Queer Time

I just finished reading Judith Halberstam's In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives and I have a very complex relationship to it. There's a part of me that wants to fall in love with everything she writes, because she's rather brilliant and writes and talks very readably and I agree with so much of her politics and her subject matter. But I recognize that the fact that I think Jack is intellectually attractive (and cute, of course), doesn't mean that everything she writes is perfect. But it does always make me want to know her better, and that's something in itself.

First of all, I think everything Halberstam says and does is really about herself. She has a very complex relationship to masculinity and her own female-born body and while she rarely talks about her own identity issues in her work, it's very much there underneath everything else. This is true of Female Masculinity and it's true of In a Queer Time and Place as well. I really wish she'd write an article or autobiographical novel or something about her own personal identity and her relation to her subjects, because it really feels like the elephant in the room in all of her work. And while she meticulously catalogues and describes various manifestations of female masculinities and trans masculinities, she doesn't always address the relationships between them in ways that need to be continuously discussed. The chapter in Female Masculinity about the "Border Wars" was fascinating, and it came out of an article that apparently caused even more trouble, but I don't think that's all there is to be said. Things like SEC's deep suspicion of Jack and her general dislike of transmen "because they often tend not to be feminists" is fascinating and problematic. So is the fact that one of my transguy friends said that it's offensive that I identify as a lesbian and yet admit that I'm occasionally attracted to and would consider dating a transman. Where does Halberstam stand in all of this? Why has she chosen not to transition (not that I'm complaining...) and how much does she identify herself as transgender? Does she often pass? How do her identity and her academic career relate? How does she theorize her own gender? What are her investments in the communities she studies? It's not entirely clear. As a feminist, I want her to situate herself. Plus I want to know when or whether to call her 'Judith' or 'Jack' when I see her at conferences and in bars. In this entry I will discuss her as female because that it the name under which the book is published.

That's my concern with Halberstam's work in general, but In a Queer Time and Place raises a different issue for me. It seems to want to say too much without quite enough exploration. There are so many different ideas and different subjects circulating in the book that I feel that none of them are explored or tied back together particularly well. There are 3 or 4 things she talks about that probably need and deserve books of their own.

The main issues that jumped out at me, probably because it relates to my own work, is queer temporality. She defines normative (heterosexual) temporality as the cycle of birth, adolescence, maturity, marriage, reproduction, death. Queers, at least those that resist normativity and assimilation, don't follow the same timeline. She talks about the AIDS crisis and how that altered perceptions of time and lifetimes in the queer community, but also that queers who avoid the imperative toward marriage and reproduction remain invested in queer subcultures much longer in their lives and thus can be perceived in a state of prolonged adolescence. This statement can be pretty provocative in relationship to a long history of pathologizing homosexuality as a failure of proper psychological development and the whole "it's just a phase" thing, but Halberstam means to valorize it as a disruption of the concept of maturity and marriage as ultimate goals. Queer lifestyles can be used to rethink imperatives such as monogomy and reproduction or even just "settling down." These are disruptions to normative conceptions of time and progress, which are important to challenge.

Another important element of the book that doesn't get as much attention and support as I think it needs in the book is the idea that transgender identities and gender fluidity became important and visible at this particlar moment at the end of the 20th century at the same time that we were discussing the fluidity of global capital and dissolution of other forms of borders. A kind of fascination with transgenderism is valorized as the epitome of postmodernism (ie Judith Butler), but that has more to do with the discourses surrounding all aspects of life at the moment than it is any real reflection on actual people. I'd love to hear more about what Halberstam has to say about this, but it's not particularly well supported in the book.

Then there's the subcultural theory that moves throughout the book and is possibly intended as the throughline, though I didn't find it quite as compelling as some of the other ideas. She takes popular standard theories about subcultures and how the are assimilated into mainstream cultures and draws attention to the fact that these theories were based on heterosexual subjects who can become part of the mainstream. Because queer subcultures have something that unites them beyond that mainstream and prevents them from ever completely identifying with the dominant culture, they can have a sort of continuity that others may not.

Each of the chapters of the book has very different objects of study: the first three are about Brandon Teena himself and representations of him and other transgender subjects. Then there's a chapter about visual art, one about mainstream film (Austin Powers and The Full Monty) and one about musical subcultures. In a lot of ways they seem more like a collection of unrelated essays without a strong throughline. Though each is quite fascinating in itself, they way they connect and work together isn't as strong as it could be. This feels like 2 or 3 different books, each of which is incredibly important but unfinished.

One major critique that I feel that I ought to voice is that the "transgender bodies" that Halberstam discusses are almost exclusively FTM. There are very few mentions of transwomen at all, and they get only glancing discussions. I don't think that it is in any way a bad thing that Halberstam's subject is almost exclusively transgender masculinity, I just feel as if she ought to discuss that.

With all of that said, I think it's a fascinating and brilliant book, and there are several parts of it which I would like to discuss with various friends if only everyone I know had read it. I will most likely talk about it and recommend it frequently, and it will be quite useful in my Salad of the Bad Cafe paper on which I should be working right now. It raises some important questions, and leaves room for quite a bit more work to be done. I wonder what she's working on next?