In “We have always been queer” Diana Taylor writes “Where native languages and cultural beliefs and practices survive as living forces, the future is not fully distinguishable from the past. We move forward into the past; our present simply enacts the second of alignment between the past that is never over and the future that is always here. Para-times, para-spaces coexist, nested in and alongside each other” (168). In other words the present is a series of incursions (or alignments) on an never-ending past and an ever-present (!) future. This formulation of time counters unilinear narrative, ordered time. Ordered time, counted with the regular resonance of church bells (Rivera-Servera), is imperial time, colonial time, patriarchal time, extractive time, neoliberal time. Linear time marks presence with heteronormative values and desires— carving out subjects that can follow (and deduce meaning from) this time. Richard Flores, in relation to the “ordering” of Texan history, explains that these discursive processes “mark the contours and bring into relief appropriate moral and ideational values that constitute both the social terrain and one’s location in it” (Rivera-Servera, 112). The ordering of history is intrinsically linked to the ordering of time, and so, the ordering of time constitutes sequenced, “normal” subjectivities “that are functional to the neoliberal order” (Valle, 232). But what happens to those who are, through these ordering, and categorizing processes— through the regular sounding of the church bell—made to be “nothing,” “nobody,” “ninguno”? Those who are sucked into the dark folds of unilinear time?
Queer performances disrupt that ordered time: “performance’s temporality is futurity and performances exist in the present, but they linger in our memory, illuminating our future to find alternative understandings of temporality and envision historical possibilities for agency […]” (Valle, 227). Performances are a rupture in ordered time. But I think that the word “queer” qualifies that rupture, turns a “lack” into presence. Manuela Valle describes queerness as a “wounded and violated social body” (223) and performance can perhaps be interpreted as marking that wound in time. If the wound is a slit, a tear, an opening through which the abject body may be disappeared; inhabiting that wound, that abyss, through presence/performance imbues that “nothing” disappeared space with futurity, with potential. And therefore disrupts unilinear/ordered time…. I don’t know if this makes sense…! But I guess what I mean is that if ordered time is counted with the chime of the church bell (imperialism/colonialism/neoliberalism), each chime punches a hole through which an abject body is disappeared, is made to be “nobody.” To fill that “hole” with potential, to fill it with futures, messes with the timeline, irritates the narrative.
Sources:
Rivera-Servera, Ramón. (2012). Movements of Hope. Performance and Activism. In Performing queer latinidad. Dance, sexuality, politics (pp. 94-133). University of Michigan Press.
Taylor, Diana. (2020). We have always been queer. ¡Presente! The politics of presence. (pp. 153- 174) Durham: Duke University Press
Valle Manuela. (2017) El Che de los Gays and Hija de Perra: Utopian Queer Performances in Postdictatorship Chile. In: Beauchesne K., Santos A. (eds) Performing Utopias in the Contemporary Americas (pp. 219-238). Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
