Polychronic Dramaturgy and the Queer Multiverse: Toward an Anti-Assimilationist Temporality in 21st-Century Playwriting

This study explores how modern playwrights use polychronic dramaturgy and multiverse visuals to create queer temporalities that oppose chrononormative and homonormative progress stories. Drawing on queer temporality theory—particularly the work of José Esteban Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, and Lee Edelman—alongside narratological approaches, this study employs close textual analysis to demonstrate how temporal experimentation in 21st-century playwriting serves as a form of resistance to both heteronormative and homonormative assimilation. The analysis reveals that polychronic structures dismantle chrononormativity by rejecting linear progression, creating space for queer potentiality beyond reproductive futurism, and collectively enacting what this study terms "anti-assimilationist temporality."