Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age

by Kath Weston

"Gender in Real Time is a provocative call to refocus gender studies on the neglected political economy of space-time: the historically sedimented social relations, demands of duration and memory that are gender's very fabric. The connections Weston draws are fascinating and suggestive. This is a book that inspires!"
—Rosemary Hennessy, author of Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism

"Who would have thought that mathematics could prove so important to feminist and queer theory? Kath Weston's eloquent meditation on the time-space continuum and the concept of zero provocatively argues for the importance of the undetermined and the 'unsexed' in thinking about sex and gender. Gender in Real Time is wise, witty, and a wonderful read."
— Linda Williams, author of Hard Core:Power, Pleasure, and the 'Frenzy of the Visible'

"This compelling book literally moves gender theory into new dimensions by making bodies 'come up temporal' and take up space. Gender matters differently after reading this powerfully inventive and evocative account of bodies, visibility, and representation in a global economy."
—Sarah Franklin, co-author of Global Nature,Global Culture: Gender, Race, and Life Itself

"Weston's compelling presence throughout the book provides a sense of companionship: this journey may be challenging and sometimes awkward, but reading Gender in Real Time is an opportunity to walk through these ideas with the past, future, and 'now' of and for gender studies in mind...[Weston] succeeds at continuing to fray the edges of seemingly definitive academic genres, weaving together ethnographic insights, stories from interviewees which can be cross-referenced with those in earlier work, critical perspectives on gender and sexuality studies, and well-crafted, careful writing."
—Current Anthropology

Genres: Queer, Feminism, Gender

208 pages, Hardcover

First published September 20, 2002

About the author

Kath Weston is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. A Guggenheim Fellow and two-time winner of the Ruth Benedict Prize, Weston is the author of several books, including Traveling Light: On the Road with America's Poor; Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age; and Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship.

Reviews

[Travis Wagner · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the book is full of some solid essays by Weston, the real gem here is "Do Clothes Make The Woman: Performing In and Out of Industrial Time." Weston is really setting up some challenging and paradigm-shifting ideas within a reworking of gender performance theory.

[Juliana · Rating 2 out of 5]

I must confess I found this quite confusing. This may be largely due to reading it in a course that didn't really give the proper background for the work. I may give it another try after I read a big stack of Judith Butler and otherwise pick up some more context...