Time, Equality and Social Justice in the Context of Covid-19: Queer-Feminist Perspectives

Structures, norms and affective arrangements of time and temporality often proceed in an unrecognized, habitualized way, as long as they are “in tune” with the normal functioning of everyday life. The pandemic situation put large amounts of stress on social systems, so that temporal aspects of power and inequality, which for a long time have remained in the background suddenly become visible. In this paper I want to develop a critical perspective on issues of temporal equality, justice and power in late-capitalist societies, which I try to investigate through intersectional queer-feminist analysis of care-work in the context of Covid-19. Hereby I want to reflect on the question, in how far time and temporality have to be conceived as a forgotten dimension in political science discourse on power, inequality and justice, and correct this by combing political concept work with empirical findings from queer-feminist time studies (e.g. Odih 2003; Halberstam 2005; Bryson 2007; Freeman 2010, 2019. Rohy 2009). Until now, notions of temporal equality and justice have been framed largely in individualistic, quantitative and substantial terms, like in Robert Goodin’s use of “discretionary time”, pointing to the amount of time which remains when we subtract 1) paid labour, 2) unpaid labour and 3) care for the personal body (Goodin 2010). Such individualized and quantified notions of free time have been criticised recently by feminist and queer-scholars by emphasizing the heterogeneity of temporal experience, which cannot be subsumed under a unified temporal measure, but also by pointing out intrinsic contradictions of such reasoning with regard to care-work. But how then could a possible perspective on time, equality and justice look like, if a common, universalising frame is understood as being suspicious of being used as a tool of power and domination? In this regard, interdisciplinary approaches emerging from the field of critical social time studies have shown that social time should rather be conceived from a relational, non-substantial, qualitative perspective, which of course has fundamental consequences for dealing with questions of temporal justice and equality (Bastian 2011, Baraitser 2017). Bringing together current discourses on time and temporality in social time studies with queer-feminist analysis and theories on power, equality and social justice, I will reflect on three points, which become especially visible in Covid-19 pandemic crisis: 1) how different forms temporal power are actualized as technology of directing the conduct of conduct of individuals and groups in their everyday behavior (Portschy 2019). This is related 2) to the ways that time is not only unequally shared among structurally differently positioned individuals but also to the problem that the time of different social actors and groups is not equally valued, making necessary 3) the development of a time-theoretical framework, which considers questions of temporal equality and justice from a queer-feminist angle.