Sticky places: temporality, affect and gender in Australian country towns

Abstract

In outlining the aims of new materialism, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost emphasise its engagement with the possibility of matter having agency. They write: New materialists are attracted to forms of vitalism that refuse [distinctions between live and dead matter]. . . . They often discern emergent, generative powers (or agentive capacities) even within inorganic matter, and they generally eschew the distinction between organic and inorganic, or animate and inanimate, at the ontological level. In this chapter, we build on this re- engagement with matter’s agentive possibilities, stressing that any such agency must be clearly located in time and space. Drawing on data from an Australian Research Council funded study titled ‘Country Boys in Uncertain Times and Places’ (1999 2001), which we have theorised in other ways elsewhere, in this chapter we consider possibilities for a feminist new materialist, or vitalist, reading of this early data on boys’ belonging in rural communities.