Queer generativity: temporal collisions of Fred Astaire’s Dancing Lessons

ABSTRACT

This essay queers the concept of generativity through the multimedia staging of the performance Fred Astaire’s Dancing Lessons. The analysis enlists Pryor’s framework of time slips to examine specific moments and choices in the performance that disrupt normative temporality, interrogate the durability of youthism in queer cultural discourse, and gesture to alternative potentials for intergenerational relations. The essay demonstrates how performative methods offer unique strategies to unearth audience commitments and entrenched cultural patterns that discipline and foreclose queer aging and cross-generational community.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer
• generativity
• temporality
• gay male aging
• queer performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This prioritization on youth is different, yet is tethered, to Edelman’s work on the linkage between The Child and futurity. Edelman’s reproductive futurism conceptualizes the idealized symbolic yet-to-be-born child, who maintains a perpetual claim to discourses of future and hope. Queers are constructed as anti-child, those not fighting for the future, and the people without a future. Edelman’s delightful and controversial “fuck the waif from Les Mis” (29) anti-future project has been examined as a privileged posture that many queers, particularly queers of color and gender non-conforming queers, cannot access (Muñoz).

2 Emmer asserts the notion of “meta-generation” to name and examine a different form of generational arrangement at work in ACT-UP Philadelphia. Through this space, Emmer discusses different ways of thinking and approaching generation. Emmer notes how in ACT-UP Philadelphia, history is not only passed on, or “transmitted” from one generation to the next, but rather is discussed, processed, criticized, engaged from multiple vantage points and approaches.

3 My experiences as a white gay male, growing up in primarily urban gay spaces (Chicago, Phoenix, Los Angeles), and the impact of representation in formative popular culture are centralized in FADL. While these narratives speak to how youthism operates within those spaces, this should not be taken to suggest alternative queer spaces, experiences, or representations cannot and do not offer up different commitments and relational configurations. In recent years, several texts like The Beginners, Pose, and Looking have offered more challenging intergenerational and diversified gay aging representations. For example, research has argued lesbian and gay aging processes and cultural meanings around age mark important distinctions and should not be conflated (Gabbay and Wahler). Or, as one inspirational example, the Mobile Homecoming Experimental Archive, as discussed by Gumbs and Wallace, reflects an intergenerational celebration of black LGBTQ black thinkers, writers, and community that enacts a deep love and connection with LGBTQ elders and histories, and their connections to the future.