Queer Medieval Time in Hamlet (1921)

Abstract

At the moment, queer studies are much concerned with time. Rather than claim that gay people experience time differently, a surge of recent sophisticated theories of ‘queer time’ are uncovering the ‘queerness’, the sexual and temporal instability, inherent in all concepts of straight or linear time. There is clearly more than a contingent link between straight sexuality and the idea that time flows linearly from one moment to the next. This linear conception of time is so deeply entrenched that even people working in queer studies often still take it for granted rather than rethink it or explain its links to sexuality. As Tom Boellstorff observes:

the most fundamental and consequential limitation of conceptions (and thus practices) of queer time to date is that they share with dominant, heteronormative temporalities the assumption that time is ultimately linear — indeed, that it is ‘straight’. Their intervention lies in slowing down, stopping or reversing that linear trajectory, rather than calling it into question. (Boellstorff, 2007, p. 229)

Boellstorff attempts to analyse this reliance on linear time further in order tentatively to imagine alternatives. He rightly hypothesizes that ‘straight time is shaped by linked discourses of heteronormativity, capitalism, modernity, and apocalypse’ (ibid., p. 228).