Currently eating a very late-night dinner post-York Festival of Ideas! Thank you so much to everybody who logged in for Queer Futures in Science Fiction Theatre. This is the first time I’ve gotten to do a public talk on my research; I had such a good time and learned so much from the process! I hope y’all had fun :)
My brain was a bit melty by the time we got to the Q&A (and I also think I just have some auditory processing issues in general anyway?) An anonymous viewer asked a REALLY good question about narrative structure and in the moment the thoughts were just not clicking in my head—I heard ‘Enlightenment’ and my golden retriever brain went on a fetch-quest to queer temporality and HISTORY, which was absolutely not the question!
The folks from YorkFest were kind enough to send me everything from the chat after, so I was able to sit down and read over the actual question again:
Thanks so much for the awesome talk Bee! I enjoyed listening to your work. Could you talk more about the temporality of queer narrative forms? I heard that the hegemonic narrative structure we're used to is very patriarchical (in the sense that there always needs to be a "climax", which slice of life pieces thoughtfully challenge) and stems from European Enlightenment movement as well. What do you think about that?
I’m so into it! This takes me back. When I first started researching my initial PhD proposal (about five minutes before lockdown hit), I spent an afternoon in the British Library utterly agog at Judith Roof’s Come As You Are. She breaks down the idea that narrative structure, particularly that in the west, has basically been patterned after the male perception of sexual intercourse, the ‘climax’ of the story being the big O and release. She was also (delightfully) big mad that even queer stories, particularly lesbian narratives, seemed to follow the same pattern, even though you’d think there’d be some variation since a different perspective is at work!
I couldn’t unsee it. It’s continued to tick over in the back of my head as I write and read. I’ve seen so much writing advice about how this narrative structure--introduction, escalation, climax, resolution—is exciting and keeps the audience hooked, but until then I’d felt weird for questioning it.
(Other variations exist too; screenwriting classes introduced me to ‘introduce, incite, escalate, twist, resolve’, which I find much more helpful, but the same basic thing of the lead-up to the big climax remains consistent.)
Because I just don’t think it’s completely true that we’re actually all that hooked to the format? Like, some people would say to me, “wasn’t it amazing when (climax of the story) happened?” And I’d have to be like “kind of? I got more out of (random detail from Act 1 scene 4). Like, we could have stopped there for a while.” It took me a long time to understand that I might be looking at those stories differently because I look at a LOT of things differently. Queerness involves a different way of reading rooms.
I often find those moments more compelling than many of the ‘big’ parts that I know I’m supposed to care about; I love those odd, queer moments where time is suspended in the middle of the action, where the characters just side-step into like a narrative pocket dimension to do their own thing. I think it was playwright Jeremy O. Harris who drew a connection between anime (comics in general, really) and musicals, because both forms can expand and stretch moments in time so that we can really savor and enjoy them. That’s a form of queer temporality in action.
Online fandom culture has also helped us build that muscle for enjoying those moments; we make gif-sets of micro-expressions, we compile those moments into studies of character and theme. The big climax is fine, but it almost feels like ticking a box (I’m trying to think of a series I’ve been in fandom for where anyone bothered to makes gifs of the big climax. Maybe Trigun Stampede? But does that even count? The reboot is so queer!) It’s like the big dance number before the end of Act One in a musical: the funders expect it and it’s traditional so I guess we gotta. But what if we didn’t worry about ticking that box?
That’s one of the reasons I’ve gotten really enthusiastic about queer video game academia (particularly Bonnie Ruberg, who seems to really be leading the charge there) and what they’re saying about queerness beyond representation. Queer video games had a similar revelation to the ‘slice of life’ form with walking simulators in the mid-2010s. A walking simulator was a shift in perspective— you could design an experience based on what a bird might see in an afternoon flight or a queer person walking through a fairy tale wood or a woman walking alone at night—and the player could just spend time there, savoring those odds moments, because they weren’t being pushed to chase any particular climax to make the story ‘worthwhile’.
All this to say: I totally get what pattern you’re talking about, I’m super into exploring how to subvert this through queer time, and I think with the intersection and audience experience of other formats (TV and film where you can pause and zoom in, walking simulator games where you can take time to explore) we’re gaining more permission in the theatre world to mess about with queer time. And how exciting is that?
Thanks again for joining me for the talk! And if you weren’t able to join tonight, the link to the recording will be up soon :)