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Notes on Crip Time and Chronodissidence
A creative non-fiction personal essay
Alessia Canteros, December 2025
Audio narration
The Bathroom Clock
During my childhood, in various homes and frequent relocations, clocks were an ever-present fixture. I grew to resent them. Remarkably, in the kitchen a clock was positioned on each of the four walls ensuring that, regardless of seating choice, the time was always visible.
In the basement room where I did my homework, there was a large mirror two meters tall. My father installed a clock atop the mirror, transforming its surface into a functional timepiece. Even in the bathroom there were clocks, such as above the toilet. This form of temporal surveillance was inescapable. I despised these timepieces. Despite expressing my disapproval, my father dismissed my objections and insisted that they were great.
On one occasion, I experienced an emotional meltdown unrelated to clocks, the details of which I do not recall, and I locked myself in a bathroom. Amid my cries and screams, I noticed the small clock on top of the toilet tank. A cheap ornate mantel timepiece. The case was baroque in spirit, a flourish of scrolling acanthus leaves, shell motifs and curling volutes.
My anger instantly escalated. I grabbed it, feeling the coated resin so light in my hands. I proceeded to repeatedly smash the clock on the floor. The plastic dial with roman numerals popped off, the white factory-cast resin with gold highlights broke in different pieces.
I contemplated the scattered pieces over the vinyl bathroom floor.
I didn’t yet have the language for what I was resisting: these clocks, in every room, even in the bathroom where I’d gone to escape, were marking time that was never mine to begin with.
Section 1
“I Have No Time”
At home, the phrase ‘I have no time’ was a constant refrain.
When my parents said that, it made me feel compelled to persuade and justify the necessity of my seeking of assistance. I was left with the impression that so often there were more urgent matters that took precedence over my concerns. During a winter storm, when I had stayed at school late to complete an assignment, I requested a ride from my father because the bus was not arriving. I was shivering, exhausted, and carrying a heavy backpack. An hour-long bus ride was equivalent to a twenty-minute car ride. His response was that that’s what my public transportation card was for.
Sometimes ‘I have no time’ was real. My mother, for instance, managed two jobs: a full-time factory day job as well as an evening janitorial shift. She also was in charge of coordinating cooking and grocery shopping. When she wasn’t rushing between her various duties, I could spend a limited amount of quality time with her. Her Sundays were mostly dedicated to recuperating from her exhausting week. Her time was genuinely scarce.
Time became a weapon disguised as fact. The sociologist Sarah Sharma calls this ‘power-chronography‘: the way time is experienced differentially based on who you are in capitalist systems. My father’s time included rest and leisure. My mother’s time was used in constant labor. The times when I needed to rely on someone were inconveniences, something to consider later if time permitted. The phrase “I have no time” was an abdication of responsibility, a scapegoat to avoid saying ‘no’ directly. It positioned time as external, uncontrollable, when really it was about choices and power.
To this day, the phrase “I have no time” irritates me. I learned that time is not rationed equally. Some people “have no time” while others have more time for rest. As a child, I started to get the sense that time is not neutral. I also learned an even more tricky lesson: that my value was measured in how I used time.
Section 2
Clocks as Surveillance
The clocks trained me well. By the time I reached school, I had learned to surveil myself more effectively than any external timepiece could. I subconsciously associated my value with my academic success. If I did not reach a satisfactory milestone before bedtime, I would reduce my sleep hours accordingly.
I believed I had control over this and, for a time, observed a correlation between less sleep and great results. Extending my waking hours allowed me to dedicate more time to my work. I frequently drank thermoses of filter coffee, costing one dollar per refill. I took pride in my ability to work diligently and maintain discipline by sleeping less.
Occasionally, I stayed up all night to complete tasks, informing my teammates at 3 a.m. that I was going to sleep and would resume the project at 7 a.m. before heading to school. I convinced myself that I performed best during those early hours, as I thought I could think more clearly and review their contributions. On a few occasions, I slept in a school laboratory in order to be efficient, wake up and continue working. In retrospect, I did not consider that no lives were at stake.
I was performing what disability scholar Ellen Samuels calls the strange arithmetic of sick time and broken time: the way disabled and chronically ill people must work harder to earn the right to rest. I was breaking my bodymind into new rhythms it was never meant to sustain, forcing breaks only when collapse was imminent, working relentlessly to prove I deserved to exist.
Years later, I would learn that disability scholars had a name for what my body was trying to tell me: crip time. Crip time is a concept from disability studies that reclaims the idea of time by rejecting ‘normative time’ in favor of a more flexible, nonlinear, and person-centred approach. It honours energy levels, pain, fatigue, and the need for rest to prevent burnout. While it can refer to needing “more time,” it is not solely about being slower. Rather, Crip time encompasses the time required for rest, mourning, managing the effects of disability, and engaging in rituals of care.
I wasn’t disabled in the way I understood disability then. No wheelchair, no diagnosis I could name. But I was neurodivergent, though I wouldn’t know that word for years. And I was a first-generation immigrant carrying the weight of proving I belonged. These things compounded. My body and brain were asking for something different: rest, irregular rhythms, permission to work in bursts and pauses, time structured around my actual capacity rather than an imposed schedule.
What I was doing was trying to force my neurodivergent bodymind to perform as if it were neurotypical. This is what disability scholars call ‘compulsory able-bodiedness,’ the expectation that everyone can and should function according to able-bodied and neurotypical norms. I was chronically trying to prove I could keep pace with a clock that was never designed for me. What disability scholars call ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ intersected with what I’d later understand as temporal colonialism: the demand to sync to rhythms that erase difference.
Section 3
The Geography of Being Late
It wasn’t just my bodymind that was called ‘behind.’ It was also my culture, my family’s country of origin, and the entire geopolitical region I was connected to.
I started noticing how entire regions of the world were positioned in time. Latin America, the Global South, indigenous communities have all been characterized as ‘developing’ in the global imaginary, as if modernity were a race and some had gotten a head start.
This is what scholars call temporal colonialism: the use of time to justify domination. If Europe and North America represent ‘contemporary modernity’, then Latin America becomes the ‘underdeveloped past’. The logic is insidious: it’s not that these regions have been systematically exploited and their resources extracted, it’s that they’re simply ‘behind’. European colonizers sought to “synchronize time according to their understanding,” dismissing indigenous temporalities as ‘cyclical’ and therefore ‘static’ compared to Western ‘progressive linearity.’
The scholar Néstor García Canclini describes this experience as living in multitemporal societies, where traditional, modern, and postmodern temporalities coexist and conflict simultaneously. Latin America, he argues, undergoes an incomplete modernization characterized by discontinuities and interruptions.
The result is temporal disorientation: being drawn toward a future that cannot be fully entered while remaining entangled in past structures. This isn’t a failure to modernize properly. It’s the lived reality of what colonial violence produces: layered time systems, creating ongoing tensions between ritual repetition and capitalist acceleration.
Marginality, Canclini explains, is not merely spatial or economic but fundamentally temporal. Those who do not conform to modern rhythms are positioned in the past, viewed as ‘still becoming’ rather than fully contemporary. The institutions that govern daily life operate under the assumption of a single, homogeneous national time, yet they are confronted with populations with diverse rhythms rooted in different relations to work, memory, ritual, and territory.
In the 1970s, Peruvian artist Teresa Burga was doing something remarkable. She worked for 30 years in customs, a job defined by bureaucracy, timekeeping, and the rigid documentation of imports and exports. But within that space of hyper-regulated time, she began to draw.
Burga used drawing, as art historian Miguel A. López writes, as ‘the opportunity to introduce the rhythms of unproductivity and other temporal logics within the pragmatic demands of everyday work.’ Remarkably, she drew during work hours, a quiet act of resistance. Her art was filled with clocks, calendars, schedules, and date stamps, but these weren’t celebrations of punctuality. They were interrogations, asking how ‘the perception and meaning of time are relativized according to bodily markers of class or gender.’
López describes how Burga created “a rhythm ‘malleable to her needs of experimentation’ that defied the preeminence of values like speed, progress, and development”. Her work showed non-linear temporalities of boredom, tardiness, indifference, improductivity, interval, latency, or interruption. She dated all her drawings and notes, as if marking her own time in opposition to the time of the state. Burga was practicing what López would later theorize: chronodissidence.
López coined chronodissidence to describe approaches like Burga’s. He defines it as “practices that subvert, differ from, or dismantle the dominant model of time that turns asymmetrical power regimes into apparently normal routines“. In other words, the idea that faster is better and that efficiency equals value are not natural facts.They’re political arrangements that benefit some at the expense of others. Chronodissidence recognizes this and refuses to comply. It embraces ‘looping, cyclicality, spirals, and repetition, discontinuity, delay, and anachronism.’
The scholar Leda Maria Martins describes spiral time, a temporality that curves toward past and future simultaneously. In Afro-diasporic and indigenous cosmologies, time isn’t a line moving in one direction. Ancestors don’t disappear, they transform, their vital force continuing in new forms. This is a ‘logic we are not used to,’ Martins explains, one that refuses the Western separation of past, present, and future into unreachable moments.
In Quechua and Aymara languages, the past is positioned as forward and the future as backward. The word ñaupa in Quechua means both ‘old’ and ‘forward.’ Quipa in Aymara means both ‘behind’ and ‘tomorrow.’ This isn’t just poetic metaphor: it’s a fundamental epistemology. The past is visible, knowable, in front of us. The future, unknown, is behind us. Objects become mediators of past knowledge, making the past present.
These aren’t just ‘alternative’ ways of thinking about time, as if linearity is the default. These are ways of knowing that colonialism attempts to erase because they threaten the logic of ‘progress’ that justifies conquest.
Chronodissidence challenges the developmental narrative that positions entire cultures as ‘behind’. As scholars have emphasized: inequality is both economic and temporal. It’s not just that Latin America has less wealth; it’s that Latin American time is devalued. Chronodissidence reclaims what Martins calls ‘duration, contemplation, rest.’ It refuses the idea that there’s one timeline all cultures should follow toward ‘modernity.’ It insists that spiral time, cyclical time, time organized around transformation rather than progression, are all valid ways of being in the world.
As someone who grew up within migration, I’ve felt this temporal violence in my body. It manifested in the pressure to ‘catch up’ and prove that I belong in the ‘now’ of North American modernity.
Both crip time and chronodissidence emerged from this realization: that time itself is a tool of oppression; whoever controls the clock controls whose lives are valued and whose paces are normal.
Section 4
What They Share, What They Don't
When I place crip time and chronodissidence side by side, I see resemblances. Neither framework accepts that time naturally moves ‘forward’ toward improvement.
Both reject the idea that there’s a linear path of human development, one path from ‘backward’ to ‘advanced,’ from ‘disabled’ to ‘cured,’ from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern.’
They both emerged from specific forms of violence. Crip time from ableism, from the exhaustion of trying to conform to able-bodied schedules. Chronodissidence from colonialism, from centuries of being told your culture is ‘late,’ your people ‘underdeveloped.’
Both ask the same fundamental question: who gets imagined in the future?
Disabled people have been systematically excluded from visions of progress, seen as burdens or tragedies to be prevented. Non-Western cultures have been written out of ‘modernity,’ positioned as stuck in the past. Both Crip time and chronodissidence frameworks insist: we are here, we have futures, and those futures don’t require us to disappear or assimilate.
Importantly, both function as active practices, not passive states. One crips time and one practices chronodissidence. These aren’t just analytical frameworks for understanding oppression: they’re methodologies for living differently, for claiming temporal agency. As disability scholars describe, the willful subjects resists compulsory able-bodiedness by creating a space to deviate from norms. Both framework generate this breathing room.
Both center knowledge that has been dismissed or pathologized. Crip time values disabled people’s embodied knowledge about rest, pain, energy management, and what bodies actually need. Chronodissidence values indigenous and Global South epistemologies about spiral time, cyclical transformation, and the continuity of ancestral presence.
These aren’t just theoretical frameworks debated in academic journals; they’re survival strategies, ways of staying alive and sane in systems designed to exhaust or erase.
As López writes about Teresa Burga’s chronodissidences, they ‘invite us to set in motion dislocated rhythms (repetitions, accelerations, delays, latencies, hiatuses…) as a resource to take distance from oneself.’ The same could be said of crip time. Both create space to breathe, to think, to exist outside the relentless forward march.
But they’re not identical. They operate at different scales, with different emphases.
Crip time is focused on the embodied, individual experience of bodymind difference. It’s about the material reality of living with disability: the accommodations needed, the access barriers faced, the actual amount of time it takes a body to do things.
It addresses fatigue that doesn’t resolve with one night’s sleep. Pain that disrupts any attempt at scheduling. Energy that comes in unpredictable waves. Medical appointments that eat hours of every week. Recovery time that institutions refuse to recognize. The need to rest, to pace, to honour what a particular bodymind requires in a particular moment.
Crip time is deeply connected to disability justice movements, to fights for workplace accommodations, to demands that the world slow down and make space for different bodyminds. At its core, crip time asks: ‘How long does this body need?’
Chronodissidence, by contrast, operates at a geopolitical and cultural scale. It’s focused on collective temporalities, on how entire regions, cultures, and ways of knowing have been positioned in time.
It addresses the ‘developmental’ discourse that labels nations as ’emerging’ or ‘third world.’ The assumption that Western modernity is the endpoint all cultures should reach. The erasure of indigenous cosmologies that understand time as spiral or cyclical. The way ‘global’ timezones center Europe as the prime meridian, literally making some places ‘ahead’ and others ‘behind.’
Chronodissidence is connected to decolonial movements, to indigenous sovereignty struggles, to demands that non-Western epistemologies be recognized as sophisticated ways of knowing, not ‘traditional’ curiosities. At its core, chronodissidence asks: ‘Whose timeline defines modernity?’
The scales are different, but not opposed. One zooms in on the bodymind; the other zooms out to the geopolitical. But both are asking questions about power and time.
Colonial violence doesn’t just position cultures as ‘behind.’ It actively produces disability. War, environmental destruction, medical experimentation and the deliberate withholding of resources: all of these create disabled bodyminds. The disabled people in formerly colonized nations aren’t incidental to colonialism, they’re its product.
Capitalism demands conformity on both levels:
- to be ‘on time’ (ableist temporality: work faster, need less rest, maintain steady productivity).
- and to be ‘up to date’ (developmentalist temporality: modernize, industrialize, follow the Western model). If you’re disabled or chronically ill, you’re ‘unproductive.’ If your culture has different economic rhythms, you’re ‘underdeveloped.’
Both frameworks fundamentally challenge who counts as human, whose lives are grievable, whose futures matter. Crip time says disabled lives have value beyond productivity. Chronodissidence says non-Western cultures aren’t evolutionary laggards. Both insist on the right to exist outside dominant temporal logics.
The scholar Sarah Sharma uses the term ‘recalibration‘ to describe how we sync our body clocks to ‘an exterior relation, be it another person, pace, technology, chronometer, institution, or ideology.’ But this recalibration ‘happens differentially and unequally.’ Some bodies and cultures are forced to constantly recalibrate to someone else’s rhythm. Others get to set the standard, to be the clock everyone else syncs to. Both crip time and chronodissidence are refusals to recalibrate, insistences on setting our own rhythms.
As someone who exists at the intersection of beng neurodivergent and a first-generation immigrant connected to Latin American diaspora, I need both frameworks.
Crip time helps me understand why my bodymind needs what it needs: the irregular rhythms, the need for uninterrupted focus followed by complete rest, the way my energy doesn’t follow a pattern.
Chronodissidence helps me understand why I’ve been marked as ‘late’ or ‘behind’ in ways that have nothing to do with disability. It gives me language for the cultural displacement, for being told my family’s rhythms were inefficient, for the pressure to ‘catch up’ to a modernity defined by someone else.
Together, they help me see how temporal oppressions compound. My neurodivergence means I need different work rhythms. My cultural background means those different rhythms are already suspect, already read as ‘not modern enough.’ The frameworks are not competing. They’re complementary tools for dismantling temporal oppression.
Section 5
Towards Pluritemporal Futures
Currently, I reside in a home without clocks. The only devices displaying the time are the oven and my cellphone. No clocks on walls, no timepieces on nightstands, no baroque frames perched on toilet tanks. The absence is intentional, deliberate, hard-won.
Getting here required transformation. It began in my adult working life, when my bodymind finally taught me to listen. I learned to ferociously prioritize rest, to refuse the equation of suffering with productivity. I established clear boundaries: no more false emergencies born of others’ poor planning, no more availability scrutinized by the minute, no more accommodations I had to justify and re-justify.
The resistance I faced was real. My need for uninterrupted focus time was questioned. My work rhythms, which didn’t match the 9-to-5 metronome, were deemed suspicious. But I held my ground. This was practicing crip time. This was enacting chronodissidence. And it led me here, to a home where time moves differently.
Without clocks dictating rhythm, something opened up. I work in bursts and spirals, not steady streams, because my neurodivergent brain has never worked linearly. I rest when I need to rest, without guilt, without the feeling that I’m ‘wasting’ time. I can honour the actual rhythms of making: the slow accumulation of marks, the need to step away and return, the spiraling process that doesn’t announce itself in advance.
Writing this essay has been an exercise in crip time itself: working in fragments when energy allows, stepping away when the bodymind demands it, trusting that the work will accumulate not linearly but in layers. Writing time, Ellen Samuels reminds us, is one form to crip time. One creates in whatever fragments the bodymind permits, refusing the myth that good work requires uninterrupted flow.
As philosopher Sahela Collette write about durée, the past remains incomplete, in continual movement, immanently reconfigured through its own duration. The past is not fixed behind us. It snowballs on itself, perpetually reshaping how we understand what came before. And if the past is not finished, neither is the future. The future isn’t something we arrive at by staying on schedule. It’s something we construct through our choices.
This essay is an invitation for others to connect, a call to think differently. It was born out of using my agency instead of waiting to be chosen or validated by an institution. I hope these words can be a springboard to imagine exhibitions, artworks, and ways of being that honour multiple temporalities.
I started writing this essay because I smashed a clock as a child and didn’t yet have the language for what I was resisting. Now I have the language and I’m sharing it here: crip time, chronodissidence, spiral time, the refusal to recalibrate. Temporal liberation isn’t something we achieve alone. It’s something we build together, one refusal at a time, one reimagined space at a time, one home without clocks at a time. The future isn’t behind us or ahead of us. It’s here, in the time we’re claiming right now.
Further Reading
Articles
Crip Temporalities (South Atlantic Quarterly issue), edited by Ellen Samuels, Elizabeth Freeman, 2021
The Past is Yet to Come, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski, 2020
Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time, Alison Kafer, 2017
Books
Performances of Spiral Time, Leda Maria Martins, Bruna Barros, Jess Oliveira, Fred Moten, 2025
50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, Gail Weiss, Gayle Salamon, Ann V. Murphy, 2019
Teresa Burga: estructuras de aire = structures of air, Miguel A. López y Agustín Pérez Rubio, 2015
In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics, Sarah Sharma, 2014
Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, Néstor García Canclini, 1992
