Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century by Elizabeth Freeman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century by Elizabeth Freeman Sarah E. Chinn FREEMAN, ELIZABETH. Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 228 pp. $99.95 hardcover; $25.95 cloth; $14.99 e-book. In recent months, there’s been a lot of talk about time and what bodies do with it. “Corona time” has seemed to slow days down and stretch time out, especially for those people under strict lockdown orders, kept from mingling with friends and strangers. The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement has brought thousands out into the streets of the United States and other countries in seemingly an instant, and the dismantling of symbols of white supremacy has taken place in accelerated time after the decades or even centuries that they have loomed over our cities and towns (as I write this, the statue of John Calhoun that dominated Charleston, South Carolina, is being removed from its perch, something I never thought I’d live to see). And the eight minutes and forty-six seconds in which George Floyd’s life was snuffed out by another man’s body pressing down on his are horrifyingly long. Elizabeth Freeman’s new book, Beside You in Time, comes at exactly the right moment to think about the biopolitics of bodies existing over time as well as across space, especially bodies existing in contiguity to each other. Freeman is especially interested in how bodies operate collectively and relationally over time, creating what she calls “queer hypersociality,” bodies that are “reducible neither to institution nor population, neither to identities nor genital sex—but in ephemeral relationalities organizing and expressing themselves through time” (7). As this quotation suggests, Freeman’s task here is to avoid both the Scylla of Foucauldian biopolitics that speaks on the register of population and the Charybdis of queer theory that focuses on the vagaries of sexuality defined through genitality and desire, finding both insufficient for the project at hand, and to steer a new route to understanding queer collectivities that find their source in knowledges and practices enacted through physical bodies. Freeman’s key term here is “sense-methods,” which, as she says, “consist of bodywork, of inarticulated or unspoken carnal forms of knowledge…inhabited and performed in groups or on behalf of them” (10). These performances can be scripted or spontaneous (or a combination), but they are above all relational, concerned with the interconnection and interaction of bodies over time. For Freeman, this mode is grounded in the ways of being present in the long nineteenth century (and it’s very long: roughly 1780 to 1936, and the book moves chronologically chapter by chapter), which, she says, “we have forgotten, or never learned how to see” (8). Paradigmatic of these modes is the topic of her first chapter, Shaker worship practices, which comprised singing and dance that enacted radical gender equality, asexuality, and communitarianism. What’s most appealing to Freeman is the early Shaker practice, in which singing and dance were unscripted and unpredictable, upswellings of the spirit that resisted the pressures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to regularize and regulate the body in time. Profoundly communal while at the same time idiosyncratic, Shaker [End Page 349] dance was not about what social dance focused on—romance, pairing up, a prelude to courtship, marriage, and heteronormativity. Even when the Shakers formalized their dances into set movements they still pushed against the demands of heterosexual desire, rendering women and men identical in movement rather than differentiated. Freeman also points to the racialization of the Shakers in response to their dance practice. When they were “wild” and “enthusiastic,” they were like Indigenous people, whose dance rituals and family arrangements seemed incomprehensible to white bourgeois culture. When they were choreographed they were “monotonous” and “imitative” as Africans and African Americans were characterized. As Freeman argues, embodied temporal resistance to what in her first book Time Binds she called chrononormativity is always raced and gendered. In her exploration of African American literature in the second half of the nineteenth century Freeman hits her...