Crooked Lifecourses: An Auto/Biographical Exploration of Queer Bodies through a Temporal Lens

This article draws on our doctoral research to explore ideas of structural mirroring between queer and chronically ill lifecourses, examining how our 'queer' bodies challenge normative constructions of time, future, and family. Grounded in scholarship on queer and crip temporalities, and informed by our own insider perspectives, we use our lived experience to show how such bodies might deviate from societal norms and temporal regulations around productivity, reproduction, and maturity. Building on traditions that extend 'queerness' beyond sexual identity, we position it as a critical lens for interrogating normative social structures. By reclaiming queerness as 'crookedness', we use auto/biographical narratives to illustrate how embodied experiences challenge reproductive futures and societal expectations. Focusing on temporal disruptions-such as recognition and visibility (diagnosis and coming out), maturity (leaving home and potential of marriage), and the future (e.g. reproduction)-we trace how 'crooked lifecourses' diverge from normative timelines. By placing the experiences of a woman in her twenties with chronic illnesses alongside those of a gay man in his thirties navigating Confucianist reproductive expectations, we highlight the exclusionary effects of chrononormativity. Our 'crooked lifecourse' concept aims to expand 'queer' and 'crip' as frameworks for understanding lives beyond normative expectations, while demonstrating how deviations from dominant temporalities generate alternative forms of care, intimacy, and resistance.