Jeremy Geragotelis
Jeremy Geragotelis is a PhD student in English/American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst Their research focuses on sites of failure, the performative act of breaking, repercussions of reiteration/repetition, and issues of embodiment relating to technologies of recording. Along with their scholarly work, they are a performance-maker, playwright, and composer. They have an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop.
Editor’s note: To preserve the cadence of the cited works, cited poetry is included as photos.
Let The Broken Things Speak For Themselves:
Crooked Lines / Out of Joint Time / Syncopation
Doesn’t Every Broken Thing Remind You of Every Other?[1]
The Serve: “Marcos Baghdatis Destroys FOUR Racquets”[2]
At the 2012 Australian Open, Marcos Baghdatis successively breaks four tennis rackets, two of which remain in plastic wrap, their newness preserved through this act of destruction. This is a relatively common occurrence in professional tennis that holds a certain performative citationality: familiar, but fractious. As Baghdatis performs his frustration, the crowd cheers in bursts, answering each smash with an energetic crescendo of claps, whistles, and boos. Baghdatis stops swinging his arm a few times to bury his head in a towel. His opponent, Stanislas Wawrinka, sits on an adjacent bench, gulping down Powerade and staring ahead at nothing. The umpire positioned between the two players, elevated in his referee chair, sheepishly surveys the act. Upon doling out a code violation to Baghdatis, he presses his lips together tight, an almost fatherly dispensation of regret and resignation, to which Baghdatis grins wickedly and shakes his head. He unwraps a fifth racket, which he will not break. He returns to the match with it.[3]
After this specific instance of racket abuse, the camera that is recording the match in real time lingers on each of these four broken things for a moment. The recording inevitably passes hands to various broadcast services; this movement acts as an undisguised, but perhaps unnoticed mechanization of the flow of capital through imperial logics. Networks like ESPN, The Tennis Channel, beINSPORTS, Eurosport, and eventually YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok air the frames that legitimate this spectacle for a transnational audience, first as tethered to the match itself and then as a reiterative compulsion, caught perpetually in digital circulation. The camera behaves as a type of cultural eye in the moment of recording, both managing and determining the viewership’s capability of witnessing this eruptive gesture and its product. It dictates the archivablility of Baghdatis’ performative behavior here since only a present audience can see beyond what it chooses to document.
The tennis pro’s muddied affective behavior in this act (Does this performative gesture release rage or enable it?) compels the camera—and thus, the viewer—to turn its gaze toward the very thing that, in many ways, undercuts the normativizing dominance that the camera typically strives to maintain.[4] As shown by frequent vocal responses to instances of racket abuse, spectators are hungry for this transgressive act that “clouds analysis while motivating intense (re)action.”[5] The event becomes embodied, for both player and viewer, as it requires the camera—unconcerned with the act’s various counter-hegemonic doings upon the surface of reality that disorder the event’s time signature—to watch it. So, the camera and the eyes of the viewers hold the frame for a few seconds: we live with Baghdatis’ broken tennis rackets as they are, in their brokenness, in that pause where nothing of note happens. They remain and are remains: unchanging and unchangeable. Simply there, here, again, now—drawing out performance theorist Rebecca Schneider’s unanswerable, but preoccupying question: “…can the time of any gesture or live act be (only) singular?”[6]
Even as the official footage of the match carries on, these remains, this glitching pause where time trips over itself as it attempts to reckon with the disordering force of the broken tennis racket, is what I want to stay with.
The Return: Brokenness and Queer Time
I will attend to the syncopative elements that arise out of the act of racket abuse that I see as bending and queering temporality, unsettling concerns that dictate—through the rules of the game and the limits of athleticism—how events must come to pass and the various doings of reality.[7] Put simply, the act of racket abuse and the resulting broken tennis racket function as a surprising interrogative frame that makes visible the nature of brokenness and its far-reaching impact as it glitches, twists, and breaks an oppressive and teleological temporality that we, with Benjamin, might identity as “homogenous, empty time.”[8] This has ramifications that reach beyond the game, helping us to identify the affective unease we feel when in the presence of a thing that can no longer perform as it once did. It is important to note that my primary interest is not in providing a critical reading of the act of racket abuse—tracking a player’s motivation or the greater social dynamics of the game. Instead, I choose to foreground the broken thing itself, attending to its disruptive, queer effect on various temporal surfaces.[9]
To reach this queer time, I use creative interludes and—later in this paper—offer an analysis of an auxiliary performance-based research practice. Both methodological interventions strive to replicate—or rather, to stage—the phenomenon I am examining. This approach allows me to reclaim these discarded objects and affirm their presence as queer and peculiar actors who demonstrate how failure, disorder, and brokenness enable an erotic potential between themselves and their witness—if we are to understand the erotic alongside Lynne Huffer as an evocative “strangeness” that realizes a “relational ethics.”[10]
In “Performing Writing,” Della Pollock posits a political implication in manifesting a performative encounter with a thing through writing; she claims that this mode of engagement is as meaningful as the actual experiential doing that could occur within a live encounter. Pollock locates a deferred embodiment in writing and suggests that this shortcoming—as made and unmade through the aesthetic qualities of text itself—gestures toward the horizonal. She states:
It is in thus spinning off textuality that I see the mark of a genuinely new politics, a politics that not only refuses to choose between affirmation and reflexivity…but also refuses to identify writing with either reflexivity or referential affirmation, pursuing it instead as a critical means of bypassing both the siren’s song of textual self-reference and the equally dangerous, whorling drain of unreflexive commitment. Performative writing takes its energy from that refusal, and from the moment when such apparent contradictions surge into productivity.[11]
I return to these disciplinary concerns that regard how we engage embodied acts to foreground the utopic alongside Pollock as a phenomenon made through a refusal: that a new social productivity emerges in relief, through negative-space, and—if we are to extend the logic of her discursive intervention—alongside brokenness and failure as ontological states.
This project, by its engagement with the performative as subject, method, and form, allows me to construct a movable politic for the broken tennis racket that aligns itself with Pollock’s writing above. This discursive and methodological implication helps in my claim that the event of breaking a tennis racket can echo out, so that its meaning can perform syncopatively in surprising ways, in many elsewheres. I wonder if the circumstances of my writing about and with the embodied implications of the broken tennis racket can build out a new genealogical understanding of brokenness that places us in many locations, in many times, in simultaneities, and in discreet occurrences, together.
Tennis has its unique theoretical affordances; its etiquette and decorum fix it within popular imagination as a game of privileged social position, which only further highlights the queer, anomalous quality of the broken tennis racket.[12] Beyond this cultural perspective, the game also requires exceptional, exhaustive effort of the body and mind of its athletes: each player strives to not only exceed their physical limits, but also outwit and outmaneuver their opponent. That contest shapes the time of the tennis match which hypothetically maintains a certain perpetuality: a volley could last for hours, days, months, or years, stopped only when an athlete is bested or has reached the extent of their ability. Of course, this is not a reality that we need to worry about; but still, the game has a certain obsessive liveliness to it as it is not held within time in the way a sport like basketball, football, or soccer might be, where teams are chasing down an ever-diminishing clock.[13]
Instead, tennis orchestrates its own time. I complicate this thinking later in tracking the subtle epistemological forces—the time of capital, our post-modern clock—that cloak or override the game’s self-assured temporality. I note that acts that insist on a disordered presentness, such as the act of breaking one’s racket, have the potential to both disrupt the time of tennis and its containment within the homogenous, empty time of empire. Through that glitch, there is a sharpening of awareness of the systematic, subjectivizing compulsions that otherwise remain invisible to the sport’s spectators. I suggest that we look toward broken things as harbingers of impactful, anomalous possibility, as signals of phenomenological rupture that provide their viewers with a playful technique for surviving the thrumming ache born from living within homogenous, empty time.
In holding focus on these broken things, I strive to read against the impulse of identifying the broken tennis racket as nothing more than a commonplace feature of the sport. Instead, I argue that the broken racket is caught in a “time slip” where nothing except for their breaking can occur, liberating them from the assumptions that brokenness denotes purposelessness and ineffectuality.[14] Here, they metonymically index, through their out-of-joint and dislocated categorical position within the world, many other—if not all other—broken things.
In Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Sara Ahmed theorizes queerness as a disorienting phenomenon, disrupting the progression of “the straight line” as it might be conceived genealogically, socially, affectively, and spatially.[15] She states: “To make things queer is certainly to disturb the order of things.”[16] The broken tennis racket and its spatiotemporal effect uphold the capacious and mutable quality of this definition; the thing invites a certain complex, relational choreography through its unsettled status within the world as something that once had capacities that are no longer available to it due to its brokenness. It emanates phenomenological difference and that difference necessitates a complimentary movement on the part of its viewers: it twists and we twist to see it. This choreographic encounter manifests a type of syncopation—a skipped beat—within the tennis match as the racket, the player, the event, and its audience are all brought into an iterable queer state, made through and aligned with the ontological status of brokenness.
The tennis racket’s queer capabilities become visible the moment it is broken, as it stands between its own peculiarity as a thing that can no longer function as it should and its presence as a tool that gains apparent functionality through its disposability. This paradox amplifies tennis as a setting that stages ways of being and gestures toward various grammatical and performative figurations of liberation.[17] Everything in tennis lives life in double between the embodied and the conditional, the rules of the game and the could-have-been’s that echo out through eruptive and disruptive performative affect.[18] Put plainly, the broken tennis racket initiates a disordered rhythmic configuration—a syncopation—in the game that makes this doubleness apparent.
And Every Other?[19]
The Rally: The Present Time of Glitch
In returning to Baghdatis’ racket abuse at the 2012 Australian Open, the closer we look at these four broken tennis rackets, the more their brokenness seems to extend beyond their ontological parameters, a phenomenological concern Schneider might identify as “medial blurring.”[20] The tennis racket radiates its brokenness outwards and trips up the entirety of the match, causing those involved to lose the plot of the game. This stalls out the event, holding everything in the space that exists between the standard bifurcating logic of the sport, which necessitates that players progress toward a resolution where someone wins and someone loses. When behaving as it should, this logic delineates the game from its various conditional capabilities. However, the presence of a broken thing brings these dramaturgical mechanisms into a static presence that troubles the game’s teleological line.
The temporal impact I am tracking here is not continuous in and of itself, but rather, I claim that both its discrete and reiterative occurrence insists on presentness. We are here, in this moment of/with brokenness, for only a second or two, until the camera pulls away and the game picks up again. But not all time matters and means the same. And the time I attend to here, which Elizabeth Freeman might describe as “the time of proprioception and the time of visual apprehension”[21]—the space between sense and embodied reckoning, between somatic awareness and mental configuration—conjures a type of “wonder” that “re-encounter[s] objects as strange things” so as “not to lose sight of their history but to refuse to make them history by losing sight.”[22] In this time, things linger within presentness and—to return to Freeman—“their syncopation enables the estranged consciousness crucial to ‘freedom.’”[23] This presentness flies in the face of epistemological forces that attempt to contain the match’s temporality: the time of empire, a notably difficult structure to step out from underneath, acting as the air we breathe, the ground we walk on.[24] In concrete terms, the Wimbledon tournament mounts a large Rolex clock on its scoreboard; it peeks through the ivied walls of the stadium to surveil the court, effectively binding the event to the time of empire, ensuring that the present audience can only ever lose time within time. The persistent presentness of the broken tennis racket glitches this temporal system.
And perhaps this glitch strings out some other possibility; its occurrence reconstitutes the temporal so that liberation, as manifested through the strange, erotic entanglement that establishes a relational ethic between this specific (and all) broken thing(s) and its audience, might seep through the cracks. The appearance/becoming of the broken tennis racket clarifies for the spectators that this was not the way things were meant to go, a recognition that imbricates both the racket and its viewers with failure. The affective signals that bring about the broken tennis racket and the resulting penalization by the umpire act as a testament to this unease. But, in my reading of this event, the gestures that attempt to right the game’s temporality are largely futile, as it is the occurrence of a syncopative skip as produced by the broken tennis racket itself that kinks the line of the game, setting back everything that follows and revising everything that preceded.
Andrew Brooks suggests, in his assessment of the glitch as a queer phenomenon in sound, that this enactment of brokenness “produc[es] cracks and breaks…” providing “a theoretical framework for understanding how disruption, deviation, and disorder are productive in systems.”[25] As I began to address above, I am hesitant to use this to point toward some notion of horizonal possibility, reinscribing productivity into the broken tennis racket that has, supposedly, lost its determinable functionality. Engagement with queerness implicates minoritarian gestures toward the utopic—a theoretical-temporal beyond that regards existence as a guaranteed and secured state for various ways of being marked as illegible by a majoritarian culture: a transpositional reckoning for those individuals confined to “a zone of uninhabitability” that sits apart from whiteness, from straightness, from ablism, from capital.[26] However, the longer I live as a queer person, the less invested I become in gestures toward the ever-out-of-reach. Not to be too cheeky with queer theory here, but the broken tennis racket has no future. It can’t live on as a tennis racket. And its meaning has, largely, no effect.
But it is exactly in its apparent meaninglessness, its behavior as a type of non-event, that it asserts its presence. As we take in this performative relic, it distorts the surface of time; this mangled nothing emanates a poetic logic that knows no possibility but gathers meaning in its prismatic temporal consequence. So, instead of pointing toward liberation as an approaching political and social model, I believe these busted-up little things posit that freedom for themselves and us resides as an extant phenomenon, transmitted through their visualization, their capacity to be seen and heard as they are. That in holding the frame as a glitch for even just a moment, these funny, twisted, jagged, and fucked things live boldly and wholly as themselves: rips in the rules, disruptions in the flow of events, a changing course in the way things might have gone through a limitation of the conditional possibilities as managed by the time of empire. They are their own realizable future in their insistence on disordered presentness.
Attempting to read queer, temporal trouble as emanating from the broken tennis racket requires that I address the commonplace status of the event of racket abuse within professional tennis. While an amateur player may think of their tennis racket as precious, for professional players, these athletic instruments have a certain fungibility built into their status in the game; when one breaks or is broken, it can easily be replaced. Players will often have several rackets within arm’s reach during a match. The result is an unavoidable conception by the world’s best tennis stars of their rackets in contradictory terms: essential tools—as the game cannot be played without them—and yet entirely dispensable—as they can readily be subject to violent acts of frustration and rage. And to further stress these object’s replaceability within the economy of the game, in the case of many professional players—Marcos Baghdatis, Nick Kyrgios, and Benoît Paire, to name a few—a single performance of racket abuse can often involve breaking multiple rackets. There is a suggested expendability, a certain kind of excess, in this repeated act that further identifies these things as failed objects.[27] And it is this iterability even within a single performance of racket abuse that further troubles the temporality of the game. What does it mean to not only stay in the presence of a broken thing, but to stay in the presence of many of the same broken things, that all were broken in quick succession? I read this as another type of glitch that performs a double function: the queer, disordered presence of brokenness here does not only operate upon the game’s temporal surface but also upon the act of breaking itself.
In presenting this research, I have created gifs that capture these acts of racket abuse, where a player consecutively breaks multiple rackets, one right after the other. The digital mode of the gif in some ways formalizes the phenomenon I am attempting to describe here and animates an assertive impulse on my part to save these objects—through aesthetic means—from the logics of replacement. Inside the constraints of the gif, when players cast their rackets as fungible objects, breaking an infinite many in sequence, we and them are caught within the time signature of the breaking, incapable of escaping the reality that counteracts the constitutive elements of capital that primarily allows these objects to be conceived of as expendable. Constructing a boundary around the performative event of racket abuse ensures the act’s syncopative configuration becomes its primary, if not exclusionary, time signature. And through this digital intervention, the glitching disjuncture I am attempting to track becomes visible, animating the phenomenon of racket abuse as “disturb[ing] the order of things,” to return to Ahmed’s definition of queerness.[28]
And Every Other, Again? 
Changeover: Syncopation
Broken things have a certain predictive eventuality—a certain status as such. And this raises the question for me: were broken things always meant to be broken? And, in following that logic, were they always broken? Does their presence in brokenness rewrite their meaning and effect through time? Does the definitional write over the historical? As George Harman articulates in regards to Heidegger’s notion of the Broken Tool: “[H]ow is that which one takes to be secondary inscribed in the things?”[29]
There’s a doubleness here, a chiasmatic stumble “where then and now punctuate each other.”[30] Maybe the difference between a broken thing and a thing that is currently situated within the act of being broken has no meaningful signification. Perhaps these are two ways of understanding the same phenomenon, that the eventuality of brokenness breaks the temporal, allowing the thing bound up in the quality of brokenness to trip up time. And so, to return to the primary concern of this project: the broken thing, whatever it might be and under its identifiable status as a broken thing, inherently speaks for itself through the citational, referent doing of brokenness. Put another way, it brings with it, through time, its own voice.
The language of syncopation helps to name the performance of this temporal euphemism. Syncopation is useful as it stretches time beyond an isolated moment: it has legs, it travels, and it brings presence with it. As jazz scholar Fumi Okiji notes, syncopation plays with dominant rhythmic structures, casting its definition beyond the categorical: “Syncopation should not be seen as an opposing pole to the main beat but as a shaking of that beat, a loosening of the soil around its roots, preparing the ground for its displacement.”[31] Put simply, syncopation must be understood as an active, relational event.
And it is this notion of the relational that allows for things to behave—through syncopation—within citational recurrence, as Schneider identifies in her taking up of the term, which she extends from her reading of Stein:
Stein finds cracks in live theatre’s seeming immediacy through which a syncopated doubleness—the same and something else—(re)occurs. And of course, syncopation (like Stein’s writing) jumps. It jumps medial boundaries, from theatre to photography and back. It travels and returns. It passes and recurs. Syncopation troubles ephemerality. It troubles medial specificity. It ‘makes one endlessly troubled.’[32]
This theorization of syncopation paired with Okiji’s sonic/rhythmic interest provides conceptual ground to consider how brokenness—in this instance, regarded beyond the broken tennis racket as an object that traffics in specific ontological interventions—might be further read as a “temporal asynchrony,” that opens the possibility to encounter brokenness as it is, not as it might be within hegemonic terms.[33] While many of the questions I pose above cannot be fully explored in this paper, their resonance is felt in the accumulative consideration of time travel through, between, with various instances of brokenness, not bound to a limited empiricism that delineates objecthoods—and perhaps needlessly demarcates objecthood from subjecthood. Through critical engagement: brokenness calls all of this into question, all at once.
Game, Set, Match: Performance Research
As I mentioned above, a performance practice formed alongside my more theoretical engagement on this subject of brokenness. Two collaborators, Chloe and Zach, and I have been attempting to build out an ever-incomplete auxiliary archive of racket abuse, using only our bodies to deploy the performative as it has been preserved through video recording. Throughout this process, we have frequently confronted the productive dilemma of having to work through embodied mechanics of breaking something that is not there: how might we somatically imagine smashing a tennis racket into the ground repeatedly when there is nothing in our hand to slow our coursing arm? This examination of brokenness without brokenness has resulted in many generative discoveries that resist textualization: their full understanding lives in performance, in the body.
On our first meeting as collaborators, I offered this question to shape our research: does an affective state inform the gesture of racket abuse, or does the gesture of racket abuse enable the explicit performance of a particular affective state? My friend and co-creator Chloe, a psychotherapist who just happens to be an astute and talented performer, immediately shot back: “This doesn’t make sense.” I thought we were simply not sharing the same conceptual ground, so I began to rearticulate the idea: what comes first, the chicken or the egg? She stopped me. “No, no. I understand. I’m saying this question is based on a false premise. You can’t tell the difference between the gesture and the affective state. They are the same.” I thought of challenging her, but I did not want to stall out the generative purpose of our time together before it even began. “We’ll see,” I smirked.
There must be a beginning and an end, an initiatory impulse and an effect.
But as we got deeper into the research—perhaps even just a week later—I began to change my tune. The more I thought about it, the more I realized my friend was pointing out a grounding for the project that, had she not challenged my thinking, could have poisoned the well, incorrectly framing the entirety of our work together.
Maybe it is my background as a playwright that shaped my thinking in terms of starts and finishes, beginning and endings: an Aristotelean logic that insists—in ways that I am always attempting to subvert—that an aesthetic experience must eventually end. A play must, at some point, give back its audience their discrete and self-inscribed sense of time. But I also know that that boundary is not a boundary at all, but a porous, breathing membrane: as a play’s life—its meaning as performance—becomes again and again in the form of insight that re-performs itself through conjurations of memory, or—more accurately, maybe—in the embodied act of remembering. A play lives and dies with recurring frequency, its endings and beginnings impossible to locate elementally.
In “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Karen Barad brilliantly animates this notion in their definition of the apparatus:
…apparatuses are not mere static arrangements in the world, but rather apparatuses are dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted. Apparatuses have no inherent ‘outside’ boundary. This indeterminacy of the ‘outside’ boundary represents the impossibility of closure—the ongoing intra-activity in the iterative reconfiguring of the apparatus of bodily production. Apparatuses are open-ended practices.[34]
I will, eventually, have to attend to the body in the act of racket abuse. I will, eventually, have to build a reading of the act’s politics, its reckoning with subjecthood and being. It is much better first, I think and I hope, to be with brokenness and reassess its doing upon the world: the way it brings those who see it into the endless echo of here and now and again, the way it moves beyond the narrow dimension of ‘homogenous, empty time’ and into some syncopative state made through a failure in understanding a thing’s functionality, a glitch in the way things should have gone and the way things should perform. And all this does what? Not much at all, I guess. But also, perhaps, it bolsters a sense of “sober futurity,” to borrow Nick Salvato’s term: a manner of hope that carries with it humility, cautiousness, attention, and—most importantly—presence.[35] Here, hope behaves contemporaneously in its concern and its gestural outcome; it is not horizonal, but indicative and insistent. This is what brokenness might supply; to paraphrase Lana Del Rey, it’s through brokenness that the light gets in.[36]
[1] Tennis Advocates United, “Benoît Paire Can’t Handle the Heat 2.0 | I Give You Money and it’s Okay,” Youtube Video, 4:06, August 24, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-pwiYWRAHc.
[2] Australian Open TV, “Marcos Baghdatis Destroys FOUR Racquets | Australian Open 2012,” YouTube Video, 1:01, January 18, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7kS68T6ptA. This is the title of the Australian Open’s official YouTube video that capture this instance of racket abuse; the number of rackets receives emphasis and not the word “destroy,” a subtle but significant attempt by cultural purveyors to straighten what I will go on to read as an inherently queer event.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1, no. 1 (1993): 11 – 12. In her article “Queer Performativity: Henry James’ The Art of the Novel,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick contends with a certain imprecision embedded in the ontology of performative functionality as it relates specifically to queerness. Other scholars have extended this argument and uncovered an affiliation between performativity and queerness that I choose to read into this discrete athletic encounter, if for no other reason than to name the dense iterable and emotive factors that motivate repeatable acts: referent lines that have no locatable beginning and, as a result, can be read as queer to some degree.
[5] John Fletcher and Sonja Arsham Kuftinec, “Spectacular Transgressions: Moving beyond Polarities,” Theater Topics, 28, no. 2 (July 2018): 140.
[6] Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 38.
[7] Racket abuse is a common occurrence in professional tennis. Throughout this paper, I will be analyzing the act broadly, utilizing certain instances—mainly Baghdatis’ performance from the 2012 Australian Open—as exemplars, but not at the exclusion of other examples that could just as easily be utilized as subjects of study here. In fact, this syncopative iterability—the sameness of the event—is critical to my argument. While I primarily focus on Baghdatis’ performance from 2012, I claim that other instances of this prevalent act are indexed metonymically within each discrete occurrence.
[8] Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), 24.
[9] This gets sticky when trying to think through the intraactive behavior of racket abuse, the resulting broken racket, and both phenomena’s theoretical entanglements. For example, I don’t think a queer interest necessarily informs the act of breaking a tennis racket and yet, that is the effect. The approximated beginning and end of our subject of study here becomes speculative within the limits of language, jumbling impulse and performance, action and result. I will try to differentiate between the act of racket abuse and the broken racket as best as I can, but—as I try to demonstrate later in the paper in addressing the concept of glitch and syncopation—the distinction between these two phenomena is not always clear.
[10] Lynne Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 5.
[11] Della Pollock, “Performing Writing,” in The Ends of Performance, edited by Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. (New York: New York University Press,1998), 97.
[12] This, of course, is a broad generalization, but I mean to emphasize the game’s function in popular American culture as a symbol of status, as an entrée into white heteronormativity, and as a demonstration or performance of capital. Whether these conceptions are without contradiction or not is beside the point as they reify the game’s social legibility.
[13] Other sports—like volleyball—have a similar perpetuity built within their dramaturgical structure. More overtly timed sports, like the ones I name above, could hypothetically also be never-ending—the three I identify, for example, can all go into overtime. However, the clock for these sports constructs a perimeter around the game. For tennis, there is no such temporal containment.
[14] Jack I Pryor, Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2017). In Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History, Jack Pryor explicitly regards the temporal implications of re/disorientations that appear in and through the presence of queerness as discursive atmosphere—when strangeness is in the air. They provide language for the queerness of temporality with the nomenclature I use above, “time slips,” which they identify as “moments in live performance in which normative conceptions of linear, progress-oriented time fail or fall away, and the spectator is transported into the future or past, while simultaneously remaining anchored to the present of performance” (42). While I am not entirely convinced of Pryor’s phenomenological reading of these instances of temporal trouble, I do think their articulation of our movement, as viewers, is useful here in helping us conceive of disoriented relationality.
[15] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientation, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 100.
[16] Ibid., 161.
[17] UVA School of Architecture, “KATHERINE MCKITTRICK: Curiosities, Wonder, and Black Methodologies // 09.14.20,” YouTube Video, 125:50, September 16, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68gIZJPt7rY&ab_channel=UVASchoolofArchitecture; Huffer,12. In using the term liberation, I index Katherine McKittrick’s incidental, but instructive, definition: “[Liberation] means friendships, radical friendships. And collaborations.” Keeping McKittrick’s wider interests in mind, spatiality moves to the fore in thinking through the relational possibilities and orientations that arise when liberation acts as a discursive conclusion; for this paper, liberation holds space and invites a relational practice based within eros as, to borrow Huffer’s reading of Foucault, “a new name for an unreasonable, corporeal ethics of living in the biopolitical present.”
[18] Stanton B. Garner, Jr, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (New York: Cornell University Press, 1994), 42.
[19] Nick Salvato, Obstruction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 9.
[20] Schneider, 168.
[21] Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 139.
[22] Ahmed, 164.
[23] Freeman, 139.
[24] Jodi A. Byrd, “Weather with You: Settler Colonialism, Antiblackness, and the Grounded Relationalities of Resistance,” Critical Ethnic Studies, 5, no. 1-2 (2019): 209; Ahmed, 100. I align my reading here of the time of capital with Jodi A. Byrd’s important reminder that “Ground is power…” I am working broadly here and cannot cover all the discursive currents that inform such a statement. Still, my argument in this section takes up various considerations that embroil this specific event of tennis with a greater capitalistic framework, which attempts to manage, confine, and construct legible subjectivities in requiring that the conditional possibilities of the sport, while apparently limitless, are in fact contained and, thus, differentiated from some greater, other(ed) creative potentiality. This seemingly infinite ground is very different from the utopic or horizonal. This progress-oriented logic disavows temporal outcomes that do not adhere to the “straight line” that Ahmed troubles in her treatment of queer phenomenology.
[25] Andrew Brooks, “Glitch/Failure: Constructing a Queer Politics of Listening,” Leonardo Music Journal, 25 (2015): 30.
[26] Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3-7
[27] In a certain regard, this excessive performance of racket abuse demonstrates a mastery on the part of the player over these objects—Baghdatis would not have broken four rackets during the 2012 Australian Open had he known he did not have four rackets to spare. Still, even within these circumstances that conceive of this performative act within the terms of expendable capital, the object of the tennis racket still behaves here outside of its apparent function and—even more significantly—can never return to behave as it once was able to. The irreparable quality of the player’s act at any level—amateur to professional—that determines the racket’s status within the economy of the sport as being either precious or expendable is beside the point when we consider that the broken tennis racket enters into failure as its various conditional potentials as a tennis racket close off when it is broken.
[28] Ahmed, 161.
[29] George Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002), 47.
[30] Schneider, 2.
[31] Fumi Okiji, Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisted (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 47
[32] Schneider, 94.
[33] Freeman, 139.
[34] Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 816
[35] Salvato, 203.
[36] I turn to pop culture here as a critically self-aware move meant to highlight the insistent disordered liveliness born from queer phenomenal adumbration and iterability. Lana Del Rey is not the first to posit this transcendental insight—nor is she the most capable figure to engage this philosophic conceit. I choose to quote her here to highlight the diffuse, popularized, unserious affordance that brokenness might bring to light as a feature of queerness: a discursive orientation that undercuts and devalues its own assertion. Put plainly: a vivid failure.