Out of time: Queer excess, trauma, and the art of nation-making

This thesis explores the ways depictions of queer trauma work to cultivate a desirable citizenship. The term "heterocapitalism" describes a national ethos that demands maximum productivity in as little time as possible, a drive to master time itself, to the end of nation-state futurity. Those lives that fail to (re)produce in a timely manner are queer, and as lives that fall outside such a massive social project, they are abject and are beyond the scope of social inclusion. Significantly, however, this thesis argues that these lives are not only beyond the fold of life but that they actively pose a threat to the well-being and futurity of the heterocapitalist nation-state. Finally, taking up Foucault's second epoch of power, this thesis contends that cinematic depictions of violence to queer bodies distribute these images as "obstacle-signs" that serve to reinstate and reinscribe normative laws of embodiment: viewers, horrified by the violence that queerness invokes, are effectively deterred from committing a similar crime against the state.