Temporality and Disability

Abstract Temporality is a crucial domain of investigation for philosophy of disability and for interdisciplinary theoretical research that addresses disabled experience. While temporality broadly has long been a mainstay of philosophical domains ranging from metaphysics to phenomenology, only in the early 21st century have theorists made explicit the relevance of temporality to questions of disability. Disability is often figured as an immovable, “fixed” object, atemporalized and naturalized. Yet institutions and nondisabled people often demand a temporal story, asking for details about how one became disabled, a projected future (or lack thereof), and a prediction of the duration of disability. This entry foregrounds the work of disabled philosophers and disabled theorists on temporality. At least four significant relationships between disability and temporality ought to be noted by philosophers and theorists alike. First, notions of delay, abnormal development, or other disordered relationships to time have been key to the modern intersectional apparatuses of disability that have concretized themselves since the 19th century. Development and temporality apply not only to individualized taxonomies of capacity but also to the collective and biopolitical interpretation and constitution of entire groups of people as degenerates, delayed, or primitive. In contemporary academia, many theorists uncritically perform temporal pathologization, a continuation of these ways of thinking. Second, both philosophers and disability theorists more broadly have developed critiques of futurity in mainstream discourses, practices, and political analyses. Disability is often absent in articulations of desirable futures, and disability itself is consistently framed through dominant, medicalized models as something that jeopardizes the future. A significant part of thinking about disability is thus refiguring the position of futurity, including the conjuring of alternative futures. Third, philosophers are greatly aided by rigorous engagement with the concept of crip time. Crip time, a concept emerging from the work of crip theorists and activists alike, challenges temporal pathologization, at both individual and collective levels, by denaturalizing everyone’s required subservience to clock time. Disabled lived experience reveals crip time as both necessary and helpful: finding the flexibility to work on “crip time” provides moments of liberation. Yet crip time is also constituted by the various delays, speeds, or forced durations that disabled people come up against in navigating bureaucracies, accommodations, and institutions. Fourth, then, philosophy of disability has a responsibility to analyze modes of temporal harms. Temporal harms are present in many spheres; these harms are particularly salient in colonial and postcolonial environments as well as academia. These aspects of disability’s relationship to temporality can be seen, for example, through the case study of post-pandemic time.