Reading response 8 —— Freeman

The reading “Introduction: Queer and Not Now” was one of the most confusing assignments in class until now. Some paragraphs seem to make more sense than others, but the structure of the text lacks uniformity and fluidity. I struggled with finding the exact message the author tries to convey. The author introduces a term called chrononormativity as “the use of time to organize human bodies into maximum productivity.” But, what does that even mean? Is it talking about productivity in every aspect of life? Is it talking about sex and sexual matters or actions? The text follows with the following idea by Bourdieu; “natural competence and thus belonging itself are matters of timing, of coming to inhabit expectations about the temporal lapses between getting and giving such that they seem inborn.” What does this mean? It is not clear to me what any of these thinkers want their audience to understand, and therefore I begin to question why a subject needs to be complicated in such a way. I believe, or what I seem to be understanding, that Bourdieu considers everything to be a matter of timing (and not only time itself). Something else that caught my attention was the following quote; “In the eyes of the state, this sequence of socioeconomically ‘productive’ moments is what it means to have a life at all.” Shouldn’t life be more romanticized than that? I think this description is sad; it leaves so much out of what life is. The worst part is that some people live like this, with the notion that life is only about work and things that do not bring them joy or lust or excitement. Others just let life pass them by, and without realizing it, they have suddenly fallen for the state’s description of what life is.