Biopossibility: A Queer Feminist Materialist Science Studies Manifesto, with Special Reference to the Question of Monogamous Behavior

Abstract

This essay is a speculative exploration into the uses of a materialism grounded in the epistemological interventions of feminist and postcolonial science studies and queer historicizations of sexuality. It is also a meditation on the materialist turn in feminist theory from a critical science studies perspective. It offers a creative approach to the materiality of embodiment, an approach that is critically alert to the ways in which scientific disciplinary ways of knowing have been constructed as less mediated access to that materiality than humanistic ones. Rather than turning to a materialist genealogy that suggests the importance of science, this essay turns to a genealogy grounded in a queer, feminist, and antiracist vision of the vital body as a source of knowledge and resistance. Reading Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic, the Erotic as Power” as a biology of the erotic to decenter assumptions about sexuality and human nature that shape the field of gene-brain-behavior research on affiliative behavior in general and on monogamy in particular, the essay elaborates a theory of biopossibility. It offers this notion of biopossibility—the complexly mediated capacity to embody certain socially salient traits and differences—as a frame for a queer feminist materialist science studies approach.