Gendered Time in the Age of Deconstruction

Bibliographic Data

ID4356465
AuthorsPamela Odih (corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume8
Issue1
Pages9-38
Publication date1999-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTime & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0961-463X • E-ISSN: 1461-7463
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0961463x99008001002
OpenAlexW2038187012
LanguageEN
Citations received28
References cited20

Representational linear time is premised on the rational ordering and control of space and time and the denial of différance; it knows no Other. Linear time's claim to neutrality has, in recent years, been the subject of much feminist debate. Davies and Leccardi have, for example, argued the incompatibility of `women's time' with a linear perspective which separates work from leisure, the public from the private, and task from clock-based orientations to time. But many of these feminist challenges are epistemologically grounded in the very same representational tradition, which has secured the hegemony of linear time. For these feminist discourses tend towards either a strategy of reversing the phallocentricity of linear time and or synthesizing the binary elements of their discourse (i.e., its male/female opposition) into mutually inclusive dualistic pairs. The problem that unites these respective strategies is that they fail to displace the dualistic epistemology that is at the heart of Enlightenment thought. Conversely, this paper argues that a way to destroy the male/female time opposition is not to invert it but to deconstruct it. Deconstruction, as defined by Derrida, is a strategy, which attacks the classical oppositions of the metaphysics of presence and in doing so, destroys the phallocentric binary that it creates. The alternative discourse of gendered time presented in this paper defines masculine and feminine time(s) as elements that represent multiple differences, pluralities of characteristics that cross and re-cross the alleged boundary between the two. It is in this sense that discourses of gendered time can fracture the masculine fiction of unity that is linear time and reveal how these unities have repressed an Other

Aesthetics · Binary opposition · Deconstruction (building · Epistemology · Hegemony · Neutrality · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law · Philosophy

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