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.
Understanding the study of sexual spaces as heterotopological, this article argues that, in the context of sexual minorities, new forms of sexual identity that contest the dominant forms are generated and practiced in specific, 'other', spaces and timings, so-called 'heterotopias'. To develop and illustrate this argument, the garden and gardening practices of Derek Jarman are described and analysed as a heterotopic space and practice. To theoretically establish the relationship between sexual difference and (other) space, the notion of heterotopia is connected to the concept of the care of the self that is simultaneously understood as an existential, aesthetic and political activity of (creating) difference. Stressing the dimension of resistance, the care of the self is interpreted as a queer practice that turns a spatial politics of (sexual) difference into one of queering spaces.
