Feminist temporalities: memory, ghosts, and the collapse of time

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the recurring use of symbols of the ghost and of memory in women’s and feminist writing and scholarship, and argues that these demonstrate an implicit challenge to linear conceptions of time. Viewing this spectral approach to temporality in consideration with Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, this paper argues for a feminist temporality that consciously draws on the temporal collapse of the ghost and memory in order to grapple with the traumas of the past and the potential(s) of the future. Further, this feminist temporality re-materializes the invisible or transparent fragments of past, present, and future, weaving these temporal threads into a fabric: the imbrication of warp and weft mirrors the collapse of past and future that the spectre brings about. This feminist temporality is utopian in outlook: it remembers the past in the present for the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist theory
• hauntology
• utopianism
• memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Although this paper has focused on examining the gendered and feminist dimensions of hauntology and memory, there is an equally urgent argument to be made for investigating the spectral and mnemonic legacies of colonialism and white supremacy, and anti-racist and postcolonial activism. Ian Baucom, for instance, touches on the hauntological memories of the slave trade in Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (2005), and María del Pilar and Esther Peeren discuss unexamined people, including undocumented migrants, in Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (2010). How does the spectre of memory function in re-remembering the pasts and presents of colonization and race-based oppression, and, equally, of Civil Rights movements, for the future, and what are the implications of using a figure like the spectre or like memory in accessing and utilizing these temporalities?

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brydie Kosmina

Brydie Kosmina is a researcher and sessional lecturer and tutor living in Tandanya/Adelaide. Her doctoral thesis, which explored cultural memories of the symbol of the witch and feminist memory strategies for reading popular culture, was awarded a Dean’s Commendation for Doctoral Thesis Excellence in 2020. Her research sits across many fields, including memory studies, popular culture studies, queer and feminist history, and sci-fi and fantasy film and literature.