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Generational time is a relational time, enabling sociocultural and political transmission between people of different ages and eras. It is manifest not only in the quantitative charting of births, ageing, and deaths, but also in the construction of symbolic generational orders and metaphors. The idea of "predecessors," for example, instills a connection to those who lived before one's own lifetime, while "successors" denotes those likely to outlive us and those yet to be born, thus stretching out futural horizons (Mannheim 1997; Ricoeur 1988; Stiegler 2010). Generational time is also figured through explicitly familial metaphors, such as "foremothers" or "forefathers." This is often the case within feminism where metaphors of "feminist fore-mothers," "mothers," and "daughters" are frequently deployed to convey relationships between feminists of different ages and eras.¹ Such terms, however, have been subject to serious feminist criticism of late. This is because the familial imagery is so closely associated with Oedipal models of relationality, which revolve around rivalry, prohibition, repression, and rebellion. Moreover, the idea of a "generational succession" can conjure images of feminism as a singular, one-way journey, where feminism is "passed on" or "handed down" from one generation to the next. As such, generational paradigms can seem inevitably aligned with linear, patriarchal concepts of historical time, steeped in logics of endowment and debt.

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