“Queer in the City” Dossier Part 2 – Queer temporalities in the urban landscape: challenging normative time structures

This blogpost by Gustavo Rigon is part 2 of a four-part dossier on “Queer in the City”. 

Queer temporalities in the urban landscape: challenging normative time structures

Image: Pexels, “Man walking around”, 2024

In the urban, time seems hard to grasp, although perceived in multiple ways. Time is inscribed within cities rhythms, density, work culture, climate, and technologies. For the queer artist Felix Gonzales, time has been a crucial topic in his work, showing how love, relationships, disease, and politics, are interconnected by notions of time. In a more theoretical vein, Hartmut Rosa, in the book Social Acceleration: a new theory of modernity, time is assumed to be given as a matter of nature. However, and as he insists, culture rather than nature heavily inscribes the ways one should invest their lifetime and how time is experienced in their everyday life. This opens time, and the perception of such, as a socio-political matter of concern ripe for critical analysis.

Following Rosa’s provocation, I want to explore urban time through a queer perspective and analysis, to understand what it means to live in a “queer” inhabitation of time. What stands central to this essay is an investigation of the ways time influences and structures the urban life (for queer subjects) and vice versa, as well as an exploration of the emergence of the concept and analytical lens of queer temporality in cultural and urban studies. For instance, in our dialogue, Gustavo Nogueira (2023) narrates his experience of researching time, in which he points to the ways in which time is perceived differently across cultures. He illustrates saying:

For example, in Brazil, we have this mixture between the European, the African culture that came with the enslaved people, and South America natives that were already there. It is a pot of different temporalities altogether. Indigenous people borrow their temporal metaphors from nature. Time, for example, is associated with the rivers, with all the movements, that is not a “straight” line.[1]

I think it’s very interesting when we look to representations of time, in different societies. The linear time or, the straight line, as in straight line as a form, but also straight as in gender, points that we have only one direction to follow from the day you were born, in one line.[2]

One follows orientations in order to fulfil time with a life-time line order. In the western urban, the uses of time are prescribed according to neoliberal and normative development of cities. These structures encompass, for example, the development of modernity, economic systems, geographical locations, and cultural implications. Celebrations such as Pride, or even crises, such as the HIV epidemic and recently, Covid-19 lockdowns, also disrupts conventional experiences of time, as in the reality we live right now. I argue that in both material as well as cultural ways, urban structures orient and regulate human bodies in space and dictate how they spend their lifetime in the city.

Critiques of normative time in contemporary society is pointed out by queer theorists such as Michel Foucault (1975), Paul Preciado (2013), Jack Halberstam (2011) and Sarah Ahmed (2009). They propose examinations of the dominant understandings and experience of time as well as normative lifetime lines; critiquing the inherited and institutionalized orders that shape, capture and orient urban subjects. Following this perspective, I use the term “lifetime” and will seek to apply a queer analytical lens to investigate the way that human lifetimes are exchanged differently within economic and gendered social systems. A point which reflects on the everyday lifetime experiences of subjects as well as our desires and plans of the future. As a socio-cultural construction, time is shown through two main perspectives: first, as a measure of time given by an individual and invests in certain activities; and second, as a linear life order or stages such as education, work, mortgage, reproduction, retirement, and death. The notion of life “as a whole”, with a beginning, middle and an end.

Foucault, in his work Discipline and Punish[3], discusses various urban institutions and infrastructures, such as prisons, schools, temporary residences, hospitals, and workplaces, as examples of places whose spatial and temporal regimes regulate subjects’ behaviour, and discipline their bodies on a daily basis through processes of internalisation. Foucault sheds light on how resistance is created, and power is distributed in space and time, offering social commands that orient the ways we fill out time and how time is conceived. Paul Preciado discusses the work of Foucault on regulation of time through the commodification of body agency[4]. From the 18^th century Panopticon and the state Brothel to the invention of birth control pills, the author points out how the play of technology and architecture influences the formation of the domestic home and the public space. Preciado elaborates on how contemporary time is embedded in locatable and specific places, spaces, epochs, and situations.

Turning to Halberstam’s text “Postmodern geographies”[5], the author helps us to explore the imagination of a future outside of dominant lifetime lines that casts out social groups that do not aligned with white, cisgender, ableist[6], heterosexual norms. “Queer time” is a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction, family, longevity, risk, safety, and inheritance[7]. Critiques of economic and political approaches to time is part of the queer theory agenda, putting into question the meanings we attribute to the different temporal concepts like industrial time, family time, time of progress, immediacy, postponement, free time and so on. Therefore, I understand that the longing for family, reproduction and inheritance are culturally constructed ways of survival and inhabiting the city, which in turn influences the distribution of power across the availability of urban space for certain subjects as well as material matter.

Practical examples that illustrate how normative temporality, and more interestingly queer time, influences our urban lives and how we may move through the urban are numerous. For instance, housing architecture often considers different life stages (e.g., single, married, family, retired) when constructing and designing houses and their proximity to key city infrastructure sites such as city centres, schools, green areas, and shopping opportunities. In the construction of city grids, entire areas (as in the case of the suburban) become demarcated as “family” zones from which the construction of certain types of houses (a master bedroom, two single rooms for kids, and a backyard for a dog) reproduces certain types of kinship structures and organization linking the urban to specific life stages that can and must take specific forms.  Additional examples may be the link between property inheritance and queerness, which puts into question material accessibility as not defined merely by kinship forms, but rather also questions of gender, sexuality, and class. The linear progression of time—past, present, and future—impacts how we think about our future in terms of care and social security, where access to jobs within the urban may be compromised or queer people may not be able to count on the support by urban communities or institutions to provide safe and reliable care, being forced to commit to non-institutionalized forms of care and support. Interestingly, life trajectories of trans identities may be disrupted by late puberty, a sense of “rebirth” appears linked to transgender processes, gender and sexually are developed through time and in different life stages, even if it depends upon institutions firmly embedded within the urban. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly for this text, I question how city infrastructures “optimize” time, convenience, and performance, reflecting on ideas of progress and development, and on the creative ways we work and live together in cities. Material examples including accessibility and ease of public transport, shopping opportunities, land ownership and access to free public infrastructure such as public libraries, walkable sidewalks or bicycle paths seem pertinent, while questions of aesthetics, politics and cultures of the urban (as it spread differentially across different urban sites) open up the urban for further analysis and questions as a non-neutral site of contestation. In our dialogue, Nogueira critically questions how we understand time in an era of time acceleration and performance: “what is happening in the urban fabric around us right now? and how a western mainstream perspective on time, which became a straight way, is also the idea of performing – performance as the idea of increase production, to perform faster, to perform better, to perform more”[8].

For Rosa, a western postmodern notion of time represents a great crisis of form and meaning, as well as an “opportunity to rethink the practice of cultural production, its hierarchies and power dynamics”[9]. Rosa provocation leads me to how notions of ageing, productivity, success, and social participation are highly constructed by mainstream and heteronormative notions of living and are in need for re-evaluation. These concepts form our reality and understanding of epochs, generations, life stages, or specific life experiences.

Therefore, queer ways of living and thinking come into friction with urban demands. If states and institutions play a role in regulating individuals timelines accordingly to urban social status, finding secure housing, accessible health care and professional development may not be experienced by everyone in the same ways. Living within queer temporalities can offer a critique to the way society organize and reorient themselves according to time. Besides challenging a system that controls lifetime lines and benefit some more than others, queer temporalities invite us to perceive time nuances beyond the normative.

As pointed earlier, the form of linear time, posited by the above theorists as “straight” time, is entangled within the logics of modern culture. Halberstam points out the way we can think queer temporalities, and how they intervene in immaterial and material hierarchical tendencies of the urban:

For some queer subjects, time and space are limned by risks they are willing to take: the transgender person who risks his life by passing in a small town, the queer performers who destabilize the normative values that make everyone else feel safe and secure; but also those people who live without financial safety nets, without homes, without steady jobs, outside the organizations of time and space that have been established for the purposes of protecting the rich few from everyone else.[10]

Halberstam critique the mainstream uses of time by the economic system, where one may be asked to acquire certain status in specific moments in time in order for your life to be considered a worth living life. Examples are expectations such as acquiring marriage, having children or moving out of your hometown house within a “reasonable” time. Access to job positions, ownerships, inheritances, loans and specific health care are at stake when discussing time, since these categories, in their original form, are beneficial for those who follow straight time. Halberstam criticizes how life status can contribute to hierarchy, accumulation, privatization, and control of other human resources.

In another perspective, Ahmed’s concept of “Orientations” indicates that it is by moving towards some culturally defined objects (e.g. heterosexuality) and turning away, deviating from other objects (e.g. queerness), that we navigate through time and space. She says that is by following some lines more than others that we embody a notion of social identity and turn away from others. This lens helps us to understand how racism or xenophobia, for example, “orientates” bodies in specific ways through the individual and political spaces we habit. Ahmed asserts that: “for a life to count as good life, then it must return the debt of its life by taking on the direction promised as social good, which means imagining one’s futurity in terms of reaching certain points along a life course. A queer life might be one that fails to make such gestures of return”[11].The discussion on how cities make certain lifetime lines more visible and “worth” living than others, tells us something about our relationship with the time and space we live in. In the introduction of “Queer Phenomenology”, for a life to be considered good, it should fulfil a societal obligation by moving in a direction that aligns with what is perceived as socially beneficial. This involves envisioning and pursuing a life course that reaches certain points or goals that are considered valuable for the individual and society. A life that deviates from or does not conform to societal expectations or predetermined life courses may be viewed as not making the expected contributions or gestures of “return”.

In the dialogue, it became clear how queer lifetime lines are already eschewed compared to straight notions of time, even as it attempts to “return” to this line as the right line to follow, leading to a sense of social disorientation/reorientation:

It’s interesting to see how this ‘straight line’ reflect on a queer person in different levels. For example, if from the beginning you are thinking about your first girlfriend, that maybe will be your wife, maybe have children together… but then you’re gay. You are somehow already in and out of this line since the beginning.[12]

A queer life, in this context, means a disorientation from, but nevertheless a longing for, the material and cultural security that a traditional lifetime line may offer. When Nogueira mentions “but then, you are gay”, it marks an opposition to the normative that somehow resonates between the prescribed and non-prescribed life in the urban. Assuming that confrontations exist between the socially expected and the critical reality of queer subjects, a queer may fail in returning to a position in which they may provide determined societal contributions, and as such put into question hegemonic notions of what constitutes a good life. Following Ahmed’s quote, I argue that urban social fabric demands from individuals to take a linear direction in life to be able to perform roles that provides major access, safety, care, and political participation. Adopting a queer perspective in this discussion implies recognizing that lifetime lines are valuable in their locatable and diverse shapes and nuances.

In conclusion, a nuanced examination of time through a queer-urban lens reveals the complex interplay between societal norms and individual experiences. Temporal perceptions are culturally contingent and socially constructed. Queer temporalities question the ways we spend our time in the city and how that is connected to gender and sexual orientations, established norms and hierarchies associated with linear “straight” lifetime lines. It asks for a re-evaluation of the societal structures that rigidly control and privilege certain life trajectories over others. The call for a queer perspective on time serves as a critical inquiry into the ways urban spaces shape and regulate temporal experiences, inviting a broader and more inclusive understanding of time and its role in our lives.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sarah. 2006. Queer Phenomenology Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1926-1984. Discipline and Punishment: the Birth of the prison.

Halberstam, Jack. 2005. In a queer time and place : transgender bodies, subcultural lives . Queer Temporality: : New York University Press.

Ljuslinder, Karin, Katie Ellis, Lotta Vikström. 2020. “Cripping Time – Understanding the Life Course through the Lens of Ableism.” SDJR 35-38.

Nogueira, Gustavo, interview by Gustavo Rigon. 2023. Dialogue with Gustavo Nogueira (March).

Preciado, Paul. 2017. “Architecture of Sex: three case studies beyond the Panopticon.” The Funambulist.

Rosa, Hartmut. 2015. Social Acceleration: A new theory of modernity. Columbia University Press.

Notes

[1] In dialogue with Gustavo Nogueira, 2023.

[2] Ibid

[3] Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish – The birth of the prison (1975)

[4] Paul Preciado Architecture of Sex (2013)

[5] Jack Halberstam “Post-modern geographies” in the book In a Queer time and space (2013)

[6] Both Ljuslinder (2020) and McRuer (2006) in the text Cripping time – Understanding the life course through the lens of ableism brings a relevant insight on lifetime course in relation to ableism. Through ableism lenses, the authors understand that is hard to ignore that a normalcy exists and, as much as hetero, white and fully able identity as privileged is temporary status. MuRuer states that “it is a question of time” for bodies to become “disabled”. That is why Ljuslinder reclaims the slur “crip” to urgently rethink the connection of space and time posing how queer temporality challenges ableist normativity and recognizes diverse bodies and minds.

[7] Jack Halberstam “Post-modern geographies” in the book In a Queer time and space (2013)

[8] In dialogue with Gustavo Nogueira, 2023.

[9] Hartmut Rosa Social Acceleration: a new theory of modernity (2013), 15.

[10] Jack Halberstam (2005) 23.

[11] Sara Ahmed “Queer phenomenology” (2006), 21.

[12] In dialogue with Gustavo Nogueira, 2023.