Abstract
In Feminism's Queer Temporalities, Sam McBean asserts the value of key feminist insights over time and how these complement rather than diminish the critical impact of queer theory. What begins as a modest agenda for the reader—examining feminist cultural output with the hindsight of non-linear temporal imaginaries elaborated in recent queer theory—soon gives way to the realisation that retrospective accounting is the very mode of thinking McBean seeks to attack. Her readings, textual analysis and close readings of Antigone, 1970s Utopian science fiction, riot grrrl archives and feminist manifestos revisit pivotal moments in a diverse feminist canon in order to dispute the belief that ‘generational inheritance is the primary means through which feminism reproduces itself’ (p. 7).
The book begins with an overview of the main argument that feminism as a movement demonstrates a queer temporality, which in turn justifies her focus on ‘literary and cultural sites that have inspired continued return in feminism’ (p. 16). Refreshing about this approach is the decision to use repeated and collective investment in certain objects, texts and artists as evidence of their ability to inspire a shared politics in spite of geographic and historical dislocation. McBean identifies themes that cut across ‘genres, historical periods and mediums’ and thereby (to use a favoured word of the author) disrupt linear time. The motive is not to convince us ‘that feminism's archive might be queered’ (ibid.); rather it is to illustrate how feminism is comprised and experienced as a series of queer temporalities. McBean's definition of queer temporality is anti-generational, that is, it rejects the idea that feminism is an inheritance bestowed by matriarchal predecessors.
McBean's readings awaken sensitivity to the number of opportunities feminist and queer activists provide to imagine life otherwise—whether this is the ‘unstable past’ (p. 44) that is regularly excavated in feminist readings of Antigone or the purposive refusal of a future in the punk undertones of riot grrrl forebears. In careful engagements with chosen texts, her critical practice effectively enacts the argument that queer identity depends on recognisable alternative modes of sustenance and reproduction. For queer women, it's important to note that these modes are both popular (in film, music and comics) and collective. This combination, in McBean's rendering, contrasts the temporal orientations that arise from the work of male queer scholars—Lee Edelman (p. 81) and José Muňoz (p. 109) are cited specifically. McBean sees the agency that women derive from shared anger as a unique contribution to queer thought in addition to Edelman's nihilism (conveyed in the title of his influential No Future) and the relative optimism conveyed by Muňoz.
The book's further objective is to ensure that there can be no recourse to ‘a generational narrative that sees queer transcend feminism’ (p. 144). For example, in the enthusiastic reception of Alison Bechdel's graphic narrative, Fun Home, McBean identifies a trend in commentary that prioritises queerness at the expense of feminist legacies that inform the book's style and composition. This is the main consequence the author sees in scholarship that advances in an inherently progressivist register: it risks ‘a linear, generational narrative where literary and cultural objects that are “queer” need not be considered through feminism’ (p. 144).
To confess: I never seriously thought of queer theory as a linear successor to feminism. Perhaps this is the result of a unique formation of which I am part as a graduate and former faculty member of the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of Sydney, where queer politics is essential to the traditions of feminist theory taught and practiced. McBean suggests that, at least in certain circles of academic practice, queer may have supplanted feminism as the theoretical heritage most likely to offer emancipation from normativity, especially where this is understood, in Edleman's terms, as ‘reproductive futurism’ (investing optimism in the next generation). As McBean notes, the rise of so-called post-feminism shows how economic and political opportunists have sought to erase women's grievances by asserting that equity claims have already been answered (McRobbie, 2009).
On a personal level, my exposure to and involvement in riot grrrl at a young age in another hemisphere confirms McBean's view that feminism allows alternative sites of cultural practice across time and space —openings and opportunities to see and hear about worlds beyond the here and now. Reading this delightful book, I started remembering moments from my childhood that have started to make more sense in light of its analysis. As a kid growing up on a farm at the bottom of the world, I engaged in a range of amusements to relieve isolation. Some of these experiments are common enough, like dressing up in my parents’ clothes, as McBean mentions in her reading of Bechdel's Fun Home. What I hadn't really thought about until now is how the visual evidence of my dressing up, the photos I now have at hand, reflect a preference for dressing in my father's clothes more than my mother's. McBean's account of Bechdel, ‘Learning to See’, explains the power of the graphic novel's reliance on these visually representative memories, like family photos, that capture past selves for future reflection. Thanks to McBean's illuminating reading, I can now recognise an identity that linear time and heteronormative logic might otherwise dismiss as immature, irrelevant or forgettable.
Overall, this thoughtful analysis of feminism forced me to confront and freshly examine my own histories of acquiring gender and sexual identity, and for this I am grateful. McBean's work will make many of us newly inspired to celebrate the forms of belonging and relief that both queer and feminism provide as categories of escape from the familiar storytelling modes, genres and, above all, times that mainstream culture takes for granted.