The Future of Next Wednesday Night: Douglas Crimp's Queer Planning in an Early Year of AIDS
Date
2024
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Producer
Director
Performer
Choreographer
Costume Designer
Music
Videographer
Lighting Designer
Set Designer
Crew Member
Funder
Rehearsal Director
Concert Coordinator
Advisor
Moderator
Panelist
Alternative Title
Department
Haverford College. Department of English
Type
Thesis
Original Format
Running Time
File Format
Place of Publication
Date Span
Copyright Date
Award
The Terry M. Krieger '69 Memorial Prize
Language
eng
Note
Table of Contents
Terms of Use
Rights Holder
Access Restrictions
Dark archive until 01/01/2044. Afterwards Haverford users only
Terms of Use
Tripod URL
Identifier
Abstract
In this essay, I close read Douglas Crimp’s 1987 weekly planner to offer a theory of what I call the “queer planning” that unfolds on and around its pages. Queer planning is the improvisational process of devising social connectivity through the quotidian gestures which underly and complement various scales of social movement to fashion an impossible future. I focus on the everyday acts of imagination, experiment, and collaboration that José Esteban Muñoz, Fred Moten, and Stefano Harney connect to queer of color potentiality and fugitive planning, hoping to open a sense of how queer relation sustained itself amidst the AIDS catastrophe’s decimation of social life. Queer planning revises theories of queer (anti)futurity which either deny queerness access to the future or situate queerness on a distant horizon, aligning with a death drive or utopia respectively. Instead, planning engages a queer future as physically and temporally proximate as the planner’s weekly scope, insisting on a temporality of possibility amidst mass death.