When Time Warps
The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, 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 builds and expands on this legacy by examining the production of normative womanhood through racist tropes and colonial domination, charting a new feminist phenomenology based in the relationship between lived time and sexual violence.
Megan Burke’s strikingly original and compelling analysis lays bare the complex ways that temporality, the threat of sexual violence, and white supremacy work in concert to shape feminine subjectivity. This is critical phenomenology at its best: intersectional, unflinching, revelatory.
Ann Cahill, Elon University
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.
Megan Burke’s strikingly original and compelling analysis lays bare the complex ways that temporality, the threat of sexual violence, and white supremacy work in concert to shape feminine subjectivity. This is critical phenomenology at its best: intersectional, unflinching, revelatory.
Ann Cahill, Elon University
Megan Burke diagnoses the ‘sexualized racism’ through which white womanhood is consolidated and reads normative femininity as the product of violence that is experienced physically, spectrally, and existentially. Carefully training our attention on temporality, ‘chrononormativity,’ and the lived experience of gendered and racialized embodiment, When Time Warps is a valuable addition to the growing body of literature in critical phenomenology.
Gayle Salamon, author of The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia
Burke... sets forth a new direction for feminist phenomenology by focusing on the sexualized racism, temporality, and chrononormativity of sexual violence.
CHOICE
When Time Warps reveals how past rape myths haunt and animate our private and public safety protocols, offering a sobering account of how our mundane habits of gender contribute to American gun culture and undermine our freedom.
Radical Philosophy Review
Contents
Introduction. “You Rape Our Women”: Rethinking Gender, Race, and Rape
Prologue
1. Toward a Feminist Phenomenology of Temporality and Feminine Existence
I. The Past
2. Sexualized Racism and the Politics of Time
3. Beware of Strangers! White Rape Myths and Lived Gender
II. The Present
4. Anonymity and the Temporality of Normative Gender
5. Specters of Violence
III. The Future
6. Feminist Politics and the Difference of Time
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
