Materialist Feminist Research Articles

Gender precedes sex: Epistemological considerations for occupational science from a materialist feminist perspective

ABSTRACT The cognitive tools humans use to perceive and name reality are social constructs that necessitate critical examination. ‘Gender’ and ‘sex’ are socially constructed categories used in daily life and in relation to occupations, that warrant scrutiny, as traditional explanations for gender differences based on biology fail to account for the social processes that construct gendered groups. Questioning the naturalness of these categories is essential for understanding how they shape individual capabilities and social norms around occupations. This discussion paper adopts a materialist feminist standpoint to problematize the concepts of gender and sex. Rejecting biological essentialism, we argue that social organization precedes and constructs the significance of sex categories. By reconceptualizing both gender and sex as socially constructed, our analysis challenges notions of gender as culture applied to a pre-existing biological sex. Occupational literature makes use of these categories to explore gender-related issues. It mainly focuses on gender identity through an interactional orientation that, nevertheless, preserves an individual conception. Social categories are also used to illustrate inequalities and contextual factors related to gender; an essential usage that remains at risk of reifying such categories as pre-existing groups. The use of gender as a social system of hierarchical bi-categorization, as we propose, is not present in occupational literature. This materialist feminist analysis underscores the importance of questioning entrenched biological determinism of sex, on which rests gender as identity. In highlighting the social construction of categories, occupational science can contribute to a deeper understanding of occupation within, and in the challenge of, oppressive systems.

Sensing the River Torne: Luminous Encounters in the Riverine Archive

This article explores the luminous exchanges that animate contemporary Western geoscience ways of imagining the Earth. Inquiring into fluvial geomorphology, it employs creative research practice and feminist materialist ideas to interrogate the multiple roles of light in the ways in which rivers become configured, envisioned, and known. Focusing on the River Torne in northern Finland and Sweden, the article contemplates creative gestures of sensing the Torne via various “technologies of light,” which draw the researcher into a haunted, intra-active, and ecological exchange with the riverscape. This immersive engagement with the Torne prompts reflection on the particular riverine knowledges, ecologies, and archives that become presenced in luminous research encounters—prompting a recognition of a distributed cognition in our practices of knowing riverscapes. In the process, the geomorphological notion of a riverscape archive becomes situated amid complex ecologies of light, which invites a radical commitment to the memory and lively potentiality of place and encourages care-full research entanglements within our luminous research archives.

Co-Becomings of Companionships

This article explores the ways in which the couple-form and its normativity take part in the everyday life of companionships that are “other than couple” relationships. I develop the concept of affective negotiation to analyze the processes in which the companionships are experienced, practiced, and acknowledged. I study the affective negotiations particularly in relation to naming practices and comparisons and expectations around the relationship categories. The article is based on 20 semi-structured interviews with individuals who have important life companion(s) that they refer to as, for example, friends, flat-mates, animal companions, and ex-partners, or fields of multiple relationships. I analyze the data using feminist materialist methodologies and affect theories. Trough reading the data with the concept of co-becoming, I develop an understanding of companionships as dynamic processes lived and experienced in everyday life through entangled affective negotiations. I argue that the couple-form in the co-becomings of companionships in multiple and often contradictory ways. The normativity of the couple-form emerges through affective tensions that may limit the possibilities of these co-becomings, for example by troubling the processes of “making sense” of the intimacies. The co-becomings are also world-making practices where new ways of relating are created and imagined; they include the potential to move away from the normative power of the couple-form and materialize in unexpected ways.

Laughing off modernity into a Daoist movement in a college classroom in China: a decolonial and feminist materialist unpacking

ABSTRACT In this paper, I revisit a spontaneous laughter event in a college classroom in China to decolonize in three steps my/our otherwise naturalized modernity/coloniality assumptions about teaching/teachers, learning/learners, gender, objects, and classroom space toward a Daoist affective ecological imaginary. First, I invoke postcritical pedagogy scholarship to theoretically recast laughter, often taken as a humorous aberrance, as a mattering pedagogy. Second, I bring in feminist ‘pedagogies of mattering’ to attend to the materiality of the laughter event, further decolonizing hierarchical power and gendered subjectivities into an experienced democracy of flesh and affective movement of collectivity. Lastly, I reinvoke the Chinese Daoist notion tiānrénhéyī 天人合一as a hope-full alternative ethico-onto-episteme to reimagine education as cultivating ecologically responsible and responsive cosmic beings. I end this paper with some penultimate thoughts on theoretical-methodological challenges in decolonizing modernity-coloniality in a Chinese context, as an overseas-returning Chinese scholar, and with/beyond the Western scholarship.

The Female Body and the Environment: A Transnational Study of Mo Yan’s Feng ru Fei tun, Murakami Haruki’s Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru, and Gabriel García Márquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera

The female body is often depicted in parallel with the environment in many literary works. This article examines how the female body can prompt a rethinking of the environment by analyzing three literary works, Mo Yan’s Feng ru Fei tun, published in 1996 Murakami Haruki’s Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru, published in 1994-1995, and Gabriel García Márquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera, published in 1985, which root in Chinese, Japanese, and Latin American cultures, respectively. This paper argues that, on the one hand, the female body parallels the environment by displaying non-human characteristics and relating to natural elements in these three works; on the other hand, it deconstructs the boundary between the environment and humans by playing a crucial role in constructing human identity. This paper draws on theories of posthumanism, material feminism, and ecofeminism to explore the depiction of the female body and its role in rethinking the environment. The cultural hybridity of local and non-local worldviews—a key reason for situating this study within a transnational comparative framework—serves as a crucial element in demonstrating how the female body bridges the environment and human identity across all three works. This analysis aims to deconstruct the anthropocentric perspective on the environment, thereby rethinking the role of the female body in this context.

The Social Reproductive Roots of Agrarian Contention: Gendered Labor amid Peasant Struggles in Tunisia

AbstractThis paper revisits the Tunisian 2010–2011 uprising and its ensuing decade of agrarian contention as a crisis of social reproduction stemming from the combined effects of depletion and dispossession. It traces the lineages of the grievances that continue to animate the Tunisian countryside to the multiple and often enmeshed labours—both productive and reproductive—of peasant and rural women. In underscoring the interconnectedness between these labours and the ebb and flow of various contestations against depletion and dispossession, it recognises social reproduction as a site of deep exploitation as well as an arena of day‐to‐day struggle. Guided by social reproduction theorisations and leveraging a multi‐sited ethnography conducted during July and August 2023, this paper relies on participant observation/observant participation and unstructured interviews conducted with predominately landed and landless peasant women, the testimonies of whom serve as a conduit for an important dialogue between feminist materialist analyses of social reproduction and peasant movements.

UnboXing relationships and sexuality education with a phEmaterialist arts-activist praxis

ABSTRACT Inspired by posthuman, feminist materialist theory-doings in educational research, this paper maps moments in a post-qualitative research project that set out to explore what else relationships and sexuality education might become with ‘art-as-way’ (Manning 2020) in a shaky yet conducive policy context where ‘what matters’ must not be assumed in advance but co-constructed with children and young people. Progressively supported by an artist-in-residence teacher assistant, composer and filmmaker, we open up what unfolds when a diverse group of 11 young people (age 13–14) creatively unbox and make ‘what matters’ to them in an art classroom. We conceptualize what came to matter as ‘dartaphacts’ (arts-activist objects) and follow these other-worldly posthuman pARTicipants as they connect, grow, and become ‘more-than’. We speculate, that in conducive, con-sense-ual environments, the affective power of dartaphacts can unbox a living curriculum for a Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) to come, in all its Majestic Insecurity, Untitled, Freedoms, Feathers, Bruised Hearts, Consent-quakes, eQuality Vibrations and Wiggly Woos.

Mobile safety apps: a material feminist orientation to precarious mobilities

The pervasiveness of sexual violence in the United States was brought to public attention by the #MeToo movement, and in the years since there has been renewed attention to existing resources for survivors of sexual violence, like crisis hotlines and websites, as well as inspiring new initiatives that address problems of sexual violence inscribed within systems of power. Many women have also taken matters into their own hands by downloading one of the many mobile smartphone apps designed to promote women’s safety and/or document instances of sexual violence. In this article, the authors apply critical mobilities studies with a material feminist approach to understand the complex relations that have and continue to coproduce women’s mobilities through the use of mobile safety apps by identifying and analyzing the features of popular mobile safety apps alongside existing literature. Such an account rejects utopian technocratic solutions to complex systemic issues; it also identifies areas for productive intervention in these users’ mobilities.

From Empowerment to Suppression: Examining Gender Dynamics through Material Feminist Lens in A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini

This study investigates Khaled Hosseini's novel A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) utilizing materialist feminism theory by Alaimo and Hekman (2008) with Nancy Fraser's Distribution justice theory. It aims to unfold how material developments or changes give rise to new gender roles within the narrative of this novel. Employing materialist feminism, the study sheds light on the oppression and subjugation of women in society, as depicted through the characters Mariam and Laila. According to the researcher’s stance, this novel delves into the experiences of women in a country undergoing socio-political transformations. So, the societal impact of these new gender roles brought about by social change is examined in this article with a proposition that the material development of Afghanistan has revesed the role of women within its community due to the political transformation. For this purpose, the study has used an intricate interplay between gender and power within the novel, employing materialist feminism theory to elucidate the lives of its female characters and protagonists amidst the backdrop of political turmoil in Afghanistan. Its significance lies in understanding how social, political, and economic factors affect gender in underdeveloped countries due to its geopolitical reality. The study elucidates how material conditions shape the experiences of Mariam and Laila and underscores the impact of economic circumstances on gender-based oppression. By scrutinizing women's access to resources and opportunities, the research concludes that social, economic, and political factors contribute to gender-based inequalities. Ultimately, this study advocates for a comprehensive understanding of women's struggles and challenges, emphasizing the need for societal change to address gender-based issues.

Francophone materialist feminism, the missing link: Towards a Marxist feminism that accounts for the interlockedness of sex, race and class

This article discusses the Marxist-Feminist Theses III and VIII. It is based on the ‘French-speaking materialist feminist’ theoretical perspective that has been developed at the end of the 1970s by Colette Guillaumin (with the concept of ‘sexage’), Monique Wittig (with the concept of ‘straight mind’), Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Christine Delphy and other members of the Nouvelles Questions Féministes journal’s board. The article first presents this theorization, which is too unknown to many English-speaking theorists. It then shows how ‘French-speaking materialist feminist’ theoretical perspective fully demonstrated that ‘sex’ was a structural social relation as much as class is (Gender relations are relations of production). The article also analyses how this theoretical perspective enables us to pay a deep attention to the ‘race question’. Therefore, it appears as the missing link that can help bridging at least two important theoretical and political gaps: first, between Marxist feminism and lesbian theory, and, second, between Black feminism and Marxist feminism.

Immigrant Exclusion Acts: On Early Chinese Labor and Domestic Matriarchal Agency in Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family

In the introduction to her influential work on Asian American cultural studies and feminist materialist critique, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Lisa Lowe shatters the contradictions manifested in Asian immigration, wherein Asians’ entry into the United States marked them either as marginalized from “within” the national political sphere or as linguistically, culturally, and racially “outside” of the national polity For Asian immigrants, the debate of being simultaneously needed and excluded is no more evidenced historically than using Chinese labor during the California Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century. Their migratory relocation was hardly met with ease and public enthusiasm, however. Evoking anxiety in their Anglo counterparts, the Chinese were characterized as foreign noncitizens: barbaric, alien, and dangerous, the quintessential “yellow peril” threatening to displace white European immigrants such as the Irish. The irrational fear of the “Oriental” from the Far East led to a succession of immigration exclusion laws passed by Congress that denied the Chinese from entering the U.S. and their rights to naturalization in 1882. Passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act suspended the entry of Chinese laborers into the U.S. based on their nationality for ten years. This paper argues that the possibility of agency for Chinese workers existed throughout the exclusionary period. Specifically, this site of agency resides with Chinese women and is expressed through a literary mode. For instance, Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family (1948) captures this moment of immigrant agency in the post-exclusion era. Lin, a pioneering Chinese writer and inventor who wrote texts such as My Country and My People (1935), The Importance of Living (1937), and Moment in Peking (1939), often utilized his narratives to bridge the clash between the East and West. Identifying what I see as the inadequacy of probing one of the earliest Chinese American texts from a rigid literary mode, I move to reconsider the novel as a legal counternarrative to the three exclusionary laws: the Page Law of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Cable Act of 1922. To direct my critical reorientation of Lin’s novel away from, though not necessarily against, literary castings of this early immigrant tale, I take the narrative as a strategic literary re-imagination that structures itself around these three legislative pieces to critique restrictive practices enacted upon the Chinese. The novel showcases how Chinese immigrants maneuvered and manipulated the legal system in their favor during assimilation. In this context, critical reappraisal is needed in scrutinizing how the Exclusion Act generated a wave of domestic-based diasporic relocation of Chinese workers from California to New York. Due to acute anti-Chinese sentiments on the West Coast, resetting Chinese workers in the northeast in search of a new Gold Mountain led to a unique phenomenon. This dispersal elevated Chinese women as valuable social capitals who transformed metropoles like New York City and redefined their views as nationalist subjects of the “about-to-be” in industrial capitalist modernity. Through a legal framework, then, Lin’s portrayal of the Fong clan suggests the emergence of a gendered Sino-immigrant agency, one that enabled the Chinese woman/mother to situate herself as the locus of the traditional patriarchal Chinese entrepreneurial family and the forefront of the northeast industrial capitalist scene.

String Figuring young children's perspectives of quality in English early childhood education and care

AbstractQuality in early childhood education and care (ECEC) is a contested concept and has generally been conceptualised by inter‐related indicators such as staff qualifications, educational environment, policy or child‐to‐staff ratios. There has been a more limited emphasis on how young children might perceive and experience quality. This empirical paper employs a research‐creation methodology in combination with feminist materialist theory, notably Haraway's String Figuring, to consider how quality manifests in young children's lifeworlds. Data from non‐participant observations in 17 English ECEC settings were collected and analysed by focusing on child‐led activities where agentic and autonomous engagement with objects, matter, resources, space and places were observed. This resulted in the identification of a series of ‘knots’: security, space(s), material objects, autonomy and other children. We present examples of these knots in six vignettes and propose that these are manifestations of young children's experiences of their educational environments. The knots developed from our analysis recognise how quality was manifested where children felt secure by exploring their chosen spaces. This led to children having autonomy over their play, both alone and with other children. We demonstrate how String Figuring can provide an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of the complex and nuanced nature of young children's lifeworlds in various ECEC settings, and argue that the identified knots can provide situated and contextual ways to recognise young children's experiences of quality. By doing so it is possible to develop new knowledge that advances theoretical and professional practice conceptualisations of quality.

Domestic service and prostitution: Empirical and theoretical connections

Various activities are systematically imposed on women in both paid and unpaid forms, generally involving care for others, sexual activity, or a combination of both. These activities have typically been studied separately, but these analytical divisions are increasingly being questioned. This article contributes to this debate by exploring empirical and theoretical connections two of the most prominent of these activities, prostitution and domestic service. Through a survey of the empirical literature on migration for domestic service, the article identifies four themes that suggest why some migrant women move between domestic service and prostitution: pre-existing structural constraints, migration conditions, working conditions, and migration policies. Subsequently, drawing on the work of French materialist feminists Colette Guillaumin and Paola Tabet and political theorist Carole Pateman, it sketches the outline of a theoretical account of the relationship between these two activities.

Decolonizing bodies and the ethics of care: On the significance of embodied vulnerability as the future of cultural studies

In the contemporary moment, systemic failures – from climate change to pandemics to political repression – have created embodied vulnerabilities worldwide. I argue here that the increasing precaritization of individual bodies is an index of the political formations that create and condition vulnerabilities among certain populations. Recognizing this, analyses of the conditions of embodied vulnerability are crucial to cultural studies in that they contribute to understanding and challenging neocolonial and patriarchal power and injustice. Feminist materialism and theories of post- and neo-colonialism reveal the processes of embodiment as complex modes of epistemic violence. To reorient cultural studies theoretically and methodologically, I propose the feminist ethics of care as a working framework for mapping, challenging, and changing the processes of materialization at work in unjust and asymmetric embodied vulnerabilities.

Denaturalizzare il sesso. Nicole-Claude Mathieu e l’analisi antropologica delle classi di sesso

This essay presents some of the main contributions of Nicole-Claude Mathieu’s work to anthropology and feminist theory. The first section is devoted to framing Mathieu’s production within French materialist feminism. The ethnologist repeatedly recalls how the forms of oppression experienced by women as a minority group in social relations of sex and the struggles that ensue underlie the epistemological transformations that invest disciplinary knowledge from a feminist perspective. Next, the article addresses the three different ways of conceptualising the relationship between sex and gender and the introduction of the category of social sex to denaturalize sex, understood as a political category. Its analysis is thus compared with some of the contributions of decolonial feminism regarding the category of gender. Just as in her study of the category of sex, we also find in the analysis of androcentrism in anthropology her ability to question the dominant frameworks of ethnological thought. In particular, Mathieu delves into the relationship between androcentrism, ethnocentrism, and naturalism to understand not only how they operate distortions in the production of ethnographic and ethnological knowledge, but also how they define the framework within which to define the relationship between Western “us” and non-Western “others” in reference to social relations of sex.

Commodifying Gender: A MatFem Perspective on "I Am For Sale, Who Will Buy Me?"

This research investigates the commodification of women in Afghanistan through an in-depth analysis of the anonymous Afghani-authored short story, “I Am For Sale, Who Will Buy Me” (2010). Employing a Materialist Feminist lens and drawing upon Silvia Federici's theoretical framework in Caliban and the Witch (2004), the study examines the influence of religious doctrines on women's social and economic status, culminating in their marginalization. The analysis dissects the exploitation of gender roles, objectification of female bodies, and the commodification of Afghan women, revealing the intricate interplay between patriarchal systems, religious ideologies, and gender disparity. Additionally, the study explores historical and contemporary challenges faced by Afghan women, encompassing barriers to education, economic opportunities, and social integration. Emphasizing the necessity for comprehensive approaches, this research advocates transformative change and gender justice, stressing its urgency. Positioned within the broader discourse on women's struggles, this study aims to contribute an understanding of women’s oppression with a primary focus on fostering agency and societal transformation for Afghan women.

Teaching Danger and Silencing Desire: Gender, Culture and Sexuality Education in Zimbabwe

In sub-Saharan Africa, the effective implementation of Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) remains challenging especially for teachers who fail to meet young people’s sexual health needs. In this study, we examine rural Zimbabwean teachers’ perspectives on, and their approach to sexuality education provided through Guidance and Counseling (G&C). Employing a new feminist materialist framework and by drawing from in-depth semi-structured interviews, we illustrate the assemblage of human and more-than-human elements that come together to reinforce sexual silencing and danger by elucidating three prevailing material forces that shape teachers’ approach to G&C. First, teachers place sexuality within the domain of danger and emphasize sexual risk to create healthy sexualities. Second, religious and cultural norms aggregate to place sexual pleasures under erasure while reinforcing female sexual purity. Third, in the context of sexual regulation, discussions about safe sex practices are difficult. While teachers’ capacity to engage with young sexuality is constrained by the entanglement of socio-material, religious, cultural and gender norms, the paper concludes with some reflection on possibilities for working with teachers to expand their capacities to effect change and improve sexual health outcomes for young people.

‘You see all these really beautiful people… and then, you look at yourself’: bodies matter in teenage girls’ engagement with porn

ABSTRACT This article focuses on South African teenage girls’ engagement with pornography. Using a decolonial approach and drawing upon new feminist materialism, this study focuses on the ways in which bodies, gender and sexuality configure to produce and constrain girls’ capacities for sexual expression. The paper makes three claims. First, the article turns away from a one-sided representation of girls as only possible to know through the lens of sexual suffering while challenging childhood sexual innocence. Second, the online pornographic field is situated in a gendered and racialised system of organisation whereby the perfect body is naturalised as an esteemed object of desire. Third, the desire for the perfect, slim, blemish-free, hairless body through self-surveillance constricts capacities in line with normative standards of female beauty. A decolonial porn assemblage is harnessed to illustrate the contradictions produced as girls both desire and object to idealised bodies that are naturalised through heterosexual and racialised hierarchies. The paper concludes by considering the implications of approaching girls’ engagement with pornography in relation to the expansion and limitation of their capacities and the body as an intense site of power.

Christine Delphy, an Anti-essentialist TERF: Materialist Feminism and the Affective Legacies of the MLF

For the last decade, Christine Delphy, one of the most important feminists in France, has taken profoundly reactionary positions in relation to transgender people, that qualify her as a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF). But while most TERF discourse relies on biological essentialism, Delphy is radically anti-essentialist. As early as 1981, she showed that both gender and sex are socially constructed, a premise that has become a cornerstone of transgender studies. How is one to understand the fact that a feminist whose thinking would seem to inscribe itself in the direction of transfeminism allies herself with the TERF movement? This essay shows that her theoretical arguments against transness can be overcome from a materialist feminist perspective and argues that her transphobia is bound up in the affective aftermath of conflicts in the women’s liberation movement that were cemented through a complex transatlantic intellectual history and never resolved.

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.