1
2 Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life”How can a relational system be reached through sexual practices? Is it possible to create a homosexual mode of life? ... To be “gay,” I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual, but to try and develop a way of life.
3 From “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies” – Jack HalberstamThe time of reproduction is ruled by a biologcial clock for women and by strict bourgeois rules of respectibility and scheduling for married couples. Obviously, not all people who have children keep or are even able to keep reproductive time, but many and possibly most people believe that the scheduling of repro-time is natural and desirable. Family time refers to the normative scheduling of daily life (early to bed, early to rise) that accompanies the practice of child rearing. This timetable is governed by an imagined set of children’s needs, and it relates to beliefs about children’s health and healthful environments for child rearing. The time of inheritance refers to an overview of generational time within which values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through family ties from one generation to the next. It also connects the family to the historical past of the nation, and glances ahead to connect the family to the future of both familial and national stability. In this category we can include kinds of hypothetical temporality – the time of “what if” – that demands protection in the way of insurance policies, health care, and wills.
4 From “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies” – Jack HalberstamA “queer” adjustment in the way in which we think about time, in fact, requires and produces new conceptions of space. ... By articulating and elaborating a concept of queer time, I suggest new ways of understanding the nonnormative behaviors that have clear but not essential relations to gay and lesbian subjects. ... “queer” refers to nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time. “Queer time” is a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance. “Queer space” refers to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage and it also describes the new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics.
5 Sarah Water, Fingersmith (2002)My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder. People called me Sue. I know the year I was born in, but for many years I did not know the date, and took my birthday at Christmas. I believe I am an orphan. My mother I know is dead. But I never saw her, she was nothing to me. I was Mrs Sucksby's child, if I was anyone's; and for father I had Mr Ibbs, who kept the locksmith's shop, at Lant Street, in the Borough, near to the Thames.
6 Book of Ruth 1:8 And Naomi said unto her two daughters in law, Go, return each to her mother's house: the LORD deal kindly (hesed) with you, as ye have dealt with the dead, and with me. In the Old Testament, hesed is generally attributed to Yahweh. In Ruth however, the three occurences of hesed are mainly connected to human characters. – Kristin Saxegaard
7 from the book of Ruth (KJV)1:11 And Naomi said, Turn again, my daughters: why will ye go with me? are there yet any more sons in my womb, that they may be your husbands? 1:12 Turn again, my daughters, go your way; for I am too old to have an husband. If I should say, I have hope, if I should have an husband also to night, and should also bear sons; 1:13 Would ye tarry for them till they were grown? would ye stay for them from having husbands? nay, my daughters; for it grieveth me much for your sakes that the hand of the LORD is gone out against me.
8 1:16 And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: 1:17 Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.
9 “Female Loyalty: The Biblical Ruth in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not theOnly Fruit,” Laurel Bollinger Unlike Ruth, Jeanette leaves her primary mother figure, but in keeping with the loyalty the Book of Ruth explores, Jeanette returns to continue the relationship. In this, Winterson creates a feminist family romance, where the development of female subjectivity and self-empowerment demands the continuation of the mother-daughter relationship, not its rejection.
10 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of ParodyTwentieth-century art teaches that we have come a long way from the earliest sense of parody as a narrative poem of moderate length using epic meter and language but with a trivial subject. ... The prefix para has two meanings, only one of which is usually mentioned – that of “counter” or “against.” Thus parody becomes an oppostion or contrast between texts. This is presumably the formal starting point fo rthe definiton’s customary pragmatic component of ridicule: one text is ste against another with the intent of mocking or making it ludicrous.
11 Here files of pins extend their shining rows, Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux. - Rape of the Lock
12 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of ParodyHowever, para in Greek can also mean “beside,” and therefore there is a suggestion of an accord or intimacy instead of a contrast. ... There is nothing in parodia that necessitates the inclusion of a concept of ridicule ... Parody, then, in its ironic “trans-contextualization” and inversion, is repetition with difference. A critical distance is implied between the backgrounded text being parodied and the new incorporating work, a distance usually signaled by irony. But this irony can be playful as well as belittling; it can be critically constructive as well as destructive. The pleasure of parody’s irony comes not from humor in particular but from the degree of engagement of the reader in the intertextual “bouncing” (To use E. M. Forster’s famous term) between complicity and distance.