Matty Layne Glasgow

[Queer Time & Space]

One year ago—a wild thought, I know—I picked up Miller Oberman’s The Unstill Ones (Princeton UP, 2017) for the first time. I’ve returned to it almost weekly ever since. A striking debut, Oberman’s collection weaves together translations of Old English poems and riddles with original work that explores family, trans identity, and the function of language itself through time. Meticulously researched and thoughtful in its theoretical approach, The Unstill Ones both constructs and operates within its own queer temporality, bringing the medieval into the present and vice versa. What’s more, Oberman reveals how this collapse of normative time through the act of translation conjures a liminal space where language, poems, matter, and bodies are in a constant state of transition, ever-changing. For its deft navigation of queer theory, Old English translation, trans identity, and environment all through gorgeous, timeless verse, The Unstill Ones arose as the inspiration for Queer Time & Space. 

One of the great queer theorists of our time, Jack Halberstam, defines queer temporality and spatiality in his collection of critical essays In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (NYU Press, 2005). “Queer time,” he writes, “is a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance, [while] queer space refers to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage, and it also describes new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics.”

For Halberstam, and for this special feature, queer refers to a subversion of normative—often cis-gender, heteronormative, and white—logics and organizations, specifically concerning “community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in time and space.” Thus, our queering of time and space operates on both social and formal levels. As queer individuals, our very lives frequently subvert heteronormative timelines and expectations of marriage and childbearing, the accumulation of wealth needed to thrive under capitalism, and antiquated notions of gender and the body. As queer writers, we might eschew tradition and the canon, question the role of genre and its confines, or trouble narrative, form, and language itself. We understand the impossibility of divorcing our queer identities from our theoretical understandings and experiences of the world, just as we cannot divorce our queerness from our writing, as much as some normatively-inclined editors, readers, or professors might want us to. 

So here we are, at the confluence of queer time and space, where eight writers invite us into their worlds, their temporalities, each with a singular voice and aesthetic, but a shared vision of deconstructing the normative hegemonies by which so many of us find ourselves bound at one time or another, or, perhaps, always. Let the blanket swaddle you in memories of grief, of love. Revel in Dionysus’s birth as queer apparition in a wholly new flash of lightning. Believe in the ways we are multiple, untethered. Let each poem and story be a space for you to seek refuge in these dark months during which so much has been taken. May your journey be a reclamation of days lost by imagining a new time—your own. 

—MLG

Queer Time & Space