Travelling the Genderqueer Slipstream

“Travelling the Genderqueer Slipstream” uses contemporary theories of time arising from Western generic studies to offer a new reading of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis”, arguing that the representation of time throughout that piece is unstable. This part of the work coheres in the concept of “frontier iconicity”: that Turner created a representation of the Western in time that is so far removed from linear representations of time that it constitutes an aesthetic point of entry into slipstream time-travel. This line of thinking, which follows Foucault and Baudrillard, is primarily explored through the work of Michael K. Johnson, Mark Rifkin, Grace L. Dillon and Peter Boag. The second part of the paper explores the potential of considering Native Slipstream as a reading strategy for all texts that invoke frontier iconicity, demonstrated by a recuperative approach to transmasculine, gender nonconforming and genderqueer presence in the literary Western. The argument culminates with the suggestion that considering the frontier icon as fundamentally temporally unstable, has set the conditions for one of the most generative discussions of queer futurity that has been possible to date. Authors and theatre makers explored in this discussion include Willa Cather, Zane Grey, Louise Erdrich and Charlie Josephine, among others.