UCLA

Performing the Past: Queer Temporality, Queer Desire,” works at the intersections of Historiography, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, and Performance Studies. It explores minoritarian subjects’ embodied engagements with the past, looking specifically at an interactive 1960s lesbian bar exhibit, queer and black Jane Austen fandom and Regency Era ball reenactments, the playing of history with American Girl dolls, and an annual debutante ball in Laredo, Texas in which Latina teens dress up as Martha Washington. This project is rooted in a feminist historiography. While the case studies encompass a variety of geographical locations and eras, they all explore an engagement with the past as experienced by women and girls inhabiting a liminal space with homosocial elements.

I implement the term queer as a tool to discuss a non-normative temporality, and more specifically, desires for the past that seem misplaced due to the subject’s position (gender, class, race, sexuality, age, citizenship) at the margins of dominant society; a sentiment that Heather Love labels “feeling backward.” I use the term queer not only in reference to sexual desire but also to a social and political rejection of certain normative practices and an embrace of the strange or abject. I argue that this turn to the past by minoritarian subjects (who are commonly seen as the very people who need to place all their hopes in the future) challenges capitalist, heteronormative concepts of straight time and progress. These embodied engagements present the past as a site with the potentiality for pleasure and an affective sense of belonging for minoritarian subjects.