Time Slips explores how performance can reimagine the way we think about time, history, memory, and trauma. Specifically focusing on performances done in the United States, Pryor investigates how American culture creates and regulates ideals of citizenship (particularly racial and sexual citizenship) using linear time and teleological narratives, aka "straight time." In further exploring this process of creating the ideal citizen, Pryor starts their analysis post 9/11, describing the process of how America has become a homeland security state concerned with the policing of borders, bodies, and time itself. Counter to that, Pryor, uses Jack Halberstam's term "queer time" to describe moments that defy the constricting logic of teleology and its normative function. In using queer time to describe performance, Pryor coins the term "time slips," which are "moments in live performance in which normative conceptions of time fail, or fall away, and the spectator or artist experiences and alternative, or queer temporality" (9).

Pryor uses their own experiences and identity as a queer and trans* Jewish scholar and performance artist to inform their theories. This gesture makes the stakes in this project about memory, trauma, and performance very real to both them and to their audience. They begin the book with a Holocaust narrative in the preface that shows the imperfect and slippery nature of memory, specifically regarding trauma. It is a story of failed remembrance wherein Pryor attempted to wrench a Holocaust memory and narrative from their grandmother, using the strictures of straight time. As Pryor points out, this effort was doomed to fail, because memory tends to slip time, and straight time negates the trauma experienced by survivors.

The introduction further explains the concept of America as a homeland security state, which was created form the trauma of 9/11. In this post 9/11 America, the ideal citizen is white, heterosexual, cisgender, and Christian. Due to the overabundance of surveillance, this security state is primarily concerned with policing both borders and marginalized individuals. From here, Pryor theorizes the United States as a culture of ghosts and forgetting, one that desires to move on and get things back to normal, thus promoting a teleological view of time. Since performance features embodied knowledge, Pryor examines queer performance "as a subjugated form of knowledge production" (33), and one that is specifically resistant to the systemic violence brought on by the homeland security state's use of straight time. For Pryor, performance and acts of remembrance can be subversive acts in such a culture of forgetting.

The introduction lays out the theoretical groundwork that helps define what is meant by time slips, queer time, straight time, and how queer and transgender bodies resist normalization in a homeland security state. Pryor asserts that performance can function as a site where these time slips occur and make visible the holes in history and memory. They use an intersectional lens to reconceptualize time and examine how performance can be used as a site of resistance against straight time. Each of the following chapters is a case study that examines a particular performance by a queer artist that interrupts straight time, calls attention to the time slips in history, and also addresses trauma in some way.

In chapter one, Pryor describes Geyser Land, a site-specific performance installation by Mary Ellen Strom and Ann Carlson in collaboration with members of the Crow and Northern Cheyenne nations in 2003. This performance piece was done on a stretch of rural land in Montana and involved audience members being carried by train to various performance installations along the route that featured historical photographs recreated using live performers in tableau along with historical video projected onto the landscape. Pryor argues that this performance installation slips time by calling attention to the failure of the archive in relation to the trauma that was done (and erased through acts of omission) to First Nations people.

Chapter two gives a deep description of a particular performance of Peggy Shaw's Must: The Inside Story performed in Amherst, Massachusetts in 2011. Because Shaw is considered a butch lesbian icon (due to her work with Split Britches), Pryor identifies her as a "trans/cestor" (71) for the transmasculine community who transmits embodied knowledge through the act of performance. Pryor chooses this particular performance due to the fact that it was after Peggy Shaw suffered a stroke, so the time slips were overtly seen in Shaw's body.

In Chapter three, Pryor turns the lens back onto their own work: a multi-site performance installation, floodlines, that was staged in Austin, TX for seven consecutive years between 2004 and 2010. Pryor weaves personal narrative into the description of the performance, noting the changes that happen when a performance is repeated over years. floodlines, which Pryor conceived, directed, and performed in, takes the audience on a journey through various performance installations in a suburban neighborhood in Austin and investigates trauma and queer time slips seen in the American landscape.

The fourth chapter switches focus to the pedagogical uses of time slips and how one might teach queer time. In examining an incident of transphobia directed at Pryor and their students while Pryor was teaching, this chapter argues that institutional responses, particularly University responses to violence and oppression, often contribute to systemic violence. Pryor ends the chapter with a performance their students created that brought the audience through a queer tour of the campus, reimagining queerness as a site of potential hope and utopia. Interrogating power structures and institutions (such as the University), and the trauma wrought by those institutions, through an intersectional lens is of great importance. There are implications to this practice that can be felt throughout the intuition of higher education and even more broadly felt in the whole of US culture. And yet, Pryor still leaves room for hope that the end. In building off of José Esteban Muñoz's concept of "cruising utopia," Pryor offers what they call "cruising home," i.e. creating a queer space within straight time and the homeland security settler colonial nation state to call home. Pryor's goal is not in using queer time as a counter to straight time, but it is about finding moments where time slips, most often due to queerness or trauma. Performance then, for Pryor, is a site where this queer time is exemplified.

In the epilogue, Pryor discusses seeing the musical Fun Home, one day before the fifteen-year anniversary of 9/11. They note how the show plays with these ideas of history, memory, and how stories are told and retold. There is hope then, at the end, as Pryor leaves us with a desire to believe in life after trauma and queerness on the horizon.

In keeping with Pryor's notion of archive failure, I have had to leave so much out of this review and am unable to convey the entirety of their theories and performance analyses. This document is thus a generative failure, creating its own time slip. Like performance, time slips can be viewed as open invitations to discover the imperfections of our own stories and memories, and this book leaves room for future scholars to jump into the slipstream.




     — Reviewed by Anna Maria Broussard, Nichols State University