Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront

by Fiona Anderson

An encounter with the past in the present was, for Wojnarowicz, always a multiplicitious encounter, a friendship, a collaborative erotic experience, and a bodily one. As Freeman puts it, an erotohistoriographic encounter with the past in the present “uses the body as a tool to effect, figure or perform that encounter.” It “sees the body as a method, and historical consciousness as something intimately involved with corporeal sensations.” It “does not write the lost object into the present so much as encounter it already in the present, by treating the present itself as hybrid.”15 The erotohistoriographic narrative that Wojnarowicz created in his waterfront writing was, then, a queer one. As Judith Butler asserts in the closing chapter of Bodies That Matter, if the term “queer,” and the collection of meanings and identities it both incorporates and generates, “is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and future imaginings, it will have to remain”—like the derelict waterfront—“that which is never fully owned, but always redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage.”16 Like queer time and ruined space, the specter “remains difficult to name,” for it is also “neither soul nor body, and both one and the other. . . . It is flesh and phenomenality that give the spirit its spectral apparition, but which disappear right away. . . . One does not know whether it is living or if it is dead.”17