‘If only for a little while, beyond the confines of this world, and into another’- Queering Time in Orlando, Giovanni’s Room, and ‘Thirteen Ecstasies of the Soul’

Author Bio:

Shahrez Chauhan is an interdisciplinary researcher working with visual, material, and literary modes of cultural production to explore questions of memory, cultural heritage, and the chronopolitics of identity. Having recently graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in History of Art and English Literature, he is currently finishing up an internship placement with the Centre for Research and Heritage Collections at his alma mater. In the fall, Shahrez plans on moving back home to Karachi, Pakistan where he will take on the role of Archivist at the Citizens Archive of Pakistan.

Essay Abstract:

This essay takes seriously the promise of queer time as a temporal elsewhere . Through close readings of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando , James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Dale Peck’s Thirteen Ecstasies of the Soul, it explores how each writer’s experiments with formal hybridity, narrative fragmentation, and their refusals of temporal linearity destabilise normative chronologies of past, present, and future. I draw on Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and Elizabeth Freeman’s theories to highlight how these modes of “queering” time in the text undermine both the conventional life-scripts and the hegemonic aesthetic traditions associated with the heteronormative world. The essay then charts how queer temporalities emerge in these works as more than just a set of thematic concerns, but rather as a central structural principle recasting the textual form itself into a site of temporal resistance. By collapsing beginnings and endings, privileging moments of temporal suspension, and inhabiting liminal queer bodies, spaces and identities, the queer subjects of each text manipulate time to reclaim agency and render the queer self both temporally and formally ungovernable. I argue that Woolf, Baldwin, and Peck thus refigure time, space, and the queer body as sites of radical potential enacting a broader resistance against historical erasure, reproductive futurism, and linear heteronormative binaries. Ultimately, my argument suggests that their queering of time generates new aesthetic, narrative, and political possibilities for queer representation in the twentieth century literary landscape.

Read the full essay here:

‘If only for a little while, beyond the confines of this world, and into another’- Queerin.

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