160 Kathleen S. G. Skott-Myhre
communicating. The key thing might be to create vacuoles of non-
communication, circuit breakers so we can elude control. (p. 175)I said earlier that feminism had two driving forces in the development
of its theories and practices. One of them is the necessity to flee
appropriation. Certainly, growing sideways as a kind of temporal
stammering has at least the latent capacity to produce the sort of temporal
circuit breakers that may well be responsive to the driving teleological
imperatives of neo-liberal capitalism. The kind of time that collapses our
lives into monetized quanta and squeezes our lives into massive
accelerators of sheer consumption. Perhaps the least we can do by way of
flight is to stammer.
The other feminist impetus is to develop possibilities that are truly
responsive to the necessities of living things. The thinking of Anzaldúa
(1987) and Barad (2007) make important proposals in this direction. The
investment in ethological capacity and more-than-human networks of care
have radical political implications for rethinking and enacting social
formations.
In terms of psychology and development, they suggest that the basic
building blocks of how we conceive of who we are and what we do, space-
time-matter, can be thought differently. Instead of filling time and space
with large universal taxonomies and hierarchies of knowledge about how
our bodies traverse a lifespan, perhaps we could open borderlands and
liminal moments? If we could decenter our notion of being human and re-
engage the world of the more-than-human, then new worlds and
knowledges might recreate and rejuvenate the field of psychology as we
know it. It is, of course, possible that developmental psychology would not
survive such a transfiguration. If so, I welcome a new world, in which it
has become irrelevant. In that extinction, I can but hope its partner in
coevolution would reach a similar fate of irrelevance.