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Material Feminisms
Edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman
Published by: Indiana University Press
448 Pages, 7 b&w photos
- eBook
- 9780253013606
- Published: January 2008
$23.99
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Harnessing the energy of provocative theories generated by recent understandings of the human body, the natural world, and the material world, Material Feminisms presents an entirely new way for feminists to conceive of the question of materiality. In lively and timely essays, an international group of feminist thinkers challenges the assumptions and norms that have previously defined studies about the body. These wide-ranging essays grapple with topics such as the material reality of race, the significance of sexual difference, the impact of disability experience, and the complex interaction between nature and culture in traumatic events such as Hurricane Katrina. By insisting on the importance of materiality, this volume breaks new ground in philosophy, feminist theory, cultural studies, science studies, and other fields where the body and nature collide.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory / Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman
Part 1. Material Theory
1. Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations for a Possible Alliance / Elizabeth Grosz
2. On Not Becoming Man: The Materialist Politics of Unactualized Potential / Claire Colebrook
3. Constructing the Ballast: An Ontology for Feminism / Susan Hekman
4. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter / Karen Barad
Part 2. Material World
5. Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms / Donna J. Haraway
6. Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina / Nancy Tuana
7. Natural Convers(at)ions: Or, What if Culture Was Really Nature All Along? / Vicki Kirby
8. Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature / Stacy Alaimo
9. Landscape, Memory, and Forgetting: Thinking through (My Mother's) Body and Place / Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands
Part 3. Material Bodies
10. Disability Experience on Trial / Tobin Siebers
11. How Real Is Race? / Michael Hames-García
12. From Race/Sex/Etc. to Glucose, Feeding Tube, and Mourning: The Shifting Matter of Chicana Feminism / Suzanne Bost
13. Organic Empathy: Feminism, Psychopharmaceuticals and the Embodiment of Depression / Elizabeth A. Wilson
14. Cassie's Hair / Susan Bordo
List of Contributors
Index
Stacy Alaimo is Associate Professor of English at The University of Texas at Arlington. She is author of Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space.
Susan Hekman is Professor of Political Science and Director of Graduate Humanities at The University of Texas at Arlington. She is author of Private Selves, Public Identities and The Future of Differences.
"This richly layered collection of essays explores materiality from the perspectives of an international group of feminist theorists. The editors categorize the essays into three sections: Material Theory, Material World, and Material Bodies. In the introduction, the editors argue that feminist theorists tend "to focus on the discursive at the expense of the material." Rather than the concept of mind over matter, this work maintains that matter and mind are equal forces, and that there are real consequences to placing one above the other. After defining the theory, section two looks at nature, which the editors state is "entangled with the nature of philosophy, politics, literature, and popular culture." The third section grounds the other two, giving body to the theories of material feminisms. It is in this last section that readers can see how feminist theory can embrace matter without hierarchy. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty."
~K.G. Saulton, Capella University, Choice
". . . Material Feminisms . . . clearly charts new theoretical waters, demonstrating how feminist thinking about materiality suffuses multiple disciplines and keeps them in lively conversation with one another. . . . [It] provide[s] succinct and rich overviews of where feminist studies, especially feminist technoscience studies, stands today. . . . Material Feminisms includes articles that address race, ethnicity, and disability."
~Olivia P. Banner, University of California, Los Angeles, SIGNS
". . . clearly charts new theoretical waters, demonstrating how feminist thinking about materiality suffuses multiple disciplines and keeps them in lively conversation with one another. . . . provide[s] succinct and rich overviews of where feminist studies, especially feminist technoscience studies, stands today."
~Olivia P. Banner, University of California, Los Angeles
"This richly layered collection of essays explores materiality from the perspectives of an international group of feminist theorists. . . . Recommended.November 2008"
~K.G. Saulton, Capella University
"Specific, groundbreaking accounts of the material effects of ethical, political, scientific, environmental, and other cultural practices."
~Shannon Sullivan, The Pennsylvania State University
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