Stepping out of Time: Performing Queer Temporality, Memory, and Relationality in Timelining

摘要

In their performance Timelining, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly explore the ways in which intimate relationships are constituted in time. The performance consists of a memory game in which two performers retrace their shared history as a couple. Throughout the performance, the various actions prompted by the memory game question the unity of the couple, instead casting the performers’ relationship as what I will call a two-togetherness. This article looks at Timelining through the lens of queer temporality to scrutinize the operations of different social experiences of time in the constitution of the couple as a twotogetherness. It then interrogates, investigates, and explores the ways in which the performance undermines normative assumptions about the constitution of intimate relationships within time. By breaking down categories of time and memory, Gerard and Kelly suggest that each intimate relationship, whether normative or queer, is constituted through the impossibility of conforming to normative conceptions of time.