Material Feminisms

This richly layered collection of essays explores materiality from the perspectives of an international group of feminist theorists. The editors categorize the essays into three sections: Material Theory, Material World, and Material Bodies. In the introduction, the editors argue that feminist theorists tend "to focus on the discursive at the expense of the material." Rather than the concept of mind over matter, this work maintains that matter and mind are equal forces, and that there are real consequences to placing one above the other. After defining the theory, section two looks at nature, which the editors state is "entangled with the nature of philosophy, politics, literature, and popular culture." The third section grounds the other two, giving body to the theories of material feminisms. It is in this last section that readers can see how feminist theory can embrace matter without hierarchy. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty. -- K.G. Saulton * Choice * . . . Material Feminisms . . . clearly charts new theoretical waters, demonstrating how feminist thinking about materiality suffuses multiple disciplines and keeps them in lively conversation with one another. . . . [It] provide[s] succinct and rich overviews of where feminist studies, especially feminist technoscience studies, stands today. . . . Material Feminisms includes articles that address race, ethnicity, and disability. -- Olivia P. Banner * SIGNS * . . . clearly charts new theoretical waters, demonstrating how feminist thinking about materiality suffuses multiple disciplines and keeps them in lively conversation with one another. . . . provide[s] succinct and rich overviews of where feminist studies, especially feminist technoscience studies, stands today. -- Olivia P. Banner * University of California, Los Angeles * This richly layered collection of essays explores materiality from the perspectives of an international group of feminist theorists. . . . Recommended.November 2008 -- K.G. Saulton * Capella University *

Stacy Alaimo is Associate Professor of English at The University of Texas at Arlington. She is author of Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Susan Hekman is Professor of Political Science and Director of Graduate Humanities at The University of Texas at Arlington. She is author of Private Selves, Public Identities and The Future of Differences.

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory / Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman Part 1. Material Theory 1. Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations for a Possible Alliance / Elizabeth Grosz 2. On Not Becoming Man: The Materialist Politics of Unactualized Potential / Claire Colebrook 3. Constructing the Ballast: An Ontology for Feminism / Susan Hekman 4. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter / Karen Barad Part 2. Material World 5. Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms / Donna J. Haraway 6. Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina / Nancy Tuana 7. Natural Convers(at)ions: Or, What if Culture Was Really Nature All Along? / Vicki Kirby 8. Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature / Stacy Alaimo 9. Landscape, Memory, and Forgetting: Thinking through (My Mother's) Body and Place / Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands Part 3. Material Bodies 10. Disability Experience on Trial / Tobin Siebers 11. How Real Is Race? / Michael Hames-Garca 12. From Race/Sex/Etc. to Glucose, Feeding Tube, and Mourning: The Shifting Matter of Chicana Feminism / Suzanne Bost 13. Organic Empathy: Feminism, Psychopharmaceuticals and the Embodiment of Depression / Elizabeth A. Wilson 14. Cassie's Hair / Susan Bordo List of Contributors Index