The 1AC’s form of linear planning privileges heteronormative timelines that justify elimination of populations through heteropatriarchal politics.

More often than not, practices and discourses of peace and conflict make references to time, whether we speak of a “peaceful future”, “sudden” eruptions of violence, “intractable” wars, “long” reconciliation processes, or about how different narrations of the past legitimise or delegitimise present violence. Queer researchers, often drawing on postcolonial theories, have offered some of the most forceful analyses of how different conceptions of time, or temporalities, relate to power and violence, but also to resistance.

Certain conceptions of time underwrite efforts of domination, subordination, and elimination, and are at the heart of nationalist, racist, colonial, and heteropatriarchal politics. Such projects have often been guided by the idea that specific forms of living, knowing, loving, worshipping, producing, and reproducing are not only superior but “of our time”. This is used to justify the forced catching up, control, or elimination of those designated as temporal anachronisms, be they indigenous populations, sexual, religious, or ethnic minorities, or immigrant groups. Jacqui Alexander (2005, p. 193) argues that appeals to tradition and modernity are powerful forms of ideological authorisation, and that implicit in the tradition/modernity binary is a paradoxical conception of time as both linear and hierarchical. However, she notes that temporalities are not pure or internally coherent, but layered as multiple narrations of time can exist within the same temporality. As feminists have shown, nationalist linear storylines of a shared past, present, and future are articulated against the fond of an eternal, timeless, and feminised metaphor of the nation (Peterson, 1999). Similarly, heterosexuality is represented as a historical, natural condition of the nation, whereas queerness is seen as something new (either as evidence of national degradation or as a sign of its remarkable modernity).

For Lee Edelman (2004), the logic of “reproductive futurity” functions as an organising and legitimating principle of social order and communal relations. The figure of the Child (not to be confused with actual children) is a symbol of this logic, imposing an ideological limit so that every political vision and intervention needs to be articulated as ultimately aiming to secure the future survival of the community. Whatever stands in the way of the reproduction of the Child and its future well-being, he argues, appears as a danger to social order as such. Thus the freedom of the future Child may mean that the freedoms of currently living people must be restricted, or even that some must be eliminated. While arguing that liberal lesbian and gay rights claims (e.g. on same-sex marriage or adoption) are within the logic of reproductive futurism, Edelman poses (and celebrates) the queer as its absolute rejection, that which refuses the teleology of reproduction and therefore “has no future”. Other researchers, rather than seeing the queer as opposed to any future-oriented vision, have advanced versions of “queer futurity” (Muñoz, 2009). In feminist peace studies, queer critiques of futurity may inspire analysis of how both practices of violence and peacebuilding – in different ways – often take place in the name of “our future children”, and what the consequences are for those subjects who fit into predominant visions of the future, and those not seen as conducive to collective reproduction.

Contemporary sexual politics is imbued with notions of time. While state homophobia is legitimated with reference to nostalgic visions of “traditional values” (Edenborg, 2018b), proLGBTQ advocacy (whether enacted by states or gay rights organisations) often invokes a linear progressive temporality where gay rights are seen as a necessary component of what it means to be modern, defined against those who are “stuck in the past”, as evidenced by their homophobia (Puar, 2007; Butler, 2008). This temporality was clearly expressed in US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2011 speech to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), where she designated gay rights as human rights and those opposing such rights as being on the wrong side of history. Rahul Rao (2012) notes the historical irony that whereas heteronormativity was seen as a marker of 19th century Victorian modernity (as evidenced by the introduction of colonial anti-sodomy laws in India and elsewhere), in the 21st century, LGBTQ rights have instead emerged as a marker of modernity. Thus, he argues, articulating gay freedom in the form of a reinvented civilising mission means that being on the right side of history often seems to mean being on the right side of empire (Rao, 2012). Moreover, the linking of liberal LGBTQ rights activism to modernisation discourse risks producing overly simplistic geopolitical mappings of spaces that “have come far” and other spaces that need to “catch up”, creating a blindness to [hiding] forms of gender and sexual minority politics that do not conform to templates of Western identity politics, and making the formation of transnational alliances more difficult.

Against such evolutionary conceptions of politics, queer theorists have proposed ways of thinking outside linear temporality. Queer people know, as Catherine Baker (2017) writes, “how easily freedoms can disappear”, and this fragile line between security and insecurity, where the first can unexpectedly turn into the other, destabilises the idea of stable, sequential, and one-directional progress. Queer theorists have suggested conceptions of time that allow for connecting or touching across time. Alexander (2005) views time as palimpsestic, where the new does not entirely erase the old but the past is visible and structures the present. Ann Cvetkovich’s research on queer trauma (2003) has pointed at how catastrophic, historical events reappear in the textures of ordinary, everyday life, thus connecting personal stories with the stories of others in an “archive of feelings”. Relatedly, queer research on spectrality has shown how the present is haunted by ghostly figures evoking histories of violence that cannot be left behind or put to rest but call for political action and ethical responsibility (Kuntsman, 2009).

Crucially to feminist peace studies, queer theories point at how temporalities may disable or enable forms of solidarity. Modernist and evolutionary conceptions of sexual politics may foster forgetting, ignorance, or paternalistic rescue narratives based on pity with those perceived as living in another time. In contrast, a more complex and multilayered conception of time, where those subjects who are (however partially and conditionally) included into citizenship stay in touch with their own past oppression (Rao, 2014), can make possible more egalitarian forms of solidarity with those (queers and others) who have been less fortunate.