Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History

201 Pages·2017·10.275 MB·English

by  Jaclyn I. Pryor

Time Slips
SERIES EDITORS This series publishes books in theater and performance studies,
Patrick Anderson and focused in particular on the material conditions in which
Nicholas Ridout performance acts are staged, and to which performance itself
might contribute. We define “performance” in the broadest sense,
including traditional theatrical productions and performance art,
but also cultural ritual, political demonstration, social practice,
and other forms of interpersonal, social, and political interaction
which may fruitfully be understood in terms of performance.
Time Slips
Queer Temporalities,
Contemporary Performance,
and the Hole of History
Jaclyn I. Pryor
northwestern university press
evanston, illinois
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu
Copyright © 2017 by Northwestern University Press.
Published 2017. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Pryor, Jaclyn I., author.
Title: Time slips : queer temporalities, contemporary performance, and the hole of
history / Jaclyn I. Pryor.
Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2017. | Series:
Performance works | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017003470 | ISBN 9780810135314 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN
9780810135307 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810135321 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: American drama—21st century—History and
criticism. | Performing arts—Social aspects—United States. | Group identity in
the performing arts—United States. | Psychic trauma in the theater—United
States. | United States—Historiography—Case studies.
Classification: LCC PN1590.S6 P79 2017 | DDC 306.48480973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003470
For Rebecca—
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
My brother and I were at Sinai
He kept a journal
of what he saw
of what he heard
of what it all meant to him
I wish I had such a record
of what happened to me there
It seems like every time I want to write
I can’t
I’m always holding a baby
one of my own
or one for a friend
Always holding a baby
so my hands are never free
to write things down
And then
As time passes
The particulars
The hard data
The who what when where why
Slip away from me
And all I’m left with is
The feeling
But feelings are just sounds
The vowel barking of a mute
My brother is so sure of what he heard
After all he’s got a record of it
Consonant after consonant after consonant
If we remembered together
We could recreate holy time
Sparks flying
— Merle Feld, “We All Stood Together”
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 3
Chapter 1. No Rock Straight Time Rain or Shine:
Carlson/Strom Remember the Geyserlands 41
Chapter 2. When Elephants Are in Must:
Peggy Shaw, Acts of Trans/fer, and the Present Future of Queer 67
Chapter 3. Following the Ghosts: Repetition, Return,
and the Disordering of America in floodlines (2004– 2010) 89
Chapter 4. Teaching Time (a periplum) 125
Epilogue. I Want to Play Airplane, or, It All Comes Back 147
Notes 153
Bibliography 169
Index 179

Preface
Perhaps, says Derrida, Freud’s contribution to any theory of
the archive is that there isn’t one: that no storehouse, especially
not the psychoanalytic archive of the human psyche, holds the
records of an original experience, to which we may return. Yet
psychoanalysis has been responsible for some of this trouble
with archives, for it wants to get back: it manifests a desire
for origins, to find the place where things started, before the
regime of repetition and representation was inaugurated.
— Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History
On my desk, stuck to a plastic file folder that holds the paper contents of the
outline of what would eventually become this book, is a small yellow Post-
it note. “NEVER FORGET,” it says. I wrote it at night. And it’s a good thing,
because by morning, I already had.
My friend Nicole had had me over for dinner to help me map out what
was then a nascent idea for a dissertation, because, as I put it, I was desperate.
And I was, and we did. And she took notes, copious ones, so that I wouldn’t
forget, so that I wouldn’t lose it all as time slipped by. “What if I forget how
it all fits together?” I panicked as I was leaving. “Will you be my witness? Will
you remember for me? Can you remind me?” She sealed our notes in plastic,
because of the rain, and because perhaps, too, plastic— unlike memory— is
the one thing that will surely, sadly, never decompose.
As I was falling asleep, I remembered one more important piece that hadn’t
made it into the official archive of our conversation. I didn’t want to lose it. I
grabbed a pen and Post- it, wrote “NEVER FORGET,” stuck it to the folder, and
went to bed.
“Never Forget” was the unofficial slogan for Holocaust memorializa-
tion in the 1980s, or at least it was in my neighborhood. Skokie, Illinois,
was then teeming with survivors, and so, too, with public discourse about
the Holocaust. Across the street from my childhood home was an Iranian
synagogue (still is), with a large, metal “Never Forget” sign staked on its
front lawn. Or maybe it said “Never Forget 6,000,000,” I can’t remember.
We didn’t “belong” to that synagogue (they were Orthodox, we were not;
they were Iranian, we were not), but I passed it every day on my way to
school. And although the word “Holocaust” was nowhere, and although I
was a kid, I somehow understood its referent and knew that it had something
ix