Queer Temporality Research Articles

Repetition with a difference

The paper examines how the return to Westeros demonstrates the audiences’ desire for “repetition with a difference,” focusing on the political underpinnings of worldbuilding and storytelling presented in House of the Dragon (2022–). A prequel to Game of Thrones , HOTD repeats the setting and many crucial figures, dynamics, and plot points of the original. Seemingly in response to fan criticism of the politics of representation in terms of race, gender, and sexuality in GOT , though, HOTD envisions a past of Westeros that strangely seems more progressive than its storyworld’s “future.” We argue that these temporal shifts can be read productively through the concept of queer temporality, challenging linear notions of time and progress. HOTD presents a seemingly progressive narrative that locates queerness and racial diversity in the past; in this vision, any potential progress thus becomes confined to the past, disappearing from the future of this fantasy storyworld. We argue that attending to the slight shifts in emphasis between GOT and HOTD provides an opportunity to identify changes in audiences’ expectations. We ask: what kind of queer pleasures are mobilized when audiences are invited to revisit a familiar world, but also to re-memory GOT , the original text, with the knowledge of its diverse past as depicted in HOTD ?

Drag Artists in Shanghai: Balancing Local and Global Influences in Queer Cultural Production

This article discusses a case study of a group of local and expat drag artists based in Shanghai, China. Theoretical perspectives of “global gay” discourse, queer temporality and Chinese-centric queer theories were employed to question how Shanghai’s drag artists navigate drag’s growing popularity, Chinese state restrictions and Western dominance. Through analysing semi-structured interviews and performance video samples of seven drag artists and one LGBTQ+ venue owner, queer cultural productions in China were explored to ask how they offer new possibilities for queer knowledge production, and propose futurities that are simultaneously transnational and rooted in China. While the influence of Euro-American LGBTQ+ discourse was documented and acknowledged, other perspectives revealed more nuanced conceptualisations of the binary between copy/original, the frictions inherent in cultural exchange, and diverse forms of resistance. Shanghai’s drag scene is evolving in distinct ways, incorporating both global and local influences and cultural traditions. With queer knowledge still largely attributed to the West, and non-Western experiences vastly underrepresented, it is important to recognise what underground cultural productions such as those in Shanghai offer global queer cultural exchange.

For queer lovers and friends: an exploration of queer connection by design in the Lex Mobile App

ABSTRACT What does it mean for a dating app to be queer by design? In this article, I examine the extent to which Lex, the queer dating and social app, diverges from algorithmically heteronormative interface paradigms to express queer temporalities and relationalities. To do so, I analyze Lex’s 2019–2022 interface using the walkthrough method, which involves critically engaging with an app’s features and functionality, vision, operating model, and governance, to uncover embedded cultural meanings and assumptions. With walkthroughs, I analyze Lex’s software components, terms of use, privacy policy, community guidelines, and branding discourse, while considering the platform’s original references to archival personal ads. From this analysis, I argue that Lex’s affordances queer dating app design by resisting compulsory data collection, countering binary sorting and categorical definitions of gender and sexuality, and disengaging from economies of visibility through text-based interaction, highlighting situated histories of queer information networks amidst normative frameworks. I extend this work to characterize how queer affordances in digital infrastructures can encourage fluid identities and pluralistic modes of connecting that draw upon rich histories of resistance in queer information practices, reinforcing calls for increased intersectionality in interface design.

From Bangladesh Colony to Shanthinagar: housing rights, sexuality, and consumption in Keralam

As the developmental state attempted to transform the urban slum in Kerala into a model housing colony, narratives of decency, self-restraint, and sexual discipline became crucial for securing housing rights in the transformed space. ‘Bad’ and ‘good’ consumption; ‘bad’ and ‘good’ poor and images of ‘normality’ and the ‘normal home’ as the abode of the ideal citizen and worker were some of the strategies deployed by the residents of the Bangladesh Colony to encounter the quotidian world of moral non-acceptance. This article examines how neoliberal articulation of rights through government projects often have contradictory effects on the lives of differently positioned women. The moral economy of consumption hinders the realization of the neoliberal ideal of the consumer-citizen. Practices considered as ‘excess’ in consumption by female sex workers were perceived as a threat to this slum community lying on the urban margins, resulting in their expulsion. The article integrates theories of urban assemblage and queer temporality to understand how women sex workers resisted such expulsions. These theories converge on the notion of excess/abundance. Abundance of relationships, of political alliances and strategies, of consumption practices—exceeding heteronormative ideals—was deployed by women sex workers to resist their erasure and confinement into any single identity.

Queer temporalities and the life course: Trans aging in Torrey Peters' Detransition, Baby (2021)

Torrey Peters' debut novel Detransition, Baby from 2021, a Women's Prize for Fiction nominee, problematizes gender norms by telling the story of three main characters: Reese, a trans woman, Ames, who de-transitioned to live as a man again, and Katrina, a Chinese and Jewish cis woman who is also Ames' lover and boss. Ames and Katrina are expecting a child and are testing the possibilities of having a non-conventional family together with Reese. Parenthood is, thus, the central theme of the novel which structures also the sections of book into the time before the conception and the weeks after it. By doing so, the temporal framework of the novel queers the linearity of heteronormative life courses on the form as well as the content level. Therefore, the interplay of form and content invites to critically investigate how the concept of trans time that challenges linearity and normative conformity (Halberstam, 2005) may provide useful insights into trans aging and the life course through this literary representation. Following, contemporary feminist theorists' commitments to negotiate what makes “life more livable for those whose gender presentation, identity, or bodily experience have been judged abnormal, nonexistent, or impossible” (Karhu, 2022, 304–305), this paper aims at carrying out a critical feminist literary analysis of trans aging, queer life courses and the thereof related gendered norms in Peters' novel. By relying predominantly on feminist poststructuralist theories (Butler 2004) and cultural aging studies (Maierhofer, 2019), it is the aim to challenge normativity and limited social norms through this critical literary reading.

RECLAIMING QUEER TIME: QUEER TEMPORALITIES IN ALI SMITH'S "HOW TO BE BOTH"

This article examines the different manifestations of alternative temporalities in Ali Smith’s Goldsmiths Award novel How to be Both (2014). My argument is that the novel ‘queers’ understandings of time in two significant ways: by highlighting new possibilities of narrative structure that challenge linear conceptions of time and by questioning regulated notions of developmental temporalities in terms of progression from childhood to heteronormative adulthood. Hence, by drawing on the compelling framework of queer temporalities, the main goal of this article is to analyze the mechanisms deployed by Ali Smith to generate unprecedented configurations of queer time.

Not getting your story straight: queering heroes’ journeys and heteronormative timelines

ABSTRACT As with many popular texts promising templates for successful storytelling, The Writer’s Journey claims that a singular story structure applies to all voices and circumstances, therefore funnelling every character journey into a ‘universal neutral’. This article offers queer temporality as a lens through which to unravel the 12 steps of Vogler’s hero’s journey, informed by queer theory’s critiques of the 8 steps of the heteronormative life journey . It joins other studies critiquing the paradigm from other standpoints, including Indigenous screen storytelling, gaming and interactive narratives, and for development of characters disenfranchised by gender and/or circumstance. Others note the model’s increasing irrelevance as writers uncover its limitations for creative processes of story development. This article homes in on how studies of queer temporalities – rejecting ‘dominant temporal logics’ and ‘chrononormativity’, replacing ‘straight time’ with ‘queer time’, can further destabilise the hero’s journey’s dominance in story development by exploring the breadth of practices in creative writing and screen production beyond the universalising models.

Paths of Honey: Jonathan Son of Saul in Hebrew Women’s Queer Poetics

ABSTRACT: This article charts a poetic conversation between three Hebrew women poets, Rachel Bluwstein, Yona Wallach and Sivan Beskin, surrounding the biblical figure of Jonathan, son of Saul. It traces the way in which the women poets reclaim and revise the figure of Jonathan against the grain of an androcentric intertextual tradition, in which the male-bond appears as a metonym of male superiority. The three poets’ shared fascination with Jonathan transposes the biblical intertext from the realm of male-exclusivity into a much more open field of meaning featuring gender-fluidity, pleasure, trauma, and queer temporality. The article reads the poetic conversation surrounding the queer figure of Jonathan as a cross-generational collaborative endeavor of queer appropriation and reconstruction. Sustaining this collaboration is an intertextual network that spans beyond the three poets and the biblical text, encompassing a wide range of multilingual classic and modern cultural intertexts, through which various queer cultural contents interact with each other ultimately confounding national and heteronormative time and space.

“To Live Is a Matter of Time”: Memory, Survival and Queer Refugeehood in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

In his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), Ocean Vuong attempts to reweave the historical threads that have been brutally severed by American imperialism, forced migration and the imperatives of assimilation, as a practice of survival. Drawing on his own experience as a Vietnamese refugee, Vuong situates a Vietnamese American queer protagonist at the centre of his non-linear narrative, which excavates the boy’s family history to trace the multiple histories of displacement informing who he is today. The novel’s temporal disorientation becomes a formulation of queer temporality that activates a critical reorientation of how experiences of refuge are typically represented—a coming into consciousness known as “refugeetude”. Such a critical reorientation serves a dual purpose. Firstly, by foregrounding the protagonist’s—and his family’s—shattered recollections, Vuong challenges dominant accounts of the Vietnam War and recovers the voices of those that are effaced by Western representation, thus assembling a more inclusive “just memory” of the war. Secondly, the novel disrupts the teleological narrative of progressive assimilation that is prevalent in refugee discourse by revealing the enduring forms of violence that displaced subjects must still face in contemporary America. By queering the normative temporality of refugee experience, the novel demonstrates how the characters’ refugeehood is not finite but ongoing, necessitating a continuous search for healing and resilience.

Group polyphony and sexuality

This article explores the intersection between group analysis, feminism, and queer understandings of sexuality, aiming to initiate a dialogue and generate new insights in these fields. I examine key concepts from group analysis, such as the ‘group matrix’ and the ‘social unconscious’, to explore how therapeutic groups can generate openness to others and differences. The article presents group analysis as a historically grounded psychosocial theory capable of bridging gaps between discourses to generate new ways of understanding social identities. The term ‘figuration’ borrowed from feminist and group analytic theory serves as a framework to synthesise conflicting perspectives, with the analytic group serving as a dynamic space of creative tension. By exploring this shared term, previously unconnected subjects can find potential common ground. Elizabeth Freeman’s exploration of queer temporalities and spaces is then considered, followed by an examination of symmetric and asymmetric logic by psychoanalyst Ignatio Matte Blanco. These concepts shed light on conscious and unconscious modes of thought. By juxtaposing the histories of figuration alongside symmetric and asymmetric logic, the article elucidates the consequences for group analysis in understanding sexuality and gender. The group analytic concept of the location of disturbance and the processes involving logic and counter-logic within the analytic group matrix are instrumental in delineating these consequences. By bridging the gaps between fields and encouraging creative engagement, the article contributes to expanding the understanding of sexuality and gender within the context of group analytic theory.

Readings in queer pleasure

This article analyzes the queer pleasures of the 2015 sf movie by the Wachowski sisters, Jupiter Ascending . We find that these pleasures operate on two intertwined levels: the movie’s campy villains and over-the-top aesthetics reflect the themes of queer temporality and reproduction on the textual level, while the straight romance of the protagonist draws on the queer archive of fan fiction. We engage with queer studies and fan studies as critical frameworks that allow us to center affective pleasures of recognizing well-established romantic tropes and character archetypes. Critical debates surrounding Jupiter Ascending point to a larger discussion concerning the space for pleasure within sf texts and sf fan communities, while the movie’s commitment to fan fiction tropes and narrative practices anticipates recent changes in media consumption and production patterns.

Queer temporalities in TV series Veneno: breaking down the spiral of silence through trans visibility

This study explores the implications of media visibility in the evolution of public opinion about trans people in the Spanish context. We focus on the socio-cultural impact of the TV series ‘Veneno’ (2020, Atresmedia) in relation to the breaking down of the spiral of silence (Noelle-Neumann, 1993) on trans issues. Based on Esteban Muñoz's (2020) theoretical approach to queer temporalities, we conducted a 'close reading' analysis (Brummett 2018) of the diachronic narrative of the television series Veneno (2020). Through a linear observation of the past, present and future of media representation and its relationship with the real-life situation of trans people, an evolution is detected from ostracism and fetishization in the past, to a future shift towards greater normalization and livable life forms. But the results also reveal a spiral of meanings that interconnect with different temporalities and contexts, reflecting the non-linear nature of queer temporalities. Additionally, the paper discusses how this series, due to its media impact, has contributed to socio-political public debate on the need to address the rights of trans people in modern-day Spanish society. Finally, its impact not only relies on improving trans visibility by portraying trans narratives, but we also discuss how the series is playing an important role in queering the media industry itself, ensuring trans people to work both in front and behind the cameras.

The Queer Voice and Gaze in Eichendorff’s Das Marmorbild

This essay investigates the alliance of ocularcentrism and cis-heteronormativity as canonical formations in Joseph von Eichendorff’s 1819 novella Das Marmorbild, which enact a process of masculine subjectivity development through silencing the protagonist’s queer voice of difference. Furthermore, this essay argues that the novella transposes the esthetic encounter of viewing and listening to mimoplastic performances such as tableaux vivants into the narrative and shows how the male protagonist’s ability to articulate his desires vis-à-vis both male and female figures is calibrated through these mutual performances’ queer temporality. Drawing on tropes from the Western visual canon, this essay demonstrates how the story’s visual configurations work in tandem with a cis-heteronormativity to eliminate the disruptive potential of queer voices to cis-heteronormative sensory order. Nevertheless, this discussion problematizes the condition of the possibility of the canonical alignment and influence of cis-heteronormativity and visuality as it locates their motivation in patriarchal culture’s organization around homosocial desires.

Subjects without history? Sexual citizenship, queer temporality, and postcoloniality in Mozambique

ABSTRACT This article analyses the relationships among queer histories, minority rights, temporal regimes and the promise of sexual citizenship in contemporary Mozambique. It critiques the dominant and conservative view that LGBTIQ+ Africans are “subjects without history,” or “out of time,” to use Rahul Rao’s influential phrasing. Based on archival and oral history research, the article argues that LGBTIQ+ Africans do not necessarily fit in the temporality of the nation but rather live in constant friction and negotiation with it, sometimes insisting on their inclusion in the official history, sometimes creating their own story and imaginations of the past. By comparatively analysing two historical moments – the revolutionary post-independence period, from the mid- to late 1970s, and the “decriminalisation” of homosexuality, in 2015 – the article advances a queer critique of national historiography, gesturing to the possibility of (and perhaps the need for) a plural queer memory for Mozambique.

Endo Time: Endometriosis and the Flow of Recognition

AbstractThe relation between time and gender has been extensively discussed in feminist theory, from Simone de Beauvoir to recent studies of queer temporality and crip time. In this article, I explore gender as “lived time” in relation to a pressing feminist issue: social recognition of the chronic illness endometriosis (endo). Based on my interviews with individuals diagnosed with endo, I argue that lived time can be studied by approaching becoming as a dynamic process or flow of recognition, creating certain temporal patterns in the lifeworld. I propose the concept of “endo time” as a phenomenological conception of the lived time of endo. I identify three temporal patterns that characterize endo time: waiting time (I), cyclical or chronic time (II), and sedimented time (III). The analysis contributes to feminist philosophy by detailing how gender appears as a specific orchestration of time. Because of its connection to feminized pain and menstrual flow on the one hand and social recognition on the other, endo presents an illuminating case for exploring the relation between gender, recognition, and lived time.

Articulating Political Feelings

This article introduces two local cases of political activism where performative methods were used: the 1987 demonstration by the feminist antimilitarists Women for Peace, and a campaign by Extinction Rebellion’s queer environmentalists in 2021, both in Helsinki, Finland. The article argues that through diversity and complexity, collectives become fluid and adaptive and thus stay ahead of party politics while advancing social change in an effective manner. This requires aesthetic strategies explored in this text: how ambivalent feelings are formed into an aesthetics to communicate political feelings and demands. The artistic methods used in these actions are considered through Jacques Rancière’s and Judith Butler’s theorising on the relational and the communal, while José Esteban Muñoz’s notions of queer temporality and the ephemeral apply to the acts as well. Through the framework of social aesthetics, as well as feminist and queer philosophy, I argue for the significance of aesthetics in collective agency building and social change.

Activation in the Moment of Pausing or Slowing

What could be activated when habitually enacted, perceived-as-linear timeframes are paused or slowed? What modes of queering become activated at these points and in what ways can these shift perspective within performance events? This article explores moments of pausing or slowing down as containing queer potential, offering opportunities to disrupt existing, and reveal alternative, modes of engagement. In these moments shifts in directionality, focus or time occur, revealing hidden microdetails and creating opportunities for unlearning and undoing. From this perspective performances and practices that invite pausing or slowing down will be considered as moments for queer activation. Queering does not require erasure of the past but approaching it anew, placing things in strange relations, and opening spaces for unknown futures. The article considers my own experiences as an audience member in performances by Sioned Huws, Goat Island and Ranters Theatre, where pausing or slowing down were used as performative strategies. Considered as being moments of queer pausing, I explore what they actually and potentially activated as inviting other ways of perceiving and inhabiting the (performance) world. These moments are interwoven with dialogic engagements with ideas about crip practices (Alison Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip, Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2013; Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez, eds, Crip Authorship: Disability as Method, New York University Press: New York, 2023), queerness and temporality (Elizabeth Freeman, Time binds: queer temporalities, queer histories, Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2010) and performativity and time (Stephen Bottoms and Matthew Ghoulish, eds, Small acts of repair: performance, ecology and Goat Island, Routledge: London and New York, 2007). The article also considers moments of my own and other's practices as neurodivergent performance-makers. Queer activation in this context dismantles conventional performance of control, masking and mastery and embraces the potential to be uncovered in moments of forgetting, exhaustion and making mistakes. Pausing or slowing down in these cases is often done from necessity, but when explored as a creative practice as well offers opportunities for queering that practice.

Queerchronotopia

This paper joins the debate of a still-expanding literature on queer temporalities that, among other things, raises the question of a queer-specific construction of time. This specific temporality is what I call queerchronotopia. By setting the description of the historical worldview (as described by Reinhart Koselleck, Sepp Gumbrecht, and François Hartog) against queer methodologies developed by scholars like Paul B. Preciado and Jack J. Halberstam, this article claims that, since the last decades of the nineteenth century, definitions and embodiments of queerness and a queer-specific temporality are constantly revised in light of the temporal shift between two paradigmatic social constructions of time—the historical worldview and “our broad present”. First, we summarize how homosexuality goes from an ahistorical aberration at the end of the 19th century to the emergence of the historical homos at the beginning of the gay liberation movement in the 1970s. Second, we try to demonstrate how the appearance of identity temporalities as an aftereffect of identity politics in the 1970s unveils some of the fractures in the temporal experience anchored in the historical worldview. Lastly, we discuss how the latent “broad present” that had already shown some of its aspects in the aftermath of the gay liberation movement and civil rights era in the United States became more evident in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic becomes increasingly intertwined with a concern with the health of the planet. Without dismissing the pessimist tone that has permeated the academic and intellectual discussions about the future of the planet and the catastrophic threats to human and nonhuman entities living in the Anthropocene, this article concludes by suggesting that the queer community and its activism, particularly in response to the AIDS epidemic, could teach us some lessons about how to live “with the trouble” in our present.

Where do incarcerated trans women prefer to be housed and why? Adding nuanced understandings to a complex debate through the voices of formerly incarcerated trans women in Australia and the United States

Background Incarcerated trans women experience significant victimization, mistreatment, barriers to gender-affirming care, and human rights violations, conferring high risk for trauma, psychological distress, self-harm, and suicide. Across the globe, most carceral settings are segregated by sex assigned at birth and governed by housing policies that restrict gender expression—elevating ‘safety and security’ above the housing preferences of incarcerated people. Aim/methods Drawing upon the lived experiences of 24 formerly incarcerated trans women in Australia and the United States and employing Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of chrononormativity, Rae Rosenberg’s concept of heteronormative time, and Kadji Amin’s use of queer temporality, this paper explores trans women’s carceral housing preferences and contextual experiences, including how housing preferences challenge governing chrononormative and reformist carceral housing systems. Findings Participants freely discussed their perspectives regarding housing options which through thematic analysis generated four options for housing: 1) men’s carceral settings; 2) women’s carceral settings; 3) trans- and gay-specific housing blocks; and 4) being housed in protective custody or other settings. There appeared to be a relationship between the number of times the person had been incarcerated, the duration of their incarceration, and where they preferred to be housed. Conclusions This analysis contributes to richer understandings regarding trans women’s experiences while incarcerated. This paper also informs the complexities and nuances surrounding housing preferences from the perspectives of trans women themselves and considers possible opportunities to enhance human rights, health and wellbeing when engaging in transformative approaches to incarceration.

The Queer Temporalities of (Im)Possible School Futures: Transness, Christian Epistemologies, and Racial Anxiety in a Secondary Classroom

Drawing on a yearlong ethnography I conducted at a public, urban, comprehensive high school in the midwestern United States, in this article I analyze a classroom instructional conversation about gender and trans identities in a sophomore humanities (grade 10) course that combined English language arts and social studies. In the conversation, youth constructed temporalities (i.e., relationships among pasts, presents, and futures) that were out of sync with the temporalities sanctioned by the school. In doing so, they drew on ideologies about gender, religion, race, sexuality, and class. Yet different youth offered futures that were incommensurate, particularly because they clashed over whether temporalities were rigid, fixed, and unchangeable or fluid, variable, multiple, and thus open to change. Being out of sync signaled possibilities, but not guarantees, of more just futures and suggested a need for literacy educators and researchers to rethink the roles of (un)certainty, (in)stability, and (non)linearity in classroom instruction with respect to sexual and gender diversity. In making this argument, I integrate queer and trans theorizations of temporality and futurity with adolescent queer literacies scholarship, specifically the concept of literacy performances.