Främmande tider - Ett (queer)temporalt perspektiv på motstånd och främlingskap

Abstract

In this text I argue that time and temporality might add to our understanding of the idea of the stranger, and that non-chrononormative temporalities can function as strategies of resistance for bodies that are defined as deviant or strange. First I shortly introduce queer temporality from the perspectives of Jack/Judith Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman and Lee Edelman, showing how queer temporality might constitute a tool that potentially could describe and redefine the stranger. As an example of time as resistance I then show how temporalizing the notion of (bodily) inscription and the body seen as a surface for inscription, is essential for the idea that disciplining and regulating inscriptions can be displaced, unlearned and thus become charged with new meanings. Then I introduce the term countermarking, which refers to a subversive, signifying practice that emphasizes the agency of the subject of artistic practice. Countermarking might be understood as an artistic method through which political and bodily practices that were formerly illegible and incomprehensible by the predominant discourse, can be readdressed through the listening and non-chrononormative optics of artistic practice. Hereby other histories and non-chrononormative bodily traces come to speak. The artistic practice brings forth the question of pleasure, bodies and time which then is explored through two literary examples: Marguerite Duras and Nina Bouraoui. In these examples I discern a certain kind of writerly device: double inscription, which creates a delay and non-synchronism in the texts and thus a time of writing that instigate ruptures in linear time and in the chrononormative order.