Time(s) of Lives: (Non)-Normative Temporalities, Age(ing), and Kinship Narratives in Contemporary U.S. American Culture (American Studies - a Monograph, 310)

What does it mean to live through time and to form affective bonds? This book discusses how concepts of time, age and aging, and kinship produce and impact each other in a neoliberal, late-capitalist 21st century U.S. American context. Located at the nexus of American studies, queer theory, critical age(ing) studies, and studies on belonging, it features case studies from across contemporary U.S. American culture. To explore potential challenges to dominant concepts and narratives, the book turns to diverse forms of temporal, developmental, and relational rupture: the multiple temporalities and erratic aging processes, the queer time modes, and the alternative models of collectivity and affect of bodies across - and as they cross - genders and the (post)human condition. With its queer analyses of examples from transgressive sites of queer contestation as well as mainstream culture, the book also asks: is going mainstream and being anti-hegemonic necessarily and always mutually exclusive? Read more