material feminisms This page intentionally left blank material feminisms Edited by Stacy Alaimo & Susan Hekman indiana university press bloomington & indianapolis This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [email protected] © 2008 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any infor- mation storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the pub- lisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Material feminisms / edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34978-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21946-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Feminist theory. 2. Body, Human. I. Alaimo, Stacy, date II. Hekman, Susan J. HQ1190.M3775 2008 305.4201—dc22 2007019295 1 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10 09 08 To Justin and Jeanne This page intentionally left blank contents acknowledgments • xi introduction: emerging models of materiality in feminist theory • Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman part . material theory . darwin and feminism: preliminary investigations for a possible alliance • Elizabeth Grosz . on not becoming man: the materialist politics of unactualized potential • Claire Colebrook . constructing the ballast: an ontology for feminism • Susan Hekman . posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter • Karen Barad Contents part . material world . otherworldly conversations, terran topics, local terms • Donna J. Haraway . viscous porosity: witnessing katrina • Nancy Tuana . natural convers(at)ions: or, what if culture was really nature all along? • Vicki Kirby . trans-corporeal feminisms and the ethical space of nature • Stacy Alaimo . landscape, memory, and forgetting: thinking through (my mother’s) body and place • Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands viii Contents part . material bodies . disability experience on trial • Tobin Siebers . how real is race? • Michael Hames-García . from race/sex/etc. to glucose, feeding tube, and mourning: the shifting matter of chicana feminism • Suzanne Bost . organic empathy: feminism, psychopharmaceuticals, and the embodiment of depression • Elizabeth A. Wilson . cassie’s hair • Susan Bordo list of contributors • index • ix This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments Permission granted by The University of Chicago Press to reprint Karen Barad’s essay “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Under- standing of How Matter Comes to Matter,” as it appeared in Signs 28:3 (2003), 801–31. © 2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Permission granted by Routledge Publishing, Inc. to reprint Donna J. Haraway’s essay “Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms,” as it appeared in The Haraway Reader, by Donna J. Haraway. New York: Routledge, 2004. Permission granted by aunt lute Books to reprint Gloria Anzaldúa’s poem “Cihuatlyotl, Woman Alone” from Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: aunt lute Books, 1987. Linda G. Hardnett’s poem “If Hair Makes Me Black, I Must Be Purple” appeared in Black Hair, edited by Ima Ebong. New York: Uni- verse Publishing, 2001. Permission granted by Debraha Watson to reprint her poem “Good Hair” as it appeared in Black Hair, edited by Ima Ebong. New York: Universe Publishing, 2001. xi This page intentionally left blank material feminisms This page intentionally left blank introduction: emerging models of materiality in feminist theory Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman The purpose of this anthology is to bring the material, specifically the materiality of the human body and the natural world, into the fore- front of feminist theory and practice. This is no small matter indeed, and we expect this collection to spark intense debate. Materiality, par- ticularly that of bodies and natures, has long been an extraordinarily volatile site for feminist theory—so volatile, in fact, that the guiding rule of procedure for most contemporary feminisms requires that one distance oneself as much as possible from the tainted realm of materi- ality by taking refuge within culture, discourse, and language. Our thesis is that feminist theory is at an impasse caused by the contempo- rary linguistic turn in feminist thought. With the advent of postmod- ernism and poststructuralism, many feminists have turned their attention to social constructionist models. They have focused on the role of language in the constitution of social reality, demonstrating that discursive practices constitute the social position of women. They have engaged in productive and wide-ranging analyses and decon- structions of the concepts that define and derogate women. The turn to the linguistic and discursive has been enormously pro- ductive for feminism. It has fostered complex analyses of the intercon- nections between power, knowledge, subjectivity, and language. It has allowed feminists to understand gender from a new and fruitful per- spective. For example, it has allowed feminists to understand how gender has been articulated with other volatile markings, such as class, race, and sexuality, within cultural systems of difference that function 1 Material Feminisms like a language (à la Ferdinand de Saussure). The rigorous deconstruc- tions of Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray (especially within Speculum of the Other Woman) have exposed the pernicious logic that casts woman as subordinated, inferior, a mirror of the same, or all but invisible. At the forefront of this turn to the linguistic is the influence of postmod- ern thought in feminist theory. The strength of postmodern feminism is to reveal that since its inception, Western thought has been struc- tured by a series of gendered dichotomies. Postmodern feminists have argued that the male/female dichotomy informs all the dichotomies that ground Western thought: culture/nature, mind/body, subject/ob- ject, rational/emotional, and countless others. Postmodern feminists have further argued that it is imperative not to move from one side of the dichotomy to the other, to reverse the privileging of concepts, but to deconstruct the dichotomy itself, to move to an understanding that does not rest on oppositions. Feminist theory and practice have been significantly enriched by these postmodern insights. Postmodern analysis has revealed the lia- bility of defining and fixing the identity of “woman” in any location or of attempting to assert the superiority of the feminine over the mascu- line. Indeed, within queer theory, especially, the “feminine” and the “masculine” have been productively unmoored, contested, and rede- ployed. But it is now apparent that the move to the linguistic, particu- larly in its postmodern variant, has serious liabilities as well as advantages. In short, postmodernism has not fulfilled its promise as a theoretical grounding for feminism. Although postmoderns claim to reject all dichotomies, there is one dichotomy that they appear to embrace al- most without question: language/reality. Perhaps due to its centrality in modernist thought, postmoderns are very uncomfortable with the concept of the real or the material. Whereas the epistemology of mod- ernism is grounded in objective access to a real/natural world, post- modernists argue that the real/material is entirely constituted by language; what we call the real is a product of language and has its reality only in language. In their zeal to reject the modernist ground- ing in the material, postmoderns have turned to the discursive pole as the exclusive source of the constitution of nature, society, and reality. Far from deconstructing the dichotomies of language/reality or 2 Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory culture/nature, they have rejected one side and embraced the other. Even though many social constructionist theories grant the existence of material reality, that reality is often posited as a realm entirely separate from that of language, discourse, and culture. This presumption of sepa- ration has meant, in practice, that feminist theory and cultural studies have focused almost entirely on the textual, linguistic, and discursive. Defenders of postmodernism would argue that this is a misread- ing of the postmodern position or even that we cannot identify a single postmodern position in any case. Theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault do, in fact, accommodate the material in their work. Their use of the material, furthermore, has been reflected in the work of other theorists. William Connolly, for example, employs the mate- riality of Deleuze in his Neuropolitics (2002). And feminist theorists such as Claire Colebrook and Ladelle McWhorter have drawn upon Deleuze and Foucault to enable them to engage with materiality in significant and revealing ways. Nonetheless, the material force of the work of Deleuze, and especially of Foucault, is often overlooked be- cause of the exclusive focus on the discursive. Furthermore, the ten- dency