It's here, it's that time

Race, queer futurity, and the temporality of violence inBorn in Flames

Bibliographic Data

ID4517115
AuthorsJ Dillon (0000-0001-6015-4181, University of Minnesota, corresponding author), Stephen Dillon
Year2013
Volume23
Issue1
Pages38-51
Publication date2013-03-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueWomen & Performance a journal of feminist theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0740-770X • E-ISSN: 1748-5819
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0740770x.2013.786277
OpenAlexW2013060836
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited20

This paper uses the film Born in Flames to engage questions around hope and the future that have been central to queer studies in the last decade. As the author understands it, the film's critique of the time of reform and progress holds profound implications for how we think about the future. By demonstrating the repetitions of racialized and gendered violence over time, the film produces a theory of the future where the continuation of the present as it is means the future will not come. If the state organizes populations, institutions, and forms of knowledge through a regulatory imagination and disciplined vision, it also determines the future in the same manner. The state ensures that the future can be extrapolated from the present by managing, contorting, and eradicating the future before it arrives. It uses preemptive action (war, assassination, incarceration, policing, administrative violence, and surveillance) to make its “imagined future come to pass.” The author argues that by showing the continuity between the racialized and gendered violence of the past, present, and future, the film constructs an anticipatory queer politics of urgency and presentism

Epistemology · Queer · Sociology · Temporality · Cinema and Media Studies · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Gender Studies · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Philosophy

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