Feminist New Materialist Approaches to Childhood Studies

Abstract

There is a growing body of feminist scholarship that has taken up “new” materialisms to research childhoods. Feminist “new” materialisms, as the name suggests, are marked by a renewed attention to matter. In previous feminist research, such as those informed by feminist post-structuralist and sociocultural approaches, matter was assigned an inert, passive, and determinate role; a substrate on which language and discourse acted upon. In contrast, new materialist ontology views matter as lively, active, and indeterminate, and inseparable from the discursive as expressed in the concatenated term “materialdiscursive.” This is to by no means put feminist post-structuralisms in opposition to new materialist thought, or to assume a radical break from past feminist interventions; instead, feminist new materialisms hold onto the advances made by feminist post-structuralisms while simultaneously expanding its focus beyond just language and discourse. While the “new” in new materialisms is an attempt to distinguish itself from older forms of materialisms such as Marxist-inflected materialism and “scientific” materialism, the claims to “newness” have been a matter of contention. As pointed out by Indigenous and Black scholars like Eve Tuck, Zoe Todd, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Uri McMillan, and Tiffany Lethabo King, Black/Indigenous philosophies and cosmologies in diverse locations have held similar views for centuries and millennia, where nonhuman agencies, transient materialities and human-nonhuman relations marked by reciprocity have shaped Black/Indigenous lifeworlds. The feminist inflection of “new” materialisms invite such productive frictions, to ensure West’s hegemony is disrupted while simultaneously enacting care in how Indigenous/Black thought is brought in conversation with new materialisms. In line with other critical approaches in childhood studies, feminist new materialisms disrupt Western humanist and developmentalist approaches, troubling linear, individualized, and deterministic notions of childhood. Childhood is viewed as a leaky, messy and indeterminate terrain, always already more-than the bounded “child.” This is not to undermine the advances made in childhood studies to enhance children’s agencies via multimodal listening, rather such agencies are viewed as inseparable from the nonhuman world. Donna Haraway’s concept of “naturecultures” and “diffraction,” Karen Barad’s agential realist concepts such as “intra-action” and “phenomena,” Stacy Alaimo’s notion of “transcorporeality” and “material memoirs,” and Jane Bennet’s “thing power” all enable disrupting human exceptionalism produced through forced cuts and boundaries imposed by Western epistemological traditions. Foregrounding the entanglements of matter, discourse, affect, temporalities, place, and space offers critical and affirmative possibilities in the field of childhood studies.