October 14, 2019
Philosophy Department Dr. Megan Burke’s new book When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race and Sexual Violence (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) examines the nature of “woman” in lived time given the reality of sexual violence. "Feminist phenomenologists have long understood a woman’s life as inhibited, confined, and constrained by sexual violence. In this important inquiry, author Megan Burke builds and expands on this legacy by examining the production of normative womanhood through racist tropes and colonial domination, charting a new feminist phenomenology based in the relationship between lived time and sexual violence.”
“[I]nsofar as one’s lived experience or social positioning as a woman is constituted through a complex field of social structures and classificatory schemas, who can assume a feminine existence, whom it is imposed on, and who is interpolated through its ideological framework is profoundly dependent on one’s assigned gender, sexuality, race, class, and national status as well as one’s geopolitical location"
Burke’s book was mentioned in Ms. Magazine’s “Reads for the Rest of Us.” "Dr. Megan Burke examines the idea of “woman” from a perspective of sexualized racism and violence. Burke makes an important contribution with their work; one that explores time, white supremacy, racial violence and womanhood in a new, invigorating way."