1st Edition
Unbound Queer Time in Literature, Cinema, and Video Games
Unbound Queer Time in Literature, Cinema, and Video Games investigates the potential of queer conceptions of time to unbind forms of understanding identities. In doing so, it recognizes the power of time to determine us, but chooses to queer time and turn it into an ally of unbound forms of understanding identities.
Through the analysis of different media—literature, cinema, and video games—the chapters revolve around three key ideas: that there are inherently queer styles of using and dealing with time and temporality in culture; that the critical rediscovery of canonical texts as well as the analysis of largely ignored queer texts and authors allow for a better understanding of queer identities; and, finally, that normative conceptions of time can—and should—be challenged through critical tools which reconceptualize notions of the self around time.
This volume will be of interest to postgraduate students and researchers working close to areas such as Queer and Gender Studies, Media and Cinema Studies, Cultural Studies, Literary Theory, Comparative Literature, Game Studies, and Art History.
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1: Queer Time Unbound
Juan F. Belmonte Ávila and Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo
SECTION 1: (UN)FORMALIZING QUEER TIMES
Chapter 2: In Perfect (A)Synchrony: Queer Style in The Line of Beauty
Jonas Kellermann
Chapter 3: “I Am Where I Need to Be”: Queer Homemaking in Fullbright’s Gone Home
Christina Xan
Chapter 4: Identity in the In-Between: Narrative Temporality and the Queer Experience in Tangerine and Moonlight
Małgorzata Mączko
Chapter 5: Disruptions to the Linear and Individual Narrative of Psychic Distress in Mike Barnes’s The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis
Cristina Hurtado-Botella
Chapter 6: Re-temporalizing Trauma through Gameplay in Gibson and Swanwick’s “Dogfight”
Amy H. Ahn
Chapter 7: Disrupting Binaries and Linearities: Queer and Trans Temporalities in Imogen Binnie’s Nevada
Steph Berens
SECTION 2: UNEARTHING QUEER TIMES
Chapter 8: “Queer Memory and the Brown Commons”
Juan A. Suárez
Chapter 9: Time, Memory, and Queer Sensibility in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Weisong Gao
Chapter 10: A Faded Photograph: Ghosts, Specters, and Other Phantoms in Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers
Ana Bessa Carvalho
Chapter 11: “Be Three Now”: Queering the Postwar Heterosexual Marriage in Ann Quin’s Three
Laura de la Parra Fernández
Chapter 12: The Rogue as a Queer Agent in Video Games: The Picaresque Novel Legacy
David Matencio Durán
SECTION 3: UNBINDING QUEER TIME
Chapter 13: Genesis Noir and Cosmological Time: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Big Bang
Merlyn Seller
Chapter 14: Posthuman Temporalities and Shared Timings: Kinship in the Work of Jim Jarmusch
Johanna Schmertz
Chapter 15: “All the Ages We’ve Shaped Together’: Examining Queer Genealogies, Science Fiction and Non-Linear Storytelling through El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s This is How You Lose the Time War (2019)
Beatriz Hermida Ramos
Chapter 16: “Unbound and Loving It!”: Pleasure, Dressage and Queer Rhythmic Resistance in Monáe’s Dirty Computer
Jack Maginn
Chapter 17: Imagining Neuroqueer Futures: Crip Time and Care-ful Connections in Night in the Woods
Lisanne Meinen
Index
Biography
Juan Francisco Belmonte Ávila is an Associate Professor at the Department of English Studies, University of Murcia (Spain). His research focuses on the study of gender and sexuality in video games and has recently published his work in journals such as Continuum: A Journal of Media & Cultural Studies and The Journal of American Culture.
Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo is Assistant Professor at the University of Murcia (Spain). Her research focuses on gender in postwar American poetry. She is the author of Beat Myths in Literature: Revisionist Strategies in Beat Women (2023) and co-editor of ruth weiss: Beat Poetry, Jazz, Art (2021)
