Cultural Critique

Judith Halberstam has distinguished herself in queer academia through her commitment to contradicting heteronormative as well as "homonormative" doxa. She represents a remarkable model of an academic intellectual with strong connections to queer subcultural producers, committed to "archiving" queer work including performance, art, music, and conceptual innovation (here her work links up with Ann Cvetkovich's An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures [2003]). Like her previous publications Female Masculinity (1998) and The Drag King Book (coauthored with Del LaGrace Volcano, 1999), parts of this new collection of essays on queer temporalities, postmodern geographies, and queer subculture read like a theoretically savvy fanzine (with praise on the back cover from "JD Samson, from the band Le Tigre"). This is in no way to dismiss the essays. In fact the theoretical arguments in the introductory and concluding chapters authorize precisely such a reading: "we need to rethink the relation between theorist and subcultural participant, recognizing that for many queers, the boundary between theorist and cultural producer might be slight or at least permeable" (161). This ongoing participation in subculture, as not just a phase to be passed through on the way to normative "maturity," is something that distinguishes many queer lives, according to Halberstam, and offers a challenge to—and displacement of—the heteronormative cultural binary of youth/adult that informs much previous work on subculture. [End Page 179]

This argument is part of a larger consideration of the possibilities of queer time and space within postmodernity, and Halberstam's work is refreshing precisely for its insistence that we must continue to engage with these terms—"queer" and "postmodern"—and not belittle their potential. Halberstam argues persuasively that "reproductive time and family time are, above all, heteronormative time/space constructs . . . [but] all kinds of people, especially in postmodernity, will and do opt to live outside of reproductive and familial time as well as on the edges of logics of labor and production" (10). Demonstrating a conversancy with art historical criticism, Halberstam critiques Jameson and other Marxist critics of postmodernism for either ignoring or disavowing the queer and transgender dimensions of postmodernity. For political postmodernism, subculture may take the place of modernist conceptions of the avant-garde, and contemporary art reveals itself as in dialogue with transgender transformations of the body and the self. In "Technotopias: Representing Transgender Bodies in Contemporary Art," Halberstam looks closely at the "transgender aesthetic" of artworks by JA Nicholls, Brian Dawn Chalkley, Jenny Saville, Del LaGrace Volcano, Alice Neel, Eva Hesse, and Linda Besemer. This chapter comes closest to the mode of interpreting cultural binaries and posthuman potentialities found in Halberstam's earlier work Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995). Much of In a Queer Time and Place similarly performs a deconstruction of deeply entrenched cultural binaries: youth/adult, subculture/mainstream, and urban/rural.

Challenging our commonsense division between mainstream cultural products and queer subculture, Halberstam performs a witty reading of the ways in which The Full Monty (1997) and Austin Powers (1997) reveal not only a "crisis" of traditional/national masculinity, but an obscured indebtedness to alternative queer masculinities, especially to drag king performance and the sensibility of "kinging," which parodies dominant masculinity and the assumed "natural" connection between masculinity and maleness. This chapter, "Oh Behave! Austin Powers and the Drag Kings," seems almost like a missing chapter of the Female Masculinity book, and repeats many of the axioms of that work. More unique is Halberstam's chapter on "The Transgender Look" in Boys Don't Cry (1999), part of a collection of short [End Page 180] chapters which form part of an "archive" of responses to the murder of Brandon Teena, "a young transgender man who defied the social mandate to be and to have a singular gender identity" (76). Through a careful revision of some foundational principles of feminist film theory, Halberstam imagines ways to "look with" rather than at the transgender figure in cinema (something attempted, but not sustained, by mainstream successes The Crying Game [1992] and Boys Don't Cry, but achieved...