Intersectional Temporalities of States in the Making: A Genealogical Approach.

Building on my recently finished dissertation, where I develop an “intersectional time-theory of the state”, this paper tries to put a genealogical lens on correlative construction of temporality and stateness. Hereby I confront state- and timetheoretical assumptions coming from the mainstream of political science and historical sociology with approaches from critical race, postcolonial, gender and queer studies. Building on Foucault and anthropological studies of the state, this paper argues against seeing both the state and time as naturalized entities, which could be taken for granted, but rather focusses on the power- and knowledgebased constructions, which enable and link certain images, practices and institutions of stateness and time, while making others unthinkable. In this regard I see forms of “doing state” as intrinsically connected to ways of “doing time” and vice versa, involving temporal norms, structures, images, narratives and embodied forms of subjectivation, which structure the conduct of conduct, but are always highly contested, therefore giving expression to forms of social struggle. In opposition to apocalyptic descriptions of a current „withering away of the state” (Engels), what we are confronted with, so the argument of the paper goes, are examples of transformations of stateness that correspond to fundamental changes of social time norms, which both have important effects on processes of temporal subjectivation.