Time Binds Quotes

“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

“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