Politicizing Time: Temporal Issues for Second-Wave Feminists

Abstract

Much sociological analysis of time understands it as a resource and focuses on the increasing dominance of capitalist temporality (e.g. Nyland, 1986). These works trace the commodification and standardization of time within industrial capitalism and the increasing control of capital over temporality. Roy (1990) has documented how workers cope with their lack of control over their work time through the use of humour and by interrupting work time with a fractured series of ritualized ‘times’ such as ‘coke time’. These and other instances (see Inglis and Holmes, 2000) may be said to represent forms of resistance to capitalist control of time, but are not an overtly politicized resistance. In fact, the issue of resistance to capitalist ‘control’ of time is underdeveloped in sociology because there has been little investigation of the connections between politics and time. In this chapter, I focus on time and feminist politics.