Fan Time and Chrononormativity
[Elizabeth] Freeman coins the word āchrononormativityā to describe āthe use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity,ā which results in a sense of normal or regular time being implanted in individuals; she states that chrononormativity is āa technique by which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts.ā She gives the example of industrial wage work enacting a āviolent retemporalization of bodies once tuned to the seasonal rhythms of agricultural laborā (Freeman 2010, 3), and Halberstam discusses the ātime of reproduction,ā and other timetables governing conception, childbirth, and childrearing, as fictions governed by āstrict bourgeois rules of respectabilityā and believed by many to be ānatural and desirableā (Halberstam 2005, 5). āFactory timeā and āfamily timeā are therefore two temporalities that arose in Western nations owing to a sedimentation, in the modern period, of certain social, economic, and cultural norms, but āqueer time,ā for both Freeman and Halberstam, throws these chrononormativities into question.Ā
āFan timeā similarly casts doubt on a range of dominant temporalities not only on āmedia time,ā but on what I would call āwork/leisure time,ā ālinear time,ā and āself/other time.ā Fan time is usually time spent on pleasure rather than on productivity (or, when it is productive timeāas when fans invent their own performancesāit is a productivity driven by pleasure seeking rather than by an imperative to do wage work); it is time spent in repetition rather than in progression (or rather, time spent consuming multiple works related to one source text, rather than time spent consuming successive, distinct media products); it is time spent on oneās self rather than on oneās family or work customers/colleagues (although one can argue that fan time is also usually time spent with other fans, in online spaces, and so it is not exclusively time spent on the selfābut it is typically time spent not on economic or domestic obligations).
DE KOSNIK, A. (2016) ROGUE ARCHIVES: DIGITAL CULTURAL MEMORY AND MEDIA FANDOM. CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS: THE MIT PRESS.




















