Time (and Gender and Sexuality)

Catalog description

From habit-tracking apps that promise to optimize our lives to the developmental life stages we’re expected to pass through, time often functions as a tool for regulating bodies and shaping everyday experience. Our relationship to time is deeply entangled with the politics of gender and sexuality—and vice versa. We’re told when to come of age, how to experience our bodies, when to “start a family,” or when to settle down. But what is the “right time”—and for whom? Who gets to be “on time”? And what role do gender and sexuality play in how time structures our lives? This course engages with these questions by examining the intersections of time, gender, and sexuality. Throughout the semester, we will explore how scholars, artists, and organizers have challenged cis-heteronormative understandings of time—whether tied to productivity, fixed definitions of childhood and development, or taken-for-granted notions of progress. We’ll read works by trans and queer theorists such as Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Sandy Stone, and Kadji Amin to explore and theorize alternative ways of being “on time.”