This paper offers a preliminary analysis of temporality inThis paper is an exploratory inquiry into how time is experienced by people who have diabetes. The substantive phase of my inquiry seeks to depict the arenas and sets of relations in which time is transformed by virtue of diabetes; the analytical phase, which is suggestive of several conceptual distinctions, seeks to account for the nature of temporality as a diabetic phenomenon. My central argument is that temporal processes are at the very heart of the diabetic experience, that those processes unite the physiological, emotional, social, interpersonal, technological, organizational, institutional, and personal *Support for this work was provided through the Psychosocial Epidemiology Training Program and BRSG Grant 2-5-21736 of the School of Public Health, University of Illinois, Chicago. I also express my appreciation for the support of the Program on Health Resources Management of that University. Joni Beemsterboer was kind enough to help me think through a couple of troublesome points of analysis in an earlier version of this paper.