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11 - Queer Bodies in Time

from Part III - Mapping New Identities and Geographies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2023

Yogita Goyal
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Summary

This chapter grows out of the strain of queer theory that revolves around questions of time. Many thinkers make sense of queer subjects by exploring their complex relationships to the past, present, and future as well as what time signifies in this context. Taking seriously the critical linkage between queerness and temporality, I consider how queer bodies make us aware of time – whether through temporal refusal, embrace, or displacement. I argue that contemporary novelists Mia McKenzie and Robert Jones, Jr., use queer characters to reorient narrative understandings of time and present new possible relationships to time. McKenzie’s The Summer We Got Free (2013) and Jones’s The Prophets (2021) both attend to the past to write Black queer life, and, in doing so, these authors provide meditations on time and the writing of history. Beginning with a consideration of the larger historical context of Black queer writing from the end of the twentieth century, the chapter highlights the narrative questioning of the temporal placement and meaning of the Black queer body and draws a connection between the narrative construction and conceptions of temporality that disrupt prevalent ways of thinking about time. In these texts, time emerges as a queer formation.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Queer Bodies in Time
  • Edited by Yogita Goyal, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature
  • Online publication: 14 December 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009159708.016
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  • Queer Bodies in Time
  • Edited by Yogita Goyal, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature
  • Online publication: 14 December 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009159708.016
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Queer Bodies in Time
  • Edited by Yogita Goyal, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature
  • Online publication: 14 December 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009159708.016
Available formats
×