Queer Times: Present, Future, Past

This seminar investigates the queer nature of time—its folds, disjunctures, and loops—taking as a foundational assumption that time is not always a linear phenomenon. In other words, time isn’t always straight. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to studying how time has been reconceptualized in queer theory, physics, trans studies, Black studies, anthropology, and art. What is the relationship between past, present, and future? Do all bodies, people, places, and spaces experience time in the same way? How is time racialized, classed, gendered and sexed in particular ways? What is the relationship between queerness and temporality? And what does it mean to be out of time? We will address these questions through encounters with scholars and artists across spacetime, culminating in a media analysis that explores questions of queer temporality in relation to popular queer films and works of fiction.