Victoria Browne’s Feminism, Time, and Nonlinear History is part of a critical effort to think the history of feminism beyond the dominant model of an ascending series of ‘waves’. The book aims to offer a political alternative to the progressive linear understandings of where feminism has come from and where it is headed. Browne’s point of departure is that this brand of totalising model severely constrains the diverse ways in which feminist theories can account for the multiple trajectories and temporalities of feminism. Thus, Browne takes as her aim to unpack and elucidate the idea that historical time is multilinear and multidirectional.
Browne argues that historical time is lived time and should therefore be understood as an aspect of how people and societies experience, symbolise, and interact with their reality. Time ‘is produced through the intersection of different temporal layers and strands that combine in distinct ways to produce particular experiences and discursive formations of historical time’ (p. 31). Given this perspective, temporalisation is a complex ‘praxis’ of encoding time. This notion of a multiple and relational temporality serves as an alternative vision to the history of feminism, one that is not limited by any single unified narrative. This temporality poses the challenge of going beyond fractured temporalities to create a shared present (p. 40).
Browne discusses four different mechanisms of temporalisation which constitute the temporal dynamics through which certain ideas, experiences, and orderings of historical time emerge within feminism.
The first temporalisation is the time of the trace. Browne describes a historiography that can discover traces of the past; these serve as ontological anchors for ‘what really happened’. Following Paul Ricoeur, Browne argues that assumptions, perspectives, and social positions always condition our understandings of the past, and that in this sense, it is the present which leaves its traces in the past (p. 71). This two-way temporality of the trace opens up a critical space for feminism to view both its past and its present.
The second mode of temporalisation is narrative time. Acknowledging the critique of narrativist history as an inherently unifying praxis that erases a multiplicity of socially located experiences, Browne defends the plausibility of the notion of narrative time for feminist historiography. She argues that the structures and temporalities of narrative can be understood as ‘internal’ to historical time, rather than external or secondary to it, since practices of historical narration are grounded in the conditions and dynamics of shared historical existence.
Drawing on Walter Mingolo’s work, Browne offers an account of ‘pluritopic’ hermeneutics which presupposes the plurality of interpretative traditions or horizons within any experiential and cultural field. These different configurations of historical time are neither entirely distinct nor separate from each other, as they are intertwined as the constitutive elements of individuals’ interpretative horizons.
This understanding of pluritopic hermeneutics gives rise to the practice of ‘contrapuntal reading’. As Browne explains,
to read contrapuntally, then, is to recognize that if historical narratives are dependent upon intersubjective encounters and relations, it is inevitable that they will express a multiplicity of perspectives and experiences, even when they appear to be unified and internally consistent (p. 95, emphasis in the original).
The third mode of temporalisation discussed by Browne is calendar time. Rejecting the view of calendar time as public neutral time, Browne argues that, like any other praxis of temporalisation, calendar time is normative and produced by specific social practices of managing people’s actions. As such, calendar time is a mechanism that mediates and syncs lived-time experiences with regulatory, social, and cultural practices (p. 100). Browne further argues that as a social mechanism, calendar time expresses hegemonic forms of temporalisation. In order to conceptualise a calendar time that would figure in a feminist notion of historiography, Browne draws on Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt and thinks of calendar time as a complex process of public ‘time-reckoning’ (p. 117).
In the final chapter, Browne puts forward an account of generational time. This is the fourth mode of temporalisation discussed by Browne. As with previous chapters, Browne aims here to provide a pluralist understanding of temporality as part of a social-cultural experience, doing so without losing the connectedness that is crucial for feminist history and politics. The idea of generational time rests on the cultural imagery of the Oedipal, heteronormative, and patriarchal family in order to construe socio-cultural and political transmissions between people of different ages and eras. To expound the notion of non-Oedipal generational time, Browne discusses Luce Irigaray’s critique of the phallocentric Oedipal cultural order and her use of Greek mythology as a source of alternative imaginary for generational relations in which both mothers and daughters can affirm their subjectivity.
Browne then moves away from the psychoanalytic framework in order to argue that conceptualisations of post-Oedipal kinship should be more attuned to the social and cultural diversity of actual families. Yet Browne does not provide such an account. She concludes the chapter with the assertion that ‘generational orders have flexible and complex meanings and temporalities, operating within the orbit of multiple symbolic logics, cultural imaginaries and historical resonances’ (p. 141). Leaving the discussion at that is somewhat disappointing. For Browne does not provide any clue as to how the diversity of kinship formations could in fact be integrated into a sense of feminist transformative lineages, and how, if at all, these different lineages could interconnect to create an intergenerational space wherein women could draw on the past of other women, their struggles and knowledge, in order to face their own challenges.
Indeed, generational time is crucial for feminism as a political project. It is also a necessary aspect of the political subjectivity of feminists. Transformative lineages are maps in time, which result from the ongoing act of figuring relations that orient the political subject in her attempts to face the future productively. Creating such lineages is a work of political imagination that transgresses Oedipal, biological, religious, and nationalistic notions of lineage and heritage. Thus, transformative lineages are passionate historiographies which affirm the political desire for a non-patriarchal future. Yet Browne does not elaborate on these alternative forms of desire that bind the political subject with past feminist figures.
Browne’s book is a profound and innovative project. It suggests a notion of ‘politemporality’ which resonates with the idea of coalitional feminist politics. Browne’s analysis of time aims to implement a post-colonial and intersectional critique of western culture, and to offer a productive alternative. She addresses the question of how we might think about feminism as located within time in a way that would correspond with the diverse lived experiences of women; or, put slightly differently, how we might think about temporality – understood as lived time – as part of a feminist critique of the western subject. Browne, however, does not take into account feminism itself as a lived experience, nor the temporalities that feminist political subjectivity assumes or activates. Does feminism need a future qua political horizon? What is the political cost of being alienated and estranged from dominant narratives about the past? Which temporalities might become a resource and a mobilising force in feminist struggles? What might we learn from the Time’s Up campaign about political feminist temporalities? Browne’s discussion lays a rich and sound philosophical basis for addressing these questions and many more.