When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence

by Megan Burke

An inquiry into the phenomenology of “woman” based in the relationship between lived time and sexual violence  
Feminist phenomenologists have long understood a woman’s life as inhibited, confined, and constrained by sexual violence. In this important inquiry, author Megan Burke both builds and expands on this legacy by examining the production of normative womanhood through racist tropes and colonial domination. Ultimately, Burke charts a new feminist phenomenology based in the relationship between lived time and sexual violence. By focusing on time instead of space, When Time Warps places sexualized racism at the center of the way “woman” is lived. Burke transports questions of time and gender outside the realm of the historical, making provocative new insights into how gendered individuals live time, and how their temporal existence is changed through particular experiences. Providing a potent reexamination of the theory of Simone de Beauvoir—while also bringing to the fore important women of color theorists and engaging in the temporal aspects of #MeToo— When Time Warps makes a necessary, lasting contribution to our understanding of gender, race, and sexual violence.

Genres: Philosophy

208 pages, Paperback

Published October 15, 2019

Reviews

[Caleb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate what this book is trying to do, but I'm not convinced by what it actually accomplishes. As a piece of Beauvoir scholarship, it's innovative and ambitious...focusing on the temporality of feminine existence and trying to stretch Beauvoir's framework to account for histories of racialization and colonialism. However, as critical phenomenology, it falls short because it doesn't pay enough attention to the multiplicity of experience. I feel like it is focused so much on existential ontology and claims about the overarching structure of (white women's) existence, that it ignores what can be learned from actual experiences of intersectional oppression. This is not entirely the fault of the author...it is symptomatic of a deeper tension between the thoroughgoing phenomenological reading of Beauvoir and the more interdisciplinary political work of critical phenomenology. It isn't helped by a certain vagueness in many of the key claims...for example, I'm left trying to figure out what it actually means for a history of racial violence to be "dialed into" feminine existence, and how that manifests in life, where normative femininity is always imperfectly inhabited and sites of resistance can be unpredictable.

I'd like to give this 2.5 stars...I'll round up because 2 stars feels low. I do think that the project is laudable, and Burke does a nice job of reading Beauvoir and Lugones especially. More of this kind of work is definitely needed.