7.1 Queer temporalities and chrononormativity

Queer temporalities challenge traditional ideas about time, rejecting linear paths focused on reproduction and productivity. Instead, they embrace diverse experiences of time, including feeling out of sync, nostalgic for unlived pasts, or anticipating unrealized futures.

Chrononormativity enforces a timeline of life events centered on heterosexual norms. Queer lives often clash with these expectations, creating a sense of temporal dissonance. This misalignment can lead to feelings of belatedness or prematurity in relation to societal milestones.

Queer Temporalities

Queer Conceptions of Time

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• Queer time challenges linear, heteronormative conceptions of time focused on reproduction and productivity
• Queer individuals often experience time differently due to non-normative life trajectories and milestones (coming out, transitioning, chosen families)
• Queer time involves a sense of temporal drag, where the past continues to haunt and influence the present
  • Includes the persistence of outdated stereotypes, traumas, and nostalgic longings
• Queer futurity imagines alternative, utopian possibilities for LGBTQ+ lives and worlds
  • Rejects the idea that queerness has "no future" and envisions radical potentials (queer kinship, liberation)

Multiplicitous Queer Temporalities

• Queerness encompasses a multiplicity of temporalities beyond just past, present and future
• Includes asynchronous and anachronistic experiences of time that deviate from dominant temporal structures
  • Feeling "out of time," nostalgia for unlived pasts, anticipation of unrealized futures
• Queer people navigate simultaneous and contradictory temporal realities (being in and out of the closet, pre- and post-transition)
• Queerness itself has been figured as a kind of temporal otherness, associated with delay, immaturity, and arrested development in contrast with "straight time"

Normative Time Structures

Chrononormativity and Heteronormativity

• Chrononormativity refers to the use of time to organize individual lives and social relations according to normative scripts
• Involves the privileging of a linear, developmental temporality oriented around heterosexual reproduction and family
  • Assumes a "natural" progression of life stages: birth, childhood, marriage, reproduction, death
• Heterotemporality shapes expectations around the "right" times for life events like marriage and childrearing
  • Those who deviate from this timeline are seen as immature, irresponsible or stunted
• Normative temporalities are naturalized and universalized, but are actually socially constructed and enforced

Queer Temporal Dissonance

• Many queer lives are marked by a sense of temporal dissonance or asynchrony with normative temporal structures
• Anachronism, or temporal misalignment, characterizes queer experiences that do not match heteronormative timelines
  • Includes dynamics of queer "phase," "late" coming out, non-linear transitioning processes
• Produces experiences of belatedness, prematurity, and untimeliness in relation to expected life stages
• Queer people often feel "out of sync" with peers and family members following conventional scripts
  • Can generate stigma and feelings of failure or deviance for not meeting temporal norms

Queer Archives and Asynchrony

Queer Archival Practices

• Queer archives document and preserve histories that have been suppressed, erased, or forgotten in dominant historical narratives
  • Collect ephemeral traces of queer lives and subcultures (objects, letters, zines, oral histories)
• Queer archiving challenges the heteronormative logics of conventional archives organized around famous figures, institutions and events
• Queer archives are often grassroots, community-based projects that resist institutional neglect of LGBTQ+ histories
  • Involve alternative classification systems, participatory practices, and affective relationships to archival materials
• Queer archives are asynchronous, bringing together past and present in an effort to imagine queer futures

Queer Asynchronicities

• Asynchrony refers to the coexistence of multiple, non-aligned temporalities within queer experience
• Queerness itself has been described as asynchronous, or "out of sync" with the temporal rhythms of heteronormative society
• Queer histories are marked by asynchrony, with past events, figures and struggles resurfacing in the present
  • Involves revivals of past aesthetics, reappropriations of historical slurs, returns to activist touchstones (Stonewall)
• Queer asynchrony highlights the persistence of the past in the present and the ways in which history shapes contemporary queer life
  • Counters progressive narratives that consign queerness to the past or claim that LGBTQ+ equality has been achieved