GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

"Queer Temporalities," special issue edited by Elizabeth Freeman.

GLQ 13.2–3 (2007).

It happened in 2007 (volume 13, number 2–3, to be precise); GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies was on time. By this I mean literally on the topic of "time," but also I mean to gesture to the notion of timeliness and arriving on time to the conversation, to the party, to work. In her introduction to this special issue on queer temporalities, Elizabeth Freeman laid out some ideas for incorporating time into queer theory (and queer theory into time), noting correlations and correspondences between the erotic and the temporal. Freeman demonstrated how we might combine queer theory and temporality into a framework to think critically about everything from life narratives to the eight-hour workday, to premature ejaculation, the AIDS crisis, the queer past and future, the lived experience of being an LGBTIQ person, and everything in between. She also elucidated ways to think about temporality, sensation, and affect in and through queer theory, noting in an early comment that "the sensation of asynchrony can be viewed as a queer phenomenon—something felt on, with, or as a body, something experienced as a mode of erotic difference or even as a means to express or enact ways of being and connecting that have not yet arrived or never will" (Freeman 2007: 159). This provocative introduction was followed by a roundtable "theorizing queer temporalities," where Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Judith Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher Nealon, and Nguyen Tan Hoang ruminated on several key questions and puzzles: How does sex intersect with temporality? How is time part of the history of sexuality and in what ways has it shaped queer studies? What might queer theory's temporal turn open up "conceptually, institutionally, politically, or otherwise?" (Dinshaw et al. 2007: 177). [End Page 97]

You don't have to dig very deep to see that temporality is laid in the foundations of our critical project. We encounter this coalition between the erotic and the temporal in every Queer Studies 101. Look back at volume 1 of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, and you'll find it in his description of the moment that homosexuality and heterosexuality were invented. He describes sexual and bodily norms as constructions motivated by a set of basic concerns: "to ensure population, to reproduce labor capacity, to perpetuate the form of social relations" (Foucault 1990: 37). For Foucault, this process was governed by the desire to constitute a normative sexuality connected to a normative body and "economically useful and politically conservative" (ibid.). To me this reads as evidence of an emergent heterosexual ideology shaping the temporality of labor, social life, and politics. Take a leap to Judith Butler's oeuvre, and you'll also find temporality, especially when she describes gender as the "repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being" (Butler [1999] 2006: 45; emphasis added). Even the foundational work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick drips with time. Her description of queer as "the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning" (Sedgwick 1993: 8) could very well be about queer temporal experience—it has since been taken up by those scholars interested in the affective possibilities of queer temporality.

What I'm getting at is that queer theory was always in some way inflected by temporality (some may say this relationship is as old as time), but it was the "Queer Temporalities" special issue that marked the field's distinct and deliberate turn toward temporality as a critical frame, a move that aimed to "reimagine 'queer' as a set of possibilities produced out of temporal and historical difference," to illuminate "the manipulation of time as a way to produce both bodies and relationalities (or even non-relationality)" (Freeman 2007: 159) and to think of temporal orientation (whether one is focused on the past, present, or future) as a profoundly political act.

They say that queer time is like being on a fifteen-minute delay, but this special issue of GLQ was by no means late. At just the right time it entered into fiercely oppositional debates between optimistic and antisocial queer projects, which sought to frame queer politics through either futurity or negativity (Caserio et al. 2006). In many ways the issue responded to the works that had ignited these debates and that had been published in the years preceding (see Edelman 2004; Halberstam 2005; Caserio et al. 2006), providing these scholars with a way to directly address their positions on the politics of queer temporality. Later that [End Page 98] same year came Heather Love's (2007) powerful reflection on backward orientation and queer history, suggesting that GLQ was right in the middle of a broader conversation about the political efficacy of one's temporal orientation.

For me, this special issue provided an avenue for thinking about the time of queerness and for thinking through queerness in relation to the temporality of lived experience. For others, this opened up what Freeman (2007: 159) describes as "a more productively porous queer studies" conceived in relation to other disciplines, shaping studies of race, nation and migration through this groundbreaking union of the erotic and the temporal. For scholars such Sara Ahmed (2010) and José Esteban Muñoz (2009), this framework opened up queer theory to the future, the future to queerness, and both to happiness. The issue also inspired works by Lauren Berlant (2011), Freeman (2010), and Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009), all of whom grappled with the question of what a queer alternative to heteronormative linear temporality might look or feel like, or how it might be represented or experienced.

Taking up the questions posed in Freeman's introduction and in the articles that followed, many of us have since asked, can time be queered? What would a queer temporality look like? How might it be experienced? What would its political worth be? Where does queerness stand in relation to futurity? And, perhaps most importantly, is there future for queer theory itself? Rather than provide us with a straightforward means of answering these questions, "Queer Temporalities" reframed our conversations, debates, and polemics on sexuality, politics, and the erotic, enabling us to rethink the very meaning of queer as a concept that is always entangled with temporality. This was perhaps best demonstrated by the late José Esteban Muñoz, a scholar who was profoundly invested in the queer future. Muñoz penned the final article in the special issue. His article concludes with a statement worth remembering: "Queerness should and could be about a desire for another way of being both in the world and in time, a desire that resists mandates to accept that which is not enough" (Muñoz 2007: 365). Given the unprecedented changes in the political landscape in the United States and beyond, the expansion of (some) queer rights that have come at the expense of others, the oppressive violence leveled against queer people on a daily basis, and the precarity of the academy, particularly for young queer academics such as myself, now more than ever we need to remember this. [End Page 99]