Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage
Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage
by Jennifer Eun-Jung Row
Northwestern University Press, 2022
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-0-8101-4471-2
Paper: 978-0-8101-4470-5
eISBN: 978-0-8101-4472-9
About the Book
Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage explores how seventeenth-century French theater represents queer desire. In this book, the first queer theoretical treatment of canonical French theater, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row proposes that these velocities, moments of unseemly haste or strategic delay, sparked new kinds of attachments, intimacies, and erotics. Rather than rely on fixed identities or analog categories, we might turn to these affectively saturated moments of temporal sensation to analyze queerness in the premodern world.
The twin innovations of precise, portable timepieces and the development of the theater as a state institution together ignited new types of embodiments, orderly and disorderly pleasures, and normative and wayward rhythms of life. Row leverages a painstakingly formalist and rhetorical analysis of tragedies by Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille to show how the staging of delay or haste can critically interrupt the normative temporalities of marriage, motherhood, mourning, or sovereignty—the quotidian rhythms and paradigms so necessary for the biopolitical management of life. Row’s approach builds on the queer turn to temporality and Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of the chronobiopolitical to wager that queerness can also be fostered by the sensations of disruptive speed and slowness. Ultimately, Row suggests that the theater not only contributed to the glitter of Louis XIV’s absolutist spectacle but also ignited new forms of knowing and feeling time, as well as new modes of loving, living, and being together.
The twin innovations of precise, portable timepieces and the development of the theater as a state institution together ignited new types of embodiments, orderly and disorderly pleasures, and normative and wayward rhythms of life. Row leverages a painstakingly formalist and rhetorical analysis of tragedies by Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille to show how the staging of delay or haste can critically interrupt the normative temporalities of marriage, motherhood, mourning, or sovereignty—the quotidian rhythms and paradigms so necessary for the biopolitical management of life. Row’s approach builds on the queer turn to temporality and Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of the chronobiopolitical to wager that queerness can also be fostered by the sensations of disruptive speed and slowness. Ultimately, Row suggests that the theater not only contributed to the glitter of Louis XIV’s absolutist spectacle but also ignited new forms of knowing and feeling time, as well as new modes of loving, living, and being together.
About the Author
JENNIFER EUN-JUNG ROW is an assistant professor in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota.
Reviews
“Excellent . . . Row integrates a historicist sense of time's particularity in the period with brilliant rhetorical and theoretical readings, resulting in an important contribution to studies of temporality, queerness, and theatre in early modernity and beyond.” —French Studies
“In many ways, Queer Velocities embodies the moments of rush and drag that it explores within its canonical tragedies: at times moving efficiently through its explanations and at others following diversions that allow a deeper consideration of theoretical or contextual concerns. This is not a weakness: it is an engaging mode that requires careful attention on behalf of the reader to fully reap its benefits . . . Queer Velocities proves an important intervention into the study of seventeenth-century French tragedy as well as providing a broader challenge to the ways in which we consider the temporality, theatrical and otherwise, of the past.” —H-France Review
“Queer Velocities makes significant contributions to multiple fields, first and foremost to early modern theater studies, but also and no less significantly to queer studies and to queer temporality studies. Jennifer Row displays brilliant theoretical creativity grounded in rigorous historical erudition.” —Lewis Seifert, author of Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France — -
“In many ways, Queer Velocities embodies the moments of rush and drag that it explores within its canonical tragedies: at times moving efficiently through its explanations and at others following diversions that allow a deeper consideration of theoretical or contextual concerns. This is not a weakness: it is an engaging mode that requires careful attention on behalf of the reader to fully reap its benefits . . . Queer Velocities proves an important intervention into the study of seventeenth-century French tragedy as well as providing a broader challenge to the ways in which we consider the temporality, theatrical and otherwise, of the past.” —H-France Review
“Queer Velocities makes significant contributions to multiple fields, first and foremost to early modern theater studies, but also and no less significantly to queer studies and to queer temporality studies. Jennifer Row displays brilliant theoretical creativity grounded in rigorous historical erudition.” —Lewis Seifert, author of Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France — -
“It turns out that our understanding of the anti-normativity of queer time reflects twenty-first century assumptions about how time functions. With Queer Velocities, Row takes us back in time to early modern France when queer velocities operated as part of a temporal regime not yet solidified. In so doing, she contextualizes queer time through classical French tragedy as she brings out the temporal queerness of the early modern.” —Todd W. Reeser, author of Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance— -
Tags
Rethinking the Early Modern, Early Modern Stage, Speed in literature, Sex, Time, French, 17th century, Drama, Theater, France, European, History and criticism, Literary Criticism, History
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