Ecstatic Abundance: Queer Temporalities in LGBTQ Studies and Music Education

Attempts to normalize (some) variant sexualities assume that normativity leads at least to tolerance. Because it occurs in relationship to preestablished norms, normativity is achieved through assimilation. Judith Butler's (1993) theory of performativity demonstrates this in terms of gender/sexuality by which the gendered/sexualized subject is produced as an effect of repetitions of coercive (heterosexual) norms that precede the subject. Operating within a temporal logic of norms first, the subject second, performativity cites the past, projecting heterosexual subjects into the future, leaving queer subjects nowhere, unless we resignify those norms for an assumed transgressive future. Queer subjects must go along to get along: to be normal, but "the trouble with normal" is that it obviates queer culture (Warner, 1999), bequeathing to queer subjects no past. In response to the double bind of no future and no past, I posit queer temporalities of LGBTQ studies and music education as saturated abundant presents in terms of Deleuzian becoming in the queer time of the infinitive: to become. Eliding the past and future, the infinitive is just before and just after. I argue LGBTQ studies, expressing a queer ethic of kinship, activates Sara Ahmed's (2006) "refusal to inherit" the norms of lack, and asserts ecstatic abundance as an exuberant queer erotic. Using Philip Auslander's (2004) performer-centered approach, I analyze Cris Williamson's (1975) song, "Shooting Star" as ecstatic abundance, contingently constituting LGBTQ studies as unquenchable, inexhaustible, unruly.