Chapter 7 - The Queer Contemporary: Time and Temporality in Queer Writing

Summary

As the Irish LGBTQ+ community has emerged in a period of radical and rapid social change, the figure of the queer is often made to function as a figure for social progress. By focusing on recent queer critical work on time and temporalities, this chapter asks how the queer figure of the contemporary fails to address lingering traumas of social stigma and violence (including the 1982 antigay murder of Declan Flynn) and also fails to fully account for the connection of temporalities to sexual identity and belonging. By examining representations of sexual bodies in and out of sync with normative social and temporal structures – particularly in literature by Irish lesbian writers, such as Emma Donoghue and Mary Dorcey – this chapter foregrounds the ways that temporalities script and structure the sexual and how some forms of queer identity and community may resist or rethink those scripts through alternative registers of time.