Chronofeminist Politics of Time: Materialist Feminist Perspectives on the Temporalities of Interlocking Crises

Time is a vital category for the analysis of current economic, ecological and political crises. The acceleration of time in a capitalist economy leaves many stressed and burned-out, ecological crises require urgent action and prevent or deteriorate possible futures and the current democratic crisis is accompanied by an accelerated authoritarian-neoliberal transformation that ‘moves fast and break things’. These crises are characterised by acceleration and disruption, reflecting the temporal order of the capitalist economy. The temporality of interlocking crises is furthermore highly gendered, exacerbating intersectional relations of power. The paper seeks to investigate the temporal and gendered dimensions of current interlocking crises. Drawing on feminist political economy, as well as feminist, ecological, economic, and theories of time, it analyses the relation between time and gender in economic, ecological, and democratic crises. Based on the analysis, it develops premises for a chronofeminist politics of time that extend beyond current feminist claims for reduced working hours. It argues that an accelerationist economy and politics undermine social reproduction, to be countered by chronofeminist politics that reclaim time.