Since Michel Foucault’s proto-queer theoretical History of Sexuality (1976/2002), time and history have functioned as important sites for the theorization and understanding of sexuality and gender as productive, culturally situated phenomena, rather than static, transhistorical, or naturally ordained. In particular the medieval has been a central site of contrast for the rethinking of modern conceptions of sexuality and heteronormativity (Dinshaw 1999). By contrast, popular fantasy often seems overwhelmingly normative in its medievalism, imagining the fantasy medieval as much ‘further back’ in a supposed linear development of greater social acceptance for sexual diversity than modern Western society.

With the popularity of Game of Thrones, this particular construction of the fantasy medieval has gained critical academic attention. Recent feminist inquiries into the medievalisms of the current popular trend towards grimness and realism in fantasy media have revolved around what Amy Kaufman refers to as “muscular medievalism,” which “imagines the past as a man’s world in which masculinity was powerful, impenetrable, and uniquely privileged” (Kaufman 2016, 58; see also for example: Polack 2015; Young 2016; Carroll 2018). In these readings, the medievalism of popular fantasy is understood as constructing problematic understandings of gender, sexuality and race through its use of the ‘past.’ 

In this presentation I want to offer a queer reading as a complement to these feminist engagements with the temporality of fantasy fiction. Drawing on theory on queer temporality and queer uses of the past (Dinshaw 1999; Fjelkestam 2018), I here make an initial attempt to sketch out a queer reading of the temporality of popular epic fantasy.