On a "Queer Time and Place"

I want to comment on Judith Halberstein’s On a Queer Time and Place, a book I am reading for my research project. She writes, “Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction. They also develop according to other logistics of location, movement and identification. They are queer and Halberstein comments in chapter 1 on the book that the queer “way of life” will include space. What has made queerness compelling as a form of self-description in the past decade or so has been it’s ability to open up relations to “time and space”

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Queer time was seen involved in the AIDS epidemic; Thom Gunn explores the erotics of compressed time and impending morality: “my thoughts are crowded with death/ and it draws so oddly on the sexual/ that i am confused/ confused to be attracted/ by, in effect, my own annihilation” (Gunn 1993, 59). Halberstein discusses in this book how queer refers to non-normative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time. There is “Queer time” and “Queer Space” in the postmodern world. In her collection of essay on queer time and space, she explores the significance of the transgender body. I find this interesting, as Halberstein proposes an alternative to heternormative time, that is to say a time not based around the generation of families. In this “queer time” as I mentioned before, there is a great arena of freedom established since our culture is still very much still bound to the importance of marriage and children. She has many feminists theorists, and argues about the meanings of masculinity in its dominant and alternative forms, especially female and trans masculinities as they exist within certain subcultures and are suitable within mainstream culture.

“Queer time” and “queer space” are two terms that are useful frameworks for assessing political and cultural change in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.