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In a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives

This wide-ranging book traverses the Brandon Teena case (subject of the feature film Boys Don’t Cry, for which Hilary Swank won an Oscar); the human geography of rural versus urban spaces; art, architecture and cinema (including the Austin Powers films, The Full Monty, The Crying Game and Boys Don’t Cry); postmodernism and modernism; Marxist politics, class and race; drag kings and riot dyke punk bands; slam poetry and other phenomena through which Judith Halberstam argues for concepts of queer time, queer space and queer subculture. That Halberstam uses the term ‘queer space’ in the body of the book but its title refers to ‘queer place’, is indicative of one of the key challenges here: a lack of overall coherence. There is a profusion and confusion both within and between themes, in definitions and in language use. Perhaps the clearest example of this can be found in Halberstam’s shifting usage of the word queer. Early on she states: ‘For the purposes of this book, “queer” refers to nonnormative logics and organisations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time’ (6) but then applies the word differently. For example, she labels as queer men who live in rural settings, participate in ‘undetected’ male-to-male sexual activity, yet present to their friends, families and communities as heterosexual. She also claims Brandon Teena as queer, despite his obvious desire to live within normative logics and organisations as a heterosexual male, with traditionally male friends, in a decidedly heterosexual rural community. Indeed, it is Halberstam’s treatment of Brandon Teena in this book that proved most troubling for this reviewer (a point to which I will return). Halberstam’s knowledge of, and confidence in referring to, the diverse fields already noted, is above question. The same is true of her knowledge of, and desire to theorise, the complex territory of liminal genders. Ultimately, however, this is a book that promises much in terms of, or arguments for, connections between queer time, queer space and queer subculture, but fails to deliver. Instead, this book celebrates a perceived community of queer outsiders who continue to resist ‘fairly conservative social projects aimed at assimilating gays and lesbians into the mainstream of the life and the family’ (153–4) and who ‘believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of the paradigmatic markers of life experience – namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death’ (2). This celebration of community is valuable and life-affirming. It is also another example of the book’s lack of coherence. Halberstam ends Chapter 4 by calling for ‘a vision of community, possibility, and redemption through collaboration’ (96), yet states categorically in the final chapter that ‘quests for community are always nostalgic attempts to return to some fantasised moment of union and unity’ (154). Halberstam is consistent throughout this book in her rejection of ‘gays who are, in the end, just like everybody else’ (94). She is also somewhat dismissive of those whose bodies have been ‘deliberately reorganised in order to invite certain gazes and shut down others’