(Beyond) Queer Crip Time
Speculative fiction allows for and often encourages varying or flexible relationships with time. These narratives destabilize time through time travel, alternate histories, imagined futures, or other speculative tools. In her article, “Speculative Fictions of Slavery,” Madhu Dubey explores the ways that speculative narratives about slavery provide an opportunity for liberation for Black communities in the now. According to Dubey, these narratives “overtly situate themselves against history, suggesting that we can best comprehend the truth of slavery by abandoning historical modes of knowing” (Dubey 784). Dubey highlights the ways that this fluid representations of time allow for better and more truthful understandings of slavery. Dubey argues that, “Refusing to regard the past of slavery as history, speculative novels suggest that the truth of this past is more fully grasped by way of an antirealist literary imagination that can fluidly cross temporal boundaries and affectively immerse readers into the world of slavery” (Dubey 785). Dubey is particularly writing about how speculative fictions of slavery can be a reclamatory tool for Black communities to refute, rewrite, undo, or reimagine the past. This mode can be vital and restorative to Black communities, and can also be healing for other or intersecting marginalized groups. While the focus of this project is on queer speculative disability narratives, many of the pieces in this project are by Black writers and artists. When thinking about the liberatory possibilities of alternate temporalities, centering POC and other marginalized advocates of alternate temporalities is essential, particularly given the ways that these alternate expressions of temporality have consistently been ignored, slighted, or abused by white and/or privileged populations.
In her book, Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Kafer advocates for what she calls “crip time,” which she defines as a “reorientation to time” (Kafer 27). Crip time means building flexibility into the way we think about time. Crip time “is flex time not just expanded but exploded; it requires reimagining our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of ‘how long things take’ are based on very particular minds and bodies” (Kafer 27). Kafer’s crip time imagines a temporality that is less rigid, challenging the ways that we structure time according to able-bodied people. Dubey’s analysis of speculative fictions of slavery is similar, challenging the ways that we as a culture place slavery firmly in the past, when it is in reality active and present in the now.
Kafer also calls out imagined futures’ relationship with disability: “Utopian visions are founded on the elimination of disability, while dystopic, negative visions of the future are based on its proliferation” (Kafer 74). Kafer challenges this, arguing that “To eliminate disability is to eliminate the possibility of discovering alternative ways of being in the world, to foreclose the possibility of recognizing and valuing our interdependence” (Kafer 83). She advocates for a crip time framing for our view of the future, as well as the present. By imagining a future that is flexible and fluid, we can better make space for and center marginalized communities. José Muñoz, like Kafer, advocates for a more just future in his book, Cruising Utopia. Muñoz argues that queerness “exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain” (Muñoz 1). Similar to Dubey and Kafer, Muñoz advocates for a fluid temporality in order to reach the desired (queer) future. Such an approach encourages us to “dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” (Muñoz 1).
The queer, speculative disability narratives that I examine in this section utilize these temporal possibilities in order to work towards a more just future. The Deep by Rivers Solomon imagines that the descendents of pregnant African women thrown overboard while being transported via slave ships have developed into a community of water-dwelling, mermaid-like people, called the wajinru. The narrative follows Yetu, the historian for the wajinru community. She remembers their entire history—all of the trauma and violence that has led to their existence—so that everyone else can forget. She is also neurodivergent and experiences frequent sensory overload, so this position is particularly difficult for her. The novella explores temporality through this generational trauma, Yetu’s role as the historian, and memory. Solomon’s novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, shares some of these thematic explorations. An Unkindness of Ghosts takes place on a generation spaceship. The protagonist, Aster, is an intersex, gender non-conforming, neurodivergent, Black, queer person. The story follows Aster as she unravels the history of the ship (run suspiciously like a plantation, with the Black people working the “fields” while the white people are waited upon and enjoy wealth), and the mystery of her mother’s role in the ship’s journey to the “Promised Land.” Similar to The Deep, An Unkindness of Ghosts explores generational trauma, cyclical violence, and, of course, ghosts. Julia Armfield’s story, “Cassandra’s Ghost,” actualizes fluid temporality in the form of a ghost/zombie of the protagonist’s dead girlfriend. Each of these narratives uses fluid understandings of time in order to make space for “bodies with limited, odd, or queer movements and orientations” (Kafer 84), proving that “disability and queerness can indeed be desirable both in the future as well as now” (Kafer 84).