metalepsis comprises a “compressed chain of metaphorical reasoning.”66 Metalepsis can be rhetorically powerful (as has been shown to be the case in Shakespearean drama),67 but nonetheless is vulnerable to critique as fuzzy logic. Freccero, for instance, suggests that metalepsis is particularly queer and theoretical: “the reversal signified by the rhetorical term metalepsis could be seen to embody the spirit of queer analysis in its willful perversion of notions of temporal propriety and the reproductive order of things. To read metaleptically, then, would be to engage in queer theorizing.”68 More interested in its status as a repressed or failed rhetorical device, Menon uses metalepsis as an interpretive crux for reading absent sex scenes in Shakespearean drama, scenes of implied consummation, which, despite their failure to be staged, nonetheless link social cause to tragic effect. While there is much to admire in the way these critics demonstrate that “the ‘farfetched’ nature of metalepsis telescopes time so that the far appears near, and vice versa,”69 their willingness to “embrace the accusation of metalepsis”70 fails to translate into a cogent defense of metalepsis as a mode of queer argument.
To the contrary: a metaleptic sleight of hand enables the ground of critique to keep shifting.71 At times, it seems that the allegation of teleology is directed against scholars who invoke any form of sexual identity, even one located in the present, and even if construed as indeterminate and internally riven. At other times, the accusation appears aimed at scholars’ attempts to track terms, concepts, and forms of intelligibility by means of the temporal frame of chronology or diachrony. At times, it appears that the complaint is scholars’ failure to treat sex solely as representation, an interpretative choice that renders them immediately vulnerable to charges of empiricism and positivism. At other times, the indictment widens to encompass the entire discipline of history and the concerns and methods of historians. Through an on-again, off-again associational reasoning dedicated to the wholesale rejection of alterity-cum-heterotemporality, these investments mingle, come together, merge, and sometimes fall apart.
Recognizing that such rhetorical maneuvers underpin the charge of teleology,72 we might be justified in asking just what forms of similarity are being celebrated and what kinds of difference are discarded. A case in point is the talismanic invocation of “the homo.” Despite the catchy phrase “homohistory,” it remains unclear how expanding the possibilities of “the homo,” “with all its connotations of sameness, similarity, proximity, and anachronism,” automatically enacts resistance to “a present assumed identical to itself.” Nor is it clear why “the homo” necessarily would be queerer than alterity, unless the corresponding shorthand of “hetero” is so essentialized as to be always already normativizing. Might historical alterity not sometimes offer its own pleasures (as well as accurately describe certain pre- and early modern modes of intelligibility)? How is it that “the homo” signifies similarity and identification across time while simultaneously signifying resistance to any such identification with sexual categories in the present? Just what is conveyed, in psychic, social, temporal, formal, and historical terms, by the über-concepts “homo” and “hetero”? How much analytical weight and presumed congruence can these master terms and their pseudocognates bear? To what extent are they in sync, when, and why? In these scholars’ hands, “homo” and “hetero” serve as mobile conceptual lynchpins, used theoretically to suture together diverse phenomena; but they fail to attach to, much less elucidate, specific social conditions or material embodiments.
Sexuality, the diverse enactments of erotic desire and physical embodiment; temporality, the various manifestations of time; and history, historicism and historiography, the aggregate repertoire of cognitive and affective approaches to the past, are not intrinsically connected. Neither straight identity nor heterosexual desire is the same as linear time. Not every diachronic or chronological treatment of temporality need be normativizing, nor is every linear arc sexually “straight.” A scholar’s adherence to chronological time does not, in and of itself, have any necessary relationship to sexuality, much less to sexual normativity. Neither does a scholar’s segmentation of time into periods. The act of periodizing is of routinized professional significance, functioning for many historians and literary critics as rote convenience, not to mention a structure underlying the academic job market. It is worthwhile to question the value of any conceptualization that has been reified in this way, as well as to insist that scholars recognize their complacency and complicity with its arbitrary application. Periodization produces some unfortunate effects, including misrecognitions of the exemplarity and/or novelty of one’s chosen purview, as well as falsely universalizing claims based on ignorance of what scholars concerned with other times actually do. But conventional periods are only one way to slice and dice the past; time, conceived as “the phenomenal ordering of events,”73 is both ontological and epistemological; as such, it can be segmented in multiple ways, with the concept of “the period” changing according to the question and time frame considered.74 To periodize is not, in and of itself, a brief on behalf of a particular method. Although it has become common to refer to the act of periodization as “not simply the drawing of an arbitrary line through time, but a complex practice of conceptualizing categories, which are posited as homogeneous and retroactively validated by the designation of a period divide,”75 the identity that periodicity imposes need not be inevitably problematic—as long as it is understood to be contingent, manufactured, invested, and not produced by othering what came before. The wholesale characterization of periodization as a straightening of the past races over such issues while making light of historical contingency—that is, the ways in which practices, representations, and discourses happen to gather in particular places and times.
Although certain problematic allegiances among sexuality, temporality, and historiography do exist—as when invocations of the future are enrolled in the service of reproductive generation76—these links, far from being immanent in either sex or time, are historically and discursively produced. If temporality has been harnessed to reproductive futurity, this is due to an operation of ideology, not to the formal procedures of diachronic method (which, while not exempt from ideology, is not the same thing as ideology). However coimplicated, mutually reinforcing, and potentially recursive, the relations of sex to time are the effects of a historical process, not the preconditions to history. We thus need to ask: by which analytical and material processes do history and historiography become teleological, heterotemporal, or straight?
History is polytemporal not only because each synchronic moment is riddled with multiple, and sometimes contradictory, asynchronicities, but because time, like language, operates simultaneously on synchronic and diachronic axes. Although it is true, as Menon argues, that “time does not necessarily move from past to future, backward to forward,”77 it also is true that time moves on. Any ethics we might wish to derive from a consideration of temporality must contend with the irreducible force of time’s movement on our bodies, our species, and the planet.78 Queer or not, we remain in many respects in time. Analytics dedicated to charting time’s cultural logics can be organized via lines, curves, mash-ups, juxtapositions. Nonetheless, writing the history of sexuality by means of asynchronicities located within a synchronic frame or by vaulting over huge expanses of time may bypass chronology, but it generally fails to break out of the binary of “then” and “now” that thus far has constituted queer studies’ engagement with the past.79
The sequential process that constitutes diachrony is, I would argue, a crucial and often tendentious element of sex, texts, and history. Sequence is a formal elaboration, made possible by a syntactical arrangement, the purpose of which is to imply connections, highlight or manage disconnections, and drive a temporal movement along. But sequence in one domain—for instance, narrative or poetic form—may or may not equate to, or even imply, sequence in another—such as that which structures erotic concepts like “foreplay” and “consummation.” What is the relationship between unconventional literary or cinematic form and queer eroticism? How and why might the operations of sexuality and form be coincident, and what is at stake in apprehending them as identical?80 What mechanism or process—aesthetic, erotic, political, historical—enables
