Queering Time, Part I

The theory of queer temporality explores the non-normative life rhythms and alternative futures of queer experience. Heteronormative ideas of intimacy, family building, and reproduction often look different for those whose identities and experiences fall outside heteronormative paradigms. Queer temporality rises in part in opposition to the heteronormative institution of family itself to explore different ways of relating and being.

The concept of queer time was most notable during the latter half of the 20th century, when the AIDS epidemic urgently shifted the focus of time from the future to the present moment. With an uncertain and unpromised future looming on the horizon for many, the possibilities for family, inheritance, and child rearing changed. The three constructs of family sciences introduced by Halberstam (2005) took on new meaning for those afflicted by the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic:

1. Time of reproduction: the biological clock of reproduction that influences people’s (particularly women’s) lives

2. Family time: time scheduled round the needs of children

3. Time of inheritance: the genealogical processes by which values and wealth are passed down through the family

   
   

Queerness itself challenges prescribed relational forms and hegemonic ideas of “naturalness” that privilege forms of intimacy historically ascribed to heterosexual, married, monogamous relationships. Within the United States, “normalcy” has traditionally centered around the nuclear family and has served as the framework through which lives are organized. Queer existence outside these paradigms opens up new and creative possibilities of intimacy and relation and challenges the notion of fixed desire across the lifespan. It challenges a singular direction of desire and expands sexuality, gender, and relationship building outside restricting binaries.

The queer paradigm challenges the normative assumption that intimacy between two individuals is restricted to monogamous dynamics by offering alternative relationship styles and possibilities that allow for inventiveness and communion in co-constructing a shared life, dictated not by norms and dogma, but by the interests, needs, and desires of those involved.

The queer paradigm challenges us to think of intimacy more broadly, encompassing relationships characterized by diversity and creativity. Relationships that deviate from the historical norms are subject to a hierarchy where “the social value placed on particular forms of intimacy creates a context of social and psychological injustice, whereby particular forms are unsanctioned, unrecognized, denigrated, or devalued” (Hammack et al., 2019). A queer paradigm challenges the normative privileging of traditional dynamics and posits an axiom of open possibility—that forms of intimacy are always historically and culturally situated and in states of constant contestation and creative emergence” (Hammack et al., 2019).

Traditional heterosexual relationship dynamics characterized by power and roles are opened up to allow for asymmetric forms of intimacy where roles and power are reversed, absent, or dynamic. “Rather than power being forced on the relationship by implicit outside forces, the power exchange… involves a performance that highlights the way in which all roles are fundamentally performative… These relationships can often involve an explicit grappling with and reframing of injustice as a form of pleasure and intimacy, giving participants a sense of power and agency over social forces like racism and sexism that are normally so systemic and widespread as to be beyond control” (Hammack et al., 2019).

The notion that intimacy is dependent on romantic or sexual attraction is similarly challenged, as queerness makes room for other forms of intimacy, such as those experienced amongst individuals on the asexual and aromantic spectrum. As normative notions of intimacy are decentered, attraction is freed to be personal and context dependent; it becomes bound in agency. As the traditional pairing of heterosexual orientation is subverted, and as attraction is understood outside the lens of biological sex or fundamentally gendered dynamics, new forms of attraction based on traits, behaviors, situations, and individuals can arise.

As sexual attraction is deprioritized, other forms of nonsexual and nonromantic attraction are brought to the forefront, such as emotional, aesthetic, sensual, and intellectual attraction. These new understandings of relational intimacy have implications for the possibilities inherent in human attraction, love, sex, and relationships, as “many of these experiences, such as being drawn to someone’s beauty, the comportment of their body, their distinct motility, their tactile nature, their playfulness, and so on, are arguably integral to a more complete understanding of erotic life” (Brunning, 2020).

The institution of the nuclear family, which has historically been made inaccessible to many queer people and often remains so today, is deconstructed in the concept of chosen family, which offers an alternative social unit that challenges the concept of the biological family as primary and central.

The nuclear family itself arises from a history of colonialism and oppression, one in which Indigenous women’s positions of authority and controlled power were targeted by the state, tying women’s economic well-being to men by tethering rights to heterosexual lifelong marriages. Drawing from the work of Marx and Engel, the institution of the nuclear family additionally serves to delegitimize and obscure working-class kinship ties (Brewster, 2025). Until the 19th century, marriage was primarily an institution centered not on love and intimacy, but a pragmatic tradition of social and family organization.

The multigenerational family constellation that worked together to run a farm or business gave way to individualism as the economy industrialized over the course of the 19th century. The nuclear family became a microcosm of both capitalist self-sufficiency and the state, as atomized families replaced the shared life and resources of communal kin and extended familial networks (Korducki, 2024). This family structure both limited what community and care could look like and denied power and access to alternative forms of kinship as a means of social control.

Under the institution of the nuclear family, other forms of kinship and relating are devalued. Amatonormativity, the social privileging of romantic relationships over others, negatively impacts the multiplicity of relational forms that arise in human life. Friendships, partnerships, extended and alternative family dynamics, and extended community relationships are delegitimized and denied the social and legal benefits afforded to married couples and traditional families.

Despite recent changes in marriage equality, ideological belief systems that exclude non-traditional family structures pervade the U.S. legal system and sociopolitical culture that reduce non-heterosexual and non-cisgender as deviant while denying access to family-building practices in a “system of violent domination over bodies and desires” (Boe, 2019).

One concrete way this discrimination manifests is in access to reproduction methods, where many queer families face barriers to family building, such as the exorbitant costs of in vitro and surrogacy, which can exceed hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical fees, combined with significant psychosocial stressors arising from financial burden and cultural responses and attitudes. Similarly, the costs for adoption, often averaging around $40,000, preclude many queer people from family-building practices (Brewster, 2025). With a lengthy adoption process characterized by various screenings, applications, legal services, and travel, the emotional and financial strain of adoption makes the process unviable to those without the resources to access it.

In the face of these barriers, a sense of asynchronicity arises in lives that don’t align with the traditional life markers of “adolescence–early adulthood–marriage–reproduction–child rearing–retirement–death” (Dinshaw et al., 2007). The past, present, and future are reimagined into new configurations that exist outside the paradigm of reproductive futurism; new relationships to time emerge as linear temporalities are critiqued and undermined by alternative lifestyles and futures, and new forms of relating are open to novel possibilities in which individuals are no longer restrained to normative configurations of sexuality, intimacy, and relationships.

References

Boe, J. L., & Jordan, L. S. (2019). A look back to move forward: Expanding queer potentiality in family science. Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, 8(2), 1–12.https://doi.org/10.31274/jctp.8204

Brewster, M. (2025). Queer Intimacies and Family Building. Lecture.

Brunning, L., & McKeever, N. (2020). Asexuality. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 38(3), 497–517.https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12472

Dinshaw, C., et al. (2007). Theorizing queer temporalities: A roundtable discussion. GLQ, 13(2/3).

Halberstam, J. (2005). In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. NYU Press.https://www.perlego.com/book/720302/in-a-queer-time-and-place-transgender-bodies-subcultural-lives-pdf

Hammack, P. L., Frost, D. M., & Hughes, S. D. (2019). Queer intimacies: A new paradigm for the study of relationship diversity. The Journal of Sex Research, 56(4–5), 556–592.https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2018.1531281

Korducki, K. M. (2024, March 28). The death of the nuclear family. Business Insider.https://www.businessinsider.com/death-of-typical-american-nuclear-family-economic-crisis-marriage-divorce-2024-3