Gender Time 1St Edition Karin Sellberg Full Chapter

Gender: Time 1st Edition Karin Sellberg
Visit to download the full and correct content document:

https://ebookmass.com/product/gender-time-1st-edition-karin-sellberg/
Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks
Gender
Time
KARIN SELLBERG, EDITOR

COPYRIGHT 2018 Macmillan Reference USA, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning WCN 02-200-210
Gender
Time
Gender
renée c. hoogland EDITOR IN CHIEF
Nicole R. Fleetwood and Iris van der Tuin ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Judith Lakämper ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR IN CHIEF
Gender: Sources, Perspectives, and Methodologies

renée c. hoogland, editor
Gender: Animals
Juno Salazar Parreñas, editor
Gender: God
Sı̂an Melvill Hawthorne, editor
Gender: Laughter
Bettina Papenburg, editor
Gender: Love
Jennifer C. Nash, editor
Gender: Matter
Stacy Alaimo, editor
Gender: Nature
Iris van der Tuin, editor
Gender: Space
Aimee Meredith Cox, editor
Gender: Time
Karin Sellberg, editor
Gender: War
Andrea Pet}
o, editor
Other Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series:

Philosophy
Donald M. Borchert EDITOR IN CHIEF
James Petrik and Arthur Zucker ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Religion
Jeffrey J. Kripal EDITOR IN CHIEF
April D. DeConick and Anthony B. Pinn ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Gender
Time
Karin Sellberg
EDITOR
Gender: Time ª 2018 Macmillan Reference USA, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning
Karin Sellberg, Editor ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced
or distributed in any form or by any means, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law, without the
Project Editor: Alja Kooistra prior written permission of the copyright owner.
Associate Editor: Elizabeth Ferguson
Product Design: Kristine Julien For product information and technology assistance, contact us at
Associate Publisher, Macmillan Reference Gale Customer Support, 1-800-877-4253.
USA: Hélène Potter For permission to use material from this text or product,
submit all requests online at www.cengage.com/permissions.
Further permissions questions can be emailed to
permissionrequest@cengage.com.
Cover photograph: Cleaning women punching in on time clock in office building.

Walter Sanders / Getty Images.
While every effort has been made to ensure the reliability of the information presented in
this publication, Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, does not guarantee the accuracy of the data
contained herein. Gale accepts no payment for listing, and inclusion in the publication of any
organization, agency, institution, publication, service, or individual does not imply endorsement of
the editors or publisher. Errors brought to the attention of the publisher and verified to the
satisfaction of the publisher will be corrected in future editions.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2017959267
Gale, a part of Cengage Learning

27500 Drake Rd.
Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535
ISBN 978-0-02-866283-1 (this volume)
ISBN 978-0-02-866315-9 (Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender set)
This title is also available as an e-book.

ISBN: 978-0-02-866284-8
Contact your Gale sales representative for ordering information.
Printed in Mexico
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 22 21 20 19 18
Editorial Board
EDITOR IN CHIEF
renée c. hoogland
Professor of English, Wayne State University,
Detroit, MI
Author of A Violent Embrace: Art and Aesthetics
after Representation (2014); Lesbian Configurations
(1997); and Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in
Writing (1994)
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Nicole R. Fleetwood
Associate Professor, Department of American Studies,
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
Author of On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public
Imagination (2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance,
Visuality, and Blackness (2011)
Iris van der Tuin

Associate Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences,
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Author of Generational Feminism: New Materialist
Introduction to a Generative Approach (2015) and
co-author with Rick Dolphijn of New Materialism:
Interviews and Cartographies (2012)
ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR IN CHIEF
Judith Lakämper
PhD, Department of English,
Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
Contents
Series Preface xi
Introduction xiii
PART I. THEORIES
Chapter 1: Queer Temporalities.............................................................................................. 3
Elizabeth Freeman
Professor, Department of English
University of California, Davis
Chapter 2: Evolution .............................................................................................................. 19

Jamie Freestone
PhD Candidate, School of Communication and Arts
University of Queensland, Australia
Chapter 3: Affective Futurity................................................................................................. 37

Rebecca Coleman
Reader, Sociology Department
Goldsmiths, University of London
Chapter 4: Generational Time............................................................................................... 53

Sam McBean
Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary American Literature
Queen Mary University of London
PART II. HISTORIES

Chapter 5: Feminist Historiography ..................................................................................... 67
Paige Donaghy
PhD Candidate, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
Karin Sellberg
Lecturer in Humanities, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
vii
CONTENTS
Chapter 6: A History of Gender ..............................................................................................85

Cassandra Byrnes
PhD Candidate, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry
Lisa Featherstone
Senior Lecturer in History, School of Historical and
Philosophical Inquiry
Chapter 7: The Gendering of History...................................................................................103

Ian Hesketh
ARC Future Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
Chapter 8: First-Wave Feminism ..........................................................................................117

Lena Wånggren
Research Fellow, Department of English Literature
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
PART III. BODIES

Chapter 9: Biopolitics ............................................................................................................137
Paige L. Sweet
PhD Candidate, Sociology
University of Illinois, Chicago
Chapter 10: Normality ...........................................................................................................155

Elizabeth Stephens
Australian Research Council Future Fellow
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
Chapter 11: The Body and Legal Discourse .........................................................................169

Kamillea Aghtan
Independent Researcher
Brisbane, Australia
Chapter 12: Menstruation and Coming of Age ....................................................................185

Ursula Potter
Honorary Research Associate, Department of English
University of Sydney, Australia
Honorary Associate Investigator
Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for
the History of Emotions
viii MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS
CONTENTS
Chapter 13: Academic Time ................................................................................................ 201

Ash Tower
PhD Candidate, School of Art, Architecture, and Design
University of South Australia
Ingrid Hoofd
Assistant Professor, Department of Media and
Culture Studies
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
PART IV. IDENTITIES

Chapter 14: Colonialism ...................................................................................................... 219
Marie Draz
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy
San Diego State University, California
Chapter 15: Intersectional Temporalities ........................................................................... 233

Barbara Tomlinson
Professor of Feminist Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara
Chapter 16: Memory Studies ............................................................................................... 249

Linda Tym
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Southern Adventist University, Collegedale, TN
Chapter 17: Diaries .............................................................................................................. 267

Anne Freadman
Professor of French, School of Languages and Linguistics
University of Melbourne, Australia
PART V. NARRATIVES
Chapter 18: Poetics and Aesthetics ..................................................................................... 285
Douglas Clark
Lecturer in Early Modern Literature, School of Arts, Languages,
and Cultures
University of Manchester, United Kingdom
Chapter 19: Literary Temporalities..................................................................................... 301

Karin Sellberg
Lecturer in Humanities, Institute for Advanced Studies
in the Humanities
GENDER: TIME ix
CONTENTS
Chapter 20: Art, Becoming, and Affect.................................................................................317

Katve-Kaisa Kontturi
Research Fellow, Gender Studies
Academy of Finland / University of Turku
Honorary Fellow, Victorian College of the Arts
University of Melbourne, Australia
Chapter 21: Transgender Temporalities...............................................................................335

Natasha Seymour
Independent Researcher
Australian National University, Canberra
Glossary ........................................................................................................................... 349

Index ............................................................................................................................... 359
x MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS
Series Preface
The Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender studies is an extraordinary

project. A handbook traditionally is a treatise on a special subject, often a concise reference
book that comprehensively covers a particular subject. Small enough to be held in the hand,
intended to be carried around at all times, a handbook can be referred to as a vade mecum, the
Latin phrase for ‘‘go with me.’’ This project exceeds the traditional definitions of the
handbook in practically all respects.
Most obviously and immediately, a series of ten full-length book volumes on gender
studies is not likely to be traveling with any one human being at all times, not even on a small
handheld device in the form of e-books. Secondly, and more significantly, this series of
handbooks does not aim at an all-embracing treatment of its central subject, gender. Thirdly,
and relatedly, the series refutes the idea that gender is something that can be conceptualized,
analyzed, or experienced fully, outside of—and thus in distinction from—the multiple
intertwining frameworks (social, political, critical, theoretical, historical, philosophical,
hermeneutical, and economic) in which it functions, sociohistorically and culturally as a
concrete, material, dynamic force, and as a signifying framework in and of itself. Although
breadth and depth are critical aspects of this series of handbooks, comprehensiveness is not,
nor can it be.
Indeed, rather than adopting an approach to gender questions from within a variety of
distinct disciplinary frames, or thinking of gender in relation to demarcated modes of socio-
cultural expression, praxis, and signification (e.g., gender and religion, gender and science,
gender and health), each volume seeks to shake up such (undoubtedly valuable) perspectives on
gender by taking on the challenge of ostensibly universal themes. Cutting through and across
the specific and shifting contexts and configurations in which they operate, both historically
and in the present moment, such all-embracing themes organize and naturalize gender in its
interrelations and intersections with other forms of differentiation, such as sexuality, race,
ethnicity, class, age, and able-bodiedness. Any form of universal conceptualization is also
inevitably and fundamentally informed by (questions of ) gender, which to some extent
explains and effectively sustains the universalizing power of, for instance, notions of Time,
Space, God, Nature, and the grand narratives subtending them. While offering an extra-
ordinary range of topics, perspectives, critical approaches, and theoretical models central to the
mature field of gender studies in the twenty-first century, at the same time and as a result of its
overall structure and organization, the series critically interrogates and challenges such power
so that questions of gender can be asked otherwise.
The entire set of handbooks includes an introductory volume, which orients readers to a
broad range of gender theories and practices in and across a variety of (inter)disciplinary
fields. The subsequent nine volumes are dedicated to the following themes: Time, Space,
xi
SERIES PREFACE
Laughter, War, Animals, Love, Matter, God, and Nature. The titles of the volumes are
defined in such broad conceptual terms not only to open up their universalizing power to
gendered critique but also to allow for the incorporation of a variety of critical, theoretical,
and disciplinary perspectives on the themes, individually and collectively, that characterizes
the field of gender studies. The series simultaneously offers an appealingly wide-ranging and
inspiring palette of perspectives to the users of each individual handbook, whether students
or instructors.
Two features make this series of gender handbooks innovative. First, most (if not all)
other handbooks on gender are organized from within or around a particular disciplinary
field—for example, gender in/and media, feminist science studies, and queer literary
criticism—or, alternatively, appear in the form of readers with abbreviated versions of
previously published work and/or classics. This series chooses a conceptual approach that
encourages a thoroughly cross-, trans-, and interdisciplinary exploration of purportedly uni-
versal themes that raise the seminal questions feminist scholars and scientists typically address,
as they are problematized and interrogated from a range of gender and sexually sensitive critical
perspectives. Second, all the chapters making up the individual volumes have been newly
commissioned and thus are based on fresh, topical research and address debates from a variety
of fields—philosophy, anthropology, literature, art, social sciences, media (old and new),
history, law, management, economics, digital humanities, rhetoric, politics, science, critical
race studies, postcolonial studies, religion, and so on.
The target audience for the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender
studies consists of undergraduate college students who have had little or no exposure to
gender and sexuality studies. The handbooks provide an introduction to the overall theme
and varied explorations of that theme from a gendered/sexual perspective. In addition, each
volume contains a glossary, bibliographies with suggestions for further reading, annotated
filmographies, and an index—all to encourage students to explore both the theme and the
critical approaches further. In other words, each handbook combines some features of an
introductory textbook with some features of a reference resource. Collectively, the volume
chapters familiarize readers with the moments, movements, theories, and problems promi-
nent within feminist and queer thinking on the volume’s theme. Authors employ an
interdisciplinary lens that exhibits the potential of gender and sexuality studies to contribute
to the values and concerns that animate everyday human life. The interdisciplinary lens
comprises all the various areas listed above and serves to frame the topic of a chapter in a way
that makes it accessible and engaging to novices in gender and sexuality studies. The eminent
scholars who have authored the chapters in the series have strived to make their discussions
comprehensible to undergraduates and at the same time respectable in the eyes of gender and
sexuality studies majors and scholars.
As editors of the series, we believe that the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks
series on gender studies provides an exceptional opportunity for many people, especially
undergraduate students, to become more familiar with the usefulness and joy of ‘‘doing
gender and sexuality studies.’’
rene´e c. hoogland
Editor in Chief
Nicole R. Fleetwood and Iris van der Tuin

Associate Editors
xii MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS
Introduction
Time is a central aspect of our everyday lives and experience. We organize our days around our
calendars—work, school, train, meal, and other schedules—and when we fail to fall into step
with the temporal organizing principles of our surroundings, we find ourselves out of time and
thus out of sync with society as a whole. Yet time does not work in the same ways on or for
everybody. The way we experience and live time critically depends on our positions in society.
Age is an important differentiator in this context: children and retirees tend to live according to
very different time schedules than students and working adults, for instance. Other factors play
into the lived experience of time as well. The United Nations Statistics Division has for many
years been collecting data on how individuals ‘‘spend,’’ or allocate, their time over a specified
period, usually twenty-four hours or a week. The data consistently show a huge gender gap
between the amount of time women and men spend doing paid and unpaid work, respectively,
with women around the world still bearing the brunt of most of the unpaid care and domestic
work while also increasingly taking on the role of breadwinner, traditionally considered a male
prerogative or obligation.
Gender, sex, age, as well as racial, ethnic, class, and national identities all play their roles in
the ways in which time is lived, valued, and experienced in variously regulated modern
societies around the world. The very idea of a standard time, however—the time of a region
or country that is established by law or general usage as civil time, measured and defined by
the clock—is a relatively recent phenomenon. The first mechanical clocks were invented in
Europe in the early fourteenth century and became the standard timekeeping device until the
pendulum clock was invented in 1656. British sociologist Barbara Adam (1945–) suggests
that the invention of clock time, or the division of time into seconds, minutes, and hours that
are organized into days, weeks, months, and years, has furthered the homogenization of
modern society and therewith its socioeconomic effectiveness and, by extension, the very
possibility of a twenty-four-hour global economy in our postmodern times. Clock time,
however natural it may feel, is something that we have learned to take for granted, that has
become naturalized, and that has to a large extent disconnected us from the actual natural
time that we continue to live alongside the regulations of the clock: the embedded time of the
cycles of nature, the rhythmic returns of the seasons, the dis/continuous cycles of life and
death. Yet, as Adam (2003) points out, this natural, or embedded, time may have become
largely invisible, may have been negated, but that does not mean that it has disappeared.
Time as it is lived today is a complex convergence between a natural, or embedded, time,
marked by variance and context dependency, and social time, the precise, linear, and
context-independent time of the clock.
Gender: Time, part of the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbook series on gender,
explores this very complexity as well as some of the cultural, social, and philosophical
xiii
INTRODUCTION
perspectives that allow for the interrogation of the interrelations between gender and time as
at once and equally actual lived realities and naturalized concepts that function to organize
society. The volume is divided into five parts (‘‘Theories,’’ ‘‘Histories,’’ ‘‘Bodies,’’
‘‘Identities,’’ and ‘‘Narratives’’), each representing a distinct angle of approach to the inter-
action and interrelations between time and gender. Chapters appearing in the section
‘‘Theories’’ introduce different philosophical, political, and sociological theoretical
approaches of temporality with which queer and feminist critics explore questions of identity
in its past, present, and future dimensions. The section on ‘‘Bodies’’ interrogates how
differently marked bodies have been shaped, named, and evaluated in and over time in
relation to modern biological, political, and legal discourses. The chapters collected in
‘‘Identities’’ focus on the ways in which the temporal operations of gender (identities) are
intersected by larger historical events and developments as well as on the more intimate,
private functions of history and memory in identity formation. The sections ‘‘Histories’’ and
‘‘Narratives’’ share a joint focus on the ways in which both histories and narratives themselves
are an intrinsic part of the organization of both time and gender processes. The chapters in
these sections show that storytelling and historiography are both political acts, involving
choices about what modes of meaning and being can be recorded and acknowledged and
thus become ‘‘real’’ and what modes of meaning and being are (deliberately) left out,
obscured, or erased.
The volume’s division into parts does not mean that there is no connection among its
individual chapters. On the contrary, despite their distinct critical foci, many chapters in the
volume cross-reference one another and/or speak to topics and theoretical perspectives they
share with contributions across the various sections. Ian Hesketh’s chapter, ‘‘The Gendering
of History,’’ for instance, shows that history (as a discipline and scholarly pursuit) was
designated a decidedly masculine undertaking as early as the nineteenth century, when
scholarly disciplines were generally invented. Female historians were accused of bias and
intellectual simplification and hence were not considered capable of producing reliable and
historically accurate accounts of the past. Paige Donaghy and Karin Sellberg’s ‘‘Feminist
Historiography,’’ in turn, explores the different ways in which feminist historians have
attempted to disrupt normative organizations of historical time and to invent alternative
ways of collecting and recording communal memories, so as to develop practices of
specifically feminine/feminist historiography. Building on the idea that nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century forms of historiography predominantly present the history of white
heterosexual middle-class men to the exclusion of all ‘‘others,’’ Cassandra Byrnes and Lisa
Featherstone show, in ‘‘A History of Gender,’’ how a gender-specific perspective can open
the way and has generated new and alternative histories. While applauding such feminist
‘‘retellings’’ of history, the authors point to the limits of focusing on only one aspect of
women’s lives, when race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity play equally determining roles in
defining both these lives and the past itself. Barbara Tomlinson’s ‘‘Intersectional
Temporalities,’’ Marie Draz’s ‘‘Colonialism,’’ and Linda Tym’s ‘‘Memory Studies’’ offer
different critical approaches that allow for the production of such multidimensional and
intersectional (life) narratives and histories.
Time is not merely something we can mark on our calendars or map out in history
books. American gender theorist Elizabeth Freeman (2010) suggests that time is as much
about the connections we construct between one time period and another or between one
situation and another as it is about relations between one person and another. Thinking
about the past and imagining the future produces feelings. We strive to find connections
xiv MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS
INTRODUCTION
between the present and moments in the past as much as we seek continuities moving from
the present into potential futures. In her chapter, ‘‘Queer Temporalities,’’ Freeman explores
the ways in which the forging of such ‘‘time binds’’ have been used in queer and LGBTI
(lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, intersex) studies to, among others, create alternatives to
dominant, heterosexist figurations of time and to develop queer theories of futurity. Natasha
Seymour’s chapter, ‘‘Transgender Temporalities,’’ pursues a similar line of argument to
counter the normative conceptions of gender and time that reduce the process of gender
transition to a conventional model of narrativization, with a beginning, middle, and end,
and thus ignore the much less linear and contrary ways in which transgender subjectivity
evolves. In ‘‘Literary Temporalities,’’ Karin Sellberg in her turn explores the ways in which
relations among past, present, and future have been alternatively articulated in queer and
transgender narrative cultures, while Douglas Clark’s ‘‘Poetics and Aesthetics’’ traces the
ways in which time and gender can be seen to function as foundational elements of poetic
composition in the work of two seventeenth-century poets, in order to question the power
dynamics and gender plots of the period.
Rebecca Coleman elaborates on the affective aspects of time and temporality in her
chapter, ‘‘Affective Futurity,’’ by exploring the function of affect in feminist and queer
theories of the future as both potentiality and a question of intense affective investment. In a
rather different fashion, Paige L. Sweet’s ‘‘Biopolitics’’ connects the body with temporality by
defining both it and life/liveliness itself as political concepts. Her chapter centrally engages
the notion of biopolitics, that is, the ways in which life, the body, and matter acquire political
importance—in, for example, discourses about health, reproduction, and age—and critically
interrogates the gendered implications of such technologies of (bio)power. Kamillea
Aghtan’s ‘‘The Body and Legal Discourse’’ continues a related series of considerations,
focusing, in particular, on Euro-American laws that police the appearance of the naked
human body in time and space and the ways in which legal discourse and law enforcement
both curtail and constitute a body and its conditions or modes of being.
A key aspect of modernism and modernity is the idea of history as progressive devel-
opment, founded in a notion of time in linear terms. Such a concept of history is teleological:
each period is seen as a stepping stone toward a better and technologically more advanced
present. Because this notion of history has primarily served the interests of patriarchal power
and phallocentric knowledge structures, feminists have been careful not to perpetuate its
logic, which favors the present over the past and which denies the continued operations of
nonlinear or embedded time in the experience of everyday life. In ‘‘Generational Time,’’ Sam
McBean explores the connotations and consequences of dominant readings of the feminist
tradition in linear terms and considers challenges to the notion that feminism moves in line
with a teleological generational model of time as well as attempts to rethink feminist timing
‘‘outside’’ such temporal figurations.
Time is central to considerations of the human body, the larger realm of nature, and
matter and organic life itself. Living or simply existing always involves some form of
temporal duration. Everything that exists ages. Australian American feminist philosopher
Elizabeth Grosz (1947–) hence proposes that the sexed body not be considered as a stable
phenomenon but rather as a process or duration opening onto space and time. In his chapter,
‘‘Evolution,’’ Jamie Freestone explains Grosz’s and several other feminist philosophers’ turn
to evolutionary science as attempts to erase the sharp dividing line between nature and
culture and to posit the two processes (body and time) as mutually constitutive. Despite its
presumed theoretical potential, evolutionary science has a dark history. Elizabeth Stephens’s
GENDER: TIME xv
INTRODUCTION
chapter, ‘‘Normality,’’ explores the ways in which evolutionary principles were used in the
period following World War II to ground a model of the normal that excluded everyone and
everything that did not fall within the dominant categories of white, heterosexual, middle-
class normality. Stephens’s chapter shows that the normal is neither natural nor given but
rather a historically specific construction that served—and continues to serve—the interests
of white racial and (hetero)sexual purity.
If modern conceptions of time are inextricably linked to bodies and physical matter, so are
they firmly bound to economic interests. Capitalist notions of time as something we (do not)
possess is one of the cornerstones of modern society and culture. We save time, spend time, buy
time, waste time, and experience ourselves as time-rich or time-poor. Time is money, and the
economy of time in some respects runs parallel to capitalist economies. If you are time-poor,
you are assumed to be money-rich. Lena Wånggren’s chapter, ‘‘First-Wave Feminism,’’
explores the ways in which feminist movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
were concerned with the ownership and distribution of women’s time and with the division of
domestic and professional labor. As we have seen, the unequal division of domestic and other
forms of unpaid labor remains a central concern today. As Barbara Adam points out, ‘‘The
cliché of ‘women’s work is never done’ exemplifies the incompatibility with a work time that
comes in finite units’’ (1995, 95). In ‘‘Academic Time,’’ Ingrid Hoofd and Ash Tower explore
the ways in which the economy of women’s and nonheteronormative white men’s work, as well
of the labor of nonwhite people of either gender, is negotiated in the contemporary neoliberal
academy, especially if it conflicts with the operations of normative clock time, usually to the
detriment of those who cannot or do not conform their lives to the dominant model of
regimented temporality and productivity.
Taken together, the twenty-one chapters in Gender: Time offer an interdisciplinary
and multidimensional perspective on the relations among gender, the sexed/sexualized/
racialized body, and the elusive concept (or set of concepts) of time and temporality. While
they do not seek or offer ultimate answers and absolute conclusions, the chapters explore
the complexity of time as lived every day in its intricate interrelations with bodies, politics,
science, and economics. As such, the volume itself constructs a number of ‘‘time binds,’’
tying together a wide range of feminist and gendered perspectives through a shared focus
on temporality.
This handbook would not exist without its authors; we are extremely grateful for
their willingness to participate in the project and for working with us throughout an
occasionally challenging editorial and production process. We also owe a great debt to one
of the series associate editors, Iris van der Tuin, from whose keen eye and broad
perspective most contributions have benefited substantially. Judith Lakämper, assistant
to the editor in chief, once again proved indispensable in the all-but-final stages of the
editorial process. Finally, without Alja Kooistra to keep the project on track, negotiating
its moving parts with great grace and patience, the project might not have reached its
conclusion.
renée c. hoogland
Professor of English
Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
Karin Sellberg
Lecturer in Humanities
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
xvi MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS
INTRODUCTION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adam, Barbara. ‘‘Reflexive Modernization Temporalized.’’ Theory, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (2003):
59–78.
Adam, Barbara. Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010.
‘‘Gender Statistics.’’ United Nations Statistics Division. 2016. https://unstats.un.org/unsd/gender/timeuse/.
Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2004.
GENDER: TIME xvii

CHAPTER 1
Queer Temporalities
Elizabeth Freeman
Professor, Department of English
University of California, Davis
Time is often thought of as a neutral medium, such as air, through which people move
from life to death, but it is human made and deeply political in ways that matter greatly for
queer theory and activism. Several social justice movements and their related scholarship
focused on questions of time earlier than did queer theory and activism, but they often
acceded to heterosexist constructions of temporality. For example, in early labor activism,
nonwork time was often imagined in terms of family; in narratives of social change,
progress has been figured as a masculine attribute; and in nationalist movements,
women have been understood as closer to nature or as the bearers of tradition. Scholars
in queer studies—broadly defined here as the critique of European-American sexual and/
or gender norms and inquiry into the lives, cultures, and practices of people who do not
fully adhere to these norms—have therefore had to both learn from these sites of inquiry
and question their ideas about time.
This chapter identifies the ideas that have been most important for thinking about
temporality in queer terms as well as investigates how contemporary thinkers and activists in
the Marxist, postcolonialist, and feminist traditions have used and expanded these ideas. It
surveys the institutions, techniques of power, and forms of knowledge that have produced
heterosexist figurations of time—nationalism and capitalism; anthropology, colonialism,
and racism; psychoanalysis; and the AIDS crisis—and identifies the key thinkers and
concepts in these critiques. Finally, the chapter turns to the most important queer theories
of futurity, the death drive, growing sideways, and utopian thinking.
FOUNDING THEORIES OF TEMPORALITY: MARXISM,

POSTCOLONIAL THEORY, AND FEMINISM
Since at least the Industrial Revolution, thinkers engaged with social justice have under-
stood time as political. Marxism, for example, has offered important ways of thinking
about profit as the theft of time. In battles between labor and management, capitalist
managers regulate the time of workers as thoroughly as possible to ensure maximum
efficiency: as labor organizer Joe Kenehan says to his fellow workers in Matewan (1987),
‘‘You ain’t men to the coal company, you’re equipment.’’ Workers, meanwhile, mobilize
to get their time back in the form of eight-hour workdays, overtime pay, paid leaves, and so
on. Labor movement issues have traditionally been framed in terms of patriarchal and
3
Chapter 1: Queer Temporalities
heterosexual notions of family (the ‘‘family wage,’’ e.g., was based on the idea that men
would support nonearning wives, and ‘‘family leave’’ is not always available to members of
households structured on principles other than marriage and parent/child relations). The
emotional labor and caretaking that women and gay men do is rarely calculated in terms of
monetary value. Thus it has been difficult to conceptualize and argue for the temporal
rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning (LGBTQ) people in
the traditional workplace or the home. Gay marriage provides one solution but hardly
answers to the needs of, for example, someone who requires leave time to help a roommate
who is recovering from trans surgery.
Time also figures in social justice movements when previously colonized nations
become sovereign. Decolonization has involved, among other things, indigenous and
colonized people struggling against being seen as stuck in time, as more primitive or less
developed, or even as lacking history altogether. Postcolonial nationalist rhetoric has often
failed to fully contest colonial thought by continuing to cast ‘‘progress’’ in terms of
reproduction and normative gender roles, with men as the avatars of modern, rational,
nation-making thought and women described as the bearers of indigenous traditions. One
example of the latter is a billboard for the 2004 ‘‘India Shining’’ campaign that showed a
woman in a sari playing cricket with a little boy dressed in Western clothing; the caption
describes women’s economic interests in terms of household budgets and home buying.
Meanwhile, queer subjects have only been admitted to the promises of nationhood as either
tourists to newly ‘‘modernized’’ countries such as Vietnam or as figures for a country’s
cosmopolitanism and liberal democratic ideals, as in Israel.
In a third social justice arena pertinent to queer theory and activism, the fight for
women’s rights, women have had to protest being cast as less valuable or as outside of
modern progressive time because they are bound to the repetitive rhythms of domestic labor,
childbirth, and parenting. In seeking equality with men in the paid workforce, mothers in
particular are stuck ‘‘leaning in,’’ trying to balance the time of paid work in late capitalism
with the more cyclical demands of housework and family caregiving. Feminism based on
women’s difference from men, however, has often generated a concept of Woman that is
timeless, ahistorical, and tied to heterosexual notions of women as complementary to men.
For example, the classic second-wave feminist treatise on spirituality, Mary Daly’s Gyn/
Ecology (1978), cast women’s strength in terms of the traditional home craft of spinning and
in terms of an inborn closeness to nature. Queer lives, however, are often illegible in terms of
the conflict between paid work and reproductive domesticity or in terms of heterosexual
notions of the feminine.
Recent work on queer temporality has taken its cue from these Marxist, postcoloni-
alist, and feminist theoretical and practical battles over time and timing, both drawing
from and critiquing the temporal paradigms they depend on. Theories of queer tempo-
rality have explored how time is arranged by institutions and governance strategies in ways
that are heterosexist, and how sexual dissidents have lived and thought time otherwise. As
this chapter contends, the discourses that produce heterosexist time have historically
included nationalism, capitalism, anthropology, colonialism, some versions of feminism,
psychoanalysis, and discourses surrounding HIV/AIDS. Even as these sites of institutional
power and knowledge-construction have controlled time in ways that seem to render queer
lives unthinkable or unlivable, they have also provided queers with powerful ways to
reimagine daily life, the past, and the future, and to articulate queer practices of
temporality.
4 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS
CAPITALIST AND NATIONALIST TIME
The essay ‘‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’’ (1967) by British historian
E. P. Thompson (1924–1993) is a foundational text in temporality studies, for it reveals that
changes in how people feel time are deeply connected to changes in the economy. Scholars
have contested and complicated Thompson’s classic formulation that capitalist time—
hourly wages, workweeks, weekends, and ‘‘time off’’—usurped agricultural and religious
rhythms, but the essay’s importance lies in the way it portrays time as malleable and arranged
by those in power. In addition to disrupting earlier patterns of sleeping and waking,
worshipping and resting or celebrating, and so on, capitalism introduced what the German
Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) calls ‘‘homogeneous, empty time’’
(Benjamin 1968, 261). This is time imagined as a neutral background against which humans
move inexorably and simultaneously forward. In Imagined Communities (1991), political
theorist Benedict Anderson (1936–2015) clarifies how this form of time arose: global trade,
the circulation of newspapers, and eventually the rise of the novel allowed people to identify
with others who spoke their language and read about the same events as ‘‘a people’’ who
operate synchronously even if unknown to one another and spread out across vast spaces.
Such national-capitalist time, or the time of ‘‘modernity,’’ seems universal and permanent in
the early twenty-first century but is actually a product of changing patterns in production,
new technologies such as the printing press, and new genres such as the novel.
QUEER CRITIQUES
Marxist scholarly critiques of this constructed modern time have made it possible to
understand that there are different forms of time lived out by different populations, not
because these populations are inherently different but because their modes of production,
technologies, and genres of experience are different. Denaturalizing time in this way has
also illuminated the fact that managing a population, especially a nation-state, might
involve engineering its sense of how long things should take, what order things should
come in, when it is appropriate to do what, and so on. Queer temporality studies
following this tradition have homed in on the question of how this engineering has
depended on and furthered heterosexism. The cultural critic Jack (Judith) Halberstam,
for example, argues in In a Queer Time and Place (2005) that ‘‘straight’’ time involves a
sharp distinction between work and domestic time, a focus on daytime productivity, and
an investment in ‘‘maturity’’ as signaled by marriage, ownership, and child rearing. Queer
time, in contrast, might involve the artist’s life of working at home and going out at night,
a focus on clubbing, and attachments to activities that mainstream culture considers
juvenile, such as fandom or collecting—regardless of the sexual orientation of those who
participate in these lifestyles.
Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds (2010) has explored the ways that having a life legible
to both dominant culture and law involves the mandatory participation in and right ordering
of birth, marriage, reproduction, and death, as well as the inculcation of cultural rhythms—
for example, when we sleep and wake or how long we pause in conversations—that seem just
like ordinary and natural things that bodies do. In Time Binds, this latter form of power is
called chrononormativity: the way that populations are controlled by temporal rules and
regulations so subtle as to seem inborn. Chrononormativity is deeply tied to class: middle-
class respectability often means being ‘‘on time’’ in myriad ways, whether this involves
showing up for a meeting punctually or knowing how long to hold on during a handshake.
GENDER: TIME 5
Chrononormativity is a local and customary form of what the literary critic Dana
Luciano (2007) calls chronobiopolitics. This term refers to the way that institutions, partic-
ularly nation-states, arrange the time of life of whole populations, of which the right ordering
of birth, marriage, reproduction, and death mentioned above is only one example. Chrono-
biopolitics are felt in everyday life, too; for example, when in the past women, relegated by
law to the domestic sphere or to service jobs that approximate it, were in charge of the daily
rhythms of mealtimes, bedtimes, and so on. This domestic time is a site not only of
oppression but also of power, for it provides a counterpoint to the rhythms of capitalism
and feels more like the earlier, task-based temporality that Thompson argues was superseded
by industrialization. Luciano explores women’s use of domestic time, particularly the time of
funerals, wakes, mourning clothes, and other cultural expressions of grief, as a seeming
bulwark against the linear-progressive time of the nation and the sped-up time of capital. By
invoking and fostering ritualized, sacred time, these cultural expressions temporarily remove
mourners from the bustle of progress. However, Luciano argues, the ‘‘pause’’ offered by
mourning rituals and more broadly by domesticity actually served both of these dominant
times by renewing the male citizen-laborer so that he could go back out into the world and
participate in politics and the economy. That is, rather than reforming national-progressive
and capitalist-productive times, domestic time actually strengthened them.
Chronobiopolitics is also tied to race and culture, insofar as the quasi-sacred time of
home and family that Luciano describes is de facto white. The recurrent and eternal domestic
time produced by chronobiopolitics is that of heterosexual white women, for it depends on
the family wage paid to men. Within this economy of time, to have a serene and relaxing
home life, men must earn enough money to ensure that their female relatives do not have to
work outside the home. Because nonwhite men are valued less for their paid labor, racialized
populations are often cast as being chronically lazy or unkempt because they are unable to
produce the form of domesticity that offers rest and renewal. Finally, chronobiopolitics is
not only implicitly and structurally racialized but also directly so. It is as much a product of
anthropological thinking about nonwhite cultures and of colonial governance strategies as it
is of state policies and everyday customs.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL, COLONIAL, AND RACIAL TIME
Anthropology offers yet another means to see time as cultural and political, in ways that
would eventually be taken up by postcolonial theory. In their fieldwork, early anthropolo-
gists noticed that different cultures organized time differently. British anthropologist E. E.
Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) famously described the African Nuer people’s units of time,
vocabulary, and perception of how time passed (Evans-Pritchard 1939). Netherlands-based
anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1937–), in Time and the Other (1983), clarified how
anthropology contributes to a politics of time wherein non-European cultures were
described as if they existed prior to European ones. Fabian calls this the ‘‘denial of coeval-
ness’’ (coeval meaning having the same date), a perception that is a result of the way colonial
governments cast the indigenous people they oppress as existing in a prior stage of develop-
ment and in need of Christianity and capitalism to become modern (1983, 25). This denial
continues, of course, in contemporary figurations of so-called underdeveloped or Third
World countries in need of Western-style democracy and economic progress. In turn,
modernizing a nation has meant, among other things, acceding to Western kinship structures
such as monogamous marriage and the nuclear family and accepting Western conceptions of
same-sex eroticism as homosexual and therefore taboo.
Early theories of decolonization countered this problematic formulation of modernity
with models of incipient nationhood that often cast women as the bearers of valuable
traditions and men as the arbiters of progress, reproducing the heterosexism of colonial
government. For example, the essay ‘‘Algeria Unveiled’’ (1959) by Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)
offers complex meditations on national consciousness that reproduce heterosexualized gender
stereotypes (McClintock 1995). Later postcolonial theorists, understanding that virtually all
knowledge about colonized people was inflected by this gendered and heterosexualized
developmental model, have sought to clarify that modern time is itself a construction. Far
from being a given, modern time has been built in contradistinction to an imagined pre-
colonized time that is variously backward, primitive, decadent, ancient, and so on, qualities
that are generally characterized as feminine. Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said’s
(1935–2003) Orientalism (1979) focuses on the West’s construction of the East as static,
timeless, and feminine. US-based historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe
(2007) advances the possibility of alternative modernities in India, tied to extralegal networks
and languages of friendship, worship, and belonging in contrast to the tempos of global
capitalism and the kinship relations it fosters. Chakrabarty’s model is important for queer
theory because it suggests that nonfamilial patterns of exchange and obligation have temporal
patterns of their own and generate temporalities that refuse to ‘‘keep up’’ with modernity.
QUEER CRITIQUES
Scholars working in feminist and queer postcolonial theory have had to clarify the degree to
which colonization depends on imposing heteronormativity and its temporal aspects onto
indigenous populations and the extent to which even liberatory notions of decolonization can
be heterosexist or heteronormative. Imperial governments, these scholars argue, have regulated
the time of labor and family, encouraged the gendered separate spheres that Luciano frames as
temporal regimes, and imposed monogamous, reproductive marriage, with all of its notions of
inheritance and futurity, onto subjugated populations. Native American studies scholar Mark
Rifkin’s book Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination
(2017), for example, shows how settlers produce a gendered, heterosexualized ‘‘modernity’’
into which they expected colonized subjects to assimilate. Rifkin shows how indigenous
temporalities—a simple example of which might be centering US history on the Dakota
War of 1862 rather than the Civil War—are negated by the temporal frameworks of the
settlers. Rifkin warns, however, that the ideal of seeing colonized people as ‘‘coeval’’ with their
colonizers, as Fabian advocates, imposes a singular temporality, making indigenous histories
and ways of organizing time secondary and illegible. In another illustration of how even
progressive ideas about indigeneity are framed by straight time, postcolonial-feminist scholar
Gayatri Gopinath points out in Impossible Desires (2005) that even the seemingly resistant
notion of a diaspora is predicated on heterosexist notions of home and family. A diaspora
consists of people presumed to be scattered afar from the country of their birth or ancestry, a
concept that makes genealogy the key to collective identity.
The highly abstract regimes of temporality enforced by colonial governments and
legitimated even by anticolonialist work are felt viscerally by those whose time schemes are
rendered illegible or dysfunctional. The premodern time that is cast as the point of departure
from (and threat to) modern time is also understood as carnal, as literalized and embodied in
GENDER: TIME 7
blackness and black people. Racist discourse has been foundational to colonialism, and one
of its bases is the characterization of black people in particular as the antithesis of modern,
progressive time. One can go back at least as far as the Lectures on the Philosophy of World
History (1837) by the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) to see formula-
tions of Africa as without time or history, an idea that affected the way that anthropologists
and ‘‘scientists’’ of race who researched physical differences among humans described
people of color.
Scholars in feminist, queer, and critical race theory, most notably the literary critic
Siobhan Somerville in Queering the Color Line (2000), have demonstrated that the late
nineteenth-century disciplines of race science and sexology especially depended on anthro-
pological conceptions of non-European cultures as primitive, developing from the theory of
‘‘degeneration.’’ According to this theory, people of color were in an earlier stage of develop-
ment, as evidenced by their lack of sexual differentiation and propensity for sex beyond
reproduction, and civilization was always endangered by atavism, or a return to more
primitive ways. Somerville shows that in sexology, which drew directly from so-called race
science, the homosexual, an identity newly invented by European scientists in the mid-
nineteenth century, was understood as at once a product of atavism and a sign that
civilization had gone too far, or had become decadent in ways that threatened devolution.
Thus the discourse of sexuality from the mid-nineteenth century onward was a discourse of
race that was deeply saturated by ideas about time. In sexological writing, the homosexual
was a temporal paradox, at once a throwback and a sign of hypermodernity, a primitive being
acting according to base instincts and a sign of the decline of the overcivilized white race.
PSYCHOANALYTIC TIME IN FEMINISM, DECONSTRUCTION,

AND QUEER THEORY
Thus far this chapter has clarified how women, LGBTQ individuals, and people of color
have been figured as living in several times at once. In addition to the capitalist and
modern time into which all populations are expected to assimilate, they also exist in a
‘‘time out of time’’ or domestic time, as represented by white women’s practices of
homemaking, worshipping, and mourning, and they represent the time of degeneration,
atavism, and lack of heteronormativity that is perceived to threaten modernity. Although
these multiple and simultaneous temporalities may seem to suggest that the goal of queer
theory should be to subjugate them into a singular, revolutionary one, theories of queer
temporality have instead drawn from the power and paradox of coexisting temporalities.
The field of psychoanalysis and the concepts it has produced have informed queer theory
and activism in this regard.
Psychoanalysis, the study of how the unconscious mind affects behavior, also
denaturalizes heterosexuality, insofar as it posits gender normativity and heterosexuality as
accomplishments achieved over time rather than as innate human characteristics. These
accomplishments are tenuous, for as psychoanalysis demonstrates, the sexual experiences of
early childhood continually haunt the adult sexual being to produce behavior he or she does
not control. Psychoanalysis has produced a concept of hybrid temporality—a time where
past and present are indistinguishable—and has thus denaturalized not only gender and
sexuality but also time. Therefore, theories of queer temporality must give attention to the
psyche and particularly to how the human subject is constantly undermined by events that
took place in infancy—a process called the Freudian unconscious after the Austrian psycho-
analyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).
The earliest work in feminist theory on the politics of time—and certainly some of the
most important—draws on postcolonial theory’s sense of multiple temporalities and on the
psychoanalytic terminology of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), but eventually
leads back to the extraordinary temporal formulations of Freud. The essay ‘‘Women’s Time’’
(1979), by Bulgarian French philosopher Julia Kristeva (1941–) and foundational to the
work of Luciano, argues that progressive-linear time is coded as masculine and associated
with the movement of nations through history. Cyclical time and the monumental or eternal
time of the sacred, however, are associated with women. Kristeva identifies the first phase of
feminism with the desire to enter masculine-rational time and national history—or what
Lacan called the Symbolic. She identifies the second phase with an interest in the uncon-
scious, or what Lacan called the Imaginary, the realm where body parts seem to be detachable
and recombinant, and eroticism flows freely among them. ‘‘Essentially interested in the
specificity of female psychology and its symbolic realization,’’ Kristeva writes, ‘‘these women
[of the second phase] seek to give a language to the intra-subjective and corporeal experiences
left mute by culture in the past’’ (1981, 19). The promise of this second kind of time for
queer critique lies in being ‘‘outside the linear time of identities’’ (19), that is, outside the
time of progress, development, coming-to-consciousness, and arrival. Its peril lies in falling
back into identity politics, such that women and the Imaginary are overidentified with each
other, and women are cast as outside of culture and history.
Locked into conflict with the symbolic order, feminists of Kristeva’s second phase (not
to be confused with American second-wave feminists), such as Luce Irigaray (1930–) and
Hélène Cixous (1937–), risk violence, incoherence, and ahistoricism. Yet the Freudian
unconscious is slightly different from the Lacanian Imaginary and has been deeply produc-
tive for feminist and queer thinking about temporality. If the Freudian unconscious has ‘‘no
time,’’ as the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875–1961) famously put it (1977, 287), this is
less because it refuses to accede to the Symbolic order and more because it preserves traces of
our earliest experiences. These experiences reappear in distorted and displaced forms in our
present, waking life as repetitive activities and symptoms. The Freudian term for this is
Nachträglichkeit, often translated as ‘‘afterwardness.’’ The unconscious not only refuses
order, sequence, progress, narrative, and closure but also insists on a certain double-time,
in which whatever we do and whomever we think we are, the past returns to haunt us, albeit
never in a form that allows us to immediately recognize and remember past events. We are
always already stuck in time, our neuroses pointing toward moments we can never return to
but of which we continue to feel the impact.
THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE TIME OF DECONSTRUCTION

The Freudian model of the unconscious has had a powerful influence over theories of queer
temporality, not only by way of deconstruction but also by way of melancholia theory.
Describing deconstruction in full, or even its influence on queer theory, is far beyond the
scope of this chapter. Primarily it is a literary-critical technique initially developed by French
philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). Deconstruction understands language, partic-
ularly the signifiers that make up a common vocabulary, as consistently pointing to mean-
ings other than what they seem to denote, just as in psychoanalysis symptoms and dreams
point to a vast network of symbols, terms, and meanings. A central tenet of deconstruction is
that there can be no exact repetition of a term: any reiteration contains the potential for
GENDER: TIME 9
a different meaning to emerge, including meanings that are archaic, obsolete, or repressed.
Feminist philosopher Judith Butler’s (1956–) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity (1990) combined this aspect of deconstruction with another linguistic model, the
performative (a term denoting pronouncements that do what they say, as in ‘‘I now
pronounce you man and wife’’) to demonstrate the theory of gender performativity.
Human performances of masculinity and femininity, she argued, seem to reach into the
past to cite an original, timeless model of masculinity and femininity. Those very citations,
however, actually install the fantasized original that they seem to draw from: thus gender
performativity is a temporal operation, a twist in time. Interestingly, Butler’s model suggests,
in the psychoanalytic mode, that the past is never accessible as such and is retroactively
constructed rather than available to be recovered.
Butler returns more explicitly to the Freudian unconscious and more rigorously to the
question of pastness in The Psychic Life of Power (1997). She argues that Freud’s theory of
melancholia, the neurosis that appears when a mourner cannot let go of the person he or she
has lost, is another example of the power of the unconscious, the pressure of the past on the
present. Freud, in ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’ (1917), claims that melancholia is con-
stitutive of the formation of all egos and not just damaged ones. Butler draws from this
model to suggest that queer lives and loves have been cast in dominant culture as ‘‘ungriev-
able’’ and as historically nonexistent or negligible, and therefore dominant culture ‘‘acts out,’’
in the psychoanalytic sense of the phrase, losses it cannot acknowledge. Same-sex desire has
not only been repressed, or removed from conscious memory, but actually foreclosed; that is,
same-sex desire has never been thinkable in the first place, as anthropology’s supposedly
universal incest taboo makes clear (the prohibition against sex with the opposite-gender
parent depends on sex with the same-gender parent never even being imaginable). All
subjectivity, Butler argues, is therefore forged through a complex form of melancholia, in
which what cannot be loved and grieved—the past unrealized—is the material for present-
tense gender identity. According to Butler, gender-normative people perform, in the very
‘‘symptom’’ of their ordinary masculinity or femininity, the impossible homosexual love of
infancy, the love that precedes even the incest taboo. In other words, a cisgender woman (an
anatomically female-born woman who identifies as a woman), having failed to grieve the
desire she felt for her mother because that very desire was unthinkable, incorporates her
mother’s gender in and as her very own.
QUEERING PSYCHOANALYTIC TIME

Freud was not entirely neglectful of collective experiences and shared histories, however. He
suggests that we can also become melancholic for a country or an abstract ideal, of our own or
of our people’s. Drawing from European anthropologists and historians of the nineteenth
century, Freud was also influenced by the concept that humanity was developing from
primitive to civilized. German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s (1834–1919) theory (1899) that
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, or that the organism’s stages of development will resem-
ble stages in the evolution of the species—also called ‘‘recapitulation theory’’—shaped
Freud’s description of sexual development in children. Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory
of Sexuality ([1905] 2000) saw infants as polymorphously perverse, but he insisted that their
stages of development (oral, anal, and genital) would properly succeed and give way to one
another as the child moved from animal to more human desires. To Freud, then, homo-
sexuals (then called inverts) were stuck or lost on this path, subject to ‘‘archaic constitutions
and primitive psychic mechanisms’’ (12). Thus Freudian developmental theory provides
another point of departure for studies of queer temporality.
Literary critics Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009) and Kathryn Bond Stockton
(1958–) have been the most passionate and playful queer critics of Freud’s temporal schema
for human development. In Tendencies (1993), Sedgwick notes that adult queer subjects
attach to their own shamed childhoods as almost endless resources for imaginative and
political change, reversing the trajectory from polymorphous child to properly heterosexual
adult. Grown-up queers, she suggests, have promises to keep to their own humiliated child-
selves, and part of this promise-keeping is creating worlds that their former selves could have
more expansively inhabited. Stockton has focused on the discourse of ‘‘growing up,’’
exploring and exploiting the paradox that children are presumed to be born heterosexual
but in the Freudian model struggle to achieve normative heterosexuality. In Stockton’s The
Queer Child (2009), the phrase ‘‘growing sideways’’ captures the way that children make
metaphors, attaching laterally to objects and people in ways that help them spread out
beyond a heterosexual teleology.
Among the fiercest psychoanalytic theorists of queer temporality as it pertains to child-
hood has been American literary critic Lee Edelman (1953–), who turns to Lacan rather than
Freud. A basic Lacanian premise is that the subject can only know itself by misunderstanding
an alienated object as ‘‘itself’’: all self-recognition is, therefore, misrecognition. In No Future
(2004), Edelman turns this lens toward queer politics, arguing that the figure of the Child—
symbolic of wholeness, purity, and the future of life itself—has animated a homophobic US
politics in which queer subjects figure as anti-reproductive, as child molesters, and as
representatives of death because of their association with AIDS. Edelman argues for the
force of destruction inherent in queerness, analogizing queers with the Freudian uncon-
scious’s death drive, the power of which lies in its consistent destruction of the coherence and
meaning inherent in consciousness. Queers, then, disrupt the platitudes and symbols that
animate ordinary politics. To Edelman, they are the avatars of anti-time, for they thwart all
movements toward the future. The signal importance of Edelman’s work lies in how it
transforms the most virulently homophobic responses to the early AIDS epidemic into a
structural analysis of the force of queerness in contemporary culture.
THE TIME OF AIDS
In celebrating the Freudian death drive, Edelman takes his cues from academic and activist
responses to the AIDS epidemic. He is also responding to the ways that HIV-positive gay
men were vilified by the mainstream media as having a death wish and as spreading
morbidity and disease, as they were portrayed in, for example, the American journalist
Randy Shilts’s (1951–1994) book And the Band Played On (1987). It is arguable that the
most explicit and violent experiences of queer temporality (at least for white gay men) were
the deaths of people in their thirties and forties from a virus that, until the mid-1990s when
effective treatments were developed, progressed rapidly into the full-blown, usually fatal
complications called AIDS. Edelman draws his ‘‘anti-social’’ thesis that queers are best
thought in terms of destruction and negation from literary critic Leo Bersani (1931–).
Bersani argues in ‘‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’’ (1987) that during the AIDS epidemic the
rectum was treated as if it were a grave; anal sex signified death itself. Bersani advocates that
queers embrace the self-shattering aspects of anal sex, seeing a ‘‘death wish’’ as a form of
cleansing the self of the ego’s false certainties. He articulates this in the spatial terms of the
psyche’s structure, not in terms of time, but the formulation certainly relies on an immediate
embrace of what humans usually wish to defer as long as possible.
GENDER: TIME 11
After the AIDS crisis no longer centered on gay

and mostly white men, when HIV treatment became
more widely available in the mid-1990s, many queer
people had the strange experience of witnessing AIDS
patients no longer die but return to relatively normal
health, resurrections that also belied the idea that dying
is a linear process. In the early twenty-first century, the
generation of gay men most affected by the AIDS crisis
is sparser than it should be by hundreds of thousands,
whereas mainstream America seems to have complete
amnesia about the early AIDS epidemic and AIDS
activism, adding another temporal dimension to the
AIDS crisis. The ‘‘post-AIDS’’ period of the early
twenty-first century feels haunted by the deaths of so
many people, by the eventual dwindling of activist
groups such as ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to
Unleash Power, formed in March 1987), by the
trauma of a generation, and by the disappearance of
AIDS from national history. The 1993 play Angels in
America, written by the US playwright Tony Kushner,
captures the sense that AIDS haunts the meaning and
history of the United States. This was also made into
an award-winning HBO miniseries, directed by Mike
Nichols in 2003.
Butler’s work on melancholia in particular has
spoken to the post-AIDS historical moment and has
produced a powerful strain of what might be called a
‘‘negative’’ theory of queer temporality that focuses on
loss. Literary critic Christopher Nealon’s Foundlings
Playbill for Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, 1993.
Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play in two parts depicts the (2001) is an early example of this. Nealon describes
time of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s through the stories of two queers prior to the 1970s gay liberation movement as
couples. PHOTOFES T stranded in history, illuminating how their popular
and literary works turned to other historical moments
to weave an alternative, fantasized genealogy for queer
life: for example, gay physique magazines often celebrated the male nude by invoking
ancient Greece. Literary critic Heather Love’s Feeling Backward (2009), a powerful work in
this vein, demonstrates how for some lesbian and gay subjects in the early twentieth
century, the advent of ‘‘homosexuality’’ as a concept was not enabling but restrictive,
causing them to cling ferociously to seemingly archaic models of gender and eroticism. For
instance, Love describes British author Radclyffe Hall’s (1880–1943) attachment to the
outmoded medical model of the man trapped in a woman’s body in The Well of Loneliness
(1928). Another example, Ghosts of Futures Past (2012) by historian Molly McGarry
(1964–), focuses on the spiritualists of the nineteenth century, for whom contact with
the dead constituted a refusal of gender norms and the heterosexual and reproductive
imperatives. These works celebrate a certain refusal to let go of the past, to get over it in the
way that Freud advocated a healthy mourner should do, as the basis of queer subjectivities
and communities.
QUEERING HOPE
Yet not all theories of queer temporality have dwelt implacably upon loss, haunting, and
shame. Queer theorists have always been interested in how queers thrive beyond mere
survival, how they make worlds out of what society has cast off or refuses to see in the first
place. Edelman’s call for ‘‘no future’’ is an intellectually rigorous paradigm, but for many
scholars it does not account for the persistence of queer lives and cultures, which tend to
persevere in the face of great odds and which generate models of specifically queer political
striving, cultural transmission, and hope.
If futurity is always suspect, how is political work possible? Edelman points out that
teleology, an orientation toward a future imagined as postlapsarian and whole, often
produces a politics of purity. Scholars doing ‘‘queer of color critique,’’ combining queer
and critical race theory, however, have been quick to point out that repudiating the future is
not nearly as appealing an option for populations who have historically been cast as stuck in
the past or not worth reproducing. In contrast to a politics of a future predicated on the end-
stage of a restored and pure identity, many of these scholars have advocated a Deleuzian
politics of becoming. Becoming, according to French philosophers Gilles Deleuze
(1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992) in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), depends on
the concept of an assemblage, which is a collection of interacting materials occurring within a
specific context. What is important for queer temporality studies about this concept is that
these interactions occur at continually changing speeds, intensities, and switch points, with
materials plugging into and unplugging from one another within an assemblage or across
more than one. When one element is drawn toward another in a new way, their mutual
influence changes the value of each, and the assemblage or assemblages will change accord-
ingly. A simple model of an assemblage might be boiling water, where hydrogen and oxygen
molecules change from liquid to gaseous states at slightly different rates and join the
surrounding air. The water becomes warmer and reduces in volume; the air becomes
moist; the state of becoming is the point at which liquid turns into gas. An example of
political becoming might be the moment in the late 1980s during which members of the Gay
Men’s Health Crisis became galvanized by anger at a neglectful US government rather than
just compassion for the sick and dying and formed ACT UP, bringing a political dimension
to health care and transferring grassroots health care paradigms into protest strategies.
‘‘Becoming’’ is concerned with contact, convergence, and rearrangement rather than
arrival and certainty. As cultural critic Jasbir Puar clarifies in Terrorist Assemblages (2007), the
tendency to relegate the Other to the past, or to a different temporality signaled by random
coincidence, is undone by contiguity or proximity. Linearity and permanency, two other
dominant forms of temporality, are also undone. Instead, contact proliferates sometimes
fleeting ways of being and belonging beyond reproduction and thus at least momentarily
extends what exists, but not as a repetition of the same. This form of nonidentical
regeneration is what becoming means. The work of Freeman has articulated this slightly
differently, suggesting in the essay ‘‘Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory’’
(2008) that practices of caretaking—by which is meant not just tending to the sick, elderly,
and infantile but also teaching and mentoring, lending one’s clothes, passing on verbal
expressions, dance moves, and so on—rather than genealogical and legal ties are the material
of kinship. These practices renew and regenerate bodies beyond the simple transmissions of
genetics and inheritance. Both Puar and Freeman seek to capture the ways that queer life
inevitably burgeons, dilating and extending time in unpredictable directions.
GENDER: TIME 13
This queer world-making has involved not only movements forward and from side to
side but also movements backward. As this chapter has already indicated, theories of queer
temporality have compellingly engaged the past in terms of grief, haunting, loss, fore-
closure, and melancholia. Yet not all reaching backward is suffused by negative emotions
and affects. Theories of queer temporality have also taken up the question of whether
nostalgia, antiquarianism, amateur history, and other discredited practices of apprehend-
ing the past might be ways of pleasurably queering historiography. For example, literary
critic Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval (1999) describes the productive thrill of what
she calls ‘‘touches across time,’’ when material from the past comes into contact with the
present and changes the meaning of each in a process of historical ‘‘becoming.’’ Dinshaw is
particularly interested in how present communities misappropriate medieval history,
sometimes in the service of heteronormativity but other times in the service of expanding
possibilities for contemporary affinity and community. For example, she argues that the
anti-sodomitical discourse of the Lollards, a medieval religious movement, actually antici-
pates the work of the term queer by blurring distinctions between the seemingly opposed
Catholics and heretics. Freeman’s Time Binds (2010) has expanded this idea to formulate
two concepts, temporal drag and erotohistoriography. Temporal drag describes the pull of the
past on the present, especially in gender performance. It draws from Butler’s work on
melancholia and on performativity to theorize drag performance and camp as archiving
practices, stagings of obsolete but beloved gender forms on the present-tense body in ways
that call the naturalness of contemporary gender norms into question. Erotohistoriography
describes the kind of pleasurable contact with the past that is invested in creating erotic
possibilities for the present. A simple example of this might be the way lesbians of the
1990s mined 1950s butch/femme culture, appropriating highly gendered 1950s styles like
the pompadour or the bustier to expand the terrain of possible gender expression between
women.
But the most powerful recent exploration of the power of positive queer affect, and of
the ways queer people make the future for ourselves, is definitely the Cuban American
performance theorist José Esteban Mun~oz’s (1967–2013) Cruising Utopia (2009). Mun~oz
is centrally concerned with the power of hope and with the making of utopias. He follows
the German philosopher Ernst Bloch’s (1885–1977) principle of ‘‘concrete utopias’’
(1995, 17), which are the anticipatory illuminations that are available within art and
other cultural productions. Surveying avant-garde art and performance in contemporary
and late twentieth-century downtown New York, Mun~oz argues that one can see in these
objects and acts the contours of a better life, even the outlines of things currently lost to
consciousness but available as traction for critique of the present. ‘‘Queerness,’’ Mun~oz
writes, ‘‘is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on poten-
tiality or concrete possibility for another world’’ (2009, 1). He also re-theorizes queer
performativity. Whereas for Butler that term referred primarily to the fact that contem-
porary gender norms are citations of fantasized originals installed into the ‘‘past’’ by
repeated performance, and for Freeman performativity invokes the wearing of past genders
on the body as a mode of intervening in contemporary ones, for Mun~oz performativity is a
matter of ‘‘doing’’ into the future, of making the future visible on the body in the present,
through gesture, costume, song, and word. He rethinks one of the foundational terms of
queer theory to lay claim to the queer project of making worlds that are imaginable and, at
least momentarily, inhabitable in real life.
Summary
Theories of queer temporality did not emerge fully conceptualized by queer scholars. They
have had a complex genealogy extending from early Marxism; postcolonialism and critical
race theory’s critiques of anthropological and racial-‘‘scientific’’ formulations; feminist and
queer reclamations of Freudian and Lacanian thought; deconstruction; historiography; and
Continental philosophies such as those of Deleuze and Guattari and Bloch. Nevertheless,
theories of queer temporality have produced key ideas of their own, central to scholars in and
beyond the field. The first of these is that time is constructed through a heterosexual
framework. Since the eighteenth century, at least, Western thought has generally viewed
time as linear and progressive and thereby correlated with the masculine, complemented by
other times that are cast as feminine; thus modern time is heterogendered.
A second key idea is that modern sexuality is a temporal phenomenon and takes place
via the arrangement of time. Theories of queer temporality have demonstrated that sexuality
itself is one product of a larger regime of temporal discipline. Human beings become legible
as such by acceding to particular sequences of life events and by successfully ‘‘timing’’ their
bodies (or having them timed) into their culture’s expectations: these sequences and timings
include life events and the rhythms of sex, home, and family. Furthermore, as a regime of
knowledge, sexuality is shaped by temporal constructions of race. Because people of color
have historically been cast as primitive, backward, and lacking history, and because sexology,
the major field of knowledge about erotic life, developed from anthropologically influenced
ideas about race, sexual minorities have been figured in terms of primitive drives or over-
civilization. Thus nation-building and imperialist projects have sought to manage indige-
nous people by way of ‘‘modernizing’’ them in ways that have directly to do with the timing
of their sexual experiences, reproductive activities, domestic life, and so on.
Beyond critique, theories of queer temporality have clarified how time might be thought
otherwise, with LGBTQ and other sexually dissident experiences at the center. Drawing
from psychoanalysis and deconstruction, queer theorists of temporality have articulated how
repetition produces a fantasized past and makes room for future difference. They have
demonstrated that refusing to let go of the past might produce new modes of identification
and new ways of writing history, as in Nealon’s ‘‘affect genealogies’’ and Dinshaw’s ‘‘touches
across time.’’ Theorists of queer temporality have explored how relationships between
adulthood and childhood, adults and children, and adults and their own past selves, might
be reorganized. They have asked how queers might seize the time of death. Queer theorists
have also seized what might be called the life drive, arguing for the power of ‘‘becoming’’ over
the power of ‘‘arriving.’’ And they have insisted on the power of such seemingly naı̈ve
constructions as hope and utopianism.
It has been said that the evidence for time’s existence is change. If so, queer temporality
theory is itself temporal, for the field is in flux. Newer queer of color scholarship, for
example, goes beyond critiquing the temporal aspects of racism and toward questions of
the relation between racialized subjectivities and temporal experiences and outlooks. Queer
theory is just converging with the field of Afropessimism, which focuses on the precarious-
ness of black life and the constant interarticulation of blackness and death. Another emerging
direction for queer temporality studies is an intersection with physics, in which space, time,
and matter are understood in complex, counterintuitive ways that resonate with earlier queer
theory. Theories of queer temporality are growing, but this growth, Stockton makes clear,
can only be sideways.
GENDER: TIME 15
Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1991. Edited by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Benjamin, Walter. ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History.’’ In First published 1905.
Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas
Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke
Bersani, Leo. ‘‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’’ October 43 (Winter University Press, 2005.
1987): 197–222. Haeckel, Ernst. Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the
Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Vol. 1. Translated by Nineteenth Century. Translated by Joseph McCabe.
Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. London: Harper & Brothers, 1901. First published 1899.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
Halberstam, J. Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York Univer-
of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. sity Press, 2005.
Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History.
Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial versity Press, 1981. First published 1837.
Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Prince- Jung, Karl G. ‘‘The Symbolic Life.’’ In The Symbolic Life,
ton University Press, 2007. vol. 18 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, translated
Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Meta-Ethics of Radical by Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull, 265–290. Princeton,
Feminism. Reprint. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. First NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
published 1978.
Kristeva, Julia. ‘‘Women’s Time.’’ Translated by Alice
Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Com- Jardine and Harry Blake. Signs 7, no. 1 (1981): 13–35.
munities, Pre- and Postmodern. Durham, NC: Duke First published in French in 1979.
University Press, 1999.
Kushner, Tony. Angels in America, Part One: Millennium
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Approaches. New York: Theater Communications
Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Group, 1993.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. ‘‘Nuer Time-Reckoning.’’ Africa 12,
Kushner, Tony. Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika.
no. 2 (1939): 189–216.
New York: Theater Communications Group, 1993.
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology
Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of
Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press,
Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
1983.
Press, 2009.
Fanon, Frantz. ‘‘Algeria Unveiled.’’ 1959. In A Dying Colo-
nialism. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Luciano, Dana. Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body
in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: New York
Freeman, Elizabeth. ‘‘Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and University Press, 2007.
Queer Theory.’’ In A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
and Transgender Studies, edited by George E. Haggerty and McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sex-
Molly McGarry, 295–314. New York: Wiley, 2008. uality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer McGarry, Molly. Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the
Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America. Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2012.
Freud, Sigmund. ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia.’’ 1917. In
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Mun
~ oz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There
Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14. Edited by James of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press,
Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974. 2009.
Nealon, Christopher. Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Histor- Somerville, Siobhan B. Queering the Color Line:
ical Emotion before Stonewall. Durham, NC: Duke Uni- Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in Ameri-
versity Press, 2001. can Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2000.
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in
Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child; or, Growing Side-
ways in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
Rifkin, Mark. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty
and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham, NC: Duke versity Press, 2009.
University Press, 2017. Thompson, E. P. ‘‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Capitalism.’’ Past and Present 38, no. 1 (1967):
56–97.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1993. FI L M
Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and Matewan. Dir. John Sayles. 1987. The dramatization of a
the AIDS Epidemic. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. 1920 coal miners’ strike in Matewan, West Virginia.
GENDER: TIME 17
CHAPTER 2
Evolution
Jamie Freestone
PhD Candidate, School of Communication and Arts
Is human behavior determined by a person’s biological makeup or a result of that person’s

experiences and environment? This question of nature versus nurture can have no simple
answer, and yet the debate is a search for just such an answer. For centuries prominent
thinkers have contributed to the discussion, but the debate reached its height in the twentieth
century, when theories of evolution and psychology gained popularity. In the 1970s and 1980s,
public intellectuals staked out positions over what most influences human behavior: genes
or other biological factors (nature) versus social and cultural influences like upbringing and
ideology (nurture). Feminist scholars were assumed to be firmly on the side of nurture and
evolutionary biologists to be entirely on the nature side, but such assumptions are now—
and probably always were—inaccurate.
A 1994 conference on evolutionary biology and feminism held at the University of
Georgia attempted to transcend the often vicious nature/nurture debate conducted in the
popular and academic press. Scholars from the natural sciences and the humanities con-
vened to discuss how to move forward with the question of how evolution influences
behavior. American evolutionary biologist and feminist Patricia Adair Gowaty organized
the conference and edited the proceedings, Feminism and Evolutionary Biology: Boundaries,
Intersections and Frontiers (1997). In the volume’s preface, Gowaty lamented, ‘‘I really have
personally suffered from the aftermath of [nature/nurture] controversy that surfaced on
my own campus and among some of my closest colleagues,’’ adding that she was ‘‘really
saddened by the depth of misunderstanding and apparently arrogant disregard for the
work of several of the contributors evidenced by several of the other contributors’’ (xii).
Gowaty’s assessment speaks to the lack of common ground between scientists and human-
ities scholars who participated in the conference even though all in attendance were at least
nominally feminists.
Gowaty attributed the furor to two misunderstandings. First, she had assumed that full-
blown genetic determinism—the view that behavior is solely determined by genes—was
understood as a caricature of scientistic thinking. Nonetheless, several participants attacked
this position, even though none of the scientists present argued for it. At the same time, none
of the humanities scholars advocated a complete social determinism—the view that genes are
utterly irrelevant in producing behavior—but some scientists railed against that caricature.
In other words, the most simplistic nature/nurture debate was still being argued, at least in
people’s imaginations. Second, Gowaty identified an ignorance of the particulars of evolu-
tionary science on the part of some humanities scholars.
19
Chapter 2: Evolution
The early twenty-first century has seen a flourishing of work in the humanities by
feminist and gender scholars that engages substantively with evolutionary biology. These
feminist scholars deal directly with the work of English naturalist Charles Darwin
(1809–1882), the principal founder of the theory of evolution, as well as with modern
updates of the theory. The work discussed in this chapter interrogates evolutionary biology
to inform and bolster feminist theory. The interrogations are serious, scientifically literate
efforts, not to discredit science wholesale or attack idealized determinisms, but to go beyond
the nature/nurture and nature/culture binaries. In doing so, these questions both provide a
new reading of evolution and open up new theoretical explorations and underpinnings of
feminist thought.
This chapter discusses contemporary feminist work that engages with evolutionary theory
but first introduces three important historical figures: Darwin and two French philosophers,
Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995). All three made important
contributions to ideas about time and temporality. These ideas are implicit in any discussion of
evolution, because evolution is a process of change happening over long periods, with past
changes accumulating and enduring into the future. The chapter then examines the work of
three feminist scholars, Australian philosophers Elizabeth Grosz (1952–) and Claire Cole-
brook (1965–) and Italian philosopher Luciana Parisi. Their views on gender, time, and
evolution vary, but these philosophers all reject the idea of a sharp dividing line between nature
and culture and see both as mutually constitutive. The chapter concludes by discussing other
feminist engagements with evolutionary biology and the criticisms of employing an evolu-
tionary perspective in theories of gender and sexual difference.
SEX AND GENDER IN EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
Evolutionary psychology and behavioral ecology are the primary scientific disciplines that
discuss gender and evolution. The former is specifically concerned with human behavior; the
latter examines social behavior in all animals. Both assume that one can study behavior from an
evolutionary perspective and that any behavioral differences among males and females must
have evolved because of selection pressures. This translates into the theory that there are
reproductive advantages to adopting certain kinds of behavior. The standard example is that
male and female mammals typically make different levels of investment in reproduction (males
merely contribute sperm, whereas females gestate, give birth, and nurse). The theory is that this
asymmetry in investment means that males have evolved different behaviors than females:
males try to impregnate as many females as possible, whereas females carefully select a mate.
Scientists first rigorously applied such evolutionary theories to humans in the 1970s,
creating the new discipline of sociobiology. Contemporary scholars generally avoid this term
because of the controversy it provoked. Critics claimed that sociobiology tended toward
genetic determinism, overemphasizing the role of genes in determining human behavior to
the full or partial exclusion of social, historical, political, and cultural influences. The debate
continues but was particularly vociferous from the 1970s to the 1990s. During this time,
proponents of the evolutionary approach roundly accused scholars in women’s studies, queer
theory, and gender studies, as well as feminist scholars in the humanities and social sciences
generally, of being anti-science. Meanwhile, many scientists ignored the input of various
feminisms, even on topics related to sexuality, gender roles, and women’s rights. Most
popular accounts from evolutionary psychology still tend to emphasize sex differences in
human behavior, based on dubious extrapolations from primate communities or the logic of
asymmetric male and female investment in child-rearing. Regardless of these views, scholars
interested in gender and sexuality have recently engaged productively with evolutionary
biology as a way of conceptualizing different kinds of change over time. Traditionally,
scholars have used evolution to explain how the distribution of genes in a species changes
with time. But the scholars examined in this chapter use evolution to look at how time is
integral to theorizing change and difference themselves.
EVOLUTION: DARWINIAN AND CREATIVE
Stereotypically, culture has been seen as fluid and nature as fixed. However, evolution is
evidence of the astounding creativity and diversity of life on Earth, teaching us that nature
itself is fluid. Before moving to a closer examination of feminist works on the nature/nurture
debate, this chapter first outlines textbook Darwinian evolution, which feminist arguments
draw on, along with the key ideas of Bergson and Deleuze.
DARWINIAN EVOLUTION
Evolution occurs in many different ways. At a basic level, to evolve means simply to develop
through time. In fact, the origins of the word evolution are the Latin volvere (to roll) and
evolvere (to unroll), as in unrolling a scroll. Darwinian evolution is more specific. It is
evolution by natural selection. For natural selection to happen, there has to be some
variation—normally through random mutation—in the characteristics of organisms. And
these variations have to do two things: they must cause the organisms that possess the
variations to have either a better or worse chance of reproducing, and such variations must be
heritable. With these conditions in place, Darwinian evolution happens.
In practice, this theory took a long time to solidify. Darwin’s idea of natural selection
was somewhat uncertain, mainly because he did not know the mechanics of heredity; that is,
he did not know the material basis for how variations could be inherited. We now know that
genes made of DNA are the carriers of the information that is inherited when an organism
reproduces. If a mutation occurs that just happens to provide a reproductive advantage, then
the organism possessing that mutation is more likely to reproduce. Reproduction can
happen through sexual reproduction, in which one mate combines genetic information
with another, or asexually, in which the organism duplicates itself (the method by which
most microorganisms reproduce). These offspring (in the case of sexual reproduction) or
clones (in the case of asexual reproduction) inherit the mutation. With time, more mutations
occur. Most will be harmful or merely useless. Occasionally they are beneficial. Given a lot of
time, these mutations accumulate and cause organisms to diversify in their forms and in how
they function. Because the changes engendered by single mutations occurring randomly are
minor, the incredible profusion and diversity of life on Earth is possible only because of the
immense time scales involved in evolution.
Time is therefore integral to evolutionary biology, presenting itself as an indelible effect
on bodies. In one sense, evolution could be considered embodied time, because every
organism’s form is a living record of past organisms’ struggles for life. Mutations that were
successful in the past are present in today’s organisms who incarnate their ancestors’ ongoing
histories. The most well-known recent popularizer of Darwinian evolution is English evolu-
tionary biologist Richard Dawkins (1941–), who may not be a particularly successful
GENDER: TIME 21
feminist but who is sensitive to the materiality of time as expressed in organisms’ bodies. In
modern evolutionary theory, the environment and the organism are not sharply delineated,
as Dawkins describes in Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) when he says that a creature’s body
‘‘is a model or description of its own world, or more precisely the world in which its
ancestors’ genes were naturally selected’’ (240). Sometimes this is quite literal, as in the
case of a stick insect that clearly evinces the sticks among which it lives and among which its
ancestors mutated accordingly. At other times animals render their world in more impres-
sionistic ways, writes Dawkins, such as a swift whose shape ‘‘embodies coded facts about the
viscosity of the air in which its ancestors flew’’ (240). Evolution is thus a nexus of time,
material bodies, and ongoing change. These are themes emphasized by Bergson.
HENRI BERGSON’S PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTS

Bergson’s work, especially his book Creative Evolution ([1907] 1944), is heavily indebted to
Darwin; indeed, Bergson called himself a Darwinian. He was convinced that the scientists of
his day were misinterpreting Darwin by ignoring the interplay between organism and environ-
ment, the mutual transformation of both in perpetual unfolding—or, as in the Latin meaning
of evolving, unrolling—that was not teleological; that is, not moving toward some purpose or
end. Bergson rightly amplified Darwin’s insistence that evolution could not be teleological,
because nature has no plan or foresight and thus the future for life is open. Bergson also
inveighed against the tendency—already emerging at the start of the twentieth century—to
make evolution abstract through mathematization. Such a tendency removed organisms from
their environment and the real (experienced) passage of time and considered their development
something that could be predicted mechanistically, like an equation in physics.
Bergson developed two concepts that militated against these views: duration and the vital
impulse (or élan vital in Bergson’s native French). Duration is a notion of the passage of time
as subjective, ongoing, and cumulative and contrasts with the mechanized, regulated time of
science and commerce. In evolutionary terms, duration recognizes the presence of the whole
past in the present. Rather than each successive moment following from the last, in some kind
of divisible sequence, every moment from the past builds and accumulates and thereby shapes
the unfolding present and future. Life mutates, constantly trying new variations, but always
with the inherited variations and differences from the past already part of the new. Importantly
for Bergson, this past goes beyond the immediate past—as in an organism’s immediate
forebear as indicated on a ‘‘genealogical tree of life’’ diagram—and instead traces all the way
back to ‘‘the remotest ancestors,’’ to the origin of life itself ([1907] 1944, 43).
Whereas scientific time is presented as being discrete, duration is continuous. Furthermore,
though scientific time is usually represented spatially as a continuum, that continuum is
analogous to the one used to represent space geometrically. As such, scientific time prioritizes
contiguity, where although time is experienced as being continuous, each moment is only next
to the one immediately before and after it, like dominoes falling in a line. This abstracts time
away from the lingering effects of the past. Duration is more like the accumulating sand in an
hourglass, with time and the past building on top of themselves.
The vital impulse is commonly misunderstood. It is distinct from the discredited
philosophical school of vitalism popular in the nineteenth century, which emphasized the
intrinsic difference between organic and inorganic matter. Whereas subsequent investiga-
tions suggested no sharp distinction between living and nonliving matter, vitalism charac-
terized every individual organism as being animated by some force that impelled it toward its
own goals. Yet as Bergson recognized early on, the notion of an individual organism is itself
problematic. Different parts of an organism have a

certain autonomy that we now know extends to the
level of individual cells and even individual genes
within an organism’s genome. In contrast, the vital
impulse is broader and more integral. It is a force or
impetus at the root of life as a whole, and it is the
tendency toward innovation and creativity typical of
living matter—from the scale of individual microor-
ganisms to whole populations—when viewed over time
and en masse. Vitalism also posited a certain finalism,
whereby an individual organism’s biological drives
could be neatly demarcated from the drive of life as a
whole. But the vital impulse is itself durational: it
endures and extends beyond any one organism’s behav-
iors and instead explores different forms of life in an
open-ended and nonteleological way, while remaining
connected with the relatedness of all life.
Bergson’s ideas are important to this chapter
because they undergird the work of Grosz, who has
set the agenda for recent feminist engagements with
evolution. In The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and
the Untimely (2004), Grosz develops a detailed and
utterly new way of looking at Darwinian evolution.
Amid the cultural backdrop of all-or-nothing arguments
over genetic determinism, of charges of being anti-
science or ignorant of science—all of which Gowaty
encountered in her 1994 conference—Grosz goes to the
very source of evolutionary thinking by examining Dar- Title page of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species,
win’s own works, especially his On the Origin of Species 1859. Darwin’s foundational text on evolution argues his
(1859). Although Darwin’s work is often associated with theory of natural selection. Rather than viewing these theories
as reductive, some feminist scholars, such as Elizabeth Grosz,
a reductive or static view of life, Grosz exposes the pro- Luciana Parisi, and Claire Colebrook, critically engage with
cessual and creative view of life in Darwin’s theory of evolutionary science to discuss ideas of gender and sexual
evolution, locating in it a source of sexual difference and difference. CHRONICLE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
difference in general. Grosz reads Darwin in conjunction
with the work of Bergson, who built on Darwin’s proces-
sual view of life, and prompts us to revisit and read Darwin’s theory as especially attuned to
temporality and continuity.
GILLES DELEUZE’S PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTS

Deleuze ([1988] 2006) drew heavily on Bergson’s philosophy and sought to further unite
two seemingly contradictory phenomena: the ongoing creation of difference and the
repetition of similarities. His idea of the virtual is probably his most important for recent
feminist approaches to evolution. For Deleuze, the virtual contrasts to the merely possible.
Traditionally in philosophy, the possible is like the present or the past—namely, something
real—but has no existence because it has not happened yet; thus a possible future equals ‘‘real
minus existence’’ (Grosz 2004, 187). But the virtual is not like that. The virtual is a potential
future that is real but has not yet been actualized.
GENDER: TIME 23
What does it mean to be actualized? Deleuze’s philosophy undertakes an ongoing

exploration of difference, with new differences coming into being all the time. But whereas
differences are generally understood as empirically identifiable only after the fact, when
comparing two or more things, Deleuze posits that difference precedes such comparisons.
New instances of things are differences that are actualizations of the virtual set of relations of
difference that already exists. The virtual was already real and in some sense the condition of
possibility for the actual that preceded it. The key point to keep in mind is that the subject
matter of evolutionary biology is how new living things come into being. The concept of the
virtual offers a way of thinking about this process that sees new species or organisms as not
merely the realization of possible forms one might have speculated about based on the
existing forms but the actualization of relations of difference that were already there
(virtually). Every new organism is a product of its ancestors’ reproduction. In one sense,
every new organism is a kind of repetition. But in another sense, every new organism is a
new, different organism that manifests one of the ways it could be different from what has
gone before.
ELIZABETH GROSZ: IS SEXUAL DIFFERENCE FUNDAMENTAL?
Looking back on Bergson’s reading of Darwin and indeed Deleuze’s reading of Bergson,
Grosz offers a vision of a biology that can underpin modern feminism. Far from limiting the
social and the political, in The Nick of Time Grosz claims that the biological ‘‘ensures that
they [the social and political] endlessly transform themselves and thus stimulate biology into
further self-transformation’’ (2004, 1). Rather than making change impossible, biology—via
Darwinian evolution—propels change through selection and variation, which the social and
the political can influence in turn. Grosz’s philosophy offers three serious interventions into
contemporary feminist thought: (1) she posits a mutual invigoration of the cultural and the
biological, each spurring the other’s evolution; (2) she offers an account of the body that goes
deeper than its construction via representations or signs, down into the biological matter of
which bodies are made; and (3) she identifies sexual selection as the very motor of how
evolution expresses difference. The third point is possibly the most contentious and warrants
a brief look at the theory of sexual selection, as it is the basis for many of Grosz’s claims.
SEXUAL SELECTION
Grosz says that sexual difference preexists the human. Thus when the human first came
along—according to the standard Darwinian account of the history of life on Earth—sexual
difference already existed as a crucial feature of life. This means that sexual difference does
not (or not only) signify the differences between man and woman; sexual difference is
irreducible. In this regard, Grosz follows the work of Belgian-born French feminist philos-
opher Luce Irigaray (1930–), who contends that there are two ways of knowing, two forms of
life, and two bodily relations to the world and that these correspond to the two sexes. But
Grosz goes beyond Irigaray by locating sexual difference in the logic of Darwinian evolution.
Not only are almost all vertebrate species divisible into two sexes, but part of natural selection
itself is sexual selection.
This adjunct to the standard interpretation of natural selection was always part of the
theory of evolution and is a key component of Darwin’s Origin of Species. In addition to the
pressure of natural selection from the environment as a whole (including climatic conditions,
the presence of predators, luck and competition for food), the other force of change acting
upon sexed organisms is sexual selection, where one sex (typically, but by no means
universally, the female) discriminates among potential mates on the basis of fitness. Cru-
cially, Darwin himself found it difficult to define exactly what fitness means within the
dynamics of sexual selection. The canonical example from Darwin is the male peacock,
whose plumage is obviously an encumbrance to fitness in terms of general survival but acts as
a signal of sexual fitness to peahens, who generally mate with the males that sport the most
impressive tails. Sexual difference is a result of natural selection but, as illustrated by this
example, is also a driver of evolution and the increasing variety of life.
Historians have noted that the cultural mores of Victorian England significantly
influenced Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Indeed, Darwin’s own views on race, gender,
and morality are evident in the way he formulated his theory. In Darwin and the Making of
Sexual Selection (2017), Australian philosopher of science Evelleen Richards provides a
thorough account of the overlooked ironies in Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Of
note is his reliance on his wife (and first cousin) Emma’s extreme domestic burdens,
including raising ten children. Because Darwin surrounded himself with women who
conformed to his notions of femininity, when he came to speculate on sexual selection in
humans he found evidence in his immediate circle for traditional sex roles. Darwin figured
human females as passive because of the sexual politics of his time, which means that
Darwin’s theory of sexual selection is born of essentialism, or assumed innate characteristics.
Ironically, Darwin was extremely diligent in acquiring as many specimens of a given species
as possible before making scientific claims about it. But in the case of humans, his sample size
was limited because he deliberately sequestered himself in his country home, away from
society, surrounded by his male and female family members whose behaviors endorsed rigid
Victorian gender norms.
The theory of sexual selection, free from Darwin’s bias, does provide for a kind of
choice. Grosz writes of how organisms, just like the peahen, can influence evolution by
making aesthetic decisions over and above the allegedly disinterested ‘‘choices’’ of natural
selection. Thus, rather than merely reflecting Darwin’s chauvinist assumptions, the theory of
sexual selection can point toward open-ended relations between the sexes into the future.
Although it emphasizes the bifurcation of the sexes, sexual selection also admits the
possibilities created by the sexual selection of the past. Because of the original bifurcation
into two sexes, we find ourselves living with the past and yet open to future bifurcations that
may unfold.
THE ONTOLOGY OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE

Grosz does not hesitate to bore into the molecular, unseen fundamentals of living organisms.
Rather than focus on the sexed body at only a macro level of analysis, she investigates the
presence of sexual difference at a microscopic level. Grosz proposes not only an epistemology
of difference but an ontology of difference. In other words, she says both that sexual
difference implies at least two ways of knowing the world (epistemology) and that this
knowing is grounded in a different way of being (ontology). According to Grosz, the nature
of being is not unitary but bifurcated. It is forged of sexual difference from the bottom up,
and these differences are grounded in fundamental biology.
The image of the genealogical tree, branching out as time moves forward, is illuminat-
ing. A person has two biological parents, each of whom contribute 50 percent of the person’s
genes. Moving up the tree, each of those parents in turn had two contributors to his or her
genome. In this way, binarism is built into the structure of heredity. If one could trace
GENDER: TIME 25
a genealogy back far enough, one would eventually find two protohuman ancestors who
mated and combined their genes to make the first human (although in practice it would be
impossible to draw an exact boundary that marked the beginning of the human). Pursuing
the lineage even further backward in time, one would pass through many species of mammals
and eventually fish and indeed so far back as to reach microorganisms that do not reproduce
sexually.
But if it were possible to pause at that last pair of sexually reproducing animals—and it
would necessarily be a pair, a binary—and then to turn back again and travel in the forward
direction, something notable would happen. Moving from some primordial pair of very
simple organisms, proceeding forward in time along the branches of the genealogical tree, it
would be clear that each branch is a result of two organisms sexually reproducing, generating
more and more differences. In fact, millions of species emerged through this process, with
genetically nonidentical individuals making up populations within each species. For Grosz,
this process not only engenders the multifarious varieties of animal life but expresses a
unidirectionality within the increasing complexity. Complexity can never reduce in the
process of sexual reproduction because a constant reshuffling of genes occurs when animals
procreate through sex. Out of one very basic difference between sexes, other differences of
species and individuals proliferate endlessly.
The proliferation occurs temporally. Grosz, along Bergsonian lines, maintains that time
is real and resists being represented spatially or geometrically. As such, the figure of the
genealogical tree is imperfect because it robs time of its durational nature, which is precisely
what makes time different from space. The tree spreads out in discrete steps that compromise
the durational view of time. But the tree does provide a sense of the coexistence of the past
and the present (in the genome) and how the present is richer or denser than the past (given
the proliferation of species/individuals). Past organisms live on in the present in the genes
they bequeath, while the diversity of life is greater than in the past.
For contemporary feminist theorists, this proliferation signals an open future and a
way to embrace difference that is fundamental without being essentialist. Anti-essentialism
was a large part of third-wave feminism’s (c. 1990s onward) response to earlier feminisms.
The first wave (c. late 1800s–early 1900s) and second wave (c. 1960s–1980s) tended to
promote or tacitly endorse the idea of essential or immutable sex differences and often
assumed a two-gender model of human identity. Evolutionary theory is nonessentialist
because Darwin’s theories discredit the idea of species having essential, immutable forms
or identities. Instead, species merely emerge through time in a process of differentiation
involving interactions with the environment, other species, and individuals within the
same species. Nothing about a species in its present moment guarantees anything about
that species for the future. And yet future organisms emanate directly—in a material,
historical world—from the organisms of the past. For these reasons, Darwinian evolution
arguably provides a scientific, historical, embodied, and temporal model for how differ-
ences are made and how essences are illusory. The relevance of Darwinian evolution to
contemporary feminist theory is therefore great.
A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
Darwinian evolution may, for many, be redolent of reductive explanations, sociobiology,
and the just-so stories of evolutionary psychology. But Darwin’s ideas have radical potential.
The crux of this potential is the view of time implied by Darwin’s theories, namely that the
future is both open yet regulated. New forms will come to be in the future and they will differ
from what exists now. But they will not be random forms. They will be circumscribed—
somewhat—by the forms of the past, which will remain the forms of the past for all futures.
Consequently, the past accumulates and grows, and all of that history continues to shape new
futures. The future will have more past than the present and therefore the future entails more
complexity.
These ideas are difficult but powerful. They are a fusion of Darwin and Bergson and
allow Grosz to establish an overall theory of temporality, including how temporality is
manifested in and augmented by life. Life is an ongoing exploration of the virtual possibil-
ities inherent in the actual past. Every stage in evolution has seen a furtherance beyond the
original, single ancestor of all life. As life continues it also increases the complexity of the
environment in which it unfolds, which in turn complexifies life. Thus, even though the first
life was necessarily rudimentary, an organism such as a human has evolved gradually out of
systems much simpler than itself. We have trillions of cells, each cell even more complex than
the first life. But there is an ongoingness to the process of life that has seen this incredible
complexity accrue in time.
This material fact of biological complexity arising from nonbiological simplicity pro-
vides a similar temporal logic to the development of other complex systems that emerge from
much simpler parts, including linguistic, economic, and political systems. Grosz boldly
offers Darwinian evolution as a general schema for development and change across many
different phenomena. This almost sounds like an ultra-Darwinist agenda, even reminiscent
of the social Darwinists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who strove to apply
the logic of ‘‘survival of the fittest’’ to social issues. But Grosz’s thinking in fact reverses the
prescriptive, delimiting, and universalist ideology of social Darwinism and instead advocates
multiplicity, unpredictability, and self-determination. She has prompted a revival of interest
in Darwin among feminist and gender studies scholars, many of whom have responded to
and expanded upon her work, from The Nick of Time to Time Travels: Feminism, Nature,
Power (2005) and Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (2011).
EVOLUTION AS BECOMING
One of the more influential responses to Grosz comes from Parisi. Parisi accepts the rationale
for Grosz’s engagement with Darwin and evolution. She also agrees with Grosz that the
evolutionary account of life is one that emphasizes the process of continuous becoming
rather than a discrete series of stages or steps. But Parisi disagrees with Grosz’s insistence on
binary sexual difference, or at least the figures of masculine and feminine. Parisi places more
emphasis on the work of Deleuze, especially his work on the virtual. For Parisi, difference is
never limited to a binary or bifurcation. Rather, the opportunities opened up in the virtual
are a multiplicity: different kinds of difference.
SEXUAL DIFFERENCE BEYOND THE BINARY

In Parisi’s ‘‘Event and Evolution’’ (2010), Irigaray is again a touchstone. Irigaray’s philosophy
of sexual difference rejects ontological sameness. The feminine cannot be reduced to a oneness;
rather it is multiple. For Grosz, this feminine is found in biology, including in sexual selection,
where two sexes are clearly central to the evolution of sexually reproducing organisms. But
Parisi thinks the feminine other is a multiplicity and so, regarding evolution, the feminine is to
be found in a plurality of sexual forms, not in a form that is merely not-masculine. Hence Parisi
GENDER: TIME 27
looks beyond sexually reproducing organisms to other forms of reproduction found in the
microbial world, and in doing so she invokes the work of famous American biologist Lynn
Margulis (1938–2011).
Bacteria were Margulis’s main object of study and provide an immediate challenge to
sexual difference based on a male-female binary. Bacteria do not have sex in the sense that
plants and animals do but simply divide themselves, thereby producing a genetic clone. But
they do still have access to genetic difference. Conjugation is a method that a bacterium can
use to swap genetic material by connecting via a kind of tube to another bacterium,
instigating a free flow of genes that allow populations of bacteria to evolve even more rapidly
than they do through chance mutation. Conjugation can be seen as a form of sex that does
not involve reproduction. In Origins of Sex (1986), written with her son Dorion Sagan,
Margulis notes that ‘‘the extreme promiscuity of gene transfer in bacteria [conjugation]
renders the idea of fixed sexes meaningless’’ (55). Parisi also highlights parthenogenesis, a
form of asexual reproduction found in many plants and in a few animals (some invertebrates,
such as worms, but also some fish and birds). This involves a female producing an ovum that
is not fertilized by a male but nevertheless generates offspring.
Parthenogenesis and conjugation are forms of reproduction and sex that exist in a much
larger proportion of organisms on Earth than does sexual reproduction, so Parisi’s contri-
bution to the topic of evolution is welcome. After all, Grosz’s account prioritizes sexual
reproduction even though it is arguably the exception to the rule of how life reproduces. For
Parisi, sexual difference is not grounded in the differentiation found in standard narratives of
evolution, such as in the figure of the genealogical tree. Instead, the variety of reproduction in
evolutionary history, which is still being uncovered, is evidence of the possibly infinite
number of sexes yet to come in the future. As new species of bacteria, for instance, continue
to proliferate they self-replicate, evolve, and swap genetic material, thereby undermining the
idea of fixed sexes; they may even evolve entirely new methods of reproduction and sex. In
addition to the reproductive practices found among bacteria, viruses, and other micro-
organisms, various other nonbinary forms of sex are in the offing, including in vitro
fertilization, engineered cloning, and synthetic organisms made in a lab. Looking to the
future, Parisi concludes that, taken together, these ‘‘are events that expose sexual difference to
a multiplicity of actual sexes, ontologically irreducible to the model of the two’’ (2010, 163).
ALGORITHMIC TIME IN EVOLUTION

The most provocative feature of Parisi’s writings on evolution is so-called algorithmic sex.
She sees the algorithmically reproducing digital organisms of recent experiments as a clear
indication that the gradualist, stepwise development of organisms that reproduce sexually are
only a small part of evolution. The experiments involve purely digital organisms, run in
computer models that explore different dynamics of evolution. The most common is the
evolutionary algorithm, which is a widely used algorithm in fields as diverse as logistics,
pharmaceuticals, and finance, indeed anywhere that a problem involves exploring a large
range of possible solutions using trial and error.
Evolutionary algorithms themselves follow a Darwinian process by reproducing and
mutating possible solutions, copying the logic of Darwinian evolution. In the example Parisi
uses, a series of strings of code (organisms) reproduce themselves each generation and mutate
slightly each time, certain strings being eliminated for lack of fitness. Eventually, a string
evolves that is an optimal solution to a problem. Computer science, medical science, and
engineering see this as merely adapting the logic of natural selection to problem solving. But
Parisi points to elaborations on this algorithm to show that the process is much more vital.
Some algorithmic models have included dynamics of evolution akin to symbiosis (where two
organisms come together in mutual dependency) or even conjugation and have instantiated
forms of genetic transfer as yet undocumented in nature. As such, the ancient, fluid sex of
microorganisms is only a prelude to an even more multiform continuum in the future, which
includes ‘‘artificial’’ forms of life.
Parisi argues that these informational life-forms are more than descriptions of, or
inscriptions in, matter; they are themselves explorations of virtual matter. So rather than
simply being simulations that tell us something about how evolution has worked in the past
or might work in the future, these algorithmic models are actually material processes of
evolution. They are ‘‘not representations of evolution and sex but are themselves immanent
forms,’’ Parisi says, adding that ‘‘nongradualist algorithms of sex and evolution are events
exposing infinite virtualities of evolution and the incomplete nature of forms of sex’’ (2010,
160). In the new forms of sex found in evolutionary algorithms and the many forms already
described by biology, Parisi finds evidence for a multiplicity of new differences opening up in
the future.
THE LIMITATIONS OF CREATIVE EVOLUTION
Colebrook is another theorist interested in developing a feminist response to evolutionary

science. Like Grosz, she incorporates the work of Irigaray, Bergson, Deleuze, and Darwin but
reaches very different conclusions about sexual difference and time. For Colebrook the
crucial problem with an evolutionary perspective is that any thinking subject is already sexed
and is masculine. In ‘‘Creative Evolution and the Creation of Man’’ (2010), she analyzes
recent extensions and revisions of Darwinism—including by feminists such as Grosz—and
identifies a latent humanism and indeed a reinforcing of man as the culmination of life.
Against this reading of Darwinian evolution, Colebrook proposes a genealogy of the future
that looks beyond the human to a posthuman future and the possible annihilation of man. In
this way, looking to the future does not involve a teleology where man is the culmination or
end point but dissolves the very figure of man after investigating the possibilities uncovered
by sexual difference and different kinds of difference.
MECHANISTIC EVOLUTION AND CREATIVE EVOLUTION

Broadly, there are two ways of looking at how evolution works overall as a system of
creating differences and as a process that deals with the very ontology of life. Colebrook
says that one way is completely mechanistic: classical Darwinism sees all change as the
result of purely chance events filtering out certain life-forms at the expense of others; the
only exception to this lifeless, blind matter is mind, which is possessed only by humans.
This Cartesian approach—as in the work of French philosopher René Descartes
(1596–1650)—is seen as old-fashioned even within the natural sciences, where a more
creative view of evolution has emerged. Emerged is the right word, because the second way
of looking at how evolution works—what Colebrook calls the post-Darwinian, or creative
evolution, approach—emphasizes that mind is made of matter and that human cognition
is explained by gradual evolution from unthinking forms. A recognition of the embodied
nature of mind and the interaction and entanglement between organisms and their milieu
(environment) is now commonplace among biologists and cognitive scientists.
GENDER: TIME 29
Equally common is the embracing of affect in lieu of cold mechanism. Affect in this
sense derives from Deleuze’s philosophy and describes the felt, embodied aspect of states like
joy or fear rather than their representation in language (emotion). Scholars theorize that
cognition and language emerged from precognitive and prelinguistic ways of interacting
with the environment. These behaviors were originally more about affect than emotion. For
example, our prelinguistic primate ancestors perhaps used vocalization as a sympathetic and
affective response rather than as a way of representing the world. This view of evolution is
seemingly more amenable to feminist theory.
However, Colebrook points out that humanism—which privileges human reason—still
lurks in this apparent rejection of Cartesianism. Creative evolutionist accounts stress that
humans alone are capable of thinking about the long process of evolution that gave rise to
them. And this thinking subject who exists only as a self-affirming, intentional being must,
following Irigaray, be a man. Thus man is created not as a special, rational subject distinct
from all else—as in the Cartesian notion—but as the mind that emerged from life itself,
indeed the mind of life. One can see how even this more modern view of evolution
(embraced by Grosz and other thinkers following Bergson’s ideas), although purportedly
nonteleological, still figures man as a culmination of life: man has no end given by God or
something transcendent but creates his own end, himself.
Against the likes of Grosz, who see in evolutionary theory an opportunity to articulate
sexual difference, Colebrook questions where the feminine can possibly fit into a perspective
that sees all nonmechanistic or seemingly irrational phenomena merely as further evidence
for Darwinian evolution. She offers examples from evolutionary psychology where alleged
differences between men and women, or seemingly irrational behaviors—men are from
Mars, women are from Venus–style differences—are explained in terms of past benefits to
the organism. For example, evolutionary psychology explains male aggression and war as the
legacy of male competitiveness in our evolutionary past: the kind of genetic determinism
discussed above. In this way, a stance that seems to accept a more affective and possibly
feminine mode of being is actually rapacious in its assimilation of all relations between the
world and the organism into a single Darwinian logic. Colebrook insists that even creative
evolution contains a kind of latent humanism and ends up reifying the concept of man.
Hence the future beyond man is where feminists should look for real sexual difference.
A GENEALOGY OF THE FUTURE

Building on the well-known concept of genealogy in French philosopher Michel Foucault’s
(1926–1984) work, Colebrook finds a different kind of emergence. The evolutionary idea of
emergence explains all complexity in terms of gradual bootstrapping up from simpler
components. This includes the complexity of both life and other systems such as language,
culture, and technology. Even politics and morality can be understood as emergent phe-
nomena, ultimately arising from evolutionary drives and rationales. Recall that Grosz’s ideas
tend in this direction. But in Foucault’s historical investigations, Colebrook locates examples
of nonemergent phenomena, or at least emergent in a different way. Often these are residual
or legacy features of institutions or structures, roughly analogous to vestigial traits in an
organism that perhaps once served a function but now have a presence that cannot be
reduced to that function, as for example, the tailbone in humans.
Colebrook suggests that the variation at the heart of evolution offers a path for finding
sexual difference. Between the mechanism of earlier versions of Darwinism and the self-
affirming, almost Romantic style of post-Darwinism, there is a way to imagine futures
beyond the logics of fitness, survival, and even intelligence. In Colebrook’s words, this future
genealogy would ‘‘lead to a sexual difference, not of genders or kinds whose reproductive
relations and sympathies would further organic or ecological life, but of powers of relation
and production beyond that of the organism, and certainly beyond creation’’ (2010, 130).
This is a radical, posthuman idea akin to Parisi’s, but Colebrook is not thinking only of
future technologies; she is surmising as yet unthought of processes that build on the non-
teleological promise of evolution to envision how the feminine—or something beyond the
masculine and feminine—could emerge.
OTHER FEMINIST APPROACHES TO EVOLUTION
This chapter has focused on Grosz, Parisi, and Colebrook as forming a new wave of feminist
interest in evolutionary biology that contributes to discourses on feminism, gender, and
sexuality. These three scholars have a similar intellectual heritage, especially in using the ideas
of Deleuze and in their engagement with queer theory. But many other writers from different
feminist traditions, influenced by gender studies and other theoretical approaches, have also
engaged with evolution, and some of their views are worth briefly summarizing.
In Evolution’s Eye (2000), American philosopher of science Susan Oyama tries to com-
plicate the interplay between genes and environment inherent in standard evolutionary theory.
By looking at the multilevel interactions of different systems within the simplified categories of
organism and environment, Oyama shows that the political uses to which evolutionary biology
is put are generally unsound. Even the supposedly more nuanced view of biology that says
human behavior is some mix of different weightings given to genes and environment remains
encumbered by essentialism; the binary of nature/nurture is made essential through the binary
logic of the genes-to-environment ratio. Thus the political implications of evolutionary science
for debates over affirmative action, education policy, the genetic basis for homosexuality, and
the biological basis of transgender identity are all problematic.
Canadian sociologist and environmental scientist Myra Hird, in The Origins of Sociable
Life: Evolution after Science Studies (2009), builds on the work of Margulis. Rather than seeing
symbiosis as an adjunct to the usual, competitive nature of natural selection, Hird posits that
symbiosis and interconnectedness are central to life. As far as the creation of difference goes,
Hird maintains that symbiosis can do more than natural or sexual selection. She points to the
fact that even large sexually reproducing organisms such as mammals (including humans) rely
heavily on colonies of bacteria to perform basic vital functions; a whole ecosystem of micro-
organisms in the gut aids digestion, and bacteria in the vagina facilitate sexual reproduction
itself. Thus the overall ‘‘symbiotic system’’ is what pushes evolution forward (Hird 2009, 67).
Combining this perspective with that of Parisi or Colebrook could fruitfully extend perspec-
tives on evolution and time, taking into account the interdependence of existing life and how
life-forms may come together in the future. For Hird, it is not only the constant bifurcation or
profusion of new life-forms that characterizes evolution but also the way forms can fuse back
together in symbiosis to make something new.
Hird also points out a kind of hierarchical thinking that may underlie theories of sexual
difference. Because sexual reproduction is highly correlated with the size of the organism
(almost all large organisms reproduce sexually; almost all microscopic ones, asexually), there
is a tendency to think of sexual reproduction as a feature of ‘‘higher’’ animals. Such thinking
also blinds us to nonbinary forms of gender in nonhuman animals. In ‘‘Animal Transex’’
GENDER: TIME 31
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
PLATE LIII
Wordaman youth playing on the “drone pipe” or “bamboo trumpet.”
“When using the ‘trumpet,’ the operator blows into the end having the smaller
diameter, with a vibratory motion of the lips....”
In the course of conversation, an aboriginal aids his speech by

gesticulation. When inclined to be cheerful, he smiles and laughs in
a decidedly refreshing sort of way, and often smacks his lips out of
sheer pleasure, but when his feelings have been ruffled and he is
angry, he pouts out his lips and does not hesitate to let you know
how he feels. He betrays his feelings by most apparent tone
inflections in his voice. He frequently nods his head to indicate
assent, but rarely shakes his head to betoken dissent. When in
doubt over any matter, especially in answer to a question, he shrugs
his shoulders. His hands are used a great deal during conversation.
If he wishes to give one an idea of nearness, the finger is directed to
the ground a short way off, and if distance is implied the finger points
to the horizon.
In reply to a question concerned with the location of a thing, he
does not point, as a European would, but turns his face in the
direction he wants to indicate and thrusts out his lips. When
beckoning with his hand, an aboriginal does not move his hand
upwards towards his face as we do, but passes it downwards with a
scooping action. The course a traveller has taken, or an animal
decamped in, is indicated by extending an arm in the direction and
snapping the fingers.
A native has a very good idea of time. The hour at which a past
event has happened, or at which a coming event is to happen, is
indicated by pointing at the assumed altitude of the sun. To fix a time
definitely for a contemplated or proposed action, a stone is placed
upon a cliff, or in the fork of a tree, at the hour decided upon, a day
or two in advance, in such a position that a sunbeam just strikes it at
the moment. When the correct day arrives, the stone is watched until
it is again illumined in the same way; and the natives then know that
it is time to act. This method is employed when, say, the men have
left camp early, and they order the women to follow them at a later
hour.
Days are reckoned by the number of sleeps they have had, and
the biggest measurement of time goes by so many moons.
When he comes to computing numbers, his fingers are of the
greatest service to him, and at times his toes as well. An aboriginal is
not a mathematician, and his vocabulary does not contain running
series of numerals. The usual method of counting low figures is after
the following pattern of the King Sound natives:
“arra” (one).
“kwiarra” (two).
“kwiarra arra” (three).
“kwiarra kwiarra” (four).
Beyond four, counting either goes by “hands” or “feet,” or for

ordinary purposes there are two comprehensive words in use which
signify a “small-large number” and a “large-small number.” In some
cases, such as the Aluridja, “one” (“goitarada”) appears as the
diminutive form of “two” (“goitara”). In the same sense, a shorter
distance is expressed by the Wongapitcha as the diminutive of a
great distance by qualifying the word “wurnma,” meaning “far,” by
affixing “wimuggitta,” which means “young.” Hence “wimuggitta
wurnma” reads the “young (one) of far,” i.e. “close up.” This is really
the same way of expressing a fraction of space as the same tribe
has adopted for expressing minority in age; a youth or young man is
known as “wimuggitta wardi,” the second word “wardi” standing for
an adult man.
PLATE LIV
1. Making “vegetable down” by pounding grass between two

stones. Humbert River, Northern Territory.
2. Worora native making a stone spear-head, Northern Kimberleys,

Western Australia.
The Dieri of the Lake Eyre region have one of the most elaborate
systems of numeration, which includes, at any rate, an expression
for every number up to eleven.
“kulno,” one.
“mandru,” two.
“parkulu” or “parkulintja,” three.
“mandru mandru,” four.
“mandru ja parkulintja,” five.
or “marra warra kulno,” five, i.e. hand part one (one hand).
“marra pirri kulno,” six.
“marra pirri mandru,” seven.
“marra pirri parkulintja,” eight.
“marra pirri mandru mandru,” nine.
“marra warra mandru” ten, i.e. hand parts two (two hands).
“tjinna pirri kulno,” eleven.
“marrapu,” many.
“mörla marrapu,” very many.
In the above table the following explanations will be found useful:
“ja” = and.
“marra” = hand.
“tjinna” = foot.
“warra” = part.
“pirri” = nail (toe or finger).
Thus the reading of the numerals runs: One, two, three, two-two
(four), two and three (five), or one hand part (five), hand finger-nails
one (six), hand finger-nails two (seven), hand finger-nails three
(eight), hand finger-nails four (nine), two hand parts (ten), foot toe-
nails one (eleven).
To imply a repetition or continuance of action, the frequent use of
the same verb is avoided by the Sunday Islanders, but the same
effect is achieved by reiterating the word “garra” indefinitely. The
expression of continued action is usually in the present tense and is
mostly applied to words like “running,” “walking,” “jumping,”
“sleeping,” “raining,” “blowing,” “bleeding,” etc., etc. For example, a
man from a tree or other look-out might be describing to his
companions below, the doings of their hunting party out on the plain;
while the latter keep moving, he conveys the fact to his hearers by
ejaculating “garra, garra, garra, ...” The direction of the hunters’
movements is indicated by the swing of his hand. The moment the
observer in the tree stops saying “garra,” the people below know that
the hunters have ducked or have temporarily ceased the pursuit.
The terminal syllable of a word is never uttered very clearly by an
aboriginal; and it is consequently difficult to distinguish between a
short e, a, o, or u. This is particularly true of the language used by
the old men, the defectiveness being often increased by the gaps
between the incisors resulting from the initiation ceremonies.
There are occasions, however, when the last syllable receives
especial emphasis. The Wongapitcha word for plenty is “ura”; when
the idea of plenty is great the word becomes “ura-ku,” with an
intentional intonation upon the “ku”; and when the plenty is
extraordinary, the word receives yet another syllable and becomes
the superlative “ura-ku-pu.”
The simple affirmative of the Aluridja, which has also been
adopted by the Arunndta, is “o,” less commonly “u”; but when strong
affirmation is intended the word is changed to “owa,” or “owau.”
The ordinary negative of the Arunndta is “itja”; but forcibly
expressed this may become “itjama” or “itjingalai.”
Any sudden exclamation or accidental noise, like a cough or
sneeze, might be exaggerated by the addition of a syllable at the
end. When a Sunday Islander sneezes he makes a word out of the
natural noise sounding like “Tish-e!”
An exclamation which is common practically to all Australian
tribes, and may express surprise, fear, pain, or disgust, is a very
liquid “irr.” The Arunndta have strengthened this monosyllabic cry by
giving it the suffix “ai”; nowadays the word is, however, mostly
pronounced “Yerrai!” A variety of the last-named, but not quite so
forceful, is “Yakai!” A sudden fright or the anticipation of harm might
produce a very short “i,” without any indication of the presence of the
liquid consonant.
Appreciation is indicated by “Aha!” or “Hm-hm!” practically
throughout the central and northern districts of Australia; in both
cases special emphasis is applied to the second syllable.
A central Australian exclamation calling one to order or attention in
a somewhat harsh manner is “Wai!” When one person is being
irritated by another, such as a parent by a whining child, the offender
is thus rebuked. This word may also become a suffix; it may be
combined, for instance, with the radical “irr” and produce a word
“Yirrawai,” which is perhaps the strongest in a sense of disgust and
reproach available in the Arunndta tongue.
Standing at the end of an adjective, the expression “’n-dora” in the
same dialect signifies a great or superlative degree; e.g. “marra”
means “nice,” but “marr’n-dora” a conception more like “excellent.” In
the opposite sense, “kurrina” (bad) becomes “kurrina’n-dora” (worst).
The same suffix can be attached to an adverb. When, say, an
emphatic denial is needed, “itja” (no) takes the form of “itja’n-dora.”
There are numerous other syllables, which, when fixed to the end
of a word, convey a special significance. When, in the Arunndta, the
syllable “tu” is added to a person’s name in address, it really stands
in place of a sentence like “Is it not so?” For instance, “Nani knulia
atoa utnuriraka, Endola-tu?” when literally translated reads: “This
dog man bit Endola, is it not so?” Endola is the name of a woman
who is being addressed. In place of “tu,” the longer form of “ditjekwi”
might be used.
Again, the suffix “lo” is found in daily use in the same dialect; it
stands for the phrase: “Where is?” Hence the completed sentence,
“Kwatche-lo?” stands for “Where is the water?”
When one finds “jara” added to a word, plurality is indicated, the
sense conveyed being that many of the kind specified by the noun
are assumed. The word for girl in the Arunndta is “kware,”
consequently “kwarenjara” means that a number of girls are being
considered, the “n” being simply interposed for the sake of euphony.
Any proper noun, like the name of a person, may be modified by
adding “ia” to it, and, by so doing, one makes it a term of
endearment in the vocative case. “Ware” ordinarily means “boy,” but
by altering it to “waria” (i.e. “ware-ia”), the meaning becomes “dear
boy” or “O boy.”
If the terminal “a” of a substantive is found to be changed to “inna,”
the diminutive of the original is implied. A somewhat common name
for a woman in the Arunndta is “Unnruba,” but during the years of
childhood of a bearer of this name, the appellation is always in the
form of “Unnrubinna”; in later years this changes to “Unnruba” more
or less automatically.
A diminutive sense is also conveyed by duplicating an original
word. In the eastern Aluridja dialect “kaitji” means an ordinary spear,
whereas “kaitji-kaitji” is an expression applied to a toy spear. The
Dieri recognize a Supreme Being whom they call “Mura”; any one of
their numerous demi-gods, however, from whom they trace their
descent is referred to as a “Mura-Mura.”
PLATE LV
1. Wongapitcha man shaping a spear-thrower with an adze.
2. Aluridja man scraping a boomerang with a sharp stone flake.
Alterations in the ending of a verb indicate different moods and

tenses. The verb “to come” in the Arunndta is “pitchima”; its
inflections and their meanings will become apparent from the
following short sentences:
“Pitchai arrekutcha!” Come here, old woman!

“Pitchikarrerai arrekutch’njara!” Come here, old women!
“Arrekutcha pitchama.” The old woman is coming.
“Arrekutcha pitchika.” The old woman came (or has come).
“Arrekutcha pitchichinna.” The old woman will come.
If we replace the verb “pitchima” by “lama” (“to go”), the inflections,
taken in the same order as above, become: “lai,” “larrirai,” “lakama,”
“laka,” “litchinna.”
An adverb which finds considerable application in the Arunndta is
“kalla,” indicating the completion of any deed or action. Most
frequently the nearest translation would be supplied by the English
word, “already.” If, therefore, we again consider one of the above
sentences and interpose the word “kalla,” the meaning is
strengthened considerably: “Arrekutcha kalla pitchama” then means
“The old woman is already coming.” But “kalla” might further convey
the sense of repletion. “Einga knullia kalla kwatche n’ dai” would
mean, literally translated, “I dog enough water gave.” And finally
“kalla” might express the completion of an action. A native, after
losing the track of an animal, or having eaten as much as he wants,
might be heard to say “kalla,” meaning “finished.” Finally “kalla”
might even stand for “dead.” We have already noted a similar word
in the vocabulary of the Sunday Islanders, viz. “Kaleya,” meaning
“finish” or “good-bye.”
The personal pronouns are either used as separate words in a
sentence, or they appear as prefixes to the principal verbs.
In the Arunndta, the following are used:
“einga,” I; “nuka,” mine; “eingana,” me.

“unda,” thou; “unguranga,” thine; “ngana,” thee.
“era,” he; “ekurra,” his; “erinna,” him.
“nuna,” we; “nunaka,” ours; “nungana,” us.
“rankara,” you; “rakankara,” yours; “rankarana,” you.
“etna,” they; “etnaka,” theirs; “etnana,” them.
As an illustration let us translate: “I like the boy”; we should have

to transpose the words into the following order, “I boy like,” and the
Arunndta would be: “Einga ware unjinum.” On the other hand, we
might select the Sunday Island dialect as an example in which
prefixes are used for representing the personal pronouns. The first
personal prefix is “nun,” the second “min,” and the third “il” or “n’.” If,
therefore, we take a simple verb like “jakuli” to “break,” we have:
“nunjaluki,” I break.
“minjaluki,” you break.
“iljaluki” or “n’jaluki,” he breaks.
The third person plural is represented by “punjanga n’”; hence

“punjanga n’jaluki” stands for “they (altogether) break.”
Whereas we have seen that an “n” might be interposed between
two words for the sake of euphony, it no less frequently happens that
two or more words are contracted into one for similar reasons. If, to
quote a simple case, we wish to translate into Arunndta “You give (it)
me,” we have three separate words, “unda” (you), “nuka” (me), and
“dai” (give), which in the above expression are fused into one word,
“nukundai.”
Apart from the full and pure vowel sounds, the Australian
aboriginal dialects include the modified sounds expressed by the
German diphthongs, œ, äu, and ue (i.e. the French u). The pairs of
consonants, p and b, k and g, and t and d, are often interchanged
during speech. Sibilant sounds are extremely rare. My own name
was very difficult, if not impossible, for the Aluridja to pronounce; the
best they could make of it was “Battedu.” So, also, the imported pet
name of the domestic cat, “pussy-pussy,” as it is used by the settlers,
cannot be managed. The Aluridja call it “putte-putte,” and the
Arunndta “put-pudtha.”
Let us look into the construction of the Aluridja personal pronouns
a little more carefully. Every pronoun consists of a stem, which is
different for every person, and an ending, which varies with the case.
The stems are:
First person, singular, “naiu”; plural, “nganan.”

Second person, singular, “nuntu”; plural, “nurangari.”
Third person, singular, “balu”; plural, “tana.”
And the endings are as follows:
Genitive, “-ba.”
Dative, “-lukuru.”
Accusative, “-na.”
Ablative, “-languru” (from), or “-lawana” (with).
A simple sentence embodying three pronouns would be: “Naiulu

tanalawana nuntulukura ngalierra,” which, literally translated, reads:
“I with them to you have come.”
A few of the Arunndta interrogatives are:
“Ewunna?” What? or What is it?

“Unndana?” Where?
“Nguna?” Which?
“Ngula?” Who?
“Ntakinya?” How many?
The aspirate is very occasionally met with. The local group of the
Arunndta, residing at Arltunga, which styles itself “Herrinda,” is one
of the few exceptions. Even in the settled districts, where the natives
have adopted European names, one christened “Harry” is usually
spoken of as “Yarri.” The sounds which are most commonly
aspirated are the exclamations, e.g. “Hai!” “Aha,” and “Hm-hm!”
Used in conjunction with a vowel, usually an “a,” the consonantal
combination “ng” is common to all Australian dialects. Although to
the modern tongue a little difficult to master, the sound is strikingly
fluent with the aboriginal; indeed, its frequent inclusion in words of
fundamentally simple origin suggests a primitive, natural derivation.
Along the north-western coast, the words for “water” are “ngawa”
(Wave Hill), “ngauwa” (Humbert River), “kornga” (Sunday Island).
In the Arunndta, “nga” stands for either “Here you are!” “There!” or
“Take it!” all phrases being used in the sense of offering something to
a person, such as mother to infant. “Ngaboni” is a modified form of
the last-named, having any of the following meanings: “Here!”
“Look!” or “Behold!” And “ngarai” is yet another modification of
similar significance, usually placed immediately behind the object it
is desired to draw attention to, e.g. “Arre ngarai!” (Look at the
kangaroo).
Verbal greetings, akin to our “Good-day!” are rarely, if ever, made
use of by natives when they meet; but some of the tribes recognize
an orthodox term of salutation at partings, as indicating a friendly
feeling which the speaker bears towards the person he is on the
point of leaving. The Mulluk-Mulluk and some of their neighbours on
the Daly River have adopted the word “mummuk” to express their
farewell, whilst the Sunday Islanders’ vocabulary includes a similar
expression in the word “tchorrogu.”
An alarm, such as we would raise in the form of “Look out!” or “Get
out of the way!” is rendered by the Arunndta “Par-le!”
There are numerous examples which could be mentioned of words
appearing in an aboriginal dialect which have a striking resemblance
to European words of modern and ancient languages, which at this
stage of our knowledge of primitive tongues must be recorded as
curiosities rather than linguistic analogies. One of the most
remarkable, perhaps, is the Arunndta for head, viz. “kaputa”; but to
connect this in any way with the Latin word would be as
unreasonable as calling the “patriarchal” type of aboriginal a semite.
It is, therefore, not my intention to suggest anything beyond mere
coincidence, and it lies far from my mind to attempt theorizing upon
little evidence, yet it must be admitted that similarities in points of
evolution and culture, no matter how trivial and accidental they may
be, are not without interest. Viewed entirely in this light, there is no
harm in mentioning one or two similarities which exist between
certain words of the Australian dialects and those of other tongues,
articulate or otherwise.
Affirmation is expressed in the Cambridge Gulf district by “yau,”
“yo-au,” or “yowai.” During latter years, the same expression has
found its way south, even as far as the MacDonnell Ranges, where it
has largely replaced the original form of “owa.” In the adjoining
coastal districts of the Northern Territory, a similar word is in use as
well as one which sounds more like the German “ja.” It is of more
than passing interest to note that throughout the Malay Archipelago
“yo-au” or “yowai” is the principal form of affirmation in use among
the local primitive peoples. It is not unlikely, therefore, that the early
Macassan trepang fishers, who used to visit the north coast of
Australia long before the white man arrived, brought this word along
with them.
We find, also, that the consonantal expression, “ng,” combined
with a vowel sound, is common among other primitive languages.
Professor Garner, too, has found it included in the inarticulate
“speech” of apes in the form of a note indicating satisfaction, which
can be represented by “ngkw-a.” The speculative mind naturally
wonders whether this simian cry of satisfaction is perhaps
fundamentally of similar, though independent, phonetic origin to the
northern Australian word for water, the essential of life, which we
noted above is “ngawa.”
The di-syllabic muttering of a European child-in-arms, moreover,
which the happy parents flatter themselves sounds like “pa-pa” or
“ma-ma,” is equally characteristic of the aboriginal babe, but the
parents in the latter case interpret the note to be “nga-nga.” And,
indeed, the Arunndta mother responds by handing the infant the fluid
it needs, while she caressingly soothes it with the simple little word
“Nga,” which in our own language would be equivalent to the
sentence, “Here you are!”
INDEX
Roman numerals refer to Preface.
A
abris, 322
Acacia salicina, 157
acacia seed, 150, 151
Adelaide tribes, xii, 100, 102, 180, 195, 204, 206, 208, 212, 214,
360, 366
administration, tribal, 225 et seq.
adzes, 366, 367
Affenspalte, 38
“alangua” (native pear), Knaninja, 353
albinism, 48
“Algerrigiowumma,” sky-shying act, 238, 239
Alligator River, 197, 249
allotment of infants, 221, 222
“Altjerra,” 279, 295, 341, 342
“Altjerrajara,” Supreme Number, 271, 296
“Altjerringa,” 279, 296, 342
“Aluggurra” women, 343
Aluridja tribe, xii, 4, 47, 48, 50, 65, 78, 82, 83, 92, 95, 111, 114,
121, 147, 149, 150, 151, 153, 155, 170, 176, 178, 184, 192,
200, 205, 213, 226, 231, 236, 239, 240, 243, 255, 259, 264,
267, 269, 271, 272, 282, 295, 296, 349, 356, 361, 362, 387,
396, 398, 400, 402
amputation of finger joints, 253, 254
ancestor worship, 257
animation, in art, 320, 336, 337, 338
animal tracks, drawn in sand, 70-73
anthill burial, 206;
of bone, 214
Anthistiria (kangaroo grass), 276, 387
anthropomorphous designs, 353-358
“Antjuarra,” tooth-rapping ceremony, 235
anvil-stone, 369
approaching a stranger, 2, 3;
a camp, 105
appreciation, expression of, 399
archer fish, ochre drawing of, 328
armistice, 188
Arnhem Land, 50, 196, 197
Arrabonna Tribe, 4, 200, 237, 269, 362
“Arrarra,” a circumcision ceremony, 239 et seq.
“arrera,” kangaroo, Knaninja, 352
“Arrolmolba” (phallus), 291
art of the aboriginal, xi, xii, 297-358
artificial colouring of body, hunting, 142;
in warfare, 184;
of emissaries at initiation, 254;
for cosmetic and ceremonial purposes, 324-326
artificial warmth applied to infant, 66
Arunndta Tribe, xi, xii, 4, 6, 48, 50, 63, 65, 70, 76, 77, 78, 82,
83, 86, 92, 95, 103, 106, 114, 121, 125, 142, 147, 149, 150,
151, 152, 153, 155, 166, 170, 172, 175, 176, 178, 184, 192,
200, 205, 214, 218, 220, 226, 231, 237, 238, 263, 264, 271,
272, 274, 275, 282, 287, 291, 292, 295, 296, 308, 311, 321,
328, 330, 337, 338, 341, 343, 347, 349, 350, 352, 361, 362,
363, 386, 387, 390, 391, 398, 399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 404,
405
“Atoakwatje,” water-men, 264, 265
aspirate sounds, 403
attachment of parents to children, 65, 66
“aumba” (Brachysema), 153
Australoid, 58, 59;
migrations, 56, 57, 58
awl, stone, 365
Ayers Ranges, 75
B
bailers, 95
baldness, 50
ball-games, 77, 78
bandicoot, corrobboree of, 383
“banki,” prepuse, 243
bark, canoes, 160-164;
drawings, 323;
shield, 86, 87;
water-carriers, 92, 93
barramundi vertebræ used as spear heads, 198
barter, with ochre, 113;
with women, 222
bathing, 99
Bathurst Islanders, 76, 77, 93, 95, 96, 115, 159, 161, 163, 168,
207, 238, 309, 310, 319, 323, 373, 379, 380
beard, 50, 51, 117;
of female, 46
bees’ honey, 145
bell-bird, 386
belly, 20, 21
Berringin Tribe, 4, 11, 129, 130, 201, 374
beverages, 153
biological consanguinity between Australia and other continents,
55
bird-like attitude, 107
birds’ eggs, 125, 126
birth of aboriginal, 61-68
biting the initiate’s head, 244, 245
bleeding, stanching of, after circumcision, 243
blindness, following club hit, 37
blonde, aboriginal, 48, 49, 50
blood, drinking of, 154;
stilling the flow of, 186;
thrown at opponent during a duel, 166;
revenge, 187
Bloodwood apple, 152
Bloomfield River, 48
blue eye in aboriginal, 25
Blue Mountains, 57
boabab, carved tree, 309;
carved nuts, 311, 312, 313, 331;
nuts used as rattles, 374;
trees serving as reservoirs, 97, 98
“Bobi,” tjuringa, 270
body decoration, at completion of mourning, 214, 215;
cosmetic, artistic and ceremonial, 324, 325, 326.
See also artificial colouring of body
“Böllier” ceremony, initiation, 250
bone, carving of, 313;
“pointing” the, 174-178, 209
bone-pointed spear-thrower, 201
bones of dead man collected, 214;
radius selected for “pointing bone,” 215
“boning” to death, 174-178, 209
boomerang, practice, 86;
used as a musical instrument, 374, 383;
used in duels, 168;
used in warfare, 187, 188
“boomerang-legs,” 15
boomerang-spear duel, drawing of, 330, 338
boras, 377
boys, apportioned to old men, 65, 66;
taught use of weapons, 85, 86
Brachysema Chambersii, 153
brain of aboriginal, 37, 38
breast, 18-20;
artificial lactation of, 20;
development of, 19;
enchantment of, 19;
touched with charred mulga, 65
Bremer, Sir Gordon, 144
Buccaneer Archipelago, 50, 51
buffalo, drawing of, 325, 337;
hunt, 144, 145, and Frontispiece
bull-roarer, used at circumcision, 241, 242;
at mika operation, 246;
at tooth-rapping ceremony, 232, 233
burial and mourning customs, 203-215
burial ground, signpost erected at, 207
burial in anthill, 208
C
Calamus used as paint brush, 319, 320
Caledon Bay, 115
calvarium, Tennants Creek, 53;
used as a drinking vessel, 214

Gender Time 1St Edition Karin Sellberg Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Gender Time 1St Edition Karin Sellberg Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Gender: Time 1st Edition Karin Sellberg

Visit to download the full and correct content document:

KARIN SELLBERG, EDITOR

Gender: Sources, Perspectives, and Methodologies

Other Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series:

Cover photograph: Cleaning women punching in on time clock in office building.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2017959267

Gale, a part of Cengage Learning

This title is also available as an e-book.

Iris van der Tuin

ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR IN CHIEF

Chapter 2: Evolution .............................................................................................................. 19

Chapter 3: Affective Futurity................................................................................................. 37

Chapter 4: Generational Time............................................................................................... 53

PART II. HISTORIES

Chapter 6: A History of Gender ..............................................................................................85

Chapter 7: The Gendering of History...................................................................................103

Chapter 8: First-Wave Feminism ..........................................................................................117

PART III. BODIES

Chapter 10: Normality ...........................................................................................................155

Chapter 11: The Body and Legal Discourse .........................................................................169

Chapter 12: Menstruation and Coming of Age ....................................................................185

viii MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

Chapter 13: Academic Time ................................................................................................ 201

PART IV. IDENTITIES

Chapter 15: Intersectional Temporalities ........................................................................... 233

Chapter 16: Memory Studies ............................................................................................... 249

Chapter 17: Diaries .............................................................................................................. 267

Chapter 19: Literary Temporalities..................................................................................... 301

Chapter 20: Art, Becoming, and Affect.................................................................................317

Chapter 21: Transgender Temporalities...............................................................................335

Glossary ........................................................................................................................... 349

x MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

The Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender studies is an extraordinary

Nicole R. Fleetwood and Iris van der Tuin

xii MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

xiv MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

xvi MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

GENDER: TIME xvii

FOUNDING THEORIES OF TEMPORALITY: MARXISM,

4 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

CAPITALIST AND NATIONALIST TIME

ANTHROPOLOGICAL, COLONIAL, AND RACIAL TIME

6 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

PSYCHOANALYTIC TIME IN FEMINISM, DECONSTRUCTION,

8 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE TIME OF DECONSTRUCTION

QUEERING PSYCHOANALYTIC TIME

10 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

THE TIME OF AIDS

After the AIDS crisis no longer centered on gay

12 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

14 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

16 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

Is human behavior determined by a person’s biological makeup or a result of that person’s

SEX AND GENDER IN EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

20 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

EVOLUTION: DARWINIAN AND CREATIVE

HENRI BERGSON’S PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTS

22 MACMILLAN INTERDISCIPLINARY HANDBOOKS

problematic. Different parts of an organism have a

GILLES DELEUZE’S PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTS

What does it mean to be actualized? Deleuze’s philosophy undertakes an ongoing