Time for the Gift of Dance

Abstract

It might appear strange that a contribution to a section of chapters that examines temporality in gender and erotic relations in order to reconceptualize sex and gender relations as non-linear and non-(hetero) normative would chose as its subject a film from that generic bastion of heteronormativity, the Hollywood romantic comedy: Peter Chelsom’s remake of Masayuki Suo’s acclaimed Japanese original Shall We Dansu? (1996), Shall We Dance?, hit the big screen in 2004, starring Richard Gere, Jennifer Lopez and Susan Sarandon.¹ What is not so strange is that the choice of text is a film. As Elizabeth Freeman observes in her introduction to GLQ’s 2007 special issue on queer temporalities, articulations of queer temporality are effectively achieved through a focus on the moving image, since ‘the time-based art of film … offers so much metacommentary on time and, indeed, makes temporality visually apprehensible’ (Freeman, 2007, p. 176, n. 30). This chapter demonstrates that Shall We Dance? does not so easily conform to the irreducible heteronormativity assumed of its genre. At the same time, my reading participates in what Roger Hallas regards as queer spectatorship, which includes ‘a rejection or neglect of narrative linearity and trajectory; a fetishistic preoccupation with the moment, the detail, the fragment; and a performativity that contributes to identity formation’ (Hallas, 2003, p. 93).²