ABSTRACT
In the United States, gender is constituted—partially, but significantly—from such time claims. Gender constructs develop in and through people’s understandings of the way that relationships were gendered before they ever arrived on the scene. This chapter focuses on family history and ethnography to illustrate some of the ways in which gender is temporally produced and to examine the implications of time claims for gender theory. Time-traveling tethers history to gender to bodies with a certainty that obscures the moments when gender zeroes out, the circumstances of narration, and the inequalities that give oppression its sting. The chapter also focuses on historical memory not only via some of the usual sites and suspects—photographs, monuments, landscapes, commemorations—but also through bodies. The embodiment of historical memory precludes certain kinds of historical understandings, even as it reinforces the conviction of having a history and experiencing change.
