“Fluid” temporality: the conflict of gender and age in the postmodern socio-cultural context

Abstract

Temporality, being an intrinsic property of the subject/object relations in the multiplicity of the socio-cultural and gender narratives, presents one of the most complicated ideas of postmodernity. The project of temporality embraces ambivalent scripts in their “momentous transition”, revealing the attempts at generalizing ages of men and women in the certain “unified” narratives. The latter is expressed in the triad paradigm of “past-present-future” with “present” as the dominating member. While conceptualizing binary oppositions, namely, the dualism “man/woman”, it is evident that nowadays the biological “intrinsic value” of the human being’s identity has become less relevant. The man/woman’s identity is not fixed anymore by anatomy, at present it is “fluid” with the time and age “shifts” of femininity and masculinity. The decentering “situation”, having transformed the temporal aspects of man/woman’s value in the social practices and corresponding narratives, nowadays demands their valorizing by means of the conceptual impact on the transformations of the “liquid temporality”.