Prof. Jodie Medd travelled to the University of Colorado in early June to give a paper at a conference co-hosted by The Space Between Society (Literature and Culture, 1914-1945) and the Feminist inter/Modernist Association. Her paper, “Modernism’s Queer Temporal Resistance in the Space Between,” explores the fact that modernism’s queer archives abound with writers anticipating a posthumous future when their queerness will be publicly manifest. She argues:
“Indeed, these queer futures are consistently, and pointedly, predicated upon the death of those imagining them. Consider E.M. Forster’s comment to T. E. Lawrence, with whom he shared his ‘unpublishable’ gay fiction, that ‘when I die and they write my life they can say everything.’ Or, Sam Steward’s recollection of Gertrude Stein insisting that her and Alice Toklas’s ‘really good friends don’t care [about their lesbianism] and they know all about everything,’ but ‘considering Saint Paul it would be better not to talk about it, say for twenty years after I die, unless it is found out sooner or times change.’ Similar anticipations that “our time will come about a hundred years hence [ . . .] at the publication of our letters” (Strachey, letter to Maynard Keynes) are voiced by Lytton Strachey, J. A. Symonds, Vita Sackville West, and others.
Scholars in our present have explored queer attachments to the past, ‘temporal drag,’ feeling backward, queer memory, queer (a)historicism, and queer anachronism, while debating whether a politics of futurity promotes an anti-queer repronormativity (Edelman) or a hopeful queer utopianism (Muñoz). My paper proposes that modernists in the space between shaped a resistant ontology based on a queer posthumous temporality. I consider how they constituted queer existence-as-resistance by anticipating a posthumous future of their public queer becoming, and how, in turn, their futural imaginings brought that queer public into being. Furthermore, while the queer turn of the late twentieth century may have received and realized modernism’s queer imaginings (‘we’ were the future they imagined would fulfill their queer becoming), in the post-2017 new world order, we find ourselves looking back to these modernists and their resistant temporalities, to inspire our own future possibilities. Within this context, I also ask how modernism’s queer anticipatory and posthumous temporalities might intersect with feminist temporalities.”
Find out more about the conference here.