The Queer Body as Time Machine

The Queer Body as Time Machine

This paper explores the ways that time travel narratives conceive of, and trouble, emerging notions of the gendered body. The paper suggests a reading of time travel narratives through the lens of Haraway’s theories of cyborg identity and José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of a queer utopia. The paper argues that a time-travelling body is, always and already, a cyborg body whose material or biological form is hybridised or altered not only through literal re-makings (surgical and supernatural alterations and evolutions) but also through the ways in which time travel changes the body’s relationship to time, knowledge, understanding and selfhood.

Despite the ways in which the cyborg body of time-travel narratives escapes the limitations of the body trapped in a time and biology, the paper nevertheless argues that few, if any, time travel narratives lead to an experience (for reader or character) of Muñoz’s queer utopia.