Reviews:

“Megan Burke’s strikingly original and compelling analysis lays bare the complex ways that temporality, the threat of sexual violence, and white supremacy work in concert to shape feminine subjectivity. This is critical phenomenology at its best: intersectional, unflinching, revelatory.”

—Ann Cahill, Elon University

“Megan Burke diagnoses the ‘sexualized racism’ through which white womanhood is consolidated and reads normative femininity as the product of violence that is experienced physically, spectrally, and existentially. Carefully training our attention on temporality, ‘chrononormativity,’ and the lived experience of gendered and racialized embodiment, When Time Warps is a valuable addition to the growing body of literature in critical phenomenology.”

—Gayle Salamon, author of The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia

Description:

An inquiry into the phenomenology of “woman” based in the relationship between lived time and sexual violence

Feminist phenomenologists have long understood a woman’s life as inhibited, confined, and constrained by sexual violence. In this important inquiry, author Megan Burke both builds and expands on this legacy by examining the production of normative womanhood through racist tropes and colonial domination. Ultimately, Burke charts a new feminist phenomenology based in the relationship between lived time and sexual violence.

By focusing on time instead of space, When Time Warps places sexualized racism at the center of the way “woman” is lived. Burke transports questions of time and gender outside the realm of the historical, making provocative new insights into how gendered individuals live time, and how their temporal existence is changed through particular experiences.

Providing a potent reexamination of the theory of Simone de Beauvoir—while also bringing to the fore important women of color theorists and engaging in the temporal aspects of #MeToo—When Time Warps makes a necessary, lasting contribution to our understanding of gender, race, and sexual violence.

Contents:

Introduction. “You Rape Our Women”: Rethinking Gender, Race, and Rape

Prologue

Chapter 1. Toward a Feminist Phenomenology of Temporality and Feminine Existence

Part I. The Past

Chapter 2. Sexualized Racism and the Politics of Time

Chapter 3. Beware of Strangers! White Rape Myths and Lived Gender

Part II. The Present

Chapter 4. Anonymity and the Temporality of Normative Gender

Chapter 5. Specters of Violence

Part III. The Future

Chapter 6. Feminist Politics and the Difference of Time

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author:

Megan Burke is assistant professor of philosophy at Sonoma State. Their work has appeared in Hypatia, philoSOPHIA, and Feminist Theory.

Target Audience:

This book is a must-read for people interested in theory and philosophy and feminist phenonenology based in the relationship between lived time and sexual violence.