Out of Date: Time Travel as Regression for Women in Lauren Beukes’ <i>The Shining Girls</i>

This paper examines Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls (2013) as a reflection on recurrent obstacles to women’s rights. Beukes geometrizes her characters’ temporalities as either linear or circular to convey the conflict between women who fight for equality and the enduring socio-economic forces that block their development as full human beings. Contrary to traditional genderings of time, in Beukes’ work the male chrononaut time-travels in circles to kill promising women, thus embodying backlash discourse and practices that repeatedly jeopardize feminist advances made across time. In contrast, his victims are set in chrononormative linear time to represent women’s struggles for advances in reproductive rights, sexual freedom, and career opportunities.