Women's Time

Abstract

The nation-dream and reality of the nineteenth century-seems to have reached both its apogee and its limits when the 1929 crash and the National-Socialist apocalypse demolished the pillars that, according to Marx, were its essence: economic homogeneity, historical tradition, and linguistic unity.1 It could indeed be demonstrated that World War II, though fought in the name of national values (in the above sense of the term), brought an end to the nation as a reality: It was turned into a mere illusion which, from that point forward, would be preserved only for ideological or strictly political purposes, its social and philosophical coherence having collapsed. To move quickly toward the specific problematic that will occupy us in this article, let us say that the chimera of economic homogeneity gave way to interdependence (when not submission to the economic superpowers), while historical tradition and linguistic unity were recast as a broader and deeper determinant: what might be called a symbolic denominator, defined as the cultural and religious memory forged by the interweaving of history and geography. The variants of this memory produce social territories which then redistribute the cutting up into political parties which is still in use but losing strength. At the same time, this memory or symbolic denominator, common to them all, reveals beyond economic globalization and/or uniformization certain characteristics transcending the nation that sometimes embrace an entire continent. A new social ensemble superior to the nation has thus been This article was originally published as "Le Temps des femmes" in 34/44: Cahiers de recherche de sciences des textes et documents, no. 5 (Winter 1979), pp. 5-19. 1. The following discussion emphasizes Europe in a way which may seem superfluous to some American readers given the overall emphasis on deterritorialization. It is, however, essential to the movement of an article that is above all devoted to the necessity of paying attention to the place from which we speak.-AJ, TRANS.

La pertinencia heurística del concepto de ‘tiempo en abundancia’ para el análisis del tiempo de desempleo desde una perspectiva de género

“…Si a ellos el cierre de la fábrica les había dejado con un exceso de horas vacías que se les pasaban sin darse cuenta, una ociosidad apenas interrumpida por actividades como cortar leña o cuidar a los conejos, a ellas no les retiraba el fardo del trabajo doméstico, que en cierto modo daba un sentido al día a día. Con el pasar del tiempo, inclusive, las exigencias Esta crítica dialoga con las contribuciones de diversas autoras (Adam, 1989;Bryson, 2007;Forman y Sowton, 1989;Kristeva, Jardine y Blake, 1981;Langevin, 1987;Leccardi, 1996;Legarreta, 2012;Walby, 1997) que insistieron en la necesidad de una socio-antropología del tiempo sensible a las cuestiones de género, que mostrase de qué manera y hasta qué punto hombres y mujeres se diferencian en las percepciones y usos del tiempo, teniendo en cuenta incluso la temporalidad biológica (apropiada socialmente) en la que se inscriben, y que coloca a las mujeres como las principales responsables del trabajo reproductivo. En este sentido podemos argumentar que las mujeres desarrollan, a lo largo de su trayectoria de vida, y mediante procesos socialmente constituidos y constituyentes -como la construcción social de la maternidad-disposiciones temporales más orientadas hacia la contingencia y la anticipación que los hombres, que a su vez disponen de mayor estabilidad y orientación hacia el presente (Leccardi y Rampazi, 1993).…”

Re(con)figuring Psychoanalysis

“…Perhaps now we can add to this the contribution that the maternal makes in keeping open 'unqualified time', not as a way of overturning the death drive, but as an alternative temporal order to that of either repetition and return, or the barely containable time of eternity. I am referring here to Kristeva's early influential essay 'Women's Time' (Kristeva, 1981) in which she offers a model for thinking about masculine and feminine time. Time as 'project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival -in other words, the time of history' is assigned as masculine, and both cyclical time (the time of menstruation, pregnancy, repetition) and monumental time (the time of the reproduction of the species, and the genetic chain) are accessed through the feminine: female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time known through the history of civilizations.…”

Changing times of feminism and higher education: from community to employability

“…Kristeva (1981) alerts us to the ways those claiming feminism may easily be caught up in reproducing relations of oppression. The pursuit of equality may be based on limited understanding of social power and social change.…”

“…Sexualized differences are relied on, advanced and reconstructed in ways that suit particular political, economic and professional interests (Haug 1992). It is important, as indicated by Kristeva (1981), to be radical and reflexive in considering how these deep seated power relations inform our everyday academic work.…”

“…Dominant ideas related to gender quickly become fossilised in the curricula (Halbwachs 1925(Halbwachs /1992, for example, ideas about the absence of male role models in family life. Practices that rely on 'naturalised' divisions of care, for example the gendered divisions represented in the children's workforce, may settle into the processes of higher education in new ways (Kristeva 1981, Cameron, Mooney and Moss 2002, Lewis 2003, Cameron 2004) and begin to operate as dominant clichés (Haug 1992). New academic disciplines find favour, whilst others fade.…”