Book Reviews

In re-telling the murders through the gaze of a critical review

Charles addresses some of the latter twentieth century’s most
disturbing anti-queer events and in doing so brings forward a
‘critical queer study’ which has contemporary resonance. This is
especially relevant considering the dearth of destabilising queerness
amidst more palatable ‘pro-gay’/’pro-gay marriage’ discourses.
Dr. Stephen Craig Kerry,
School of Creative Arts and Humanities
Charles Darwin University
Stephen.Kerry@cdu.edu.au
DOI: 10.3366/soma.2014.0122

Barrett, Estelle and Bolt, Barbara, Carnal Knowledge: Towards a

‘New Materialism’ through the arts, I.B. Tauris, London, 2013. ISBN
(paperback): 9781780762661, 256 pp., £17.99.

This edited collection considers new materialist approaches to

contemporary aesthetic theory and creative arts practice. The essays
collected cover a broad field – painting, film, paratexts, ontology,
dance, fashion, and virtual reality. Each differently considers what a
so-called new materialist position might look like, engaging with
current discussions around affect, embodiment, human/non-human
relations (including post-humanist philosophies and non-human
agency), and technology.
Framing the essays is an introduction by Barbara Bolt
contextualising the new materialist moment in contemporary theory.
Here, Bolt posits new materialism as a critique of the ‘cultural turns’ of
the mid- to late-twentieth century. Bolt joins others (such as Karen
Barad) in critiquing the over-emphasis of linguistic signification and
the under-emphasis of matter in contemporary humanities and social
sciences. ‘Exponents of the new materialism,’ writes Bolt, ‘argue that
where social constructivist theories thrive, matter becomes mute.’ She
continues: ‘New materialism aims to return to matter, the vivacity
denied by social constructivist theories that posit all social processes
and, indeed reality itself, as socially and ideologically constituted.’ (3)
As Sara Ahmed (2008) has pointed out, the new materialist position,
in its historicising gesture, risks simplifying the complexity of
constructivist arguments by assuming that they reduce ‘everything’ to
language (that is, signification and representation) and further,
often leaves out of the story a lot of critical additions from science

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studies and feminism (to name two areas) that have engaged with
matter in a manner apart from nature/culture and subject/object
binaries. (Ahmed names Haraway as a key figure here; I would
add Isabelle Stengers and Jane Bennett to this list too.) Like Ahmed,
I have some problems with the historical and rhetorical framing of
the new materialist position. However, this is not say that I am not
engaged with and indeed invested in many of the (diverse) tenets of its
inquiry.
In Carnal Knowledge, discussions of material agency in aesthetic
objects (the material effects of paint, film, architecture, the page, a
signature) suggest a space for art theory and criticism apart from
interpretive or descriptive analysis. Discussions of the affective
materiality of the body in space, the body as movement, the body as
assemblage, and the body as gesture suggest a space for a theory of
sociality and corporeality apart from discourses of the subject or the
ego. There is much rich material here for non-normative, feminist,
anti-racist, and queer articulations of contemporary theory, all
predicated on a foundational interest in the centrality of poiesis:
thinking through making. And although familiar names are leaned on
here (not surprisingly, Deleuze and Guattari, Massumi, Manning, and
Grosz; perhaps more surprisingly for the context, Kristeva, Barthes,
and Heidegger), there certainly seems to be the potential, at the very
least, for innovative formations of thought in relation to the body
(or bodies) in the occasion of making.
Standout chapters include Jondi Keane’s “Æffect: Initiating
Heuristic Life” and Milla Tianien and Jussi Parikka’s “The Primacy
of Movement: Variation, Intermediality and Biopolitics in Tero
Saarinen’s Hunt”. These two chapters impress because they both
interrogate the historical and philosophical conditions of new
materialist inquiry and examine the various claims made on behalf
of matter and the body through time and for different reasons –
specifically, the political, legal, social, cultural, scientific, and aesthetic
definitions of subject, object, body, and life. Here, ambivalent attitudes
towards definition and distinction – between, for example, biology and
sociology, capitalism and the avant-garde, are emphasised as critical
factors in materialist debates. Both also offer vocabularies for the
articulation of aesthetic experience and engagement with creative arts.
Tianien and Parikka, in particular, engage with the differentials of
contemporary dance in order to investigate differentiation as
ontological and material reality. Their analysis of the dancing body
brings philosophy and the arts into a relation of companionable
resonance and mutual investigation.

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Undoubtedly, there are fascinating things going on in scholarship

today. The deprivileging, and indeed, the problematising, of the
‘human’ seem apt for a present and a future codified by ecological
destruction. New materialism is part of this exciting shift, but for me,
the calls for the new, very much like Ezra Pound’s modernist mantra,
might be better off as calls for the re-examination of that which
has been argued in the nuances and margins of critical debates from
the get-go. The problem is not ‘the turn’ but the habit of always
turning away from the small, the minor, and the seemingly irrelevant.
Attention to the details of both historical and contemporary attempts to
challenge the endemic binaries and cleavages of western thought
maybe exactly what is needed, as opposed, for example, to the aspiration
of utter innovation. As is the book’s focus, this can be framed as an
aesthetic solution to an aesthetic problem – an adjustment of approach.

References
Ahmed, Sara (2008), “Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of
‘New Materialism’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 15(1).
Dr. Astrid Lorange,
College of Fine Arts,
University of New South Wales
DOI: 10.3366/soma.2014.0123

Engebretsen, Elisabeth L., Queer Women in Urban China: An Ethnography,

Routledge, London and New York, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-415-63620-9,
xx + 188 pp., £80.00.
Kam, Lucetta Yip Lo, Shanghai Lalas: Female Tongzhi Communities and
Politics in Urban China, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2012.
ISBN: 9789888139460, x + 142 pp., USD $25.00.
Tang, Denise Tse-Shang, Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong Lesbian Desires
and Everyday Life, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2011.
ISBN: 978-988-8083-02-2, xiv + 194 pp., USD $25.00.

The three books reviewed here attest to the recent maturity of

scholarship on female same-sex desire in China. The subject is a
challenging one for scholarly research, not the least because, as all
three authors acknowledged, male homosexuality has garnered more
visibility in the public domain and left behind a greater measure of
(and by extension more easily traceable) documentation than female
same-sex relations. Although the authors have a number of important

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