Tag: queer time

Queering Time in a Queer World: Deconstructing Chrononormativity in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

     In Time Binds, Elizabeth Freeman emphasizes the effects of “chrononormativity, or the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” (3). By and large, society operates upon the assumption that everyone follows the same timeline; “marriage, accumulation of health and wealth for the future, reproduction, childrearing, and death and its attendant rituals” all occur in roughly chronological order (4). If an individual’s life does not follow this “sequence of socioeconomically ‘productive’ moments,” they are deemed a societal outcast (5). But what happens when no one’s life follows a rigid timeline? What happens when time stands still, folds in upon itself, or collapses? What happens when the chrononormative individual steps into a strange, unfamiliar world where queer time is the norm? Such is the case in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Though Alice attempts to impose chrononormativity upon the unusual inhabitants of Wonderland, they resist her inflexibility and seriousness. In a world where everyone is mad, time goes mad, too.

     Alice’s story begins on the shore of a lake when she notices a peculiar White Rabbit with pink eyes. When the Rabbit begins talking to itself, Alice does not find it “so very remarkable” or “so very much out of the way” (Carroll 7-8). It is only after the Rabbit takes “a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket” that “Alice start[s] to her feet” (8). As critic Gillian Beer points out, “[i]t’s the watch that startles Alice;” she does not find “an animal that speaks” all that remarkable, but she is roused by “the accoutrements of adult business, busy-ness” (xxviii). Alice’s violent reaction to the watch implicitly suggests that she has already become aware of the ticking clock of chrononormativity. By the mid-nineteenth century, the watch had become a “token of human respectability and worth” (xxix). Parents, teachers, and bosses all gave watches as gifts to the young to help usher them from immaturity to adulthood. Becoming an adult meant regulating yourself within a “state-sanctioned” timeline that served “the nation’s economic interests” (Freeman 4-5). When Alice hears the Rabbit fret that it will be “late,” she undoubtedly recognizes the fears of a society determined to regulate time (8). As a child inching toward adolescence, she understands that she must soon regulate herself in the same way. However, she soon finds that Wonderland is not as chrononormative as the Rabbit would suggest. 

     As Alice falls down the rabbit-hole to Wonderland, she finds that she has “plenty of time…to look about her, and to wonder what [is] going to happen next” (8). When time operates on a nonindustrial clock, individuals have more time to reflect on their surroundings, contemplate their situation, and enjoy the peculiarities of life. Still, Alice cannot discard the ideas she internalized growing up in a chrononormative world. When in Wonderland, she attempts to impose chrononormativity upon the residents. At the Mad Hatter’s tea-party, for instance, Alice tells the Hatter that he has “a funny watch” (60). After the March Hare fiddles with the mechanisms of the Hatter’s timepiece, it only “tells the day of the month” rather than “what o’clock it is” (60). Alice cannot fathom such a queer way of telling time. “‘I don’t quite understand you,’” Alice, feeling “utterly puzzled,” says to the Hatter (60). In response, the Hatter tells Alice that she does not know “Time” as well as he does (61). Outside of the confines of an industrial society, the Hatter can recognize time as a construct. “‘For instance,” the Hatter says, “‘suppose it were nine o’clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you’d only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!” (61) As the Queen of Hearts realizes, the Hatter is capable of “murdering the time” (62). When one steps out of a chrononormative timeline, one can see time for what it is: something to be manipulated, rearranged, and disregarded at will. The Hatter can throw a tea-party whenever he wants because he moves to his own rhythm. Not regulated by an industrial or reproductive clock, the Hatter makes what he wants out of life. He represents the positive potentialities of queering time. He represents an alternative “to the sped-up and hyperregulated time of industry” (Freeman 7). He represents freedom masquerading as madness.

     Unfortunately for Alice, she must leave Wonderland and step back into the world of chrononormativity. As her sister realizes, Alice will one day become a “grown woman” surrounded by “little children” (109). Once she leaves childhood, Alice will be expected to adhere to a chrononormative, state-sanctioned timeline. First, she will marry and then have children to share her stories with. Her childhood fantasies will become nothing more than entertainment for the next generation. In Wonderland, however, these rules do not apply, and these destinies are not prewritten. Time moves according to the residents’ whims. The Dormouse sleeps when it wants. The Queen of Hearts lets her croquet match last indefinitely. The Duchess even rewrites astronomy so it agrees with her peculiar perspectives: “‘If everyone minded their own business…the world would go round a great deal faster than it does’” (52). Alice initially recoils at such an idea, explaining that “the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis” (52). Any alteration to this clock would surely be fatal. However, after spending so much time in Wonderland, Alice is not so sure of herself anymore. “Twenty-four hours, I think; or is it twelve?” she asks herself (52). She, too, realizes that time can bend without breaking, shift without shattering, and queer without quibbling. The clock is merely a tool, and often a faulty one at that. The earth moves to its own rhythm, regardless of human measurements. By keeping its own time, it always maintains the right time. Perhaps humans can (and should) do the very same.

Works Cited

Beer, Gillian. “Alice in Time.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 106, no. 4, 2011, pp. xxvii–xxxviii. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5699/modelangrevi.106.4.xxvii. Accessed 2 Apr. 2025.

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Penguin Classics, 2015.

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press, 2010.

New Life Narratives and Queer Time

So, I decided to get ahead by reading the excerpt we were assigned from In a Queer Time and Place by Jack Halberstam and these portions in particular stood out to me:

“Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (Halberstam 1).

“part of what has made queerness compelling as a form of self-description in the past decade or so has to do with the way it has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space” (Halberstam 1-2).

I find the idea of queer time as an opposition to “normality” and a “typical life path” very interesting. It definitely hits close to home for me and I think that’s why this whole passage in particular stood out in my mind. Even from a very young age, I had an “atypical” idea of where my life was headed. In elementary school, my dream when I grew up was not only to be author, but to adopt a child or two and be a single parent. (Since learning more about difficulties with LGBTQIA+ people adopting and the system of wealth in the U.S., I don’t know how obtainable this goal really is, but to little me it sounded amazing and totally plausible. Plus I’ve grown and learned more about myself and I’m not sure how much this is a goal I really want anymore, but it’s interesting looking back.) I think deep down I knew this wasn’t something I was expected to want, because my mom used to bombard me with the stereotypical idea of “oh, when you get married/have kids one day”, but even before I learned about any queer terminology I had the awareness to know what I wanted for myself.

Tying back to the second quote, I know personally after learning about what asexuality and aromanticism were, I was really hit with this idea that I could live a “new life narrative.” I had always looked up mostly to people who lived on their own with their own house/apartment and it made so much sense why I did that. On a different note, I recently read a book called Ace and Aro Journeys (which is by The Ace and Aro Advocacy Project if you want to check it out, highly recommend!) and there was a very real emphasis that being aro and/or ace can open up new avenues for your life that most cishet people don’t consider. I think this is true of all LGBTQIA+ identities; especially with regards to the “alternative relations to time and space” aspect, which makes me think of how a lot of trans people compare “second puberty” to being a teenager again. Additionally, differing ideas about family can be seen in how many queer people create their own chosen family. Overall, learning about the concept of queer time has helped me think about elements of queer culture in a new way.

The Terrible Slopes of Time

Once Geryon had gone

With his fourth-grade class to view a pair of beluga whales newly captured 

From the upper rapids of the Churchill River. 

Afterwards at night he would lie on his bed with his eyes open thinking of 

The whales afloat

In the moonless tank where their tails touched the wall – as alive as he was 

On their side 

Of the terrible slopes of time. What is time made of? Geryon said suddenly

Turning to the yellowbeard who

Looked at him surprised. Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction. 

Just a meaning that 

We impose upon motion. But I see – he looked down at his watch – what you mean. 

Wouldn’t want to be late 

For my own lecture would I? Let’s go.

Autobiography of Red, 90  

The moment before this passage, Geryon sees a list of names belonging to “professors detained or disappeared” hanging on the wall, and tries not to focus on any one of them in particular. He wonders, “Suppose it was the name of someone alive. In a room or in pain or waiting to die” (90). This thought plunges him into the memory of his fourth-grade field trip, and Geryon sees a connection between missing people, “alive… in a room or in pain or waiting to die,” and the captured whales, who are also alive, in an enclosed tank, their freedom taken from them, waiting to die. I struggled to understand the lines “as alive as he was/on their side/of the terrible slopes of time,” but I think they show Geryon identifying with the whales and their lack of freedom, and places him at the same point as the whales in their respective timelines. I imagine “the terrible slopes of time” as a mountain, or a roller coaster – beginning at the bottom with birth, climbing to the peak, and falling downward towards death. If Geryon is as alive as the whales are, and he is on their side of the slopes of time, does that mean that both he and the whales are on the downward slope, heading toward death? Is that how Geryon imagines his life progressing, as a fourth-grader lying in bed late at night – a captive in a cage, already falling down the “terrible slopes of time”? I’m reminded of the moment earlier in the text when Geryon, his brother, and their babysitter are discussing weapons, and Geryon says his favorite weapon is a cage (33). At various moments throughout the text, Geryon seems preoccupied with cages and captivity, and here he connects that feeling of being caged with ideas about time. 

Geryon’s thoughts suddenly jolt him back to the present moment with a question: what is time made of? I think there is a connection here between time, cages, and queerness, and “the yellowbeard” helps to put it into words. “Time is an abstraction,” he says – time is just a concept, with no meaning beyond that which people impose upon it. This imposed meaning, however, is central to existence within a cis- and heteronormative society. The yellowbeard’s next comment shows that although he recognizes time as an abstraction, he is still bound by its practical purpose: “‘But I see – he looked down at his watch – what you mean./Wouldn’t want to be late/For my own lecture would I? Let’s go.” The yellowbeard, like the vast majority of people, experiences time as a practical measurement of motion, which he has to adhere to for his own sake and the sake of others. I think Geryon, on the other hand, experiences time in a less straightforward, more queer way. In “In a Queer Time and Place,” Halberstam argues that queer experiences of time oppose a ‘normal’ or ‘standard’ timeline of birth, marriage, reproduction, old age, and finally death – Geryon’s “terrible slopes of time.” To a fourth-grader witnessing “newly captured” whales and suddenly aware that they will likely spend the rest of their lives in captivity, this ‘normal’ timeline may feel like a cage. However, the moments of Geryon’s adult life that Carson presents align with Halberstam’s ideas about queer time: “queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices” (Halberstam 1). Autobiography of Red shows Geryon as an adult whose future timeline does not conform to “those paradigmatic markers of life experience – namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (Halberstam 2); rather than settle down, get married, have children, and eventually die, Geryon travels the world, asks strangers what time means to them, captures his life in photographs, and outlives the end of his biography.

Growing Up is Hard to Do

Sex can feel like love or maybe it’s guilt that makes me call sex love. I’ve been through so much I should know just what it is I’m doing with Louise. I should be a grown up by now. Why do I feel like a convent virgin? (94)

The narrator of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body is waiting for his/her married lover Louise to make a decision on how to proceed with their relationship. Louise’s husband Elgin is aware of their affair, yet they remain married. However, all three of them have come to realize that something needs to change and the narrator is waiting for Louise to choose between her marriage and her affair.

The narrator is wondering if the love Louise has said she has for him/her is truly love and not just an illusion created by sex. By saying that guilt may make sex feel like love, the narrator is suggesting that we like to hide behind love. We are afraid of the shame we might encounter if we have sex for nothing but pleasure. As Michael Warner points out in his book The Trouble with Normal, we are constantly looking for a way to handle our sexual shame, to get rid of it. We want to “pin it on someone else” (Warner, 3), or in this case something else. If we say we love someone, our sexual shame is automatically reduced because it is far more ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’ within our society to have sex with someone you love than having sex for your own pleasure.

Even though the reader still doesn’t know if the narrator is male or female, he/she clearly lives on, as Judith Halberstam would put it, ‘Queer Time’. Indulging in numerous relationships with (married) partners of both sexes, not settling down, and clearly challenging “conventional forms of association, belonging, and identification” (Halberstam, 4), the narrator does not follow the traditional life span of school, marriage, kids, a steady job, and retirement. Instead, the narrator realizes himself/herself that he/she is not yet a grown up, does not fit the norm. He/she is aware that society expects him/her to end the affair; that he/she should know what ‘is right’ by looking at his/her life and the mistakes made, the lessons learned. Nevertheless, the narrator feels like a ‘convent virgin’: childlike, innocent, and clueless.

Although the narrator at one point believes that Louise will not, under any circumstances, choose to end her marriage, the comparison to feeling like a convent virgin furthermore suggests the narrator’s hope and faith that their love will prevail against all odds, against the norm, and against his/her fears. It shows the narrator’s hope that not following the norm will pay off in the end and lead to happiness.