TITULO: San Sebastián flechado por Dorothy, o de los ...



THE REBELLION OF ABJECT PASTS:

MEMORY, (AGENCY) AND QUEER THEORY

Abstract

Gender Theory and Memory Studies share several common features: evoking what is allegedly unspeakable from the past implies setting into motion categories where anything outside the norm or conceptualization challenges the classical ways of understanding temporality and corporeality. As certain elements of the memorialist tradition such as Trauma Studies may threaten the capacity of political intervention, there has been a search to stress the need to remember that we face a shared past based on norms, conventions and common practices aimed at some sort of stability guaranteeing agency. The purpose of this paper is to describe the way in which queer theory may help solving some of the issues of memory studies, especially those associated to the theory of trauma, without reconstructing stabilities. Later, the article takes the analysis of two series of photographs taken by the Argentine artist Sebastián Freire as its inspiration, given his capacity to challenge stereotypes displayed when representing certain disruptive events, especially those issues related to the role of agency.

Keywords

memory, abjection, agency, queer, time, body.

San Sebastian's martyrdom occurred in the year 288: the wounds of the arrows on the body of the Christian soldier shed light on both the evidence of stigmatization and paradoxically, or consequently, the beauty of the male body. One thousand and eighty one years later –on June 27 and 28, 1969-, coinciding with Judy Garland’s funerals, the Stonewall events that began the fight for the rights of sexual minorities in the United States took place. Representations of these events are precisely the inspiration of the discussions of this article. In each of these two cases, the events encouraged the spreading of images that helped to constitute, but also to question, queer identity –or the choice of questioning it as identitarian mechanism-. It is these two events –or, actually, their representations- the thematic axis of the series of photographs by the Argentine artist Sebastián Freire that we take as a starting point of our analysis of what the theories of memory have to learn from queer theory: Sebastiano martir (2005) and Rainbow (2008). There, as we will see below, the interpretation of corporeality and temporality alternative to those generally normed place the theoretical weight of reflection upon the abject in a particularly revealing spot. Though this article does not intend to be a case study of Freire’s pictures, I understand that these images may be helpful at illustrating my thesis. The capability of this concept to present alternatives in connection to the reconstruction of the past, especially that defined by some as traumatic or disruptive of linear temporality, turns out to be particularly relevant.

The purpose of this article, first, is to describe a key debate inside the field of memory studies to later suggest an alternative, which is not precisely a third accommodating position. Memory Studies express a tradition that tries to develop alternative strategies devoted to represent the past based on the experience of those affected and involved in this past. This framework –deployed after quarrels around problems introduced by the apprehension of massive killings such as the Holocaust- rejects the efficacy of established explicative principles and claims a role for the immediacy and fragility of memory (Traverso, 2007: 67 ff). It implies a strong contrast to traditional academic History (Nora, 1978) that –allegedly- ignores the role played by subjective experience as part of what has to be taken into account in order to represent the past. Memorialist strategies usually reject any attempt to establish comforting totalizing narratives, particularly those that might be related to a progressive conception of History. As it has been stated by Ricouer: the autonomy of historical knowledge from memory is established thanks to the presupposition of a coherent scientific epistemology (2000: 168), “a singular collective that goes beyond the infinite multiplicity of memory” (Ricoeur, 2000: 393). The notion of ‘trauma’ –as we shall see- has played an important but also problematic role in the development of this paradigm. Trauma studies –founded by Cathy Caruth (1996) and continued by Shoshana Felman (2002), Susan Brison (2002) and Roger Luckhurst (2008) – built up a field based on the assumption that “the genocide of European Jews can be seen as the paradigmatic historical trauma of modernity, a physical and moral cataclysm in both Jewish and Western histories that produced an enormous and enduring range of symptomatic cultural products” (Berger, 2004: 575). It is the dispute triggered by the deployment of this influential version of memory studies, what precipitated on us the need to review some of the terms involved.

As we shall see, Trauma Studies have been critized for its use of the notion of trauma alleging that the alternation of temporality involved has disastrous effects on the empowerment of agency. We will argue that, in order to overcome this problem, a new conceptual framework based on recent developments of Gender Studies is potentially useful. This strategy may avoid these paradoxes without erasing certain differential qualities of events considered unspeakable or traumatic. Our proposal is focused on providing a role to concepts such as vulnerability and abjection, and to alternative ways of considering temporality and corporeality deployed under the umbrella of queer theory.

Actually, the closeness between memory studies and gender theory has been already established. Both fields stress the appeal to a traumatic past that undermines the classic forms of representation. This articles intends to go beyond the common axes already pointed in order to establish new theoretical axes that may help overcoming some of the problems of trauma studies.

Paths to a deviated memory

Before introducing the way in which Freire modulates instability and artifice –through the role of kitsch in questioning traditional representational mechanisms- as forms to promote minorities’ agency, we will deploy our first point to explain the link traditionally established between gender theories and alternative forms of representing the past focused on genocides.

In fact, with regards to the first phase aforementioned, gender theory and memory studies share more than one feature: evoking what is disruptive from the past implies setting into motion categories where anything outside the norm or conceptualization challenges the classical ways of understanding temporality, corporeality and its own representation. Feminist studies of sexual abuse, autobiographical literature, migration, and slavery have either assumed gender to be relevant to cultural memory or have engaged it explicitly (Hirsch and Smith, 2002: 3-12). The discussions within the scope of gender theory on modes of constitution and representation of identities have also been connected from the beginning with theories attempting to account for the statute of testimony in the reconstruction of the past. Even the feminist definitions on “counter-history” have helped to unfold issues related to “counter-memory” (Hirsch and Smith, 2002), both in the sense of counter-hegemonic experiences of the past and those that, from the present, refer to the past.

Gender Theory as well as Memory Studies presuppose that the present is defined by a past that is both constructed and challenged, assuming we do not study the past for itself, but to address the needs of the present. Both fields are always suspicious of universal categories, disregarding the possibility of considering identity as something already established. The critical role of memory works in a conceptual arc close to that of gender theory and the latter forces us to address the role of the body –traditionally displayed by feminism- through the reconstruction of the so-called traumatic pasts.

Hence, what is allegedly unrepresentable from the past –genocides, collective massacres, etc.- has been addressed considering these points of contact supported by the theory of trauma (Hirsch and Smith, 2002), particularly influential within the framework of memory studies.

The key elements of Trauma Studies have been developed by Cathy Caruth –also highly criticized-, who defines trauma as “the response to an unexpected or overwhelming event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares and other repetitive phenomena” (Caruth, 1996: 91). However, the effects of trauma extend far beyond with a late influence until they taint other areas of a feeling of incomprehension (Caruth, 1996: 92). It is therefore capable of determining the way in which the relationship with the future is established in undifferentiated terms toward the past and the present.

On the other hand trauma interrupts the experience understood as a coherent articulation and frequently involves a dissociation between cognition and affection that many times leads to an aporetic relation amidst the compulsion to repetition (LaCapra, 2004: 117). Considered as a typically disorienting experience, trauma as an experience where the past is uncontrollably relived, voids the difference between past and future.

This type of approach to explain the disruptive past has been subject to a critical turn objecting the use of the category of ‘trauma’ for threatening the capacity of political intervention and risking the relation between memory and identity. It is therefore necessary to warn about certain hazards: It becomes necessary –as it is claimed, for example, by LaCapra- to highlight that we face a shared past based on norms, conventions and common practices aimed at some sort of stability. There have been many arguments put forward following these line, aimed at pinpointing that reflection upon these issues in terms of trauma have only disempowered agency: A flattened temporality of constantly present events is argued to seal the forwarding toward the future as an otherness demanded by emancipating strategies. Wulf Kansteiner (2006: 18 ff ) has stressed that certain uses of the concept of trauma question the role played by agency and intentionality to the point of endangering the term ‘collective memory’ itself. In the same path Nancy Wood (1999: 66) has pointed out that, if not discussed publicly, trauma can turned into resentment neutralizing its own political effects. Postcolonial theorists have even emphasized that traumatic events need to be thought as life-afirming: “there is a need of some kind of affirmative message that can be taken from the ‘unspeakable horror’” (Ward, 2007: 199). These objections have led to a displacement, as the one developed by Dominick LaCapra (2001, 2004) –in a path destined to critically rescue the framework given by the theory of trauma-, aimed at reestablishing stabilities. This theoretical displacement fostered to save the memorialist paradigm from challenging immobilism implies disregarding some of the premises shared with gender theory: The identity of historical agency is now posed as incompatible with the flattened temporality of trauma. The ghost figures that live in the present (Berger, 1999: 52) would threaten any future transformation power dissolving the agent. Hence, following these lines, LaCapra states that it “tends to create what I term a sense of enlightened disempowerment –a kind of elaborated theorized fatalism (...) which may itself not get beyond aimless agitation, blank utopianism, or blind hope” (LaCapra, 2004: 8). We could, first, endorse that as trauma implies the ghostly presence of the past in the present, it enables a sort of temporal flatness that would restrict the necessary sedimentation to frame action. The agent, in fact, can only be constituted as such if certain autonomy of the present –actually, the core of the political- is guaranteed from where change can be introduced, from that moment and toward the future. It also needs certain connection with the past, at least to deny it. In other words, the radical temporal continuity established from the traumatic breaking point would enable the reification of the injury of the past in terms of an “injured identity” (Brown, 1995) plunged into victimization. As stated by Wendy Brown, if we consider gender fully a production of power (Brown: 1995: 84), specificity and plasticity are not only dissolved, but a theory of subordination is also generated resulting in victimization capable of dissolving the power of its public interventions. The insistence on finding the roots of an identity in a traumatic past forces the discursive and emotional reiteration of the injury in the present (Brown, 2001: 53 ff.). Even when this strategy may have had a constitutive function, its reiteration only disables agency. We may, in fact, accept that if trauma results in a flattened temporality displayed after the shock of an event, the openness toward change would be clearly foreclosed: It is the suspension of temporality associated to the compulsion to repetition. However –and this is the purpose of this article-, if we reconceptualize certain features of disruption addressing the productive and re-defining the capacity of precariousness, the strategies of change would be restored. This is where memorialist theories should return to those of gender. As a possible response to this trend, the use of gender theory with its specific strategies related to body and temporality to explain what is allegedly unspeakable or unrepresentable of the past has recently reshaped the discussion in a new sense: that one linked, for example, to the idea of the precariousness of life developed by Judith Butler (Sosa, 2009). There, the issues of vulnerability (Bell and DiPaolantonio, 2009) and mourning prompt the questioning of identity’s constitution as a horizon from where to sustain political agency and with it the emancipation under alternative premises. Let us briefly reconstruct the concepts relative to this point. Butler mainly highlights vulnerability as a basis for a community (Butler, 2004, a). In her own words, “Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure” (Butler, 2004, a: 20). This implies that “grief displays the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain” (Butler, 2004, a: 23). She argues that “the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and the instrument of all these as well (...) the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension” (Butler, 2004, a: 26). In other words, instabilities established by the imprints of disruptive events on the present, far from sealing empowerment, on the contrary, are opening it up to new meanings: opening it to the public implies the constitution of a space for agency. It is the visibility of the suffered pain what exposes the agentic dimension of vulnerability. It could even be said that addressing the transformations of agency, and thus face the possibility of a sound emancipation is only possible from this perspective. Therefore, as we shall later see, while trauma implies a temporary flattening constantly turning the past into present, the concept of vulnerability –actually, inspired by the theory of trauma- is focused on the ways in which agency is altered –but no erased- from the impact of a specific fact. There is no overlapping of temporalities, compulsion to repetition or dissociation here. The notion of vulnerability can then be used to refer to disruptive moments of the past—such as September 11, 2001, used by Butler as an example- given a specific quality that does not necessarily refer to temporary setting on that particular event characteristic of the theory of trauma. The experience of vulnerability, as mentioned by Butler, refers, however, to an effect on subjectivity of specific events that –even when deciding to maintain elements characteristic of the traumatic dimension such as temporary alteration- are focused on the transformation of agency out of mourning. Within this Butlerian framework where “the “doer” is variably constructed in and through the deed” (Butler, 1999: 181), and “agency” is defined as “to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition” (Butler, 1999: 185), agency is not incompatible with the presence of vulnerability. Therefore, the statement “construction is not opposed to agency” (Butler, 1999: 187) is asserting the possibility of identity subversion within the practice of repetitive signification. And this is the core element for our purpose: the constructiveness of agency is not incompatible with its transforming power. On the contrary, the reconceptualization of identity as an effect, that is, as produced or generated, opens up, according to Butler, possibilities of “agency” that are insidiously foreclosed by positions that take identity categories as foundational and fixed (Butler,1999: 187).

In Undoing Gender Butler starts from the role of experience of recognition to show the way in which we are constituted as socially feasible beings (Butler, 2004, b: 2). These are socially articulated and variable terms in charge of both granting humanity to some and depriving others of the possibility of attaining said status by establishing the difference between human and less than human. The critical relationship depends then on the invariable and unavoidably collective capacity of articulating an alternative version and sustaining norms or ideals that let us act. If one is that agent, it is for being receptive to the fact that one is constituted by a social never chosen world. Not despite said constitution, but thanks to it. Not against the social world, but through its constituting presence. The self is thus established through rules from which it depends, but also through efforts to live in ways that maintain a critical and transforming relationship with them. According to Butler, “critique is understood as an interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained in order to open up to the possibility of different modes of living” (Butler, 2004, b: 4). It is that creative dimension of Butler's argument what triggers some of her most recalled formulas: “we are undone by each other” (Butler, 2004, b: 19), writes Butler, “the body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency (…) where “doing” and “being done to” become equivocal” (Butler, 2004, b: 21). Agency thus implies both struggling for a conception of myself as invariably in community, and acknowledging the presence of vulnerability that in its path became unavoidably incarnated in September 11, 2001 (Butler, 2004, a: 39)[i],. when the narrative “I” was actually decentered: “This decentering is experienced as part of the wound that we have suffered, though, so we cannot inhabit that position.” (Butler, 2004, a: 7). It is that key date in the acknowledgement of vulnerability presented in Precarious Life what Butler employs to establish the moment in which destabilization became unquestionably real. In her own words, “this means, in part, hearing beyond what we are able to hear. And it means as well being open to narration that decenters us from our supremacy” (Butler, 2004, a:18). It is important to state that, to develop her concept of vulnerability, Butler resorts –with some reformulations- to the idea of mourning as a mechanism to overcome trauma. She argues that “it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility” (Butler, 2004, a:22). “Vulnerability here is the dislocation of safety” (Butler, 2004, a: 30). This acknowledgment of loss that defines vulnerability is, according to Butler, the condition of possibility of any ethical encounter. It is very relevant for our purposes to stress that this conception of mourning does not imply the restitution of the state of affairs previous to the wound. On the contrary, it happens to be a process of endless and unpredictable transformation, a continuous mutation of the mourner who, through his grief, turns himself into a vulnerable and ethical being: “there is losing, as we know, but there is also the transformative effect of loss, and this later cannot be charted or planned” (Butler, 2004, a: ). Trauma changes agency forever, but it does not erase it.

Butler’s appeal to the concept of trauma also avoids the disempowering consequences over agency by showing the way in which mourning narrates vulnerability. Indeed, in Giving an Account of Oneself Butler states: “Conditions of hyper-mastery, however, are no more salutary than conditions of radical fragmentation. It seems true that we might well need a narrative to connect parts of the psyche and experience that cannot be assimilated to one another. But too much connection can lead to extreme forms of paranoid isolation.” (2005, 52). The fragmentation prompted by trauma is then simultaneously preserved –in order to expose vulnerability- but also surmounted to guarantee certain level of mastery. As she emphasizes later in the same book: “non-narrativibizable self cannot survive and is not viable. For such a stand, it seems, the very livability of the subject resides in its narrativizability. The postulation of the non-narrativizable poses a threat to such a subject, indeed, can pose the threat of death. (…) If I am not able to give an account of some of my actions, then I would rather die, because I cannot find myself as the author of these actions, and I cannot explain myself to those my actions may have hurt ” (Butler, 2005: 79). Consequently, Butler´s theory attempts to preserve a role for vulnerability in order to set up agency, but also to notice the need of narrative to guarantee its empowerment.

Vulnerability then, as support of every ethical experience and only through the presence of certain level of narrativization, empowers agency: it is a mechanism in charge of overcoming trauma without hiding it where the footmarks of that disruptive moment that enabled the generation of a constitutive link with the political life are acknowledged. There is no temporal paralysis or flattening here, but the constitution of citizenship.

Let’s take a first glimpse at Freire’s pictures. At the series devoted to Saint Sebastian Freire designs a contemporary and pop setting for the martyrdom: Surrounded by famous characters of Toy Story –Woody, Barbie, Mr.Potato Head-, Monsters, Inc.- Sulley- and Star Wars –Jedi- colorful and shiny pins replace the classical arrows over Sebastian’s plastic body. His stereotyped smile –picture 6- emerges from a chaos of toys and dares to stare subtly at the audience. Sao Sebastiao 2 –picture 5- deepens this ironic emphasis on the consequences of transforming martyrdom in a sort of frozen image that does not pretend to attend to the paradoxes of the proximity implied in his actual experience: dozens of images of Sebastian are shown inside boxes of Barbies, the epitome of gender stereotype. Sebastian has definitely been transvestited into a commodity, infinitely reproduced and strictly banalized or, in Butler´s words, hyper-mastered. Indeed, the taming of his suffering has transformed him into a sort of emblematic doll. The original trauma has been erased through the same gesture that shows the inaccessible and stereotyped qualities of his pain. It is as if the essential attribute of a martyr, deep and public suffering, had vanished forever. Sebastian turned into a puppet is an example of the assertion that hiding pain is not a way of conquering agency, but a condemnation to losing it.

However, the weird smile that Sebastian offers to the audience implies that he is still able to exercise irony and, therefore, to defeat hyper-mastery and reconquer agency. As it has been previously stated, the visibility of suffering turns agency possible, but only as far as there is a narrative involved.

It is important to notice that a martyr is not merely a victim. While victims suffer as a result of perpetrators’ actions, martyrs are involved in meaningful sacrifices inserted in a narrative that implies future-oriented actions of which martyrs are responsible for. Agency together with suffering are then the central qualities of being a martyr capable of leading political interventions.

Therefore, Sebastian is a martyr, not only due to his suffering, but also because of his potential agentic capabilities. Here, vulnerability forces visibility and, accordingly, agency itself. It is only thanks to the showing of Saint Sebastian’s wounds and pain that his suffering transforms him into a visible martyr. Since visibility is a condition of possibility for agency, the capability of action is achieved through the constitution of a narrative over trauma in terms of mourning that disregards hyper-mastery.

As in any work inscribed in the tradition of abject art, Freire’s pictures vindicate what has been abjected by others at reifying it: Sebastian has been turned into a plastic puppet, but the counter-narrative he expresses still survives. Freire tries to show the continuity of the abject with our present without erasing its weirdness. In his images Saint Sebastian is at once our contemporary –surrounded by Kens, Woodies and other iconic artificial puppets- but also a martyr whose representation is hard to achieve: the impossibility of a realistic and close expression of his suffering informs us of his queer quality.

In the case of the series Rainbow Freire intends to evoke, not only the oppression present at the Stonewall riots, but also the way in which this event encouraged the constitution of a new collective agent: not a unified and homogeneous agent, but a complex and open one. The queer agency that emerged that day of 1969 was the result of a trauma, but one that simultaneously preserves its disturbing qualities and empowers action thanks to the role played by mourning and the expression of deep collective pain and vulnerability: as in Butler, it is the outcome of a grief that transformed agency forever. The chaos of the bodies that distort the images of The Wizard of Oz do not dissolve the strength of the rebellion of that day but, on the contrary, informs us of the birth of a new way of understanding agency. As we shall later see it is the process of abjection imposed by others what paradoxically constitutes queer agency.

Considering then the elements contributed by the Butlerian theory of vulnerability, we will probe into other difficulties of the theory of trauma that may be overcome thanks to the intervention of categories characteristic of queer theory consistent also with vulnerability. Namely, the notion of abjection, given its capacity to display a criticism to the theory of trauma.

Regarding abject pasts

Bearing in mind the starting point developed in the previous section, and following the Butlerian matrix, we believe it is important to substitute the notion of "traumatic past” for that of “abject past”. It is, as we shall see, a way of describing the alteration of temporality generated by these events whilst, under the premise of the empowering role of vulnerability, agency is addressed.

The notion of “abjection” is developed by Butler -following Kristeva in her turn following Douglas- to analyze the way in which, under certain sexed identifications, the sexual imperative should exclude and repudiate others. The exclusion of some positions makes up the sexual positions possible and allowed by the heterosexual social norm. In her own words, “a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet "subjects," but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject” implies that the abject designates here precisely those "unlivable" and "uninhabitable" zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the "unlivable" is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject” (Butler, 1993: 3). If the constitution of subjectivity implies adopting a sexual position, as our identity is a sexed identity, the rejection of certain sexual choices will entail the rejection of certain subjects. So that to shape the subjective identity, those beings that would never become subjects should be expulsed from the scope of the possible. Therefore, the production of human subjects requires the simultaneous repudiation of those that will make up their constitutive exterior into an operation that constitutes both the rejected and the excluding. The expulsed exterior makes up "the abject". And the limit established by the abyss, that expected fixed line, is also contingent.

In fact, “the abject is rather inscribed in a primordial chaos, marked by a primary indistinctness of formless” (Domanska, 2003: 37-54). We do not face thus one of the poles of a binary distinction, but indistinction itself, a sign of a previous animal existence threatening our identity as humans. The abject –supported by pollution, by contamination- unavoidably implies an excess: there is always abject in excess (Domanska, 2003).

Ewa Domanska, in a path that tries to disregard the reference to the sublime as a strategy representative of extreme events due to their reifying results, understands that the appeal to abject art –dedicated to produce catalyzing works such as those by Cindy Sherman- enables probing into those approximations to the past far from the norm established by the historical discipline. The abject is here, under a guise of Kristeva, a dimension previous to the constitution of the subject. It is neither subject nor object and it is unavoidably destined to introduce instability into the subject or system that therefore sees its identities threatened. However, it is, in turn, an indispensable element for the existence of the system or subject itself; it is an integral part of them. This is how bodily fluids –excrement, urine, blood, breast milk, sperm, vomit, pus and saliva- have a place in the works under the umbrella of abject art. One of the functions of this type of artistic strategy is precisely to resist the aestheticization of the abject and suggest an art beyond aesthetics and any type of domestication and disciplinization of what threatens systems stability. Domanska’s objective is the debasement of historical studies to examine the issues that form constitutive elements of historical discourse (Domanska, 2003) usually taken for granted by the historical science. In other words, identifying in the abject art a debasement mechanism enabling the denaturalization of certain assumptions guiding the reconstruction of the past. In our case, we propose –as developed below- to assess these expectations of domestication as constitutive of the recourse to the theory of trauma. We believe this type of art –such as the case of Freire’s photographs, which will continue analysing later- is not merely capable of revealing this dimension in a mirrored fashion, but of addressing an operation to exhibit the consequences of the contingency of the limit set up by abjection within the framework of alternative conceptions of body and time.

The recourse to the idea of abjection highlights the way in which excluding a subject –him, her or the other- is part of the process of constituting stable subjectivity, in other words, a specific type of agency associated to a certain way of understanding temporality and corporeality.

Following this, it is important to pinpoint that abjection also implies a sort of disabling or disenfranchisement- in the sense of withdrawing the possibility of exercising rights- resulting in de-politicization (Hughes: 2003: 33). What becomes rejected is also deprived of agency. As if –following the style of analysis given by Arthur Danto to the role of philosophy in the constitution of a depoliticized artistic field (Danto, 1986) -, the isolation in connection to politics would result in withdrawing the attribute of agency. It is not therefore merely a matter of deleting, but dissolving its public presence and its capacity to exert any type of influence on the present.

We face, therefore, a category that we consider useful when rethinking that disruptive past. If we conceptualize the so-called “unbearable” or “traumatic” past as abject, we would be highlighting the way in which said exclusion is necessary to constitute the stable action sustained in a linear narrative as that presented by the classical conceptions of the historical sense. It is not an unspeakable past as some suggest, it is a past expected to be unsaid. The theory of trauma divested from a discussion about agency becomes, paradoxically, a sort of oblivion, as that past can no longer be integrated to the political action. It is actually necessary to incorporate it to the course of action but not under a turn to the framework of a stable subjectivity homogeneous to the style of that claimed by La Capra, but under the premises of the gender theory presented herein. The incorporation of the idea of abjection implies being subject to vulnerability and reformulating action and subjectivity in contingent terms; in other words, opening the possibility to refer to agency receptive of the abject and, thus, vulnerable. Addressing that past implies, precisely, a destabilization of subjectivity, but not its dissolution. Neither does it imply being involved in the abjection process, but revealing and challenging it.

It ‘s a matter of abjection in two senses. On one hand the constitution of stable and unified subjects excludes what is considered undesirable, in this case the so-called traumatic event –or what has been considered queer-. On the other hand, trauma theory itself at suggesting that this past cannot be related to any future-oriented action reifies –malgré lui- this same past that allegedly tries to preserve. Trauma Studies are then actually responsible for depolitizing the field of memory by isolating past from future. Our proposal intends, not only to notice this difficulty, but also to propose a way to overcome it through the usage of key concepts that belong to the core gender theory.

We therefore believe it productive to rethink that past called “traumatic” by some and “unspeakable” by others as “abject”. If the idea of trauma implies a number of specific theoretical consequences that may allow the aforementioned criticism, the concept of unspeakability aimed at respecting a supposed moral mandate of unrepresentability also seals the possibility for the past to be part of the necessary sedimentation to impose collective action destined to execute emancipating processes. On the contrary, “the abject” expresses the possibility through which the present expects to exclude certain pasts altering the constitution of stable subjectivity. Precisely, the abject is not something unrepresentable, but an instance that is expected to be excluded, denying the possibility of being visualized. Unspeakability is not thus a way to prioritize these events, but, on the contrary, it is a strategy resulting in the constitution of an excluding present subjectivity that does not acknowledge its complex, intertwined and destabilizing relation with this past. We therefore propose to opt for a conceptual focal point warning about the homogenizing, stabilizing –and, eventually, deproblematizing- risk of the tactics disseminated, without thus being committed to the unspeakability of the past. It also implies –and this is central to us- placing the constitution of subjectivity in historical processes in the centerpiece, where the appeal to subjectivity implies focusing on the way in which acknowledging the type of strategies behind the constitution of the abject forwards subjectivity to vulnerability. Hence, opening up to that abject past implies being subject to a destabilization of subjectivity that is far from disempowering agency, but, on the contrary, it multiplies its transformative possibilities even on itself. If we then understand that that unbearable past is better featured in terms of the abject, as it visualizes the creation of a limit for the constitution of a subject, it is possible to rethink the theory of trauma in its reification of the injury process as a reinforcement of the abjection process. The recourse to vulnerability and the explanation of the forms of abjection exercise enable the refiguring and the empowering of agency.

As vulnerability implies disregarding the stability of linear notions of temporality and corporeality itself, let us now focus on the alternative conceptions of these categories presented under the umbrella of queer theory. This is where it is clearly observed that the ways of thinking about time and the body developed by queer theory enable reformulations of the concept of emancipation putting at stake problems that, in terms of immobilism, have been attributed to trauma studies. This will let us go beyond the mere temporal flattening proposed by the theory of trauma and, in turn, rethink the role of the body in agency disregarding stabilizing expectations.

As we have argued, it is inevitable for agency to constitute itself through an abjection process. However, if this process is observed and the abject is addressed, said agency may be characterized in non-linear or non-homogeneous terms. And it is here that specific conceptions of time and body are central to define an agency alien to paralysis.

Body, time and history

We will now assess the way in which certain reflections on body and temporality –such as those by Judith Halberstam (2005), Elizabeth Freeman (2010) and Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 2005) - may contribute to the discussion about the memorialist paradigm and help to open up new aspects. Moreover, they may avoid certain paradoxes that, just like the disempowerment of agency, have been launched against the memorialist mode of the relationship with the unspeakable or traumatic past –which is also, in addition, a way of thinking the relationship between past and future-. It should also be taken into consideration that these are premises that go along the characterization of agency that we have introduced above: considering its constitutive mechanisms and therefore vulnerable and unstable.

With regards to the body, it has been Elizabeth Grosz who developed a theory aiming to “refigure bodies” as an element of the social construction of subjectivity (Grosz, 1994: 16). In her own words, “if feminists are to resuscitate a concept of the body for their own purposes, it must be extricated from the biological and pseudo-naturalist appropriations from which it has historically suffered” (Grosz, 1994: 16). The idea is to think the body as a border concept where the inside and the outside, the public and the private, the active and the passive are in conflict. The analysis of the social inclusion of body processes show, according to Grosz, that biology or nature are inherently social and that there is no pure or natural origin outside culture, but rather that we face a timeless retranscription and registration that constitutes all the sign systems. In other words, feminism enables –and even forces- an interpretation of the body radically opposed to any essentialism. The body provides here a point of mediation between public and private arenas (Grosz, 1994: 20). If abjection, in the reconstruction proposed by Grosz, cannot be reduced to the subject/object and inside/outside oppositions it is because bodily fluids expose the permeability of the body. Fluids circulate, infiltrate, are viscous and evidence the possibility of permanent contamination. And it is in this contamination that the contingency of subjectivity that abjection attempts to forget is exposed. The body thus posed represents fantasies and obsessions: as Grosz puts it, “its orifices and surfaces can represent the sites of cultural marginality” (Grosz, 1994: 193).

This way of understanding the body, precisely and considering the discussion herein presented, tends to multiply the range of emancipatory possibilities and resist its sealing based on stereotyped schemes that have been naturalized, such as those sustained in the expectation to expulse -for being abject- the past that does not meet the norm in terms of the expectable. Somehow trauma anchors the body to a timeless present. On the contrary, the matrix hereby presented is based on instability of its own borders making it particularly dynamic.

With regards to the issue of temporality, we will first focus on Judith Halberstam's analysis. According to Halberstam “queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience -namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (Halberstam, 2005: 133- 139). In her own words, this implies that queer time and space are useful frameworks for assessing political and cultural change in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries (Halberstam, 2005: 166-171). Within this context, the notion of an identity sustained in a unitary and predetermined body is replaced by a model where subjectivities are placed between corporeality, place and practice according to the principles of postmodern geography –as in the cases of Edward Soja and David Harvey, namely- where the dialectics between time and space is central. Within this framework, those who take for granted the time fluidity diagnosis, demand –just like us- a place for agency without appealing to foundational beliefs. There, objections against the modern social theory “usually concentrate on processes of temporal change, keeping spatiality constant” (Harvey, 1996: 9). If any kind of knowledge implies mapping space (Harvey, 1996: 111) and the “revolutionary practice entails remapping of social relations and agents who no longer acknowledge the place to which they were formerly assigned” (Harvey, 1996: 112), time and space open up to a constant alteration. According to Soja, “spatiality exists ontologically as a product of a transformation process, but always remains open to further transformation in the context of material life” (Soja, 1989: 122). And it is on this alteration that queer conceptions of time and space are sustained. Even though Halberstam takes the postmodern geography tradition as a point of reference –enabled by the Foucaultian notion of “heterotopy”-, she understands that by having actively excluded sexuality as a category for analysis for obstructing the "real" work of activism (Halberstam, 2005: 191-96), the analysis she considers relevant is thus avoided. Her perspective is precisely focused on the variable introduced by the desire as the element responsible for unfolding the core rupture.

According to Halberstam, the non-normative logics defining queer time pinpoints temporality as constructed rather than as a natural progression organized according to the logic of capital accumulation. It is, then, a matter of denaturalizing the notion of temporality and introducing a matrix supported by the unpredictable based on the exercise of a queer sexuality. We face a non-normative logic personifying community organizations, sexual identity, corporeality and activity in time and space. Queer time is thus a term referring to those models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once temporal frameworks of bourgeoisie reproduction and family, longevity, risk/security dichotomy and inheritance are abandoned. “Queer space refers to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage and it also describes the new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics (Halberstam, 2005: 205-10). In other words, the fracture of the linear temporality –present behind different conceptions of the historical sense such as progress or decadence- as the one whose subject is the homogeneous space enables infinitely more upsetting disruptions than classical ones, empowering and no longer disempowering agency. We could state that the representation of the past in terms of fluidity and radical contingency of the identities involved –both of agents from the past and the present experience of said past- may reinforce empowerment by deepening the scope of influence.

As we have argued above, the process of exclusion that implies pointing the other as abject, leads to a construction of stable subjectivity disregarding an allegedly inapprehensible past. If, on the contrary, it is represented and the involved exclusion strategies are acknowledged, the contingency of agency, the instability of the links with the past and the individual vulnerability are forced to be admitted. Classical and homogeneous conceptions of time and body are consequently especially disregarded. Hence, queer temporality disregards continuity enabling the instabilities of concern. The body, in turn, becomes conceptualized in a way that the distinction between the inside and the outside is dissolved unveiling the exclusion of the other and making vulnerable what is not considered as given.

One of the authors who has elaborated on some of Halberstam's insights is the already quoted Elizabeth Freeman. Focused on characterizing a path where the redefinition of body and time defy classical notions of agency, she introduces alternative forms of historicity. According to her characterization, queer temporality refers to “ways that nonsequential forms of time (in the poem, unconsciousness, haunting, reverie, and the afterlife) can also fold subjects into structures of belonging and duration that may be invisible to the historicist eye” (Freeman, 2010: xi). If what she calls History I is part of the modernizing narrative of bourgeois citizenship of the nation state and, especially, of the logic of capitalism perceived as inevitable (Freeman, 2010: xx), History 2 –associated to queer temporality- emerges within the logic of capital as a manifestation of its contradictions, frequently as seemingly archaic material not yet fully vanquished. It consists especially of dispositions that enable other subject-positions than that of a worker. Embodied in the person’s bodily habits they express, but also define, the way in which relations with the environment are established. The body becomes here an effect of time, not its metaphor.

According to Freeman, “queer temporalities, visible in the forms of interruption are points of resistance to this temporal order that, in turn, propose other possibilities for living in relation to indeterminately past, present and future others. Hence the emergence of asynchrony, anachronism, anastrophe, belatedness, compression, delay, ellipsis, flashback, hysteron-proteron, pause, prolepsis, repetition, reversal, surprise and other ways of breaking apart the homogeneous empty time” (Freeman, 2010: xxii).

Freeman develops a specific concept to describe the moment in which body and time liaise within the framework of History I: chrononormativity. According to her characterization, it is the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity. This is how people feel coherently collective. Chrononormativity is a mode of implantation, a technique by which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts constituting the gender binary that organizes the meaning (Freeman, 2010: 5). Fissures that can open up to suggest other historical moments or ways of living (Freeman, 2010: 6), make a dent here in both linear and cyclical structures imposing alternatives inure in a reconceptualization of the possibilities of political intervention and the relationship established between past and present. Contingent forms of being and belonging (Freeman, 2010: 71) that inevitably refer to what is allegedly excluded by abjection and which is addressed by interpretations of agency in terms that, as those related to vulnerability, are herein presented.

Freeman's defined erotohistoriography (Freeman, 2010: 95) implies that the contact with historical materials can be precipitated by particular body dispositions, and that these connections may elicit bodily responses. The feeling of having been surprised by an overflow of libido triggering a loss of control (Freeman, 2010: 119) making these dispositions capable of challenging the norm. Hence, temporality and corporeality are joined to characterize alternative approaches to the past consistent with alternative agencies as well. The detotalization of time addressed by queer theory has been particularly useful to explain desire and fantasy, two key attributes to unfold alternative ways to rethink historical imagination.

The way in which erotic relations and bodily acts supporting them link the work of the normative structures we call family and nation, gender, race, class and sexual identity should be acknowledged here, always according to Freeman, changing tempos, remixing memory and desire through the recovery of excess, as that expressed by the abject. Queer temporality attacks, therefore, the concept of the inevitable (Freeman, 2010: 173) rendering an agency that needs indetermination possible (Freeman, 2010: 171).

Regarding this issue, and before continuing analyzing the consequences of our central opposition, it is important to notice that there is a remarkable difference between queer temporalities and the temporality of trauma. On one hand, trauma refers to the mere implosion of an established pattern: indeed, we face the impossibility of survival of regular temporality (Caruth, 1996: 91). On the other, queer temporalities imply the establishment of diverse and contingent patterns capable of opening up new possibilities to the rules any agency needs in order to be empowered. While the logics of trauma –based in a flattened temporality- may disempower agency due to the need of some temporal sequence –even a contingent one-, a queer perspective deploys the possibility of multiple temporalities. The agentic capacities (Coole, 2005: 125) attend here to the establishment of diverse identities and different temporal patterns in charge of framing action.

Hence, based on the arguments deployed in this section, we could state that queer time and space have attributes compatible with the openness of vulnerability, showing as well the material dimension of agency as defined by this perspective. In turn, it helps to visualize abjection as that exercised by the theory of trauma when attaching a possible meaning to the past reifying thus the injury of the agents involved.

Sebastiano, Dorothy and beyond

Let us focus again on Freire’s images and dig for the manner in which these forms of understanding body and time above and beyond any normalization reconfigure the memorialist paradigm. The Rainbow series –pictures 1, 2 and 3- correspond to a construction –where the statute of the visibility of the constructed is part of what is represented- based on the screening of The Wizard of Oz on naked bodies. As mentioned above, the work evokes the events of Stonewall when a particularly violent police raid in the New York Village’s Stonewall Inn, which hosted the most excluded members of the queer community –transsexuals, drag queens, homeless, drag kings-, was strongly resisted in 1969. It was an underpinning moment for the LGBT militancy. In fact, it was after the following year when the gay pride parade was organized every June 28, first in New York and Los Angeles, and later in other cities around the world. In his photographs dedicated to this rebellion, which coincided with Judy Garland’s funeral -already a gay icon and whose death was lamented inside the bar- Freire plays with the representation of an overlapping of temporalities: the screened film –which includes, like filmed image as such, a reflection upon time- and an unregulated, entangled demonstration where immediate goals are overlapped with other long-term ones expressed through the bodies marked by the screening of Dorothy, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow. There is a filmed past that, as trauma, flows constantly, anarchically insisting on the present, and a present that, sustained by an alternative sequence where agents never manage to present themselves in a stable unity, is defined upon a movement that attempts to constitute and in turn reject the unity of agents. It is thus about images that, even when evoking certain characteristics of trauma, advocate the role of the agents involved in the upheaval and its impact on the empowerment of agency in the present. It is abjection what shows the expectation of excluding that past that insists, however, on the present. It is also the acknowledgment of vulnerability what forces to reveal that it is not something that happens merely as a result of maintaining the injury, but it is sustained on a strategy that aims to exclude that past, given its capacity to challenge the way in which agency is understood in the present. The abject past –as aforementioned- is the past we exclude for being unbearable, but the theory of trauma itself implements the same strategy of abjection by reifying it and rejecting to question its limits, as Freire does do through his images sustained on the premise of vulnerability. There is, therefore, an overlapping of temporalities here that, imposed on altered bodies, promotes its capacities multiplying the logics on which it is installed. As Halberstam would put it, it is about temporalities that fall beyond the norm that recognizes a unified conception of time. Thus, establishing overlapped temporalities, as in Freire's photographs and Halberstam's description, opens up the possibilities of action to horizons far more unpredictable than the unified logic of linear temporality while challenging trauma’s immobilism. It is precisely then the evidence of temporality’s contingency demonstrated by the overlapped experience of time in the photographs what promotes emancipatory capacities and the efficacy itself of the 1969 demonstration and the subsequent parades organized to evoke the Stonewall riots.

In the second series addressed -pictures 4, 5 and 6- dedicated to the martyrdom of San Sebastian -where the classical understanding of space and time are challenged by portraying a specific conception of the grotesque-, an alternative mode of the corporeal is revealed. The possibility to conceptualize what is called the unspeakable as “abject” and incorporating thus not only a valuable category of analysis of the past, but also the possibility to reformulate the idea of agency of the protagonists of the past in such terms that would challenge immobilism and recover the instabilities characteristic of the gender theory clearly emerge here. Freire’s photographs are a mockery of the stable through the evidence of artifice sustained in the use of shiny and particularly stereotyped dolls to represent San Sebastian. Barbie, the Joker, Woody or even Ken are the plastic faces emerging among colored necklaces and bright candles. It is precisely this stage in terms of the body as predetermined, stable and freezed under the norms of a kitsch stereotype what becomes central in Freire’s representation.

The body of San Sebastian –in other words, the abject- has been represented through the stereotype that tends to anchor the victim’s subjectivity to one single ground, distant and alien. The camp strategy sustained on irony, reveals the absurd of this type of representation crossed by motionless. The excessive contrivance that employs the artifice of mocking it can warn about the anchoring modality managing to incorporate the wasted, the abject to re-define it. It is about acknowledging the artifice of reconstruction and eliminating the veneration of the past –nothing is mythical any longer- to describe the line between the excluded and the included.

If the purpose is to express martyrdom marked by violence using normed images, very little may be recovered from the event’s significance. It is the stereotyped body, frozen in some sort of naturalization following the style reported by Grosz, what is under consideration.

We have thus seen how the two series of photographs present queer conceptions both of temporality and corporeality up to the point of showing the sealing of agency when stabilities are chosen, whether that of the mask’s stereotype or those contained in the pre-established linear sequences.

These morals are precisely what can be incorporated into the discussions about the reconstruction of pasts other than what is assumed by the norm of established expectations. Queer theory and Freire’s photographs show that evoking the past in unstable terms, far from presenting identities as anchored, increases the possibility of making that past significant for the present. If these events are read as included in alternative temporalities and their players as framed within fluid bodies, the mark of the past in the present results in a higher rather than a reduced transformative potential. It is, ultimately, the acknowledgement of vulnerability what more fairly responds to the impact of the past on the present, and also, potentially the present on the future. If, by presenting the injury, the theory of trauma exerted abjection on the past that it did not address, the acknowledgement of this gesture, of this contingent limit between the accepted and the abject of the past, opens up the memorialist tradition of the historical theory to the possibility of overcoming some of these dilemmas.

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Picture 1 Sebastián Freire, Rainbow 1 (2008)

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Picture 2 Sebastián Freire, Rainbow 2 (2008)

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Picture 3 Sebastián Freire, Rainbow 3 (2008)

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Picture 4 Sebastián Freire, Sebastiao Mártir 1 (2005)

[pic]Picture 5 Sebastián Freire, Sebastiao Mártir 2 (2005)

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Picture 6 Sebastián Freire, Sebastiao Mártir 3 (2005)

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