I am a sucker for a good double entendre, and Victoria Pitts-Taylor's edited volume, Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism, hangs on a fitting one. The key word in the title, “mattering,” points to new materialism, a field of study that has grown in importance in recent years, as well as to the word's political resonance, especially in the era of Black Lives Matter. This double entendre—and the relationship between these two meanings of the word—sets up the purpose of the book itself. Writing in her introduction to the volume that this new attention to matter and mattering is transforming feminism, Pitts-Taylor sets as the task of this book to illustrate how feminism can in turn influence academic approaches to matter, nature, and bioculture (1). More specifically, the book aims to shed light on the specificity and particularity of mattering and on its differential distributions (16). While the book meets this aim to a degree, it is more successful in an area outside of its stated goal: showing the political import of matter and mattering, particularly in this charged political moment.

Mattering is divided into four parts, grouping the 16 chapters together thematically. By far the strongest of these parts is the third, “Biopolitics and Necropolitcs.” Though treating fairly diverse subjects, the five chapters included in this section hold together well, building on each other to form a coherent overall argument: that matter, especially the matter of the body or matter that alters the body, is being used to serve disciplinary and repressive political ends. Essentially, that it is the stuff of contemporary biopolitics. The cases evoked in these chapters—a racialization that inscribes borders on the body through technology (Josef Barla), the discursive shift from a poisoned victim to a toxic body that normalizes dangerous exposure and displaces responsibility to the individual (Teena Gabrielson), the use of ADHD drugs to compensate for an underfunded education system that exposes a new variant of eugenics (Julian Gill-Peterson), the bioeconomy and specifically female tissue donations essential to assisting fertility and conception that alienates women from their own bodies and places the body above the person (Sigrid Vertommen), and finally the use of psychotropic drugs to discipline prisoners and chemically fashion model behavior (Anthony Ryan Hatch and Kym Bradley)—paint a broad picture of how technology is acting on or analyzing the body at a molecular or genetic level to serve a regressive politics. In these chapters, the study of matter exposes the dangerous reach of biopolitics in its contemporary form—chilling food for thought in the era of Donald Trump and the rise of radical right-wing politics.

The first part of the book, “Probing New Theories of Matter,” also poses some interesting questions, in this case exploring the limits of new materialism as a school of thought. Like Pitts-Taylor's own introduction, the chapters here look at new materialism and posthumanism with a skeptical, though not hostile, eye, opening the book with a constructive problematizing of the field. Stephanie Clare, in her chapter, “On the Politics of ‘New Feminist Materialisms,’” asks the often nagging question: “What counts as politics within new materialist thought?” (61). This is an important question, one that some new materialists answer better than others, that Clare deploys deftly to argue for a project of recreating human subjectivity and a return to “human politics” with an interest in power relations, a core tenet of feminist scholarship. However, she too quickly glosses over a key political lesson of new materialism—to maintain a radical openness to the nonhuman and to the constant tension that this openness engenders. This posture is in itself political, insofar as it forces us not to accept as given existing understandings of and interactions with the world. It can be applied not only to the nonhuman, but also to an understanding of the human, social, and political world.

Two chapters in the following section, “Nature/Culture in the Twenty-First Century Sciences,” raise other challenging questions about the way that science is sometimes deployed in materialist thought. In her discussion of epigenetics and the embodiment of intersectional experience, Lisa H. Weasal cautions against rendering the subject invisible with the field's focus on the socio-molecular process of becoming (117). Sigrid Schmitz, in her chapter on brain-computer interfaces, warns against the danger of falling into a modern discourse of neurological determinism, a traditional feminist worry that warrants resuscitation.

The final section, “New Materialism and Research Practices,” unfortunately lets down the rest of the book. The chapters feel disjointed, without a common thread really drawing them together. One chapter, “Un/Re-making Method: Knowing/Enacting Posthumanist Performative Social Research Methods through ‘Diffractive Geneologies’ and ‘Metaphysical Practices’” by Natasha S. Mauthner, is sadly so encumbered by idiomatic language that it is hard to follow. This is in fact a broader problem for the book. While some chapters are very well written, the heavy reliance on jargon coupled with arguments that are overwrought or unclear is a problem that plagues several chapters, unfortunately making the book overall somewhat hit-and-miss.

A more serious problem for the book is a lack of clarity about the feminist nature of the argument or analysis in some chapters. For a book that aims to illustrate how feminism can influence academic approaches to matter, nature, and bioculture, this absence is somewhat troubling. It left me wondering if the implicit argument is that a close examination of the body suffices to make a text feminist. This type of argument would be problematic, drawing too deterministic a line between the body and feminist scholarship. This leap may go too far on my part, but the uncertainty about the feminist contributions of some chapters left me with this fear and with a guarded stance while reading the book.