ABSTRACT
The relation between feminist struggle and concept of time was classically articulated in Julia Kristeva's essay 'Women's Time' in 1979. Alice Jardine was responding as an American critic in part to cultural specificity of the text, embedded as it was in a European arena informed by the concerns of French cultural-political life. Yet the logic of Kristeva's future perfect suggests rather a configuration of modernity than Jean-François Lyotard's postmodern, which might make us read her polytopic hope rather differently. Following the Second World War, Kristeva argues, the nation as a homogeneous entity becomes no more than a powerful ideological illusion, transformed by the pressures of globalisation. Women's time spatially conceived may mark a generative foundation of disjuncture, that principle of dissidence, but it isn't a social form of temporality thought in terms of the disjunctural times of modernity. The Woman's Labour does so not least because it registers in sexual political terms the disciplinary pressures of another form of modernity.
