Feminist new materialism

Educational research shows a growing interest in "affect as pedagogy", a concept grounded in feminist studies, which focuses on the relationality and materiality of affect. This article addresses the becoming of affect as pedagogy, positioning its inquiry at the crossroads of feminist scholarship and the Deleuzian-Guattarian concept of affect. It presents a postqualitative inquiry that "experiments with" an agentic assemblage of 76 public schools in Brazil, 78 responses to a qualitative survey, 12 teachers interviewed, and the researchers' fieldwork observations. The result of this experiment is a collective narrative organized as a Voice without Organ (VwO), which shows interlocking elements of challenging, disadvantaged educational scenarios and a teaching practice traversed by affect. The VwO answers the question of how affect becomes pedagogy, describing events that can be characterized as embodied history, affective labor, and the capacity to be affected. In these events, an intense connection between bodies occurs. This pedagogy also shows the capacity to affect, by creating affirmative desires that materialize in alternative narratives for the students' futures. In the face of limited and precarious resources, lack of public support, and an environment of violence, affect as futuremaking pedagogy becomes a means of working against exclusion and social injustice.

Article link: https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/11/1/216/138278/Toxic-BodiesTicks-Trans-Bodies-and-the-Ethics-of


Tracing ticks in two different artworks and Leslie Feinberg’s activist writing, I take my lead in this article from philosopher Donna Haraway and her suggestion to think about engagement with the environment through an “ethics of response-ability.” By deploying close readings, I will discuss the affects represented in the video installation Act on Instinct (2013) by Elin Magnusson, a sequence of the film Something Must Break (2014) by Ester Martin Bergsmark, and blog entries from the “Lyme Series” by the late trans activist Leslie Feinberg. Through these works, I explore the meaning of this correlation between ticks and transing bodies for environmental ethics as well as for the forging of livable lives for trans people. Toxicity surfaces as a link in these works. The notion of feminist figuration, developed by philosopher Rosi Braidotti among others, allows me to discuss toxicity as a material-discursive figuration, which highlights how human societies in a western context approach the body of the Other, in this case the transgender body as a human-Other and the tick as animal-Other. As a figuration, toxicity then becomes a shared meeting site that helps to problematize the western pathologization of trans bodies and asks what ethics emerge in this proximity between ticks and trans bodies. Toxicity exists in the discussed works in particular as a complex material-discursive trajectory. Although some discourses on toxicity uphold social hierarchies and racist assumptions, as illustrated by Mel Y. Chen, for example, the works here seem to reappropriate the status of the toxic body as a strategy for adjustment and alliance and a site of ethical engagement with the world. The tick will be my guide in weaving together stories of different bodies and of what Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren call the “unloved other.”

We live in an age of movement. More than at any other time in history , people and things move longer distances, more frequently, and faster than ever before. All that was solid melted into air long ago and is now in full circulation around the world like dandelion seeds adrift on turbulent winds. We find ourselves, in the early twenty-first century, in a world where every major domain of human activity has become increasingly defined by motion. 1 We have entered a new historical era defined in large part by movement and mobility and are now in need of a new historical on-tology appropriate to our time. The observation that the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was marked by an increasingly " liquid " and " mobile modernity " is now something widely recognized in the scholarly literature at the turn of the century. 2 Today, however, our orientation to this event is quite different. Almost twenty years into the twenty-first century we now find ourselves situated on the other side of this heralded transition. The question that confronts us today is thus a new one: how to fold all that has melted back up into new solids. 3

This article emerges from our relationship with Theo Combrinck, a colleague, a passionate social and academic activist, a recovering addict and a PhD student, who left our living space during 2014 ‒ a death that was unexpected yet a consequence of an iterative desire to end a troubled/ing life. The intensity of Theo's physical absence retains a vibrant presence and continues to intra-act with us as we consider socially just pedagogies. Theo's work lives on through memories, audio recordings and different forms of texts written by him, all representing his views of socially just pedagogy. Our entanglements with Braidotti's posthuman and Barad's diffractive methodologies shape our understandings of the past and present intra-actions with Theo in time and space. The Bozalek et al. Diffracting socially just pedagogies 202 generative process of our individual and collective becomings through Theo illustrate how the collaborative energy of co-constituted relationships contribute an affective response towards developing socially just pedagogies.

This paper explores the intersections within bodily materialism and future textiles by inquiring into embodied practices and materiality in care. By placing the body as a site of research, it centres around concepts of bodily care and the body as an ecosystem, one that is always in flux and considers the fluidity of bodies and bodily fluids, such as urine, discharge, breath and sweat, as fluids with potential to design with. It looks at how bodies are acted upon by outside forces, and explore more-than-human relations as co-creators in co-habiting the space of the body and that around it. To illustrate this, the paper introduces a series of design research artefacts that take a variety of approaches to exploring the materiality of care in the everyday. First, an eTextile toolkit that aims to create bodily awareness through hands-on engagement with textile crafting technology, then a biotextile harvesting toolkit that involves the raw material of the intimate body that explores DIYbio in the context of the home, and lastly a set of wearable living material-based explorations that recognize biomimicry and symbiotic relationships in designing for chronic stress. In embracing notions of bodily materialism, this paper explores the bodily abject i.e. fluids and the more-than-human as crucial to engendering new modes of knowing in intimate and personal care through textile-based materials. The paper engages critically with textile design research and practice by placing material that embraces care as ambivalent at the forefront and thus challenging traditional approaches to health and care and, importantly, the design of future textiles.

In this paper we interrogate the practices of imagining in human-computer interaction (HCI), particularly in scenario building (SBE) and persona construction. We discuss the philosophical premises of HCI imaginings in rationalism, cognitivism and phenomenology, and we propose (feminist) new materialist philosophy as an enriching perspective that helps generate a holistic, relational perspective of users, imaginaries and technologies. In the end we explore the method of figurations as a potential tool for HCI design.

The care sector in Denmark is undergoing rapid change and facing severe challenges due to the increasing number of elders and cuts in social welfare. The political response is welfare technology aiming on efficiency and replacement of care workers. Welfare technology is presented as a quick fix to a welfare state in crisis. In these times of change it is important to obtain more knowledge about what care work consists of, and how it is changing.

Care research has mainly focused on the paradigmatic shifts in the sector and working conditions. In a movement beyond discourse this thesis approaches care work by identifying how multiple modalities, including discourse and materialism, affect and human and non-human actors intra-act in the constitutive processes of care practices. Framed by an analysis of policy documents on welfare technology, I analyse interviews with care workers. The thesis is an analytical experiment inspired by Lis Højgaard and Dorte Marie Søndergaard’s framework for analysing multimodal constitutive processes in empirical research. Further it is inspired by feminist new-materialist theory, including Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism and Sara Ahmed and Dorthe Staunæs’ insights on affect. This approach enables an analysis of how care practices are constituted in a complex intra-action of human and non-human actors, including affect, body, gender, technology, mundane technologies, time, skills, work regulations, as well as local, institutional and societal discourses.

I find that care workers apply a variety of strategies, negotiated in relation to discourses of good care, in order to target the care recipients’ needs and influence affective transformations. Needs are identified through multi-sensory hunches seeking information from available sources: voice, facial expression, furniture, life history etc. Motivation, medication and mediation through language and use of mundane technologies are some of the other strategies applied. The strategies are constantly reshaped in relation to the context, colleagues and care recipients. The demented represent an inappropriate post-human challenge to the ideal of care. In facing this challenge care workers apply a somatic and relational approach and try to restore the self of the demented. The practices are shaped by bodily, gendered and affective subjectification of the care worker related to the hazards of the demanding work, sexual harassment and violence.

I find that there is a gap between the discourses on welfare technology and the care work practices. As a reaction to cuts and technologisation the care workers struggle for recognition and a revalorisation of their skills and the importance of humane skills in conducting care.

Avec HOMO INC. OPORATED, Sam Bourcier poursuit la réflexion menée dans la trilogie des Queer Zones. Mariage, procréation, travail, patrie, les bons homos ont basculé dans la sphère de la reproduction et de la production. Que reste-t-il du sujet politique LGBT lorsqu'il est défini par le droit et le management de la diversité? Pas grand chose. Raison pour laquelle les queers et les transféministes se mobilisent pour un agenda de redistribution économique et de justice sociale plus large que la simple demande d'égalité et d'intégration.  HOMO INC. OPORATED propose une critique radicale de l'homonationalisme et des politiques de l'égalité des droits. C'est aussi une boîte à outils pour lutter contre le néolibéralisme, avec une réflexion et de nouveaux moyens d'action sur les politiques du savoir à l'université, le genre comme travail, la grève du genre sans oublier le gender fucking!

The history of puppetry is full of supernatural bodies on stage that dramatically or subtextually represent their quest of coming to life and gaining autonomy from their masters. A puppet’s performance often reflects on its condition of existence: How does a random object become an animated body on stage? This practical and theoretical question energizes South Korean artist Geumhyung Jeong’s (b. 1980) body of work. Jeong extends the possibilities of puppetry by choreographing her entire body as her animation technique. Moreover, she explores the various dimensions of the object’s liveliness by way of sexuality. In fact, in Jeong’s exploration of animacy, this stage life of the object always already involves intimacy and sensuality. She crafts and manipulates her performing objects that range from simple masks to dummies to machines, embraced carnally with them in the double entendre of playing with control. Reflecting on the six performances Jeong created between 2008 and 2019, I am repeatedly reminded that there is no anima, no life, and no agency for objects devoid of sexual being.

Exploring the intra-actions of new animist and new materialist movements within the environmental (post)humanities, this paper argues for transductive methods in-between the disciplines of the sciences and humanities and Western, Eastern, and Indigenous disciplines beyond the academy. Following such feminist technoscience scholars as Karen Barad and Donna Haraway down one outgrowth of trails and animist environmental educators like Priscilla Stuckey and M.J. Barrett  and Robin Kimmerer and Winona LaDuke down others, we observe different sets of subjects and objects. Yet each scholar shares an open attentiveness to the liveliness and relational reciprocity of the more-than-human. Being present on the margins of any bounded field or at the crossroads where a pattern of intersecting lines of flight has been seen, it is advantageous to present a gift. In this way, the researcher is not only open to receiving gifts but to the habituation of a transductive relational patterning which allows for the emergence of more expansive becomings.

Presented at the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture conference on Religion and Science at the University of Florida on January 17, 2016

This chapter charts feminist research in early childhood and the generative potential it offers to continually revisit childhood and gender - and the important ways in which this has shifted over time. This review celebrates the significant contributions feminist scholars have made to the field; and demonstrates the potentialities within contemporary approaches such as new materialism and post-humanism to respond to postfeminist claims that gender is no longer an issue. Our intention is to identify the centrality of feminism to the field of early childhood studies and the continued relevance of gender to all early childhood debates. The chapter addresses the following issues: the influence of feminist theory to conceptualizations of the child/childhood; the relationship of feminist theory to post-structuralism and to queer theory in relation to understandings of childhood, gender and sexuality; equitable and transformative pedagogies in early childhood education; advances in theoretical perspectives that contribute to contemporary understandings of gender in the lives of young children, including the tensions that can exist around some feminist perspectives and gender diverse and trans children; the perceived relevance of gender issues in early childhood policy and curricular frameworks; and identifying the current gender issues pertinent to early childhood education and to young children’s lives.

Death, decay, and transcendence are transformed if interpreted from a microbial perspective. This paper constructs a non-anthropocentric approach on a microbial scale through the concept of microbiopolitics, an expanded notion of biopolitics with the inclusion of ​zoe​, a postanthropocentric interpretation of ecological relations, focused on the life of microorganisms and introducing an ecological thought for the microbial planet. This research explores, in particular, the work of Latin American artists Ana Laura Cantera and Gilberto Esparza as a form of material speculation that opens up alternatives of thought grounded on the accountability of biological and technological matter, its limits and possibilities.

This chapter explores an academic-creative collaboration that formed around 'The Confidence Project' led by Untold Dance Theatre, Bristol, UK, to evaluate the engagement of women in somatic movement workshops. I discuss how methods of inquiry such as body mapping, interviews and diaries informed a unique research evaluation process that acted as a feminist intra-vention. Rather than being a separate evaluation 'of' the creative project, our methodology was designed 'within' the somatic workshop process that experimented with the gendered contours of women's embodied confidence (including intersections with race, age, sexuality and so on). From this perspective, the research process can be understood as 'intra-active'-acting on, with and through the creative relations between researchers, choreographers, participants and the materiality of movement practices. As a feminist intra-vention, our arts-based collaboration sought to mobilise methods of embodied learning to unsettle the gender normativity that often frames women's lack of confidence as an individualised 'deficit'. Unlike many physical activity interventions that assume women's bodies are passive objects requiring interventions, such as instructional movement pedagogies, our project worked through a feminist ethics of engaging the sensory body through experimental movement, as well as drawing-talking about gendered embodiment. Body mapping methods have yet to be used in critical health and physical activity research and hence this project contributes to new approaches to researching gendered movement.

Solar power has long incited feminist imaginings of socioenvironmental justice and a commoning of energy, despite its associations with military technology and precarious labour. This article addresses the question of responsible collaboration with a form of power that remains indifferent to human pursuits. It does so through a situated inquiry into a solar energy initiative in the Czech Republic considered as a technoecological phenomenon. Feminist technoecology is developed in terms of a double process of associations and dissociations – or technoecological dis/ articulation – through which a collective and its milieu and ethos are constituted. It thereby attends to the immanent tensions and exclusions in the economic, political and ecological work of solar panels in particular encounters, including relations with the land and racialised labour, that differentially produce an ethos of interest and indifference. In this light, the non-participation of local Roma in the solar installation does not signal the absence of a relation but makes responsiveness, and responsibility, towards the indifference they constitute, possible. In a mode of speculative rearticulation, immanent frictions and potentialities are reworked to expand an ethos of caring and communing that incorporates extinguishment, non-participation and indifference.

A perspectiva sociomaterial visa expor, por meio da observação de micropráticas, o que as coisas “fazem” e como elas materializam ações coreografadas que compõem a dança de relações entre sujeitos humanos e objetos não-humanos. Partindo dessa perspectiva, este trabalho investiga a materialidade utilizando o ambiente universitário para explorar as tendências de produção e de consumo de tecnologias, os efeitos concretos de sua presença e as oportunidades desiguais por elas geradas. Apresenta uma investigação empírica em um ambiente educacional durante a pandemia do Covid-19, baseada em evidências a partir de uma aula de pós-graduação ministrada remotamente no Brasil no primeiro semestre de 2020.

This paper proposes benefits of the entanglement of feminist new materialist theory with post-phenomenology. The paper focuses on an empirical study of interviews using photo-elicitation with four young women to document their lived experiences producing self-images to share via social media. Drawing on post-phenomenology, the cellphone is discussed as a multi-stable technology wherein the selfie is experienced at once as a mirror, a camera, and a window to social media platforms. But this paper also draws on glitch feminism, which, via metaphors of technological failure, challenges ossified conceptual boundaries between the body, desire, and technology. Through this coupling the paper suggests that what are identified as corporeal, photographic, and performative glitches by the participants are worked out, thereby erasing any experiential delineation between mirror, camera, and cellphone.  Whereas post-phenomenology often refrains from examining the complex power dynamics that shape technological–human relations, this paper argues that such dynamics are crucial when examining gendered technological phenomena like selfies. Contributing empirical data to recent post-phenomenological work on cellphones, this paper details the gendered material-discursive dimensions of the selfie via the work of contemporary feminist new materialist thinkers.

KEYWORDS: Selfies, audience theory, photo elicitation, feminist new materialism, social media

L'article retrace d'abord les apports des féministes matérialistes francophones —principalement Guillaumin, Wittig, Tabet et Mathieu. Celles-ci ont transformé la notion de "travail", en théorisant l'appropriation des corps comme machine-à-force-de-travail. Elles ont montré que la sexualité pouvait être appréhendée comme un travail, dans la continuité des rapports sociaux de sexe existants, et profondément dénaturalisé la maternité. Jules Falquet propose ensuite le concept de "combinatoire straight". Régissant à la fois l'alliance et la filiation, et organisant les dynamiques simultanées et historiques des rapports sociaux de sexe, race et classe, la combinatoire straight constitue un nouvel outil pour analyser la reproduction sociale et pour penser le développement historique du capitalisme, mais aussi l'actualité néolibérale, dans une perspective qui rejoint une partie du féminisme décolonial latino-américain et des Caraïbes.

During the 19th century, sublime depictions of North American mounds captivated Euro-American colonists and Romantic travelers. Settlers frequently embedded farms and homesteads into the material fabric of these Indigenous ruins across the American Bottom region and surrounding uplands, uncovering traces of antiquity in the process. Focusing on the Emerald mound site and broader mound discourses, I examine how material intimacies underlying this 19th-century phenomenon periodically corrupted Romantic sensibilities. Specifically, I highlight aspects of archival and spatial data that capture fleeting moments when mound intercourse generated uncanny affects and queer temporalities. I argue that in moments when uncanny affects haunted colonial homes, Indigenous histories queered the tense of settler colonialism.

The most original and shocking interpretation of Lucretius in the last 40 years.

Thomas Nail argues convincingly and systematically that Lucretius was not an atomist, but a thinker of kinetic flux. In doing so, he completely overthrows the interpretive foundations of modern scientific materialism, whose philosophical origins lie in the atomic reading of Lucretius' immensely influential book De Rerum Natura.

This means that Lucretius was not the revolutionary harbinger of modern science as Greenblatt and others have argued; he was its greatest victim. Nail re-reads De Rerum Natura to offer us a new Lucretius--a Lucretius for today.

Semiotic Subjectivity in Education and Counseling demonstrates the importance of addressing the concept of the unconscious in learning. Exploring the innovative concept of edusemiotics, it challenges the received notion of learning as solely academic and linguistic, instead offering an ethico-aesthetic paradigm that draws on transdisciplinary research in the context of this new direction in educational theory.

The chapters explore the production of subjectivity within the process of semiosis as the action and transformation of signs. An unorthodox pedagogy of the unconscious blends with the therapeutic dimension and produces subjectivities that emerge in the midst of the relational dynamics of experience. The book argues for holistic education that rejects the schism between matter and spirit pervading Western thinking and represents a shift in rethinking spirituality while never separating it from logic and reason. Giving voice to the unconscious contributes to learning and changing our habits as an important objective in educative and counseling practices.

The book critically examines the legacy of Charles S. Peirce, Lev S. Vygotsky and other forerunners of edusemiotics. It will be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students across the fields of educational philosophy, educational psychology and counseling as well as science studies.

Rozprawa stanowi próbę ukazania w jaki sposób splątane konceptualizacje i praktyki ciała przenikają się w procesie samoorganizacji materii. Tak sformułowane rozważania zostały usytuowane w obrębie dwóch współczesnych nurtów filozoficznych: posthumanizmu i nowego materializmu. Przedstawicieli i przedstawicielki tych formacji myślowych łączy potrzeba przemyślenia sposobów stawania się materii, uchwytnych w dynamice przeistaczających się ciał. Tego rodzaju ukierunkowanie rozważań umożliwia rozumienie cielesności w kategoriach procesów, relacji, zależności, a także wspólnotowości. Nieodłącznym wątkiem tak sformułowanych filozoficznych dociekań są analizy poświęcone powiązaniom ludzkich i nie-ludzkich przejawów sprawczości. W takim ujęciu myślenie i ruch, zachodzące w układach powiązanych ciał, stanowią nierozerwalne przejawy aktywności materii. W związku z tym filozoficzne spekulacje zostały połączone z analizą praktyk ciała wywodzących się z tańca, performance, sztuk wizualnych itp., aby umożliwić lepsze zrozumienie ich wzajemnego przenikania się w procesie samoorganizacji materii, a tym samym w przekształceniach współdziałających ciał. Słowa kluczowe: konceptualizacje ciała, praktyki ciała, ciało, materia, cielesność, posthumanizm, nowy materializm

The contributions of women are largely ignored in the history of art. Though the works of artists such as Artemesia Gentileschi, Berthe Morisot, and Mary Cassatt are known by sight, their names are rarely mentioned in discussing the great works and great artists of Western civilization, whether in art history textbooks, scholarly articles, or other sources. The stories of these women artists are even more invisible, despite immense talent, significant complexity and meaning in their art, and, often, struggles to reach these achievements. Women were excluded from the traditional academies, denied opportunities to work with the same subject matter as men, and even forced to have chaperones when they appeared in public, whereas men could move freely about alone (Cascone). As Hélène Bertaux, founder of Paris’s Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, proclaimed in 1881, “The woman artist is an ignored, little-understood force, delayed in its rise! A social prejudice of sorts weighs upon her; and yet, every year, the number of women who dedicate themselves to art is swelling with fearsome speed” (para. 5). One of these women was Paula Modersohn-Becker, a prolific artist who bridged Post-Impressionism and German Expressionism, broke boundaries in her depictions of women, nudes, and self-portraiture, and lived a life she could call her own. As she expressed, “I believe the best thing is for one to go one’s own way as if in a dream” (“Paula Modershon-Becker”).

Este trabajo forma parte de un repertorio más amplio que aborda el estudio de la cultura nocturna como uno de los vectores en torno a los cuales se articula la jotería. Fusionando el trabajo de Carlos Monsiváis, Deborah Vargas, José Joaquín Blanco, Nancy Cárdenas, Cecilia Sotres, Antonio Marquet y otras artistas, activistas e intelectuales, arguyo que la noche popular es una ecología política.

New materialism (and new materialisms) is part of the material turn currently sweeping through the Humanities and Social Sciences and entails a paradigm shift towards a more material(ist) understanding of social and cultural life. From new materialist thinking, new (empirical) approaches, methods, methodologies and objects of study ensue. The new materialisms emerge from feminism, philosophy and science and technologies studies and critique the foundational binaries of modern thought, especially the nature/culture, object/subject, human/thing dualisms, whose anthropocentric biases are seen to have led to the current ecological and civilizational crisis and the incapacity to think through and adequately engage with them. Proposing to give things their due, new materialisms are interested in "the force of things" and debate "the agency of things." The post-anthropocentric interest in the vitality of things parallels the non-dualist modes of thinking of Indigenous ontologies on which some new materialisms may in fact be based, but whose influence has so far insufficiently been acknowledged. At its most radical, new materialism is posthumanist, part of the nonhuman turn. A number of scholars have sought to bring the insights and concerns of new materialism(s) into the fields of literary theory and criticism, developing "thing" or "stuff" theory, and seeking to conceptualize and operationalize a new literary materialism. For this, they draw on insights from a range of disciplines, including material culture studies, book and print culture studies, and comparative textual media studies. Given the importance attached to the linguistic turn as the cultural moment and textual approach in relation to which new materialists agonistically construct the newness of their material(ist) endeavors, the publication context of Roland Barthes's famous essay "The Death of the Author"-the multimedia magazine in a box Aspen 5+6-is highlighted as an important site for critiquing a non-material approach.

Parents, and particularly mothers, are increasingly using digital media and devices to monitor the progress of pregnancy and the health and development of their children. A plethora of apps is available for these purposes, including those designed for monitoring pregnancy and the health, development and wellbeing of infants and young children. This chapter examines and analyses the implications of these types of monitoring apps for women’s experiences of pregnancy and the care of children, drawing on the findings of two empirical studies involving Australian women. In doing so, two major literatures – dataveillance and feminist new materialism – are brought together to offer new insights into digitised caring practices in relation to children.

The rise of the health, beauty and fitness industries in recent years has led to an increased focus on the body. Body image, gender and health are issues of long-standing concern in sociology and in youth studies, but a theoretical and empirical focus on the body has been largely missing from this field. This book explores young people’s understandings of their bodies in the context of gender and health ideals, consumer culture, individualisation and image.

Body Work examines the body in youth studies. It explores paradoxical aspects of gendered body work practices, highlighting the contradiction in men’s increased participation in these industries as consumers alongside the re-emphasis of their gendered difference. It explores the key ways in which the ideal body is currently achieved, via muscularising practices, slimming regimes and cosmetic procedures. Coffey investigates the concept of ‘health’ and how it is inextricably linked both to the bodily performance of gender ideals and an increased public emphasis on individual management and responsibility in the pursuit of a ‘healthy’ body.

This book’s conceptual framework places it at the forefront of theoretical work concerning bodies, affect and images, particularly in its development of Deleuzian research. It will appeal to a wide range of scholars and students in fields of youth studies, education, sociology, gender studies, cultural studies, affect and body studies.

Bodies of Water explores what it means to be a watery body in a watery world, specifically at a time of hydro-ecological precarity. Drawing on a wide range of feminist theory, it articulates embodied phenomenology with posthumanism to produce a mode of inquiry that pays close attention to our own (differently situated) implication in watery environmental matters. This selection is a preview (pre-copyediting) of the Introduction. The book will be published by Bloomsbury (Environmental Cultures series) in January 2017. An HTML open access of the entire text can be found here:
https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/bodies-of-water-posthuman-feminist-phenomenology/

The authors of this edition propose a novel and inspiring research approach to the subject of plants, which – being a form of life that is different, yet akin to us – is a constant source of nourishment and metaphors, decoration and obsessions. The articles included in this thematic block on plants enter into lively ongoing debates on genetics, feminism, ecology and plant ontology. They are excellent examples of the fact that in Polish philosophical and cultural reflection there was an understanding very early on of the challenges that posthumanism poses to our anthropocentric intellectual habits. Foreign readers will recognize in these Polish reflections a bold willingness to ask ethical and aesthetic questions of great relevance to the modern world that go far beyond the safe, though most likely imagined, limits of what it is to be human.

Moving transversally across feminist, ecofeminist, anticolonial and posthuman positions, this paper gathers up various insights on the problem of representation. This gleaning not only highlights how these positions might collectively refigure technologies of representation, but also emphasises the important continuities, overlaps and shared concerns in these theoretical engagements. What emerges is the possibility of posthuman representation of non-human natures—in other words, a representation without representationalism, where the notion of a pre-representational reality as ontologically distinct from and hierarchically ordered in relation to its representation is rejected. The kind of representation I seek would remain concerned with the urgent need to advocate for the interests of others (non-humans, in this case), but also with the risk of capture and appropriation that runs alongside the impetus to ‘speak for others’ highlighted by feminist and anticolonial debates. Drawing on but extending these discussions, I link the problem of representationalism specifically to a tenacious nature/culture dualism. Here, posthuman feminist theories, and the work of Vicki Kirby in particular, prove helpful for navigating a path through the ontological quagmire of representationalism as intimately bound to the nature/culture split. Following an elaboration of Kirby’s flattened ontological schema where all matter is ‘nature writing itself’ differently—that is, as a difference differing— I return finally to the  fraught ethics of representing others (human and more-than-human). Accepting that representation is necessary, but that it should not entail mastery, I advocate paying closer attention to the lessons of anticolonial feminism, where the stakes of such representations are particularly high. Here, posthuman representation becomes a question of planetarity (Spivak 2003) as well.

Breathing is not a common subject in feminist studies. Breathing Matters introduces this phenomenon as a forceful potentiality for feminist intersectional theories, politics, and social and environmental justice.

By analyzing the material and discursive as well as the natural and cultural enactments of breath in black lung disease, phone sex work, and anxieties and panic attacks, Breathing Matters proposes a nonuniversalizing and politicized understanding of embodiment. In this approach, human bodies are conceptualized as agential actors of intersectional politics. Magdalena Górska argues that struggles for breath and for breathable lives are matters of differential forms of political practices in which vulnerable and quotidian corpomaterial and corpo-affective actions are constitutive of politics.

Set in the context of feminist poststructuralist and new materialist and postconstructionist debates, Breathing Matters offers a discussion of human embodiment and agency reconfigured in a posthumanist manner. Its interdisciplinary analytical practice demonstrates that breathing is a phenomenon that is important to study from scientific, medical, political, environmental and social perspectives.