A literary rhythmanalysis of queer life writing from COVID-19 home isolation

This paper applies literary rhythmanalysis to six queer life writing texts from The incompleteness book, an Australasian anthology of writings produced in 2020 under early COVID-19 home isolation protocols. The analysis is steered by Halberstam’s theory of queer time in articulation with rhythmanalysis as theorised by Lefebvre and Régulier. The paper includes discussion of these driving theories, followed by the literary rhythmanalysis itself. Across the six texts, two common themes arise. The first is geo-temporal dissociation. The second is an acute sense of pain stemming from social arrhythmias that preceded the pandemic but were exacerbated or made more noticeable by it. The concluding section reflects from a current day vantage on what these findings reveal about queer people’s relationships to dominant social rhythms before and during 2020 and how this can inform future situations.

Key words: rhythmanalysis, queer writing, life writing, LGBTQIA+ visibility, Henri Lefebvre

Introduction

The 2020 pandemic brought sudden confinement for people globally. The impacts were especially felt by ‘those on the margins of society’, including queer people (Gucciardo and Siino 2022: 271). As a bisexual and queer woman, I bear lived experience of these extra pressures. Queer life writings from the time represent important sources of information about how other queer people were affected. This paper applies literary rhythmanalysis to six queer life writing texts from The incompleteness book (Prendergast et al. 2020a, 2020b) – an Australasian anthology of writings produced in 2020 under early COVID-19 home isolation protocols.

The selected texts were identified as queer on the basis that all authors identify as queer and/or LGBTQIA+ on public professional platforms (such as author profiles, book spiels and publicity statements). One of the texts is my own, but for consistency of voice and critical distance, I discuss it in the same manner as I do those of the other writers. In line with Baker and Thompson’s account of queer writing as encompassing much more than sexuality and/or gender (2015: 7), not all six texts necessarily include explicit LGBTQIA+ content, but all express a queer standpoint – ‘a perspective on social reality’ (James et al. 2023) steeped in ‘think[ing] across boundaries, beyond what is deemed to be normal, to jump at the possibilities opened’ (Hanman 2013). This approach reflects Sedgwick’s definition of queer based on its semantic links with ‘across’ (1993: xii). Queer writing bears long traditions of oblique reference to queerness via symbolism and allusion – a strategy that has often been necessary for legal and/or personal safety reasons (Streitmatter 1995). Examples include Oscar Wilde, A. E. Housman, and Countee Cullen (see discussion in Gargaillo 2022). Furthermore, queerness involves not only our sexual and romantic preferences, but also how social consequences of resisting heteronormativity shape ways of relating to space, time and other aspects of life (Halberstam 2011).

Life writing is defined as a genre ‘encompassing many forms of self- representation, including the literary autobiography, personal essays, testimony, letters, diaries, lyric poems, blogs and a wide variety of popular memoir genres... ranging from cookbooks to performance art’ (Grubgeld 2020: 4). Offering much more than just ‘biographical data’, life writing ‘occupies a place between fiction and non-fiction... between literature and history’ and bears a significant place in ‘movements for equality’ and ‘resistance to dominant cultural narratives’, including those of LGBTQIA+ communities (4-5). In addition to autobiographical and biographical narratives about human lives, life writing may encompass non-narrative texts, collective histories and beyond-human foci (Batzke et al. 2021: 3).

The sections that follow consider first how queer lives are always already subject to constraints. Halberstam’s ‘queer time’ (2005) contextualises my turn to rhythmanalysis, which becomes the second section’s focus. Previous COVID-19 rhythmanalyses have investigated work, study, family life, leisure and women’s experiences, but rhythmanalysis of queerness under COVID-19 remains underexplored. Rhythmanalysis conventionally requires being present in the focal context, but literary rhythmanalysis enables inquiry into past contexts. Section three discusses literary rhythmanalysis methods. Subsequent sections provide the literary rhythmanalysis itself, working towards findings and concluding reflections.

Queerness and confinement

Historically (and sometimes still) constraints on queerness have included: criminalisation of homosexuality; non-recognition of same-sex marriages; barriers accessing medical assistance for transgender people; and similar challenges of reproductive technology and adoption access. Despite ongoing legal improvements, we still live subject to socially enforced constraints. These manifest via explicit verbal and physical attacks, and more subtle – sometimes unintentional – processes of exclusion, uneven privilege and pressures of normativity. Constraints on queer lives furthermore extend to time, language and thought.

Regarding temporal constraints on queerness, chrononormativity describes socially dominant white western cultural norms of time and its proper usage. Chrononormativity characterises valid versus invalid lives through milestones of ‘birth, marriage, reproduction, and death’ (Halberstam 2005: 14). As Halberstam’s writings on ‘queer time’ relay, western cultures:

chart the emergence of the adult from the dangerous and unruly period of adolescence as a desired process of maturation... time of reproduction is ruled by a biological clock for women and by strict bourgeois rules of respectability and scheduling for married couples... time of inheritance refers to an overview of generational time within which values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through family ties from one generation to the next. It also connects the family to the historical past of the nation, and... the future of both familial and national stability (Halberstam 2005: 17-18).

Those who live outside chrononormative time are ‘characterized as immature and even dangerous’ (Halberstam 2005: 18). This often includes queer people, people with disabilities and neurodivergent people. Chrononormativity also represents mechanisms of colonisation, racial injustice and cultural domination through which white western cultures historically enforced colonial domination and maintain on an ongoing basis insidious unevenness of privilege based on race, Indigeneity and culture (Shahjahan 2015: 490). In strong relation to western imperial power, chrononormativity is additionally associated with neoliberal ideologies of productivity and consumption as represented in common western tendencies to treat time as money (493).

The concept of time as money is reinforced linguistically via dead metaphors about spending or saving time (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 7-9) – one among multiple examples cognitive linguistics provides of how language reflects and shapes individual and collective cognition, attitudes, beliefs and imagination. Queer theory also recognises strong language-thought connections via ‘discourse’ – the vast web of communicative practices and artefacts wherein a given culture’s knowledges are born, negotiated and transformed (Butler 1999: 12). Discourse has historically contributed to queer marginalisation by silencing queer knowledges as ‘subjugated knowledges’ that ‘have not simply been lost or forgotten; they have been disqualified, rendered nonsensical’ (Halberstam 2011: 5). Attention to queer life writing can help revive and sustain our ‘knowledges from below’ (ibid., original italics). Given that recent history is ‘the most easily forgotten’ (Highmore 2014: 35), attention to queer writing from 2020 presently seems particularly worthwhile.

Halberstam’s ‘queer time’ (2005) is one of two reasons why I use literary rhythmanalysis to study queer writings from 2020. The other is that rhythmanalysis illuminates interdependencies of space, time, rhythms and social power, and thus suits studies of confinement generally. The next section summarises key concepts from rhythmanalysis, then reviews rhythmanalyses of COVID-19.

Rhythmanalysis: Key concepts and contemporary applications

That time and space are connected has long been widely observed (Elden 2004: x). Rhythmanalysis additionally links time and space with rhythms (viii). Contributors to rhythmanalysis include Lucio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos, Gaston Bachelard, Henri Meschonic, Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier (ibid: xiii-xiv). My approach relies mostly on Lefebvre and Régulier because they emphasise rhythms’ implications in social power. Lefebvre and Régulier primarily considered issues of social class and gender, but Reid-Musson’s (2018) ‘intersectional rhythmanalysis’ shows their approach’s applicability across intersecting social axes, including queerness.

Rhythmanalysis treats rhythms as ‘repetition in time and in space’, specifying that ‘there is no identical absolute repetition, indefinitely’ and emphasising ‘the relation between repetition and difference’ (Lefebvre 2004: 6). Equally important to rhythmic beats are ‘stops, silences, blanks’ and other gaps between them (Lefebvre and Régulier 2004: 78). Rhythms concern natural and mechanical phenomena observable across macro to micro scales – from historic rhythms traversing millennia to seasonal rhythms of years, weekly schedules of work and leisure and daily routines incorporating work, leisure, eating, sleeping and circulation (73-74). Temperature, birdsong, traffic, plant growth, the media and light also bear daily, weekly, annual and longer-term rhythms, as do virtually all things (74). Rhythms can be broadly cyclical and/or linear. Cyclical rhythms encompass ‘the cosmic, in nature: days, nights, seasons, the waves and tides of the sea, monthly cycles’. Linear ones stem ‘from social practice... from human activity: the monotony of actions and of movements, imposed structures’ (Lefebvre 2004: 8). Cyclical and linear are an interrelational pairing, not an opposing dichotomy: no rhythm is purely one or the other; rather, the two share an ‘antagonistic unity’ that ‘sometimes gives rise to compromises, sometimes to disturbances’ (ibid). For example, ‘[t]he circular course of the hands on (traditional) clock-faces and watches is accompanied by a linear tick-tock... it is their relation that enables or rather constitutes the measure of time (which is to say, of rhythms)’ (ibid).

Rhythms reflect and affect their geo-temporal contexts. They also constantly interact with other rhythms. A key task for rhythmanalysts is observing and describing relationships of these ‘polyrhythmic’ assemblages (Lefebvre and Régulier 2004: 79). Rhythmic relations may be called ‘eurhythmic’, ‘arrhythmic’, and ‘isorhythmic’, or shifting between these things. Eurhythmia describes rhythms that complement each other (like harmonious lines of music played by instruments in an orchestra). Arrhythmia signals clashes (as if musicians in the orchestra are playing songs with incompatible time-signatures) (Lefebvre 2004: 16). Eurhythmia and arrhythmia are not by nature always good versus bad. Eurhythmia can be a symptom of excessive control (for instance, authoritarian regimes), while arrhythmia can be a driver for positive changes (Thorpe et al. 2023: 1555). Isorhythmia describes rare scenarios where just one rhythm plays (Lefebvre 2004: 67) – a problematically unsustainable situation much like monoculture farming that quashes biodiversity, interdependence and cooperation. Isorhythmia may result from extreme eurhythmia wherein rhythmic coordination becomes homogenisation, or from arrhythmic situations where one dominating rhythm quashes others.

Rhythmanalysis reveals how ‘[p]olitical power knows how to utilise and manipulate time, dates, time-tables’ (Lefebvre 2004: 68). Through ‘mobilisation’, authority ‘combines the unfurlings [déploiements] of those that it employs (individuals, groups, entire societies), and rhythms them’ (68-69). For example, Reid-Musson’s ‘intersectional rhythmanalysis’ raises both the exploitation and resistance practices of migrant workers (2018), while Chen uses rhythmanalysis to show how radical transformation of oppressive structures became possible in 1970s ‘conjunctural analysis’ (2016: 53-65). Rhythmanalyses of COVID-19 have enriched understandings about social inequalities, including greater challenges for women (Thorpe et al. 2022), students (Zasina and Nowakowska 2022), youth and people marginalised by intersecting factors such as race, social class, disability and more (Gucciardo and Siino 2022: 271).

Rhythmanalyses of COVID-19 have examined work (Nash and Lyon 2023), study (Zasina and Nowakowska 2022), family life (Gucciardo and Siino 2022), leisure (Argan et al. 2022), and women’s experiences (Thorpe et al. 2022). COVID-19’s impacts on queer rhythms remain underexplored. A challenge for addressing this gap now is that conventional rhythmanalysts operate in the present (Lee 2017): the rhythmanalysis studies of COVID-19 cited earlier all drew their data while the pandemic was ongoing, mostly via remotely conducted interviews. Unable to retrospectively gather such data, life writings from 2020 enable an ‘archival’ approach via literary rhythmanalysis (Highmore 2002). The next section discusses literary rhythmanalysis precedents and methods.

Literary rhythmanalysis: Precedents and methods

In senses, virtually all rhythmanalysis involves literary aspects, as reflected in Lefebvre and Régulier’s frequent use of analogies to creative writing to explain rhythmanalytical processes (see discussion in Karhio 2014: 77). Both rhythmanalysis and poetry are grounded in ‘verbal action’ with an ‘aesthetic import’ (Lefebvre 2004: 23-24). However, literary rhythmanalysis here specifically describes rhythmanalysis of literary works. Precedents include studies of novels (Boes 2008; Katz 2010; Highmore 2014: 34; Fülöp 2015; Rodriguez Gonzalez 2016), short stories (Galam 2010; Güvenç 2020; Rydstrand 2022), poetry (Galam 2010; Karhio 2014) and magazine serials (Green 2017).

All the above examples provide strong examples of literary rhythmanalysis in action, albeit with scant explicit discussion of methods. To guide my own inquiry, I reviewed the features each precedent identified in their focal texts, then synthesised two tables mapping a two-stage process that I then followed. These tables are presented in Appendix One. As there is not space individually to discuss all nine of the literary rhythmanalysis precedents that informed my approach, I will here summarise three that particularly informed my processes.

The first is Tobias Boes’s (2008) analysis of James Joyce’s A portrait of the artist as a young man. Boes emphasises the novel’s ‘polyrhythmic qualities’, particularly the clashes or arrhythmias of competing rhythms including those of the protagonist Stephen’s desires versus social rhythms (772). Boes notes how these rhythmic tensions are reflected in the narrative order of the text, which sometimes ‘moves forward by leaps and bounds, skipping from one phase in Stephen’s life to another’ and at other times ‘seems to merely spin around in circles, as each new episode takes on a disturbing resemblance to those that preceded it’ (767). Boes also observes how the advances of time and modernity are brought forth in a passage of the book where Stephen takes a train trip and observes the rhythmic passing of telegraph poles – train travel and telegraph communication being icons of technological shifts that historically produced significant differences in people’s relationships with time, particularly in terms of the shift from more cyclical agrarian lifestyles towards the dominant linear temporalities of modern and contemporary life (773-775). Boes’s article thus informed the processes I traced by signalling the value in attention to individual versus social rhythms, the temporal framings of texts and the presence of time- related technologies.

The second precedent I wish to discuss is Galam’s (2010) study of poems and stories written by Herman Garcia Tabin under the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines in the 1980s. Under the Marcos regime, many people lived in extreme poverty while a select few enjoyed great wealth (Galam 2010: 490-493). There were strong censorship laws with harsh penalties (482-483). Tabin tested boundaries by depicting the daily lives of people living on the streets, and later ‘claimed his works to be his way of resisting the dictatorship’ while evading consequences of explicit resistance (ibid: 482). Galam proposes that literary rhythmanalysis can illuminate contexts where direct expression is constrained by approaching texts at two levels: the explicit content they directly ‘represent’ and the implicit content of form and style (496).

For instance, in an analysis of Tabin’s poem 10 a daniw-rinka (10 poems- feelings), which describes the death of a homeless person depicted as ‘a victim / of the unaffordable / cost of breath’ (Tabin, cited in Galam 2010: 399), Galam identifies the poem’s explicit content as evoking an arrhythmia between the ‘cyclical movement and rhythm of life’ and the linear rhythms of ‘a capital-driven city’ wherein ‘[t]he natural and cyclical movement and rhythm of life ceases for our victim because he or she could no longer afford to breathe, that is, to live’ (ibid). The poem’s implicit content meanwhile uses short lines and interruptive enjambment to underscore breathlessness while also hinting at ‘slow movement... almost like a burial procession’ (ibid). Galam’s (2010) article thus informed my approach by alerting me to the need to consider rhythms as much in textual form as in content.

The third literary rhythmanalysis precedent that steered my approach is Katz’s (2010) analysis of Virginia Woolf’s novels Mrs Dalloway and The years. Katz lends special focus to instances where characters pause or wait – in other words, to the gaps between what would conventionally be recognised as the textual action – as ‘acts of suspension in both time and place’ (ibid: 3). This emphasis reflects Lefebvre and Régulier’s insistence that rhythms be identified not only by their beats but by gaps between beats (2004: 78). Like Galam (2010), Katz also considers style, specifically ‘Woolf’s persistent use of participles’ such as ‘knowing’, ‘making’, ‘building’, ‘tumbling’ and ‘creating’ (Katz 2010: 7). These words ‘denote ongoing actions, appropriately for a novel arguing against a punctual version of time’ in ways that reflect ‘the novel’s concern with the relation between past and present... its insistence on seeing the past lingering in the present’ (ibid). Katz’s (2010) article therefore influenced my processes by reinforcing the value of considering the presence of technologies that shape relationships with time, alerting me to the importance of attention to moments of pausing, waiting and/or other modes of temporal suspension, as well as the importance of fine grammatical details such as word and sentence types.

The points drawn from these three main examples (Boes 2008; Galam 2010; Katz 2010) are reflected in the tables of Appendix 1, alongside additional considerations drawn from other articles that helped inform my processes for literary rhythmanalysis of texts from The incompleteness book (Prendergast et al. 2020a, 2020b). The next section summarises those texts themselves.

Literary rhythmanalysis of queer life writings from COVID-19: Overview of focal texts

The texts I analysed include ‘It all’ (Lobb 2020), ‘Shame list’ (Taylor 2020), ‘Taking time’ (Walker 2020), ‘MURRAY’S COVIDICTIONARY: New words for testing times’ (Murray 2020), ‘Note to self (in novel times)’ (Drummond 2020), and ‘April’ (Pearce 2020). Lobb’s text is presented in prose and deploys a massive temporal frame. It begins with early human life (‘We hunt, we gather. We traverse the plains...’), then proceeds via montage-like relays of significant moments up to the 2020 context, ending with ‘We fight over toilet paper. We hold our breath, and wait’ (2020: 77). The events it relays have a metonymic quality wherein small moments seem to stand for larger historic events. For example, ‘We step away from the old man coughing, spots of blood splattering the dirt,’ seems to signify bubonic plague, while ‘We shoot, we expel, we offer diseased blankets’ appears representative of colonial violence and repeated references to foul air suggest environmental destruction (ibid). There are recursive motifs of (implicitly, white western) humans travelling and claiming land, fighting over it, constructing buildings and erecting walls to keep others out, encountering crisis, moving to new places and repeating the same patterns in historically-shifting variations (for instance, medieval city gates and bubonic plague versus suburban picket fences and COVID-19). Beyond explicit content, repetition is also stylistically via repetition of sentence openings. The first five and last five lines of the text are all statements beginning with ‘We...’, between which there is alternation between statement sentences mostly beginning with ‘We’ or ‘The’, with occasional exceptions to this rule (six sentences beginning with different words and three questions) signalling significant events. Lobb’s overall text thus bears a cyclical form, while interim repetitions produce mini-loops in between, giving a sense of perpetual failure to learn from mistakes. Lobb’s uncertain ending leaves readers asking whether this monotonous looping will continue, or new approaches be finally sought.

Taylor’s ‘Shame list’ (2020: 135-136), also prose, offers a first-person singular relay of life in lockdown. It begins with the narrator taking their permitted daily walk and becoming frustrated with other walkers who don’t keep a sufficient physical distance, forcing the narrator to walk on wet grass and get wet shoes. The narrator returns to their apartment and bemoans challenges of working from home, with the implication that they feel overworked and stressed by demands to maintain pre- pandemic productivity levels. The narrator resists a temptation to escape into alcohol, but succumbs to the lures of internet distraction and its paradoxes: ‘I see articles online urging me to reject productivity expectations born of capitalism... these lead me to the socials, where I see all manner of creative record keeping and watch in awe’ (ibid). The narrator also recalls technology-mediated correspondences with their mother and reflects on their privilege in having a safe place to isolate, with implications of guilt about feeling dissatisfied despite privilege. All events are relayed in present tense, though some are clearly not relayed in their order of occurrence and/or are non-specific memories of recurrent happenings. There is frequent use of words ending in ‘ing’, suggesting inconclusion and/or suspension. Taylor also uses repetition via ongoing additions to the narrator’s growing list of things they feel ashamed about. These techniques produce a sense of multiple moments blurring together for a protagonist simultaneously present in all yet none of them. Like Lobb, Taylor uses a cyclical form, with a reference back to the opening scene’s wet shoes appearing close to the end.

‘Taking time’ by Walker (2020: 141) also predominantly uses first- person singular prose. It concerns bisexual heartbreak, biphobia and bi-erasure. The narrator pines for a lover who has refused them physical contact since the pandemic started. Addressing the distant lover as ‘you’, the narrator wonders whether the relationship is ongoing or finished, expressing pre-pandemic regrets about having prioritised work demands of ‘striving to juggle appointments, meet deadlines, [and] slay to-do lists’ over quality time with their now-unreachable partner (ibid). ‘Taking time’ employs predominantly present tense, mixed with past tense relay of memories. Though temporally located quite specifically at ‘three weeks and four days since I touched another human’, the setting (presumably home-isolation) is never mentioned or described, indicating disconnection from place (ibid). Past tense memories form the only scenes where places, events and sensory experiences are described, suggesting the narrator is living more in the past than their present situation. Their relay is fragmented and jumpy, some from the recent past just before the pandemic and some from twenty years ago, interspersed with questions about the future. Again, the speaker seems present in all yet none of these moments, indicating a geo-temporal dissociation. There is frequent use of words ending in ‘ing’, suggesting things that are unresolved and/or unresolvable. The refrain, ‘Yes, but these things take time,’ (ibid) is introduced near the start, then re- iterated as the final line, lending a formal cyclicality like that observed in Lobb’s and Taylor’s pieces.

Murray’s ‘COVIDICTIONARY’ (2020: 95-100) takes an alphabetical dictionary list form. Like Lobb’s piece, it reflects collective histories and concerns rather than an individual protagonist. Characteristic features and social concerns of the 2020 era are evoked via references to right- wing politics (Donald Trump), global corporations (Uber) and self- destructive indulgences (particularly alcohol) described in a flat tone implying indulgence brings little relief from ennui. Murray also highlights human impact on the environment via the ‘Anthropocoronacene’ (‘Geological age wherein the planet enlists biological weapons to counter the influence of human activity on its climate and environment’) (2020: 95). The entries make cultural reference to popular social media tropes of the 2020 lockdown period including baking bread and DIY hairdressing. The citation of these activities in abstraction – not individual moments in any one person’s life, but generalised ones shared by many people across geo-temporally nebulous virtual platforms – contributes to a sense of disconnection from self as well as time and place. Geo-temporal dissociation is also explicitly signalled via the entry ‘Blursday’ – ‘All-purpose name for any discrete twenty-four hour period with no distinguishing marks’ (ibid). As with Taylor’s and Walker’s texts, words ending in ‘ing’ feature frequently. Formal repetition is evoked via the list format, and a cyclical form via recalling of the first entry, ‘Anthropocoronacene’, in the penultimate one, ‘Youthage’: – ‘Months of life lost wondering when the Anthropocoronacene will end’ (ibid: 100).

‘Note to self (in novel times)’ by Willo Drummond (2020: 36) is a poem. It is non-narrative, with no direct relay of details concerning the speaker’s personal life. Nonetheless, it seems deeply oriented in personal thoughts and emotions reflecting collective concerns of early 2020. The poem employs a to-do list form via which the speaker compels themselves to remember ‘the world... the wailing... the air... the wind... of change’ and ‘the deep, challenging dark / of water; the topography / of spirit’ (ibid). On one hand, the speaker seems strongly connected with nature. On the other, the way they present these imperatives to themselves suggests forgetting and needing to actively self-remind. This reflects a subtle tension between the speaker’s values and their reality. The sole reference to time is the title’s bracketed reference to ‘novel times’. This loose temporal frame suggests geo-temporal dissociation, as does the speaker’s silence regarding their present time and place (presumably, a home isolation environment distant from the wild landscapes of which they keep reminding themselves). There is significant use of blank space in the poem, which seems to evoke pauses, gaps, uncertainties and/or moments between other things. The first stanza’s references to ‘love’ are echoed in the final stanza’s recourse to the ‘heart’, creating a cyclical form as observed in other texts (ibid).

Pearce’s ‘April’ (2020: 109) is also a poem. It is temporally framed by the title ‘April’, yet which April and where remain unstated. The first of two stanzas describes in present tense an ‘i’ and ‘we’ gathering ‘flowers / to fill our bellies / to last through winter’. The second stanza shifts to future tense: the ‘i’ anticipates being ‘found, half-buried / a mount of gin-soaked peonies / folded from the pages of my favourite novels’ (ibid). There is a juxtaposition of the bright mood in the first stanza, wherein a reader can initially interpret the poem’s flowers as living plant ones, with the more sombre second stanza, which reveals the flowers to be paper ones, and evokes deep, aching disconnection. The poem’s temporal position may be read as the start of stay-at-home lockdown protocols – with the first stanza representing April 2020 and the second future unknowns. The first stanza could also represent past Aprils not in lockdown, with the second suggesting ‘winter’ in both the immediate sense and as symbolism for future unknowns (ibid). Through its tense shifts and uncertain ending, Pearce’s text, like the others considered here, creates feelings of suspension in time and space – that is, of geo-temporal dissociation, and of things remaining inconclusive or in suspension. The parallelism of the two stanzas creates repetitive and cyclical effects like those noted in other examples.

Now that the six poems have been individually summarised, the next section interprets connections between them.

Interpretation of themes across the texts

Across the six texts, two themes stand out. The first is geo-temporal dissociation. The second is an acute sense of problems that preceded the pandemic. This section discusses each in turn.

Geo-temporal dissociation is evident both in content and style. In the texts featuring first-person speakers, these speakers seemed disconnected from the times and places they were in, dwelling instead in memories of the past and/or introspective imaginings relayed in non- linear order and/or with vague temporal framings. The texts without first-person speakers were likewise disconnected from time and place – in Lobb’s case, via the vast temporal and geographic framing, and in Murray’s, via the portrayal of widespread generic acts such as making bread and cutting hair. Adding to this temporal vagueness across all six texts were strong tendencies towards repetition, both in content and in form via language patterns and cyclical patterns. Three of the texts also made strong use of words with ‘ing’ endings, evoking incompleteness and inconclusion, while all six bore inconclusive endings, suggesting things unresolved and in suspension.

However, geo-temporal dissociation appears to have been a common experience for most if not all people in early 2020 and similar features arise across many other texts in The incompleteness book (Prendergast et al. 2020a, 2020b). This first theme therefore reflects aspects of the early pandemic shared by people across multiple backgrounds and axes of identity, including but exceeding queer people. Still, I raise geo- temporal dissociation as a theme worth recognising because of how it seems to have set the conditions for the second. As Lefebvre and Régulier note, grasping a rhythm requires having been ‘grasped by’ it, but also requires getting ‘outside’ it via some form of shift (2004: 88). The geo-temporal dissociation evident in all six pieces seems to have provided such a shift that enabled revaluation of pre-pandemic conditions through fresh eyes.

The second theme evident across all six texts was an acute sense of problems that preceded the pandemic. In Lobb’s text, this is evident in the relentless historic cycles of greed, violence, invasion, environmental disregard and failure to learn from the consequences thereof. Lobb’s text also expresses ennui with the creature comforts of suburban life won through all these acts of destruction and with the sense of being squeezed in with ever tighter fences. In Taylor’s, similar points arise through the protagonist’s explicit disdain for ‘productivity expectations born of capitalism’ and the ways these expectations bear on the speaker through stress and a desire to drink problems away (2020: 135). Walker’s piece also signals work stress – specifically indicating this to have been a pre-pandemic problem of arrhythmic clashes between professional routines and intimate connection seems to have resulted in an isorhythmic situation where work rhythms quashed relational rhythms that the speaker now realises were more important. In Murray’s text, pre-pandemic problems are signalled via references to right-wing politics, corporations and the Anthropocene. References to self-destructive drinking and other indulgences that bring little joy bear parallels with Taylor’s comments about alcohol and Lobb’s evocation of suburban ennui.

Drummond’s and Pearce’s poems differ from the others by focusing more on the natural world than the human one, without explicit reference to the pre-pandemic problems the four others directly address. Yet these problems are implied in that both texts, while superficially evoking love of nature, are, at a closer read, about disconnection from nature and the pain thereof. As earlier noted, Drummond’s poem evokes this disconnection via the fact that the speaker must actively compel themselves to remember nature. That they do so in the format of a ‘to do list’ – among the strategies specifically noted by Taylor as characteristic of unbearable ‘productivity expectations’ (2020: 135) – also seems to imply a disjuncture between what the speaker is telling themselves to do versus their actual state. In Pearce’s poem, the disconnection from nature is evoked via juxtapositions between the two stanzas, particularly of real flowers with paper ones. Similar to Taylor’s and Murray’s pieces, the pain of this disconnection is reflected via implied temptations towards self-destructive drinking. Read in connection with Lobb’s and Murray’s texts and their specific evocations of Anthropocene problems caused by human actions across centuries, the environmental disconnection evoked in Drummond’s and Pearce’s poems is likewise recognisable as having long pre-dated 2020’s pandemic outbreaks.

Pre-pandemic problems brought to light in these pandemic era poems therefore include human greed, violence, unsustainable work pressures and environmental disregard. I now note that all these pre- pandemic problems can be understood as arising from and/or involving arrhythmias of the kinds Lefebvre and Régulier critiqued – particularly cyclical natural, bodily and/or interpersonal rhythms under threat from linear tick-tock rhythms of neoliberal socioeconomics. Unlike the first theme of geo-temporal disconnection, this acute sense of pain caused by pre-pandemic arrhythmias was not present in other texts of the anthology to the same acute degree as in the six queer life writing texts. This seems to reflect Halberstam’s (2005) points about queer time versus heteronormative time or chrononormativity. It seems queer time always already exists in arrhythmic relation to chrononormativity, and that pandemic conditions exacerbated the pain this arrhythmia drives. In other words, what was previously a persistent but manageable sense of dis-ease was markedly exacerbated. This finding is consistent with other research indicating that 2020 bore more devastatingly on the mental health of queer people than on the general population (Gucciardo and Siino 2022: 271), but extends previous understandings by drawing attention to the role rhythms played.

The next question is that of what these findings mean now, four years on from 2020, and for future inquiries. The next and final section ponders these possibilities.

Beyond the pandemic? Further directions for rhythmanalysis of queer writing and other genres

This paper applied literary rhythmanalysis to six samples of queer life writing produced under constraints of early COVID stay-at-home measures. Common themes across the six texts included geo-temporal dissociation and intensified awareness of pre-pandemic arrhythmias. As noted, the first does not seem specific to queer experiences of the pandemic, but does seem to have provided conditions for writers to grasp pre-pandemic rhythms from ‘outside’ (Lefebvre and Régulier 2004: 88), thereby raising problems of human greed, violence, unsustainable work pressures and environmental disregard. All these can be understood in terms of arrhythmias wherein routines dictated by social expectations threaten to quash rhythms of wellbeing. That these arrhythmias were reflected in queer writings from the pandemic more so than others within the same anthology seems reflective of how queer time exists always, already in arrhythmia with heteronormative time or chrononormativity, and of how 2020’s changes exacerbated longstanding problems.

In the current context, four years on, the pre-pandemic problems noted above remain rife. Pandemic deaths remain ongoing; right- wing governments continue to exploit; devastating wars are waging; global environmental policies still fail to adequately address crisis-point issues; housing and basic needs are inaccessible for many people; and the uneven effects these problems bear across intersecting axes of social experience reflect stark injustices of privilege. This paper has shown how literary rhythmanalysis of life writing can raise ‘knowledges from below’ (Halberstam 2011: 5, original italics) about rhythms as a significant yet overlooked factor in human and beyond-human wellbeing. I acknowledge, however, that the study presented here was small scale and limited on multiple fronts including that of its predominantly Australian context, the narrow range of textual media and genres considered and the minimality of comparisons with texts reflecting social axes beyond that of queerness as well as texts reflecting pre- and post-2020 contexts. These things simply were not feasible within the given constraints of a single paper. However, I do suggest that the signalling of these limitations here raises the value of these as potential areas for ongoing inquiry through literary rhythmanalysis. I likewise note the potential value literary rhythmanalysis seems to bear for the studies of other more recent crises.

The main way in which this paper can inform current and future scenarios is thus via its demonstration of how literary rhythmanalysis can bring up subjugated knowledges about ways that situations of confinement and other crises bear on marginalised groups including but exceeding queer people. As part of this demonstration, I have elucidated adaptable processes to sustain ongoing inquiries and signalled next directions such inquiries might take.

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Appendix 1: Tables for literary rhythmanalysis

Tables 1 and 2 reflect the methods I used for my literary analysis, based on precedents from Boes (2008), Galam (2010), Katz (2010), Karhio (2014), Fülöp (2015), Rodriguez Gonzalez (2016), Green (2017), Güvenç (2020) and Rydstrand (2022). The tables give ‘guiding points’, not strict protocols: some may be omitted, and other tangents emerge along the way. In my literary rhythmanalysis, I filled the tables with observations of each text individually, then their connections. I did not proceed linearly but jumped between and beyond steps, maintaining the intuitive spontaneity that enriches rhythmanalytical thought. I generated fifteen pages of notes (12,381 words) from which I developed the arguments presented in this paper.

Table 1

Table 2

Funding

The author received no specific funding for this paper.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Creative Faculty at The University of South Australia.

Note on the contributor

Amelia Walker is the author of four poetry collections and three poetry teaching resource books in Macmillan’s All you need to teach series. Her fifth poetry collection, alogopoiesis, is published by Gazebo Books (2023). She completed her PhD in 2016 and currently teaches courses in creative writing and literary studies. She also supervises HDR candidates undertaking creative writing research. Amelia is chief investigator on Invisible Walls, an Australia-Korea Foundation funded project focused on building intercultural connections between Korea and Australia.