Feminist Materialisms

Bringing together the work of Barad and Deleuze, this article develops the concept of the living present as a frame for an emerging feminist temporality. Within feminist and queer theories, there has been much discussion of the value of non-chronological time in opening up a transformative and unknown future. The author expands on this arena by discussing not only the future, but also the echoes, resonances and traces of the past—a past whose material effects continue to act as living, changing forces on the present and the future. Described as the present of retention and expectation, the living present is never a static ‘now’, but always a stretching between past and future as it contracts all past experiences and expects those yet to come. As it builds on the work of Grosz, Colebrook and others, the living present encourages non-linear, open-ended readings of past events, and therefore represents a new lens through which to approach documented and assumed histories. By opening up collaborative lines of flight between new materialism, Deleuze and feminism, the thick time of the living present reveals a past of forceful, intra-active materialities. It is a realm of possibility to which one is accountable, but not bound.

In the dominant “climate change” imaginary, this phenomenon is distant and abstracted from our experiences of weather and the environment in the privileged West. Moreover, climate change discourse is saturated mostly in either neoliberal progress narratives of controlling the future or sustainability narratives of saving the past. Both largely obfuscate our implication therein. This paper proposes a different climate change imaginary. We draw on feminist new materialist theories—in particular those of Stacy Alaimo, Claire Colebrook, and Karen Barad—to describe our relationship to climate change as one of “weathering.” We propose the temporal frame of “thick time”—a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past—in order to reimagine our bodies as archives of climate and as making future climates possible. In doing so, we can rethink the temporal narratives of climate change discourse and develop a feminist ethos of responsivity toward climatic phenomena. This project reminds us that we are not masters of the climate, nor are we just spatially “in” it. As weather-bodies, we are thick with climatic intra-actions; we are makers of climate-time. Together we are weathering the world.

The film "Inch'Allah" by the Canadian director Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette presents at first shame as signifying neutrality, incapacity of being "contaminated" by the affect of the other. Paradoxically, as the plot evolves, shame becomes delivery. Overcoming trauma and the confusion of proximity, it is a form of reorganizing subjectivity, a critical exchange with the past and a glance into the future. From this point of view, there is a profound continuity between the concept of shame-an "imprint of body on history" (as characterized by Elspeth Probyn in her text "Writing Shame") and the feminist concept of freedom, developed by Elizabeth Grosz in "Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom." This concept is linked to actions, processes, and events that are not confined to the present and become exceptional, unpredictable. Shame represents thus a generative force, capable of delivery.

Judith Butler's analysis of “corporeal matters” offers an exemplary account of the hidden political agenda within the very grain of representation and discourse. This essay, however, argues that “language” and its political implications are even more complex and curious than Butler concedes. The author contests the conflation of “writing” with Culture, as if Culture is the constitutive and enclosed space of productivity and transformation. She argues that the question of Nature has not been provoked in Butler's analysis but answered and dismissed much too quickly. The author extends the problematic of “writing” to biology and suggests that Nature is literate.

Following the ‘material turn’ feminist theatre and performance scholars have begun to engage with questions of matter and materiality and their potential for feminist world-making. This often means acknowledging the vitality (Bennett) or performativity (Barad) of matter as a way of rethinking the masculine-connoted notion of the fully agential, Cartesian subject. Typically, this has meant reading performance works for instances in which the “agency” of matter comes to the fore through the way it is presented and manipulated. In this presentation, I would like to suggest another way in which performance might engage with matter. I propose that turning towards Bachelard’s idea of the material imagination might allow scholars to uncover how the embodied experience of our Lebenswelt is present in dramaturgical practices through metaphor and analogy. By redirecting the focus from the present thing to the more intangible and slippery concept of metaphor, I hope to show that performance’s engagement with matter can be characterised as an intersection between experience (via the sensual encounter with particular types of matter) and history (the layers of cultural scripts associated with it). This perspective is of particular interest to feminist scholars since it enables us to critically assess the metaphorical worlds that a performance draws on and the kind of world-making it undertakes in relation to feminist politics.

Concretely, this presentation will consider what remnants of the imaginary link established between the maternal and the sea might still be useful in feminist performance practice and theory. It will do so by discussing a practice-as-research experiment I undertook. The performance adapted strategies from Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine–which performs a liquification of ordering structures in prose writing–into a dramaturgical form based on the logic of waves. I will suggest that such a dramaturgy recasts creation as a fluid state of becoming ex tempore, resisting the phallocentric vision of creation as an act of the singular genius ex nihilo. Drawing on a particular type of matter, the sea, to describe and theorise a type of dramaturgical composition might be read as a twofold interrogation of the hegemony of patriarchal culture: through its associative link with the maternal body the creative potential of the feminine is revalued while at the same time the generative capacity of matter is recognised via the material imagination. Ultimately, I propose that the sea, together with its analogic association to the maternal, can be instated as a figure that gives temporary shape to an alternative vision of creation and world-making rooted in feminist politics.

[Open Access: http://phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/phaenex/article/view/4394/3875]


Do ecofeminism and new materialism share common features? In ecofeminist literature’s concern for the nonhuman, one could foresee feminist theory’s “material turn” that would eventually lead to new materialist feminisms. In this paper, I argue that they indeed share some common interests and features; they both want to rethink the environment and what constitutes it, but from different angles. On the one hand, ecofeminism is more oriented towards understanding structural oppression of women and nature, including animals, while new materialism wants to reconceptualize agency precisely by looking at the posthuman and the transhuman. I present a wide scope of common features between both fields as well as their mutual tensions.

In Quantum Anthropologies, the renowned feminist theorist Vicki Kirby contends that some of the most provocative aspects of deconstruction have yet to be explored. Deconstruction’s implications have been curtailed by the assumption that issues of textuality and representation are specific to the domain of culture. Revisiting Derrida’s claim that there is “no outside of text,” Kirby argues that theories of cultural construction developed since the linguistic turn have inadvertently reproduced the very binaries they intended to question, such as those between nature and culture, matter and ideation, and fact and value. Through new readings of Derrida, Husserl, Saussure, Butler, Irigaray, and Merleau-Ponty, Kirby exposes the limitations of theories that regard culture as a second-order system that cannot access—much less be—nature, body, and materiality. She suggests ways of reconceiving language and culture to enable a more materially implicated outcome, one that keeps alive the more counterintuitive and challenging aspects of poststructural criticism. By demonstrating how fields, including cybernetics, biology, forensics, mathematics, and physics, can be conceptualized in deconstructive terms, Kirby fundamentally rethinks deconstruction and its relevance to nature, embodiment, materialism, and science.