A Political Pause: Multiple Temporalities of Activism in the Feminist Newspaper Distaff

In social movement organizing, time not only marks events but also structures activist imaginations, practices, and goals. Most political praxis exists in and reproduces linear time, relying on and reproducing an epistemology in which the future follows directly from the present. Despite the necessity of this approach for reducing inequities, it can tether our visions for change to existing categories, state apparatuses, and political repertoires. Drawing from queer, feminist, and critical race theorists, I argue that puncturing temporal linearity in the form of the caesura is a means for catalyzing social justice activism not limited to building on what already exists but allows us to imagine the impossible. Distaff, a feminist newspaper published in New Orleans in the 1970s, offers examples of this political temporality through the poetry and photographs it included, illustrating the caesura's potential temporal ruptures, opening into futures that break radically with the present.