Queer Time and Space

Tues 14 Mar 2023, 04 pm – 07 pm
Sàn Art
Units B6.16 and B6.17, 6th Floor, Block B Office, Millennium Masteri
Ward 6, District 4, HCMC (enter via Nguyen Huu Hao street)
Registration link

From the organizer:

Fiona Ngô will lead a discussion of the introduction to Gayatri Gopinath’s Unruly Visions, the introduction to Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds, and a screening of Nguyen Tan Hoang’s short video PIRATED! (2000). We will consider conceptualizations of time, space, archives, and region and how they are linked to trauma, desire, imperialism, and transnational capital. Participants are encouraged to read Gopinath and Freeman in advance of our event.

* Language: English

About Unruly Visions

In Unruly Visions, Gayatri Gopinath brings queer studies to bear on investigations of diaspora and visuality, tracing the interrelation of affect, archive, region, and aesthetics through an examination of a wide range of contemporary queer visual culture. Spanning film, fine art, poetry, and photography, these cultural forms—which Gopinath conceptualizes as aesthetic practices of queer diaspora—reveal the intimacies of seemingly disparate histories of (post)colonial dwelling and displacement and are a product of diasporic trajectories. Countering standard formulations of diaspora that inevitably foreground the nation-state, as well as familiar formulations of queerness that ignore regional gender and sexual formations, she stages unexpected encounters between works by South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Australian, and Latinx artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Akram Zaatari, and Allan deSouza. Gopinath shows how their art functions as regional queer archives that express alternative understandings of time, space, and relationality. The queer optics produced by these visual practices creates South-to-South, region-to-region, and diaspora-to-region cartographies that profoundly challenge disciplinary and area studies rubrics. Gopinath thereby provides new critical perspectives on settler colonialism, empire, military occupation, racialization, and diasporic dislocation as they indelibly mark both bodies and landscapes.

About Time Binds

Time Binds is a powerful argument that temporal and sexual dissonance are intertwined and that the writing of history can be both embodied and erotic. Challenging queer theory’s recent emphasis on loss and trauma, Elizabeth Freeman foregrounds bodily pleasure in the experience and representation of time as she interprets an eclectic archive of queer literature, film, video, and art. She examines work by visual artists who emerged in a commodified, “postfeminist,” and “postgay” world. Yet they do not fully accept the dissipation of political and critical power implied by the idea that various political and social battles have been won and are now consigned to the past. By privileging temporal gaps and narrative detours in their work, these artists suggest ways of putting the past into meaningful, transformative relations with the present. Such “queer asynchronies” provide opportunities for rethinking historical consciousness in erotic terms, thereby countering the methods of traditional and Marxist historiography. Central to Freeman’s argument are the concepts of chrononormativity, the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity; temporal drag, the visceral pull of the past on the supposedly revolutionary present; and erotohistoriography, the conscious use of the body as a channel for and means of understanding the past. Time Binds emphasizes the critique of temporality and history as crucial to queer politics.

About Fiona Ngô

Fiona Ngô is a musician, sound artist, and Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Virginia. Ngô was the touring guitarist for Alice Bag from 2013-2017, has composed and performed soundscapes for plays and video installations, is the author of Imperial Blues: Geographies of Race and Sex in Jazz Age New York, and is currently at work on Refugee Hauntologies, a book that confronts death and being in the art, dance, poetic, and film work of the Southeast Asian diaspora.

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