After the 1958 Iraqi revolution, state officials increasingly invoked the threat of counter-revolution and the necessity of rapid economic development to construct a range of local practices such as homosocial leisure activities (home visiting for women, sitting in coffee shops for men) and the Shi`i institution of mut`a marriage as backwards “traditions” on a historical plane of temporality and as “wasted time” on a quotidian plane. One thing such “traditions” had in common was that they were neither productive nor reproductive: by distracting Iraqis from work and family, they purportedly threatened the entire revolution and, with it, all hopes for development and a national future. State officials launched a public campaign against “the tradition of ladies who hold at-home parties for other women” for this very reason. The paper focuses especially on such constructions of female homosociality, connecting them to a pre-revolutionary debate in Iraq over whether female-only life-worlds were signs of a decadent social system leading to tragically wasted lives and to a prevalence of homosexuality in Iraq. After 1958, officials elaborated on this discourse by constructing female homosociality as not only decadent and tragic but also as an obstacle to the revolutionary state’s economic development plans and its campaign to depoliticize the Iraqi public sphere. The paper shows how attention to conceptions of time and temporality can contribute to histories of gender and interpersonal formations in a so-called “developing” country. It examines the usefulness and limitations in an Iraqi context of queer theorist Lee Edelman’s concept of “reproductive futurism” as the modern political imaginary that is “no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than [it is] able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child.” In looking at the interchangeability of “wasted time” with “tradition” in official Iraqi statements, it also makes use of Talal Asad’s observation that the word “traditional” in modern secular discourse often simply means “existing.” This is of course ironic, given the association of “traditions” with past activities or institutions when in fact the term (in both English and Arabic) often points precisely to present ones. In revolutionary Iraq, I argue, what caused existing interpersonal practices such as homosocial gatherings and mut`a marriages to be demeaned as “traditional” was not their attachment to the past but their attachment to the present -- i.e., their non-child-centeredness and their failure to contribute to the national-developmental future.