Clocked by the pandemic! On gender and time in Rousseau’s Émile

Abstract

ABSTRACT Pandemic disruptions to schooling threw into sharper relief the entanglements of economy, gender norms, and education that had been there, and throughout the modern world, all along. The particular entanglement this paper aims to unravel is the reliance of education on a certain kind of attentiveness, historically provided by a feminized teaching force and mothers, that itself rests on the cultivation of particular sensibilities regarding time.