Queer and Now Review
Elizabeth Freeman uses the example of Nguyen Tan Hoang’s video work k.i.p., to introduce the term chrononormativity, which is the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity. Furthermore, it is “a mode of implantation, a technique by which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts. These “hidden rhythms” (Evitar Zerubavel) exist within society to promote conformity and productivity, in the watches we wear, calendars we use and timezones we adhere to.
Freeman offers a brief history of the significance of photography, particularly to middle class society, through which the home was represented as “the ‘‘timeless’’ spaces of heart and hearth, the stillness of a domestic life imagined as a haven from rather than a necessary correlate of industrial time.”. Through photography and film, Freeman details the ongoing manipulation of time and continued enforcement of heteronormative narratives, which demonised racial and sexual “otherness” as threats to collective progress.
Freeman uses the The Physics of Love, as an example of the disruption of linear time and forward motion. The artwork shows a resistance to the expected relationship between mother and child, instead offering a fragmented and “stuttering” depiction of the pairs relationship. This example is one of many in which alternative narratives are presented which reject chrononormativity, an experience historically familiar to marginalised communities such as queer or black.