A literary rhythmanalysis of queer life writing from COVID-19 home isolation

This paper applies literary rhythmanalysis to six queer life writing texts from The incompleteness book, an Australasian anthology of writings produced in 2020 under early COVID-19 home isolation protocols. The analysis is steered by Halberstam’s theory of queer time in articulation with rhythmanalysis as theorised by Lefebvre and Régulier. The paper includes discussion of these driving theories, followed by the literary rhythmanalysis itself. Across the six texts, two common themes arise. The first is geo-temporal dissociation. The second is an acute sense of pain stemming from social arrhythmias that preceded the pandemic but were exacerbated or made more noticeable by it. The concluding section reflects from a current day vantage on what these findings reveal about queer people’s relationships to dominant social rhythms before and during 2020 and how this can inform future situations.