Jagger New Material & Sex Diff

Gill Jagger
The New Materialism and Sexual Difference
here is a rising tide within feminist theory, referred to as the new

materialism, which has been described as an emerging new paradigm
Alaimo and Hekman 2008; see also Ahmed 2008. This article examines key strands in this new materialism, which is differentiated from the
materialism rooted in Marxism. The new materialism is, rather, a response
to the linguistic turn that has dominated the humanities in the past few
decades and that, it is claimed, has neglected the materiality of matter.
Concerned with rectifying this neglect, the new materialism has developed, in part, in debate with poststructuralism and with Judith Butlers
theory of the body, which often serve to exemplify the linguistic turn.1
Butlers work is criticized for not allowing an adequate role for the materiality of the physical body in the process of its materialization. The new
material feminisms attempt to address such an imbalance by returning to
the materiality of matter. Their aim is to find a way of theorizing the interimplication of the discursive and the material, the natural and the cultural,
the body and its social construction in a way that is more respectful of the
agency of matterto find a way of according matter a more active role in the
interimplication of each of these aspects.
A concern with the agency of matter is thus a key feature of the new
materialism, in relation not just to the body, sex, and gender but all aspects of the material world, all aspects of that which is designated nature
in opposition to that which is designated culture, including, for some,
the environment Alaimo 2010. Indeed, the neglect of the agency of
matter and, in keeping with this, a lack of attention to science studies are
considered the most problematic features of the preoccupation with language and signification, the social and the discursive, that characterizes the
linguistic turn.
I would like to thank Kathleen Lennon for her helpful comments, encouragement, and
inspiration during the writing of this article.
1
There is some confusion over the use of the phrase the linguistic turn. While it is
sometimes taken to characterize poststructuralism or postmodernism, others accept that poststructuralist theories such as Butlers are, rather, an attempt to avoid a reductive linguisticism.
Either way, Butlers account of the materiality of matter falls short from the perspective of the
new materialism.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2015, vol. 40, no. 2]
2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2015/4002-0007$10.00
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
322
Jagger
Much of the work in the new materialism accepts the basic insights of
feminist poststructuralism concerning the mediated nature of our access
to the world. It is felt, nevertheless, that the constitutive role of language
and meaning needs some kind of foothold in or interaction with the world
of matterwhat Karen Barad calls intra-action 2003, 2007in order
to understand its full force. In relation to the body, it is argued that a focus
entirely fixed on the cultural effects of the bodys constitution fails to appreciate that the biological body involves open systemsas contemporary developments in the physical sciences especially nonlinear biology are
increasingly emphasizingand does not simply provide a fixed, inert basis
for cultural interpretation, as some constructionist accounts would seem
to imply. Hence, understanding the active role of matter in the cultural construction of matter requires combining insights from the physical sciences
with social studies of science as well as philosophical inquiry. The basic
premise is that accepting that we cannot access these materialities in and of
themselves should not blind us to the ways in which materiality, including
the materiality of the body, is in intra-action with its cultural intelligibility.
Uniting the various strands in the new materialism, then, is a broad aim
to give the materiality of matter a more active role. This includes redressing
the biophobia that would seem to characterize much contemporary feminist body theory Davis 2009, 67. It also involves rethinking the nature/
culture dichotomy to recognize that it is not just that nature and/or matter
are products of culture but that culture is also in some sense a product of
nature. Indeed, nature is that without which culture wouldnt exist at all
Kirby 2008.
In this article, I examine two different claims running through these new
materialist positions. The first is a kind of metaphysical claim about the
link between our articulations and that which they are articulating. This
reasserts a general claim about the interimplication of the material and
the symbolic and reflects the concern that contemporary theories of the
body, such as Butlers, are not respectful enough of the agency of matter
Colebrook 2000; Barad 2003 without going so far as to make matter the
determining force. The aim here is to develop a better understanding of
the process of interimplication, of the mutual articulation of nature and
culture, matter and discourse. The second claim is a stronger one, about
the relationship between biological processes and social formations, forms
of social identity and culture, in which culture is resituated as part of nature. In this strand, the emphasis is on culture as inescapably, inevitably a
product of nature and matter. Nature thus becomes the determining force,
however open-ended and contingent. In this view, culture was nature all
along Grosz 2005, 2008; Kirby 2008, although not in the reductionist

S I G N S
Winter 2015
323
sense that feminist theories of the body and feminist critiques of science and
animal studies among others have extensively contested.
These two claims are examined in the context of debates about sexual
difference. This is a key aspect of Elizabeth Groszs work, in which sexual
difference is deemed an ineradicable, ontological difference. I argue, however, that addressing the concerns of the new materialism does not lead to
the conclusion that the duality of sexual difference is in any way inevitable,
nor does it provide justification for the claim that there is a metaphysical
basis for sexual difference in biology. I argue instead that considering sexual
difference in the context of the new materialism provides the possibility of
reconfiguring such difference beyond the binary frame. The reason for this
is that rethinking the relationship between nature and culture, materiality
and discourse to allow some kind of agency for matter also requires rethinking the relationship between epistemology and ontology. Although
rethinking this relationship is a significant aspect of Butlers work, her refusal
to allow the ontological aspect any active role stems from a privileging of
the epistemological over the ontological in an attempt to avoid a metaphysics of presence or substance Butler 1990, 1993. It is this avoidance
that results in her refusal to allow the materiality of the physical body a
significant role in the process of its materialization.2 Rethinking the relationship between ontology and epistemology in the context of the concerns of the new materialism can avoid this impasse. It can help us to better
understand the active interimplication of ontology and epistemology for
Butler, only the latter is active without succumbing to a metaphysics of
presence or substance. This then allows us to see, first, that sexual difference
is not given in matter, ontology, or metaphysics and, second, that the binary
constitution of sexual difference is open to challenge and reconfiguration.
This becomes clear when sexual difference is considered in the context
of Barads agential realism, which underpins her account of posthumanist
performativity. Although this involves respecting the agency of matter, it
also involves a fundamental rethinking of ontology as relational. I argue
that this gives Barads account an edge over other new materialist positions
such as Vicki Kirbys and Groszs because it better explains the relationship
between culture and nature, discourse and materiality as a matter of active interimplication on both sides. In so doing, it undermines the idea
of sexual difference as immutable: sexual difference becomes a product of
In Butlers view, ontology is always already bound up with regimes of power/knowledge,

such as the epistemic regime of presumptive heterosexuality Butler 1990, x. It is these epistemic and ontological regimes that reify and produce any purported categories of ontology.

324
Jagger
boundary-making practices in the intra-action between the material and

the discursive rather than an immutable, ontological difference that exists
outside the material-discursive relation.
Claim 1: Active matter
One important area of discontent running through the new materialism,

then, stems from a sense of unease about the way that the discourse/
materiality or discourse/reality dichotomy has been rethought in the past
three decades. The general contention is that rather than rethinking the
interimplication of these two aspects in the constitution of realityas,
for example, Donna J. Haraway 1991 and Butler 1993 have explicitly
attemptedthere has been what amounts to a wholesale capitulation to
the discursive side of the dichotomy. The focus on discourse has been at
the expense of the material, as Susan Hekman 2008, 86 puts it, which has
led to an unfortunate loss of concern with the real. Although the aim has
been to understand the real in discursive terms, there has been instead a
privileging of the discursive. The main problem with Butlers account is
that matter becomes a postsignificatory effect of power Alcoff 2006, 158;
Colebrook 2008.3 Consequently, her account is much criticizednot
only for failing to link the materialization of the body in performative
acts to the materiality of social and economic structures McNay 2000 but
also for not allowing the body more of a drag on signification Martin
1994, 112. Butlers approach is thus emblematic of contemporary feminist theorys flight from the material that, Stacy Alaimo and Hekman
suggest, has foreclosed attention to lived material bodies and evolving
corporeal practices 2008, 3. The demand within this claim, then, is to
find a more satisfactory way to define the relation between the discursive
and the material, building on the insights of poststructuralism without
losing sight of the reality of matter.
Hekman 2008, 2010 thus echoes those feminists who insist on a real
beyond discoursenot in a modernist sense of an independent, objective
reality but more in a postpositivist, realist sense 2008, 90; citing Alcoff
2000 that moves away from the idea of language as constituting reality to
one of language as disclosing reality, drawing on Joseph Rouses work in
Postsignificatory refers to the way in which, for Butler, matter is always only ever that
which is posited, in a Hegelian sense. As such, it can be known only within conceptual schemes,
including those of language and signification, which are the products of regimes of power/
knowledge.

S I G N S
Winter 2015
325
the philosophy of science.4 The aim here is to include an ontological aspect as well as an epistemological one, which, it is claimed, is missing in the
linguistic turn and in Butlers account. The idea of disclosure aims to avoid
both the assumption that there is a fixed reality about which we can have
absolute knowledge as in modernist realism and the problems of representationalism, which assumes a gap between reality and our representations of it. Indeed, the rejection of representationalism is a key concern
that runs throughout the new materialism. The aim, instead, is to overcome the duality of words and things, language and reality, that underpins
modernist conceptions of passive nature or matter awaiting representation
in language and culture.5 In this view, there may not be an objective, independent reality to which we can compare the results of our investigations,
but we can, nevertheless, compare different disclosures to find the most
effective. Most important for this claim, there is a world that shapes and
constrains our knowledge even though we cannot get at it independently of
our conceptualizations. As Hekman states, We know our world through
our concepts but the difference is there is a world that we know 2008,
110. Reality the world is considered to be agentic rather than passive:
Language structures how we apprehend the ontological but it doesnt
constitute it 98.
This approach, it is suggested, involves a kind of realism and view of
ontology that is disallowed in Butlers account because it like Hegels
Logic conflates the being of a thing with the mode in which it is known
Colebrook 2000, 78. Butler could turn this comment back on realist
accounts, however. For, as Alison Stone puts it, Butlers account is antirealist because she regards any realist account of bodily forces as epistemically confused, mistakenly regarding its normative and productive claims as
neutrally descriptive 2005, 20. From Butlers perspective, it is in fact realist
accounts that make the error of misrecognizing or, at least, underplaying
Although the idea of disclosure was originally Martin Heideggers, Hekman rejects that
sense of the term as too mystical, involving the showing forth of Being throughout the
ages 2010, 92. Rouses development of it in relation to scientific practices has been more
influential in the new materialism; see especially Rouse 2002.
5
Hekman 2010 provides a detailed discussion of the problems of representationalism
and the many critiques of it from a wide range of approaches, including philosophies of science, social studies of science, social theories concerned with political representation, postcolonial studies, and queer theory. She examines the metaphysical and ontological implications
of representationalism and the far-reaching implications it has had for modernist and contemporary social and scientific understandings of the nature of the relationship between reality
and our representations of it.

326
Jagger
the constitutive role of particular conceptualizations in any apparent objective

reality, a danger the new materialists must address.
The guiding thread in this first claim is thus a rethinking of the interimplication of the material and the discursive in a way that allows some kind
of active role for the physicality of the body in the constitution of our embodied subjectivities. This involves finding a means to get at the concrete
reality of bodily forces without given Butlers possible response succumbing to normative descriptions of them and despite the ubiquity of mediation. There is a general contention that it is one thing to show that biology does not determine social norms but that it is going too far to make
biology irrelevant to sexed embodiment Moi 1999; Alcoff 2006.
In this article, I focus on Barads account of posthumanist performativity 2003, 2007, which addresses these concerns. It provides an account of the entanglement of matter and meaning 2007 by combining
feminist and queer theory with science studies, especially quantum physics
via the philosophy-physics 2003, 813 of Niels Bohr. Barads work
provides a way of thinking the interimplication of the discursive and the
material in way that allows a more creative role for matter than poststructuralist accounts such as Butlers would seem to allow. Moreover, in
relation to the second claim my article is addressing, Barads account does
not, I will show, require a commitment to a metaphysics of sexual difference or provide a basis for a metaphysics of sexual difference. On the
contrary, it shows the implausibility of any such notion.
Posthumanist performativity and agential realism
Barads account of posthumanist performativity attempts to get at the intertwining of social and scientific accounts of nature and culture in order
to rethink the relationship between the discursive and the material as one
of interimplication. She suggests that this could be read as a diffractive
elaboration of Butler and Haraways crucial insights Barad 2003, 808 n. 10
because it aims to shed light on how discursive practices produce material
bodies. Indeed, this was Butlers task in Bodies That Matter 1993 and again
in her turn to psychoanalysis and reconsideration of G. F. W. Hegel and
Louis Althusser in The Psychic Life of Power 1997. Nevertheless, there
remains a lacuna in her work, because if matter cannot be understood except as an effect of power and signification, then the account remains onesided. In contrast to that, Barad wants to get at the intertwining of matter
and discursivity in the mattering of the world Barad 2003, 817, a relation she describes as material-discursive with a hyphen to denote the
linkage 810. Her account of agential realism, which is the central shift in
her performative metaphysics 811, allows her to do this. It involves

S I G N S
Winter 2015
327
drawing on Bohrs work in quantum physics, which Barad suggests could be

regarded as a kind of protoperformative account of scientific practices
813 n. 17, and applying it to the question of ontology.
The turn to Bohr is of great significance for Barad because Bohrs work
is the source of her fundamental rethinking of ontology as relational rather
than as something beyond meaning and metaphysics. This move is crucial
to the development of the agential realist ontology involved in her reformulation of performativity as a kind of performative metaphysics further
explained below. It is this fundamental rethinking of ontology that allows
her to rethink matter as playing an active role in the discursive-material
relation and to avoid the charges of antirealism that haunt an account such
as Butlers. In addition, it allows Barad to avoid the problems of representationalism that Butlers approach, and others deemed antirealist, also attempts to avoid.
The most significant insight, for my purposes here, that Barad takes from
Bohrs work is his radical rethinking of the atomist metaphysics that underpins much modern thought, including science and liberal social theories,
which take things as ontologically basic entities that are individually determinate Barad 2003, 813. Bohrs work in quantum theory undermined
both Newtonian physics and Cartesian epistemology, with its tripartite
structure of knowers, words, and things and its distinction between subject
and object, which in turn underpins representationalism. Bohrs work emphasized instead the inseparability of observed object and agencies of
observation 814 and the significance of Werner Heisenbergs uncertainty principle. These insights, taken together, lead to the conclusion that
the primary epistemological unit is not the independent object with inherent boundaries and properties but, rather, phenomena 815. These
phenomena are produced in the interaction of what amounts to practices
of knowing and seeing and being. While Bohr wanted to develop a new
theoretical epistemological framework to make sense of his empirical findings and retain the possibility of objective knowledge, Barad applies the insights of his work to the question of ontology 814. She argues that Bohrs
work undermines the idea of ontology as outside meaning and metaphysics
and suggests instead that ontology is fundamentally indeterminate. Setting
these insights in the context of contemporary science studies that emphasize the performative impact of scientific practices, Barad develops the
agential realist ontology that underpins her account of posthumanist performativity and her account of the material-discursive relation.6
In Barad 2003, she refers in particular to Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Rouse.

328
Jagger
Barads work thus focuses on the ways in which metaphysical assumptions, basic philosophical beliefs, have shaped the study and understanding of ontology and, in this sense, are inseparable from it. She questions,
in particular, the assumption that reality beings and things consists
of individually determinate entities with inherent attributes that are ontologically prior to their representation. For Barad, this is a problematic
metaphysical starting point. Thus, she claims, we need a different metaphysics 2003, 812. Hence, she describes the agential realist ontology that
is the cornerstone of her materialist, naturalist, posthumanist elaboration
803 of performativity as a kind of performative metaphysics. This performative metaphysics is based on the idea of ontology as fundamentally
indeterminate yet locally decidable via the boundary-making practices inherent in the material-discursive relation. Hence, Barads agential realist
ontology addresses some of Butlers concerns regarding the interrelation
of ontology and epistemology but without succumbing to the problems
that stem from Butlers insistence on the undecidability of matter or to
the concomitant failure of Butlers account to accord the materiality of the
body any role in the process of its own materialization.
The distinction between undecidability and indeterminacy is crucial
here. The ontological indeterminacy that underpins Barads account is not
the same as the undecidability involved in Butlers account in relation to
matter. Thus, to say that the meaning of something is indeterminate in
ontological terms in Barads account is not the same as to say that that something is fundamentally undecidable, as in Butlers account. It is, rather, as
Barad puts it in explaining the significance of the wave/particle duality paradox that gave rise to Heisenbergs uncertainty principle, to say that an
inherent ontological indeterminacy is decidable only locally and within phenomena Barad 2003, 815 n. 20, through specific material resolutions
that is, in specific causal intra-actions in which the apparatus of observation
plays a constitutive role.7 In Barads performative metaphysics, despite a fundamental ontological indeterminacy, decidability is enacted in the boundarymaking practices inherent in the material-discursive relation and is thus a
matter of the ongoing intra-activity of the world in its becoming discussed
further below.
7
Apparatuses are open-ended practices of rather than in the worldalways in intra-action

with other apparatuses, involved in the production of phenomena even as they are also phenomena themselves see Barad 2003, 81517; 2007. They are continually changing, iterative
and reiterative, thus open to rearticulation: Apparatuses are dynamic reconfigurings of the
world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted 2003, 816.

S I G N S
Winter 2015
329
Like Butler, Barad thus argues that matter is always already an ongoing
historicity Barad 2003, 821; it is not fixed and inert. Where Barad differs
from Butler is that the rethinking of ontology as relational in Barads account of agential realism addresses what she refers to as the anthropocentric
limitations of Butlers account by providing a way of linking discursive practices to material phenomena. Butlers account is described as anthropocentric due to its enclosure of the performative process, including resistance and
agency, within language and signification, so that the constitutive outside
in her account remains inaccessible except as an outside within language or
as excess. Therefore, matter remains a passive product of discursive practices.
In contrast to this, in Barads account of agential realism, matter is rather a
matter of substance in its intra-active becoming 828 and, as such, is always
given within phenomena that are inherently material-discursive. Matter is accorded an active role in this relation, and no priority is given to either side.
The performative process includes matter within it. There isnt an outside
in Butlers sense, because all is enfolded within the material-discursive relation, in an ongoing dynamic process of interimplication. Thus, this account acknowledges that the material dimensions matter of regulatory
practices are important factors in performative production, not just a matter of excess that cannot be captured, as in Butlers account. Rather than
coming to be in a process of citationality as Butler drawing on Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and speech act theory would have it, matter
comes to matter through the iterative intra-activity of the world in its becoming: The world is intra-activity in its differential mattering Barad
2003, 817. For Barad, the performative process is thus more one of ongoing iterative intra-activity in which matterthe weightiness of the
world 827is accorded an active role in the fullness of its historicity.
This view of the material-discursive relation is based on a relational ontology in which the primary ontological units are not things but phenomena
and in which the primary semantic units are not words but materialdiscursive practices Barad 2003, 818. Particular intra-actions produce phenomena in an ongoing dynamic process that involves the configuring and
reconfiguring of locally determinate causal structures, with determinate
boundaries, properties, meanings, and patterns of marks on bodies 817.
Hence, it is through material-discursive practices that particular boundaries
come to be constituted. In this process, properties are stabilized and destabilized, precisely because the world is a continually open process of mattering involving the realization of different agential possibilities 817 that
arise in the interaction of the discursive and the material. Material-discursive
practices are thus boundary-making practices that have no finality in the on-

330
Jagger
going dynamics of agential intra-activity. In this view, reality is not composed of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena but thingsin-phenomena.8 Hence, it is these phenomena that are constitutive of reality, including, I will suggest, the reality of sexual difference.
Most important for understanding the significance of sexual difference
as an ontological feature of natural life, neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemically prior: Intra-actions are
causally constraining but nondeterministic enactments through which
matter-in-the process-of-becoming is sedimented out and enfolded in further materializations Barad 2003, 823. The concept of sedimentation is
significant here, as reality in agential realist terms consists of the sedimentation of particular intra-actions and boundary-making practices that have
produced intelligible configurations or materializations. Sedimentation
thus indicates an ongoing process of configuration and reconfiguration,
involving both human and nonhuman agencies, a process that constitutes
reality and yet is open to change. Reality is sedimented out of particular
practices that we have a role in shaping Barad 1998, 102. And this gives
us responsibility and accountability which is of particular significance concerning the possibility of reconfiguring the apparatus of bodily production
in relation to sexual difference. Although Barads account allows the possibility of active agency on the part of matter, that active agency is clearly
intertwined with its ongoing discursive articulation and is not a matter of
causal determination in a traditional sense.
In relation to the body and sexual difference, Barads account helps us to
see that bodies do not preexist their discursive production but are intertwined with it as Butler insists while fully incorporating materiality
in the process of the bodys materialization in a way that Butlers approach cannot accommodate. Although the idea of ontological purity is
undermined in Butlers account of performativity, as is the idea of sexual
difference as ontological difference, Barads performative metaphysics provides a fuller rethinking of ontology, one that might help us to better account for the establishment or enactment, to use Barads terminology of
binary sexual difference as ontological difference. Thus, Barads account
is more respectful of the materiality of the body while also, I shall argue,
allowing the possibility of opening up sexual difference beyond the binary
frame.
Barad distinguishes phenomena in the agential realist sense, in which phenomena are
the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components 2003, 815, from
both Immanuel Kants sense and the sense used in phenomenology.

S I G N S
Winter 2015
331
Claim 2: Culture is nature
The second claim running through the new material feminisms is a claim
about the link between biological formations, forms of social identity, and
culture. The common thread here is an overturning of the nature/culture
dichotomy so that rather than seeing nature or matter as the passive
ground of social construction, or as some kind of inaccessible otherness,
culture becomes the product of nature. In this view, culture was really
nature all along Kirby 2008, 214. Two proponents of this view are
Kirby and Grosz. Kirby extends the Derridean notion of writing and differance to the question of the materiality of matter, to make the process of
differentiation immanent to matter rather than some kind of grid imposed
on it, as in Butlers account. This involves renaturalizing language so that
both language and culture become the stuff of nature. Grosz, on the other
hand, committed to a kind of Spinozian monism and Bergsonian vitalism
emphasizing the creativity of life as it constantly strives to animate matter
Bergson 1912, turns to a feminist revision of Charles Darwin to explain
cultures immersion in nature.
Kirby, differance, and the consubstantiality of nature and culture
Kirby has long questioned feminist attempts to theorize the body without
reference to what she refers to as its corporeal substance Kirby 1997,
2002. She uses this term rather than matter to get at the very meat of
carnality that is born and buried, the stuff of decay that seems indifferent
to semiosis, the concrete and tangible thingness of things Kirby 2002,
277. She thinks it is a mistake to separate discourse and culture from nature, from the body of the material world, indeed from the material body
of human animality 2008, 220, as if the body could be some sort of primordial and inhuman outside, which includes the materiality of the body.
Hence, Kirby wants to argue that nature and culture are consubstantial
2008, 223 However, her understanding of consubstantiality is based on
two rather radical claims: first, that culture is nature because it is in our
nature, in our biological makeup, to produce culture and, second, that
life itself is creative encryption 219 because nature including biology is literate and articulate. This leads to the provocative conclusion that
the workings of language could be an instantiation of a more general articulation and involvement whose collective expression . . . we are 229.
To make these moves, Kirby draws on Bruno Latours 2004 work in
science studies, which takes issue with social constructionist critiques of
science. She draws in particular on Latours concept of realistic realism
Kirby 2008, 226, which is based on a refusal of the separation of nature and culture. It involves, rather, the idea that the referent is actively

332
Jagger
produced from both sides and that in this interaction nature is articulate,
communicativeand, in a very real senseintentional 228. Kirby sees
this as a development of Derridas conceptions of writing and differance,
arguing that these processes structure nature as well as culture. In this case,
as she insists in an early work, the referent is immanent within language
rather than before or after it: The fact of the referent is not located in the
truth of biological substance, a truth that must remain inaccessible behind
the skin of cultural interpretation. It is the very tissue of their interweaving.
Reference, then, is not so much a veiling or a mediation of the substantive realm from the formal as it is a partitioningan intricate and infinite
fabric-ation Kirby 1997, 80.
Hence, Kirbys account is based on an extended application of Derridean writing and differance, which is an important aspect of Butlers refusal of a metaphysics of substance and presence in relation to bodily ontologies. For Butler, the nature of the natural body is simply undecidable outside
our human conceptual and phenomenal frameworks. The body itself thus
remains under erasure and, as such, inescapably, inaccessibly othera matter of excess. Butler fails to consider the process of differentiation as applicable to the body or nature and flesh, in Kirbys terminology, and thus
the possibility that nature scribbles or flesh reads is foreclosed in her account Kirby 2002, 278.9 Kirby thus argues for extending Derridas key
insights to the material world of matter in a way that suggests a kind of
materialist naturalism, in keeping with similar moves in science studies.10
In so doing, she argues that the process of differentiation is at work in the
natural world, too, including the bodys biological processes. This leads her
to claim that language is the stuff of nature. Hence, Kirby identifies the nature of nature in language and linguistic codes.
Groszs Darwinism: Culture and evolutionary principles
In her turn to Darwin, Grosz also resituates culture as part of nature. In

this account, nature and culture are not separate domains, and the principles of evolution apply throughout. Contrary to other interpretations of
Darwin, culture in this account is a product of evolutionary principles, just
9
Kirby argues that the main problem for Butler is a failure to see the matter of nature and
the body as supplements, which are open to the logic of supplementarity and the workings of
the trace structure, in a Derridean sense Kirby 2002. This is at the root of Butlers refusal to
consider life itself as creative encryption and, as such, an ontological feature, a refusal Kirby
finds frustrating, as she demonstrates when she discusses Butlers response to her questioning
in an earlier interview Kirby 2008.
10
See Colebrook 2011 for a discussion of some of these moves to reformulate Derridas
work in terms of a materialist naturalism.

S I G N S
Winter 2015
333
as biological organisms are.11 Hence, the systematic cohesion of modes

of reproduction forms of repetition, with their resulting mutations, which
are imperfect or innovative copies forms of difference, and modes of
natural selection systems of differentiation, produce a systemor, rather,
an asystematic systematicitythat is co-extensive with all of life in its political, cultural, and even artificial as well as its natural forms Grosz 2008,
39. This understanding of the relationship between nature and culture
thus involves the disquietingly radical claim that culture is natures way of
thinking itself: we simply are our biologies.
The question for Grosz thus becomes, How does biology, the bodily
existence of individuals whether human or nonhuman, provide the conditions for culture and for history, those terms to which it is traditionally
opposed? . . . How does biologythe structure and organization of living
systemsfacilitate and make possible cultural existence and social change?
Grosz 2008, 24. She argues that the turn to Darwin provides a means of
answering these questions positively, primarily because it involves a view of
matter as creative without being determining, which suggests an active but
transformable and historicized account of biology.12 It thus involves a rejection of the idea of matter as inert and passive or fixed and determining or
as that which is posited postdiscursively, as in Butlers account. It also allows
Grosz to conceive of differentiation as immanent to matter rather than
extraneous and imposed on it, as in traditional dualist accounts as well as in
Butlers attempt to avoid them.
Hence, Grosz emphasizes that the three principles that in her interpretation govern evolutionnatural selection, individual variation, and
heritabilityare underpinned by a logic of self-transformation that provides the motor for change. They provide an explanation of a series of
processes and interactions that are fundamentally mindless and automatic,
without plan, direction, or purpose, which are, on the other hand, entirely
unpredictable and inexplicable in causal terms Grosz 2008, 36. What
she likes about this is the asystematicity 46 it involves and the way
that cultural change can be seen to be part of natural evolutionary change
precisely because cultural relations are not separated from living material
relations.
Grosz wants to positively embrace the possibilities for change and
transformation that evolutionary theory, thus interpreted, involves. She
In this interpretation, Grosz rejects Daniel Dennetts distinction following Richard
Dawkins between the biological evolution of species and the mimetic evolution of cultural
and mental concepts, because that distinction reproduces mind/body dualism.
12
For a discussion of the reasons she thinks the turn to Darwin makes a positive contribution to feminist projects, see Grosz 2008, 4046.
11

334
Jagger
emphasizes that evolutionary theory avoids the idea of linear progress.

Although history fixes what was fundamentally a matter of contingency
and chance, the future is constrained only by what has gone before. She
argues that Darwin offers an account of the genesis of the new from
the play of repetition and difference within the old Grosz 2008, 29,
moving toward a future with no real direction, no promise of any particular result, no guarantee of progress or improvement, but with every
indication of inherent proliferation and transformation 38. Thus, she
offers a dynamic and open-ended understanding of the intermingling of
biology and history that emphasizes the significance of temporization and
the antihumanist and broadly mechanical movements of difference, bifurcation, and becoming that characterize all forms of life 28. Or, as Claire
Colebrook puts it, Matter, life, and embodiment name that which differs to produce complex morphologies, such as the male/female binary, and
intricate structures, such as the beauty of art and the systems of language,
reference, and knowledge Colebrook 2008, 75.
For Grosz, the political promise lies in the capacity to harness the potential for alternative futures in the service of feminist goals, although this
would also involve radically rethinking those goals and feminism itself. As
she points out, developing this potential would need to begin with radically rethinking matter, biology, time, and becoming in more politicized
ways. It would also involve identifying the processes through which, as
contemporary forms of life have descended from earlier ones, descent
with modification occurs Grosz 2008, 29. But there is an additional important factor. Underlying Groszs work is a deeply held conviction concerning the irreducibility of sexual difference, a conviction that, she wants
to argue, is fully supported in her feminist interpretation of Darwinian evolutionary theory. In this view of the intertwining of history and biology,
sexual difference was once subject to the vagaries of contingency and
chance but has since become fixed historically as an ineliminable feature
of human becoming: the requirement of genetic material from two
sexes has become an ontological feature of life itself, not merely a detail,
a feature that will pass 44. Indeed, Grosz claims that, in this sense,
Darwinism confirms Luce Irigarays claim that sexual difference is an immediate natural given, a real and irreducible component of the universal
40. Moreover, Groszs account of sexual difference as ontological difference involves the claim that there is something in our biological natures that
influences our becomings differentially as women and men. This is in keeping with Irigarays later work. However, for Grosz it also leads to the suggestion that feminist science studies, especially in the biological sciences,

S I G N S
Winter 2015
335
may well have some explanatory power regarding social relations between
men and women Grosz 2008, 46 n. 2.13
All-encompassing nature: The ontology of life as given in matter?
The unifying principle in these two accounts is that they both want to
move from a position that sees ontology as a product of conceptual schemes
to a recognition of the ontology of life as given in matter. Hence the structures of differentiation that for Butler remain linguistic and symbolic are regarded in the work of both Kirby and Grosz as instead immanent to matter.
This includes the matter of the body, which is expressed in modalities of
becoming. Moreover, they each want to include scientific accounts of the
material world in explaining social relations, because both the material
world and social relations are considered to be part and parcel of the same
thing. In this endeavor, Kirby turns to Derrida to explain the ontology of
life in terms of language and linguistic codes, while Grosz turns to Darwin
to explain it in terms of evolutionary principles. Thus, Kirby argues that writing and difference structure nature and culture, that biological processes
function like language, and that in this sense there is nothing outside nature
because language is the nature of nature. Alternatively, Grosz argues that all
aspects of social and political life, even the evolution of language and concepts, are products of evolutionary and biological processes and, as such,
are governed by the principle of natural selection. For both Kirby and Grosz,
then, we are natural rather than cultural products in the sense that we simply are our biologies and that it is a human conceit, a kind of anthropomorphism, to suggest that human culture is anything other than nature
here identified with biology acting out its concerns. The possibilities for
human becoming are governed by natural codes modifying themselves or
by evolutionary principles. We cannot get outside nature or even find a relative autonomy for culture in either of these accounts.
Consequently, rather than getting at the interimplication of nature and
cultureas in Barads account of the material-discursive relation, which accords some mutuality to either sideboth Kirby and Grosz produce an
account that is ultimately dominated by one side: nature. While Butler is
accused of overemphasizing culture as the dominant force in the materialization of matter, such that matter itself is posited as radical otherness,
neither Groszs nor Kirbys account allows any otherness, radical or otherwise. Hence, as Colebrook puts it in relation to Grosz making a point
13
Irigaray is less enamored with scientific inquiry and evinces an affinity with Heideggers
critique of modern science as reductive and instrumentalist, as Stone 2006 attests.

336
Jagger
that, I would argue, is equally applicable to Kirby, If we take Butlers

work to be a deconstructive radicalization of the nature/culture binary,
we can then see how Grosz refuses a critical deconstruction Colebrook
2008, 73. Neither Kirby nor Grosz deconstructs this dichotomy. Instead,
they ultimately capitulate to one side. The full implications of a deconstructive approach to the interdependence of these twin poles are thus
not fully developed. Most significantly, neither approach takes account
of the interdependence of the textuality of materiality and the materiality of
textuality, which allows the possibility that concepts may arise from matter
and out of matter but still be more than the expression of matter, more than
matter simply expressing itself Colebrook 2011.
Thus, if the aim of the new materialism is to provide a way of rethinking the interimplication of culture and nature, moving away from the
negation of one in the determination of the other, difficulties remain in both
Kirbys and Groszs accounts. This is not the case, however, with Barads
account of the intra-action of nature and culture in the material-discursive
relation: it involves a process of mutual articulation that is a matter of
interimplication.
I would argue that making the concession that culture is indeed part
of the natural worldin interaction with our biology, physiology, and environment as living open systemsdoes not require giving up all hope of
a relative autonomy for culture. If it is in our biological natures to be cultural, could we not also concede that it is in our natures to be antinatural
and that the potential for this is given in the dynamic, open, temporal, and
diverse nature of our biologies? If so, the claim that we simply are our
biologies is a step too far in the concession to matter. This is not a claim,
however, that follows from Barads agential realism. Although more respectful of the agency of matter than an account such as Butlers is, Barads
reformulation of the material-discursive relation retains an equally strong
role for the significance of discursive articulation without suggesting that
the latter is nothing more than nature expressing itself.
Sexual difference: Beyond the binary frame
It is, moreover, also a big jump to make from saying that structures of
differentiation are immanent to matter to saying that ultimately all differentiation of human becoming has at its root sexual difference, as Grosz
claims. In my view, this jump is both untenable and unjustified. This is
made evident when sexual difference is considered in the context of Barads
agential realism. As Barads work demonstrates, any such structures of
differentiation are always in intra-action with their discursive articulation
and cultural intelligibility; this is an immanent relation in which neither

S I G N S
Winter 2015
337
structures of differentiation nor structures of discursive articulations are

fixed or foundational to the other. As bodies do not preexist their discursive production but are intertwined with it, in their very physicality, so
sexual difference, I would argue, becomes a product of boundary-making
practices in the intra-action between the material and the discursive rather
than an ontological or metaphysical difference with roots outside the materialdiscursive relation.
This would suggest that, first, challenging and reformulating sexual
difference as a causal structure and opening it up beyond the binary frame
would be possible and, second, that the way to do this would be through
intervening in the boundary-making process to reconfigure the materialdiscursive apparatus of bodily production through which phenomena such
as sexed bodies are constituted in Barads agential realist sense. This
would, in turn, involve identifying and reformulating those practices that
work to produce the binary construction of sexual difference in intra-action
with the physical world of bodies. Part of this would consist in identifying
all the ways that social and scientific accounts of sexual difference, sexuality,
and sexed identity continue to be read through a binary framework despite
the multitude of challenges to this binarism to be found in studies of nature,
animal studies, and transgender and transsexuality studies some of which
are discussed below. It would then entail identifying and reworking those
practices that ensure the exclusion of anomalous bodies, those that do not
readily find expression in the binary framework.
Indeed, in the new materialism in general, and in Groszs work in particular, there is an insistence on the need to accommodate science studies as
a means to overcome the nature/culture dichotomy. Yet even without
considering the significance of Barads insights, science studies repeatedly
show that binary sexual difference is undermined in nature. Biological studies
are increasingly revealing that the duality of sexual difference is rooted in
human and scientific conceptual schemas rather than in the biological facticity of organisms Fausto-Sterling 1993, 2000; Hird 2003, 2004; Keller
2010. This would suggest that insistence on the immutability of sexual
difference reflects a cultural need to support dimorphism, not that the basis
of sex duality is revealed in nature Hird 2003. We can see that in nature
there is no such necessary fixed division, as these studies show.14 Insisting on
Emerging new workson queer ecologies Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010;
human and nonhuman gender and sexual diversity Roughgarden 2004; posthuman environmental ethics Wolfe 2010; and transcorporeality, which focuses on the intersection of
science, the environment, and the body Alaimo 2010; among othersalso indicate the
problems with this view.
14

338
Jagger
the immutability of sexual dimorphism stands only by suppressing the diversity in nature and rendering those outside the binary frame, at best, unnatural and unintelligible or, at worst, inhuman. These studies help to make
evident the boundary articulations and exclusions involved in the constitution of sexed identity and thus, I would argue, help to reveal the role of
cultural constructions of sexual difference in the enactment of sexual difference as a causal structure in an agential realist sense. If we see sexual difference as multiple and overlapping, in terms of a continuum, rather than as a
dimorphism as the variation and diversity in nature that these studies highlight would seem to suggest, we can better see that dimorphic sexual difference based on ineradicable difference is a social construction with roots in
power relationsthe power of difference and differentiationnot in nature.
Studies concerned with trans experiences of embodiment also support this
view. For example, Riki Lane draws on scientific accounts that stress the continuum of sex differences to argue that mobilizing a reading of biology as
open-ended and creative supports a perspective that sees sex and gender diversity as a continuum, rather than a dichotomyput simply, nature throws
up all this diversity and society needs to accept it 2009, 137. If human
being is recognized as capable of multiple variations in sexed embodiment
along multiple trajectories of male and female categories, then social identities of masculinity and femininity need not be tied to male or female bodies.
I would therefore suggest that sexual difference becomes an apparent
ontological feature of human becoming only if we make it so through the
possibilities we provide for the modalities of becoming that give expression
to our bodily natures. That there are always everywhere men and women,
which Irigaray says is the reason for her recent turns to nature and biology,
does not require that the basis we have for understanding and living out
our lives as human beings must involve an understanding of maleness and
femaleness in oppositional or binary terms or, as Grosz would have it, as involving an immutable ontological difference. Much feminist work has gone
into demonstrating the continuum of sexed identity; much trans work has
gone into challenging the basis of sexed identity in a biological account
based on genitalia or chromosomes; psychoanalysis has shown the significance of the imaginary, rather than biological, libidinal drives, to the institution of sexed identity; and Barads work, as I have shown, accords an
active role to the materiality of the body while undermining the idea of
any such fixed difference. Thus, if we want to recognize the multiplicity
of biologically based drives in the matter of human bodies in their corporeality, does it really make natural sense to insist on a basic dimorphism
at the root of the principles of natural selection? Or does it make more sense
to see this insistence as yet another form of anthropomorphism? If those

S I G N S
Winter 2015
339
material drives are shown again and again to be other than dimorphic in
nature but are repeatedly binarized in our conceptualizations, wouldnt it
make more sense to develop an approach based on multiplicity and potential
in human becomings as men and as womenan approach that is based
neither on fundamental difference nor binarism but on relationality and
overlapping?15 Barads account of ontology as relational, I have suggested
in this article, provides an important step in this direction. In challenging the
ontological distinction between cultural practices and natural bodies, rather
than rendering the former a product of the latter as in Kirbys and Groszs
accounts, Barads agential realism not only provides a means of getting at
the way that our modalities of becoming do more than simply express our
biological natures. It also reveals our responsibility and accountability in
determining which practices are in intra-action with which bodies and
which exclusions are effected in order to produce and sustain the binary
frame.
Conclusion
Rethinking the interimplication of the material and the discursive to allow

a more active role for matter does not require the claim that we simply are
our biologies. To make such a claim is to continue to privilege one side of
the dichotomy at the expense of the other rather than to more fully appreciate the interimplication of both. I have argued that difficulties remain
in Groszs and Kirbys accounts in this regard, whereas Barads account of
15
We also do not need to confer fundamental significance on the characteristics of human

reproduction, which, in any case, are increasingly open to human intervention, as recent developments in life sciences have shown: babies dont need to be breast-fed, and fertilization
doesnt require sex acts or even a biological mothers body for instance, in surrogacy. That is
not to say that there are not really women. Rather, it is to say that the being of women is not
or, at least, not necessarilygiven by binary sexual difference inherent in every aspect of human being, as Grosz and her interpretation of evolution would want to suggest, and that there
is no justification for a metaphysics of sexual difference in the differential roles of men and
women at the point of conception. For the purposes of reproduction, we might need matter
genetic material from what are deemed oppositional or ineradicably different male bodies and
female bodies, but if the binarism of male and female is contested, shown in nature and biological studies to be a product of human conceptual schemes rather than present in corporeal
matter, then we might find female eggs in male-identified, nonoperative trans men for example, Matt Rice, who gave birth in 1999, and Thomas Beatie, who gave birth three times between 2008 and 2010 and sperm in female-identified, nonoperative trans women. These possibilities must be denied or suppressed and their implications ignored to sustain a commitment
to binary, ineradicable, immutable sexual difference. This would suggest that for reproduction to take place, we need matter from two sexes only because we have already assumed that
there are only two sexes.

340
Jagger
the material-discursive relation involves the active participation of both

sides. Moreover, when applied to the question of sexual difference, Barads
account of the interimplication of the discursive and the material allows a
more active role for matter, one that does not entail the conclusion that
sexual dimorphism is inevitable, nor does her account support a metaphysics of sexual difference. If anything, it undermines it.
Thus, to say that biology constrains what we can say about it does not
require the claim that social identities must at root be divided into two. If
we accept all the diversity that nature throws up, as Lane suggests, we
can recognize the continuum of sexed identities and accommodate those
for whom the binary framework doesnt allow expression of their sexed
nature that is, nevertheless, felt to be biologically based. This is so precisely because biology is never separable from the social and discursive,
biology is not neatly divisible into two, and finally, biology is better characterized by diversity, nonlinearity, and dynamism than by binarism and
immutability.
School of Social Sciences
University of Hull
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2008. Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary

Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the New Materialism. European Journal
of Womens Studies 151:2339.
Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. 2008. Introduction: Emerging Models of
Materiality in Feminist Theory. In Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and
Susan Hekman, 119. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Alcoff, Linda Martn. 2000. Whos Afraid of Identity Politics? In Reclaiming
Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula M. L.
Moya and Michael R. Hames-Garca, 31244. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
. 2006. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Barad, Karen. 1998. Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality. differences 102:87126.
. 2003. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How
Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 283:
80131.
. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

S I G N S
Winter 2015
341
Bergson, Henri. 1912. Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and
W. Scott Palmer. London: G. Allen.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York: Routledge.
. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York:
Routledge.
. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Colebrook, Claire. 2000. From Radical Representations to Corporeal Becomings: The Feminist Philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens. Hypatia 152:
7693.
. 2008. On Not Becoming Man: The Materialist Politics of Unactualized
Potential. In Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 5284.
. 2011. Matter without Bodies. Derrida Today 41:120.
Davis, Noela. 2009. New Materialism and Feminisms Anti-biologism: A Response to Sara Ahmed. European Journal of Womens Studies 161:6780.
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 1993. The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not
Enough. Sciences 332:2024.
. 2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality.
New York: Basic.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Sydney: Allen &
Unwin.
. 2008. Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations for a Possible
Alliance. In Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 2351.
Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
Hekman, Susan. 2008. Constructing the Ballast: An Ontology for Feminism. In
Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 85119. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
. 2010. The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Hird, Myra. 2003. From the Culture of Matter to the Matter of Culture: Feminist Explorations of Nature and Science. Sociological Research Online 81.
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/8/1/hird.html.
. 2004. Feminist Matters: New Materialist Considerations of Sexual Difference. Feminist Theory 52:22332.
Keller, Evelyn Fox. 2010. The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kirby, Vicki. 1997. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. London: Routledge.
. 2002. When All That Is Solid Melts into Language: Judith Butler and the
Question of Matter. International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies
74:26580.

342
Jagger
. 2008. Natural Conversations; or, What If Culture Was Really Nature

All Along? In Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 214
36. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Lane, Riki. 2009. Trans as Bodily Becoming: Rethinking the Biological as Diversity, Not Dichotomy. Hypatia 243:13657.
Latour, Bruno. 2004. Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of
Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry 302:225 48.
Martin, Biddy. 1994. Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer Utopias.
Diacritics 2423:10421.
McNay, Lois. 2000. Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and
Social Theory. Oxford: Polity.
Moi, Toril. 1999. What Is a Woman? and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson, eds. 2010. Queer Ecologies:
Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Roughgarden, Joan. 2004. Evolutions Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality
in Nature and People. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rouse, Joseph. 2002. How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical
Naturalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stone, Alison. 2005. Towards a Genealogical Feminism: A Reading of Judith
Butlers Political Thought. Contemporary Political Theory 41:424.
. 2006. Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.


Jagger New Material &amp; Sex Diff

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Jagger New Material &amp; Sex Diff

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Gill Jagger

The New Materialism and Sexual Difference

here is a rising tide within feminist theory, referred to as the new

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

In Butlers view, ontology is always already bound up with regimes of power/knowledge,

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

boundary-making practices in the intra-action between the material and

Claim 1: Active matter

One important area of discontent running through the new materialism,

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

the constitutive role of particular conceptualizations in any apparent objective

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

drawing on Bohrs work in quantum physics, which Barad suggests could be

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

Apparatuses are open-ended practices of rather than in the worldalways in intra-action

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

Claim 2: Culture is nature

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

In her turn to Darwin, Grosz also resituates culture as part of nature. In

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

as biological organisms are.11 Hence, the systematic cohesion of modes

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

emphasizes that evolutionary theory avoids the idea of linear progress.

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

that, I would argue, is equally applicable to Kirby, If we take Butlers

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

structures of differentiation nor structures of discursive articulations are

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

Rethinking the interimplication of the material and the discursive to allow

We also do not need to confer fundamental significance on the characteristics of human

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

the material-discursive relation involves the active participation of both

Ahmed, Sara. 2008. Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

. 2008. Natural Conversations; or, What If Culture Was Really Nature

This content downloaded from 128.111.121.042 on April 19, 2016 04:58:49 AM

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen

Jagger New Material & Sex Diff

Jagger New Material & Sex Diff