Derrida and Halberstam: the Queer Body as a Site of Difference

When reading Jacques Derrida's article Differance, I was constantly reminded of a book by writer Judith Halberstam entitled In a A Queer Time and Place. In this book, Halberstam examines the queer body in all its manifestations- transgender, transsexual, gay, intersex, etc- as a specific place in which our conceptions of time and space interact. Halberstam examines how our vision of the queer body forces us to confront our sociohistoric visions of time and space and then breaks them down, revealing their limitations and providing an image for a possible future embodied, specifically, by the transsexual body.

As I read Differance, I wondered what Derrida would have to say about the Halberstam's book and the queer movement in general. I think he would have been fascinated with Halberstam's application of the processes of spacing and temporalizing to the body, and to a specific type of body. Obviously the concept of difference plays a role in all queer theory and gender studies in general- some of the main 'problems' gender studies wrestles with is the origin of difference, the maintenance of difference, the meaning of difference, the hierarchy of difference, etc etc etc. But I think Derrida would really have been into the physicalization of some of his concepts that gender-based work like Halberstam's book make possible.