Feminist/queer/diasporic temporality in Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other (2019)

Claiming that individuals and communities get their choices, rhythms and practices biopolitically choreographed by temporal mechanisms that dictate which human experiences are included or excluded, Elizabeth Freeman states that those ‘whose activities do not show up on the official time line, whose own time lines do not synchronize with it, are variously and often simultaneously black, female, queer’ (2005). The narrative subject of Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other ( 2019 ) is black, female and (mostly) queer in her design of a polyphonic text featuring twelve black women moving through the world in different decades and occupying a temporal dimension that deviates from the linear and teleological modes. I draw on Edelman (2004) ; Freeman (2010) and Ahmed (2010 , 2017 ) to analyse Evaristo's novel as a text informed by feminist queer temporality and thus explore these characters’ resistance to chrononormative assumptions like ‘the straight time of domesticated gender, capital accumulation, and national coherence’ ( Ramberg, 2016 ). In this light, I address her cast of ‘time abjects’ –lesbians, transgender women, feminist killjoys and menopausal females—as characterized ‘chronotopically’ as their racialized and gendered subjectivities coalesce temporally and spatially seeing their pasts and futures interact in a typically transpositional, queer and diasporic continuum. By invoking Freeman's notion of ‘erotohistoriography’ ( 2010 ) as a distinctive mode of queer time that not only recognizes non-linear chronopolitics, but decidedly prioritizes bodies and pleasures in self-representation, I contend that Evaristo depicts bodies as likewise performing this encounter between past and present in hybrid, carnal and trans-temporal terms. I conclude that in her joining temporality and corporeality, memory and desire, she suggests alternative ways of representing contemporary black British womanhood

The coloniality of queer theory: The effects of “homonormativity” on transnational Taiwan’s path to equality

This study extends the “Queer” Asia s critique to deconstruct the coloniality of queer theory in transnational Taiwan. Focusing on Duggan’s critique of homonormativity, I used 22-months ethnographic data to examine its Taiwanese glocalization and influences on American scholars’ denigration of Taiwanese marriage equality campaigns. I argue that the glocalization of homonormativity theory has generated the disruption between queer theory and embodied experiences, falsely assumed the universalism of queer theory, and failed to recognize practices of diversifying families and resistance to neoliberalism. The homonormativity glocalization also produces “radical queer temporality” and Orientalist double standards that collude with imperialist epistemology. I conclude with strategies for a decolonial queer theory.

Queering the Moment of Hypospadias “Repair”

Heteronormativity structures biomedical justifications for continuing surgical interventions on infants’ genitals that are cosmetic and medically unnecessary. It would seem, then, that queer theory is uniquely suited to challenge this continuing practice. This article takes up the question of what queer theory can do for intersex, with particular focus on queer temporality. I consider the example of “hypospadias repair,” a surgical intervention justified by invoking restrictive norms of what the penis should look like and be able to do at some point in the future. In contrast, intersex activists invoke post-medical futures, structured by norms of consent and bodily integrity. While queer approaches to temporality might challenge the notion of intervening surgically on an infant for the sake of the future adult the child will become, might this queer critique also disrupt the ability of activist individuals and organizations to invoke other narratives of the future, including ones where adults have not had irreversible surgeries as infants? I will ask whether queer theories of temporality and futurity can challenge medical practices that compromise consent and bodily integrity. Can queer theory question surgery as a queer moment and help us to conceptualize all bodily differences within a more expansive frame, without reinstating heteronormative narratives of futurity?

Queer Trauma in Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Red Tree

Despite winning numerous literary awards, Caitlín R. Kiernan’s work has received little critical attention. Scholars have focused on Kiernan’s reworking of H. P. Lovecraft’s influential weird fiction and have discussed Kiernan’s pioneering work in New Weird fiction and short fiction. As astute as much of the critical work is, none of it addresses the cornerstone of Kiernan’s fiction: trauma. This essay considers Kiernan’s novel The Red Tree as a queer American gothic novel dealing with trauma and its lingering effects on its witnesses. Through its complex, fragmentary form and its use of dream sequences and unconsciously produced narratives, the novel invites readers to witness and consume Sarah Crowe’s trauma while loosely theorizing the relationship between trauma and queer temporality and spatiality.

‘Not at all afraid’: Queer Temporality and the School Detective Story

Kate Haffey has recently argued that if queer time can be seen as a turning away from narrative coherence, it suggests new possibilities for considering narrative structures more generally. Combining the narratively rigid structures of the school story and the detective novel, the four novels discussed in this article – Gladys Mitchell’s Laurels are Poison (1942), Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes (1946), Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman (1951), and Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) – disrupt conventional understandings of linear time. Depicting not only queer, or potentially queer, characters, but a queer phenomenological perspective, they challenge reader expectations with a focus on aporias and gaps, whether in terms of trauma (Jackson), the blurring of fact and fiction (Lindsay), or the prolonged delay of both crime and resolution (Tey). These novels draw attention to the insufficiency of texts to capture experience, and the inadequacy of textual authority. As such, they reveal the extent to which mid-twentieth-century women’s fiction was able to challenge the genres and narrative structures with which it was most closely associated.

Queer Theory

Many of Virginia Woolf’s books from the 1920’s and early 1930’s feature characters with queer longings. The mock biography Orlando (1928) was written for Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s lover, and exemplifies her work’s queerness. Beginning male but waking up one morning female, Orlando shakes up fixed ontologies of gender identity and sexual orientation, anticipating Sara Ahmed’s analysis of queer spatiality and Elizabeth Freeman’s examination of queer temporality. Orlando’s concerns are reinflected in the work of contemporary English novelist Jeanette Winterson and invite transnational comparisons to twentieth-century Islamic writing, such as the works of Indian writer Iqbalunnisa Hussain, Egyptian novelist Nawal El Saadawi, and Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun. Crossing borders of gender, nation, and time, Orlando and other of Woolf’s writings ask readers to engage the divergences and continuities between what we now call feminist, lesbian, queer, and transgender theories.

“A Monster of iniquity in my self”: Queer Sacramental Temporality in Thomas Shepard and Michael Wigglesworth

This article contends, through a reading of Thomas Shepard and Michael Wigglesworth, that puritan devotional practice contains a queer temporality that emphasizes the recurrent experience and recording of personal sinfulness. This queer temporality, articulated in puritan devotional literature in sacramental terms, poses an important challenge to the secularization account Charles Taylor offers in which puritan religious emphasis on righteous conduct leads to ultimately secular projects of social and individual reform.

Queer Comics

Queer comics have been a staple of LGBTQIA+ culture, from independent and underground comics beginning in the late 1960s to web comics in the current digital age. Comics are a uniquely queer art form, as comics scholar Hillary Chute has argued, consistently marginalized in the art world. Queer comics have also principally been produced by and for queer audiences, with mainstream recognition not being their primary goal. This marginalization has, in some sense, been a benefit, as these comics have not been captive to the pressures of capitalist aesthetics. This makes queer comics a rich historical archive for understanding queer life and queer communities. Collections of queer comics from the late 1960s and onward have recently been published, making large archives of work widely available. The Queer Zine Archive Project online also houses a large volume of underground and self-published material. There are some affordances inherent to the medium of comics which make it a distinctly powerful medium for queer self-expression and representation. In comics, the passage of time is represented through the space of the page, which makes complex expressions of queer temporality possible. The form is also quite intimate, particularly hand-drawn comics, which retain their original form rather than being translated into type. The reader plays a significant role in the construction of meaning in comics, as what happens between panels in the “gutter” (and is thus not pictured) is as much a part of the story as what is pictured within the panels. In addition to the value of reading queer stories in comic form, incorporating making comics and other creative practices into pedagogy is a powerful way to engage in queer worldmaking.