Temporal disobedience: Intersex timescapes, chronopolitics and intersex joy

This article theorizes inter time as a critical intervention into normative life courses governed by whiteness, cisheteronormativity, able-bodiedness and endonormativity. We explore how 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 joyous 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 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 intersex time?