Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage

Queer Velocities examines how seventeenth-century French theater represents queer desire by proposing that affectively saturated moments of temporal sensation can analyze queerness in the premodern world. Jennifer Eun-Jung Row's approach builds on the queer turn to temporality and Elizabeth Freeman's notion of the chronobiopolitical to show how the staging of delay or haste can critically interrupt the normative temporalities of marriage, motherhood, mourning, or sovereignty.

Format: Hardback
Length: 200 pages
Publication date: 15 April 2022
Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage delves into the representation of queer desire in seventeenth-century French theater. In this groundbreaking work, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row presents the first queer theoretical exploration of canonical French theater, proposing that these velocities, moments of unseemly haste or strategic delay, sparked new forms of attachment, intimacy, and erotics. Rather than relying on fixed identities or analog categories, Row suggests that we should turn to these affectively saturated moments of temporal sensation to analyze queerness in the premodern world.

The advent of precise, portable timepieces and the establishment of theater as a state institution converged to ignite a range of embodied experiences, orderly and disorderly pleasures, and normative and wayward rhythms of life. Row employs a meticulous formalist and rhetorical analysis of tragedies by Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille to demonstrate how the staging of delay or haste can critically disrupt the normative temporalities of marriage, motherhood, mourning, or sovereignty—the daily rhythms and paradigms essential for the biopolitical management of life. Row's approach builds upon the queer turn to temporality and Elizabeth Freeman's notion of the chronobiopolitical to argue that queerness can also be fostered by the sensations of disruptive speed and slowness.

Ultimately, Row suggests that 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. This groundbreaking work offers a fresh perspective on the complexities of early modern sexuality and gender, challenging traditional narratives and illuminating the rich tapestry of queer experiences in the premodern world.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780810144712