QUEER OBJECTS AND INTERMEDIAL TIMEPIECES

Abstract

This paper takes as its queer object a serialized podcast. With its story about John B. McLemore, a clockmaker from Woodstock, Alabama, S-Town is a blockbuster success from the producers of Serial (2014–16) and This American Life (1995–present) (the seven-part series was downloaded 16 million times in the first week of its release, with that number now exceeding 40 million; see Hess, “‘S-Town’ Attains Podcasting Blockbuster Status,” New York Times 5 Apr. 2017). Against both affirmative and negative reception of S-Town – responses that tend to position the podcast either as transcending or as reproducing the idea of a backwards or lagging South – this paper argues that S-Town is an intermedial narrative incorporating various media that themselves comprise competing temporalities. Indexing these alternative temporalities are the intricate designs of clocks and sundials that tell of mythological time and seasonal and diurnal rhythms. There are also tattoos and other inscriptions that mark both bodies and sundials. My argument attends to the animate and inanimate forms narratively contained within the podcast, touching on Rebecca Schneider’s idea of “inter(in)animation” and Elizabeth Freeman’s challenges to “chrononormativity” in the process. From within this intermedial structure, John emerges as an intermediary whose engagement in processes of self-objectification and historical re-enactment complicates a normative timeframe and confounds conventional subject/object relations. Through a consideration of what I call the queerly intermedial form of the S-Town podcast, the essay looks beyond both discrete forms and regional/national concerns to gesture toward the significance of broader networks and spheres for thinking about time, space and being.

Keywords:

• queer
• intermedia
• time and temporality
• the South

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Rémy Besson discusses the emergence of intermediality as a “strategic response” to the “hyper-specialisation of research in the humanities” (139). Much discussion of intermediality has focused on the form and function of film, including early silent film, in the context of the larger media ecology that film incorporates and to which it is inextricably connected. On the intermediality of film, see Besson; Chamarette; López; Mueller; Shail. For an intermedial reading of theatre, see Chapple and Kattenbelt’s edited collection Intermediality in Theatre and Performance; see also Nelson; Rajewsky. Rosemary Overell writes about the intermediality of television and microblogs. See Edmond for a reading of the intermediality of contemporary podcasting – a narrative form that simultaneously incorporates other media and is itself embedded in globalized digital networks and adds a new dimension to scholarship that has tended to focus on the intermediality of film. My conceptual approach to intermedia aligns most closely with that of Ágnes Pethő as set out in her Cinema and Intermediality.

2 Throughout this essay “intermedia” is a plural noun but in this instance, where I refer to how it functions as “a noun,” I use the singular.

3 William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is an intermedial form with which this essay doesn’t engage, even though it has significance for the theme of time and for the way in which the S-Town episodes are structured. Apart from Brian’s opening reference to Faulkner’s story – it is one of a number of reading materials that John recommends to him – each episode ends with a rendition of The Zombies’ song “A Rose for Emily,” which is based on the story.

4 On the immense popularity of Serial, the This American Life podcast that precedes S-Town, and the immersive qualities of this particular form of audio-drama, see McMurty. In another essay, Richard Berry considers the popularity of Serial in the context of technical change and podcast histories (“A Golden Age of Podcasting?”).

5 This and all subsequent quotes are taken from S-Town’s chapter transcripts, which can be found at<https://stownpodcast.org/>.

6 On regulatory time and the biopolitical management of bodies, see also Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief. In addition to work that investigates the relationship between sexual orientation and normative ideas of time, there is the important scholarship that probes the “metronormativity” (Halberstam) of urban-based queer identity. See in particular Herring; Halberstam. For studies of “queer rurality” that have been published in the wake of Halberstam’s argument about metronormativity, see Colin Johnson as well as Gray, Johnson, and Gilley’s edited collection Queering the Countryside.

7 Following Joan Shelley Rubin and Janice Radway’s influential work, scholarship about middlebrow pivots on the social value (Rubin), as well as gender-inflected denigration (Radway), of literature and art ostensibly made for the purposes of broad accessibility, educative value and social/cultural distinction. That prevailing accounts of middlebrow as “reception practice” tend to focus on the role of literary/aesthetic objects in the context of the larger culture industry can create difficulties for tracking middlebrow across national “borders,” raising “issues such as audience and address, genre and authorship and legibility and universality” (see Galt and Schoonover). The reading of middlebrow as both a mode of reception and a culture-industrial product also tends to overlook the distinct ways in which any given cultural form interacts with other media that, ranging from filmic, journalistic, televisual texts and radio podcasts, may contain elements that contradict the alignment of aesthetic forms with social value.

8 See Leo Bersani’s argument about sado-masochistic practices in Homos. Elizabeth Freeman challenges Bersani’s reading in her chapter “Turn the Beat Around,” in which she explores what she calls the “erotohistoriographic” implications of performances in which “the individual subject’s normative timing is disaggregated and denaturalized” (Time Binds 137).

9 Barthes’s Camera Lucida attends to the specific properties of photography – to what Barthes refers to as the technology’s “own genius” (3) – at the same time as it places photography within a broader spectrum through which the exceptional moment it privileges is questioned. My reading of photography in the context of S-Town as intermedia aims, similarly, to acknowledge photography’s specific qualities while understanding how its elements interact with other media, such as performance/re-enactment. For an inspiring reading of photography as “ec-static visual object” that also draws on Barthes, see Cannon.

10 The date on which John took his own life (22 June 2015) also holds significance in relation to calendar and clock time. In 2015 in the United States, 21 June was the day on which Father’s Day was celebrated – an occasion that signifies in a particular way within the drama, with its implications that Tyler’s relationship to John is one informed by the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his biological father. Similarly, the persistent references to Father’s Day (21 June 2015) rather than to the summer solstice (which takes place over 21/22 June each year in the northern hemisphere) uncannily displace the seasonal rhythms that undergird calendar time.

11 Through its privileging of John’s peculiar perspective on death and decay, the podcast, and this essay, may be guilty of overwriting, for example, the experience of a slave known only by the name Gordon and one whose beating John has re-enacted. Such an approach may similarly be read as fetishizing a certain kind of knowledge, including that of the supposedly knowing investigator or that of the academic scholar whose approach somehow trumps that of the plot-driven binge-listener.