Feminist new materialism, religion and perception

2021 ◽  
pp. 195-213
Author(s):  
Sally McKay
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Feminist New Materialism

An organization’s relationship to violence

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-48
Author(s):  
Kate Lockwood Harris
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Material World ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The World ◽  
Feminist New Materialism

Two sets of assumptions—ones about communication and ones about agency—shape debates over the violence–organization relationship. When scholars and laypersons suggest that words are mere symbols that represent the world and correspond to things in it, communication remains a way to describe violence. Under this representationalist line of thinking, communication is split from the material world and cannot do harm. Similarly, when people assume that agency is a human’s intentional decision about how to act, the broader processes that inform action fade from view. An individual perpetrator becomes the sole violent actor. Both sets of assumptions make it difficult to conceptualize an organization’s role in violence. This chapter relies on feminist new materialism to problematize these assumptions. After providing an overview of the theory’s distinctive features, the chapter shows its resonances with existing scholarship on communication, agency, and organizations. These resonances provide a framework for understanding organizations to be more than mere sites for violence.

scholarly journals Communication and Feminist New Materialism: Methodologies to understand the continuum between matter and discourse

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2018) ◽  
pp. 55-70
Author(s):  
Beatriz Revelles-Benavente ◽  
Ana M. González Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Social Networking Sites ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Trapping Force ◽  
Communicative Process ◽  
Feminist New Materialism ◽  
The Continuum

The relationship between literature and social networking sites (SNS) is a material context in which authors and readers merge into each other to create a literary communicative process that transforms contemporary politics. The aim of this paper is to analyse the communicative process by investigating the continuum between matter and discourse from a new materialist approach. From social sites, we can understand how elements, such as readers, authors, context, novels, culture and digital platforms, “intra-act” (Barad 2007) to create an affecting/ed communicative process. We propose feminist new materialism as a theoretical terrain that helps to reconfigure politics and communication in order to build a methodological framework for contemporary feminist politics and theory related to Literature. Using a digital genealogy and the theory of new materialism, we identify communication in literature as a trapping force in which different elements intra-act with each other and become indivisible. Affecting/ed communication is a dynamic conceptualization, a literary activity in which active agents participate in creative spaces for future social changes.

scholarly journals Alice’s Garden: Imagining Agency in the Natural World in Clare Boylan’s Black Baby

2020 ◽  
pp. 42-52
Author(s):  
Maureen O’Connor ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Life Span ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Generative Process ◽  
Untimely Death ◽  
The Status ◽  
Feminist New Materialism ◽  
Interracial Family

The Irish writer Clare Boylan is something of a forgotten figure, despite enjoying significant literary success in her lifetime. Because of her untimely death, little critical work has been done on her fiction. Her blackly comic sensibility responds sensitively to characters situated in culturally specific environments, with particular attention paid to the vexed and contradictory position of women in their relationship to the natural world, and so this essay conducts a reading of her 1988 novel, Black Baby, using the insights of feminist new materialism and critical posthumanism, especially as articulated by Rosi Braidotti. In every genre, contemporary Irish women’s writing finds space in the natural world to explore alternatives to the status quo. Black Baby imagines an interracial family of women (and cats) in the enchanted environment of a miraculously blooming winter garden. By staging Alice’s most transformative moments, including her final moments of semi-consciousness, in a garden, Boylan makes recourse to the idea of an unending, generative process. Nothing really dies when life is no longer an individualised experience, but an impersonal moment of radical inclusion that exceeds the material limits of any one life span.

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.

Composing Collaborationist Collages about Commercial Security

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-97
Author(s):  
Anna Leander
Keyword(s):  
Building Blocks ◽  
Academic Work ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Analytical Strategy ◽  
Main Building ◽  
War Games ◽  
Martha Rosler ◽  
Feminist New Materialism

This article is an argument about why it is worth taking the trouble to work with feminist, new materialist approaches inspired by Haraway, Mol, Stengers and others, when studying IR questions. It introduces and exemplifies one specific analytical strategy for doing so, namely one of “composing collaborationist collages”, focusing first on the main building blocks of the approach and then on the (dis-)advantages of working with it. In terms of the building blocks, I underline that composing makes it possible to join the heterogeneous and unlikely, that collaging accentuates the scope for playing with heterogeneity and that collaborating is a necessary part of this process as a well as a helpful check on one’s positionality. I then proceed by focusing on the (dis-)advantages of composing collaborationist collages, making the arguments that this research strategy directs attention to (dis-)connections and to the temporal politics of emergence. It also requires a willingness to face the uncertainties associated with creative academic work. The article introduces composing collaborationist collages as a research strategy. It does so working with material from feminist new materialism, practice theories, the exhibition War Games featuring installations by Hito Steyerl and Martha Rosler and my own work on the politics of commercial security.

A Horse Is a Horse, Of Course, Of Course: Animality, Transitivity, and the Double Take

Somatechnics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-47
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Barker
Keyword(s):  
Animal Movement ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
Slow Motion ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Running Time ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Feminist New Materialism ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Dividing Line

Lanthimos's The Lobster (2015) invites a way of looking that coincides with work done by scholars of feminist new materialism with an eye toward queering binary and static concepts of species, gender, and the relation between them. A close look at one fleeting, slow-motion image of horses racing on a track reveals a pattern of ‘diffraction,’ in the critically productive sense that Karen Barad uses the term, such that we see neither camera movement, human movement, nor animal movement proper, but movement that is ‘of’ all three bodies, but not ‘in’ any given one. The film perpetually defers the dichotomy between animal and human as it is classically conceived in order to reconfigure it.That diffractive pattern recurs throughout the film, in its use of slow motion, lateral camera movements, and the overlapping of multiple movements and rhythms. Throughout its running time, The Lobster suspends the process of becoming in motion, emphasizing the experiential aspect of this ‘-ing’ that bodies do. The film draws vision sideways, rippling and redoubling itself; in the process, it shifts attention from a human state or an animal state – states that, according to conventional logic, exist on one side or another of a dividing line, and which certain types of movement might transcend – to transitivity, or the movement of movement itself.

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