Technological Multistability and the Trouble with the Things Themselves

Following Husserl, phenomenologists and “postphenomenologists” often use a rhetoric of getting back to the “things themselves.” However, open questions remain about how we should understand the metaphysical status of the technologies that we encounter. These questions remain especially open for perspectives such as postphenomenology (and sister accounts such as feminist new materialism, and actor-network theory), with their commitments to an ontology of relations. One way forward is through a deeper consideration of the postphenomenological notion of “multistability,” the idea that technologies always support multiple meanings and uses. Including a detour through Jean-Paul Sartre’s example of the letter opener, I explore what it can mean for technological multistability to constitute a jumping-off point for analysis, rather than a conversation stopper. The “things themselves” are a fine investigative target to be sought. Nevertheless, we should prepare for the possibility that we may find something else.

Anoreksi og agens

Cultural studies and gender studies hold long-standing traditions for studying people with eating disorders as either passive objects subjected to misogynist discourses or subversive agents that negotiate societal norms. In both cases, agency is primarily investigated as a phenomenon that unfolds between the anorectic individual and the surrounding society. In contrast, this article explores how the question of agency also unfolds within the anorectic her-/himself. It does so by setting up a dialogue between the anorectic testimony of Cecilie Lind’s pathography Scarykost (2016) and philosophical ideas of corporeality in feminist new materialism, affect theory, and phenomenology. Ultimately, the article argues that the anorectic subject is not a homogenous individual that can easily be classified as either passive or active, but comprises an infra-corporeal landscape of social, psychic, and biological forms of agency that struggle to determine the will of the anorectic “I.” In that way, the article pushes back on the tendency in cultural and gender studies to make generalizing claims about the anorectic’s subversive agency – or lack thereof.

Feminist New Materialisms

This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in feminist new materialism, including examples of important contributions to this discussion, as well as current and future directions. The chapter discusses three different sources for the conception of materialism engaged in the feminist new materialisms: (1) attention to materiality in the philosophical traditions of phenomenology and postmodern thought, (2) a turn to the sciences to better understand materiality, and (3) Marxist-inspired conceptions of materiality. The chapter also reflects on the meaning of “new” in feminist new materialism.

Sexuality Education and Feminist New Materialisms

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.

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

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.

Composing Collaborationist Collages about Commercial Security

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.

New Materialist Openings to Children's Literature Studies

New materialist and posthuman thinking denote a range of approaches that have in common a focus on materialities as a turn against the persistence of Cartesian dualisms (mind/body, subject/object, nature/culture, for example). In this article, we explore how the feminist new materialism of Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Rosi Braidotti, among others, may provide openings to research in our field, especially when considering what is recurrently taken up as one of its central problems: the positioning of the child in a world ruled by adults. We first discuss recent approaches in children's literature studies that show interest in these theories and then use these to offer a toolbox of terms and notions – from ethico-onto-epistemology to diffraction – that may open possibilities for research in more-than-human environments.