Kennedy applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book Reclaiming Time: The Transformative Politics of Feminist Temporalities, and reported the following:
Page 99 is the last page of chapter two, “Precarity and the Girl-Time Imaginary.” In this conclusion to the chapter, I wrap up my reading of Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and remind the reader of some of the arguments I have made about Ward’s novel and several of the texts analyzed in the chapter such as Tupelo Hassman’s Girlchild. In the chapter, I analyze contemporary working-class fictions of girlhood and argue that some texts—such as Salvage and Girlchild— challenge what I term the “girl-time imaginary” as it is depicted in contemporary popular representations of American girls. I argue that Ward’s work in particular has been devoted to reframing those racialized discourses of class that present Black girls as symbols of sexualized poverty, “at-risk” because of their failure or inability to calibrate their lives to the demands of nationalist and capitalist tempos of bourgeois development. Ward’s Salvage the Bones is written expressly to speak to this representation of poor Black girls who “are silenced, they are misunderstood, and they are underestimated. Black girls period: pregnant young black girls, poor black girls—girls like that are diminished in American culture” (Ward, qtd. in Hoover 2011). I am specifically interested in how Ward’s depiction of the character Esch depicts the adultification of Black girls and how that adultification is seen as Black girls’ deviance rather than as an effect of patriarchy and racist capitalism. This is true more generally of the representations I examine in the chapter; I show how dominant representations articulate consumerist, sexualized sensibilities of working-class femininity that displace structures of capitalist patriarchy as a temporal frame for understanding girlhood. What I mean by this, is that successful girlhood is represented as the ability to develop along the lines of the chrononormative as defined by queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman, “Chrononormativity is a mode of implantation, a technique by which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts. Schedules, calendars, time zones, and even wristwatches inculcate what the sociologist Evitar Zerubavel calls ‘hidden rhythms,’ forms of temporal experience that seem natural to those whom they privilege. Manipulations of time convert historically specific regimes of asymmetrical power into seemingly ordinary bodily tempos, which in turn organize the value and meaning of time” (Freeman 3). The adultification of Black girls excludes them from privileges of care practiced in social institutions such as education and the media where the time of girlhood is imagined as a platform for future success. In arguing that Ward reframes deviance as exclusion and social abandonment, I argue that Ward’s writing is reparative and, on this page, argue that Black feminist writing more generally can be argued to be reparative, inasmuch as it challenges the dominance of white time that values white life/time over Black life/times.Learn more about Reclaiming Time at the State University of New York Press website.
Readers of page 99 would a get a partial idea of my book, but would miss the theoretical concepts that I attempt to bring into conversation throughout the book, specifically reparative reading as introduced in the work of Eve Sedgwick and taken up by other queer theorists and reparative justice as theorized in critical race feminism. One quote from page 99 helps explain how this reading of Ward is related to the chapter as a whole, and more importantly, some of the key concepts of the book: “The harm of reprofuturity as with chrononormativity is that these are regimes of white time in capitalism, eugenic temporalities that depend on the social deaths of those who put national futures at risk” (99). It would be difficult for readers to understand this quote without reading the introduction to the book, but I hope that it is sufficiently intriguing to make them want to read more about the concepts discussed in the sentence, concepts key to critical time studies, queer theory, feminism, and critical race theory. If they did read the introduction and other chapters in the book, they might see that it’s in the later chapters that I make direct connections between reparative reading /writing and reparations by analyzing, for example, how contemporary feminist and queer writing has used medical and legal archives of eugenic sterilization to support reproductive justice movements for reparations to survivors of sterilization abuse, those who historically have been identified as a threat to national and capitalist futures.
--Marshal Zeringue
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