The Crisis of Collage

As a compositional strategy of collaging, juxtaposition involves deliberately putting disparate things/texts next to each other without direct connective material with the belief that they will resonate with each other in some way.

—Kilgard, 2009, p. 15

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My eyes enlarge to the point where my eyebrows are about to shoot off the top of my head, my jaw hangs limp. Walking right next to my mom, we pass a naked gay man with every reason to be proud. I quickly jerk my head to the right toward mom, who assures me “I’m hip. I went to Berkley in the 60s.” After a few steps of reminiscing, she smirks all cool and collected, “I’ve seen it all,” gently bobbing her head. I give her a shoulder bump. Her bright pin that reads “Straight But Not Narrow” seems a semi-accurate representation of her politics, which are best described by the term women’s liber. She supports traditional family structures (husband, wife, 2.5 kids, dog, and a picket fence) as well as radical feminist ideals from the ’70s, such as equal work for equal pay, the right to choose, improved health care for women, more representation of women in all levels of the U.S. government, and so on.

***

We are sitting next to each other in the bleachers among the commotion. Mom is wearing a bougie and uppity visor, like one a tennis player would wear. I feel the need to help her blend in a little, so I stick a little plastic rainbow flag in her visor. Being caught up in the atmosphere of celebration, she smiles and accepts the gift. After all, it is the San Francisco Pride Parade and everyone is wearing something rainbow. She never mentioned why she wanted to take the BART train into the city and participate in the festivities. My guess was that she was trying to show support. I, on the other hand, am a bad gay, for I was going to watch the parade on TV from the comfort of my couch. Don’t get me wrong, I participate in the June festivities, but my calling is the San Francisco Dyke March.

For 3 years I have volunteered on the Old Dykes and Dykes with Disabilities Sub-Committee. We are dedicated to making the Dyke March as accessible as possible, and I enjoy doing the heavy lifting. My responsibilities tend to include roping off a section of the grass with heavy stakes for people with disabilities (and their partners) and laying out carpet upside-down for chairs to easily roll on the grass. I like doing the physical work of lifting things so much that other committee members often call me “the muscle.” Despite my critiques of the committee’s essentialist views of woman and cisgender privileging, the mission of the subcommittee tugs at my White middle-class desire to help.

As I sit on the bleachers with my mom, I become aware of the labor my body did the previous day at the Dyke March. My feet and back feel the strain of being the “muscle.” I look over my shoulder at the Civic Center behind me and question all the physical labor, emotional energy, money, and dedication that go into organizing a large-scale pride parade. I turn back to watch the flow of people parading down Market street, progressing LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) politics.

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Time is often perceived as a natural flow of progression, and many people fail to see the ways time is constructed and for what purposes. Daily schedules, long-term retirement plans, family timelines of biological reproduction, and other chronological structures “naturalize” power inequalities, control, discipline, and other factors that contribute to progress or productivity. As Halberstam (2005) argues, there are conditioned emotional responses to time that contribute to it being “natural.” For example, guilt may be associated with leisure time due to the lack of “productivity” it makes possible. Freeman (2010) agrees that time is systemically naturalized and, consequently, produces a “natural” sense of belonging. For example, when a dyslexic student consistently cannot complete in-class reading assignments in the given time allocations, then the students is often aware of his or her social location and feelings of belonging (or alienation) within educational structures. The many forms of schedules in education work to privilege a specific way and speed of processing information.

Time masks the hidden rhythms of privilege. For people who follow the expectations of normative timelines, it is often difficult to see the systems of privilege that are naturalized by time. When I log onto Facebook and see my friends from high school with their newborn babies and handsome husbands, I often wonder if they are aware of their complacency in heterosexual reproductive structures and the privilege that affords. Then I can not help but smile and gawk at the similar facial features that are passed down from generation to generation, often thinking, “He has his mother’s eyes.”

Time frames daily habits, rituals, and routines in the name of “progress.” It binds bodies to repetitive (re)production—get up in the morning, commute to work, feed the pets or kids, eat lunch (if there is time for lunch), pay the monthly bills, fill out the forms, and so on. According to Freeman (2010), time “binds” our bodies to the arbitrary schedules of capitalism, of heteronormative notions of family, of productivity, of reproductivity, and so on. She writes,

By “time binds,” I mean something beyond the obvious point that people find themselves with less time than they need. Instead, I mean that naked flesh is bound into socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation: binding is what turns mere existence into a form of mastery in a process I’ll refer to as chrononormativity, or the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity. (p. 3)

Thus, chromonormativity entails regulation through a framework of time, which encompasses more than individual bodies and impacts the management of entire populations, communities, and cultures. She suggests chrononormativity as a product of capitalism and, in turn, a mechanism through which to reproduce capitalist ideologies that, in effect, discipline bodies to be “productive.”

Productivity has multiple meanings regarding family biological reproduction and economic progress, and concerning other possible aspects of our lives, for example, knowledge “production” in higher education. In other words, “productivity” can apply to economic production of goods and capital as well as the “family’s” production of more people who will join the workforce and consume products. Muñoz (2009) describes “straight time” (p. 22) in terms of biological reproduction that is co-constitutive with capitalist production. Capitalism requires the family unit to save up for college, to buy a bigger family car, to buy more cell phone lines, to go on family vacations, and to do all the middle-class things required to keep a capitalist supply-and-demand economy running. In addition, children are an investment in the future of our economic system; they are the ones who inherit wealth or the family business, and they make up the workforce.

In these ways, I believe chrononormativity and its focus on the naturalization of time for the purposes of productivity serves as a useful and critical lens to analyze power inequalities. What can we learn about dimensions of identity, such as gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, class, sexuality, and disability, by analyzing time as a normalizing force? How does chrononormativity impact institutions that have material effects on bodies and ideologies? From my positionality as an upper middle class, White, Western, crip queer, cisgender woman, I explore through this collage the intersections of these subjectivities, particularly sexuality and disability, through a framework of time.

Chrononormativity particularly resonates with me because it points to an intersection between disability and queerness. Samuels (2003) addresses some of the concrete connections between LGBT sexuality and disability. For example, LGBT folks and people with disabilities often find themselves in a place where they need to “come out” and tell people about their sexual practices/desires and/or their disability status. This is especially true for people with nonvisible disabilities; however, even people with disability marked on the body are often forced to “explain” their disability, its origins, and its impact on daily life. For me, normative notions of sexuality and able-bodiedness are connected at a site of compulsory and normative embodiment—consequently, disabled bodies and “homosexual” bodies are systematically positioned on the periphery as nonnormative and nonproductive. The medical institution invented the term homosexuality as an impairment, and documented it in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (see American Psychiatric Association, 1980), a listing of psychological diagnoses. In this way, the invention of homosexuality was also the invention of a disability.

“Crip theory” is a framework for analysis that works to denaturalize able-bodiedness and heteronormativity. The theory assumes these realities are constitutively produced within/by social institutions, and crip theory attempts to illuminate the ways that able-bodiedness and heterosexuality are specifically linked. For example, the scientific or medical institution produced discourses asserting that homosexuality was a disability. McRuer (2006) has been very influential in this growing area of inquiry. Drawing on Butler’s “performativity,” he argues that able-bodiedness and heteronormativity are interwoven and produced through a process of repetition in a compulsory system. McRuer contends that compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heteronormativity (the movement toward a form of normative embodiment) are linked in that they are an impossible accomplishment and in their incomprehendability. “They are incomprehensible,” he writes, “in that each is an identity that is simultaneously the ground on which all identities supposedly rest and an impressive achievement that is always deferred and thus never really granted” (p. 9). In addition, they are linked in the ways that they are produced within/by the same social institutions, as I discuss below, they are linked by chrononormativity.

I claim that similar to the heterosexual timeline, or “straight time,” there is also an able-bodied timeline. “Timeline” suggests a linear progression of cultural expectations bound by normative notions of time, expectations that are inherited from prior generations. For example, according to normative notions of time, it should take a student 5 min to read a passage; however, a student with dyslexia or a blind student may need more time to accomplish the task. Drawing on Muñoz’s and McRuer’s emphasis on capitalist implications, chononormativity becomes a useful term to denaturalize normative notions of time and the production of able-bodiedness and heteronormativity. I offer my personal narratives here as a means of challenging normative timelines, particularly in regard to my queerness and dyslexia. I aim to problematize straight and able-bodied timelines through the method of performative collage.

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Looking back on our fight, I try to put the bits and pieces of hurtful words together to make more “productive” understandings. To find a way out of this crisis of meaning, I put the fight in context. When we were on our car trip, my mom had just had two surgeries and was about to start radiation. Breast cancer called into question her mortality, her timeline was coming to an end. Her disability called into question my reproductive timeline, which was also her reproductive legacy. I want to believe that her unexpected attack on my queerness and reproductive choices was the cancer talking. She was not the same person who attended the pride parade with me. Her disability and mortality brought new meanings to my sexuality and reproduction, which all collided in one endless, complicated car ride.

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As a dyslexic scholar, I do not read straight. For example, I do not read straight through a word, a sentence, a paragraph, an essay, or a textbook. When in public, I often “make strange” public signs (to use a phrase that once helped explain the meaning of queer), which can make the world a confusing place. “Medical Arts” more often than not appears to me as “Martial Arts.” When reading a written document, my eyes are often tripped-up by the symbols on the page, and I have to go back and re(read). One of my favorite dyslexic scholars, Granger (2010) does an excellent job of writing about her reading experience:

When I read, I never start from the first word and travel through to the end of the paragraph, and oftentimes even the end of the sentence. Rather, I’ll read in the shape of a spiral. Sometimes I’ll read the first half of the sentence three times before I get to the end of it, and then I start back two sentences before the one I had just completed. I do this because there are many random spellings that make words become incomprehensible. It is as if I’m forever completing a fill in the blank vocabulary quiz, except I don’t have a word bank on hand. Context clues of all kinds become an essential component to reading. In reading, I’m always stopping to tend to my webs, my puzzles, my Rubik’s Cubes. (Lessons in Reading section, para. 1)

Her use of the descriptive terms webs, puzzles, and Rubik’s Cubes resonate with my experience of piecing together symbols as a means of understanding the world.

Collage is the piecing together of distinct texts/bits/images to create a larger picture, leaving space for multiple readings, multiple meanings. The idea of possible readings resonates well with my understanding of dyslexia, specifically the natural ability to apply various meanings to symbols, letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, texts, and so on. Yardley (2008) argues,

The inclusion here of many kinds of text acknowledges that there are multiple ways in which human cognitive networks process information and make creative leaps. This contribution directly presents the case for multi-layered narrative inquiry as a paradigm of ethical activity. (p. 1)

Yardley makes the case that, not only are there different ways of reading texts, but it is ethical to leave space for layered readings. What I find most significant about this method is that collage is based on the idea that there are multiple ways in which the neurological brain functions to make meanings.

In collage, there is not a standard “right” way to read a collection of texts, and collage is not a linear, progressive narrative (similar to queer temporalities). It utilizes juxtaposition and depends on intertextuality. “Intertextuality” is a word commonly used in reference to performance, and, like the term queer, I find it often resists clear definitions. Here, I provide an example particularly relevant to this essay, specific to my concept of “production.” I am trying to address ways in which notions of “production” or “the process of producing” function in different contexts (family, capitalism, disability, queerness, and so on). Collage pieces fragments of different worlds together in an episodic structure allowing the thesis and main points to be present in the subtext; this is the crisis of collage. This crisis allows the reader to wonder and play in the reading process, to make spirals and re-dos. As Kilgard (2009) writes “Collage is the process of becoming” (p. 4), and, like queerness, there are many possible ways to read and re(read) fragments and the process of understanding is never finished. A collage can be read forward and backward, in sections, or in fragments, and with the understanding that there is not a “right” way to proceed.

I am not claiming that collage represents a dyslexic way of knowing, or is trying to display or mimic how a dyslexic scholar may approach a written text. I am particularly drawn to the notion of crisis, for it resonates with my understanding of crisis of meaning. How do I make meaning of the juxtaposition of my mom’s efforts at the Pride Parade and our fight in the car? How do I make meaning in the juxtaposition of being a dyslexic scholar (two words that I rarely find next to each other)? The crisis of collage, or multiple subtextual meanings, is interwoven with Granger’s (2010) description of the scientific approach to naming dyslexia as impairment and the accompanying crisis.

When we pay attention to how I do read and how I do learn, then the previous crisis (how it is that I am not learning) is thrown into crisis. The crisis is no longer about locating or fixing impairments. The new crisis becomes the potential destruction of the boundaries between the mind and body, abled and disabled, smart and stupid, truth and fiction. (p. 2)

The crisis of meaning making has the potential to disrupt binaries and provides a lens to see new possibilities. Through the intertextuality, juxtaposition, seemingly unrelated fragments/bits/pieces, and the crisis of collage, this method provides a potential to re(frame) understandings of experiences and larger social structures.

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Fassett and Warren (2007) describe the process of disciplining bodies through a framework of time as disciplined in higher education. They write, “Foucault calls this effect of power a disciplining of the body—a type of social control whereby, over time, we craft ourselves in the image of the oppressor” (p. 65). Fassett and Warren contend the educational system is like a “machine,” a well-organized process that reproduces itself in its own image by controlling the docile bodies that flow through the knowledge factory. Educational disciplining of bodies includes sitting in rows of desks, raising a hand to speak, asking permission to use the bathroom, lining up after recess, walking in a single file line, as well as promoting (White middle class) cultural beliefs, dominant notions of normativity, socially expectable behaviors, arbitrary standards of intelligence, and so on.

The disciplining is also exemplary of the ways economic institutions function to discipline bodies. Chromonormativity functions to discipline bodies in the academy and keep the well-oiled machine running on time. For example, when the final bell rings it is time for school to let out the students, similar to the “five o’clock whistle,” which indicates it is time for workers to end a long day’s work. If chromonormativity is the regulating through a framework of time that expands past individual bodies and embraces the management of entire populations through institutional restraints, then these institutional systems, economic and educational, function congruently to discipline bodies. The implications of this disciplining have varying degrees of impact on bodies dictated by institutionalized systems of privilege.

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Dad and I are dyslexic, and I feel we share a special form of communication, conversations that only we can understand. My mom and brother sit baffled as we carry on, knowing exactly what we both mean in the conversation. I believe our special communication has something to do with the words we leave out, with what is not spoken . . . but understood. It is clear that this apple did not fall far from the dyslexic tree, and that we are the bad seeds in a gifted and talented family. After all, my mom graduated from Cal Berkeley in the early 1970s, and my dad never went to college. I did not always find our dyslexic way of communicating a special gift; I hated special education. I was schooled into believing my cognitive difference was inherently bad, and I blamed my dad for passing on his learning disabilities. I inherited his cognitive disability, but I did not inherit shame. Shame comes from the educational institution.

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One time, my dad and I were working together to replace the carpet in the living room and hallway. Dad is a roofing contractor, and I believe he can build or fix anything around the house. We were repairing the spots where the boards in the floor made squeaky noises. While I was getting a tool, dad wrote “skweek” on the floor to mark all the spots where the floor squeaked. He must have spelled the word “squeak” at least five different ways—a few of them started with s.k.w. With a loud and obnoxious voice, I pronounced all the words phonetically “skwak” “squwik” and laughed at what I felt were stupid mistakes. My mom shushed me. I did not realize what I was doing.

I know now that there was a way in which I was accessing power, a false sense of empowerment that comes from dishing out the same insults I often endured—my peers mocked my intelligence and laughed at my pronunciation mistakes. In effect, I was doing what I was taught; I was completing the cycle of discipline, a cycle of maintenance in the educational system. I looked at my dad, but he just looked down. We both looked at the words written on the floor and paused for a moment. He was waiting to be corrected, which was an all too familiar feeling for me. He was waiting for the proper spelling, but we both had no idea how to spell the word “squeak.” Without saying anything, he went to the hall to finish marking the floor, and I reflected on the way I schooled him. This was not the first time I insulted his intelligence. Strangely, he often seemed unaware of his disability, and I was fixated on mine. I wanted to be “normal” so bad. I was repeatedly compelled to perform the “perfect student.” I played the role so well; I started disciplining others.

As I later walked down the hall, I noticed my dad marked the squeaks on the floor with an “X” as opposed to writing the word. I had silenced my dad’s expression, his communication. I was teaching him my stigma. Why didn’t he ever scold me? Why didn’t he ever say anything? Maybe it has something to do with the words we left out, with what was not spoken . . . but understood.

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Who will inherit the white picket fence and the dog? Queer time emerges from postmodernism and is a specific mode of temporality that deviates from the hegemonic “temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 6). Queer subcultures, Halberstam suggests, create queer temporalities that deviate from the paradigmatic markers of life experiences—birth, marriage, reproduction, and death. Queer time veers from the “natural” progression of time, and the natural progression is mirrored after bourgeois timelines, expectations, and norms. For example, many queers form families outside of the traditional structure of two parents and offspring, that is, two dads, two moms, and a dad co-parenting, a non-cisgender parent, queer parents, and on and on and on. For the most part, at this point in time, same-sex couples can not biologically reproduce a child in the “traditional” sense. In many U.S. cultures, the normative bloodline and reproduction of family is vital to all the major markers of life experiences. However, class privilege helps reinforce this chrononormativity, for example, paying ridiculous amounts of money for a destination wedding, or buying a daughter a new car on graduating from college, or sending a son to Europe after high school, or inheriting the family business when dad retires. These are all important events in a child’s timeline that are marked/celebrated with monetary gifts, contributing to a classist market that is designed specifically to capitalize on significant temporal life experiences. The power inequalities embedded in capitalism are particularly evident when it comes to inheritance, and by “inheritance,” I mean passing on biological characteristics as well as wealth.

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It is about 1:30 p.m. on Friday afternoon at 1618 San Pablo Avenue in Berkley, California, and that means all the work is done for the week. The estimates have all been typed, the contracts have been signed, the materials have been ordered, the phone calls have been made, and, most importantly, the men have been paid. It is time for lunch, and lunch really means happy hour. Dad keeps a bottle of Centenario, sipping tequila, in the bottom drawer of his desk along with a collection of semi-clean plastic shot glasses. As part of the weekly ritual, the person sitting at dad’s desk (the desk that once belonged to my grandfather and will soon be my brother’s) takes out each plastic shot glass and reads the name scribbled on the cup with indelible ink. “Who’s cup is this? Ernie! Ernie’s here!” so the cup marked Ernie is placed on the desk. Ernie is the United Postal Service (UPS) man who used to deliver to the office before they changed his route. Now he is just good friends with my brother, Nick. Scott’s glass is eventually found and placed on the desk. Scott works part-time answering the phones, and he never misses a Friday lunch. “Nick is here. Here’s his cup.” “Tarcio is not here today,” so his cup goes back in the drawer. “Where is Julie’s cup? Here it is!” It was in the way back of the drawer. I am usually not at the Friday lunches due to my hectic work schedule at the nonprofit. I happen to be passing by THE office on my way from my office in Oakland to my other office in Richmond. In our family there is only one office, THE office. In 1946, it housed Seal-Tite Roofing, my grandfather’s roofing business, and my father opened his business, Nicholas Roofing, sometime in the 80s in the very same office space. It is THE office.

We all gather around the desk chatting, and my brother, Nick, starts talking about remodeling the space. After all, he is going to take over the family business one day, so it makes sense to have a few alterations done to the office, especially in the bathroom. The small sink mounted to the wall has two spider-shaped, miss-matched handles for hot and cold water. Tar and grease stain the cracks in the porcelain reminiscent of decades of roofers washing their grimy hands at the end of a long day’s work. A loud familiar FLUSH sound comes from the bathroom followed by my dad’s voice, yelling “NO! Not the sink.” He rushes out of the bathroom wiping the water from his hands in a swirling motion. “No, man. You can’t change that sink!” pleads my dad, staring at the gathering of neighborhood guys all ready for the Friday lunch ritual. “We can’t get rid of that sink.” Then he starts his monologue. “My father washed his hands in that sink! Uncle Frankie washed his hands there, too.” He makes washing gestures with his hands as he remembers all the people who have passed through THE office.

My brother Gerald, Uncle Tony, all characters, there was this one guy who would stink up the bathroom so bad, we all had to wait outside the office way over near the dump truck until it was safe to come back inside.

He stomps his foot in the ground as he laughs at the memories. “Hey, you guys” gesturing to my brother and me, “when you were kids, you washed your hands in that sink, too! Heck, when I was a kid, I washed my hands in that sink! No way man, we can’t get rid of the sink!”

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For Freeman (2010) the heterosexual, normative timeline serves the economic interests of the state. In the United States, the state, in some cases, licenses, registers, and documents birth, which then dictates citizenship, social security, and taxpaying. Marriage, or state-recognized relationships, privatizes caretaking and is historically an economic arrangement. Death terminates the economic agreement between state and individual and distributes any leftover monies down the familial line. In her discussion of the ways in which time binds, Freeman writes,

In the eyes of the state, this sequence of socioeconomically “productive” moments is what it means to have a life at all . . .. The logic of time-as-productivity thereby becomes one of serial cause-and-effect: the past seems useless unless it predicts and becomes material for the future. (p. 5)

In other words, to have a life at all, one must be productive in ways that the state can recognize. This is a state-influenced example of chrononormativity that leaves me with a number of questions about family legacy: How do I conceptualize “inheritance” or “legacy?” What is worthy of being calling “inherited?” And how does time influence this cultural focus on family, loss, and legacy?

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My hands grip the stirring wheel as I keep my head straight forward, looking for identifiable landmarks. My body is tense, not only by the need to keep my foot on the gas, hands on the wheel, and eyes on the road, but also by the conversation. I am starting to feel lost in the argument, trying to find new words to express the same thing over and over again. Looking for the Benicia Bridge, but only seeing quick glimpses of speed limit signs, my eyes widen as my foot applies more pressure on the gas.

We are going nowhere in this endgame. “I wanted to see my only daughter pregnant.” My mom’s voice cracks, and I can picture myself jumping out of the car and rolling on the shoulder of the highway. I am pretty sure I would see tears if I looked at her. She finally spits out what’s really on her mind after talking way too long about a topic we are both not ready to address: “I am grieving the loss of the child I thought I had. Why can’t you be normal?” Not knowing what to say . . . out pops, “But I’m a normal queer.” I think my response is priceless. Unfortunately, she did not get my humor in the contradiction inherent in “normal queer” (notwithstanding the literature on homonormativity).

She continues down a horrible road, “You have to parade your queerness in front of your father and me. You were kissing your girlfriend at the Raiders game in front of us on purpose, to rub it in our faces.” It is like she finally figured out how to use the Internet and happened to stumble on the quintessential homophobic rhetoric. She adds “you know, your father and I are the most accepting people in our church.” REALLY? That’s your argument? I can’t even begin to respond. Where’s the bridge?!?! This whole car trip is a bad rendition of Waiting for Godot. Are we there yet? Are we there yet!?!

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A few days later, I called the house, and my dad answered. I asked him how mom liked the Pride festivities. His initial reaction was an impulsive, “Yes, she had a good time.” Then his voice slowed and took an unexpected turn. He accused me of making mom walk all over the city. I admitted that the day involved quite a bit of walking. The festivities were spread out and required us to walk some long distances. I reminded him that she insisted on taking the BART into the city. While saying this I simultaneously felt guilt for dragging her around looking for my friends. He said mom’s feet and lower body hurt so badly she could not get out of bed the next day. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that her arthritis was getting so bad. I didn’t know the physical sacrifices she made, walking all over the Civic Center looking for my queer friends and their son.

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For me, the pride parade is exemplary of a White middle-class, Western notion of being “out and proud.” There are many culturally specific ways to perform one’s sexuality that do not involve a verbally articulated version of a gay (Western) identity. Coming out publicly is not always the best option, or the only way to be a “gay activist.” Pride parades have a hidden rhythm “forms of temporal experience that seem natural to those whom they privilege” (Freeman, 2010, p. 3). It is a privilege and a risk to be out and proud walking the streets with multicolored balloons. The rhythm of the march caters to specific bodies who benefit from certain class privileges, that is, being able to make the trip into the city, taking the time off work, finding lodging that is not overpriced in the area, and having some sort of social connection that enables participation in the parade as a walker, a vendor, a musician, and so on. On one hand, I find the parade to be an important celebration of visibility, and on the other hand, I worry that the money to fund the festivities could have been used, for example, on legislation to stop gender and sexuality discrimination in the workplace.

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Collage also has the power to put everything into question by removing texts from one (perhaps familiar) context and putting them in another. This calls on the audience to participate in the act of questioning, asking them to examine their own associations and experiences with the constitutive elements of the collage as well as the themes, ideas, and texts themselves presented in the collage work. (Kilgard, 2009, p. 4)

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In May, my brother is marring his girlfriend/fiancé/partner/special person. I am very happy for him. With the family business and a wife, his timeline is set, which is a relief for the entire family. Also, I secretly hope they participate in heterosexual reproduction; I really want to be an aunt.

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“If queer theorists have agreed on anything, it is that, for queer thought to have any specificity at all, it must be characterized by becoming, the constant breaking of habits” (McCallum & Tuhkanen, 2011, p. 10). We are always becoming. I find that queer theorists throw this term around like yesterday’s copy of the Advocate. All joking aside, I wonder about queer’s future. What if we are always becoming and “the possibility of one’s becoming is something other than queer” (McCallum & Tuhkanen, 2011, p. 11)? McCallum and Tuhkanen (2011) draw on Butler’s performativity to explain their notion of “unbecoming” (p. 11). If we are produced through stylized acts of repetition, then we are always becoming. The unintelligibility of queerness (and I would add able-bodiedness) and their refusal to adhere to the regulatory regimes creates a space for queer (and able-bodied) unbecomings. They write,

Becoming is figured not so much as a narrative of self-development, a bildungsroman, but embraced as constant change to the limits, norms, and constraints on intelligibility that hem in and define a subject. Insofar as her work undoes the subject of becoming—countering ontology through language as well as through the cultural semiotics of sexual differences—Butler opens up the space to think queer becoming as unbecoming, as a question of the lack of fit, the difficulties of interpretation, the moments of textual resistance or of unintelligibility that scholars in literary, film, and cultural studies wrestle with in their work. (p. 10)

(I recommend you read the above quote again, but this time, read the sentences in reverse order. I always find it helpful to re(read) backward anything related to Butler.) I understand queer unbecoming as a queering of intelligibility, or moments of resistance to or deviation from dominate notions of normative gender and sexuality. As McRuer (2006) argues, compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness are linked in their mutual unintelligibility and in incompressibility. How might we conceptualize a crip queer unbecoming? How might we identify a queering of intelligibility?

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I am lost in the endless flow of people smiling and waving. The parade seems to be repeating itself, so recognizable from last year. The same cheerleaders, the same liberated (usually White) bodies doing cartwheels down Market St. In my trance, I become aware of the hidden rhythms of the pride parade—the stomping of feet, the beats of the drum, the long multicolored balloons attached to briefs, the convertible cars where the powerful sit and wave, the recycled float after float after float after . . . .

Suddenly my mother erupts like a happy little volcano. Looking up at her in her bougie visor, as she cheers at the top of her lungs, bouncing up and down without letting her feet leave the bleachers. Her arms are stretched out as if she could actually touch the float from our seat at the top. Dazed for a minute by her reaction, I eventually stand up to see . . . the Planned Parenthood float. Bouncing, my mom yells “The pill set us free. Yea! Planned Parenthood! YEA, Planned Parenthood! The pill set us free! WAHHHHH!” Oh my goodness, it is so “unbecoming of a lady” to jump around and yell at Planned Parenthood. Again, my jaw hangs limp, as my wide eyes look up at her, I see her in a new light. My mom is a sexual being. My mind instantly recalls the first few conversations I had with my mother about sexuality and morality. I asked her, “Do I have to wait until I am married to live with a boyfriend? Well, that’s what they say in Sunday school.” She responded quickly with “No, you need to know if you are compatible before you get married.” Then I asked if I needed to wait until I was married to have sex. She had the exact same reply as my first question. Gazing up at her yelling on the bleachers, I wonder what she means by the “pill set us free.” Maybe she was simply free to have sex without the fear of pregnancy, which was a big deal at the time. My mom is a sexual being, and I am not sure why this was so unintelligible before. The realization brings a big grin to my face and my head gently nods—talk about pride. I jump up, stretch out my arms toward the float, and join her in cheering as loud as I can. “YEA Planned Parenthood! WAHHHHH!” PLANNED PARENTHOOD!!!

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Freeman (2010) argues that the disciplining of “timing” engenders a sense of belonging, and this sense of belonging feels natural. For me, time as a framework for critical analysis helps me to denaturalize the structures that work to hold power inequalities in place. Time is another lens through which to see the ways regulatory regimes compel bodies toward the impossible accomplishment of normativity. When I fail to repeat and (re)produce, that is, when I fail to follow institutional timelines, I know it. For instance, as a dyslexic student, when I am not finished with the test within the allotted time, or when I cannot keep up with reading assignments, I feel the implications of normative naturalized timelines. It takes me longer because I don’t read straight; I jump around from fragment to fragment to make meaning, I naturally “make strange” texts. Granted, I recognize that normative frameworks of time impact bodies differently and with various levels of severity, due to power inequalities and systems of privilege. This essay is, in part, an exploration of my own sense of belonging (and privilege) as an effort to denaturalize normative frameworks of time.

I hope my collage of bits and pieces functions as, with Alexander (2000), a “generative autobiography”; that is, I hope it will inspire you, readers, to be reflexive and make connections to your own experiences of time, belonging, and family. There are many ways to read the intertextuality and juxtaposition in life experiences. Similarly, following Kilgard (2009), my aim is to encourage readers to engage with collage, a process asking readers to actively do this critical work of making connection through “intertextuality.” This is our essay, our performance, and the possibilities are endless.

This essay has entailed weaving these bits and pieces together with theories of queer temporalities in collage. I see aspects of my personal narratives as exemplary of what Halberstam (2005) calls “temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction” (p. 6; capitalist-driven productivity/consumption and family reproduction), with all its negative implications and privilege. I also see aspects of my personal narratives that work to queer chrononormativity in some productive ways. What do you see?

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My mom and I are trying to meet up with my good friends Becky, Danielle, and their young son, Sam. It is difficult for us to maneuver through the crowds of visibly happy people. The San Francisco Pride festivities encompass a large area of the Civic Center. Large, outdoor stages and surrounding streets are full of vendors and organization tables. Mom and I wander through the celebration of rainbows looking for Sam’s stroller, and we stop at the table for PFLAG (Parents, Family, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). I am eager to tell her the mission of the organization, but my words stumble and fumble out of my mouth. “Hey, ya know, ah . . . you might see if there is . . . ya know, something in Lafayette?” But she shows very little interest in engaging in dialogue with other parents of gays and lesbians. Instead, I gently attach a pin to her blouse that reads, “Straight But Not Narrow.” We head for the other side of the Civic Center to the drink vendors to find my queer family. With both hands holding margaritas, we all head back to the very top bench of the bleachers to witness the procession of excited paraders.

Sam is only 5 years old and can not see the parade over the tall people in front of us. He eventually finds his way to my lap. Even with his neck and back stretched long, he still can not see. Squirming in my lap, he stomps and pulls on me like he would a climbing structure. He works his way onto my shoulders and perches there with his little hands wrapped under my chin. We can finally see; we are both happy.

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I acknowledge and appreciate the work that the collage structure of this essay demands of you, the reader. There are no “guarantees of meaning” (37), at least not in the sense of many traditional essays that have one clear and specific thesis statement that you can walk away articulating. The thesis is in the gaps, in the juxtapositions, and in the (perhaps miraculous) possibilities of the meaning-making process. It is in the crisis of collage. (Kilgard, 2009, p. 2)