Trans Times: Que(e)rying Normative Logics of Temporality, Gender, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf's <em>Orlando</em>

Abstract

Prefiguring contemporary inquiries into queer and trans temporality, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography explores temporal politics of sexual and gendered identity amidst socio-historical developments in modernism. In her critique of prevailing nineteenth-century presumptions about human experience and related biologically determined, chronologically structured lifetimes, Woolf creates an untimely, gender-variant character resistant to normative order. To conceptualize Orlando’s non-normative temporality and gender identifications, this article draws from the threefold framework developed in Fisher, Phillips, and Katri’s (2017) research on trans temporalities: ‘the construction, deconstruction, and resistant reconstruction of trans subjects’. Spanning from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, Orlando’s queer reality serves as dual resistance to norms of both time and gender; a confluence of constructed male past and deconstructed present as trans woman substantiates the gender variance and future reconstructions of the trans self within what this article introduces as a continuum. In consideration of modernist interactions with time and genderqueer life along with current theorizations of queer and trans temporalities, this article seeks to argue how the trans self modeled by Woolf emerges as asynchronous and ever-evolving. This article then offers, in the vein of Orlando’s transgender subjectivity, an exemplification of the potential to resist and subvert hetero- and chrononormativity in introducing alternative modes of lived reality that endorse unscheduled lifetimes and divergent relations to time, gender, and sexuality.