#chrononormativity

[Elizabeth] Freeman coins the word “chrononormativity” to describe “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity,” which results in a sense of normal or regular time being implanted in individuals; she states that chrononormativity is “a technique by which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts.” She gives the example of industrial wage work enacting a “violent retemporalization of bodies once tuned to the seasonal rhythms of agricultural labor” (Freeman 2010, 3), and Halberstam discusses the “time of reproduction,” and other timetables governing conception, childbirth, and childrearing, as fictions governed by “strict bourgeois rules of respectability” and believed by many to be “natural and desirable” (Halberstam 2005, 5). “Factory time” and “family time” 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 “queer time,” for both Freeman and Halberstam, throws these chrononormativities into question. 

“Fan time” similarly casts doubt on a range of dominant temporalities not only on “media time,” but on what I would call “work/leisure time,” “linear time,” and “self/other time.” Fan time is usually time spent on pleasure rather than on productivity (or, when it is productive time—as when fans invent their own performances—it 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 one’s self rather than on one’s 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 self—but it is typically time spent not on economic or domestic obligations).

Queer Time: The Alternative to “Adulting” | JSTOR Daily

Queer scholar Jack Halberstam’s 2005 book In a Queer Time and Place argues that “queer uses of time and space develop… in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.” Queerness itself is “an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices.” It is inflected by time-warping experiences as diverse as coming out, gender transitions, and generation-defining tragedies such as the AIDS epidemic. That is, queerness is constituted by its difference from conventional imperatives of time.