Entangled Temporalities in Social Movement’s Strategies: Reflections from Queer and Trans Radical Activism

Temporality is a fundamental dimension both to social movements’ practices and visions and to the social change processes in which they are embedded. Their practices are inscribed in multiple and at times contradictory temporal dynamics. Everyday practices for the sustainability of a movement are inscribed in temporalities in some conjunctions at odds with the times of confronting and composing with state politics and the times of inventing new political practices and horizons are inscribed in other temporal perspectives. Conceiving activists practices as a form of concrete utopianism (Wider 2018; Dinerstein 2021), a dialectics of practice and imagination, in which past and present imaginaries and strategies come into play, shapes how each social movement navigates these temporalities differently. This paper focuses on the case of queer and trans radical activism in Colombia and Argentina in order to ask how three different temporalities have been entangled in social movements’ practices and strategies: namely, the times of institutional politics (passing laws, demanding public policies, taking part in elections); the times of creating futures in negation to and beyond present constraints of political action (Holloway 2023); and the constant and transversal time of regularly maintaining, sustaining, enduring collective work while creating change (Beraiser 2017). Based on the analysis of 40 conducted semi-structured interviews with activists, participant observation in protests and documentary analysis, this analysis encompasses highlights on the changes of the balance of these multiple temporalities in the movement’s visions and practices when temporal opportunities change, as with the Covid-19 pandemic or with the rise of the far right. The ways these temporalities collide, converge or diverge in the constellation of social activists’ practices and strategies are the focus of this paper, shedding light on social movements as processes entangled in multiple temporalities and futurities.