Material Feminism: Changing Nature

Material Feminism calls for what Bruno Latour termed a ‘new settlement’: a return from the linguistic turn in Postmodern Feminism to material reality, yet informed by the former. In the introduction to their 2008 landmark volume Material Feminisms, Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman set out their goal: ‘The new settlement we are seeking is not a return to modernism. Rather, it accomplishes what the postmoderns failed to do: a deconstruction of the material/discursive dichotomy that retains both elements without privileging either.’

Both new-materialist approaches and Postmodern Feminism have focused on breaking down dichotomies. The New Materialisms foreground the material in order to disrupt entrenched binaries, dislodge agency from the human subject and level the ontological playing field. Similarly, postmodern feminists have argued that the male/female dichotomy informs all the dichotomies that ground Western thought, and they have argued that rather than moving from one side of the dichotomy to the other, simply reversing the privileging of concepts, we must deconstruct the dichotomy itself, to move to an understanding that does not rest on oppositions. However, material feminists argue that the male/female dichotomy is actually the one dichotomy Postmodern Feminism did not manage to deconstruct, instead just reversing the privilege and prioritising discourse. There is work still to be done. In 1985, Donna Haraway issued a call for a redefinition of the material in discursive terms without repolarising in the opposite direction – and the Material Feminisms aim to revisit this call.