Never on Time, Always in Time: Narrative Form and the Queer Sensorium

Queer futures begin with the body. In Never on Time, Always in Time, Kate McCullough explores how writers summon queer bodily experiences by way of the senses: these experiences have much to tell us about the pasts, presents, and futures of queer life. The author discusses how narrative form and techniques represent the senses in order to open a more expansive temporality for writers and readers. Can queer futures contain the utopic, while also addressing the violence of the past and present? McCullough argues that a narratology that incorporates the senses is integral to conceptions of queer time, which in its most potent, palpable, and radical expression depends on a rendering of the senses. Never on Time, Always on Time looks at works by Monique Truong, Carol Rivka Brunt, Mia McKenzie, and Alison Bechdel to explore how they invoke the senses to narrate what otherwise seems to be non-narrativizable. McCullough thus reveals a vital queer narratology at work, a mode of reading and writing the senses toward a survivable future. She calls this cluster of contemporary texts ＂narratives of the queer sensorium＂ and argues that representations of the senses in these texts open new perspectives onto history, futurity, and relationality.

Kate McCullough is Associate Professor of English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women’s Fiction, 1885-1914.