Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage by Jennifer Eun-Jung Row (review)

Abstract

In this important book, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row demonstrates the many ways in which the most famous early modern French playwrights queer time. Indeed, while novel timing technologies such as clocks and timepieces allowed for new ways of disciplining the masses in early modern Europe, the theater, both as text and edifice, provided a privileged space where time could be manipulated. This temporal aspect of the theater is especially crucial because, of the three unities in Aristotelian poetics and seventeenth-century French dramatic theory (time, action, and place), time is the most fundamental one. (The unities of action and place depend on the socalled twenty-four-hour rule.) Rather than write about time in general, however, Row focuses specifically on “queer velocities” (non-normative directions and speeds at the micro-levels of diegesis, performance, and rhetoric), to suggest that they are intricately related to the “intertwined sociosexual dynamics of the early modern world” (p. 5). The result is a stimulating, insightful, provocative, and vital re-reading of canonical French drama. A review of this length cannot do justice to the complex and sophisticated analyses contained in Row’s book, including (but of course not limited to) tempo, erotic intimacy, and sexual identity in Isaac de Benserade’s Iphis et Iante (introduction); the unity of time, chronobiopolitics, and sexuality in Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid (chapter 1); delay, grieving, motherhood, and trauma in Jean Racine’s Andromaque (chapter 2); fanaticism, seduction, and martyrdom in Corneille’s Polyeucte (chapter 3); nonprogressive temporality, “circular velocity,” and polyamorous attachment in Racine’s Bérénice (chapter 4); and, finally, utopia and otherness in Voltaire’s Zaïre (conclusion). Row draws on the theory of Michel Foucault, José Esteban Muñoz, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Johannes Fabian, and many others. Row’s impressive erudition and adroit handling of complex (queer) theory is admirable and a breath of fresh air. Moreover, by selecting well-known plays written by men and with predominantly heterosexual storylines (save, perhaps, Benserade’s Iphis et Iante, though the story does revert to a heteronormative schema in the end), Row’s book cunningly queers the canon. What is more, by not following a strictly chronological timeline (the book jumps back and forth between Corneille’s earlier plays from the 1630s and 1640s and Racine’s tragedies of the 1660s and 1670s in chapters 1–4), the narrative thrust of the book deftly subverts time and playfully challenges many reader’s (normative) expectations. Row’s book will hopefully lead to more studies of the queerness of early modern French theater, including comedies, operas, and other plays that are less well-known, especially those penned by women, such as Françoise Pascal’s Le Vieillard amoureux (1662) or Françoise de Graffigny’s Phaza (1753). In the meantime, Queer Velocities should be read widely and be held as an example of how to blend contemporary (queer) theory and early modern (French) studies.