How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time

what is it, when is it, who gets to live in it, and who decides?

desire can reveal a temporally multiple world in the now

I offer them as provocations that will, I hope, help readers of How Soon Is Now? to develop other frameworks and find other examples.

Queer, amateur: these are mutually reinforcing terms.

The interrelations between desire, bodies, and the now create a broad framework for my concerns in this book.

Queerness, I maintain in this book, has a temporal dimension—as anyone knows whose desire has been branded as “arrested development” or dismissed as “just a phase”—and, concomitantly and crucially, as I hope to show, temporal experiences can render you queer.

In my theorizing of temporality I explore forms of desirous, embodied being that are out of sync with the ordinarily linear measurements of everyday life, that engage heterogeneous temporalities or that precipitate out of time altogether—forms of being that I shall argue are queer by virtue of their particular engagements with time.

My broadest goal in this book is not only to explore but also to claim the possibility of a fuller, denser, more crowded now that all sorts of theorists tell us is extant but that often eludes our temporal grasp.

Time is lived; it is full of attachments and desires, histories and futures; it is not a hollow form (not a “hatful of hollow”) that is the same always.