Temporal Entanglements and Gendered Selves: Navigating Queer Temporality in A Tale for the Time Being

Abstract

This paper will explore the novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013) by Ruth Ozeki in relation to queer temporality, as a means of exploring how digital interconnectedness and cultural displacement are remaking gender and identity in the present literary imagination. Inspired by the theoretical perspectives of Elizabeth Freeman and Jack Halberstam, this study contends that Ozeki uses queer temporality as a narrative device to destabilize linear, chrononormative notions of selfhood, in which her characters occupy fragmented, nonlinear temporalities, which resist fixed identity formations. This paper focuses on the relationship between the two protagonists, Nao Yasutani and Ruth, who are linked through Nao's handwritten diary, as a model of the possibility of identity formation outside of the framework of traditional time. This study takes a qualitative and textual approach informed by feminist and queer theory to examine the temporal entanglements that go beyond the individual and the nation that form Nao's experience of bullying, cultural dislocation, and existential self-discovery. These temporal ruptures are intensified by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which is a historical chronotope. The results show that digital landscapes are asynchronous spaces of identity transmission and make selfhood inherently relational, contingent, and always in process. Finally, this paper makes a unique and valuable addition to the literature of queer temporality, digital culture, and transnational feminist literary criticism by uncovering Ozeki's novel as a reconfiguration of the gendered self as an adaptable, intersubjective construct in the digital age.