Paper short abstract:

This essay applies Samuel Delany’s (2003 [1968]) post-structuralist notion of helical time, in which experience in subcultural settings can be seen as organized along a sequence of recurring yet changing events, to elucidate life-course and generational positionality in queer subcultures.

Paper long abstract:

Conventions of writing in an “ethnographic present” encounter particular challenges when applied to queer subcultures, which are often organized across a set of changing institutional settings both in-person and digitally mediated, and within a larger society with rapidly changing attitudes towards sexual minority individuals. Queer ethnographies have typically viewed queer institutions and social networks synchronically, centering the experience of young adults in their 20s and 30s who are thoroughly acculturated. Conversely, psychological studies have emphasized relatively ahistorical stage models. This essay takes inspiration from Samuel Delany’s (2003 [1968]) post-structuralist notion of helical time, in which experience in subcultural settings can be seen as organized along a sequence of recurring yet changing events. In a helical model, one may return to similar events or participate in the same spaces as another, but with a particular positionality informed by their prior experiences in those subcultural settings, as well as by their shifting age/life stage. Shared subcultural understandings and experiences are partly structured by the intersection of individuals’ age/life stage, age at which they began participating in particular queer subcultures (or “scenes”), and time acculturating in those subcultures (Hammack 2005). This paper draws on four years of ethnographic fieldwork since 1999 among gay and bisexual men in Czech Republic, examining their self-understandings and relationships, and the changing institutional setting of queer subcultures in Czech Republic (Hall 2009).