Unai Bilbao Vélez How does feminism incorporate notions of time in its critiques of patriarchy and its proposals for the future? Time as we know, more than just a way of structuring life in a chronological perspective, is an “active ingredient in the making of matter and thus in the constitution of objects and subjects(Grosz, 13)”. As well as,“Knits together the subjective and the social, the personal and the public(Felski, 22)”. In this sense, understanding this connection between the subjects and its time leads to feminist theories to analyzed the importance of time as a more philosophical concept. In this scholar there has been four forms of time that are at the based of the critiques of patriarchy and its proposals for the future: time as redemption, time as regression, time as repetition, and time as rupture. Feminism incorporate this notions by looking to the past as well as the future, in different ways. But also having in common that they all reach beyond the empty mechanical measure of clock(Felski, 21). In the same way, feminist discourses have an intrinsic relation with a number of theorist in the questioning of time. Darwin, with the concept of indetermination, Nietzsche, that understood time as an eternally return to affirm its positive openness; then Bergson who introduce the spatialization into time, and finally Deleuze, pointing out the multiplicity and the irreducibility of life to prediction. This theories are the most productive and complex engagements of contemporary feminist theory(Grosz, 16). Therefore, the undermining of a patriarchal society and its proposals for the future are held by this complex conceptions of time as a source of knowledge to create an “ontology of becoming(Grosz, 15)”. This means, a re-elaboration of the conception of time to hold a subject that is always in the process of becoming something else, ultimately beyond its subjectivity. This ontology would it be crucial to face the question of “how to articulate a future in which futurity itself has a feminine form, in which the female subject can see itself projected beyond its present position as other to one”( Grosz, 15). In the other hand, if we take a look to the conceptions of time, understanding it as a redemption, for many women, feminism would meant above all a conviction that they would not repeat the lives of their mother. But in other cases, time as regression, such as African American women’s need to respect and revere the past, as there has been oppress their ancestors, other type of subjectivity relate it with time takes an important role in the feminist theory(Felski, 23,24).In this sense, this different ways of incorporating time notions in the feminist theory and so understanding the present and the future in an specific way are needed because an “attachment to the past can throw critical light on the present, allowing us to question the smugness of the now and the sovereignty of the new(Felski, 25)”. Finally, if time haves an influence and ultimately makes the subject, the aim of the feminism is to shape and change the times of psyches and bodies of the patriarchy and create new ones. In order words the projects of a radical feminist politics, “remains how to envisage and egender a future unlike the present, without being able to specify in advance what such a future entails(Grosz, 18/19)”. And this goal is driven by seen time as a dynamic force; beyond a restrictive linear and circular vision of time. Having access to the sources of the past which do not tied to any definitive way or with any particular orientation and which provide for it future proposals the resources by which to supercede the past and the present(Grosz, 18). 478 words
