Agential Materialism and the Feminist Paradigm. A Posthumanist Approach

Abstract

Much has been argued within the fertile critical field of feminism in the second half of the twentieth century. With the advantage of distance from the twenty-first century, we can now gain a certain perspective on the general context of production and reception of feminist criticism as it becomes embodied in new myths that subvert the old phallogocentric ones. My approach intends to start a dialogue between such embodiments (mainly in the work of Cixous, Hayles, de Beauvoir, and Haraway) and Karen Barad’s agential materialism, using her critical construct of “phenomenon” as an instrument to understand the feminist paradigm in the post-human context and proposing accountable diffractive intra-action as an alternative to naturalized constructs.