Talk by Victoria Pitts-Taylor—Deep Pasts and Failed Futures: Exploring Hospital Time in Queer Memoir and Film (a work-in-progress)

Tuesday, November 17, 2020 at 6:00pm
Zoom Webinar

FREE! RSVP required for access to virtual event.

Professor and Chair of Wesleyan’s Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, and Professor of Sociology and Science in Society Victoria Pitts-Taylor will give a talk, Deep Pasts and Failed Futures: Exploring Hospital Time in Queer Memoir and Film (a work-in-progress), followed by a discussion of Charlotte Prodger’s video BRIDGIT, the sixth video being screened as part of the exhibition A SCULPTURE, A FILM & SIX VIDEOS

The talk examines the depiction of “hospital time” in Amy Hoffman’s memoir by that name, as well as in Charlotte Prodger’s film BRIDGIT, through the lens of queer and crip theory. Pitts-Taylor will show through a close reading of Hoffman’s introduction, in which the ICU clock and the calendar produce alienation, that hospital time operates within the logic of futurity, casting its AIDS patients as failed subjects who are “out of time.” Prodger’s film situates the hospital in a different timescape, one that looks not to the future but to queerer rhythms of the deep past. Reading them together, the present appears more habitable when it is contextualized in relation to the imagined and recovered past than when it is pitted against an unreachable forthcoming. This work in progress is part of a broader project that includes close readings of other texts and films through the lens of temporality and embodiment.

BRIDGIT (2016) will be screened in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery for Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff, from Tuesday, November 10 through Sunday, November 22, 2020. The gallery is open to Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday from Noon to 5pm.

Stream the video BRIDGIT online from Tuesday, November 10 through Sunday, November 22, 2020 on the A SCULPTURE, A FILM & SIX VIDEOS exhibition website.

Top image:

Charlotte Prodger
BRIDGIT, 2016 (still)
Single Channel HD Video with sound
Duration: 32'00''
Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London.

Thumbnail image: Victoria Pitts-Taylor.