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Taking a Moment: Embodying Temporality and Finding a ‘Queer Sense of Belonging’ through Live Performance

Amy Keating

Using Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of chrononormativity, I show that a capitalist and heteronormative society can manifest in queer embodiment through the extra work required by queer subjects in order to adhere to these expectations. Following this, I provide an autoethnographic and affective reflection of a personal encounter at a “queercore” concert of the band Hunx and His Punx in Brooklyn, New York, in 2019. During this live performance, I felt a queer moment of ease and comfort. Through an unpacking of the multifaceted components of the performance, I argue that the concert fostered a temporal space to allow the embodied tension and discordance of queerness to dissipate: thus offering what I call a ‘queer sense of belonging.’

Keywords: Chrononormativity, Queercore, Live Performance, Queer Belonging, Queer Embodiment

Amy Keating is a PhD Candidate at Western University in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Department. They explore various queer communities that surround art and aesthetics, working to uncover how art can foster spaces of belonging for queer identified folks through theories of queer time and aesthetics.