Queerchronotopia

Abstract

This paper joins the debate of a still-expanding literature on queer temporalities that, among other things, raises the question of a queer-specific construction of time. This specific temporality is what I call queerchronotopia. By setting the description of the historical worldview (as described by Reinhart Koselleck, Sepp Gumbrecht, and François Hartog) against queer methodologies developed by scholars like Paul B. Preciado and Jack J. Halberstam, this article claims that, since the last decades of the nineteenth century, definitions and embodiments of queerness and a queer-specific temporality are constantly revised in light of the temporal shift between two paradigmatic social constructions of time—the historical worldview and “our broad present”. First, we summarize how homosexuality goes from an ahistorical aberration at the end of the 19th century to the emergence of the historical homos at the beginning of the gay liberation movement in the 1970s. Second, we try to demonstrate how the appearance of identity temporalities as an aftereffect of identity politics in the 1970s unveils some of the fractures in the temporal experience anchored in the historical worldview. Lastly, we discuss how the latent “broad present” that had already shown some of its aspects in the aftermath of the gay liberation movement and civil rights era in the United States became more evident in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic becomes increasingly intertwined with a concern with the health of the planet. Without dismissing the pessimist tone that has permeated the academic and intellectual discussions about the future of the planet and the catastrophic threats to human and nonhuman entities living in the Anthropocene, this article concludes by suggesting that the queer community and its activism, particularly in response to the AIDS epidemic, could teach us some lessons about how to live “with the trouble” in our present.