Queer Temporalities

This chapter examines the way in which, in the discussed works of postcolonial speculative fiction, queer desire is actively facilitated by the engagement with the historical narrative, bringing the fractured queer temporalities together to bridge the gaps and rifts left behind by the colonial discourse. Employing postcolonial theory as well as the theory of science fiction as the methodological framework, the chapter posits that in Suzette Mayr’s “Toot Sweet Matricia” and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl , it is the engagement with the historical past which mediates and facilitates the emergence of queer desire and queer temporalities which upset the hegemonic status quo. In both works, this mediated experience of history and desire allows the characters to reject the dominant structures imposed upon them and engage in acts of disobedience that rupture the hegemonic order within which they function. Those strategies of resistance, in turn, are predicated on the unruly, disobedient bodies of the characters—queer, erotic, but resisting the objectifying colonial gaze, liminal and atemporal—and involve a thorough reexamination and ultimate reclamation of the past.