Embodied,caring and disciplinary: A Foucauldian reading of ‘process time’ as constitutive of the biopolitical institution of the family

Abstract

‘Process time’ describes the recursive/fluid, social and embodied temporality that characterises much ‘women's work’. Though this concept has proven highly useful to feminist analyses of caring and other feminised labour, there has arguably been a tendency for authors in this area to naturalise and valorise this temporality – particularly in relation to the abstract, economic and disciplinary time of the clock. I argue that this naturalisation or valorisation of process time flattens our understanding of feminised labour, and that a feminist social theory of time must recognise the potentially disciplinary forms process time can take. As such, this paper contributes to feminist analyses of time, gender and labour by arguing that the embodied, caring and processual temporality that circulates within modern families can be understood as fundamentally disciplinary. Drawing primarily on Foucauldian theory, as well as Sharon Hays’ concept of ‘intensive mothering’, the paper argues that process time is central to the functioning of the family as a biopolitical institution, just as clock time is integral to the disciplinary mechanisms of the school, prison, barracks, etc. Specifically, it argues that the unique relations of power that circulate within the biopolitical family rely on a unique use of time: one that is intensive and oriented towards the rhythms of the physical body – that is, processual. Further, this disciplinary time is deeply and fundamentally feminine, as it operates (in its ideal form) primarily through the mother.

It is important to recognize that when we speak of housework we are not speaking of a job like other jobs, but we are speaking of the most pervasive manipulation, and the subtlest violence that capitalism has ever perpetrated against any section of the working class. True, under capitalism every worker is manipulated and exploited and his or her relation to capital is totally mystified… The difference with housework lies in the fact that not only has it been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character.

(Federici, 2012: 16)

Introduction

Feminists have long been interested in examining the interrelationships between time, gender and power. Among the most prominent and well-researched concepts to have emerged from this field is Davies’ (1994, 1996: 583) concept of ‘process time’, which relates to the time of ‘caring work, emotional work, maintenance work, solidary labour and creativity; that is, too much of the work that fills women's lives’. Since its inception as a concept, numerous empirical studies have examined how this temporality differs from, clashes with, and is overshadowed by the hegemonic culture of clock time – and how this effects the mothers, carers and other workers who live this time (see e.g. Bryson and Deery, 2010; Hislop and Arber, 2006; Twigg, 2001). Though Davies (1994: 282) notes that process time ‘can be as oppressive as clock time when the latter is experienced as a straightjacket’, it seems that this potentiality for discipline has remained largely unexplored in the time studies literature. Rather, process time is typically conceptualised as an inherently humane, pre-industrial, bodily time that is dispossessed of power by the abstract, modern and economic time of the clock. Though empirical research sometimes notes process time's disciplinary effects, these tend to be attributed to the influence of clock time, or the ‘clash’ between these two temporalities. Resultingly, there has been very little theoretical consideration of process time as an inherently or uniquely disciplinary force. This is a striking gap, considering that almost every other aspect of women's (re)productive labour ¹ (including even love; see e.g. Weeks, 2017) has faced in-depth feminist critique for its oppressive capacities since the 1970s.

In this paper, I contribute to feminist analyses of social time by arguing that – like clock time – process time is also modern, productive and disciplinary. Drawing primarily on Foucauldian theory, as well as Hays’ (1996) concept of ‘intensive mothering’, I argue that process time is central to the functioning of the family as a biopolitical institution, just as clock time is integral to the disciplinary mechanisms of the school, prison, barracks, etc. Specifically, I argue that the unique relations of power that circulate within the biopolitical family rely on a unique use of time: one that is intensive and oriented towards the rhythms of the physical body – that is, processual. Further, this disciplinary time is deeply and fundamentally feminine, as it operates (in its ideal form) primarily through the mother. As such, while I agree with extant descriptions of process time as deeply embedded within social contexts, tied to the non-linear rhythms of the body and oriented towards the rationalities of care and love, I diverge from this literature with my assertion that this social, embodied, loving time is also inherently disciplinary within the modern context. As I argue, recognising process time as disciplinary is crucial if we want to avoid valorising and naturalising the feminine forms of labour that are generated in this time.

In the first section of this paper, I outline the concepts of clock and process time, and how an underlying conceptualisation of power as commodity positions these times in dichotomous terms as ‘having’ and ‘lacking’ power (see also Odih, 1999). I then introduce Michel Foucault's understanding of power as a relation that operates through the body, focusing on his discussion of temporal discipline. Though Foucault's consideration of time is focused on the time of the clock, I argue that we may be able to locate an alternative, processual temporal discipline in one of the biopolitical institutions he wrote (comparatively) little about: the family. In the final section, I draw on feminist and Foucauldian literature on motherhood and the family to argue that the uniquely intense, static and externally mediated processes of power within the institution of the family gave rise to a uniquely feminine, processual use of disciplinary time. Here, my aim is not to provide a complete and irrefutable account of process time across all contexts. Rather – in the spirit of genealogy – I am proposing a ‘counter-history’ (see Taylor, 2012: 215) of process time in the family, in aims of problematising existing understandings of this time as pre-modern (or natural), separated from economic concerns, and resistant to discipline. In so doing, I advance scholarship concerned with time and gender by offering an alternative framework for examining the lives and labour of all those who engage with this feminine, processual temporality.

The time that isn’t money: Process time as physical, unproductive and powerless

In his hugely influential early essay, Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism, Thompson (1967) argues that the advent of industrial capitalism cemented a shift in the West's cultural relationship with time that had been slowly building since the Middle Ages. While pre-industrial work had been ‘task oriented’ (i.e. the workday was organised in relation to specific tasks, and work and leisure time were often blurred), industrial capitalism imposed a new form of time orientation upon workers (Thompson, 1967). This time, ruled by the clock, was regular, co-ordinated and disciplined: ‘Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent’ (Thompson, 1967: 61). Though the historical accuracy of Thompson's claims has been much critiqued (see e.g. Birth, 2022; Glennie and Thrift, 1996), the impact of his argument on the field of time studies is undeniable – especially when combined with other high-profile arguments linking capitalist time reckoning with discipline (see e.g. Foucault, 1979; Marx, 1977). That is, the time of the clock is now commonly understood to be a disciplining force that separates human beings from more ‘natural’ social rhythms, even as ‘Ideas of traditional cultures as embedded within unchanging natural cycles, characterized by cyclical rather than linear ideas of time… have all been debunked’ (Glennie and Thrift, 1996: 284). Regardless of the historical (in)accuracy of aspects of Thompson's argument, the concept of ‘time discipline’ – linking time with power – has proven to be significantly theoretically useful.

Although Thompson's (1967: 79) analysis focuses on waged labour, he briefly notes that (re)productive labour was somewhat left behind in this transition to clock time:

… despite school times and television times, the rhythms of women's work in the home are not wholly attuned to the measurements of the clock. The mother of young children has an imperfect sense of time and attends to other human tides. She has not yet altogether moved out of the conventions of ‘pre-industrial’ society.

While Thompson's fleeting account of women's attitudes as ‘pre-modern’ has been critiqued as ‘quasifeminist’ (see Heyes, 2020: 80), feminist researchers have since argued that women's times do differ significantly from the hegemonic, masculine culture of the clock (Bryson, 2007). This literature is wide-ranging and diverse, examining women's temporal experiences at multiple different levels (for an overview, see Bryson, 2007). In my view, the most useful of these frameworks for understanding the quotidian temporality of caring labour is Davies’ (1994, 1996) concept of ‘process time’, which she developed through ethnographic work in Swedish day nurseries. According to Davies (1994: 281), process time ‘refers to letting the task at hand, or the perceived needs of the receivers of care, rather than the clock, determine the temporal relation’. Process time can be distinguished from clock time in that it is typically recursive and/or fluid (rather than strictly linear); thoroughly entangled within social relations (rather than abstracted from these); and guided by a rationality of care (rather than one of economic gain) (see Davies, 1994). Process time is therefore present in most caring and emotional labour, where the rhythm of activity is dictated by highly contextual physical, social and emotional circumstances. This means that process-oriented activities often have fluid temporal boundaries and can be difficult to measure quantitatively – as Davies (1994: 280) demonstrates with the following example:

A colleague and good friend of mine tells me that she has found a lump in her breast and that she has an appointment at the hospital to be examined. She is extremely nervous about this and I also feel concern. On the morning that she is due to go to the hospital I put a pretty card on her desk and wish her all the best. I think about her several times during the day – but obviously I do not set aside time solely for this activity – it occurs while I am doing something else (perhaps I am making photocopies or waiting on the phone to be connected) – and I ring her in the evening to hear how it went.

Because of the fluid and contextual nature of process time, it is difficult to squeeze process-oriented activities into clock time logic, and the two temporalities may ‘clash’: ‘If a young infant or senile individual needs to be fed, it is hard to push this activity into a predetermined linear and clock time framework’ (Davies, 1996: 583). Davies (1996: 538) has since argued that this time might be better referred to as ‘embodied time’, stating that this description pushes back against the Newtonian conception of time as abstract and mathematical: ‘If we are to leave this specific scientific paradigm, we then have to relocate our subjects in their bodies which are in turn enmeshed in history, culture, and space’. While process/embodied time is clearly gendered via its close association with feminised labour, it does not apply solely or uniformly to women; as argued by Adam (1995: 99), ‘neither caring nor healing, loving, educating and houseworking times are the sole prerogative of women’. As such, process time has been argued to dominate in most forms of ‘work “with people”, such as education, healthcare, social work and youth work’ (Yuill and Mueller-Hirth, 2019: 1538). Additionally, as work in general has become feminised and oriented towards flexible, caring and emotional labour under post-Fordism (see Adkins and Jokinen, 2008; Weeks, 2017), process time has become relevant to a wide range of work processes. For instance, Snyder (2019: 701) uses process time to examine the temporalities of US truck drivers, also noting that this time is relevant to white-collar work in ‘flexible organisations’. This large diversity of work forms may be attributed to the fact that process time is multifaceted and plural: ‘Fused together within this concept it is important to realise, are many different times’ (Davies, 1996: 538). For the sake of simplicity, I have attempted to focus my discussion here on process times relevant to care work within the family – noting however that there are clear connections between this work and broader forms of feminised labour.

Though Davies notes in her 1994 study that the cyclical, repetitive nature of process time ‘can be as oppressive as clock time’, the potentially disciplinary nature of this time has been scarcely explored since (Davies, 1994: 282; cf. Snyder, 2019). Rather, process time has been overwhelmingly presented in the literature as ‘warm, organic’ and ‘powerless in the face of clock time's oppressive abstractness’ (Snyder, 2019: 700). This unimpeachable reputation may be assigned a number of causes. Chiefly, I would echo Odih's (1999: 21) argument that process time tends to be positioned within an understanding of power as commodity – ‘the property of some to the preclusion of others’. Davies (2001: 137, emphasis in original) makes this understanding explicit in her argument that clock time was designed by men to maintain patriarchal power structures:

… [the] time-that-we-take-for-granted – the present-day dominant linear and quantitative temporal consciousness – grew out of various religious, scientific and economic interests, all of which were male dominated. Or put another way, the social construction of current dominant temporal patterns has its roots in the central concerns of various male-dominated hierarchies which were interested in solidifying and retaining their positions of power in society.

Relatedly, Adam (1995: 90) argues that time can only function in a disciplinary way once it has been abstracted from human relations and transformed into a commodity: ‘The capacity to control people's time and the association with money, in other words, is only possible once time has become decontextualized and disembodied from events’. Drawing on Davies’ research, she argues that ‘some times are clearly privileged and deemed more important than others’ and are therefore denied power under this framework: ‘Research on women's caring and emotional work demonstrates that times which are not convertible into currency have to remain outside the charmed circle’ (Adam, 1995: 95). In other words, because process-oriented tasks are often unpaid, low-paid or otherwise marginalised in labour processes, this time is literally ‘worth’ less than clock time – translating to a concrete lack of power for those who engage in caring and other feminised labour.

Within this strain of literature, it is often argued that process time is made inherently unproductive by its intimate connection with the human body. This is because the economy of clock time is considered to be fundamentally inhumane:

… [this is] a time from which body and soul are exorcised. It is a temporality governed by entropy rather than by development and growth, a time of finitude, death and pollution, antithetical to generative being (Adam, 1994: 96).

By contrast, the experience of process time is an experience based in one's own body and oriented towards the bodily needs of others. As Adam (1995: 95) notes, Davies’ research into women's temporal experiences demonstrates that ‘female times of menstruation, pregnancy, birth and lactation are not so much measured, spent, allocated and controlled as time lived, time made and time generated’. This time ‘between spouses, lovers and friends, between parents and children, carers and the cared for’ is a ‘gift’, because the organic human body cannot produce an inhumane commodity (Adam, 2003: 98). It is significant to note that this reading views the body as fundamentally resistant to discipline. That is, while power may be projected onto the body under clock time (e.g. in Marx's argument that capitalism compresses greater labour power into a shorter timeframe; see Adam, 2003) experiences (including labour) that are generated within – or oriented towards – the lived (often female) body cannot be inculcated by power. This suggests something of a disconnect between the body and society, which is ironic considering that process time is ‘enmeshed in social relations’ by definition (Davies, 1994: 230, emphasis in original). Taking this argument further, Leccardi (1996: 177) posits that there is something inherent to bodily times that makes them resistant to socialisation:

… corporeal, non-linear and non-abstract times, while making a crucial contribution to experience, are not completely socializable: while coexisting, today, with public times (such as the times of the market and of politics), these times answer to different logics.

The idea of embodied process time as out of sync with larger social and cultural trends relates back to Thompson's (1967) conceptualisation of women's time as ‘pre-industrial’. In other words, because bodily processes cannot be integrated into modern, abstract, economic time, they seem to be connected instead to much older – even ‘primordial’ – human relations (Adam, 1994: 99). This links to another strain of literature on ‘women's time’ in which the female body (and specifically its potential capacity for childbirth) generates a time beyond time, linked to both past and present, and therefore not able to be located squarely within the modern era (see Bryson, 2007). Perhaps as a result of this association with the body and the past, there has been a tendency to valorise the social, generative and creative nature of women's time in contrast with the modern, mechanical, disciplinary nature of clock time. For instance, Leccardi (1996: 178, 182, emphasis in original) argues for the promotion of women's time in the ‘society of work’, stating that this time possesses ‘a conceptual commitment to valuing the non-economic and non-quantifiable aspects of human existence: being in tune with the times of life over and above productive purposes’. Relatedly, because Davies (2001) associates process time with Carol Gilligan's ‘ethic of care’, this time may be included in the argument that ‘forms of time use traditionally associated with women give rise to positive moral qualities’ (Bryson, 2007: 53, 54).

Though process time has faced some critique in the feminist time studies literature, this tends to focus on the false dichotomy that has been set up between this time and clock time. For instance, Adam (1995: 97) points out that the distinction between process and clock time (and similar dichotomic distinctions, such as Thompson's clock and task time) share ‘a conceptual history and a common logic with male-stream social science’. Similarly, Maher (2008: 130, 2009) has argued that many forms of (re)productive labour incorporate multiple (sometimes seemingly contradictory) temporalities; for instance, birthing combines ‘complex intersecting temporalities for each woman: some rhythmic, some repetitive, some linear’. This problematises the common narrative of the ‘clash’ between clock and process time. Even accounting for these critical approaches however, the understanding of process time as thoroughly disconnected from power is rarely challenged. Rather, this is overwhelmingly portrayed as a fundamentally good time generated by pre-modern (or even ahistorical) bodily rhythms that are dispossessed of power by the abstract, modern and economic time of the clock. Resultingly, the disciplinary effects of this time become almost inconceivable, even when they appear in research. For instance, while multiple empirical studies have recorded the (seemingly) disciplinary aspects of process time (e.g. routine nocturnal care work interfering with sleep; see Hislop and Arber, 2006), and/or the protective elements of clock time (e.g. ‘bounding’ difficult or emotionally taxing labour; see Twigg, 2001), this research almost always names the disciplinary force at play as clock time or the ‘clash’ between these two times (see also Hirvonen and Husso, 2012; Yuill and Mueller-Hirth, 2019). In fact, Snyder's (2019) research into fatigue in the US truck driving industry is the only study that I am aware of that associates the disciplinary effects of process time (i.e. facilitating overwork) with process time itself (though the focus of his study is somewhat removed from the current topic of care work). As such, viewing power as a commodity arguably flattens our understanding of process time, and the diverse (and potentially disciplinary) forms it may take. By contrast, utilising a theory of power as a relation can help to illuminate the complex nature of this time (see also Odih, 1999, 2007). In the following sections, I draw on Foucault's writing on power to develop a concept of disciplinary process time. As I explain, this is a form of temporal discipline that is embodied, caring and feminine, while at the same time being distinctly modern and implicated within relations of power. Establishing a theoretical foundation for process time as disciplinary may help to denaturalise and problematise this form of social time and offer a critical intervention to inform conceptual and empirical research on the gendered dynamics of time and labour.

Foucault on disciplinary time and the biopolitical family

In contrast with the literature discussed above, Foucault rejected the idea of power as a commodity. Rather, he argued that power is ‘something which circulates’ through the social body, that is, a relation (Foucault, 1980a: 98). Further, the specific shape of this relation (how power is exercised through the social body) is tied to its particular socio-historical context. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1979: 136, emphasis added) argues that relations of power began to operate through the body in the modern era:

The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body – to the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skilful and increases its forces.

This new form of power – which Foucault names ‘disciplinary power’ – increases the economic utility of the body, while simultaneously diminishing its capacity for disobedience: it creates ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault, 1979: 138). Significantly, the creation of docility is achieved through the partitioning and surveillance of the body in relation to time, space and movement (Foucault, 1979). In an analysis ‘remarkably conceptually similar’ to Thompson's – and, incidentally, to Marx' ² (Heyes, 2020: 78) – Foucault (1979: 150) argues that disciplinary methods altered existing ‘methods of temporal regulation’ by refining them: ‘One began to count in quarter hours, in minutes, in seconds’. The goal here was the development of a ‘totally useful’ economy of time: ‘it is a question of extracting, from time, ever more available moments and, from each moment, ever more useful forces’ (Foucault, 1979: 154). This new cultural conception of time was then imposed upon the body: bodies and gestures must submit to new, efficient frameworks and rhythms (Foucault, 1979). Accordingly, ‘Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power’ (Foucault, 1979: 152). Crucially, the constant, unverifiable surveillance of the body (exemplified by the Panopticon, see below) under this new conception of time leads to self-discipline – ‘correct’ behaviours are internalised by the subject and carried out even when nobody is watching (Foucault, 1979).

As with Thompson's conceptualisation of clock time, Foucault's analysis of modern ‘methods of temporal regulation’ obviously cannot easily accommodate process time. The practice of refining and partitioning time to its most minute form is clearly alien to a temporality that is oriented towards unpredictable biological and social rhythms. However, Foucault (1979: 139) notes that his is not an exhaustive account of every disciplinary technique in every disciplinary institution, but ‘a series of examples of some of the essential techniques that most easily spread from one to another’. Rather than being one absolute rule, discipline is:

… a multiplicity of often minor processes, of different origin and scattered location, which overlap, repeat, or imitate one another, support one another, distinguish themselves from one another according to their domain of application, converge and gradually produce the blueprint of a general method (Foucault, 1979: 138).

As such, it may be possible to conceive of minor disciplinary processes that overlap and imitate – but can be distinguished from – those described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. I argue that an alternative temporal discipline may be located in one of the disciplinary institutions that Foucault largely ignored in this text: the family. Though Foucault paid more attention to the family than is sometimes suggested, his writing on this topic is incomplete and occasionally inconsistent, having developed alongside the evolution of his broader ideas on power (see Taylor, 2012). Perhaps his most useful writing on this topic (for feminists) occurred after the development of his concept of ‘biopower’. Foucault (1990, 2004) describes biopower as a broad form of power that incorporates disciplinary power at the micro level and regulatory power at the macro level. While disciplinary power is focused on increasing the forces of the individual human body, regulatory power is focused on increasing the forces of the body of the population (Foucault, 1990, 2004). It does this, for instance, through the regulation of birth and death rates, the management of public health and hygiene, and the organisation of public space (Patton, 2016). As such, biopower is a positive power, aimed towards ‘the expansion and efficiency of life’ (Cisney and Morar, 2016: 4). Foucault distinguishes this modern form of power (disciplinary power emerged in the seventeenth century, with regulatory power following in the second half of the eighteenth century) against the older, negative form of sovereign power – that is, the sovereign's right to appropriate the labour, property and even lives of their subjects (Cisney and Morar, 2016; Patton, 2016). While Foucault initially considered the family to be a fundamentally sovereign institution that was partially integrated by disciplinary power, he later argued that the modern family was transformed by biopower (Taylor, 2012). Under biopower, the family became an institution tasked with ensuring the health, ‘normality’ and productivity of the populace (see Foucault, 2016, 2002; Taylor, 2012). Starting in the late eighteenth century, then, the family begins to act like other disciplinary institutions. Like the school, hospital and barracks, the family guarantees the (future) productivity of individuals through the management and surveillance of the body – as I will discuss in greater depth below.

However, we can also identify several features that are unique to the family among disciplinary institutions (see also Taylor, 2012), three of which I argue are particularly salient to the issue of process time. Here, I am drawing especially from feminist interpretations of Foucault, and particularly from Taylor's (2012: 201) comprehensive review of Foucault's ‘continually changing observations on familial power’. First – and most significantly – the level and quality of surveillance and control that occurs within the family is uniquely intense. Second, the roles within the family are not interchangeable, but static. Third, the parents’ power within the family is never absolute but is always informed and mediated by external institutions. It is due to this unique character that I argue the family developed its own distinctive discipline of time, as I outline in the following section. Unlike the disciplinary institutions of the school, prison and barracks – which all function under light and detached relations of power (timed by the clock) – the family developed a form of temporal discipline that is intensive and oriented towards the rhythms of the physical body (that is, processual). These disciplinary processes typically (and ideally) operate through the mother, making them fundamentally feminine. Additionally, because the mother is subject to relations of power beyond the family, she is also disciplined through this time.

The disciplined/disciplining mother and processual care of the innocent child

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1979) uses Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon as a metaphor for the use and function of surveillance in disciplinary society. Within this structure, the constant, unverifiable surveillance by the guard (located in a centre tower, which the prisoners cannot see into) allows for a ‘light’ use of power, in which prisoners learn to discipline themselves (Foucault, 1979: 202). By contrast, Foucault's account of late-eighteenth-century parenting norms paints a very different picture of surveillance and control. For instance, he discusses how parents were tasked with a new responsibility of constant surveillance of their children as part of a broader campaign against masturbation (Foucault, 2016). Unlike the unverifiable and detached surveillance by the guard in the Panopticon, it was insisted that this surveillance of children be direct and intensive, involving the close physical proximity of watcher and watched:

This is the instruction for the direct, immediate, and constant application of the parents’ bodies to the bodies of their children. Intermediaries disappear, but positively this means that from now on children's bodies will have to be watched over by the parents’ bodies in a sort of physical clinch. (Foucault, 2016: 173).

Under biopower, parental care of the child becomes deeply implicated with intensive methods of disciplinary surveillance and control (see also Logan, 2012). Of course, it is no surprise that the practice of surveillance in the ‘absolute’ institution of the Panoptic prison would be more detached, light and impersonal (i.e. easier and more effective; see Foucault, 1980b) than that practiced in other institutions. However, it seems that while public disciplinary institutions have trended towards more impersonal uses of surveillance and control in recent decades (see e.g. Castel, 1991), this has only become more personal, concentrated and intensive within the family. A pertinent example of this trend can be found in Hays' (1996) concept of ‘intensive mothering’, which she introduced in The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. In this text, Hays (1996) argues that children were not always considered to be a particularly special category of people. For instance, in the Middle Ages, European adults considered children to be ‘demonic, animalistic, ill-formed, and physically fragile’, and so did not treat them with the level of attention and care that is considered humane today (Hays 1996: 22). Rather, typical methods of childcare at that time included whipping, ‘tossing’, drugging with opium and simply leaving the child to their own devices (Hays, 1996: 23). Like all other social categories, ‘the child’ shifted in meaning and importance over time and across place. Consequently, it is beyond the scope of this article to provide a full account of the history of the child here – even if focusing solely on Western, bourgeoise and middle-class children (for a review of historical and sociological accounts of childhood globally, see Wells, 2014). However, it is pertinent to note that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the European bourgeoisie and aristocracy began to view children as ‘innocent’ beings requiring special attention and protection (Hays, 1996). By the late eighteenth century, this ideology had travelled to the United States and been adopted by the American middle class (Hays, 1996). At this time, there arose fears that the innocent, precious child who was disciplined too early, or too intensely, may become ill or go ‘insane’ (Hays, 1996: 31).

Though the concept of the ‘innocent’ child briefly fell out of favour towards the end of the nineteenth century, Hays (1996) argues that it had returned in strengthened form by the 1930s. From the early twentieth century, then, childrearing practices switched from being adult-centred to being child-centred: ‘the natural development of the child and the fulfillment of children's desires are ends in themselves and should be the fundamental basis of child-rearing practices’ (Hays, 1996: 45). In addition to being guided by the innocent child, contemporary childrearing should be undertaken primarily (if not solely) by the mother – who is most ‘naturally’ capable of doling out loving care and gentle discipline (see below) – and should be characterised by ‘copious amounts of time, energy, and material resources’ spent on the child (Hays, 1996: 8). Hays (1996: 9) names this collection of dominant discourses ‘the ideology of intensive mothering’. Hays’ concept has proven extremely influential and prompted a significant amount of empirical literature examining mothering as an ideology (Taylor, 2011). Though it is beyond the scope of this paper to review this literature in full, it is worth noting that researchers in this area generally agree that intensive mothering constitutes the ‘universal standard for all mothers’, even as it reflects the values of White, heterosexual, middle-class parents (Cappellini et al., 2019; Randles, 2021: 37). As such, we might argue that the ideology of intensive mothering is central to the institution of the modern family, even as different mothers have diverse experiences of this ideology (more on this below).

As multiple authors have explored, Foucault's writing on surveillance can be used to analyse how women become disciplined by the ideal of intensive mothering (see e.g. Budds et al., 2017; Cappellini et al., 2019; Henderson et al., 2010). Additionally – and inversely – I believe that the concept of intensive mothering helps to reveal the unique temporal dimension of the intensive surveillance and control of children that occurs within the biopolitical institution of the modern family. That is, in addition to being constant, intensive and physical, this control involves the (almost paradoxical) guidance of the gentle, loving mother by the innocent child. Temporally, this comprises the mother being oriented towards the child's social and bodily rhythms. Unlike earlier periods of history, in which parents were advised to ‘set rigid schedules for the child's feeding, changing, sleeping, and playing’, child-led contemporary norms dictate that the child should ‘guide’ mothers by ‘[establishing] their own feeding and sleeping times’ (Hays, 1996: 39, 57, 45). Further, the mother should pay close, constant attention to the child and ‘learn how to determine the particular behaviour and peculiar needs of her child, moment by moment’ (Hays, 1996: 59). This practice involves the mother sacrificing her own time to the time of her child – not only in terms of the great number of hours she spends caring for the child but also in terms of synchronising her time with that of the child. For example, expectations around breastfeeding are central to the ideology of intensive mothering (see Stearns, 2013). The pressure to breastfeed can be intense, and mothers are often reminded that their own breastmilk is far superior to anything else they could feed their child (though, of course, alternatives have long existed) (see Lee, 2018; Stearns, 2013). However, breastfeeding is an extremely temporally demanding activity (undertaken about every two hours for newborns; Stearns, 2013) requiring that the mother (alone, on one solitary unending shift) synchronise her body with the physio-temporal needs of her child. Notably, this activity can be experienced as unpleasurable, laborious and even painful for the mother (Lee, 2018). Similarly, keeping children in clean, dry diapers involves paying close attention to their physio-temporal needs. As with breastfeeding, mothers encounter strong social messaging about what kinds of diapers they should be using on their children: though disposable diapers are most common, there has recently been a push for cloth diapers, as these are thought to be better for babies (free of ‘chemicals’) and the environment (Randles, 2022). However, as Randles (2022: 228) demonstrates through her research into ‘diaper work’, cloth diapers involve a huge amount of time and labour on behalf of mothers, who need to ‘store and wash soiled diapers, dry and fold clean diapers, track diaper supplies, plan around washing/drying schedules and worry if cloth diapers leaked, smelled, or appeared insufficiently clean’. It is worthwhile to note that this compounds the significant and ‘inventive’ processual labour that many poor mothers engage in to diaper children at all (Randles, 2021). This can be seen in a separate study by Randles (2021: 46), where she demonstrates how ‘diaper work’ ‘profoundly shaped the daily rhythms of family life’ for poor mothers (and especially poor mothers of colour). This included paying intense – and at times even scientific – attention to children's specific physio-temporal needs:

Most mothers knew their children's elimination schedule so well they could predict within a few hours, depending on the child's current health and how much they recently had to drink and eat, when their last available diaper would be too full or dirty to use. Maria, 30, Latina, and a mother of four, logged each diaper change on a chart, tracked her son's urine output by the ounce, and set a daily diaper quota with different limits for when her son had diarrhea and when he was healthy (Randles, 2021: 45).

Within the ideology of intensive mothering, simply keeping a child fed and diapered is not enough. A truly good mother would do even more – breastfeed and use cloth diapers – even though this involves processual labour above and beyond the substantial labour necessary to raise a child in the first place (and which is experienced even more acutely by marginalised mothers).

This attention to, and privileging of, the child's temporality within the intensive mothering ideology extends beyond the period of infancy. For instance, in a study of intensive mothering by nannies and au pairs, Macdonald (1998: 43) describes how many working mothers ‘chose a one-on-one caregiver who could go with their children's schedule, not a day care centre that would impose its own routines on their children’ (though, ironically, these mothers often ended up disturbing their children's daily rhythms so that they would be able to spend ‘quality time’ with them after work). Similarly, Hochschild (1997: 77) notes that the ‘homemaker's sense of child time’ involves ‘building spacious temporal castles around the early events of her child's life’, and Warner (2006: 69) argues that the ‘ideal mother’ learns ‘to exist in an eternal present’ and develop ‘“affective synchronicity” with her child’. As with the category of the child in general, children's particular temporalities become precious and worthy of protection under contemporary ‘intensive mothering’ norms. Therefore, through intensive care of the child, the mother becomes oriented towards the child's unique temporality. Unlike the clock time that characterises other disciplinary institutions, the time through which the mother watches, disciplines and cares for the child is an inherently processual time.

A second difference between the family and other disciplinary institutions relates to the static organisation of hierarchy, which contributes to the feminisation of the minor disciplinary processes generated within this space (here, processual disciplinary time). In his Abnormal lectures, Foucault (2016: 172) argues that it is the parents alone who are ‘exhorted or even challenged in the campaign directed against childhood masturbation’ in the late eighteenth century. All other carers not directly biologically related to the child (i.e. not a member of their immediate family) were cast out of the domestic space at this time, for fear that these interlopers would ‘come between the parents’ virtue and the child's natural innocence and introduce a dimension of perversion’ (Foucault, 2016: 171; see also Hays, 1996). In other words, positions in this institution are made static – the individual watching the child should be their biological parent (see Taylor, 2012; cf. Feder, 1997). This stands in contrast with the anonymity and homogeneity of disciplinary institutions that Foucault (1979: 202) describes elsewhere. For instance, of the Panopticon, he argues that ‘it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine’ (Foucault, 1979: 202). Of course, these disciplinary institutions are still organised hierarchically, and people occupy distinct positions within them (e.g. patient, nurse, doctor) (Foucault, 1979, 1980b). Even so, these positions are not fixed (Foucault, 1979). Within these institutions, ‘Power is no longer substantially identified with an individual who possesses or exercises it by right of birth’ (i.e. the sovereign), rather, it is ‘a machinery that no one owns’ (Foucault, 1980b: 156). As such, watcher and watched are interchangeable positions everywhere but inside the home (recall that Foucault associated the family with both biopolitical and sovereign forms of power; see Taylor, 2012). Extending our analysis past the late eighteenth century, we can see that the static position of surveillance/control held by parents in the family eventually narrowed to seat only the mother. As Hays (1996) notes, the category of ‘mother’ did not develop its intimate relationship with childrearing until the second half of the nineteenth century. At the same time that children became precious and innocent, motherhood became valorised and developed new associations with morality, sensitivity and emotions (Hays, 1996). Accordingly, fathers lost their previous responsibility as the ‘shepherd’ of the family, and ‘Mothers, and only mothers, now moral and pure, were the shepherdesses, leading their flocks on the path of righteousness’ (Hays, 1996: 30). Therefore, the uniquely static positions that characterise the contemporary family make the discipline within this institution fundamentally feminine: the guard tower in the domestic Panopticon is designed to accommodate the mother alone. Further, this mother's methods of surveillance, control and care of her children should be consistent with her ‘natural’ feminine character, that is, they should be attentive, loving and gentle, etc. (Hays, 1996). Of course, stating that this discipline is gendered does not mean that it operates through women exclusively – obviously, men also care for children and may do so intensively (despite the significant lack of emphasis contemporary norms of masculinity place on engaging in childcare; see Brown, 2022). The central point here is simply that the processual, disciplinary temporality of care work within the home has developed a markedly feminine character – and therefore effects women more often, and more directly than it does men.

Though I have been discussing discipline in terms of the mother's surveillance and control of the child, it is important to state that the mother is also disciplined through her work in the home (indeed, this is my central concern). Foucault (1980b: 161) notes that labour has three functions that often work in concert: ‘the productive function, the symbolic function, and the function of dressage, or discipline’. It is easy enough to see the interplay of labour as production and labour as discipline in a setting like the industrial workshop (inhabited by men, and ruled by the clock). Foucault (1979) describes how these workers were trained in the correct use of time through new, exacting rules imposed by supervisors: workers should not arrive more than fifteen minutes late; distract each other from the topic of their work with stories (even during breaks); or play, sleep or drink at work at any time; etc. This ‘time of good quality, throughout which the body is constantly applied to its exercise’ disciplines the subject through (economically) productive activity (Foucault, 1979: 151). But what of the modern mother's (re)productive labour – if her position as family warden is static, how does she become disciplined in this role? Though the contemporary mother assumes almost complete moral responsibility over the care and outcomes of her children, her power within the family is never absolute (Logan, 2012; Taylor, 2012). Rather, power relations within the family are always informed and supplemented by external institutions (Taylor, 2012). Indeed, the intensive control contemporary mothers are expected to carry out over their children is prescribed by medical and other ‘experts’ outside the family. For instance, with regards to the late-eighteenth-century crusade against masturbation, Foucault (2016: 176, emphasis added) notes that it is doctors who advise parents to surveil their children, and doctors who should hear the child's confession: ‘the family must function merely as a relay or transmission belt between the child's body and the doctor's technique’. Similarly, Hays (1996) argues that, within the ideology of intensive mothering, the mother's own knowledge of childrearing is considered insufficient and must be supplemented by scientific advice. Returning to the example of breastfeeding, the significant pressure for mothers to breastfeed is not arbitrary, but is based on ‘actuarial assessments of risks and benefits to babies’ short and long-term health’ – exclusively breastfed babies fare better than formula-fed babies across a number of health outcomes (Murphy, 2003: 455). Similarly, the recent push for cloth diapering – as well as previous arguments for disposable diapers – is based (at least in part) on arguments about babies’ health (see Randles, 2022; Takeshita, 2014). The mother's intensive, processual care of the child gives them the best chance (based on scientific evidence) of growing up healthy and productive.

Further, institutions external to the family do not just guide the mother, but watch her. For instance, Henderson et al. (2010) note that when paediatricians measure and rank a child against their peers, they are also measuring and ranking the parent. The paediatrician ‘watches how parents answer the standard development questions, how they interact with their children, and any other signs that a parent is not meeting that perfection standard’ (Henderson et al., 2010: 235). The mother's activities are also surveilled (in a perhaps more continuous manner) by other families in her neighbourhood, who judge how well she keeps her home, and how effectively she disciplines her children, etc. (see Feder, 1997, 2007). In much the same way that the prisoner internalises the gaze of the guard, mothers therefore internalise and self-discipline according to biopolitical discourses of appropriate mothering (see e.g. Henderson et al., 2010; Murphy, 2003). As such, though the mother occupies a static seat of control over her children, she is simultaneously subject to broader relations of power – external disciplinary institutions that invade and influence her operations within the family. In this way, the uniquely feminine, processual temporal discipline that characterises the biopolitical institution of the family disciplines not only the child but also the mother. The mother who does not lavish extensive time and energy upon her child, sometimes going so far as to completely synchronise her physio-temporal rhythms with those of her child, is at risk of accusations of ‘deviancy’ and ‘bad mothering’ (see also Murphy, 2003). Just as the factory worker is disciplined through labour timed by the clock, the mother is disciplined through labour synchronised to the rhythms of her own family.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have argued that examining ‘process time’ through a Foucauldian lens reveals this time's uniquely disciplinary character. Though power and discipline are often associated with clock time, examining the family as a biopolitical institution demonstrates that embodied, caring and processual times can also have disciplinary aims and effects. Under biopower, the use of process time in the family ensures that children will grow to adulthood in the best physical and mental condition possible. Certainly, this early, scientifically backed processual care will only improve their clock-oriented training in other disciplinary institutions later in life. In this sense, it may be argued that process time is constitutive of the unique biopolitical institution of the family, just as clock time is constitutive of other disciplinary institutions. Further, this disciplinary time is fundamentally feminine, as it operates (in its ideal form) solely through the labour of the mother – who is herself surveilled and disciplined by institutions external to the family. As such, I argue that it is particularly important for feminists to examine process time as a form of temporal discipline. At the beginning of this paper, I quoted Federici's (2012: 16) Marxist feminist argument that housework is a particularly ‘pervasive’ form of capitalist violence, not only because it chiefly effects women but also because it has been ‘transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character’. Similarly, by discussing process time as an embodied, caring and creative social time without also examining its disciplinary nature, we risk naturalising and valorising the feminised and (re)productive labour that is generated in this time. Bringing process time out from under the ‘shadow’ of clock time (see Adam, 1995: 94) is undoubtedly important, but we cannot stop there. We must also pay attention to how this time facilitates and reifies gendered relations of power. This is important not only for women and mothers but also for all those who engage in process-oriented labour – workers in caring and emotional labour, white-collar workers in flexible organisations, members of the gig economy, and truck drivers, inter alia.

Finally, I should note that by identifying process time as disciplinary, I do not intend to cast it as uniformly negative. Because Foucault conceptualises biopower as positive and productive, it can have effects that we enjoy or wish to preserve. For instance, he argues that not all relations of power should necessarily be shaken off, even as we understand them as a constraint on our agency as individuals:

… there's no reason why this manner of guiding the behaviour of others should not ultimately have results which are positive, valuable, interesting and so on. If I had a kid, I assure you he would not write on the walls – or if he did, it would be against my will. The very idea! (Foucault, 1988: 12; cited in O’Farrell, 2005: 119).

Similarly, I believe that contemporary parenting norms clearly have ‘positive, valuable’ effects where the care and respect of children is concerned. Modern childrearing practices are a definite improvement on Medieval methods of drugging, whipping and ignoring children (for instance). However, by denaturalising these practices, and situating them within modern relations of power, we are better placed to parse the positive from the negative (see also Logan, 2012). For instance, we can separate a newborn baby's need to be fed consistently throughout the day and night from their mother's sole responsibility for feeding them. In other words, by naming process time as a form of discipline, we can determine which elements of this time we wish to keep, and which we decide might be improved upon.