Photo credit: The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
This is the fifth in a series of essays I’ve written on time. You can view a list of all of them on the first essay.
In my second essay in this series, I wrote about how work became the dominant temporality in our lives and how we bend our lives to be in sync with the demands of work time. Frese (2022) writes “time is a vector of power that structures not only our every daily activity, encounters, and actions, but also encroaches on the overarching course of life” (57). In reality, there are people who simply can’t be in sync with the dominant temporality and this may be a temporary, permanent, or intermittent condition. Whichever it is, it can be keenly painful to feel that out-of-syncness because being in sync is so pegged to career success and people’s sense of worth. I wrote about how soul-killing it was to stay yoked to the dominant temporality when I had my son and was dealing with physical illnesses as well as postpartum depression. For many parents and other caregivers, the demands of caregiving can push us out-of-sync at certain points in our lives. The needs of children and other people we care for don’t always conveniently occur during non-work hours. Flexibility in our jobs is helpful, but, as I wrote earlier, it usually requires the performance of increased commitment, so, for many, it means pushing our work into the nights and weekends we desperately need to recharge (and/or to offer more care).
Katie Walsh brings up an example that should be familiar to us all: “Remember the last time you got sick and had to take time off work, did you simply take the time you needed to recover, or did you guess how many days you were ‘allowed’ to be sick, as though you can simply stop being ill whenever it is convenient for capitalism?” If you’ve ever come back to work still sick or fatigued or depleted or in pain, you’ve experienced the pull to prioritize the dominant temporality over your well-being. You’ve experienced ableism.
People with disabilities often live lives out of sync with the dominant temporality. The temporality of disability is so often profoundly different from the dominant temporality that it has a name: crip time. Crip time, a term reclaimed from its traditional use as a slur, can mean so many things. I’d highly recommend Ellen Samuels’ essay “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time” to get a sense of just some of the different ways we can conceive of crip time. It’s much more than just needing more time for things. It’s the starts and stops. The unpredictability. The two steps forward and three steps back nature of being disabled. May Chazan (2023) defines it as “the non-linear, unpredictable, ever-changing, or multiply enfolded temporalities of being disabled” which is the most concise definition I’ve seen to describe something so multifaceted and complex.
People’s experiences of disability are so diverse that it’s difficult to generalize about crip time. According to Sheppard (2020) “there are as many forms of crip time as there are crip bodyminds, crip ways of being in the world and being in/through time” (40). In addition to being out of sync with the dominant temporality, there are also different seasons in crip time (also not experienced the same by everyone if at all): before disability, pre-diagnosis, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, grief, acceptance, recovery/remission. And people rarely move linearly through those categories. As Samuels writes, “disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings.” While the pain I experience is pretty horrible, the most frustrating part of my illness for me is the unpredictability. I don’t know how I’m going to feel from one day to another and thus what my capacity for work or contributing to my household will be. It makes it so hard to make plans. But the price of ignoring my body is too high as Samuels explains:
For crip time is broken time. It requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world. It forces us to take breaks, even when we don’t want to, even when we want to keep going, to move ahead. It insists that we listen to our bodyminds so closely, so attentively, in a culture that tells us to divide the two and push the body away from us while also pushing it beyond its limits. Crip time means listening to the broken languages of our bodies, translating them, honoring their words.
To do this, disabled people have to often live in the future, guessing how many spoons we have to do what we need and imagining what might happen if we use too many on any particular day. Chronic illness makes it nearly impossible to “live in the present” because not thinking about tomorrow could be ruinous.
There’s something quite beautiful about crip time too in that it can be positioned as a critique or resistance to the capitalist imperative of speed. To live outside of capitalist demands can feel paradoxically liberating. To prioritize ourselves, our well-being, is powerful. By prioritizing my health, by refusing to allow my bones to be ground up on the altar of capitalism, I set an example for others and break open the possibility of reorganizing the world around all of us prioritizing our health together. I love what Gauthier-Mamaril (2024) says about crip refusal:
Crip refusal is an important and generative tool in our effort to hack our way to a more just world. After all, crip time is our time. It is not “how to make up for lost abled time”. With every refusal we open a portal, a sliver, a crack that shows us that an alternate reality is possible. What Smilges calls “access thievery” is both a mundane and radical act: the act of taking what we need, taking the time we need, without waiting for it to be offered, without asking for permission (2023). The more comfortable you become living in crip time, the more adept you become at rewriting the rules of living.
Like the brilliant Alison Kafer (2013), I see the possibility in crip time to destroy our current toxic temporal norms and create something better for everyone:
crip time is flex time not just expanded, but exploded; it requires reimagining our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of ‘how long things take’ are based on very particular minds and bodies. We can then understand the flexibility of crip time as being not only an accommodation to those who need ‘more’ time but also, and perhaps especially, a challenge to normative and normalizing expectations of pace and scheduling. Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds. (27).
When so many simply can’t meet the organizational pace and others sacrifice pieces of themselves in order to do so, is the answer accommodation (as it is now if organizations do anything)? Or is the answer a radical rethinking of how our organizations work and how we work together? Do we dare change the pace? More on this in my next essay!
There’s clearly more to the dominant temporality than just the times and numbers of hours we are expected to be working. There’s also the definition of what a “normal” life course looks like. The late (and brilliant) Elizabeth Freeman (2010) coined the term “chrononormativity” to refer to “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” (3). We’re expected to live our lives in a certain linear way with certain milestones, including producing the next generation. In our society, there’s an expectation that we will grow up and become independent adults, find a partner, get married, have and raise children, and contribute productively to the capitalist project. Chrononormativity defines what is considered “normal” in how we move through our lives and careers. In our profession, chrononormativity might look like moving up the career ladder to Director/Dean/University Librarian or pushing towards the highest rank possible in the organization. The idea of chrononormativity came from queer studies because, historically, openly queer lives rarely followed the “normal” chronology. Its critique, however, can go beyond those who identify as queer. Freeman writes about how “failures or refusals to inhabit middle- and upper-middle-class habitus appear as, precisely, asynchrony, or time out of joint” (19). When success or normalcy is pegged to a certain progression through life or one’s career, it leads some to either grasp for that progression (when perhaps it isn’t what they really want or what fits their life) or to feel like they are out-of-step and somehow failed at life. I remember my Director in my first professional job expressed being disappointed in a colleague of mine for not being “ambitious” because she was happy in the staff job she had and didn’t want to go to library school and climb the career ladder. She had fully internalized chrononormativity and painted everyone who hadn’t bought into it as somehow deficient. I recently read the delicious book I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol and while MacNicol sees her disinterest in marriage and children as deeply liberating, it’s interesting to see how even some of her friends assume that she ultimately must want these things and thus not understand her hookups in Paris with 27 year old men as a 46 year old woman.
From the rejection of chrononormativity came the concept of queering time. Jack Halberstam (2005) writes that queer time is a kind of warping of normative time, “an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices” and also “time outside of productivity.” Halberstam sees different temporalities, milestones, and disruptions in the lives of queer people, so defining the normality or success of queer lives by heteronormative standards makes no sense. Like crip time, here’s no one definition of what queer time looks like; instead, it is more a queering of the very notion of chrononormativity and a freeing from heteronormative and linear ways of looking at time. In that sense, it can be both an acknowledgement of queer people’s lived experiences outside of the dominant temporality and queer people’s rejection of and resistance to chrononormativity. Carrie Sandahl describes queer time as a “wry critique of hegemonic norms” (as quoted in Kafer 2021, 426). While her relationships are heterosexual, I see MacNicol also queering time as a “woman of a certain age” (AKA my age) rejecting the traditional chrononormative limitations and wants she is supposed to be subject to and living life joyfully on her own terms.
Queer time might sound a lot like crip time and there’s a reason for that. The notion of crip time was largely based on writings on queer temporality. We know that for so long, queerness was viewed through the lens of ableism and defined as mental illness. Both temporalities have different seasons and milestones that define the life course as different from heteronormative and able-bodyminded. I was, at first, going to write separate essays on crip time and queer time, but they are so deeply entwined that it didn’t make a lot of sense. In fact, both have many key thinkers in common (Alison Kafer, Elizabeth Freeman, Ellen Samuels, etc.). Valuable critiques and brilliant ideas about crip time and disability justice have also been published by disabled feminist thinkers of color (Leah Piepzna-Samarsinha, Sami Schalk, Jina Kim, Audre Lorde, Moya Bailey, etc.) bringing the various lenses of their identities and scholarship to bear on these topics. As Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha writes in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice:
The histories of white supremacy and ableism are inextricably entwined, both forged in the crucible of colonial conquest and capitalist domination. One cannot look at the history of US slavery, the stealing of indigenous lands, and US imperialism without seeing the way that white supremacy leverages ableism to create a subjugated ‘other’ that is deemed less worthy/abled/smart/capable … We cannot comprehend ableism without grasping its interrelations with heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism.
I deeply appreciate their critiques of the whiteness of traditional disability studies and their more collectivist visions of what disability studies could be. According to Schalk and Kim, “by situating disability within other overlapping systems of domination, feminist-of-color disability studies also emphasizes coalition, affinity, and solidarity.” Solidarity… I love that. In my next essay, I’ll be highlighting a brilliant essay by Moya Bailey that looks at what an ethics of pace might look like. I’m not an expert in these topics and maybe this is just a product of what I’ve chosen to read, but it really feels like queer, disabled women of color have the most progressive, solidarity-focused, and visionary views of what a more just and humane future could look like. They are the futurists I want to listen to.
I’ve come to really appreciate groups whose temporal norms exist outside of the dominant temporality because it’s nice to find practices that either do not conform to or that actively resist these hegemonic norms. It breaks open the possibility of other ways of being in relation to time. I love that Islamic temporalities, specifically Muslim prayer temporality, have stood the test of time in spite of how out-of-sync they are with the demands of capitalism. They do not conform to colonial and neoliberal notions of time, which makes so much sense since one’s relationship with God should take precedence if you’re a believer (I’m not but I can appreciate faith). I appreciate other groups who have reclaimed their culture’s lack of Western-valued punctuality as a point of pride. Jenny Odell writes about this in Saving Time:
This brings me back to “Filipino time.” From one angle, the term looks derogatory, given that it was coined by the Americans who took over the Philippines at the turn of the century and who found Filipino people to be less than punctual. Still, it’s often invoked as a sort of inside joke or even a wry point of pride, at least among people I know. When a recent memorial service that my mom attended started late, my cousin said, “What do you expect? It’s a Filipino church.” (Odell 2023, 203)
That pride in a cultural practice that also thumbs its nose at colonial and neoliberal values around punctuality really holds a special place in my heart. Ellen Samuels and Elizabeth Freeman (2021) ask “what if we all simply took as much of our time as possible back from late capitalism? What if we developed new forms of punctuality centering on presence, simultaneity, and concurrence: new ways of being together in time?” (251). I’m not 100% sure what that would look like, but I’m very interested in finding out.
Our society has constructed so many norms or “idealized standard[s] of human life” (Hendren 2020, 10). According to Sarah Hendren, these norms are relatively recent, most of them having come from the scientific and social scientific work of population data collection and the notion of “the average man” that only came into being in the mid-19th century. And these norms were quite faulty. For example, about 150 years ago, we were told that the average body temperature is 98.6, and it’s not anymore, yet the myth persists (and wow is modern medicine good at uncritically using norms like BMI to bully and scare patients). But more than that, they created this narrow vision of normal that keeps so many of us chasing or trying to live up to or feeling alienated by standards that don’t fit for probably 90%+ of people (oh, and by the way, a lot of these great 19th century statisticians were eugenicists!). As a parent, I remember worrying hugely about the few areas where my son was not developing on schedule as if every child could possibly be developing exactly the same way on exactly the same timeline like they’re little machines. How will my child’s life be forever ruined because he can’t use a sippy cup when the books say he should?!?! These constructions of normal serve only to harm us and I am deeply appreciative of queer studies, disability studies, and critical race theorists for revealing these social constructions for what they really are: hegemonic tools of social control and stigmatization.
I’m grateful to those writing about queer and crip time for opening up new possibilities for being in relationship with time and showing us that our relationship to time doesn’t have to be as harmful as it is when capitalist productivity is centered. I’ll leave you with an exhortation from Katie Walsh, writing about crip time: “I urge you to reconsider your understanding of time in the workplace and reckon with the idea that your worth cannot be determined by the schedule on which you operate.” As I and others have written before, nothing about how we work is inevitable.
If you’re interested in learning more about disability in libraries here are a few resources:
Kumbier, Alana, and Julia Starkey. “Access is not problem solving: Disability justice and libraries.” Library Trends 64, no. 3 (2016): 468-491.
Manwiller, Katelyn Quirin, Amelia Anderson, Heather Crozier, and Samantha Peter. “Hidden Barriers: The Experience of Academic Librarians and Archivists with Invisible Illnesses and/or Disabilities.” College & Research Libraries 84, no. 5 (2023): 645.
Manwiller, Katelyn Quirin. “Disability in Academic Libraries: Moving from Accessibility to Inclusion.” PaLA CRD Connect and Communicate Webinar Series (2023 Nov).
Schomberg, Jessica. “Disability at work: Libraries, built to exclude.” In The Politics and Theory of Critical Librarianship, ed. Karen P. Nicholson and Maura Seale. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2018: 111.
Schomberg, Jessica J., and Wendy Highby. 2020. Beyond Accommodation : Creating an Inclusive Workplace for Disabled Library Workers. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press.
Other works cited:
Frese, Hannah. “Time to Care: Disabled and queer lived realities of care and time as forms of non-normative resistance.” Master’s thesis, 2022.
Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds : Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham [NC: Duke University Press.
Gauthier-Mamaril, Élaina. “MedHums 101: What is Crip Time?” The Polyphony (2024 Jan 26), https://thepolyphony.org/2024/01/26/medhums-101-what-is-crip-time/
Halberstam, Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place : Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press.
Hendren, Sara. What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World. Penguin, 2020.
Kafer, Alison. Feminist, queer, crip. Indiana University Press, 2013.
Kafer, Alison. “After crip, crip afters.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (2021): 415-434.
May, Heather. “Practice-Based Research: Working in Crip Time.” Performance Matters 9, no. 1 (2023): 205-221.
Odell, Jenny. Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture. Random House, 2023.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. Care Work : Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Samuels, Ellen. “Six ways of looking at crip time.” Disability studies quarterly 37, no. 3 (2017).
Samuels, Ellen, and Elizabeth Freeman. “Introduction: crip temporalities.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (2021): 245-254.
Schalk, Sami, and Jina B. Kim. “Integrating race, transforming feminist disability studies.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 46, no. 1 (2020): 31-55.
Sheppard, Emma. “Performing normal but becoming crip: Living with chronic pain.” Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research 22, no. 1 (2020): 39-47.
Walsh, Katie. “Cripping Time at Work” Early Magazine. (2023, March 30). https://www.earlymagazine.com/articles/cripping-time-at-work
Ward, Marchella. “Queer Time, Crip Time, Woman Time, Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Muslim Time… Remaking Temporality Beyond “the Classical”.” In Critical Ancient World Studies, pp. 172-188. Routledge, 2024.
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