Feminist New Materialism and Literary Studies: Methodological Meditations on the Tradition of Feminist Literary Criticism and (Post)Critique

Abstract

This chapter examines the potential embedded in feminist New Materialism for transforming established methods, conceptualizations, and attitudes within feminist literary criticism. It sketches a chronological outline of feminist theory and feminist literary criticism in order to situate feminist New Materialism as the latest cross-disciplinary transfer in an ongoing history of dialogues and appropriations from (1) second wave feminism, (2) French feminist theory and (3) queer theory. Drawing on ideas from Mayra Rivera, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and others, the chapter argues that the lines of thought promoted by these figures are best adopted to literary criticism by engaging literature as an affective and imaginative site for witnessing what it feels like to live as a specific carnal configuration, subjected not only to the powers of discourse, but also to the recalcitrant materiality of the flesh, thereby revitalizing the emphasis on affect and experience also characteristic of the gynocritical approaches of the 1970s.