Gender Futures:
Law, Critique and the Struggle for Something More  

3-4 April 2009 @ Westminster University, London

Lisa Adkins, Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

"Feminism, Time and the Future of Gender"

In recent feminist theory there is an increasing recognition that the relations of temporality that it assumes are profoundly connected with its political efficacy. This is so not least because with its paradigmatic concerns with change and the creation of the new feminist theory is necessarily and intimately tied to questions of the future (Grosz, 2000; Coleman, 2008). In this context, there are a variety of calls for feminist theory to make its relations of temporality explicit, a task which is necessary if feminist theory is to secure its claim that it offers alternative futures. Feminist theory is however not alone in its commitment to the future. Since its very inception the Sociological enterprise had a concern with the creation of the new. While from a feminist point of view the futures imagined by classical social theorists may be far from desirable, nonetheless as Adam (2004) has crucially noted the concern for the future found at the very beginning of the Sociological enterprise was intimately linked to industrialisation, not least to the rise of regimes of knowledge (including socio-scientific knowledge) which located time and the future as a subject (and object) of social action. For the sociological enterprise therefore questions of the future (including the question of which futures are possible) are always tied to the issue of social action. Thus for Bourdieu (2000) (human) practice does not take place in time but makes time. Feminist theory moreover shares much in common with this sociological orientation to time since its futures are also made possible via a hinging of time to action. Yet while this is so, in its recent calls towards the making of its relations of temporality explicit, feminist theory has tended to bracket the possibility of shifts in the very the co-ordinates of action. In this talk I will argue for a confrontation with these shifting co-ordinates, a confrontation which necessitates that feminist theorists not simply temporalize theory to engage a future but confront a restructuring of time itself.