Queer Time, Colonial Time, and Questions of Justice

This paper will ask to what extent queer temporalities and critiques of colonial time converge in overlapping or complementary reconfigurations of time and history. Using Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of chronormativity, it will demonstrate how multiple theorists with divergent methods destabilize a unified and universal sense of time as a precondition for critiquing colonial capitalism. It will conclude by asking whether versions of teleological or messianic thinking—however abstract or indeterminate—recur across these critical discourses. It asks, in particular, what Freeman’s queer erotics and Bliss Cua Lim’s notion of “the fantastic” might have to do with conceptions of justice.