Queer Time of Hereness and Progressive Responsibility in Hir by Taylor Mac

Taylor Mac’s absurd realism play Hir (2015) portrays an American family at the threshold from the old heteropatriarchal system to a new queer-feminist postmodern mode of living. This paper uses theories of queer and crip temporality to analyze Arnold, Paige, and Max’s relations to time and progress to seek queer potentials in the present, here and now. Hir trans’s conventional tropes of the (white) American family drama by making a trans masculine teenager Max the protagonist and metaphor for America. Queer-feminist liberatory politics of Paige ruptures patrilinear temporality and chrononormativity of the family institution as an ideological apparatus of chronological, re/productive, and generational temporality, but her linear investment into the future also imposes curative time on Max and appropriates hir transness as a result. Instead, Hir positions a transgender character in this troublesome situatedness of “here and now” to suggest progressive responsibility as an alternative to the linear and (neo)liberal notion of progress. This paper ultimately argues that queer time of progressive responsibility offers a different paradigm on progress not as a neoliberal, developmental marker of normative temporality but as a radically queer, non-temporal responsibility of caring backward for those with whom they have shared times.