At the time of writing : Sedgwick's queer temporalities

This essay, written ‘after Sedgwick', in no way attempts to imitate her inimitable writing, but operates, rather, in the wake of her work, drawing together some of the concerns that animated it—queer theory, affect theory, and literary performativity—and drawing on it, perhaps obliquely, to address an unlikely text, Jane DeLynn's Don Juan in the Village. It's an unlikely text because it is seems in many ways too obvious (since it deals explicitly with lesbian sexuality and with the affects of shame and disgust and therefore can't possibly require ‘queering'), and it's unlikely, too, because specifically lesbian fiction is so rarely taken to make present and palpable something of the politics of queer, never mind the politics of the literary tout court. On the other hand, though, Sedgwick's work amply legitimates such a perverse textual choice.