Introduction: Novel Futures Beyond Times of Crisis

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• Introduction: Novel Futures Beyond Times of Crisis
• Angela Yang Du (bio) and Tara MacDonald (bio)

“Reclaiming my time, reclaiming my time, reclaiming my time.”

– Maxine Waters, 2017

During a United States committee hearing in 2017, Congresswoman Maxine Waters interrupted Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin with this now notorious phrase. Mnuchin had been responding to Waters’s question about a letter from her office with compliments and platitudes, a tactic that Waters recognized as stonewalling: “Thank you very much. I don’t want to take my time over how great I am.” When Mnuchin protested that, according to the rules, he should not be interrupted, Waters reminded him that, according to the same rules, “when you’re on my time, I can reclaim it” (“User Clip”). Although Waters invoked House procedural rules, which honor a representative’s time allotment when given the floor, a Black woman’s refusal to yield her time to a white, male colleague resonated powerfully with many who were fed up with electoral tensions, misogyny, and racism.

“Reclaiming my time” would continue to be an apt anthem a few years later, when the World Health Organization officially declared the spread of COVID-19 a pandemic.¹ The global crisis, which officially ended in May 2023, was (and is) marked by multiple kinds of lost, fractured, and precarious time: postponed or cancelled social gatherings, developmental delays in children and adolescents, the juggling of multiple jobs due to mass unemployment, the simultaneity of caregiving while working from home, the uncertainty of the pandemic’s length, and, of course, the cumulative cases of illness and death. This period was also marked by intense racial and political protests around the world. While these typically responded to incidents of social injustice, they also reminded people [End Page 365] of chronic conditions underlying present violence: historically disenfranchised groups did not necessarily register “the new normal” as a disruption.

The normalization of inequity during COVID-19’s spread was deeply gendered. Women across multiple sectors struggled with the competing demands of work and increased caregiving duties (Oleschuk, Squazzoni), resulting in a “shecession” (Gupta, Elting). Moreover, Black women were (and remain) disproportionately tasked with the labor of providing essential care, fighting racism, and performing what Christina Sharpe calls “wake work” (17). The pandemic confirmed what was already widely accepted: in a crisis, feminine, racialized, and marginalized bodies are asked to yield their time to perform more affective and domestic labor in the hopes that this work preserves some sense of normalcy. Sara Ahmed reminds us that, when time is shared, inequality is “manifest in how some take up time; time taken up can be time taken away from others” (55). Given the normalization of this inequity, how can these subjects “reclaim time”? What stories are told about time as given, taken, owned, or shared?

These and other questions were part of our conversation back in 2021, when we, the editors, first discussed gendered experiences of time. As fellow Victorianists with shared interests in the novel, feminist narrative theory, and temporality, and as women academics working in North American institutions, we shared professional and personal investments in gendered claims to time. “Strange times” became a pandemic slogan conveying both the period’s unpredictability and the sense that our collective and individual relations to time had altered. Despite the apparent novelty of this experience (due in part to the sheer scope of COVID-19), scholars of queer, feminist, and trans studies have long demonstrated that “strange temporalities” structure social groups. We borrow the phrase “strange temporalities” from Jack Halberstam, who declared back in 2005, “If we try to think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices, we detach queerness from sexual identity” (1).² In accordance with this understanding, “queerness...has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space” (1–2). More recently, the phrase “strange temporalities” appears in Ahmed’s monograph on the material histories of how we use objects, ideas, and words (9). In her conclusion, she reflects upon “queer use,” meaning the use of something for which or for whom it was not intended (199). While Ahmed reminds us that...