Keeling writes, “Jose Muñoz’s argument that “queerness can be understood as ‘a structuring and educated mode of the desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.’ it is a historically specific, collectively produced, shared sense that insists upon an immanent ‘potentially or concrete possibility for another world.’ ‘Not yet here,’ ‘queerness’ for Munoz marks a utopian project that might activate what is ‘no longer conscious’ in the past in the interest of moving toward a ‘not yet here.’ Muñoz understands queerness as a ‘horizon,’ which allows it to be perceived as a ‘modality of ecstatic time’ in which the ‘temporal stranglehold’ of straight time ‘is interrupted or stepped out of.’ Significantly, understanding queerness as a temporal mode yet to be achieved means that ‘doing, performing, engaging the performative as for of and for futurity is queerness’s bent and ideally the way to queerness.’ a temporal mode ‘always in the horizon,’ ‘queerness’ also spatialize, even if only through the imagination of or the desire of it. Queerness produces horizons and, as Sara Ahmed points out in her study of queer phenomenology, other spatial orientations”(86).
Based of her discussions earlier in the chapter, Keeling argues that poetry as a branch of self-study produces metaphysical content that cant be compartmentalized in typical activities that society as a whole are able to easily digest. The enterprise of this temporal narration is peculiar in the e sense that it draws on historical entities while also formulating new embodiments of yet to be understood expressions of what it means to be a human being. Poetry as an entity follows a recognizable timeline while also generating ideas that cannot be understood by society today but in future
In the selected passage, Jose Muñoz describes queerness as a way to look beyond the present and imagine. With knowledge of the past and experience of the present, we think of the future as only playing out in one way. Muñoz is describing queerness as a way to look beyond this linear timeline to set out of the straight times- which we defined in class as the societal norms people feel they have to conform to. Queerness is the link to imagining a world that society tells you is “not yet here.’
With this new concept of queerness in mind and thinking of my course on human rights lawyers, I thought of the role queerness plays in social change. For example, Congresswomen Eleanor Holmes Norton began work in the beginning stages of the women’s rights movement. Before sexual harassment even had it name, she note the injustices and did something about it. During a time where women’s voices were silence, she worked tirelessly to define sexual harassment as that and issued regulations to work towards a solution. She queered a historically male-dominated positions as the first woman chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In another example, Oliver Hill and Thurgood Marshall devoted their lives in crafting a future of acceptance and duality in their work in Brown vs. Board of Education. These prominent figureheads in our nation’s history saw a different possibility for another world. They lived in a world where they were discriminated against for their sex or race but imagined a time in which that didn’t have to be the case. Like Muñoz and Keeling express in this work, they queered the space – went against what was assumed of them – in order to reach the world they imagined.
