På sporet af promiskuøse tider: Queer temporaliteter i Guillaume Dustans forfatterskab

This thesis investigates the relation between promiscuous pleasure and queer temporali-ties in the work of Guillaume Dustan, analyzing three affective relations to time: melan-cholia, ecstasy, and hope. I use the AIDS-crisis as the focal point of my thesis, exploring how it delimits an affective shift in gay men’s attitude toward sexual promiscuity as an important component of queer world-making, marking sexual promiscuity as a thing of the past. In Dans ma chambre, sexual promiscuity makes Guillaume feel melancholic, as though “being stuck” in his sexual activities is literally killing him. Thus, promiscuity exerts a kind of backward pull on the present, similar to what Elizabeth Freeman de-scribes as temporal drag. Promiscuity, I argue, troubles a sense of temporal progression in Guillaume’s representation of Marais. This temporal conflict is also evident in Dustan’s public conflict with prominent French AIDS activists regarding bareback sex. I read Dustan’s claim that “the condom has never existed” as an anachronism that makes his views on condomless promiscuity both untimely and morally disturbing. As an anachronism, however, it offers an opportunity to read barebacking as a sexual prac-tice structured around temporal drag.
In Je sors ce soir, I examine ecstasy as a narrative situation. As a first-person nar-rator Guillaume ecstatically steps out of himself by way of the narrative device metalep-sis, paradoxically creating an effect of proximity. His ecstasy explodes the linearity of temporal progression the narrative strives for. Instead of pushing forward, ecstasy seems to make time coagulate in a perpetual present. In this way, ecstatic time brings about a powerful waste of time, halting its progression into the future.
Lastly, I ask what hope Dustan’s work holds for a queer future. Here I consider ecstasy, not only as a way of stopping time, but also as an important temporal figure when conceptualizing a queer utopia. Furthermore, I consider how Dustan’s novel Plus fort que moi traces a utopian impulse as an education of desire. The novel stresses the importance, not of what Guillaume enjoys or how he specifically enjoys it, but rather of his attitude toward sexual desire as a pleasurable pedagogic. I argue, then, that in his literary work Dustan practices an erotics of art, that is, an erotics of literary writing it-self.