Queer times in Moonlight

Abstract

ABSTRACT The time is out of joint in Moonlight (2016). While Barry Jenkins’ film appears to divide Chiron’s life into three chronological periods, each stage both repeats and anticipates something of the others, on the levels of both form and content – from the recurrence of heteronormative, antiBlack violence throughout Chiron’s life to the reprisal of the police-like flashes of light that cinematographically periodize his story, this narrative is (un)structured by repetition. This essay asks how Moonlight’s reiterative temporality might intervene in the ‘temporal turn’ in queer studies. By emphasizing the structuring repetition of antiBlackness, I want to complicate the utopian aspirations of queer futurism, in the vein of José Esteban Muñoz, as well as the psychoanalytic elision of race that defines queer anti-futurism, or the ‘anti-social thesis’, after Lee Edelman. What is the (non)place of Blackness in romances of queer futurity? In romances of queer negativity? In conversation with prior queer and Black scholarship on Moonlight, I argue that the film stages Blackness as a disruption to both straight and queer temporalities as we know them. Ultimately, I suggest that the film posits a third way out of the futurism/anti-futurism deadlock in queer studies: the iterability that (de)constructs Black(ness)’s narrative gestures toward an absolute open(ended)ness which is unrealizable as futurity and which is inextricable from the endlessly reiterated antiBlack, antiqueer violence of the modern world.