Performing Queer Time: Disrupting Heteronormativity with Representations of Working-Class Sexual Minorities in Michelle Tea’s Valencia (2000)

Abstract

This article argues that Michelle Tea’s Valencia (2000) advocates for sex-positivity and queer ways of being to resist heteronormative life markers and capital accumulation that fuel hypergentrification which, in turn, displaces queer communities and people of color (and those at the intersection of these identities) from their neighborhoods. In the first section, I posit that Tea, through her documentation of working-class sexual minorities in the 1990s San Francisco Mission District, uses the feminist tradition of memoir writing to form social and political community. I then utilize Jack Halberstam’s notion of ‘queer temporality’ to demonstrate how Tea constructs queer spaces occupied by sexual minorities who, removed from financial wealth and inheritance, inhabit a temporality that insists on the present moment. Employing queer time, Tea’s work encourages sexual minorities to imagine alternate life possibilities that subvert heteronormative institutions. To underline the significance of queer spaces, I conclude this paper by interrogating Tea’s inclusion of an interlude outside of the Mission District when Michelle (the narrator) and her lover, Iris, visit Iris’s Georgia family. Examining heteronormativity’s limits and highlighting the importance of spaces in which queer sexual minorities can perform and imagine lives outside of heteropatriarchy, I offer Tea’s Valencia as a text that disrupts the idealization of access to heteronormative institutions and the rise of homonormativity to push for a transformational politics that critiques capitalist power structures.