The queer subject of ‘getting on’

Abstract

This chapter dwells on disruptions of normative time, on what is done ‘at the right time’, and by whom. It empirically situates ‘intersections’ of age, sexuality and gender, as bringing forward certain subjects, while rendering others out of time, backwards, behind and redundant. Sexualities research is replete with metaphors of ‘coming of age’ and, with the passing of Equalities legislation, may well be seen as a discipline that has itself, ‘got on’ or ‘arrived’. Yet only certain gendered and sexual subjects are constructed as on time, planned alongside work-life balance, situated against anticipated life-course trajectories, and as endorsed in social policies, institutional practice and normative imaginings. I draw on concepts from Bourdieu, and ideas of ‘queer temporalities’, to explore how (non)normative personhood is produced and ruptured. I locate myself in and through research, as inevitably intersecting my own cares, biography, personal and professional identity (as also a queer subject ‘getting on’).