Alison Kafer and Embodied Time
Alison Kafer’s discussion of how disability studies can help make sense of, or add nuance to, queer time, is a further emphasis on embodiment and how the body works with and through conceptions of queer time. Our discussion last class using Elizabeth Freeman’s work on S/M was one way that the body reflects an understanding of time. Not only the pausing of this seemingly eternal and unending time, but the control of time in general. S/M practices rely on anticipation, denial, etc. and changing the body’s interpretation of time. But whereas Freeman explains how time is queered on the body, Kafer focuses on how the body changes conceptions of time. She explains how criptime is flexible time, extra time, conceptions of time needed when someone may depend on an attendant, have a slower gait, or has to deal with malfunctioning equipment (26). This also applies to the flexibility of futures that Kafer writes about, in how our modern conceptions of life very literally erase disabled people out of existence, preferring to ensure a future for a different type of person (34; 46). It is not that time looks differently on disabled bodies, but rather that disabled bodies themselves change time and conceptions of time. Freeman focuses on how the body shows time as a site and location, whereas I think Kafer is much more concerned with bodies moving through what we consider “time.”
The point I’m interested in here is that distinction between what time looks like for bodies and how conceptions of time are changed because of bodies. In some sense, time for bodies in understandable, legible, linear, and heading towards a point (such as conceptions of the future Kafer describes). But bodies and how they move, their abilities, their disabilities (and what can or cannot count as a disability at a particular moment) changes the linearity of time as a construct and as a marker. For example, the diagnosis of a body is not linear or clear in many sense, and may also involve relapses or chronic illnesses, where the body may not be read as “disabled” or ill in certain instances, but it will in other moments. Kafer gets at this a little bit in her discussion of the future, but the implications are not as fully fleshed out. Disabled bodies can do more than to just challenge time daily time such as planning and meeting, but to actually challenge how bodies move through time.
This is not to say that queer bodies moving through time and space cannot also challenge the linearity of time, but I think disabled bodies provide a clearer way to make that comparison. To queer time or temporalities through this understanding is not necessarily pausing or taking control of time, but rather moving through an uncontrollable time in a new or separate configuration of time. Moving “childlike” or dependent in the eyes of the state or others or as a group with no future (33). In some ways this means casting away notions of time, and letting one be subject to it as it passes without control- knowing that the future may change at any moment, that one’s day of planning could change entirely due to a singular event (37, 38). Aware of time “falling” around you, without being able to do anything about it, and still letting it fall. Where Freeman emphasizes regaining control, Kafer emphasizes the lack of control- and what a queered, uncontrollable time looks like.
