Ur led är feminismens tid

Om tidsmetaforer, otidsenlighet och gengångare i feministisk historieskrivning

Abstract

The intention of this article is to follow Elizabeth Grosz’ invitation to explore some of the ways that time constructions and time metaphors attain significance in contemporary feminist theory. Each history includes and produces different temporal structures. How these temporal structures work, the value ascribed to them, and their implications for feminist historiography, is discussed by looking at various examples of writing contemporary feminist history. How is the recent history between the 1970’s and the present of Swedish feminist theory portrayed? Using Claire Hemmings’ historiography of Anglo-American contemporary feminist theory, the article traces similar patterns in the way the development of Swedish feminism is described. The article shows that the common way to write the history of feminist theory in terms of breaks and turning points are deeply problematic. Basically these metaphors rest on a conception of time as serial and hierarchical. That the time is “out of joint” is a prerequisite for feminist work. Feminist theorization must be untimely in Nietzsche’s sense. The later part of the article shows how concepts like untimeliness, anachronism and Derrida’s concept of “hauntology”, along with contemporary queer theoretical research on the literary Gothic, offer alternative constructions of time, which might make it possible to see feminist pioneers, not as specters either to be revenged or silenced, but as ghosts, as un-deads in a positive sense.