February 16 & 17, Thursday & Friday

For more information: abelove.wordpress.com

NYU’s Ireland House was the perfect setting for Fiona Brideoake’s talk, sponsored by the Irish Studies Program, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and [...]]]> From Irish Exile to Welsh Celebrity: The Queer Self-Fashioning of the Ladies of Llangollen:
“In Your Own Persons, Where You Are”
New York University, 5 October 2011

NYU’s Ireland House was the perfect setting for Fiona Brideoake’s talk, sponsored by the Irish Studies Program, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and the Department of English. The old-fashioned, ornate room provided the right sort of ambiance for Brideoake’s discussion of the infamous Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, who have been described as “‘mascots’ for the no-sex-before-1900 school” of proto-homo romantic friendships, understood to be “emotionally passionate but physically chaste.” Brideoake didn’t venture into the speculative, did-they-or-didn’t-they, even as she carefully situated Butler and Ponsonby in a queer genealogy of intimacy; instead she focused on the important role of their beloved estate in their canny self-fashioning, as they “painstakingly” transformed themselves from “queer Irish exiles” into the honorific “Ladies.”

Butler and Ponsonby successfully “eloped” together in May 1778, leaving Ireland for Wales with the begrudging blessing of their guardians and with small pensions, on which they were to live without further tarnishing their family names. They commenced a fifty-one year retirement just outside Llangollen, a town on the road connecting Dublin and London, which ensured them a “constant stream of prominent guests,” including noblemen and poets; and which, as Brideoake articulated, they used to their benefit in distancing themselves from their scandalous origins—Ireland!—even as their Irish connections remained important in the success of their retirement, as they “styled their home as a family seat, secured by pedigree and illustrious ancestors.”

Brideoake described Butler and Ponsonby as “amongst the most significant cultural celebrities of late Georgian Britain,” and accounts of their “inscrutable intimacy” were widespread and circulated both “in print and epistolary form.” She detailed the ways in which their relationship was “subject to prurient interest” from their contemporaries, including accounts in newspapers of their suspiciously gender-deviant style, meant to imply an untoward sexual relationship. Brideoake argued for their complex negotiation of that interest as evidence of their “sophisticated self-promo[tion],” as they relied upon their potentially scandalous identities to achieve prominence among the British gentry, even while working to deny any claims of scandal. They thus came to embody a “productive slippage between fame and notoriety,” as they simultaneously denied any charges of sexual deviance, while also “capitaliz[ing] on the fascinated frisson that surrounded their shared life.”

Brideoake argued that their extensive architectural improvements of their Welsh home, Plas Newydd, from “humble cottage to Gothic extravaganza,” worked to “subsume their transgressive status beneath an edifice of chaste provincial friendship,” and served, along with their extensive library, as their “material and textual refutation of Sapphic scandal.” They clad the cottage, inside and out, in ornately carved Welsh oak, echoing the architectural style of their neighbors in order to “assert possession of similar temporal and geographical ties.” The “sheer materiality” of the oak-clad house—which they didn’t own, but rented, until 1819, well after its Gothic transformation—allowed Butler and Ponsonby to portray themselves as “sexually virtuous Welsh gentry.”

While Brideoake emphasized that the “irreproachable gentility” of their home and persons shouldn’t imply that their “unconventional ménage” was “accepted uncritically,” she suggested that the “increasing eccentricities” of their later years implies that the success of their material accrual of social capital was such that it “authorized, with time, their increasing oddity.” Thus they were free, eventually, to act “like a couple of hazy and crazy old sailors,” living out their lives together in style. As Ponsonby wrote in a letter before their departure from Ireland: all she wanted was to “live and die with Miss Butler.” After 51 years of romantic friendship and cohabitation, the Ladies were buried together in a three-sided tomb—along with their maid; however, as Brideoake said, that is “a whole other course of interest.”

–Julia DeLeon

Julia DeLeon is a PhD student in Performance Studies at NYU.

(1819 image of Butler and Ponsonby is owned by the British Library, call number/ms details Add. 59655 f. 78)

David Eng’s lecture—co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute, and the Department of East Asian Studies—was a long time coming, having been originally scheduled for last fall, in celebration of his most recently [...]]]> Reparations and the Human:
“Justice or Love”
New York University, 28 September 2011

David Eng’s lecture—co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute, and the Department of East Asian Studies—was a long time coming, having been originally scheduled for last fall, in celebration of his most recently published book The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy.

He began his talk, “Reparations and the Human,” with a warning that it was going to be a long one, and asked the audience for patience as he laid out the “very enormous territory” of his new book, instead of indulging in a belated book party for The Feeling of Kinship. Of course, he had no need to apologize, as the sneak peek he offered of the book was complex and engrossing, dense with theoretical insights, but also peppered with fascinating background details on his collaborations with therapist Shinhee Han and the progression of their work together, from their analysis of the intimate workings of racial melancholia to his current interest in what he calls “racial reparation” and the “evolution of the western liberal subject outside of any universal norms of the human.” His work with Han, which emerged out of clinical case studies, has shaped the direction of his new solo book, in which he is mapping a conjoined genealogy of “reparation” in its political and psychoanalytic registers.

Eng described this work-in-progress—centered on a trans-Pacific archive that includes the internment of Japanese Americans by the US government during World War II; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, particularly as described in John Hersey’s 1946 New Yorker essay, “Hiroshima”; and the contemporary legal claims of comfort women—as a narration of “an alternative story of reparations as a concerted moral response to violence and war,” after “the dissolution of and disillusionment with European Enlightenment.” Using the writings of “psychic wonder twins” John Locke and Melanie Klein, who together “bookend the Enlightenment project,” Eng argued for the ways in which the political and psychic workings of reparation “supplement one another in the framing of liberal humanism,” as well as in “colonial conquest”—projects that, as he posited, cannot be considered in opposition to one another.

Reparation is a “key term” in both political theory and psychoanalysis, and although its disparate functions and meanings in these fields are rarely considered in tandem, Eng presented an argument for the importance of a comparative reading in order to conceptualize both its psychic and social “potentials, as well as its limits and liabilities.” He argued that the concept of racial reparation “emerges from and is managed by both political and psychic genealogies” of reparation, in order to trace the erasure of the violence of reparation through the ghostly figure of “the Indian in the woods,” who emerges in both Locke’s and, surprisingly, Klein’s theories of reparation.

While Locke’s work, particularly in the second of his Two Treatises on Government, describes reparation as a logic of compensation in the wake of war and violence, in which the always-victorious victim of aggression is awarded “the spoils of war,” this logic breaks down around the “borders of liberal personhood, property and dominion” inherent in colonial violence. According to Locke’s rendering, the colonizer is never positioned as the aggressor, but always a victim of the “natives and brutes” who are “disqualified from legal personhood, rights, and sanctioned address.” In contrast to Locke’s political philosophy, Klein’s work on reparation is figured as an “experimental ethics” of interpersonal relationality, in which “morality and self-reflection are not the causes but rather the effects of reparation.” However, though Klein ostensibly presents reparation as the “preservation of love and ethical possibility,” her own turn to “the colonial theatre of the new world” presents colonial violence as an act of reparation between Europe as “mother” and her colonizing “infants,” excluding colonized populations from the reparative process entirely and instead rendering it as a process of love for the “self-same.” This “shocking” turn speaks to both the difficulty and importance of reading psychic theories of reparation, typically centered on the “charmed dyad” of mother and child, in a broader social sphere that is “defined by histories of colonial violence and nationalism.”

Eng presented his close readings of Locke and Klein as a means to consider the question of “who and what is worthy of care, of repair, redress, and reparation,” in order to write toward the concept of racial reparation as a way to imagine “a future worth living in,” both psychically and socially. Here’s hoping the book comes out soon.

–Julia DeLeon

Julia DeLeon is a PhD student in Performance Studies at NYU.

Bettina Aptheker’s engaging talk “Sexual Politics, Sexual Violence, and the Communist Left,” organized by NYU’s Department of Teaching and Learning and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS), showcased both her incredible [...]]]> Sexual Politics, Sexual Violence, and the Communist Left:
“Complexities and Contradictions”
New York University, 19 September 2011

Bettina Aptheker’s engaging talk “Sexual Politics, Sexual Violence, and the Communist Left,” organized by NYU’s Department of Teaching and Learning and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS), showcased both her incredible history of activism, and her continued scholarly commitment to issues of human rights. Aptheker, who is a frequent visiting scholar at NYU, described the impetus for and development of her new research project to an attentive seminar-style gathering of 25, and shared some of her initial findings through her archival work with NYU’s Tamiment Library.

Aptheker’s current research emerged in the wake of controversy surrounding her memoir, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought For Freedom, And Became A Feminist Rebel, which was published in 2006. The memoir “weaves the personal and political through a feminist lens, and tells the story of childhood sexual abuse, the consequences of later experiences of sexual violence, FBI surveillance, police violence, and imprisonment,” as well as issues of Jewish and lesbian identity. As she joked, “it’s very light reading.”

Aptheker described responses to the memoir as, fittingly, both personal and political. Some readers considered Aptheker’s description of years of abuse at the hands of her well-known and respected father, Herbert Aptheker, to be untrue, opportunistic or irrelevant, and internet-wide debates—from articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, to radical left messageboards and forums—were waged over the extent to which Aptheker’s revelations should affect her father’s legacy. At the same time, in letters, phone calls and in person, hundreds of people thanked Aptheker for articulating the violence and discrimination she had experienced within the Communist Party, as her experiences resonated with their own and their loved ones’. This spectrum of responses suggested to Aptheker the necessity for the left to take up these common but rarely discussed issues, including childhood sexual and physical abuse, neglect, domestic violence, and homophobia, as important “political and human rights issues.”

While she acknowledged the difficulty of admitting the possibility of such disturbing violences within an organization ostensibly dedicated to human rights, Aptheker argued that there is “very little understanding [in the Party] of the ways different kinds of oppression, such as class, race, gender, and sexuality, are interconnected.” These issues, “so often disdained and abandoned by the left,” have shaped the direction of her research into the official policies and disciplinary actions in the history of the Communist Party, particularly in relation to the Party’s explicitly homophobic history, and a contemporary atmosphere in which queer communist identity is “more tolerated than celebrated.”

In addition to the Tamiment collection, which houses the sealed files of the Party’s disciplinary committees, she is using the NYPL’s LGBT Archives, the Mazer Lesbian Archives, and the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. Her current line of analytic inquiry into these archives is on the question of personal and political effects of closeting, and particularly the “double, maybe triple closeting” required for some queer party members, who were required both to deny their sexuality within the party, and deny their party involvement to the broader political arena. She described this experience, with which she is intimately familiar, as “very difficult to maintain… filled with painful contradictions and denials,” and “rife with terrible pressures, fears and suffering.”

In tracing the historical shifts over time of the Party’s official and unofficial policies on the treatment of its gay and lesbian members, including such prominent figures as Bertha C. Reynolds and Harry Hay, Aptheker is helping a whole history of queer communism to come out of the archival closet, in an effort to “contribute to a useful social, personal, psychological, and political historiography”—a tall order, but one that Aptheker is certainly well-equipped to fill.

–Julia DeLeon

Julia DeLeon is a PhD student in Performance Studies at NYU.

Roderick A. Ferguson kicked off the fall CSGS calendar of events with a chapter from his provocatively titled forthcoming volume, The Reorder Of Things: On The Institutionalization of Difference. Professor Ferguson contextualized this project in relation to his previous [...]]]> The Racial Genealogy of Excellence:
“Excellence Is The Watchword”
New York University, 14 September 2011

Roderick A. Ferguson kicked off the fall CSGS calendar of events with a chapter from his provocatively titled forthcoming volume, The Reorder Of Things: On The Institutionalization of Difference. Professor Ferguson contextualized this project in relation to his previous work,the influential Aberrations in Black, which he called a book he wrote because “[he] wanted to write a book [he] wanted to read.” Following that trend, he began The Reorder of Things in 2009,when he became chair of the American Studies Department at University of Minnesota, and wanted to write a book to “make sense of [his] own life,” as well as “the life we all inherited.”

He described the project as his attempt to answer the question: “how did we get here?” by examining the institutionalization of interdisciplinarity and “rethink[ing] some shibboleths about the contemporary university” as strictly a corporate setting. Instead, he asked: how do we inhabit and exceed corporatization, and what might be in excess of corporate culture? His talk resonated with the roundtable discussions on negotiating institutionalization from last spring’s New Majorities II conference, as he thoughtfully considered “how we might be in the university but not necessarily of it,” using both historical context and examples from his own experience at the University of Minnesota.

The chapter he presented, “The Racial Genealogy of Excellence,” focused on the discourse of excellence in relation to what he called the “undertheorized” open admissions movement at New York’s City College—particularly as articulated in June Jordan’s essay “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person”—in order to track the contradictory impulses that shape our contemporary experience of institutionalization. While excellence was circulated as a discourse that promised a future of anti-racist liberal democracy, Jordan described excellence as “fundamentally antagoniz[ing] democratic understandings of the people, constructing them as the antithesis of that category’s principles.” This “critical suspicion of excellence” prompted Ferguson to consider the exclusivity of the category of excellence, and its intimate ties to racial and economic projects.

In 1969, when Jordan was on faculty at City College, 200 students shut down campus for two weeks before the college agreed to the students’ demands for the admission of more minority students. In his close readings, Ferguson described Jordan’s essay, which elaborates the demands made by student activists, as a prompt that “begs us to interrogate the histories of racial domination that make up the underside of excellence,” pointing to the ways standards of excellence are part of racialized genealogies of slavery, racism and neo-colonialism. He argued that the discourse of excellence– and the activist responses to its effects– are crucial in comprehending contemporary social relations. The category of excellence in the 60s “shaped social relations nationally and globally,” with real effects on ideological and economic spheres through the dynamic relationship between governments and universities. College campuses, which were more and more coming to be funded by the state, were considered a way to “restage the degradations of slavery” because excellence theoretically allowed minoritized subjects to “break free from days of debasement,” signaling instead “that long-awaited morning” when the “past could finally be sloughed off and the day could begin anew.” Yet the tension between getting as many people into classrooms as possible and maintaining high standards of admission demonstrated the difficulty of preserving an ideal of excellence while striving for the creation of an egalitarian society—a still-relevant dilemma.

The demands from City College activists in the face of the discourse on excellence demonstrate the contradiction that shapes our contemporary moment, as their demands included what Ferguson described as both a desire for the “dynamism of community,” and a “desire for institutional forms that would ultimately restrict that dynamism.” Now, interdisciplinary fields are “inheritors and negotiators of this living contradiction,” between the seductive and restrictive potential of institutionalization.

Having thus answered his initial query—“how did we get here?”—Ferguson followed up in the Q&A with a volley of responses to the implicit next question: what do we do now? Calling on James Baldwin’s desire to educate students in ways the academy never intended, Ferguson insisted that the work of scholarship must be tied to institutional transformation and “change we can see,” for both scholars and students. “We have to assume power over this stuff,” he said; and sometimes that means recognizing funding as a technology of interpellation in the university, and paying for our own lunch.

–Julia DeLeon

Julia DeLeon is a PhD student in Performance Studies at NYU.

Read a review of this talk!

October 5, Wednesday 7 to 8:30 pm

Fiona Brideoake, Literature, American University

Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby eloped together from Kilkenny in 1778. They settled in the [...]]]> FROM IRISH EXILE TO WELSH CELEBRITY: THE QUEER SELF-FASHIONING OF THE LADIES OF LLANGOLLEN

a lecture by Fiona Brideoake

Read a review of this talk!

October 5, Wednesday
7 to 8:30 pm

Fiona Brideoake, Literature, American University

Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby eloped together from Kilkenny in 1778. They settled in the North Welsh village of Llangollen, their location on the road linking Dublin and London ensuring them a steady stream of prominent guests. Throughout their fifty-one years of domestic ‘retirement,’ Butler and Ponsonby were plagued by insinuations that their relationship was sexual. They responded by transforming their cottage into a Gothic mansion clad in local oak, masking their status as impecunious and sexually suspect exiles with a literal veneer of Welsh historicity. They established an extensive private library and located themselves within gentry and aristocratic networks of literary sociability, consolidating their affective alliances and distancing themselves from the charges of female social and sexual mobility associated with public circulating libraries. They cultivated friends including Edmund Burke; the Duke of Wellington; George Canning, and Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, drawing on Anglo-Irish social capital while asserting their enduring association with the picturesque Vale of Llangollen, this performative identity eventually reified by their designation as ‘the Ladies of Llangollen.’ Accounts of their inscrutable intimacy circulated widely in print and epistolary form, rendering them among the most significant cultural celebrities of late-Georgian Britain.

Butler and Ponsonby’s performance of geographic and class identity distanced them from both the putatively metropolitan vices of sapphism and the sexualized ‘stain’ of Butler’s Irish Catholic upbringing. As they were transformed over the course of their retirement into central, and increasingly eccentric, features of the British cultural landscape, they also came to embody the productive slippage between fame and notoriety, rendering their corporate identity a form of the commodified cultural production that Clara Tuite terms “scandalous celebrity.” Butler and Ponsonby may thus be recognized as both sophisticated self-promoters and producers of a distinctive and nationally hybrid form of queer celebrity, their identity as Irish exiles at once underpinning their public prominence and necessarily erased by their successful self-fashioning.

Glucksman Ireland House
One Washington Mews
at 5th Avenue between 8th Street and Washington Square Park

For more information, please contact the NYU Glucksman Ireland House at 212-998-3950.

This event is free and open to the public.  Venue is wheelchair accessible.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Irish Studies Program, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and the Department of English.

1819 image of Butler and Ponsonby is owned by the British Library, call number/ms details Add. 59655 f. 78

Read a review of this talk!

September 28, Wednesday 6:30 to 8 pm

David L. Eng, English, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies, University of Pennsylvania

This presentation explores the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation. Reparation is a key term in [...]]]> REPARATIONS AND THE HUMAN

a lecture by David L. Eng

Read a review of this talk!

September 28, Wednesday
6:30 to 8 pm

David L. Eng, English, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies, University of Pennsylvania

This presentation explores the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation. Reparation is a key term in political theory, but it is also a central concept in psychoanalysis (specifically object relations theory), yet the two are rarely discussed in relation to one another. In this talk, I will explore how political and psychic genealogies of reparation might supplement one another in theories of the human and discourses of human rights, while helping us to understand better the social and psychic limits of repairing war, violence, colonialism, and genocide. Specifically, I will trace a global genealogy of reparations from John Locke to Melanie Klein to twentieth-century Asia in order to rethink the concept’s transnational significance and the possibility of “racial reparation” in context of the trans-Pacific: the internment of Japanese Americans by the U.S. government during World War II; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ending that war; and contemporary legal claims by “comfort women,” young girls and women from Japan’s colonial empire conscripted by the imperial army into sexual slavery.

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
41-51 East 11th Street, 7th Floor Gallery
between University Place and Broadway

This event is free and open to the public.  If you need wheelchair access, please let us know 24 hours in advance: 212-992-9540.

For more information about this event, please call CSGS at 212-992-9540.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute, and the Department of East Asian Studies.

William P. Jones University of Wisconsin

“Gender, Jobs and Freedom: The March on Washington and the Birth of Black Feminism”

Friday, March 11th at 10 a.m.

NYU King Juan Carlos I, Room 428 53 Washington Square South NYC

Lunch will be served!

**The paper is pre-circulated—email khary.polk(at)gmail.com [...]]]> The American History Workshop @ NYU presents…

William P. Jones
University of Wisconsin

“Gender, Jobs and Freedom: The March on Washington and the Birth of Black Feminism”

Friday, March 11th at 10 a.m.

NYU King Juan Carlos I, Room 428
53 Washington Square South
NYC

Lunch will be served!

**The paper is pre-circulated—email khary.polk(at)gmail.com to receive a copy in advance**

a documentary by Jean Carlomusto 70 minutes, color, USA, 2010

December 8, Wednesday 6:30 to 8:30 pm

Click here for trailer.

This pioneering documentary explores the personal, political and structural challenges that have continually hampered the best efforts of HIV educators [...]]]> SEX IN AN EPIDEMIC

A screening and discussion with filmmaker Jean Carlomusto

a documentary by Jean Carlomusto
70 minutes, color, USA, 2010

December 8, Wednesday
6:30 to 8:30 pm

Click here for trailer.

This pioneering documentary explores the personal, political and structural challenges that have continually hampered the best efforts of HIV educators and community groups to curb HIV infection rates in the United States. It is a compelling history of the devastating early days of the epidemic in NYC, when men with “GRID” were a stigmatized population that died swiftly of a terrifying new disease.

Few concepts have had as great an impact on sexuality over the past 28 years as that of “safer sex.” Yet, as a concept, it is important to remember two things: first, safer sex had to be invented amidst an alarming lack of information that existed before the discovery of HIV in 1984; and second, safer sex as a concept had to be sold by the persistent and creative persuasion of community-based groups all across the country.

Michelson Theater, Cinema Studies
721 Broadway, 6th Floor

Co-sponsored by NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies; the Center for Health, Identity, Behavior, and Prevention Studies (CHIBPS); and CSGS.

This event is free and open to the public.  Venue is wheelchair accessible.

For more information, please call 212-992-9540 or email csgs(at)nyu.edu.

Admittedly, “history” has never been one of my favorite subjects. I’ve never found it particularly, well, sexy. But Elizabeth Freeman’s talk on “erotohistoriography,” a decidedly queer mode of historicizing that not only recognizes temporality’s non-linear and omni-directional character but [...]]]> Queer Time Makes Queer Bodies:
Elizabeth Freeman Historicizes Erotohistoriography
New York University, 28 October 2010

Admittedly, “history” has never been one of my favorite subjects. I’ve never found it particularly, well, sexy. But Elizabeth Freeman’s talk on “erotohistoriography,” a decidedly queer mode of historicizing that not only recognizes temporality’s non-linear and omni-directional character but also takes bodies and pleasures into account, had me all aflutter. Freeman, Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, described erotohistoriography as a manner by which the past is encountered through the carnal enjoyment of erotic practices and performances, an alternative way of “arranging and living the social” where time is experienced and practiced corporeally. While turning to loss and shame has been a common trend in queer studies, Freeman, reading selections from her forthcoming book, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, seeks a different, and might I add juicier, affective modality for queer temporality. While historical affect’s effect on subjectivity has been taken up by both psychoanalysis and Marxism, Freeman argues, it is erotohistoriography that attends to how pleasure, and not pain, shapes the way subjects come to understand themselves.

Explaining that historical consciousness and “queer self-fashioning” are not unique to modernity, Freeman organized her lecture around three moments or practices: relic worship in the Middle Ages, romantic sentimental historiography, and interpenetrative historiography. Freeman contextualized these moments with brief readings of three historical works: the story of Saint Erkenwald, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, respectively. In her reading of the alliterative poem of Saint Erkenwald, a story about Erkenwald’s unearthing of a sarcophagus in a former pagan temple, Freeman suggested that contact with a relic produces not just a resurrection, for the corpse is animated by its contact with the living, but a moment of historiography. Freeman asked, how must we understand the implications of an encounter where “earthly time [rubs] up against the eternal?” Freeman then turned to Mary Shelley’s novel to explore the sensate body of Frankenstein’s monster, striated, discontinuous, and “bound by chains of obligation to another past,” as a site of historical consciousness. Examining history’s ability to affect bodily constitution, she asked how the “past and present wears literally on the body.”

I found Freeman’s last example, her consideration of Woolf’s Orlando as a depiction of the “historian as pervert,” most intriguing (possibly because I’m a sucker for any discussion about the malleability of sex and gender). Freeman explains that the novel’s main character, who lived for 350 years but barely aged, loses his and her self through too much contact with the past. Orlando, obsessed with artifacts of the past, “is, temporally speaking, out of joint.” Participating in a queer mode of seeing and writing history, s/he undergoes a transformation from male to female in the course of the novel and claims h/er perverse status exuberantly. Accordingly, the novel, Freeman argues, is not simply about the construction of gender, but about how “the protagonist experiences historical change bodily and erotically” and “feels the centuries as reorganizations of the body.”

With its tantalizing case studies and stimulating modes of analysis, Freeman’s discussion of erotohistoriography, suggests a potentially wide breadth of the method’s applicability. As one who writes about theories of the body, Freeman’s discussion of erotohistoriography makes me question my own methodology and epistemological bag of tricks. She is pushing us to consider how the body is made and remade through historical encounters, not only regarding one’s own personal history, but in terms of the various temporalities one taps into by “rubbing up against” objects, sites, and other bodies that vibrate with unheard narratives. Wouldn’t a study of bodies without temporality be somewhat incomplete? I imagine so.

–Krista Miranda

Krista Miranda is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University and the Book Reviews Editor for Woman and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Her prior graduate work includes an MA in Humanities and Social Thought with a concentration in Gender Politics and an MA in Writing and Publishing.