‘I feel pretty’: beauty as an affective-material process

2021 ◽  
pp. 146470012110000
Author(s):  
Toni Ingram
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Relational Approach ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Feminist New Materialisms ◽  
Material Process ◽  
Ontological Shift

This article explores the potential of feminist new materialisms and theories of affect for reframing how we might think about beauty and the body. Through an exploration of girls, beauty and the school ball (prom), the article engages with Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action to conceptualise beauty as an affective-material process. This perspective involves an ontological shift in how girls, bodies and beauty are understood; from thinking about beauty and the human as discursively produced, towards a relational approach that conceptualises materiality and affect as co-constitutive forces. The article is interested in how such a framing might invite ways of understanding beauty that avoid binary frameworks, such as good/bad, subject/object and discourse/matter. I consider the potential this might offer feminist analyses of beauty, where the focus is less on what beauty is or what it means, and more on how it comes to be.

scholarly journals Feminist affect and children's embodied trauma

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Anna Hickey-Moody ◽  
Marissa Willcox
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Intergenerational Trauma ◽  
The Body ◽  
Refugee Children ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Theoretical Tool ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Bodily Feelings ◽  
Feminist New Materialisms

Feminist new materialisms account for the agency of the body and the ways it is entangled with, in and through its environment. Similarly, affect scholars have putwords to the bodily feelings and attunements that we can’t describe. In this paper, we provide a brief survey of feminist thought that established the scholarly landscape and appetite for the turn to affect and offer this as a theoretical tool for thinking through the child body. Feminist affect is used here as a resource for understanding embodied change in children who are living with intergenerational trauma. Through analysing data from the Interfaith Childhoods project, we explore art as a way to affectively rework trauma in three case studies with refugee children from our Australian fieldwork sites. Our new materialist arts based approaches map embodied changes in children that speak to how bodies inherit and are affected by things that often can’tbe described. Specifically, in relation to their religious, cultural and refugee histories (Van der Kolk 2014, Menakem 2017), we offer the analysis in this paper as a routetowards understanding children’s bodily experience and expression, in ways that havebeen made possible by affective lines of inquiry pioneered by feminist scholarship.

Toward a Trans* Method in Musicology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Baitz
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Sources Of Knowledge ◽  
Musical Structures ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Way Of Knowing ◽  
Material Conditions

This chapter shows that the methods used to approach queer musical subjects cannot adequately account for transsexual ones. To show this, I distinguish queer methods from transsexual methods, while acknowledging a continuum between those extremes. Queer aesthetic and interpretive models highlight a transcending of bodily and other material structures; transsexuality invests in the body. Transsexual studies situate embodiment and material conditions as primary sources of knowledge (or forms of “counterknowledge”), thereby providing new ways for musicologists to consider the meaning that musical structures hold. Likewise, transsexual artists become legible within musicology through an application of transsexual studies (notably including phenomenology and new materialisms) to music. Ultimately, by integrating transsexual epistemologies with queer ones, a new way of knowing music (a “trans* method”) is suggested.

Materialisms

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Wingrove
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Historical Materialist ◽  
Theoretical Inquiry ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The World ◽  
Feminist New Materialisms ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Interpretive Frameworks

This chapter explores the diverse, sometimes discordant ways in which commitments to materialism have shaped feminist theoretical inquiry. Focusing on two alternative interpretive frameworks—historical materialist feminisms (HMF) and feminist new materialisms (FNM)—the chapter considers how distinct understandings of “materiality” sustain alternative accounts of agency, power, and difference. The chapter aims to highlight how these appeals to markedly different notions of a material “real” lead to markedly different interpretive grammars: one (HMF) emphasizing systematicity and the durability of structured relations, the other (FNM) emphasizing indeterminacy, flux, and the “messiness” of the world. Among the stakes identified in these interpretive differences are how physical bodies, processes of embodiment, and nature figure in feminist analyses; how the relationship between matter and representational systems is conceptualized; and whether oppression should serve as a central or secondary locus of analytic concern.

scholarly journals Understanding with Water: Hydro-art in Osieki (1973)

2021 ◽  
pp. 356-374
Author(s):  
Karolina Majewska-Güde
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Land Art ◽  
Environmental Humanities ◽  
Active Participant ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Water Surfaces ◽  
History Of ◽  
Feminist New Materialisms

The paper is located at the intersection of the art history of the Polish neo-avant-garde and the environmental humanities informed by feminist new materialisms. It proposes an interpretation of performative works in which artists used aqueous matter as an object of interaction, a source of artistic transcription, and as an active participant in artistic scenarios. It concentrates on works that were realized during the open-air art meetings in socialist Poland and in particular at the Osieki meeting in 1973 with the title The Art of Water Surfaces [Plastyka obszarów wodnych]. Based on the analyzed works, it offers a speculative reflection on Hydroart, which is defined as region-specific development parallel to land art practices.

Sexuality Education and Feminist New Materialisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louisa Allen
Keyword(s):  
Education Research ◽  
Sexuality Education ◽  
Unplanned Pregnancy ◽  
Sexual Consent ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Sexually Transmissible Infections ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The World ◽  
Feminist New Materialisms ◽  
Feminist New Materialism

School-based sexuality education has existed in various forms since the 1800s. Sexuality education researchers have recently turned to feminist new materialist thought to rethink debates that occupy this field. These debates include whether sexuality education should be taught at school, who should teach it, and what constitutes appropriate content. While these issues have been important historically, some sexuality researchers view them as stifling other possibilities for teaching and generating knowledge in this field. Feminist new materialism emerges from a broader ontological turn within the social sciences and humanities that diverges from social constructionist accounts of the world. This work is associated with scholars such as Barad, Bennett, Haraway, and Braidotti and draws on thinking from Deleuze and Guattari. Employing theoretical tools, such as “intra-action,” “onto-epistemology,” and “agentic matter,” feminist new materialism reconceptualizes the nature of sexuality education research. These concepts highlight the anthropocentric (human-centered) nature of sexuality education research and practice. Feminist new materialisms encourage us to think about what the sexuality curriculum might look like when humans are not at its core, nor bestowed with the power to control themselves and the world. These questions have profound implications for how we teach aspects of sexuality underpinned by these assumptions, such as safer sex and sexual consent. Ultimately, feminist new materialism encourages us to question whether issues such as prevention of sexually transmissible infections and unplanned pregnancy should remain the conventional foci of this subject.

scholarly journals Speculative Before the Turn: Reintroducing Feminist Materialist Performativity

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilia Åsberg ◽  
Kathrin Thiele ◽  
Iris Van der Tuin
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Feminist Scholar ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Feminist New Materialisms ◽  
Art And Activism ◽  
The Many ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
Speculative Thought

This is a moment for new conversations and new synergies. While a wealth of contemporary speculative materialisms is currently circulating in academia, art and activism, in this article we focus upon a few ethico-political stakes in the different, loosely affiliated conceptions of ontologies of immanence. More specifically, we are concerned here with the very meaning of speculation itself after the many new headings of immanent ontologies, such as object-oriented ontology (OOO), speculative realism or the (feminist) new materialisms. Our concern is a feminist concern, as some of the immanent ontologies seem to actively connect with the varied feminist archive of speculative thought while others seem to actively disconnect from the very same archive. What does this imply for the feminist scholar who is in want of tools for navigating the contemporary landscape of ontologies of immanence? Here, we highlight some important overlapping as well as poignant clashes between various feminist materialist genealogies and OOO/speculative realism. In our discussion we underline the importance of situatedness and context, relationality and affinity—and the possibility for rewiring relations—amid a plethora of lively historiographies and emergent post-disciplinary movements and world-makings.

scholarly journals La “personeidad” de la caguama: arte rupestre, paisaje y agencia en la costa central de Sonora, México

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 119-138
Author(s):  
Silvina Vigliani
Keyword(s):  
Landscape Archaeology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Archaeological Remains ◽  
Main Interest ◽  
Relational Approach ◽  
The World ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
Ontological Position ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Do So

Not all societies identify themselves and the others in the same way nor do so invariably over time. At the same time, not all of them conceptualize the same notion of being and relating, nor do we have to expect that different social collectives in time and space understand objects, animals, stars, rocks, dead or places in the same way we do. Therefore, the main interest of this work is not so much discovering the function or meaning of the archaeological remains we study but trying to understand them in their own ontological parameters.Based on that, we propose starting our study from 1) the critical review of our categories in order to deconstruct their sen-ses, and 2) the reading of ethnographic information which introduce us to other forms of Being-in-the-world. From this point, we can propose and apply methodological tools in order to analyze the information from a closer ontological position to that of the groups we study. In this case, I will analyze the way in which certain images painted on the rock would have affected the transformation of the body and the identity of those who painted them. This analysis will be addressed from the relational approach through the landscape archaeology and the agency theory as analytical tools.

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