Why Do I Have to Get It Out the Mud? Racialized Delay, Withstandability, and the Uneven Timing of Security

This thesis examines how security operates through uneven temporal logics that structure who receives protection and when. Using storytelling and narrative as qualitative analytical methods, it draws on Black feminist epistemology to analyze public cases including Breonna Taylor, Grenfell Tower, and Tamika Huston, as well as the lived experiences of Black women, to trace patterns of delay, recognition, and urgency. It argues that this uneven timing is a structured feature of how security operates, produced through a racialized logic of withstandability in which Black women are expected to endure prolonged exposure to harm within patriarchal and racialized systems. I center narrative as a form of analysis to demonstrate how lived experience and storytelling function as evidence. Lived experience is essential to this project because conventional approaches to security focus on visible moments of crisis and formal state response, rather than the temporal processes through which protection is delayed, deferred, or denied in everyday life. They cannot adequately capture how protection is unevenly lived and felt by Black women navigating racialized and patriarchal systems. In doing so, it redefines security as a governing structure that allocates urgency, care, and response unevenly across populations. The use of storytelling reflects the argument itself, demonstrating that security is not only structured at the level of policy, but lived through time and experience. This thesis contributes to security studies by reframing security as a system that governs time, and by offering a conceptual language for understanding delay, abandonment, and uneven protection.