Shain (2000: 159) argues that an analysis of young Asian women’s experiences means that ‘race, gender, class and age divisions cannot be mechanically added or reduced to one or other of the divisions’. For this reason, Shain’s research focuses on ‘the complex reality of the lived experiences of young Asian women with reference to the […]

what people are experiencing [in this global world order] is not transparently clear, and we lack sufficiently subtle connections for collectively building effective theories of experience. Present efforts — Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, anthropological — to clarify even ‘our’ experience are rudimentary. (Haraway, 1997a: 519) Alongside Benhabib’s (1992) exile and Braidotti’s (1994) nomad, Haraway’s (1985; 1991; […]

Whilst personal experience undoubtedly influences one’s perspective and understanding, many current references to it are determinist and essentialist. Experience/identity is substituted for, or deemed to be equivalent to, politics, as if critical awareness and understanding are inscribed on a person through forms of oppression, with an implicit or explicit presumption that such awareness is inaccessible […]

In particular, I will suggest that, like the lives of proletarians according to Marxian theory, women’s lives make available a par­ticular and privileged vantage point on male supremacy, a vantage point that can ground a powerful critique of the phallocratic institutions and ideology that constitute the capitalist form of patriarchy… I will suggest that the […]

The meaning of experience is perhaps the most crucial site of political struggle over meaning, since it involves personal, psychic and emotional investments on the part of the individual. It plays an important role in determining the individual’s role as social agent. It affects both where and how the individual acts and whether her actions […]

Central to Walby’s (1997) research is the question ‘Is the condition of women in society improving or getting worse?’ Through a materialist feminist theoretical framework Walby analyses statistical data sets and the findings from survey research that gathered life history data. Her research is centrally concerned with issues of time and space in the following […]

What I am about to tell you, or confide in you, today, will remain rather primary, loose. This is both deliberate and due to lack of time. But what time do I mean? The time that has not, or has not yet, been loosed by all that is too bound, too secondarily bound, thereby leaving […]

The term ‘biological clock’ is a relatively familiar term that is applied to Western women who decide to delay child-bearing until they have established their careers. Once women reach their mid-thirties, how­ever, time is seen to be running out. Indeed, Crouch and Manderson (1993) comment that the issue of the timing of motherhood is now […]

  Psychoanalytic theories of the development of the self suggest that key events in the development of sexuality or personality occur at a fixed point in time. Freud, for example, argued that the first five years of a child’s life determined sexual orientation and personality. In particular, Freud considered that at about the age of […]

The linear conception of time — where we see time as unfolding in a straight and unbroken line, unidirectional and heading towards an unlimited horizon — is the time that has preponderance today. On a concrete level, this time consciousness is mirrored in our time reckoning where atomically measured seconds flow into minutes and hours […]