Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

Description

In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman offers an innovative rethinking of time, history, and embodiment through the lens of queer theory. She argues that normative structures of time—such as linear progress, productivity, and reproduction—are intimately tied to heteronormative and capitalist systems that enforce certain life scripts, like marriage, reproduction, and inheritance. Freeman introduces the concept of “chrononormativity” to describe how time disciplines bodies into conventional life patterns. In contrast, she explores how queer practices and cultural productions disrupt these temporal norms, creating alternative experiences of time that open up possibilities for resistance, pleasure, and new ways of inhabiting the world. Drawing on literature, film, and performance, as well as feminist and critical race theory, Freeman highlights how affect, sensuality, and bodily experience can be used to challenge dominant historical narratives and temporal regimes. By emphasizing “erotohistoriography”—a method of engaging with history through embodied, affective, and often sensual means—she reclaims queer pasts and suggests more liberatory futures. Time Binds is both a theoretical intervention and a call to rethink our relationship with time, memory, and history, making it a groundbreaking contribution to queer studies and beyond.