Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeIssues20-4Queer Temporalities, Beat Times

Queer Temporalities, Beat Times

Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo and Juan Antonio Suárez

Full text

  • 1 Among the few exceptions to this is Jamie Russell’s Queer Burroughs (2001), which remains the most (...)

1The two terms of our title have long been destined for each other but, in the style of a Hollywood romantic comedy, have taken their sweet time to merge in an embrace. This special issue wants to be a setting for such a moment. We come into this with a double-pronged hypothesis: that “Beat time” is queer time, as it disrupts and rearranges the chronological patterns of straight society, and that recent critical work on queer temporality—the particular rhythms and tempos of queer minorities—can tell us much about what is at stake in the Beats’ relation with time. This intervention wants to fill in a critical void. Separately, both the peculiar temporalities and the queerness of Beat writing have been intermittently acknowledged, but their mutual resonance—the queerness of Beat time—is virtually absent from the scholarly literature. This is because most scholarship on the Beats has—surprisingly—tended to steer clear of what in the last two and a half decades has been called queer theory—which we prefer to call “queer analysis.”1 A further reason is that discussions of the Beat writers have long privileged the spatial dimension of their work.

2Beat spatiality is often dominated by tropes of movement and travel. From the constant motility of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to William Burroughs’s itinerant decades (New York, Texas, Mexico, Tangiers, Paris, London, New York), and from Allen Ginsberg’s well-documented travels around India with Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger, to Snyder and Kyger’s long sojourns in Japan, and to Anne Waldman’s personal mapping of the world in her epic Iovis, motion has been a—if not the—defining characteristic of the Beat ethos. It is then logical that spatial discourses have dominated much of the scholarly debate on the work of the Beat Generation, producing a substantial body of work built around Spatiality Studies. Combining insights from geography, urban studies, sociology, and cultural theory, what has been called the “spatial turn” in the humanities has fruitfully engaged the Beats as dissident wanderers and dwellers who both recorded and creatively inhabited public and private spaces, non-places, junk spaces, borderlines and liminal locations, and heterotopias, even if they did so in terms that reproduced the gender politics of their time, with men largely on the move and women mostly at home (Wolff, Johnson). By contrast, the temporal dimension of Beat literature has remained fairly understudied. While many Beat poets and artists traveled far and wide—on both physical and psychedelic trips—their work also established new forms of thinking not only about space, but also about time.

3Erik Mortenson’s Capturing the Beat Moment offers a necessary counterbalance to the spatial bias in Beat scholarship by shifting attention to Beat temporality. Mortenson argues that the Beats’ investment in spontaneity, immediacy, and presence—in what he calls “the Beat moment”—is not a mere stylistic choice but a deliberate response to the alienation and mediation of postwar American culture. Temporal disruptions were central to the Beats’ cultural politics: they challenged dominant social rhythms and offered a counter-model to the tightly regimented temporal patterns of Cold War America. As Mortenson puts it, “the Beats combated repressive spatial and temporal limitations derived from the workplace, the suburb, and the cold war with an insistence on spontaneous, lived experience that sought to redefine space-time as a fluid, personal conception.” (11)

4At the same time, the Beats’ “fluid” space-time was not only a “personal conception” acted out in individually “lived experience.” It also operated at supra-personal scales—the scales of cultural, communal and historical time, in which the Beats discerned loops and repetitions, time folds, anachronisms, and heterochronies. They revived old cultural repertoires in order to open gateways to the prophetic, the ecstatic, and the mythic in modern ordinariness, and they folded together past and present, keeping older energies and cultural memories alive and endowing their moment with temporal depth. Such forms of disjointedness and untimeliness could not be adequately measured or contained by the isochronous ticking of the clock and the regular turning of calendar pages.

5These temporal dislocations and untimely convergences are most evident in a visual work like Wallace Berman’s film Aleph (1958-1976). Composed in 8mm over nearly two decades and eventually interrupted by Berman’s untimely death, it is a rapid montage of the everyday, the pop, the mystical, and the transcendent. It combines quotidian takes of his wife, son, and friends (one of them, Robert Alexander, is glimpsed shooting up in the last scene of the film) with close-ups of pop idols (Flash Gordon, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan), with Berman’s own verifax works, and with the effigies of contemporary politicians filmed off newsprint and television screens, all periodically overwritten with Hebrew and Latin letters and effaced with scratches and black stains. The film weaves together cyclical domesticity with the linear time of public life, the euphoric surges of pop culture, the private epiphany of individual drug-taking, recurring damage to the emulsion, and evocations of ancient Jewish mysticism that return as periodic incantations, especially through the repetition of the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet—aleph. The letter, which gives the film its title, symbolizes in Kabbalistic lore unity between the transcendent and worldly and, by extension, between their respective time signatures. And the breakneck speed of the montage suggests the elusiveness of experience subject to these discordant tempos.

6Much of this varied temporal dissidence can be directly tracked to the Beats’ queerness: to their cultivation of “a spiritual kinship with those on the margins of society” (Newhouse 3), of an outrider tradition (Waldman, Outrider), or of a “contraband, outlaw character” (Stephenson 1) that was powerfully inflected by sexual non-conformity. Beat sexual dissent predates the identity politics of the sexual-liberation era—predicated upon homosexual or lesbian self-identification, transparency, and visibility—and was instead incidental, unlabeled and casual. It ranged from the frank homosexuality of Ginsberg, Burroughs or Harold Norse—whose outness foreshadowed 1970s-style gayness—to intermittent bisexuality and to forms of heterosexuality and eroticism that shunned the narrow molds of postwar respectability and, at the same time, had not yet found a political dimension or a language or communal revolt, as they would in the 1990s under the queer conceptual umbrella.

7Queer theory emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s as an attempt to explore this breadth of deviance. It went beyond the vindication of homosexuality to defend that variable object choice and changeable gender identification are characteristic of all sexuality. It defended that all sexuality is, at bottom, in Freud’s famous expression, “polymorphously perverse” and that gender is malleable and performative, not an essential, fixed subjective attribute. And it further explored the varied ways in which sexual and gender heterodoxy—the lack of alignment between sexual morphology, desire, and gender identification—informed cultural production. Queer analysis gradually expanded its critical scope from the body and its cultural representations to the way in which the faultlines and instabilities of sexuality permeated all aspects of social and cultural life. It acted on Eve K. Sedgwick’s generative claim that “virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition” (3)—which could be broadened today to the distinction between “normative/non-normative sexual and gender definition.” Taking up this suggestion, queer analysis explored the entanglement of sexuality with race and ethnicity, class, nationality, citizenship, and migrant and diasporic status. And going beyond bodily marks of identity, it also examined how sex informs such basic categories of experience as space or time. Queer spatial studies, for example, showed that sexuality was spatially regimented (surveyed, zoned, confined to privacy) and that sexual minorities sought to avoid such regulation in order to create niches for pleasure, survival, and kinship. And analyses of queer temporality, in turn, showed that queer experience operates on its own distinctive clock and calendar, running against what Elizabeth Freeman has called “chrononormativity” (2007, 2010). Queer time debunked the homogeneous, linear time of the state and the progress-oriented sense of history; it rejected normative biographical arcs; it regarded the future ambivalently; and had a peculiar relationship with the past and with memory.

8It is difficult for minorities to conceive historical time as a linear vector pointing towards progress. Heather Love and Ann Cvetkovich have noted that queer experience abundantly features the non-linear, the circular, the interrupted, and the backward. In their biographical span the Beats witnessed various changes in sexual mores. In their early youth, they experienced the transition from the relatively lax war years to the repressive post-war decades, overshadowed by the red scare and a parallel homosexual scare that led to wide-ranging witch hunts and the eventual banning of homosexuals from Federal jobs (D’Emilio, Terry). Yet their middle years saw a gradual opening that has often been credited to their influence. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, “Howl” and Naked Lunch were cleared of obscenity charges in landmark decisions that redefined obscenity and virtually helped overturn Comstock laws and censorship legislation. Barely a decade later, the Stonewall Inn riots of June 1969 in New York City ushered into the sexual liberation movement that became consolidated in the following decade. Seventies activism achieved some legislative milestones and growing acceptance and visibility for homosexuals, but the spread of AIDS in the early 1980s triggered a homophobic reaction abetted by conservative moralism. This succession of forward and backward steps showed that, for minorities at least, progress always comes at a cost, it is often partial, and invites backlash. Queer historical time is less a forward march than a meandering journey full of loops, dead ends, and returns.

9The rejection of linear history as simplistic and false to minority experience may lie at the bottom of many Beat experiments with time. Burroughs’s cut-up technique, used most prominently in the Nova Trilogy—The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964)—disrupts chronological storytelling and conflates past and future in the present through textual juxtaposition and manipulation. In The Ticket that Exploded, textual montages shatter linear sequence—“winds of the earth through archives of Time as film and newspapers shredded to dust in a tornado of years and centuries” (81)—as repetitions and variations of the phrase “Isn’t time is there left” loop the reader into disorienting spirals. Cut-ups, fold-ins, and tape-recorded speech resist the authoritative, controlling nature of language and progress-oriented time—“You see the past is radioactive. Time is radioactive. Virus is radioactive.” (150) In other works, the rejection of a homogeneous, forward-moving chronology is less encoded formally than thematically. On the Road’s Sal Paradise often penetrates the veil of the present to catch traces of earlier dwellers—the Native, the Mexican—in contemporary Colorado and California. And powerful mythic latencies underpin the writing of di Prima (Loba, 1973); Waldman (The Iovis Trilogy, 2011), and Kyger (The Tapestry and the Web, 1965). Through a conceptualization of myths as stories that seep through past, present, and future, these poets rework inherited narratives. Kyger revisits the Odyssey to grant Penelope a modern consciousness and room for self-expression, even as she remains bound to Homer’s narrative frame. Di Prima’s Loba, informed by the feminist and Goddess movements of the 1970s, reimagines the she-wolf deity through the theoretical and aesthetic debates of the period, aligning the poet’s political and creative intentions with broader feminist mythmaking. Waldman, for her part, dismantles patriarchal cosmologies through the recurring motif “all is full of Jove,” invoking the pervasive authority of Zeus. Across these works, myth is treated as a constructed fiction, and the epic poem—traditionally marked as male—is reclaimed through an act that reflects what Alicia Ostriker described as “a vigorous and various invasion of the sanctuary of existing language” (71). With “meteoric speed & deft imagination” (907), as the speaker says in Iovis, these poets’ incursions into mythological discourse often underscore a critique of a rigid and necessarily artificial construction of gender across past and present cultural and temporal frameworks.

10If queer collective time is fractured and reversible, individual, biographical time also eschews forward motion. Michael Moon and Kathryn Bond Stockton have suggested that queer children have historically grown “sideways” rather than headlong into reproductive adulthood, following alternative maturation paths. Queer adults similarly embrace stasis and lateral growth and refuse to follow the patterns that shape conventional lives (Halberstam 2). The subcultural filiation, rebelliousness, and deliberate instability often associated with youth may be willingly cultivated by queer adults throughout their lifetimes. This was certainly the case among Beat writers, whose lives often followed deviant trajectories. They indulged in the wasteful temporalities of drugs, contemplation, and sex, and relished improvisation, restlessness and adventure (etymologically an opening into an unscripted future), all commonly associated with youth, pre-productive life stages, and social marginality. Ginsberg’s epochal elegy to “the best minds” of his generation sketches lives marked by precarity, deviance, and nonconformity, where reproductive time, profitable existence, and future investment give way to erotic immediacy and affective, intellectual, and chemical highs. And the protagonists of Kerouac’s On the Road, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, refuse to structure their lives, to borrow Elizabeth Freeman’s words, as a succession of “socioeconomically ‘productive’ moments” (5).

11Feminist critiques have pointed out the masculine imprint of such refusal, which often entailed a flight from domesticity and women in order to embrace intensely homosocial (and homoerotic) bonds (Ehrenreich 29-40; Stimpson). In their quest for “kicks” and excitement, Paradise and Moriarty’s regard the home as a rest stop, and the women there as lovers and caretakers but seldom as companions. Paradise realizes at some point in the novel that his male friends’ girlfriends “were spending months of loneliness and womanliness together, chatting about the madness of the men”—while the men ran around together (On the Road 170). Paradigmatic in this regard is the comedic Beat film Pull My Daisy (1958), directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie and written by Kerouac, who is also the off-screen narrator. A group of beatniks (Orlovsky, Ginsberg, and Corso, playing themselves) disrupt the domestic life of their friend Milo (played by painter Larry Rivers), who is just home from a night shift as a railroad brakeman. They end up tearing him away from his wife and child and luring him into a men-only outing while his wife remains behind to clean up after them.

12Kicks and outings are frequent male privileges in the Beat canon, but not exclusive to them. Some women did get out and about as well, refusing the lives and temporalities arranged for them. Diane di Prima’s autobiographies—the fictionalized Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969), Recollections of My Life as a Woman (2001), and her posthumous memoir of her friendship with dancer Freddie Herko, Spring and Autumn Annals (2021)—are exemplary in this regard. Chasing her fluid, contingent desires, the protagonist of Memoirs of a Beatnik engages in a series of unapologetically described heterosexual, bisexual, and polysexual encounters—including an infamous orgy scene—that destabilize notions of sexuality as a stable category. In between the sex scenes, di Prima depicts a life trajectory that resists heteronormative life scripts, with the immediacy of pleasure and art taking over the futurity of the normalizing narratives of adulthood. In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, choosing to be a poet is defined as rejection of the era’s culture of conformity and of its chrononormative rhythms—“the quiet unquestioned living and dying, the simple one-love-and-marriage, children, material pleasures, easy securities. I am leaving the houses I will never own. Dishwashers. Carpets. Dull respect of dull neighbors” (Recollections 78). Published in 2021, Spring and Autumn Annals was written in the mid 1960s and depicts the bohemian, alternative, living arrangements di Prima pursued from the mid-1950s through 1965, the year after Herko’s passing. The ritualistic mourning of her friend while in the bardo eschews linear time and favors a circular structure guided by memories that create their own personal chronological organization. This new temporal paradigm, centered on feeling and embodied experience, resists normalizing straight time and makes room for the queer experiences of outcasts such as di Prima and Herko, producing alternative visions of homemaking and belonging. For instance, the couch of her first independent apartment—it fit four or five sleeping “in a heap. The two on the ends were coldest, and got up early” (16)—reappears later in the memoir with a reminiscence of interlocked bodies, as if meshed into one organism, so that movement on one end ripples across to the other—“five of us, huddled, all lying on one side. Fitting like spoons. If one of us wanted to turn, the whole row stirred, woke a little, and turned on the other side” (67).

13Much like di Prima, the work of other women associated with the movement exhibits a similar resistance to the life scripts and vital rhythms imposed upon them—both by the cultural climate of postwar America and by the largely masculinist canon of the Beat Generation. Lenore Kandel’s The Love Book (1966)—which was also brought to trial for obscenity—dwells on physical contact between the lovers with an explicitness and excess that blur female and male bodies: “we are transmuting / we are as soft and warm and trembling / as a new fold butterfly” (6). Kandel’s assertion of female erotic authority resonates with a sense of sexual agency that also structures Janine Pommy Vega’s journey in Tracking the Serpent (1995), a text that simultaneously challenges the goal-oriented male quest narrative and the inaction and passivity often attributed to women within Beat circles. The work of these and other authors such as Joanne Kyger or ruth weiss clearly shatters the homebound, “silent chick” stereotype, painting a picture of women who moved, desired, wrote, and formed communities on their own terms, and often exceeded or disrupted the masculinist rhythms of the movement and the chronologies of the straight world.

14Refusing a normative life entailed rejecting futurity, a rejection that Lee Edelman regards as definitory of queer experience. For Edelman, the future is “kid stuff.” A vanishing point for most endeavors, commitment to the future implicitly affirms society’s desirability and commends its perpetuation through reproduction and generational relay. But queers, Edelman argues, ought to abstain. As universal pariahs, they have never had a role to play in the future, which has been systematically denied to them. They ought to remain unassimilable and to insist on their own irreducible difference, indigestible by the social body. Edelman conflates queers with the Lacanian sinthome—the manifestation of an obdurate drive that resists interpretation (a modality of narrative, and therefore of temporal regimentation) and resolution (which assumes linear unfolding) (Chapter 2 “Sinthomosexuality”). This obduracy has its main expression in Burroughs’s work. From Queer and Naked Lunch to The Wild Boys and The Place of Dead Roads, sexual deviance is acerbic and destructive, a denial of the social compact, and intimately tied to violence and annihilation. Even the potentially utopian The Wild Boys is more about the destruction of society than about the construction of a better version that will succeed it.

15If the future is occasionally refused in Beat writing, the past is not. Invocation of cultural memory and former tradition is constant. Conscious of being at odds with their times, and in seeming agreement with T. S. Eliot’s idea that creativity relied on a dialogue with tradition, the Beats rummaged through past literature and culture in order to forge a lineage for their revolt. Their canon was populated with outlaws and misfits along with writers who brought their aesthetic subversiveness to bear on their lives. It included canonical figures such as Shelley, Blake, Whitman or Joyce; eccentrics such as Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud or Ezra Pound—then secluded in the psychiatric ward of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D. C.; and sub-literary figures such as legendary hobo Jack Black, whose memoir You Can’t Win (1925) was revered by Burroughs and Herbert Huncke.

16Beyond literature, they also revived arcane belief systems that resisted the utilitarianism and instrumental rationality of what Herbert Marcuse, writing in the wake of the Beat rebellion, called “one-dimensional society,” a fascination that Ginsberg memorably captures in “Howl” with mention of those “who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop Kabbalah” (11). Beat precursor and steady ally Robert Duncan was fascinated with the Kabbalah, as were artists Wallace Berman and poet David Meltzer, who edited an anthology of classic Kabbalistic writing. And Gnosticism and alchemy inform much of Philip Lamantia’s poetry. Neither Meltzer nor Lamantia were queer, but their fascination links up with a powerful strand of queer occultism that had bloomed in California since the late forties (Johnson and Filreis 2025). In addition to Duncan’s poetry and life, whose mystical interests were more literary than existential, one can catch glimpses of the queer occult in Marjorie Cameron’s art and biography and in two filmic works of the mid-fifties by queer artists who were not, however, part of Beat culture: Curtis Harrington’s Wormwood Star (1956) and Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1955), both of which feature Cameron. Adjacent to gnostic systems was ritual drug-taking, an ancient Pre-Columbian practice that served as a pathway to alternative modes of enlightenment and that the Beats incorporated into their lives. Burroughs spent some time in the early fifties seeking for yage in the Peruvian Amazon and he, Ginsberg, Wallace Berman, and others occasionally took peyote, the hallucinogenic mushrooms native to Mexico whose effects had been pioneeringly described by Artaud. Two peyote buttons graced one of the covers of Berman’s journal Semina, placing in dialogue the cutting-edge art of the day with a vision-inducing, ancient ritual substance. Anne Waldman’s recent Mesopotopia (2025) is a further example of the Beat mulching together wayward literary traditions and arcane belief systems in a way that eschews any sense of forward linearity or historical succession. Waldman’s text conjures, in the words of its publisher, “troubadour dawn songs, pyramid texts, Buddhist mantras, canonical hours of Judeo-Christian tradition, Persian prayers, Druid sorcery, and the wild, gnarly syntax and modal structure of Waldman’s particular performative passion and wit[.]”

17Many of these writers (Rimbaud, Whitman) and traditions (magic, Gnosticism) revered by the Beats were associated with a sexual freedom that stood in counterpoint to the repressive postwar years. They were invoked out of nostalgia for queer kinship that, as critics Christopher Nealon, Carol Freccero, and Carolyn Dinshaw have pointed out, has often driven contemporary queer cultural memory. In the absence of an open queer world in their present, writers and artists have often scavenged the past for models for dissent and sources of inspiration. These historical leaps are often speculative, fueled by longing and desire rather than supported on historical research. Freeman has aptly called queer culture’s backward tropism “temporal drag” for its pull towards former eras and for how past reference garbs contemporary cultural production (59-94).

18These are just some examples of what is at stake in the analysis of the Beats’ queer temporalities. Building on some of the insights delineated above, this special issue explores the articulation of alternative temporal modes in the formal and thematic disruptions of time that shape Beat writing. In “A Beat in Time,” Michael Davidson brings Disability Studies and queer temporalities into dialogue to examine the poetics of dailiness, the materialities of the present, and propositions of Beat futurity as variations of crip time. Focusing mainly on Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger, and William Burroughs, Davidson focuses on figures who exist “out of time” to argue that Beat writing foregrounds temporal experiences shaped by non-normative embodiment, cognitive difference, and technological mediation, thereby challenging Cold War chrononormativity and ideals of efficiency, productivity, and progress. In doing so, the article reframes Beat futurity not as a teleological horizon but as an open, contingent temporal practice rooted in the lived rhythms of the present.

19In “The Synchrony of the Visionary: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, towards a Transcendental Ontology,” Tanguy Harma explores the pursuit of transcendence in the works of Kerouac and Ginsberg as a counter-epistemological and temporal project to modern American civilization. Focusing on Kerouac’s road novels and Ginsberg’s early poetry, the article analyses how allegorical and prophetic modes function as literary strategies for the visionary, generating a synchrony in which linear temporality collapses. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of queer temporality, the article argues that these modes give rise to heterodox forms of being grounded in a transcendental ontology indebted to Ralph Waldo Emerson, in which the spiritual embodiment of nature is central to the visionary experience.

20Jonas Faust offers a queer reading of Allen Ginsberg’s prophetic poetics, tracing his resistance to temporal normativity across his career. In “Allen Ginsberg’s Queer Prophecy and Resistance Against Chrononormativity,” Faust shows how Ginsberg reworks Biblical sacred time, apocalypticism, and non-linear temporal forms—ranging from cyclical histories and death-centered teleologies to moments of a continuous present—to articulate queer desires and modes of resistance. The article concludes by examining Ginsberg’s late work, where failure becomes a strategy that disrupts the finality of normative teleologies.

21In “The Improbable Education of Thomas Pynchon: Notes on Beat Slowness,” Julián Jiménez-Heffernan explores Pynchon’s often forgotten debt to the Beats, and particularly to Jack Kerouac. Jiménez-Heffernan substantiates this debt through a reading of the temporality of Pynchon’s early short stories, collected in the volume Slow Learner (1985) but written at the outset of his career. These stories dwell on slowness, cognitive retardation, arrested maturation, truncated linearity, and failure, all symptoms of a deviant, unproductive temporality that was akin to the Beat ethos and amply featured in their literature. These temporal tropes are embedded in homosocial groups and therefore have a masculinist adscription. While on the one hand they appear to corroborate a feminist reading of the Beats as an all-male compound where women are incidental or absent, on the other hand, Jiménez-Heffernan shows that in their homosocial (male) adolescent fixations there is also a critical kernel of refusal to heteronormative life trajectories and to the exigencies of productive time in late capitalism.

22Benjamin J. Heal turns to William Burroughs’s literary debt to Joseph Conrad in “Queer Fluidities: William S. Burroughs’ Conradian Traces,” an article that tracks the representation of bodies of water and the sea as spaces of queer resistance. Exploring motifs of fluidity through the literary representation of the sea, the article links Conrad’s preoccupation with temporality to Burroughs’s rejection of linear progression and fixed subjectivities in works such as Cities of the Red Night. Heal shows how Burroughs extends Conradian temporal rupture into a fully queer aesthetic in which discontinuous time, mutating identities, and formal fragmentation converge to dismantle normative narratives of history, sexuality, and power.

23Juan Antonio Suárez investigates the transient and ephemeral queer energies that populate the work of actor, filmmaker and poet Taylor Mead. Mostly known for his performances and participation in underground films, Mead’s writing and filmmaking have received little to no scholarly attention. In “Taylor Mead’s Home Movies (1962-1968) and the Queer Temporalities of Travel, Memory, and Bliss,” Suárez redresses this situation by analyzing Mead’s home movies, diaries, and poetry, which often condense events into minimal, synoptic notations of everyday life. He places Mead’s films in dialogue with the subjective cinema of his time and with beat poetics of the quotidian and shows that Mead’s intensely personal temporal organization is governed by presentness and impermanence, rather than narrative continuity or symbolic coherence.

24“Zairja, Missiles, Bees: William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in David Blair’s Wax” also turns to seldom studied filmic texts to investigate the nonlinear approaches to time and semiosis in the work of filmmaker David Blair and William Burroughs. In this article, Antonio J. Bonome analyzes how Blair’s electronic montage and Burroughs’s cut-up methods converge in Wax, producing nonlinear, queered temporalities and semiotic experimentation. Their practices reveal a shared interest in disrupting conventional narrative, merging technology, text, and image to produce unexpected connections and meanings.

25Chad Weidner and Olivia Doidge examine fragmentation and temporal ruptures in Diane di Prima’s lesser-known dramatic work, arguing that it extends Beat aesthetics into dramatic form while challenging linear narrative chronology. Their article, titled “Fluid Roles and Fragmented Time in Diane di Prima’s ‘The Discontent of the Russian Prince’,” focuses on stage directions, metatextual strategies, character dynamics, and the shaping of dramatic space to explore themes central to this special issue, including instantaneity, epiphany, atemporality, and the convergence of space and time. By foregrounding di Prima’s theatrical experimentation and the play’s temporal polyphony, the chapter reconsiders Beat temporalities and advocates for greater attention to underrepresented dramatic works within the Beat canon.

26The issue concludes with “A Time of Her Own: Elise Cowen’s Temporalities,” where Isabel Castelao-Gómez draws on feminist theories of time, queer temporalities, phenomenology, and new materialist approaches to affect and embodiment to offer a cultural and literary analysis of New York Beat poet Elise Cowen. Challenging chrononormative narratives shaped by loss, trauma, and myth, it articulates “a time of her own” for Cowen by foregrounding the living present, affective intensities, and impulse toward becoming and transformation in her poetry. By queering literary history and emphasizing gendered, embodied temporalities, the chapter reclaims Cowen’s authorship and underscores her significance as a proto-feminist voice within Beat writing.

27Acknowledgement: This special issue is one of the results of Research Project PID2022-137592NB-I00, funded by the Spanish State Research Agency.

Top of page

Bibliography

Burroughs, William. Naked Lunch. 1959. Grove Press, 1962.

---. The Soft Machine. Grove Press, 1961.

---, The Ticket That Exploded. Grove Press, 1962.

---, Nova Express. Grove Press, 1964.

---, The Place of Dead Roads. Holt, Rinehardt and Winston, 1983.

Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Lives. Duke UP, 2003.

D’Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970. Chicago UP, 1983.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Duke UP, 1999.

DiPrima, Diane. Memoirs of a Beatnik. Olympia Press, 1969.

---. Loba. Penguin Books, 1998.

---. Recollections of My Life as a Woman. Viking, 2001.

---. Spring and Autumn Annals: A Celebration of the Seasons for Freddy. City Lights, 2021.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP, 2004.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. Anchor, 1983.

Freccero, Carla. Queer / Early / Modern. Duke UP, 2006.

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke UP, 2010.

---. “Introduction.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, special issue “Queer Temporalities,” vol. 13, nos. 2-3, 2007, pp. 1-8.

Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. 1959. City Lights, 2001.

Ginsberg, Allen, and William Burroughs. The Yage Letters. City Lights, 1963.

Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York UP, 2005.

Johnson, Alexis Bard and Kathy Filreis, eds. Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer LA: Sexual Science and the Imagination. Inventory Press and ONE Archives, 2025.

Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir. 1983. Penguin Random House, 1999.

Kandel, Leonore. The Love Book. Stolen Paper Editions, 1966.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. 1957. Penguin Random House, 2001.

Kyger, Joanne. The Tapestry and the Web. Four Seasons Foundation, 1965.

Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Harvard UP, 2007

Melzer, David, editor. The Secret Garden: An Anthology in the Kabbalah. Continuum, 1976.

Moon, Michael, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture, Henry James to Andy Warhol. Duke UP, 1998

Mortenson, Erik. Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence. Southern Illinois UP, 2011

Nealon, Christopher. Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall. Duke UP, 2001

Newhouse, Thomas. The Beat Generation and the Popular Novel in the United States, 1945-1970. McFarland & Company, 2000.

Ostriker, Alicia. “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking.” Signs, vol. 8, no. 1, 1982, pp. 68-90.

Russell, Jamie. Queer Burroughs. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Sedgewick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. U of California P, 1990.

Stephenson, Gregory. The Daybreak Boys: Essays in the Literature of the Beat Generation. Southern Illinois UP, 2009.

Stimpson, Catharine R. “The Beat Generation and the Trials of Homosexual Liberation.” Salmagundi, nos. 58/59, Fall 1982-Spring 1983, pp. 373-392.

Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in American Culture. Duke UP, 2009.

Terry, Jennifer. An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. U of Chicago P, 1999.

Vega, Janine Pommy. Tracking the Serpent: Journeys into Four Continents. City Lights, 2001.

Waldman, Diane. Outrider: Essays, Poems, Interviews. La Alameda Press, 2006

---. The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment. Coffee House Press, 2011.

---. Mesopotopia. Penguin Random House, 2025.

Wolff, Janet. “On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Cultural Criticism.” Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 1993, pp. 224-239.

Top of page

Notes

1 Among the few exceptions to this is Jamie Russell’s Queer Burroughs (2001), which remains the most substantial attempt to read of Burroughs’s novels through the lens of queer theory.

Top of page

References

Electronic reference

Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo and Juan Antonio Suárez, Queer Temporalities, Beat Times European journal of American studies [Online], 20-4 | 2025, Online since 07 December 2025, connection on 11 March 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/25256; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15oxy

Top of page

About the authors

Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo

Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo holds a PhD in postwar American Literature from the University of Murcia (Spain), where she is an Associate Professor at the Department of English Studies. Her research focuses on gender and feminism in postwar and avant-garde American poetry. She is a member of the “Queer Temporalities” research project, funded by the Spanish State Research Agency, and a Board member of the European Beat Studies Network (ebsn.eu) where she also acts as communications officer. Her latest publications include “The Potentiality of Mourning: Queering Time in Diane di Prima’s Spring and Autumn Annals” (forthcoming, Atlantis), “Off She Went: Travel-Writing in Women of the Beat Generation” (English Studies 2022) and “Ethnicity and Gender in the Beat Generation: Jack Kerouac and the Other Woman” (IJES 2022). She is also the author of Beat Myths in Literature: Revisionist Strategies in Beat Women (Routledge 2023), and coeditor with Thomas Antonic of ruth weiss: Beat Poetry, Jazz, Art (De Gruyter 2021).

Juan Antonio Suárez

Juan Antonio Suárez is a Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Murcia (Spain). He is the author, among others, of Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars (Indiana UP), Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday (Illinois), Jim Jarmusch (U of Illinois P) and Experimental Film and Queer Materiality (Oxford UP). He is the Principal Investigator of a research project on queer memory in contemporary anglophone cultures funded by the Spanish State Research Agency (Project PID2022-137592NB-I00) and is writing a monograph on queer memory in contemporary experimental film

By this author

Top of page

Copyright

CC-BY-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

Top of page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search