Just in time

The new issue of GLQ, guest edited by Beth Freeman, is on queer temporalities. The introduction provides a really generous and comprehensive snapshot of available work on time (and its pleasing to see medieval and early modern reference points here) and work which is only now emerging or forthcoming--(co)incidentally I've just finished Tom Boellstorff's A Coincidence of Desires" Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia (Duke University Press, 2007) which argues for the "coincidence" of anthropology and queer studies, for a reparative deontologization of time and for queer hope as a method, an "optimism of the intellect" among other things in an extraordinarily rich argument. Medievalists and early modernists are well represented among the essays too: Carolyn Dinshaw and Carla Freccero participate in a roundtable discussion on queer temporalities with Judith Halberstam, Lee Edelman, Christopher Nealon, Roderick Ferguson and Nguyen Tan Hoang the highlights of which are Freccero describing herself as a "future dead person" and Edelman refusing a sweet "dollop" of "messianic hope". There is also an essay by Kathleen Biddick on Christian martyrdom which brings out many of the issues which have preoccupied us here recently including spectrality and seems especially urgent for any of us thinking about global politics and race right now. Go get absorbed in it if you have...