Can you queer time?

It’s June and I gave an accidental eulogy

Photo by Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash

It’s June. On the first Monday, I co-facilitated a fifty-minute online reading group for scholars curious about science and technology studies.

I try to be mindful of time.

I mapped the meeting into a labeled diagram beforehand, as if it were an imaginary dead butterfly, carefully spread and pinned to a board. A little morbid, this gaze. Each wing and abdominal part is labeled with precise numerical measurements—four minutes, the epitaph, six minutes, brainstorm using a shared notepad—to make what otherwise might be awkward, leggy, or meandering, fit the container.

The meeting went according to plan. The host was evocative and brilliant. The conversation was shifting.

When the last timer sang, I made a joke about the calendar being “a tyrant.” Heads nodded in their squares.

At that moment, I remembered a brilliant scholar who’d written about chronomormativity, a concept that indexes the temporal norms and standards about living that we bend our lives around to keep to.[1] You know, when we’re supposed to go to school. When we’re supposed to be an expert. When we’re supposed to arrive at life’s milestones. When we’re supposed to be. When, when, when.

When we don’t bend to chrononormativites, we can widen our scope of living to crip time, queer time.

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At this point, I may have been veering off script. Taking up valuable time. In chat, I wrote, “There’s a book, Time Binds that might interest you, it’s by—”

I searched to spell the author’s name correctly, Elizabeth Freeman. But to my astonishment, I saw that she’d slipped out of time. Yanked to the underworld.[2]

I choked up, baffled at the coincidence. Thinking of her the day she was marked as absent. I pasted her name in the chat. Soon enough, the meeting was over.

Forced or compulsory synchrony was Freeman’s invisible butterfly. But she didn’t kill anything. She spied and pinned down temporal norms and milestones in order to denaturalize them. She magnified little novelties, beauties, and marvels in alternative temporalities of living. She let light in through barely visible cracks.

Photo by Aaron Lee on Unsplash

I’d like to believe the synchronous timing of my accidental eulogy with her untimely death as a queering of time. A little morbid, this gaze? But in her book, she invites us to “jam whatever looks like the inevitable,” to enact queer resistance to chrononormativity, as an erotic act.

I’m not the kind of confident person who could suppose I might know what someone would like, once they are gone. Would Freeman like this essay? I couldn’t say.

But is it a binding of time, when yoking her ideas into our moment, disrupting what seems inevitable? That I can’t stop thinking about.

Other ways to jam normative time? Be late? Be unseasonal? Wear out-of-fashion clothes? Throw yourself a party? Take a decade to read a book on a tenth of a second?[3] I do believe there are many ways to enact queerness, to shift perspectives, let the light in through the cracks. 🌈🌈🌈


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Thank you for reading The Gift.

Until next time,

Monika
The Gift


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References

[1] “[B]inding is what turns mere existence into a form of mastery in a process I’ll refer to as chrononormativity, or the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity. […] Chrononormativity is a mode of implantation, a technique by which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts. Schedules, calendars, time zones, and even wristwatches inculcate what the sociologist Evitar Zerubavel calls ‘‘hidden rhythms,’’ forms of temporal experience that seem natural to those whom they privilege. Manipulations of time convert historically specific regimes of asymmetrical power into seemingly ordinary bodily tempos and routines, which in turn organize the value and meaning of time.” Freeman, 2010, pg. 3

[2] Duke University Press’s post.

[3] https://thegiftbymonika.substack.com/p/to-almost-be-finished