As feminist philosophers and social theorists interested in the “bio” politics of embodiment, we are pressed to expand and deepen our critical engagement with the biosocial, biocultural, and the posthuman so as to be accountable for, and able to effectively contest, the ways by which matter is entangled in multispecies world‐making. Contemporary feminist scholarship works as a necessary corrective to the political status quo, which, under the current US Administration, is growing increasingly hostile to planetary life in the name of capital gain. Important trajectories for contemporary feminist scholarship, then, are approaches that place social, economic, and environmental justice in the forefront, as well as seek to address suffering and inequities in the ways in which matter not only comes to be composed, decomposed, and recomposed, but also in the ways meaning circulates. Grappling with what kind of creatures we intend or hope to become, and who and what we hope to become with, requires a robust engagement with intersectional, transgenerational, and multispecies world‐making highlighted by feminist materialism.

Challenging these investigations, however, are scholars who question the novelty of the approaches that fall variously under the umbrella of new materialism, feminist materialism, vital materialism, or the material turn in social theory. These critical voices suggest that the recent focus of feminist theorizing that explores the social meanings, cultural practices, and agency of matter draws upon longstanding commitments within science and technology scholarship, indigenous thought and practice, and upon a rich archive of materialist philosophy without offering much new. This is a problem, as in the case of indigenous thought, for example, as not acknowledging these sources of knowledge risks reproducing colonial and settler‐colonial relations of power. However, recent feminist materialist studies do offer something in that their engagement deploys the biosocial, biocultural, and posthuman not as the punch line of investigation but rather as the starting point for deeper and increasingly complex entanglements with neuroscience, epigenetics, quantum physics, public health practices, disability and disease, as well as governance, colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, racial formation, and ways of critically addressing how matter is composed and counted. In their careful accountings, and as I show through this essay, the plasticity and porosity of matter is revealed to be as dangerous as it is liberating, and it is precisely within the fine details that such demarcations can be engaged and addressed. As such, the issue is less whether such work is new but rather how these approaches work to generate more just relations with the world entangled within and around us.

One such generative approach is Samantha Frost's Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human, as it mobilizes the biocultural to insist that humans, as biocultural creatures, must “own up to and take collective responsibility” for “social and ecological devastation” (Frost 2016, 2–3). Frost pushes readers to consider culture as incorporating the material, social, political, aesthetic, economic, representational, and symbolic worlds we inhabit alongside the chemical, spatial, thermal, viral, bacteriological, and nutritive factors and practices that provide the conditions through which biocultural humans become subjects. In seeking to “deculturalize culture,” Frost demands a more expansive sense of the environment so as to engage the ways in which subjective and collective experiences such as neoliberalism, empire, and racialized violence “become more or less transiently embodied … in ways that both frustrate and facilitate social and political processes of institutionalization and protest” (153).

Frost's usage of “bio” pushes against the presumed “überbiological”—what Sarah Franklin calls the slippage where “nature becomes biology becomes genetics” (Reference Franklin, Franklin, Lury and StaceyFranklin 2000, 190). Against the überbiological, Frost elucidates “how humans are constituted through a matrix of biological and cultural processes that shape one another over various time scales in such a way that neither one nor the other can be conceived as distinct” (5). Frost achieves this through discussions about carbon, cell membranes, genes, proteins, oxygen, and time. Through meticulously detailed examples, Frost shows the porosity of living organisms, constituted in terms of transitions or conglomerations of energy. Frost asserts that the substantiality of matter is an effect of the constrained flow and interrelation of energy (34) whereby living organisms must “take the world into themselves, ingest it, consume it, absorb it, dismantle it, appropriate it, and expel it” (118). Here, the environment is not merely a context but the energetic condition and constraint “for the transitions in energy that make creaturely life possible” (118). For example, Frost marks the ways in which eating and breathing are not separate things, as “the carbon atoms that remain from the dismantling of sugary carbohydrates are the carbons in the carbon dioxide molecules that we exhale when we breathe” (102). Tracing how food and air facilitate the cellular transformation of molecules from one state to another disrupts the habit of thinking about food and air as stable substances so as to instead consider the biological as an ongoing “activity of composing and decomposing” (105) that has implications for social and environmental justice. Frost marks the human as constituted through processes that are at once both political and biophysical such that “neither one nor the other can be conceived as distinct” (18). In carefully parsing these processes, Frost indicates that “we can apprehend just how profoundly and fundamentally material and social environments get under the skin without at the same time losing the conceptual possibility of talking about organisms or bodies as particular distinct things” (76).

This is especially evident in Frost's take on time. For Frost, the biological and social act within a multispecies transgenerational field whereby “an organism is not wholly contemporaneous with its environment” (123). For example, germ cells—cells that are used to seed an entirely new organism—have long been thought to be überbiological, isolated and protected from the environment or habitats of the organisms that carry them. However, scientists have found that germ‐cell membranes are permeable, revealing that “environmental factors not only can but must pass in and out” of these cells (128). One consequence of germ‐cell porosity is that both “male and female germ cell DNA can be affected by environmental toxins and thereby have an effect on the development of an embryo or fetus” (128). Therefore, chemicals, toxins, and foodstuffs that are ingested, aspirated, or absorbed into the body also “traffic into and affect germs cells as they develop themselves” (129). This has transgenerational effects on gene expression and organism development, leading to uneven and differential effects on populations marked by race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and so on. In this way, the environment or habitat must be seen “as a constituent of what creatures will and can become over time” (129).

Importantly, however, these transgenerational effects are not fully determined. As Frost points out, “[t]he noncontemporaneity of biocultural creatures’ responses to varying habitats means that persistence in a feature or form need not collapse conceptually into inertia, that repetition need not slide conceptually into determination” (149). Rather, biocultural creatures are seeded with traces of their future that in being experienced recompose the biocultural body anew (149). Indeed, what is re/composed at “one temporal frame and one scale of reference may appear to be fairly stable at another … the micro‐adjustments and transformations might not be made manifest until they accumulate sufficiently so as to affect the larger scale function and behavior” of the organism (150). This makes biocultural creatures “anticipatory forms whose creative responses to the provocations of habitat draw on rich and deep histories‐of‐responses” (150). Thus, the “porosity and responsiveness of a biocultural creature to its own modes of persisting in its habitats entails first that we not conceive of living matter as impenetrable, and second, that we not think of the traffic of habitats into biocultural creatures as a deposit, an imprint, or a sedimentation that is determinative of what they are” (151). Biocultural creatures are formed by, but also exceed, the contexts of their formation such that the effects of shared environments that are “held in common through place and/or culture … can be conceived as collective problems with political and possibly democratic modes of resolution” (21).

Frost's work is generative for feminists wanting to engage more deeply with the politics of bioculture. For example, her book complements the activism of organizations like the Canadian‐based Endocrine Disruptors Action Group which seeks to eliminate the circulation of harmful flame‐retardant chemicals from our bodies, homes, and communities, or the Sioux Standing Rock water protectors’ actions against the Dakota Access Pipeline, or the work of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), a feminist, anticolonial lab specializing in monitoring plastic pollution. Detailing the role of proteins, genes, oxygen, carbon, biochemical reactions, and more, Frost persuasively argues that “we must compel ourselves, always, to think ecologically, to think of organisms engaging in their habitats over time, habitats whose particular and variable conditions make a specific use of genes and proteins likely rather than not” (84), suggesting that “in order to account for the extraordinary range and productivity of biological activities particular to cells with permeable membranes, we must trace how both the exacting precision of composition and the stimulation of environmental conditions together make the processes linking genes, proteins, and cellular function neither random nor determinate but, in its more literal sense, contingent” (85). In sum, Frost imparts that “when we think about biological processes and activities, we cannot but consider an organism as it engages, perceives, responds to, reaches toward, and imbibes its habitat in its efforts to persist in living” (99).

Victoria Pitts‐Taylor's The Brain's Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics brings this dynamic process of living through one's habitat to the fore. Pitts‐Taylor draws on empirical and theoretical research programs within the neurosciences to trace the physical and social matter of the brain so as to challenge the “mechanistic, genetically determined, and asocial ideas of the brain and neurobiological body,” allowing “nurture into nature” that speaks “to the complexity, variation, and multiplicity of experience” (Pitts‐Taylor 2016, 8). Pitts‐Taylor provocatively suggests that “we need to look more closely at knowledge of plasticity, sociality, and embodiment to see what kinds of brains and bodies are being enacted, erased, transformed in neuroscientific thought and practice” (12), finding that “neuroscientific research distributes plasticity unevenly across brain regions, developmental timescales, and neurocognitive systems” (12).

Pitts‐Taylor importantly traces how neuroscientific research that addresses certain bodies‐at‐risk often reflects and reinforces “social stratifications such as class and race” (12), arguing that this “isn't only an epistemic issue; it also concerns how social institutions are governing—literally shaping—neurobiology” (12). For example, Pitts‐Taylor finds that research on the effects of poverty and the brain “risks essentializing social categories and fixing them in the developing brain—especially in the brains of those who are most vulnerable to scrutiny, such as those of minority and poor children. It also obscures how neuroscientific practices have an effect on (are part of) the phenomena they seek to measure” (13). Depicting the brain as biosocial often relies on “a parallel effort to fix persons in social categories, statistical aggregates, or populations that can be mapped onto the brain …. The measurement of human difference through biosocial plasticity can require cuts that belie biosocial complexity and that (mis)construe the experience of individuals and groups as homogenous and predictable” (41).

As neuroscience opens up the management of the self to new brain‐based practices of care, enhancement, and optimization, including pharmaceutical interventions (3), “materialism does not absolve the need to critically access neuroscientific knowledge and practice” (11). Thus “while brain plasticity is conceived as having tremendous clinical potential for reversing the effects of traumas and degenerative diseases, it equally underpins biotechnical, pharmaceutical, and military industries aimed at cognitive modification and enhancement” (18). Such interventions lead Pitts‐Taylor to ask, “How can [the brain's plasticity's] promise be understood when plasticity so neatly coincides with dominant ideologies and practices, or when it threatens the body‐subject with techniques of governmentality?” (18). For example, a range of techniques “involving cognitive exercises, brain‐machine interfaces, drugs, supplements, electric stimulators, and brain mapping technologies, now target the brain for modification and rewiring” (18). Plasticity complements neoliberal demands for innovation and adaption, demanding that individuals optimize and enhance their biology as a matter of personal responsibility and citizenship. Pitts‐Taylor generatively traces how “the plastic brain is susceptible to social hierarchies and inequalities” (22), suggesting that “in the contemporary context, the meeting of the conceptual and the biological has material effects and demands not only bioethical but also biopolitical accountability” (42).

Such biopolitical accountability includes accounting for the ways in which brains and bodies experience material changes as a result of how brain knowledge is enacted. For example, the way neuroscientific research on maternal attachment figures into the clinical management of reproduction could lead to the development of oxytocin as a “prosocial drug” (120). Or, particular enactments of brain plasticity may inform educational policies that target specific brain regions or particular populations for modification. It is important to challenge the power of scientific knowledges in producing normative models of being. For example, the neurobiological effects for a child who experiences “economic vulnerability, chronic stress, and food insecurity” (124) must be examined in light of how scientific inquiry probes and examines such effects. “How generalizable is that experience, and for whom?” asks Pitts‐Taylor (124). In this way, the neurobiological effects of poverty on the brain are far from “mere social constructions” but rather are particular enactments “of neural difference that ha[ve] real, material effects” (124). The stakes, then, “are onto‐epistemological” (120), marking Pitts‐Taylor's work as essential reading for feminists interested in scrutinizing the material effects of neuroscientific knowledge practices.

Such a critical analysis of material effects is interwoven throughout Neel Ahuja's Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species. Ahuja provocatively questions how critical theory might “offer a methodological generosity toward life and matter without romancing bodies, animals, microbes, cyborgs, and things, disavowing their assimilation into international divisions of labor and life” (Ahuja 2016, xvi). Ahuja explores US empire as a posthumanist project that crosses “borders and species” and embeds national defense and imperial and colonial interests “in the racialized matter that we call bodies,” providing a detailed accounting of “how the value‐added body of the settler emerges from a form of empire that increasingly takes on the planetary field of life itself as its space of intervention” (xvi). For Ahuja, “disease interventions are political processes, ones that link media, bodies, institutions, and medical technologies in order to securitize privileged forms of circulation against the queer potentials of interspecies contact” (195), marking the equal distribution of health care as an important “political strategy” but one that also “opens up new forms of imperial securitization that layer power across an expanded range of bodies and environments” (201).

Taking aim, then, at the ways in which posthumanist knowledges “plainly serve as resource for both the agents of empire and its critics” (xv), Ahuja traces the body as a contemporary and historical “site of vital warfare” (7) for containing and controlling risk. Ahuja effectively demonstrates how US public health interventions targeting leprosy (chapter 1), syphilis (chapter 2), polio (chapter 3), smallpox (chapter 4), HIV (chapter 5), and other infectious diseases from 1870 to the present have been “guided by a combination of geopolitical and medical concerns deeply imbricated in capitalist geographies of racial differentiation and changing relationships between states, publics, and species” (6). Ahuja suggests that race fluidly materializes “across different contexts” and circulates “through and across human bodies inhabited by viruses, bacteria, and animals incorporated as food and medicine” (6), tracing throughout the text how “race has long played a central role in the US security state, particularly as it works to map and aggregate biological risk” (197). Ahuja addresses how “many of the most intimate experiences of living and dying” became a major concern for the US, marking how “the vulnerable body as an object of governance” (vii) has been transformed through state policies, technological intervention, and ecological forces. Ahuja notes the ways in which a biopolitics of empire is oriented toward “the dependence of the human body on forces that appear inhuman, even inhumane: medical technologies to extend, optimize, or end life; markets and institutions that unequally distribute resources for sustaining life; environmental processes that support, deprive, or injure bodies” (vii). In doing so, he shows how public health interventions are “not simply public goods” but rather are mobilized by the state to defend “the national body in a world of expanding contact” (3). Such interventions “operate through a number of logics, including attempts to prevent the geographic transmission of disease across borders and species, the use of drugs including vaccines to prevent infection, the development of large‐scale systems of surveillance and quarantine, and efforts to control how the public feeling of risk circulates between experts and broader publics” (5). In sum, Ahuja importantly tracks “the microscopic bodies of viruses and bacteria” that are made “into the very matter of racial differentiation” and addresses how “conduits of debility and death” have “threatened a dangerous intimacy between species and social groups in a globalizing world of empire” (5).

Ahuja importantly pushes for feminist posthumanist thought to more robustly account for the ways in which the politics of empire “is embedded in living bodies and planetary environments, which are themselves constituted as objects of knowledge and intervention for imperial science” (ix). Ahuja does so by focusing on how adaptability, risk, and differentiation constitute the very matter of politics, showing that the “inequalities and violences of imperialism can be productively understood” within “the field of life itself” (ix). This field is marked by a “physics of imperial power,” conjoining the repressive control of bodies with attempts to capacitate bodily and environmental immunities, situating US empire within an embodied, material politics of race and species. For example, images of “infectious, disabled black and brown bodies” mobilized hope that “state and market forces could control national vulnerabilities by managing interspecies environmental circulation” (5–6). From this vantage point, the biosocial crossings of empire show empire to be not only “a process of territorial and economic accumulation across international divisions of labor and sovereignty,” but also “a reproductive process managing bodies in unequal planetary conjunctions of life and death” (x). Through generative case studies, Ahuja's emphasis on the biosocial alerts us to the fact that bodies “are not empty containers of human political subjects, but are lively, transitional assemblages of political matter” (x).

In doing so, Ahuja suggests that “interspecies relations and the public hopes and fears they generate shape the living form and affective lineaments of settler societies, in the process of determining the possibilities and foreclosures of political life” (x). Some life forms are optimized, expanded, reproduced, and securitized through biocapitalist investments and the management of affective relations. Empire securitizes life's relational potential through bio‐necro political practices that entangle capital and territorial accumulation with the distribution of death, precarity, and debility. Ahuja importantly and critically insists that such a plastic, vitalist, and affective governance of species that puts “everything into relation” (xv) relies on bio‐necro practices of containment, segregation, violence, profiling, surveillance, and expulsion, so as to mobilize the mutable borders of species to fuel further capital and territorial accumulation. This is especially evident in chapter 3 on the use of the rhesus monkey in polio research, which demonstrates “the transcolonial roots of medical science's ambivalent production of the non‐human primate as almost, but not quite, human” (116). In marking the porous nonhuman as being at the center of imperial politics and science, Ahuja lays out how “imperial medical science looked into the eyes of the monkey to find a deep evolutionary kinship of feeling and mobility, a shared affective space for human and monkey nervous systems to interface; it then stabbed the monkey in the back, extracting its immune capacity for a new biopolitical formation of empire” (131). That is, Ahuja shows how imperial science optimizes some life forms as more or less livable through the porous, mutable borders of species enabling the furthering of capital accumulation.

Resisting the bio‐necro relationship between capital and bodies is central to David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment. Mitchell and Snyder focus on how crip/queer subjectivities represent alternative forms of being‐in‐the‐world that “create capabilities that exceed, and/or go unrecognized within, the normative scripts of biopolitics” (Mitchell and Snyder 2015, 3). They take issue with the biopolitics of neoliberal inclusionism that embraces diversity and difference through what they argue are normalizing practices. Mitchell and Snyder argue that neoliberal inclusionism is “primarily made available to newly visible public identities such as those labeled handicapped, cognitively impaired, intersexed, deaf/blind, or queer based on a formerly stigmatized group's ability to approximate historically specific expectations of normalcy” (2). Neoliberal inclusionism reifies “the value of normative modes of being developed with respect to ablebodiedness, rationality, and heteronormativity” (2). However, Mitchell and Snyder argue that such integration practices “largely short‐circuit opportunities for more meaningful apprehensions of disability subjectivities that involve ways of experiencing and being disabled in the world” (2–3). That is, disabled people's lives and “crip/queer forms of embodiment provide alternative maps for living together in the deterritorialized, yet highly regulated spaces of biopolitics” (3) that tend to “organize crip/queer biologies into hyper market‐driven identities” that are measured and assessed “by the yardsticks of an increasingly medicalized culture” (10) embedded within an “ablenationalism” that marks disability as a materially devalued existence upon which nationalism flourishes (13).

For Mitchell and Snyder, disability is “something other than the oppressed product of social constraints” (5). Building on feminist materialist approaches to develop what they call “nonnormative positivism” (5) the authors open up “the matter and materiality of embodiment as exceeding its social scripts of limitation” (5) in order to articulate why “disabled lives matter” and “how we might revise, reinvent, and transform narrow normative practices, beliefs, and qualifications of who counts” (6). They are particularly interested in “the creative ways in which lives experienced within differential bodies transform the environments of which they are a part” by engaging how “disabled people experience their material lives as alternatively embodied” (6). The materiality of disability is a “site of creative dynamism” whereby disabled bodies become “more than inert corporealities” that have been “imprinted by cultural beliefs” (7).

Throughout their text, Mitchell and Snyder chart the ways in which neoliberal practices create categories of bodily and affective imperfection so as to encourage consumption. They argue that disabled people increasingly represent “objects of care in which enormous sectors of postcapitalist service economies are invested” (205). In this way, “[i]ncapacity transforms into ‘the new normal’ and, in this process, we lose an ability to recognize alternative maps for living evolved within alternative crip/queer contexts” (41). For example, by fashioning themselves “into a demand‐based market for potential treatments” (172), disability‐ and illness‐related Patient Expert Groups (PEGs) end up disavowing alternative maps for living. Thus, while PEGs open up spaces for individual narratives of creativity and allow for the flourishing of expert knowledge in relation to personal experiences of anomalous embodiment that can challenge medical authority, PEGs also participate in neoliberal healthcare models that demand that people manage their medicalized subjectivity (172). Mitchell and Snyder's critiques of inclusionism and ablenationalism make their text a generative contribution to the understanding of neoliberal biopolitics as it plays out within the realm of disability.

What becomes clear through each of these engagements with the biosocial, biocultural, and posthuman is that feminist materialism continually finds generative ways to confront the differential forms that biopolitical control takes over life in the interest of further capital accumulation and the expansion of empire. These texts emphasize the ways that the plasticity and porosity of matter is as dangerous as it is liberating, from the promise of a politics embedded in the decentered human and the political demands emerging out of the transgenerational effects of inequities, to the dangers of an expanded individualized biopolitics of risk, imperatives of neoliberal bio‐enhancement, and heightened bio‐necro practices of in/exclusion. Each text marks how scientific onto‐epistemologies often exacerbate and perpetuate inequality and injustice, and in doing so, these texts effectively implore us to imagine, demand, and practice a future otherwise.