourse & Society on queer linguistics, this article argues that the concept of indexicality, as theorized across diverse fields in sociocultural linguistics, has the potential to offer a much richer account of subjectivity than found in dominant strands of queer theory. While queer theory valorizes practice over identity, viewing the latter as fixed and necessarily allied with normativity, research on language and social interaction suggests that an analytic distinction between practice and identity is untenable. The indexical processes that work to produce social meaning are multi-layered and always shifting across time and space, even within systems of heteronormativity. It is this semiotic evolution that should become the cornerstone of a (new) queer linguistics.

Queer science: Temporality and futurity for queer students in STEM

2021 ◽  
pp. 0961463X2110081
Author(s):  
Rachel E Friedensen ◽  
Ezekiel Kimball ◽  
Annemarie Vaccaro ◽  
Ryan A Miller ◽  
Rachael Forester
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Stem Learning ◽  
Learning Spaces ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The Past ◽  
Queer Politics ◽  
Queer Temporality

The sociopolitical landscape for queer people has changed dramatically in recent decades; however, progress has been both halting and uneven. While this is evident in many areas of professional and private life, this study focuses on the experiences of queer students in STEM learning environments in US colleges and universities. Specifically, we explore student expressions of temporality and futurity with regards to their STEM experiences and aspirations. Engagement with queer theory, especially queer formulations of time and space, alerted us to the importance of sociopolitical developments of the past several decades—particularly the rise and entrenchment of neoliberal politics in both academic STEM arenas and gay and queer politics. Engaging with queer temporality and spatiality, neoliberalism, and the homonormative turn, we found three interdependent themes: (1) the (re)negotiation of queer politics within academic disciplines linked to the neoliberal state; (2) the multiple bifurcations of self, time, and space required to simultaneously navigate queerness and STEM; and (3) the development of utopian projections of the future intended to reconcile queer identity, neoliberalism, and STEM. These findings point to a tension between queer identities and STEM fields arising not from the nature of the fields themselves but from science’s interconnectedness with a neoliberal economy. This tension not only structures participants’ current experiences in STEM learning spaces but also flavors the way they consider their futures as queer scientists.

scholarly journals Beyond anti-welfarism and feminist social media mud-slinging: Jo Littler interviews Angela McRobbie

2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942110361
Author(s):  
Jo Littler ◽  
Angela McRobbie
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Radical Feminism ◽  
Social Politics ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Academic Context

In this wide-ranging interview, which took place in spring 2021, Angela McRobbie talks about her work in relation to social politics, the contemporary conjuncture, cultural studies, decolonisation and feminism. Beginning with a discussion on her experience of Covid, it contextualises these reflections through a discussion of anti-welfarism and the scapegoating of dependency, drawing from her new book Feminism and the Politics of Resilience. It moves on to discuss different forms and experiences of feminism: including the neoliberal Anglo-German academic context; the legacies of queer theory and radical feminism; the ‘mud-slinging’ of social media which ‘does not allow us the time and space to rehearse what is really going on’; the need to engage with social policy alongside cultural theory; and the ongoing intersectional work of rewriting the curriculum.

scholarly journals The end of universality: new collectivities in current literary studies

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (38) ◽  
pp. 17-27
Author(s):  
Ronald Greene
Keyword(s):  
Literary Work ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Creative Commons ◽  
Intellectual Traditions

The author investigates how the literary studies reacted to the conceptual crises of universalism, especially after WWII. In order to replace a concept that refers to the ability of a literary work to transcend time and space, literary studies should focus on different and specific collectivities that, situated in time and space, read and interpret literary works. The author makes use of the concept of the obverse, in which two poems, from different historical moments and intellectual traditions are compared based on a common social-historical problem they are trying to solve.  O autor investiga sobre como os estudos literários reagiram à crise do conceito de universalismo, sobretudo depois da II Guerra Mundial. Para substituir um conceito que se refere à capacidade de uma obra literária transcender tempo e espaço, os estudos literários deveriam indagar sobre as diferentes coletividades específicas, no tempo e no espaço, que leem e dão significado à obra literária. Para isso, o autor se utiliza do conceito de “obverso”, em que dois poemas, de épocas e tradições intelectuais diferentes, são comparados a partir de um problema sócio-histórico que tentam resolver.   This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. 

Beyond the Doctrine of Man

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Direct Reference ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Analytical Work ◽  
The Way

Beyond the Doctrine of Man responds to the question of how individuals and communities can live and have lived beyond the way the human person is defined in colonial modernity. This volume brings together essays that interrogate the problem of modern/colonial definitions of the human person and that take up the struggle to decolonize these descriptive statements. As the problem of coloniality transcends disciplinary constructions, so do the contributions in this book. They engage work from various fields, including ethnic studies, religious studies, theology, queer theory, philosophy, and literary studies. The essays in Beyond the Doctrine of Man were catalyzed by Sylvia Wynter’s questioning of modern/colonial descriptions of the human person. Wynter asks this question within a larger project of unsettling and countering these definitions. Contributors to this collection follow in this move—sometimes in direct reference to Wynter’s work and sometimes primarily focusing on the work of others—of asking how Western modernity has naturalized itself through a discourse on the human. This analytical work taken up by contributors is at the service of unsettling and countering this naturalization.

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