A tale of grappling: Performative duoethnography as expanded methodological thinking

This article is a tale of two researchers, teachers, and artists grappling and playing with duoethnography. By expanding the methodology, we aim to bridge duoethnography into pedagogy. Grappling with the methodological to pedagogical bridge, we found that intertwined performative aspects of doing a duoethnography could challenge our knowledge production and roles as researchers and the current and more dominant practices that we operate within. We engage with a performative paradigm (Bolt, 2016) and lean on relevant theories from new materialist feminist thinkers such as Karen Barad (2003, 2007), Lenz Taguchi (2009, 2012) and Tami Spry (2011, 2016), while dialoguing with Joe Norris and Richard D. Sawyer’s (2012) tenets of duoethnography. Our embodiment of these tenets, intertwined with our theoretical positioning, allows our investigation to expand into a performative duoethnography. As an end, we propose duoethnography as a critical performative pedagogy (Pineau, 2002) and offer this article as a playful impulse connecting methodological considerations with pedagogy.

Historical materialism and international studies: theorising the politics of struggle in the everyday world

This forum brings together critical engagements with Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton’s Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis to assess the prospects and limits of historical materialism in International Studies. The authors’ call for a ‘necessarily historical materialist moment’ in International Studies is interrogated by scholars working with historical materialist, feminist and decolonial frameworks in and beyond International Relations (IR)/International Political Economy (IPE). This introductory essay situates the book in relation to the wider concerns of historical materialist IR/IPE and outlines how the contributors assess the viability of Bieler and Morton’s historical materialist project.

Wages for Face-Work

The episode “Nosedive” from the Netflix series Black Mirror (dir. Joe Wright, Netflix, UK, 2016) provides a dystopian version of a popular narrative about digital culture, according to which the ascent of social media marks the “feminization of the Internet,” its transformation from an open wilderness of hackers to a domesticated web of social performance and consumerism. This essay draws forward an argument implicit in “Nosedive”: social media use is a specific form of labor that Marxist feminists have taught us to call reproductive, the un- or underpaid labor sustaining domestic and social life (and thus also the global economy), which is compelled through normative idealizations that erase its status as labor. Reading the episode and the contemporary social media economy in dialogue with the Marxist feminist Wages for Housework movement, the essay argues that individual social media users’ unpaid digital labor—creating, sharing, and responding to content—sustains the platforms that extract their data as “surplus value.” It further draws on sociologist Erving Goffman’s account of “face-work” in order to clarify the way in which a person’s digital identity is produced in collaboration with others through ceaseless labors of interactive self-maintenance. This analysis foregrounds the limitations of Black Mirror’s political vision and reveals the political and theoretical resources provided by a materialist feminist critique of the tech economy.

Unthinkable concepts, invisible genealogies: rereading the new materialist rereading of The Second Sex

In the essay ‘Sexual Differing’ from their book New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin develop their new materialist take on sexual difference through their rereading of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. I propose to read this essay as deploying the ‘analytical tool’ of ‘jumping generations’ articulated in the homonymous paper by van der Tuin as signature of the ‘new materialist’ ‘third wave’ of feminist theory. By pointing to the immediate textual context of the passages from The Second Sex quoted in ‘Sexual Differing’, to the philosophical underpinning of Beauvoir's work, and to the historical context of its reception, I argue that while the tool of ‘jumping generations’, as put to use in ‘Sexual Differing’, might produce unexpected outcomes, it also risks confining to dusty feminist archives segments of feminist philosophy that might still be relevant for thinking gendered oppression and liberation today: Beauvoir's understanding of the social ontogenesis of freedom, the collective and egalitarian nature of political transformation and the genealogy of materialist feminist thought theoretically and historically linked to Beauvoir and The Second Sex. The issue is not merely one of historical and theoretical accuracy, but of enabling a capacious materialist analysis of gendered oppression and liberation. I conclude by pointing at how Dolphijn and van der Tuin's approach expressly discards understandings of history and scholarship that it nevertheless necessarily performs, and propose that this can be taken as a starting point to rethink sexual differing in terms of a political and ethical commitment beyond its originary metaphysical new materialist articulation. This is where, I propose, the above-mentioned conceptual resources linked to The Second Sex and muted by ‘Sexual Differing’ could prove fruitful, and timely.

Connectivity in times of control: writing/undoing/unpacking/acting out power performances

In this collectively written article, the authors interrogate contemporary power constellations that run between control and connectivity. Regimes of individualism, hierarchies of assumed classifications and imperialistic subjectivities sustain the basis for political control that organises connections and divisions used to justify hierarchical dominations and distributions. This makes anti-oppression practices that value differing forms of connectivity and intra-dependence (between humans, more than humans, disciplines, all things considered to be of different bodies) nearly unimaginable. The authors offer/reconfigure/understand connectivity as a practice acting in and at odds with those controlling political regimes that organise and classify matter(s), while experimenting with their own writing methodology aimed at staying connected. Informed by new materialist feminist practices and ideas, the authors discuss the political stakes of multiple ideas of connectivity within three empirical scenarios: academic labour practices, social media and a digitally established mutual aid community. We trace entangled forces of separation and control shaped by global imperialism, processes of individuation and technological apparatuses and how they perform within these scenarios. This approach is mirrored in our practice of writing together. In an alternative to traditionalised ways of writing, we expand upon an embodied praxis, elaborating on multiple engagements while offering our own connections with these differing situated knowledges. In light of this, the authors write in a diffractive, collective fashion that lies somewhere between a conversation and the strict linearity of typical narratives.

Materials, forensics and feminist geopolitics

This article seeks to advance the case for feminist geopolitics that recognises the challenges both to the Enlightenment individual and the discursive turn in geography posed by ‘new materialisms’. I will argue that for a distinctively feminist geopolitics a consideration of the way that representational categories align the material around bodies is vital. After a brief discussion of feminist geopolitical approaches, the article moves on to consider accounts of new materialism and assemblage approaches as they are applied to geopolitics, before moving on to consider what a forensic approach might offer to a materialist feminist geopolitics.

Gender Socioeconomic Inequalities in Intimate Relationships

Inspired by the materialist feminist theoretical approach, this study starts from an underlying assumption that research of gender socioeconomic inequalities in intimate relationships requires the analysis of specific variables that constitute the socioeconomic status of intimate partners. Based on five indicators relevant for contemporary Croatian society, the GSEI index was constructed and applied to a representative sample of Croatian women in intimate relationships. The results showed significant gender socioeconomic inequalities between intimate partners, mostly in favour of men. The highest level of inequality between intimate partners was discovered with regard to real-estate ownership, whereas the highest level of equality between partners was found in their level of education. Although socioeconomic inequalities between intimate partners in favour of men prevail regardless of the geographic and social context, they are more pronounced in regions with more traditional values, among couples who live in rural areas, and among those who are married (in comparison with those who live in domestic partnership). A recommendation for further research and GSEI index application is to consider which are the relevant indicators for measuring gender socioeconomic inequalities in intimate relationships depending on the wider social context.