Women and Travel: Temporal Imaginaries of Becoming

Abstract

The representation and uses of time have critical implications for the ways in which we orient discourses, practices, and bodies in institutions of higher education. Performing time in a taken-for-granted fashion incites practices of regulation, prescription, and limitation, which deserve to be talked about. In this chapter, I discuss the naturalization of time using the experiences of women who travel ‘abroad’ to obtain their graduate degrees and their subsequent narratives of “going back to their home countries.” I seek to bring the discussion of time¹ to the forefront to explore the potential of ideas of becoming and of the new, particularly in times where the notions of fluidity, movement, and openness have been described as constituent elements of contemporary cultural and social life. The experiences of movement, dislocation, displacement, and reorientation lived by these women serve to explore the ways in which imagined notions of time support normalizing discourses and practices in academia.