I learned the word ‘Chrononormativity’ from the third chapter of Sherronda J Brown’s Refusing Compulsory Sexuality. (it’s a really good read, you should check it out.) In RCS, Brown discusses how asexuality, but merely existing, stands outside of chrononormativitiy. I’d never heard the word chrononormativity before, but I instantly understood it. I’ve been fighting against it for most of my life.
“First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage.”
My first conscious run-in with chronormativity was when I embraced polyamory. We called it ‘the relationship escalator’. The idea that relationships are expected to follow a specific pattern — a specific chronology. The pattern typically goes something like:
- date
- become exclusive
- get engaged
- get married
- have babies
- live together until one of you dies
Any relationship that doesn’t complete this chronology is considered failed. Any relationship which doesn’t follow the correct order or rejects a step entirely is ‘doing it wrong’ at best, and often considerd unethical and immoral. In some places and situations it can be illegal.
In embracing polyamory, I automatically rejected the ‘become exclusive’ step, and I also made the choice to reject the ‘get married’ step. I refused to privilege one relationship over another that way.
Of course, chrononormativity, like all normativity, has a great deal of societal pressure behind it. In this case, I was at one point ‘forced’ to get married in order to have access to health insurance and health care.
The Sabbath
It’s always struck me as somewhat ironic, how much of the world is structured around a five day work week, Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. But then for so much of my ‘working’ life, I’ve been put in a position of ‘work Saturdays or you don’t get/lose the job’. But it’s not just work. There’s a local hiking group on MeetUp I’ve thought about joining more than once, but they only go out on Saturdays.
I could spend a very long time listing out the ways keeping Sabbath has conflicted with the expectations of our world. (And don’t get me started on the frustrations of having our holiday season overlap with the very start of the school year!)
Good Night, Sleep Tight!
The kid refused to go to sleep. We tried everything. Reading together, taking away screens, no water or food right before bed. Nothing worked. Eventually, we broke down and tried medication. Because they ‘had’ to go to sleep at night and they ‘had’ to be awake before 8 in the morning, and it didn’t matter if they were getting enough sleep, because they weren’t getting the right sleep.
And I would have told the doctors to fuck off except the kid was getting ready to start school, when they would be forced to get up before 8 whether they’d gotten to sleep on time or not.
For better or worse, the medication didn’t work either.
We homeschool now. For better or worse. And the kid sleeps when they need to and gets up when they need to. And it feels like I constantly need to deal with well meaning busy-bodies who want to know why I ‘let’ my kid stay up so late and don’t enforce a ‘healthy’ bed time.
Because it isn’t healthy for them, that’s why. Now fuck off.
Not many years later, I had my own run-in with weird sleep patterns, when I kept waking up in the middle of the night and couldn’t fall back to sleep. I was exhausted all the time, constantly running on half the sleep I needed.
Finally, I had a brain storm — why not try splitting my sleep schedule? Sleep 4 hours, be awake for 8 hours, sleep another 4 hours, etc.
It worked really well for a year or two, but god did it complicate interacting with the rest of the world!
Then for some reason I’ll never know, my body decided I was done with that, and I needed to start sleep 8 hours at a stretch again. And I learned another new thing — not only does our body’s chronology not always line up with what the world expects, it can also change on us with no warning and we just need adapt as best we can.
Except for far to many people ‘adapt as best we can’ means set that alarm clock real loud and stagger through the day on not enough sleep because our bodies needs are second in importance to being ‘productive members of society.’
That ‘productive’ is important.
Chrononormative-Fuck You
The term ‘chrononormativity’ was coined by Elizabeth Freeman in 2010 in her book ‘Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories’. Defined as “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity,” chrononormativity finally describes and defines the force society has excerted on me for so long, dragging me into a ‘right’ pace and process for living. A pace and process determined not by what is best for me or my loved ones, but what is most productive for society.
Capitalism for the win?
I decided a long time ago that I was living life on my time and have been lucky enough (privileged enough) that I have mostly gotten away with it. But each step of the way has been a fight.
As always, fuck capitalism.
How has chrononormativity impacted your life?