Feminism, Time, and Nonlinear History

Abstract

For the last twenty years, feminist theory has been presented as a series of ascending waves. This picture has had the effect of constraining the way we understand and frame new work as well as de-emphasizing the diversity of past scholarship. The aim of this series is to attract original scholars who will unearth neglected contributions to feminist theory and offer unique interpretations of past scholarship. By breaking free from the constraints of the image of waves, this series will be able to provide a wider forum for dialogue and engage historical and interdisciplinary work to open up feminist theory to new audiences and markets.

Imagining Disability Futurities

“…Ultimately, the normative life span reflects and reinforces a hopeful story of Western culture itself, one premised on belief in human progress and perfectibility. Feminist theorists have argued that the taken‐for‐granted logics underpinning Western notions of time—personal lifespan and historical periodization—are deeply intertwined and “irredeemably bound to notions of teleological progress” (Browne , 7).…”

“…Theorizing against any progressive (or dystopic) narrative of time—narratives that typically render disabled lives as regressive or “out of time”—Victoria Browne argues that such storylines not only “close off the past” to contingencies and alternative readings, but by assuming that certain trajectories are inevitable also “close off the future,” including crip futurities, to instabilities and a range of possibilities (Browne , 17). By delimiting readings of past and future, the progressive (or regressive) narrative delimits our understandings of what constitutes personhood and what is possible in the present.…”

“…Building on and apart from queer temporalities, feminist disability scholars Alison Kafer and Ellen Samuels work to “crip” queer time to centralize disabled lives and disability temporality; lives that do not follow a normative lifespan; people who are not perceived as adults regardless of chronological age; whose material existence threatens the dominant temporal narrative arcs of perfectibility and progress; and those who, like Samuels, a disabled queer mother, desire to crip and queer rather than reject reproductive futurity entirely (Samuels ; Kafer ). Here, feminist, queered time becomes nonlinear, not marching on unabated toward a singular future, but instead multidirectional, plural, even circular, a lived time that “foregrounds the experiential, relational, and discursive aspects of temporal existence” (Browne , 26).…”

“…In this first round we center the theme of disability history; however, all of the themes—disability histories, legacies, and futures—are woven together in all of the films. If we think about each storyteller's narrative as something they create, rather than as something that objectively exists, we can recognize that any accounting of the self in time, of “lived time,” or the “living present” (Loewen Walker ) is inevitably “a complex and fragmentary conjunction of plural pasts, presents, and futures” (Browne , 40), an enfolding of past, present, and future into one another in the becomings they document. We witness in these films a dynamic interplay among past, present, and future, among memory, experience/observation, and possibility, as the storytellers' modes of temporal orientation.…”

‘Birth work’ accompaniment and PhD supervision: an alternative feminist pedagogy for the neoliberal university

“…Critics from within feminism argue that appeals to women's sisterhood tend to downplay differences of class, ethnicity, race, and sexuality. The narrative of 'waves' between generations of feminist activists has also been criticised for cleaving too tightly to linear notions of feminism's 'progress' and implicating women in relationships of indebtedness that may hinder alliances between different generations of women (Sandoval 2000;Browne 2014;Gunkel et al 2012;Henry 2004). In other domains such as the feminised caring professions, relationships between women have been explored through the lens of employer/employee relations (see for example Arlie Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich's (2002) work Global Woman) demonstrating how reconfigured relations between women are an important part of the story of new divisions of labour between women workers in the global North and South.…”