Megan Burke, "When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)
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How does Megan Burke’s personal background shape her feminist phenomenology of time?
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tyson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Denver. And I'm co-host of the channel along with Carrie Figdoor, Robert Talise, and Alexis McLeod. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Megan Burke, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sonoma State University. Their book, When Time Warps The Lived Experience of Gender, Race and Sexual Violence, is just out from Minnesota University Press. In when time warps, The lived experience of gender, race, and sexual violence, Megan Burke considers the relationship of sexual violence to lived time by re-examining and building upon the work of Simone de Beauvoir and in conversation with Judith Butler, Maria Lugonis, Maurice Merlo-Ponti, and many others.
Through developing a feminist phenom phenomenology of time, Burke allows us to consider how racialized colonial sexual domination structures feminine subjectivity. By focusing our attention on temporality, Burke deepens our understanding of how the past haunts the present. giving rise to sexual domination, as well as how we can actualize latent b possibilities to lay those ghosts to rest. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy, Megan. Thanks so much, Sarah. Um, would you start by telling us a bit about yourself, your background as a philosopher, um, and how your interests led you to write this book?
Yeah, sure. Um I have a bit of a kind of Wayward um A wayward background, I guess, or wayward into philosophy. I I as an undergrad Um, studied English and cultural studies. Um, and while there was bits of kind of continental philosophy sprinkled in there, um I honestly the first philosophy class I took, the only one I took as an undergrad was an intro class and I just didn't enjoy it at all. So I found my way into literature and thought that I wanted to um write queer young adult fiction and then later found myself in women's and gender studies thinking, oh maybe I could do policy um stuff. So I felt myself split and torn in these directions and then wound up in a feminist theory class taught by a graduate student who at the time was studying with uh Deborah Berghofen, who's a Beauvoir scholar.
And about a week or two into the course I found myself kind of knocking on Deborah's door. Um pleading and hoping that she would do an independent study with me. Um, because I just kind of fell in love with um French feminist thinkers in particular, um and so my way into philosophy was really through um women thinkers and feminist philosophy in particular and Um, I was just fortunate enough to kind of get some of the support I needed from. Other femin feminist philosophers to find my way in um a graduate program in philosophy without little um formal training um at the undergraduate level. Um in terms of my book, I became really interested in. thinking about time and sexual violence, um By engaging with classical and feminist phenomenological texts.
Um and in feminist phenomenology there had been some really rich discussions. Um there are really rich discussions on The relationship between um, women's existence, uh sexual violence, um, or what I end up calling sexual domination. and space, um, and the lived experience of space. And I I found myself asking You know, what about the temporal dimension, since it's such a central kind of theme and and feature of phenomenological considerations of um subjectivity? Um And so this kind of started my kind of thinking around time. Um But I think I've as I've kind of meditated on my own Preoccupation with time. Um I've realized I it may go back farther than that. Um I as an undergrad studying literature was really interested in
Um Shakespeare and in particular um The Tempest and one of my favorite um lines from that play is what's past is prologue. Um, and I have that kind of inscribed on my body in the form of a tattoo.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How does Megan Burke’s personal background shape her feminist phenomenology of time?
0:07–6:49
2
What is the relationship between Beauvoir’s concept of feminine existence and sexual domination?
6:49–13:34
3
How does the book link racialized colonial domination to the temporality of gendered subjectivity?
13:34–21:13
4
In what ways does the myth of the black male rapist transform into the contemporary myth of stranger rape?
21:13–28:44
5
What does “spectrality” mean in the context of sexual violence and how does it function as a temporal harm?
28:44–36:01
6
How does the “ghost‑busting” practice aim to interrupt the temporal structure of sexual domination?
36:01–43:16
7
What role do feminist “time‑reclamation” projects like the Mattress campaign play in challenging normative temporality?
43:16–50:47
8
What future research directions does Megan Burke propose for feminist, queer, and trans philosophy?
50:47–56:16
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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