Temporal Refusals: Towards Reparative Temporalities

• In Event: Reparative Education: The Politics and Practice of Repair

Abstract

Girl-focused empowerment interventions craft structurally marginalized young women into forward thinking dreamers. This temporal project demands movement along a civilizational continuum and is based on racialized and gendered hierarchies. This temporal movement requires the cultivation of what I theorize as affective human capital. Drawing on 18-months of transnational feminist ethnographic research across interventions in New Delhi and New York City, I illustrate how affective self-transformations demand embodiments of confidence and regulation anchored in an anticipatory future-oriented logic. While girls are positioned to perpetually aspire, my research shows that the temporal regimes of girl-focused interventions are refused. It is precisely because epistemes of time and related ontologies are rendered virtuous that they are also highly contested (Bear 2016). In this paper, I argue that young women participating in these girl-focused life skills educational projects refuse lessons of sensorial discipline and orientations towards the future. These temporal refusals are gestures towards temporalities that offer reparative onto-epistemic possibilities. I argue that the category of the girl provides unique potential for thinking about temporal refusal.

I define temporal refusal as a disruption of dominant temporalities and related racialized & gendered regimes. Indigenous scholar Audra Simpson (2014) theorizes refusal as both a stance and a theory of the political that reflects an ongoing refusal to consent to the apparatuses of the state. In my theorization of temporal refusal, I engage Deleuze & Guattari’s (1977) notion “line of flight” to suggest temporal refusals might be momentary. A temporal refusal might not take hold; it may not even be intentional. Rather, it may be a temporary line of flight into another temporal terrain, inviting & imagining other onto-epistemic existences. This paper follows the “lines of flight” taken by young women in both New Delhi and New York City, and pays careful attention to the reparative educative possibilities they offer. I consider the temporal implications that young women have about being present, escaping, pleasure and collective care.

The girl, as scholars have noted, is positioned in a state of becoming (Harris, 2004). As a category, unlike the fully formed woman, the girl has more capacity to be malleable, to be “developed.” At once, this positioning centers girls as targets of development within the development industry and girl-empowerment initiatives (Moeller, 2018). The assumption underlying this broader project is that girls can be molded and shaped into future-oriented subjects that can shape the futures of communities, nations, and the world. Engaging Laura Bear’s argument that dominant epistemes of time that are laden with value are contested, this future-oriented potential attached to the girl has generative capacity for refusal. That is, the very state of “becoming” attached to the category girl also provides possibilities for thinking of temporalities otherwise. Feminist scholars such as Sara Ahmed (2014), Saidiya Hartman (2020) and others illuminate how the everyday lives of young women hold revolutionary seeds of otherwise. My theorization of temporal refusal contributes to this conversation illustrating how girls on the margins invite temporalities that gesture beyond the trappings of liberal humanism.

Author

• Karishma Desai, Rutgers University