4th Annual Queer History Month Lecture

Temporal Disobedience: Intersex Studies & Chronopolitics

Oct. 20, 2026 | 5:30 - 7 p.m.
Presented by Dr. Celeste E. Orr (Co-authored with Tori Dudys and Casey Burkholder)
Alden R. Clark Theatre | NB Sports Hall of Fame | 503 Queen Street, Fredericton

Abstract

We offer inter time as a critical intervention into normative life courses governed by whiteness, cisheteronormativity, able-bodiedness, and endonormativity. Intersex people are positioned as temporal disruptions: outside, behind, or threatening to linear, coherent timelines of birth, reproduction, productivity, and death.

Building on queer, crip, Indigenous, and Black temporalities, we develop the notion of inter time as a messy, non-linear, self-authored relationship to time – a refusal of the timelines that mark intersex people as failed or tragic.

We examine how endonormativity – the assumption that only ‘male’ and ‘female’ exist – underpins dominant temporalities and restricts intersex lives to scripts of disorder and deviance. In contrast, inter time foregrounds joy, agency, and resistance. We centre intersex joy alongside queer, crip, Indigenous and Black joy to imagine vibrant, liberatory intersex futures.

This work aims to disrupt intersex deficit narratives and invites further integration of intersex studies into broader critiques of time. We ask: What does inter time offer to theorizing temporality? And what might it mean to live – and thrive – on inter time?

Biography

Celeste E. Orr (they/them) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, the Wendy J. Robbins Professor in Gender & Women’s Studies, and the Coordinator of the Gender & Women’s Program at UNB.

Orr is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research broadly concerns intersex, queer, and disabilities studies. Orr is the author of the award-winning book Cripping Intersex (UBC Press 2022), which received a 2024 Canada Prize from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Among other publications, Orr is the co-editor of two special issues of Feminist Theory: “Feminist Loneliness Studies” (with Shoshana Magnet) and “On Intersex Joy” (with Casey Burkholder).

Presented by the Department of Historical Studies and the Faculty of Arts