Contemporary LGBTQ+ writers often write using forms of non-linearity. Rather than writing queerness in a linear progression, contemporary writers frequently reflect an understanding of queerness that is fluid and non-linear. As LGBTQ+ identities have grown more widely visible, young queer people have experimented with forms of queer expression, reimagined queer histories, and envisioned possible futures. Likewise, as contemporary queer writers experiment with fluid timelines and subject positions, their insights throw various conventional (and even conventionally queer) milestones into question. Rather than visualizing “coming out” as a linear process, queer narratives give the impression of experiences smeared together. Like paint bleeding through paper, queer experiences feed into each other–their through lines–intersect, with the past informing the future and the future informing the present. In short, in modern queer literature, time starts to bleed.
This experience of non-linear queer temporalities is theorized in the critical work of Dr. Elizabeth Freeman. Her book, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, outlines this experience of longing and how queer people inherently disrupt a concept known as chronobiopolitics. This concept describes how societies use milestones to organize “the management of entire populations” (Freeman 4). Everything from the “accumulation of health and wealth for the future, reproduction, childrearing, and death” becomes filtered through the lens of what benefits the state (Freeman 4). From this perspective, queer time is not only the act of subverting chronobiopolitics, but the act of creating new meanings within these subversions. Queer people exist in all spaces across all periods, which is what our cluster examines.
Throughout each of our essays, we wanted to focus on texts that highlight and subvert systems of chronobiopolitics. By analyzing nonlinearity in queer texts, our cluster found a wide range of queer perspectives on temporalities. We also found that through writing about these experiences, queer writers were able to subvert chronobiopolitical structures and create new meanings through art. Our cluster selected these essays based on their ability to:
- Analyze Queer Non-Linear Narratives
- Analyze How Queer Politics Subvert Linear Milestones/Productivity Culture
- Analyze Queer History in a Modern Context
- Analyze the Structure of Narratives That Play With Time
Our first essay, “Dream House as Moody Thinkpiece: Reading Hauntology in In the Dream House,” analyzes Carmen Maria Machado’s gothic memoir In The Dream House from the perspective of queer and structures of time. By incorporating Jacques Derrida’s theories of Hauntology into Machado’s memoir, this essay reveals how time repeats in Machado’s account of her experience with domestic abuse. Furthermore, it also highlights how narratives of abuse continue to circulate in a culture that does not want to address the problem.
“Stitching History’s Holes from In the Dream House” is an essay that centers on Carmen Maria Machado’s exploration of archival silences in the field of queer domestic abuse. By putting Machado’s work in conversation with Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, and Heather Love’s Feeling Backward, this work can discuss the erasure of queer and domestic abuse survivors while acknowledging how Machado builds her history from the inside out.
“House of Memories: An Abstract Approach to Queer Domestic Abuse Awareness” analyzes Machado’s In the Dream House as a nonlinear storytelling tool to convey the writer’s domestic abuse survival story. The memoir poses a call to fill gaps in the archive that leave underrepresented communities like queer people of color out of the conversation. This piece analyzes Machado’s narrative as an act of hermeneutical justice, analyzes her ideas in conversation with Munoz’s queer idealist future outlined in Cruising Utopia, refutes the notion of curative time concerning trauma recovery, and ultimately highlights the author’s blurring of time, folktale, research, and dialogue to create a chilling ghost story about queer domestic abuse awareness.
“Jumping Through The Narrative: Little Dog and Ada’s Life Organized Through Queer Time,” departs from the previous three articles. This piece, a comparative analysis of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, compares how these two novels use time to critique power structures. Through analyzing how both novels play with point of view, this piece dissects how queer trauma experiences often directly break heteronormative structures. Additionally, comparisons are emerging from Ada’s multiplicity in contrast to Little Dog’s singularity and how both factor into ideas of the deconstruction of heteronormative family structures.
“Trans Temporality: Transition, Detransition, and the Nuances of Queer Time” explores Freeman’s ideas of queer temporality, specifically in a trans context. Utilizing the novels Little Fish by Casey Plett and Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters, this essay seeks to examine the ways that transgender individuals form unique timelines that break from heteronormative conceptualizations of time. Moreover, this essay draws attention to the fragility of trans futurity due to the many struggles of existing within a primarily cisgender society.
Finally, “Between the Binary: Navigating Temporal Constraints in Queer Parenthood and Family-Making” analyzes Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters, focusing on the complexities of the fluidity of queer identity, parenthood, and family-making in a world bound by normative temporal constraints. Through the lens of Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of time binds, this essay explores how Reese, Ames, and Katrina handle societal expectations while each forging paths of their own that defy linear temporalities.
Together, these essays create a well-rounded conversation about the intersections of queer temporality and storytelling. We can learn so much from the non-linearity of queer experiences, specifically how our social institutions suppress queer voices and inhibit people of queer identity from living long, fulfilling lives. Although it is challenging for queer writers to be vulnerable about past traumas, these stories are necessary to be told. Drawing attention to queer issues challenges our social systems and creates a more hopeful queer future.