Touching the Past; or, Hanging Chad

Abstract

Carolyn dinshaw, in Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Preand Postmodern,1 develops and follows what she calls a his? torical risking partial connections between and across a heterogeneous array of historical agents, cultural artifacts, and epochs: from Margery Kempe to Lynn Cheney, Canterbury Tales to Pulp Fiction, Foucault in the archives to barbarians (well, queer medievalists) at the gates. She engages documents of historical fact and fictional texts. From queer mix of genres and subjects, she derives a queer historical method whose found? ing assumption is contingency and driving metaphor, touch. But Dinshaw does not rest on metaphor. Her metaphorics of touch itself displaces meta? phor in favor of metonymy. This is not an idle move; the play of metonymy is a warrant against mimetic approaches to history, in which the past is mirror or it is nothing at all. Dinshaw's touch, the queer historical method she proposes, pressed on me as I was racing to complete the first version of paper in November 2000 for presentation at the Annual Meeting ofthe American Academy of Religion. I was doing so against the endless droning of MSNBC's endless analysis of what, at the time, felt like an endless presidential campaign. While the vote counting continued, halted, continued again, until the Supreme Court's votes were counted once and for all, cable TV was my constant companion; like me, it was up at all hours with not much new to report. How many times did pundits?those mediatized historians of the sixty-minute hour (less time for commercials)?tell us, variously, that we were 'witnessing history,' this election is one for the history books, or (and track the heteronormative claims of reproducing the nation) we will be telling our grandkids about one?