Academics have written extensively about queer temporalities but little attention has been paid to their relationship with ethics. This essay argues that examining this relation can reveal new insights into ethics and how it intersects with sexuality.
Queer Temporality
Queer temporality is an approach to time that challenges dominant models of linearity and progress. It views time as non-linear, cyclical, or even non-existent. It also considers time as socially constructed and subjective.
Ethics
Ethics refers to moral principles that guide individuals' behavior and decisions. It involves issues such as right and wrong, justice, fairness, respect, compassion, responsibility, and empathy.
Relationship between Queer Temporality and Ethics
The relationship between queer temporality and ethics lies in their mutual implications for memory, hope, and presence.
Memory
Memory is central to both queer temporality and ethics. In queer temporality, memories are often associated with trauma and marginalization, which inform identity formation and resistance. Memories may be fragmented, disjointed, or repressed. They may involve painful experiences, loss, grief, or guilt.
Ethics focuses on shared values, morals, and responsibilities towards others. These require remembering the past and learning from mistakes. Memories of past injustices can motivate action against discrimination, oppression, and violence.
They must be balanced with a desire for the future to avoid dwelling on negative emotions.
Hope
Hope is closely related to both queer temporality and ethics. Queer temporality highlights the importance of imagining alternative futures, challenging normative temporalities, and resisting heteronormativity. This requires imagination, creativity, and optimism about possible worlds where sexuality is not regulated by binary gender roles.
Ethical concerns also demand hope. Individuals need hope that they can make a difference, that collective change is possible, and that justice will eventually prevail. This requires recognizing progress over time while acknowledging persistent inequalities and injustices.
Presence
Presence involves being fully engaged with current events and circumstances without neglecting the past or sacrificing dreams of the future. It entails living in the present moment, making decisions based on available information, and acting now. It requires balance between memory and hope.
Queer temporality emphasizes the fluidity and unpredictability of time, which challenges linear progression and destiny. It encourages individuals to live in the present without fixating on what happened or might happen. It may also involve embracing uncertainty as part of life's natural cycle.
Ethically speaking, presence requires awareness of how actions affect others and their consequences. It means taking responsibility for choices made today and considering how they impact tomorrow.
Choosing sustainable practices today benefits future generations.
Exploring the relationship between queer temporality and ethics reveals new insights into both concepts. Examining them together offers unique perspectives on memory, hope, and presence. Doing so could inform policy-making and activism around social issues such as identity politics, climate change, and human rights. By incorporating non-linear approaches to time and valuing lived experience, we can promote more inclusive ethical frameworks that account for individual and societal needs.
Can queer temporality open new ethical relations between memory, hope, and presence?
Queer temporality can be understood as an alternative perspective on time that challenges traditional notions of linearity and permanence. It invites us to think about time as non-linear, fluid, and constantly changing, allowing for multiple pasts, presents, and futures to coexist simultaneously. From this viewpoint, it is possible to create different temporal relationships among people, objects, and events.