Feminist Time. Analysing Women’s Movement Temporalities

Feminist theory has shown how, in addition to knowledge, time is also a situated concept. Time is not neutral, objective and universal. The ways in which time is perceived and used vary, as does its impact. Similarly, social movement research refers to time in various ways. Time can be conceptualised as a given historical context in which collective action takes place, but also as memory in the legacy of movements, as an eventful temporality in reference to cycles of protests or revolutions, or again as a lived social experience in the biographical paths of activists. The way time is told and used influences movements’ repertoires of action, their claims and activists’ trajectories in time. Specific ideas of time are contextually bound, rooted in the current model of economy and society, and constantly promoted in order to guarantee its sustainment, such as the concept of neoliberal time. At the intersection between feminist theory and social movement studies, our study contributes to the understanding of time and conceptualizes political activity through a temporal perspective. Taking feminist movements as our case study, we ask: how do feminist movements use and think about time? What is the impact of time on the practices, discourses and politics of feminist movements? Feminist movements have historically elaborated on the concept of the personal as political. Rather than starting from established paradigms, the understanding of women's condition and its transformation unfold through a process, taking oneself as point of departure. Individual constraints, including time, are brought back to a gendered structural context that produces those oppressions which, in turn, can be challenged and acted upon through agency. In this, social movements function as microcosms of the types of gender structures and processes evident in the wider society and, just as politics is based on the personal, so is time. Moreover, social movements are often regarded as avant-garde, in the sense that they tend to process the limits of society faster as well as question them more quickly. Yet, feminist movements have emerged from the subtraction of the political agendas of social movements and from the repertoires of established contentious male-based action. In this sense, the feminist movement elaborates on a different idea time. When the organising of activities and protests seems to go too fast, the feminist movement slows down, interrupts the flow of neoliberal productivist time. We argue that the way feminist movements perceive and use time has an impact on their repertoires of action, strategies and outcomes. That is why we refer to feminist time as a concept that at once challenges neoliberal ideas of time as well as conventional social movements’ temporalities in relation to political agendas, confrontation and productivity. Based on data collected through 40 in-depth interviews administered to feminist activists in Italy and Madrid, from different generations, this study contributes to the debate in social movements and feminist research around the idea of a situated and non-neutral social time.