In Epiphenomenal time the individual is seen as the point where many collective identities intersect, the individual doesn't become the dominant focus that identities are under. This also means realities can change and shift based on how someone's social identity is construed, and the harm and violence enacted based on that identity. 

Epiphenomenal Time and the Individual

Michelle Wright coined the term Epiphenomenal time to bring together this idea of closeness and intra-activity by situating the role of social identity - including violence and harm enacted on an individual - to argue that an individual's different experiences are what constitutes different realities.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Price asks the question of how can we conceptualize the feeling when you know you do not share every facet of a reality with someone but your realities feel "close" in terms of spacetime. For example, in discussing Crip Spacetime how do we get at the notion that the reality of a white autistic trans-man may share some of the same contours with the reality of a white autistic woman because of a shared embodiment of being societally perceived as a woman/girl at one point. Price offers epiphenomenal time as a way of conceptualizing this closeness.

Close Realities

Barad emphasizes in her discussion of entanglement that identity experiences that someone is legible as don't just come into being and then interact with each other, rather if someone is both disbaled and Black or disabled and queer those identities coconstitute each other and start interacting during identity formation to shape how each is embodied by the person. Barad calls this phenomenon intra-activity.

Intra-activity

Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime. Duke University Press.

Crip Spacetime

Wright, Michelle M. 2015. Physics and Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Physics and Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology

Epiphenomenal Time

There is pretty good understanding within disability studies spaces about the barriers individuals face in getting access to a diagnosis (provider biases, access to resources, time, access to health insurance) which can all be considered aspects of inter-activity because of how we see both the formation of disability being created through the lens of race, gender, socio-economic status, body size, etc. but also how experiences of racism, misogyny, antifatness, and classism in medical settings can in turn shape identity formation of non-disabled identity categories.

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