It has been said that love is the most powerful force in the universe. Similarly, temporality is notoriously outside of human control. Yet everything can be questioned, even such seemingly immutable phenomena as time. Both forces have immense transformative powers that are often represented in popular media. This project investigates the depictions of queer temporality and time travel in narratives permeated by queer erotics. Imbued with hope through the relationships built in its wake, connection forms the antithesis and antidote to the isolation perpetuating capitalism.

Utilizing the concept of queer temporality, this project seeks to conceive new ways of relating that strive towards queer liberation. Its corpus of texts depicting queer time and romance speaks to the revolutionary potential of disregarding naturalised rules set forth by capitalistic, white-supremacist, and misogynistic forces. Through their relationships, the characters in these texts unlock a revolutionary joy of revelling so completely in the connection with another person that the normative world and its notion of time cease to exist for a while. To name an example from the corpus, in This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019) two women are adversaries on different sides of a war across time, made infinite by time travel technology. Yet in the end their love is how they escape this war, literally breaking the systems that trapped them in perpetual conflict through the connection forged in spite of their differences. Thereby they demonstrate that in the end, oppressive power structures can be overcome by people connected in love and joy, even to the point of transcending time itself.

This project endeavours to retheorise temporality and queer love through embracing the tempest of time and rejecting restrictive notions of the nature of reality. There is a powerful current of potential in no longer seeking to harness time, but to find a way to roam within its vortex.

Publications:

Forthcoming; “The Work of a Witch: Queerness and Labour in Ellen Galford’s The Fires of Bride” in Recasting the Bygone Witch by Vernon Press

Bittner, Corvin. “Living a Postmodern Purgatory: Death Anxiety in Russian Doll.” European Journal of American Culture, vol. 41, no. 3, 2022, pp. 227–239. https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00076_1

Presentations:

10.2023, talk titled “Time Will Tell: Queer Temporality and Wales as Postcolonial Space in Stevie Davies’ Impassioned Clay” as part of the “Queering Postcolonial Worlds” post-graduate conference at the University of Bremen

03.2021, talk titled “Impaired Gods: Óðinn as an Impaired Deity from the Perspective of Disability and Memory Studies” as part of the “Interdisciplinary Aarhus Student Symposium on Viking and Medieval Scandinavian Subjects”

09.2020, talk at the “Annual Conference of the “GFF (Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung): Imagining Alternatives” at the University of Augsburg (paper accepted, but talk cancelled due to the pandemic)

01.2020, talk titled “Chivalry is Dead: The Complexities of Westerosi Masculinity” as part of the lecture series “Science Fiction and Fantasy – Subject this Year: Game of Thrones” at the University of Augsburg

01.2020, talk titled “The Horror of Feminism and Lesbian Vampires in Carmilla (1872)” as part of the “Symposium: Feminismus im Studium?” at the University of Augsburg