View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by OTHES DIPLOMARBEIT Titel der Diplomarbeit “Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America” Verfasser Leopold Lippert angestrebter akademischer Grad Magister der Philosophie (Mag. phil.) Wien, im November 2008 Studienkennzahl lt. Studienblatt: A 343 Studienrichtung lt. Studienblatt: Diplomstudium Anglistik und Amerikanistik Betreuerin: Univ.-Doz. Dr. Astrid Fellner Hinweis Diese Diplomarbeit hat nachgewiesen, dass die betreffende Kandidatin oder der betreffende Kandidat befähigt ist, wissenschaftliche Themen selbstständig sowie inhaltlich und methodisch vertretbar zu bearbeiten. Da die Korrekturen der/des Beurteilenden nicht eingetragen sind und das Gutachten nicht beiliegt, ist daher nicht erkenntlich, mit welcher Note diese Arbeit abgeschlossen wurde. Das Spektrum reicht von sehr gut bis genügend. Es wird gebeten, diesen Hinweis bei der Lektüre zu beachten. UTOPIAN CONTEMPORARIES: QUEER TEMPORALITY AND AMERICA Leopold Lippert TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction 1 1. The Willingness to Insist That the Future Start Here 9 2. Life in the Memory of One Who No Longer Lives 31 3. Transcending the Discipline of the Service 51 4. Blackout: Utopian Contemporaries 71 Conclusion 91 Bibliography 95 Index 107 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The fact that my name, and my name only, graces the cover page of this thesis is, to say the very least, an oversimplification. The following study emerges out of the numerous conversations I have had with friends and colleagues over the last year. Consequently, I have to thank many people who offered me the invaluable gifts of an open ear, an open mind, and an open heart. First and foremost, I am grateful to Astrid Fellner, my thesis advisor, for her consistently generous and intensive engagement with my work. Her serious care for my ideas has pushed me to advance them more imaginatively, more vehemently and, perhaps, more explicitly. At the University of Vienna, I want to acknowledge Margarete Rubik and the participants of her seminar for MA students, for providing me with a safe space in which I could articulate and clarify my early findings on the x subject. I also have to thank Judith Kohlenberger for supplying me with indispensable material, for giving me the greatest confidence, and for offering me an inspirational glimpse of her own audacious thinking. I am exceptionally grateful to Cornelia Kubinger, for reading and commenting on various drafts of this thesis, and for her sustained optimism and motivation. Steffen Rother and Alfred Schler have engaged some of these ideas as well, and I want to thank them for that. At Freie Universität Berlin, I am grateful to Susanne Hamscha, who read and commented on earlier versions of this thesis, and whose critical remarks were immensely helpful. At Georgetown University, I want to thank Patricia O’Connor and the participants of her Narratives of Violence class, who allowed me to test my early thoughts on the utopian potential of The Laramie Project. I am also grateful to Tim Raphael and the participants of his Performing America class, for their critical appreciation of several of the ideas I advance in the third chapter of this thesis. Tim Raphael has also had a profound influence on my thinking, and has offered me nothing but encouragement. I am deeply grateful for that. At Princeton University, Jill Dolan has read and commented on several chapters of this thesis, and her warm reception of my ideas has revitalized my belief in the utopian powers of the contemporary. At Nottingham University, I want to thank Paula Higgins for her unceasing determination to bring about better world, and for offering me the gift of inspiration. I am extremely grateful to my family, for providing me with a secure and welcoming environment, a safe haven in which my thinking could thrive. My thanks go to Edda, Andi, Hannes, Dani, to Conny, Judith and Astrid, once again, to Jürgen, Stefan, Barbara, Norbert, Ingrid, Konsti, and Nici. They all stand as living proof of utopian contemporaries. Their friendship and love have made this work truly worthwhile. A map of the world that does not include utopia is not even worth glancing at. Oscar Wilde In the time of your life, live – so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed. William Saroyan 1 INTRODUCTION …and the home of the brave? With the forceful invocation of the great concluding question of the American national anthem1, rock singer Melissa Etheridge took the stage of the sellout Equality Rocks concert in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 2000.2 The show constitutes a centerpiece of 1 Throughout my argument, I come to understand “America” as a cultural concept, not as a physical place. Working in cultural studies, I am always interested in the America that is a culturally mediated representation of national imaginings and cultural figures, not the United States that is the concrete landscape inhabited by actual human beings. It goes without saying, however, that these representations of America profoundly impact and often conflate with the lives of citizens of the United States and people around the globe. For a theoretical underpinning to this stance, see Anderson, 5-7, Berlant, Anatomy, 20-21, and the first chapter of this thesis. 2 As I did not have the opportunity to participate in this concert, I rely on a YouTube-copy of the VH1 broadcast of Equality Rocks for documentation. The show was originally aired on October 27, 2000, and was also hosted by Melissa Etheridge. For more details on this VH1 program, see URL: <http://www.inbaseline.com/project.aspx?project_id=46745>. For the YouTube-copy of “Scarecrow”, see URL: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2_b8Cqv-Dc>. Both links were accessed on October 14, 2008. 2 the three-day Millennium March on Washington, a political rally that brought hundreds of thousands of GLBTQ activists to the capital, celebrating, as a New York Times report has it, “the gains of the gay rights movement in recent years and vowing redoubled efforts on issues like hate crime legislation” (Toner, n.p.). Almost immediately, Etheridge’s rendering of the Star-Spangled Banner blends into her 1999 song “Scarecrow”, a touching commemoration of the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming who was severely beaten and left to die by two local homophobes in October 1998. But Etheridge’s song not only honors the deceased: she accuses the American nation of “thinly veiled intolerance, bigotry and hate” (“Scarecrow”), and uncovers the systematic pervasion of homophobic sentiment in the setup of the “imagined community” (Anderson, 6). The “monsters” (“Scarecrow”) that crucified the gay student, she argues, need not hide in America; instead, they are “rocking in our cradles, […] preaching in our churches, and eating at our tables” (“Scarecrow”). For Etheridge, the murder of Matthew Shepard is a sad but foreseeable symptom of an all too ordinary homophobia, a discursive undercurrent that is allowed plenty of space to flourish in the imaginings of the American nation. In the moment that is created by the performance of the song, however, Melissa Etheridge engages in a particular substitution. In the first two choruses of the song, she merely reiterates the despondent resignation of Matthew Shepard, already comatose and, like a scarecrow, tied to a fence in the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming, where he is incredulously bearing the deadly repercussions of a homophobic hate crime. Onto an eight-bar musical structure, Etheridge heaves the lines, “scarecrow crying, waiting to die, wondering why” (“Scarecrow”), and aptly summarizes the unfortunate realization that queers, in the futurist regime that constitutes America, have no future. Halfway through the song, though, the same musical phrase is invested with new, and more hopeful, meaning. In the very evanescence of the musical performance, the figure of the crying scarecrow, heavily burdened with homophobia, is substituted with a more imaginative vision of communal relations. The bruised body is lifted and replaced by “love, love, love, love, rising above, all in the name of love” (“Scarecrow”). During this brief and ephemeral period of time, filled with the buoyancy of performed 3 music, the cultural boundaries of the nation are renegotiated. It is no coincidence that, in the context of the Millennium March on Washington, “Scarecrow” is introduced by the national anthem, since the very definition of the American imagined community is reconfigured through Etheridge’s song. For a moment, new possibilities of belonging, kinship, and identity become thinkable; for a moment, a social open and welcome to queer lives of all kinds is being present. Even more so, the way “Scarecrow” is composed allows for the moment to linger. In fact, the eight-bar structure of the chorus only provides enough space for the words “love, love, love, love, rising above, all in the name of” (“Scarecrow”), thereby displacing the final “love” to the first bar of yet another round of the chorus. The coincidence of the initial and final “love” in one bar enables the phrase to enter a loop, a convolution of temporality that is always anticipatory, yet always firmly rooted in the now. The loop structure of Etheridge’s queer moment permits it to prevail indefinitely, and opens up a space in which the future and the present can converge and anticipate the utopian: a vision of a more imaginative, more tolerant, and more humanist America. Having entered the temporal loop of the final lines of the song, Etheridge withdraws her voice, realizing that the bodies of thousands of people in the audience have already joined her anticipatory moment, vocally transforming the cultural landscape into one of love rather than homophobia.