Materialist Feminist Research Articles

Utopian and Dystopian Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Big Data

Data feminism, a way of thinking about and “doing” data utilizing feminist tools and perspectives, has emerged in recent years as a part of a critical discourse surrounding datafication. The aim of this study is to analyze and identify shared perceptions of big data as expressed in a corpus of scholarly writings published in the domain of data studies and data feminism. We analyzed a set of 44 scholarly texts engaging in feminism concerned with the concept of big data. For the purpose of this article, we refer to this set of texts as data feminism and examine how authors frame and describe big data. We compare future visions in data feminist material with policies by the European Commission and explore what tensions arise among them. Furthermore, we explore and delineate social and political alternatives that emerge from data feminist texts. Both corpora describe futures inclusive of big data and imagine possible positive outcomes from different perspectives and with different ideas of the current role of big data. We found that sociotechnical imaginaries of big data within the data feminist corpus are considerably richer and more nuanced than those of the European Commission. In the data feminist corpus, big data is described as a multiplicity of things and often implicated in perpetuating power imbalances and large societal issues. The European Commission corpus employs the perspective of “data as a resource” to be exploited.

Roundtable discussion: World-culture and social reproduction feminism

This dialogic roundtable discussion elaborates the possibilities opened up by the use of social reproduction theory in intersection with world-literary, materialist feminist, queer Marxist and world-systems approaches to literature and culture. In particular, contributors consider how the analysis of social reproduction might illuminate the politics of everyday life, the representational challenges accompanying the banality or ubiquity of women's work, the potential gaps of social reproduction feminism, and the aesthetic challenges accompanying or following from an interest in social reproduction. Topics covered include digital media as foundational operating mode of Hindu nationalism, the sexuality- and race-based exclusions of employment in higher education, Philippine literature as ‘reproductive fiction’, the Latin American novel vis-à-vis its registration of domestic service, the short story as bellwether for global issues surrounding women’s labour, and questions of complicity in the kinds of labour some women and sexual minorities enact for larger authoritarian, patriarchal projects. If women do much of the work of producing the everyday then we must also ask how women might re-make the everyday along more radical, and radically egalitarian lines.

The normalisation of sexual violence revictimisation in regional and rural areas: Our failure to respond

AbstractSexual revictimisation has devastating consequences for victim/survivors, yet there is limited research exploring women's experience of revictimisation in regional/rural areas. Using a community‐based participatory research (CBPR) approach, this paper reports on a qualitative study that employed a material feminist lens and Nixon's theory of “slow violence” to explore women's lived experiences of sexual revictimisation. In‐depth interviews were conducted with victim/survivors (N = 11) living in regional and rural areas of Australia. Findings show that the failure of family, community and services to respond appropriately to participant's disclosures of violence and abuse was deeply entangled with rural infrastructure, isolated landscapes, fear of social isolation, victim‐blaming discourses, idealisation of men in the community and limited relationship and sexuality education (RSE) in schools. These components collectively formed a manifestation of “slow violence,” which accumulated over the participants' life spans and gradually normalised relational violence. This paper draws attention to a complex interplay of cultural, material and interpersonal elements, including the culture and spaces of rural/regional communities, that establish conditions enhancing the likelihood of women experiencing sexual revictimisation.

기후위기의 페미니즘 정치학과 생태시민되기

The climate crisis is a global and urgent ecological problem facing humanity that cannot be avoided. The various ecological and environmental catastrophes caused by the current climate crisis lead to the politics of developing science and technology to solve them. However, the climate crisis is also rearranging human society in the midst of environmental changes that cannot be predicted by science and technology. This article begins with a critique of the science-technoism, anthropocentrism, colonialism, and developmentalism of the mainstream climate crisis discourses by asking: whose crisis is the climate crisis, and whose responsibility is it? This article calls for a deconstruction of the science-technoism discourse surrounding the climate crisis and a reconstruction of the relationship between humans and nature, especially through ecofeminism and new materialist feminism. By elucidating ecofeminism's decolonization theory of the climate crisis and new material feminism's becoming-climate debate, this study critically examines the issue of women's victimization in the climate crisis and considers whether nature can become a public subject in our society. Based on the analysis of feminist politics surrounding the climate crisis, this study proposes becoming ecological citizens as a new feminist citizenship in the era of climate crisis through the case study of women peasants' ecological citizenship practices based on interspecies relations.

The Cenote as Material Feminist Figuration: From the Holocene to the Halocline

ABSTRACT Cenotes are naturally occurring freshwater sinkholes that are formed when limestone bedrock erodes, exposing subterranean water. They are visually striking: cavernous, circular holes in the ground that drop down to the shimmer of bright blue water. Building on the genealogy of feminist figures, this article argues that cenotes are rich feminist figurations that can assist us in thinking through the complexities of ecological crises in the Anthropocene. I utilise scuba diving in cenotes as a method of bodily enquiry, drawing on fieldwork conducted at eight cenotes in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico to demonstrate how thinking with the rich material-discursive composition of cenotes can question and undermine normative approaches to the Anthropocene. Cenotes are spaces of rupture and affective possibility, transitional zones that privilege fluidity over categorisation. By analysing cenotes and their unique hydro-geological formations as a distinctly feminist figuration, I argue that the binary onto-epistemologies implicit in the Anthropocene can be challenged and re-thought through the radical liminality of the cenote. I propose that thinking-with cenotes engenders an understanding of what I call a hydro-geologic corporeality and subjectivity that emphasises the liminal boundaries between the body (bios), the water (hydro), and the geologic (geos).

Plasticine Music – or the intimate social life of cultural objects

ABSTRACTWhy do you value recorded popular music? How does popular music sticks to our lives through time? This article presents the concept of Plasticine Music to explore the way music becomes an assemblage through our individual embodied history with it. The concept intends to expand on recent developments on the value of recorded popular music outside capital and production systems. By following scholarship from Music Sociology and Feminist Materialism it invites to consider how pieces of music become part of our biographies through emotional forces, embodied actions and affects that transform the way we relate to music; the music change and we change with it. It focuses on the materiality of music with modifiable qualities, flexibility, resistance and non fixity, which lead to multiple new shapes. Plasticine music is a form of changeling traditional conceptions of meaning and cultural consumption, as well as considering the affective force of cultural objects.

Critique and the Black Horizon: questioning the move ‘beyond’ the human/nature divide in international relations

In the contemporary moment of the Anthropocene there appears to be a growing consensus on the need to move beyond the key modernist binary, the Human/Nature divide. We draw out a shared understanding at work in International Relations across critical approaches in Science and Technology Studies (STS), new materialist, and material feminist fields, as well as critical Indigenous, decolonial and pluriversal thought. This is an understanding that seeks to go beyond the limits of modern epistemological and ontological assumptions of human exceptionalism. These approaches seek to rework both sides of the Human/Nature divide: to reconstitute the Human as a knowing, responsive and relational subject, no longer tainted by hierarchies of race and coloniality; while, redistributing agential capacities of responsivity, care and relation beyond the Human. Drawing from work across the broad field of critical Black studies, we flag up the limitations of these entangled, relational posthuman and more-than-human imaginaries, which can easily reproduce hierarchies of subordination and control. We suggest that another approach to the Human/Nature divide is possible, a critical perspective we call the Black Horizon, focused upon the task of deconstruction: an approach which emphasises difference rather than identity, negation rather than addition, critique rather than affirmation.

Diffractive Menstruation: Toward a Technical-Rhetorical Perspective of Menstrual Health Technologies

This article provides a technical-rhetorical perspective regarding the impact of historical menstrual health technologies through a material feminist approach. My Baradian diffractive analysis builds on previous work from material feminist scholars as well as feminist technical-rhetorical scholars to explain how menstruation and the innovation of menstrual health technologies are often predicated on efficiency bias. Ultimately, I trouble well-worn dichotomies to disrupt bodily efficiency logics and problematize deterministic ideas about menstruation.

Multiverse, Feminist Materialist Relational Time, and Multiple Future(s): (Re)configuring Possibilities for Qualitative Inquiry

Critical feminist materialist theorizing opens up possibilities for enacting different ways of knowledge making. In this article, I connect feminist materialist inquiry with time and temporality to develop a line of inquiry to reimagine the nature of multiple future(s). Employing theorizing developed by Francesca Ferrando, Karen Barad, and Donna Haraway, and thinking with the concepts of Multiverse, spacetimemattering, and agential cuts, I develop the concept of feminist materialist relational time as a methodological possibility for inquiry. Using examples from my own and others’ scholarship, I propose that feminist materialist relational time articulates ways in which affirmative and transversal ethico-onto-epistemologies can reconsider power, mattering, enactment, and exclusions, creating multiple future(s) for qualitative inquiry. I argue that the entanglement of past/present/future as events and forces in flux highlights the multiplicity of temporality where past/present/future are now, then, immanent, processual, always already in the making, and formed of intra-acting bodies.

Mujhay Na Kha Jana! : Women and Food in Faseeh Bari Khan’s "Burns Road Ki Nilofer"

This paper is a materialist feminist study of Pakistani writer, Faseeh Bari Khan’s comedic telefilm, “Burns Road Ki Nilofer”, translated as “Nilofer of Burns Road”. A recurrent motif in Pakistani comedic telefilms is of women, both married and single, portrayed as beasts with voracious appetites and insatiable consumption patterns. This paper expounds how Khan’s female characters are portrayed as women of agency who, by claiming the right to comment on the desiring, economy and distribution of food, rise beyond their stereotypical representations of gluttonous eaters. Following Lisa Angelella’s scholarship on food and feminism, I posit that both Nilofer and her mother, Saeeda, try to negotiate their sense of selfhood and approach what it means to be a woman and a human via their conversations on food in the telefilm. My research aims to unravel the underlying dominant factor in their crippled sense of self while also retaining within it a muffled identification of female agency when the female characters consume as per their desiring. The void that women wish to fill while devouring great amounts of food, is occasioned by the absence of women’s positionality as a class in a patriarchal capitalist society where, as materialist feminist scholar Christine Delphy propounds, they are not made part of the system of “exchange of values” despite their domestic “labor” (“The Main Enemy” 73). Thus, this research reimagines womanhood and women’s exploitation in a domestic mode of production within Pakistani patriarchal capitalist cartographies.Keywords: Materialist feminism, feminist food studies, Pakistani television, female selfhood, female appetite

The Female Economic Independence in Mother Courage and Her Children

This research investigates female economic independence throughout the war in Brecht's play Mother Courage and her Children (1941). Mother Courage is a single mother alongside her three children making sacrifices and hustling to provide for herself and her children not being dependent on a male to live but only on her personal wagon. The methods used to prove her perseverance to achieve economic independence are through the lenses of two materialist feminist theories the first one is Simone De Beauvoir and her theories are taken from her book The Second Sex (2011). The second theory belongs to Charlotte Gilman and her book Women and Economics (1898). These theories are used to analyze the text of the play and spot the whereabouts of materialist feminism and how this character is following what is called materialist feminism, even though it was written before the theories. At the end of this study, a clear picture is formed of how Mother Courage truly proved herself worthy of the title “Mother Courage” in a sense of achieving or at least never giving up to create her financial goals to be an independent working mother through the worst possible scenarios.

Feminist Digital Ecology: Mimesis, Fictocriticism and Altering Technological Space

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the ways authors of fictocriticism—a hybrid form of writing that blurs literature and literary-critical commentary— reenvision the affordances of digital media and the rise of networked technologies in feminist materialist terms. I consider the crucial role of mimesis in fictocriticism to foster “becoming similar with” one’s environment, including its media, and how fictocritical mimesis can serve as a feminist tool for space-making and betweenness. Through close readings of Mauve Desert (1987) by Nicole Brossard, Places Far From Ellesmere (1990) by Aritha van Herk, and Steven Shaviro’s Doom Patrols (1995–97), I make the case that fictocriticism affords an altering and ecological conception of our digital age in which the land and architecture are also understood as networked spaces of nomadic identity and capacious flux.

„We Are Made of Star-Stuff“

Abstract Connectedness is a significant element of sociality that occurs not only ideally and ‘leiblich’, but also consists of a material dimension. This is established through the materiality of the human body and points beyond it at the same time. The material aspect of connectedness is not simply social but has a social meaning nonetheless: Materiality has an impact on society and on the quality of human coexistence with the environment. To be able to describe this aspect, we use approaches of feminist (neo-)materialisms. First, a neo-materialist perspective on subjectivity is developed, which, in addition to the immaterial aspects of the social, is also able to grasp the dependence of the development of human bodies on their environment. Connectedness as a material-discursive phenomenon adds a neo-materialist dimension to the established ‘phenomenological’ interpretation of the resonance concept that integrates interactions of repulsion or alienation by understanding feelings of alienation, rejection, or the silencing of the world-relationship as well as a resonant world-relationship always also as agentic cuts of the LeibKörper.

Isagani Cruz and His Fiction: A Footnote to the “Deconstructive Effect of Feminist Materialism on the Newly-Discovered Cordillera Archives”

Isagani Cruz and His Fiction: A Footnote to the “Deconstructive Effect of Feminist Materialism on the Newly-Discovered Cordillera Archives”

Girls becoming ‘sexy’ on digital spaces: capacities and constraints

ABSTRACT In this paper, we draw upon a qualitative study to investigate how black teenage girls interact with digital spaces to provide both capacities to express and constrain sexuality. Following a new feminist materialist approach, we demonstrate girls’ experiences of sexuality as embedded within a complex entanglement of matter (both human and more-than-human) that produce capacities, mediating what girls can do, feel or be on social media. Specifically, we conceptualize girls’ experiences within a ‘techno-sexual’ assemblage of bodies, things, ideas, social media applications, videos and pictures to illustrate how ideals of heterosexuality are connected to an affective flow of matter that creates vibrancy, permitting capacities and constraints. Firstly, we show how girls’ entanglement with celebrity and media culture, sexy selfies, and videos through digital affordances unlocked agentive capacities for the experience of heterosexual desire. Secondly, we illuminate how the assemblage generated restrictive capacities for girls who did not ascribe to heteronormative and racialized ideals of beauty through objectification and online sexual harassment. We argue that a recognition of this online micro-political space remains a vital part of gender transformative interventions.

Feminist Strategies Against Digital Violence: Embodying and Politicizing the Internet

This article aims to analyze feminist strategies against digital violence and their relation to performative forms of social justice. Based on new feminist materialisms (Coole & Frost, 2010; Souza, 2019), the article shows how female bodies are at the crossroads in our digital society. On the one hand, they are a target of digital violence because of their political activities, while on the other hand feminist protesters are opening new political possibilities for mobilization. By conducting a digital ethnography with two social collectives located in Mexico City – Luchadoras and Laboratorio de Interconectividades – I argue that embodying and politicizing technologies are strategies to mobilize the body as a political, critical and material category, which reveals a renewed feminist agency in hacking the hegemonic meanings of digital technology and resignifying its materiality in order to politicize it. Furthermore, I argue that based on the body as material category, innovative forms of social justice for feminist collectives emerge. These strategies are related to the critical questioning of technologies to repoliticize digital violence, to render visible the memories and affectations in women’s bodies, as well as to mobilize a new feminist positioning called hackfeminist self-defense. All in all, this article seeks to contribute to understanding the broader issue of feminist politics performing social justice in the digital era.

The Politics and Aesthetic Choices of Feminist Art Criticism

This article explores feminist art criticism from the point of view of aesthetics/politics in global contemporary art. It is based on the author’s experience as an art critic and founding editor of n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal (1998–2017). Reading articles published in the previous two decades both for the journal and outside it, it became possible to identify how subjects produce specific objects in art criticism that demonstrate different locations and standpoints in thought and how these align with criticism from broader feminist political theories. This is an exploration of the aesthetics/politics both in, about and beyond feminist art criticism. The methodology presented analyses feminist art criticism using a model of clusters of concepts that draws on Anne Ring Petersen’s examination of identity politics, race and multiculturalism from 2012. Feminist analyses in which this approach has been attempted are discussed: Sue Rosser’s 2005 analysis of cyberfeminism and Tuzyline Jita Allan’s 1995 discussion of black/womanist/African feminisms. The article identifies four types of feminist art criticism: liberal feminism, materialist feminism, feminist cosmopolitan multi-culturalism, and queer post-colonial feminism. The aims, methods and approaches of these tendencies are outlined to demonstrate the differences between them. The article concludes with a discussion about the futures of feminist art criticism.

Re-turning to fitness ‘riskscapes’ post lockdown: feminist materialisms, wellbeing and affective respondings in Aotearoa New Zealand

A plethora of research has focused on how the pandemic has shifted human relations with space, place and wellbeing. Yet, to date few have focused on how the return to public spaces after extended periods of lockdown is impacting subjective wellbeing, particularly amidst a context with fluctuating levels of risk, rapidly changing policy demands and expectations, and different affective responses to such regulations. In this paper we re-turn with the voices of 17 women who were living in Aotearoa New Zealand during the early stages of the pandemic and working in the sport or fitness industry before, during and after the first national lockdown. Drawing upon insights from feminist materialist theory, we explore how indoor fitness studios materialised as ‘riskscapes’ in women’s negotiations of the affects that shaped their re-turn. Whereas some women experienced fear and anxiety in re-turning to familiar spaces ‘made strange’ through new risks, responsibilities, routines and objects (i.e. sanitizer, floor markings), others came to new appreciations for the importance of human connection offered through shared movement experiences. Conceptualizing these different affective relations as processes of becoming, we trace the multiple and more-than-human relations through which wellbeing and risk were co-implicated in particular ways of knowing-moving-­becoming in the re-turn to fitness. Recognising the effects of continued uncertainties, this paper contributes material feminist insights through women’s affective engagements with the social world, surfacing more-than-human wellbeing in the processes of re-turning to familiar spaces ‘made strange’ in and through pandemic space and time.

Spitting open the sky: eruptions of difference in an early years classroom

Diffracting a research project in a UK primary school, this paper concerns feminist materialist orientations to odd-ness as a relational, distributed, and affective form of “thinking-feeling”. It suggests that attuning to affect as it moves through a context resistant to disruption, involves becoming “bad researchers”; bad for composing an unruly research problem, for embracing a transgressive methodology, and for writing in willfully inconclusive ways. It comments too on the dangers of embracing badness as an identity if used to conceal rather than acknowledge ongoing inequalities between researchers and children and between privileged researchers and others routinely marginalised.

Girls, sexuality and playground‐assemblages in a South African primary school

AbstractInspired by new feminist materialism, this paper seeks to reimagine existing knowledge of girls, sexuality and playgrounds by considering how the socio‐material reality may unlock girls' capacities for what is possible through play. Focusing on semi‐structured interviews of girls (aged 12–13), the paper draws attention to the playground as an ‘assemblage’ of human and non‐human matter that connect to illuminate other ways of being, feeling and doing. We argue that the assemblage not only creates spaces for girls to disrupt hetero‐patriarchal ideologies but simultaneously serves to reinforce them. Interventions require attention to the oppressive materialities that underpin play.