Allen Ginsberg’s Queer Prophecy and Resistance Against Chrononormativity

This article explores Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s prophetic teleologies from a queer perspective, demonstrating the full breadth of his resistance to temporal normativities. It uses Ginsberg’s poems as examples of how modifications and critiques of normative teleologies can be used as means of queer resistance and expressions of queer desires. With the non-linear forms of Biblical sacred time as a foundation, the early Ginsberg constructed temporalities largely in line with Judeo-Christian apocalypticism and highlighted idleness, stasis and salvation through sexual liberation. In a series of “drug poems,” he explored more radical breaks with linear time, such as cyclical histories and death-centered teleologies. In the 1960s, the poet followed a poetics of presence and described “queer moments” of a continuous present in which past and future are contained. Finally, the late Ginsberg turned failure into an instrument of resistance and engaged in iterative acts of future-founding which negated the finality of normative teleologies.