Elizabeth Freeman > Quotes

“Any time while I was a slave, if one minute's freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told that I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it just to stand one minute on God's earth a free woman.”
― Elizabeth Freeman

“To close read is to linger, to dally, to take pleasure in tarrying, and to hold out that these activities can allow us to look both hard and askance at the norm.”
― Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

“With a chronic disease, prognosis is really more of an agnosis; as long as a condition remains chronic, one simply has it; one can go into remission or experience relapse or return.”
― Elizabeth Freeman, Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century

“Queer melancholia theory, an especially lush account of how the mourning process bodies forth gendered subjects, insists that subjectivity itself is a record of partings and foreclosures, cross-hatched with the compensatory forms these absences engender. Within this paradigm, queer becoming-collective-across-time and even the concept of futurity itself are predicated upon injury—separations, injuries, spatial displacements, preclusions, and other negative and negating forms of bodily experience—or traumas that precede and determine bodiliness itself, that make matter into bodies. This paradigm is indebted, via Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power, not only to Derrida but also to Freud’s theory that a bodily imago and eventually the ego itself emerge from raw suffering.”
― Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

“Incurable, hopeless, excessive, organic, ill: this is the language of chronic disease, of the static bodies it indexes and the defective temporalities it engenders. The modality of the chronic, then, is less safely habitual than the compromised, the unconjugated, the "would" in the sense of being able or unable to realize one's will.”
― Elizabeth Freeman, Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century