ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on queer affective theory, and specifically the work of Sara Ahmed and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, to engage with time travelling notions of queerness in Torchwood. The chapter considers the affective investment which informs potential queer readings of Torchwood to think about how queer happiness and unhappiness operate in ways which make apparent both the risks and benefits inherent in reading cultural products queerly. Torchwood invites us to read reparatively in ways which enable queer audiences “to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did” (Sedgwick 25) even as it remains the source of queer unhappiness.
