infonet-economy

In this paper, a queer approach to feminine writing is related to the development of new female subject positions through conceiving of other understandings of time. To conceptualize this relationship, the novel The Hours by Michael Cunningham is analysed and interpreted as a queer story of how women - writing, reading and enacting a novel - acquire an opening to a life that breaks with the heteronormative conception of time. This one-day novel that interweaves the lives
of three women in a multiple assemblage offers the ‘formula' of the triptych, which can be considered a primary form of life as multiplicity. Interconnecting the writings of Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the cartographic analysis zooms in on three aspects of time by addressing respectively the motifs of the party, the kiss and the day: time as pause, time as exquisite moment and time as affect. By re-establishing the relationship between writing, time and the becoming-woman of life, the paper aims to indicate that queer writing can help to re-imagine new possibilities for (work) life.