In recent years, feelings such as melancholia, paranoia, despair and political depression have been deemed distinctive political moods, also within critical theories. This, the author argues, is the affective landscape for understanding and situating new materialist endeavours. As much as new materialist approaches have been praised and even celebrated lately, they have also provoked highly controversial reactions and evoked questions, such as: Why a new materialism, why at this historical moment? And what is so attractive about this material turn? In (...) this article, the author argues that new materialist approaches seek to oppose the contemporary affective condition of political depression, despair and hopelessness by desiring and mobilizing to achieve a different political future, one that ultimately relates to care and commonality as well as to modes and modalities of political agency. However, while new materialist approaches doubtlessly provide engaged and powerful inventions and interventions within contemporary struggles for agency, the author also demonstrates the risk of depoliticization inherent in this longing for something different, which can ultimately even compromise opening up possibilities for agency. This article, thus, aims to discuss new materialist concerns within the context of contemporary political and theoretical landscapes in order to better decipher the new materialist signals of our times, but also to critically push further the possibilities for political agency within feminist theory, at times even against all odds. (shrink)

Biological individuality is without a doubt a key concept in philosophy of biology. Questions around the individuality of organisms, species, and biological systems can be traced throughout the philosophy of biology since the discipline’s inception, not to mention the sustained attention they have received in biology and philosophy more broadly. It’s high time the topic got its own Cambridge Element. McConwell’s Biological Individuality falls short of an authoritative overview of the debate on biological individuality. However, it sends a welcome message (...) to new and seasoned scholars to reorient the debate towards practically and politically relevant themes. (shrink)

Myra Hird and Harlan Weaver have been invited by the editors of this special issue to enter into discussion with each other – to conduct a series of interchanges – because of the careful attention their research has paid to the ways in which transness as a lived reality is ontologized in humans, non-human animals, bacteria, and viruses. With this issue’s interchanges, we would like to further the conversation on critically approaching the consequences of merging transness with animality. In the (...) following series of four essay questions, we particularly invited each of these scholars to consider moments of classificatory tension in which taxonomies of human and non-human become inflected and redirected by the categories of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and geopolitical location. (shrink)

Elizabeth Grosz's interpretation of Darwinian evolutionary theory to ground a feminist ontology of biology has been particularly controversial. Most critics have understood Grosz as supporting her theory with empirical evidence, and they criticize her for being either inaccurate or uncritical of and overly dependent on science. I argue that Grosz reads Darwin as a philosopher in a Deleuzian and Irigarayan sense, and that Grosz's project is therefore better understood in terms of its ethical and political goals rather than in terms (...) of empirical adequacy. Employing this evaluative framework leads to a novel route for critique of Grosz's ontology in terms of its reliance on the Darwinian distinction between organism and environment. I conclude that Grosz's work is valuable for the way it maintains ethical and political considerations in feminist ontological debates, and that introducing a more sensitive understanding of the organism–environment relation will lead us closer to a truly feminist ontology of biology. (shrink)

This article explores the possibilities of considering how ‘matter and meaning are mutually constituted’ in the production of knowledge (Barad, 2007: 152) through presenting a diffractive analysis of a piece of interview data with a six-year-old boy in a preschool class. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s (1997) and Karen Barad’s (2007) theorising, I understand diffractive analysis as an embodied engagement with the materiality of research data: a becoming-with the data as researcher. Understanding the body as a space of transit, a series (...) of open-ended systems in interaction with the material-discursive ‘environment’, diffractive analyses constitute transcorporeal engagements with data. Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) theorisation of the transcorporeal is put to work diffractively with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1987) thinking on the process of becoming minor or minoritarian. This implies a reconceptualisation of the very act of thinking as a transcorporeal process of engagement, going beyond the idea of reflexivity and interpretation as inner mental activities taking place in the mind of the researcher understood as separated from the data. Through my example, I argue that diffractive analysis can make visible new kinds of material-discursive realities that can have transformative and political consequences. (shrink)

The focus of my inquiry in this article is the figure of the Human that is enacted in the design of the humanoid robot. The humanoid or anthropomorphic robot is a model (in)organism, engineered in the roboticist’s laboratory in ways that both align with and diverge from the model organisms of biology. Like other model organisms, the laboratory robot’s life is inextricably infused with its inherited materialities and with the ongoing — or truncated — labours of its affiliated humans. But (...) while animal models are rendered progressively more standardised and replicable as tools for the biological sciences, the humanoid robot is individuated and naturalised. Three stagings of human— robot encounters (with the robots Mertz, Kismet and Robota respectively) demonstrate different possibilities for conceptualising these subject objects, for the claims about humanness that they corporealise, and for the kinds of witnessing that they presuppose. (shrink)

Written as the introduction to a special issue of Body & Society on the topic of animation and automation, this article considers the interrelation of those two terms through readings of relevant work in film studies and science and technology studies (STS), inflected through recent scholarship on the body. Drawing upon historical and contemporary examples, we trace how movement is taken as a sign of life, while living bodies are translated through the mechanisms of artifice. Whereas film studies has drawn (...) upon work ranging from production history to semiotics and psychoanalysis to conceptualize the ways in which the appearance of life on the cinema screen materializes subjectivities beyond it, STS has developed a corpus of theoretical and empirical scholarship that works to refigure material-semiotic entanglements of subjects and objects. In approaching animation and automation through insights developed within these two fields we hope to bring them into closer dialogue with each other and with studies of the body, given the convergence of their shared concerns with affective materializations of life. More specifically, an interest in the moving capacities of animation, and in what gets rendered invisible in discourses of automation, is central to debates regarding the interdependencies of bodies and machines. Animation is always in the end a relational effect, it seems, while automation implies the continuing presence of hidden labour and care. (shrink)

This article explores the idea of agential multiplicity in medical treatment of childlessness. The analysis illustrates the kinds of agencies that emerge in the use of assisted reproductive technologies. The article begins with a discussion on feelings as participants in IVF treatment and as elements of women’s embodied experience. This is followed by an analysis of three consecutive steps of IVF: ovulation induction, assisted fertilization in the laboratory and embryo transfer. The article aims to show that feminist theory and praxis (...) benefits from empirical analyses of lived bodily experiences as they take form in relation to non-human agencies. Also, it provides a view into how biological processes and material elements can be taken into account in anti-essentializing ways in feminist research. (shrink)

This article analyses the discussion about the ‘new materialism’ or ‘material feminisms’ as an interplay between transdisciplinarity – moving beyond canons and disciplines – and affective interdisciplinary encounters. The previous discussion is taken in a slightly different direction, by arguing that a politics of materiality is at work in the debate, which is implied in affective interdisciplinary encounters. It is argued that despite the transdisciplinarity, the relations of natural science engagements to both social science and humanities feminisms are pivotal. Two (...) specific cases are analysed: the politics of definition, where ‘materiality’ tends to be equated with ‘natural science matters’, and the matter and politics of race. In the latter, race ‘sticks’ to the materiality of materialist feminism, which tends to be left out of the sphere of the presumably new and exciting material feminisms. (shrink)

This article explores how race, sexual attractiveness and ‘female nature’ are biologised in plastic surgery. I situate this analysis in relation to recent debates over the limits of social constructionism and calls for more engagement with biology in feminist theory and science studies. I analyse not only how the biological is represented by biomedicine, but also how it is experienced by patients and, most problematically, how it is entangled with social constructions of beauty, race and female reproduction. Drawing on ethnographic (...) fieldwork conducted in Brazil, I focus on plastic surgery, but also analyse how this specialty is linked to Ob-Gyn and endocrinology. I argue that medical procedures instantiate a biologised model of beauty I call ‘bare sex’ (Edmonds, 2010) that is defined in terms of racial traits, anatomy, reproductive processes, hormones and ‘secondary sexual traits’. While this is a historically specific model, it is also one that is inscribed on patients, altering anatomy and physiological processes. It thus has the potential to create a biological self-awareness that cannot fully be accounted for by a social constructionist analysis. (shrink)