ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two levels of temporality in representations of trauma in William Gibson and Michael Swanwick’s short story, “Dogfight” (1986). For the main characters of “Dogfight,” trauma is caused by the stressors of the historical and sociocultural contexts they live in, and, as a result, the characters relate to time in distinctly atypical ways. One character is aligned more closely with common prognoses of trauma, and his experience of time under trauma matches the description of a displaced time. For another character, Lauren Berlant’s model of “everyday” trauma (2007a; 2007b; 2011) is used to give articulation to his experience as a postmodern subject under capitalism, whose relationship to the future is effaced. The second level of temporality found in “Dogfight” shows that these traumatized relations to time are, in fact, queered in the story, as the characters play a video game to link with time in yet another set of configurations. Whereas trauma forced a version of nonnormative temporality on them, the queer response to their traumas allows them to find small ways to retake time under changed frameworks of meaning and coping. The video game played by the characters creates an affective nexus that invites investigation into such alternative temporal relations.
