Investments into the resolutional question are an investment into state time that creates cruelly optimistic futures for queer folks that remain visible but always out of reach – their plastic integration of queerness through economic equality problematizes that the starting point for queerness is always located in a radical disjunction, and reform exists as an exhausting mechanism that only infuses state time into queer rhythm

Throughout Born in Flames, countless members of the Women’s Army declare: “This is our time.” The time of the revolution was not the time to abolish anti-blackness, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. It was a time that left behind and captured poor (queer) women of color through the progress of democracy and equality. In this way, “our time” and state time are two antagonistic temporalities of violence in the film. As James Scott argues, the modern state’s utopian aim is to reduce the disorderly and chaotic social order under its purview into a mirror of the administrative knowledge central to its observations and governance. The state works to produce temporal and spatial intelligibility with the goal of manufacturing the orderly administration and regulation of the nation’s population, resources, and infrastructure. By disrupting and dismantling spaces, populations, and epistemologies that are illegible to its regimes of knowing and governance, the modern state creates a utopia of visibility and legibility that is open to policing and control (Scott 1998, 82). The management of time is central to this process. “Our time” is what the state seeks to capture. In Born in Flames, state time extends and expands the violence of the past, while “our time” is a temporal regime that exceeds and undoes state time. Again, Fanon proves useful for understanding these differences. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon describes a “time lag, or a difference of rhythm, between the leaders of a nationalist party and the mass of the people” (Fanon 1963, 107). According to Fanon, the rank and file of anti-colonial rebellions demand the complete and utter immediate destruction of the forms of power that render them “more dead than alive,” while both colonial and nationalist governments attempt to manage, temper, and restrain the demands of those who have no more time to give to the promises of a future that is always coming, but never arrives (51). For example, in the film, the state promises that “in the future” there will be jobs, an end to sexual violence, and racial and gender equality. But for Fanon, the “hopeless dregs of humanity” (or the wretched of the earth) are filled with an “uncontrollable rage” and thus exist in a temporal regime apart from that of the party or the nation. This is a time of intensity and immediacy (“the slaves of modern times are impatient”), where the future of the present as it is means no future at all (74). Like the financial, epistemological, and racialized legacies of slavery Baucom sees intensifying in our current moment, Fanon diagnoses the future of colonialism as the accumulation of the social, biological, and living death of the native. The native lives a death in life produced by the racism of slavery and colonialism. The future’s horizon is the accumulation of past forms of racial terror and violence. In this way, Baucom and Fanon draw connections between race and time that are crucial to questions of queer futurity. The relationship between race, gender, death, and the future is central to the immediacy and spontaneity of the Women’s Army and is foundational to the film’s critique of the future. We can turn to the Fanonian-inspired prison writings of George Jackson to further explore the relationship between death, race, and the future. In his 1972 text Blood in My Eye, published shortly after he was shot and killed by guards at San Quentin prison, Jackson writes of racism, death, and revolution: Their line is: “Ain’t nobody but black folks gonna die in the revolution.” This argument completely overlooks the fact that we have always done most of the dying, and still do: dying at the stake, through social neglect or in U.S. foreign wars. The point is now to construct a situation where someone else will join in the dying. If it fails and we have to do most of the dying anyway, we’re certainly no worse off than before. Here, Jackson argues that the social order of the United States is saturated with an anti-blackness that produces, in the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (2007, 28). Jackson’s text is littered with a polemic that links race and death in a way that preemptively echoes Michel Foucault’s declaration that racism is the process of “introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die” (Foucault 2003, 254). When Jackson, Gilmore, and Foucault define race as the production of premature death, they make a connection between race and the future. Race is the accumulation of premature death and dying. For Jackson, race fractures the future so that the future looks like incarceration or the premature death of malnutrition, disease, and exhaustion. The future was not the hopefulness of unknown possibilities. It was rather the devastating weight of knowing that death was coming cloaked in abandonment, neglect, incarceration, or murder. In other words, according to Jackson, death was always and already rushing towards the present of blackness. In the last line of No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman similarly connects the future to premature death when he references the murder of Matthew Shepard. He writes: “Somewhere, someone else will be savagely beaten and left to die – sacrificed to a future whose beat goes on, like a pulse or a heart – and another corpse will be left like a mangled scarecrow to frighten the birds who are gathering now, who are beating their wings, and who, like the death drive, keep on coming” (Edelman 2004, 154). For Edelman, the future will necessarily continue to produce a world that is unlivable for queer people. In this way, the polemics of black liberation and Edelman’s anti-social thesis share an affinity around the theorization of the future as overdetermined by premature death, yet they diverge in how they imagine death’s relationship to race and power. For Edelman, the future looks like repetition of the death of Matthew Shepard (a white gay man), while for Jackson, it looks like the premature death of incarceration, the ghetto, and chattel slavery’s haunting contortion of the present. In other words, the state and anti-blackness were central to the anti-sociality of the black liberation movement. Within Jackson’s analysis, the state is the primary mechanism for unevenly distributing racialized regimes of value and disposability. Following the writing of Fanon, Jackson argued that for this relationship to be abolished: “The government of the U.S.A and all that it stands for, all that it represents, must be destroyed. This is the starting point, and the end” (Jackson 1972, 54). Jackson’s polemic crescendos when he describes the future he desires: We must accept the eventuality of bringing the U.S.A to its knees; accept the closing off of critical sections of the city with barbed wire, armed pig carriers criss-crossing the city streets, soldiers everywhere, tommy guns pointed at stomach level, smoke curling black against the daylight sky, the smell of cordite, house-to-house searches, doors being kicked down, the commonness of death. If the past and present have produced the accumulation of the premature death of black people, then Jackson imagines the complete undoing of the social order as the way out of temporal capture. The future of the social order means no future, and so the future must come to an end. Fanon similarly imagines the relationship between the native and the future of the social order: “They won’t be reformed characters to please colonial society, fitting in with the morality of its rulers; quite on the contrary, they take for granted the impossibility of their entering the city save by hand grenades and revolvers” (Fanon 1963, 130). Here, the invitation to the safety and security of the city (or the social order as it is) is an offer to continue a life that is a half-life. Possibility comes from a starting point that is an end.