The Transcendence of the Momentary: Queering Sex, Gender, and Temporality, 10. -11. 12. 2015, ICI Berlin (original) (raw)

Both the category of gender and the category of faith are deeply imbued with the notion of 'essence’: what is gender, what is faith, what does it mean to be of a particular gender, what does it mean to practice a particular faith etc.? However, the way these questions are posed is revealing more about the particular regime of genealogical vectors of power relations than the categories themselves. In order to map this specific socio-political matrix of various meanings, we are going to delineate the workings of essentialisms in order to demonstrate that by the process of ‘essentializing’, a given dominant matrix of power creates its own genealogy that assigns subjectivity its ‘rightly’ oriented position within the performance of genealogy’s established boundaries, usually naturalizing through teleological narratives. However, following Angela Mitropoulos’s understanding of the concept of genealogy, we will try to expand and defend a non-genealogical approach, which however requires the proximity to genealogical order. In order to do so, we are interested in how queer is connected both to notions of becoming and transformation on the one hand and temporality on the other. Queer time's flow has little to do with socially shared normative temporalities and rhythms, reproductive time or linear narrative history, and more with the lack of proper temporal orientation (McCallum and Tuknanen 2011), arrested developments and asynchronies that designate queer subjects out of time, without a proper history and failing to embody the normative temporal markers of ‘proper’ life trajectories. Socially shared temporal markers of one’s life are closely related to reproductive futurism (Edelman 2004), and its strongest emblem of societal projections into the future, the Child. We conclude with how queer possibilities could open up new relations to time that would go against or around normative forms of socially organized time. Instead of progressive linearity and futurity we try to reconsider the other (queer) side of the “plastic ambiguity of time” (Malabou 2012, 54), one that talks about raptures, rapid bursts of life and the momentary.