Temporality
In July 2017, Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) repeated the phrase “reclaiming my time” in the face of attempts to run down the clock on her questions as chair of the House Financial Services Committee. A procedural move, this statement nevertheless captured the nation’s attention, for it succinctly invoked the time stolen from people of color and women of all races, foregrounding time as a vector of control. Though we are conditioned to see time as a neutral substance through which we simply move in a forward direction, in academic discourse, the term temporality registers the collective patterning of stasis and change according to various regimes of power: the politics of our experience of time. Disciplinary tools as various as the whip in slavery, total quality management in capitalism, and domestic violence in the household have ensured that vulnerable bodies wait or move according to the dictates of others. Even within seemingly benign settings like homes and schools, bodies are trained to sleep, to wake up, to eat, to work, to have sex (or not), and to follow myriad activities keyed to maximum productivity in a process I have called “chrononormativity” (E. Freeman 2010). Moreover, the state organizes lives according to...