This article engages the politics of discomfort as a critical but neglected dimension of feminist methodologies and research praxis. Discomfort is explored as a ‘sweaty concept’ that opens space for transformative praxis and the emergence of feminist forms of knowing, being and resisting. I theorise discomfort as an epistemic and interpretive resource and a lively actant in research encounters, fieldwork and analytic and theory-praxis spaces. Building on the work of Clare Hemmings and Sara Ahmed, I trace discomfort as an affective (...) intensity that matters for opening up resistant and anti-colonial feminist research practices and modes of knowledge production. Starting, and staying, with discomfortis theorised as a form of resistance to the reiteration of comfortable and normative truths and ‘wilful ignorances’. Weaving together the work of postqualitative and postcolonial feminist theorists, the sticky praxis of discomfort is conceptualised as involving a number of research strategies, including: engaging with ‘gut feelings’ and embracing interpretive hesitancy. In moving beyond an idealisation of empathy as the central affective principle underlying feminist research praxis, this article explores the epistemic and political salience of discomfort as affective intensity, ‘sweaty concept’ and potentially transformative interpretive resource. (shrink)

Social theory has paid little attention to air, despite its centrality to bodily existence and air pollution being named the world’s biggest public health crisis. Where attention to air is found, the body is largely absent. On the other hand, conceptualizing the body without life-sustaining breath fails to highlight breathing as the ongoing metabolic bodily act in which the materiality of human and more-than-human intermingle and transmute one another. Political ecology studies how unequal power structures and knowledge production reproduce human–environment (...) relations, including a nascent focus on the body and air – but as separate issues. This article argues that a political ecology of air would productively fuse with a political ecology of the body to bring the visceral realm into intersectional analysis of air’s contemporary materialities. A feminist political ecology situates explicitly air-and-breathing-bodies, their intimately posthuman, relational, elemental and corpomaterial intra-action, at the heart of such analysis. (shrink)

Teresa Brennan was born in 1952 in Australia and died in South Florida, following a hit-and-run car accident in December 2002. In the ten years between her doctorate and her death, Brennan published five monographs, the most famous posthumously. The Transmission of Affect begins with a question that readers often remember: “Is there anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and ‘felt the atmosphere’?” Here and throughout her work, Brennan challenges the self-contained subject of Western modernity, (...) whose affects are presumed to be possessions of that self, underscoring the historical emergence of this egoic construction.I never met Teresa Brennan; I did not know her name until a decade after she... (shrink)

This article discusses the basic arguments and important achievements of Jane Bennett’s vital materialism, as well as some problems and limitations of this theoretical perspective. It first analyzes the ontological underpinnings of Bennett’s materialist account and presents two examples she uses to illustrate the notion of a ‘force of things’. The paper then addresses central conceptual and analytic problems of Bennett’s account. The notion of an all-encompassing ‘vitality of matter’ is insufficient to explain the relationality of matter; it is also (...) empirically limited and provides only a selective account of agency. These shortcomings and limitations affect the political perspectives of Bennett’s version of vital materialism. I conclude that there is a tendency in her work to displace political considerations by invoking new ethical responsibilities and sensibilities. Being attentive to the vitality of things translates into a systematic blindness concerning the inequalities, asymmetries and hierarchies enacted in vital materializations. (shrink)

In the current socio‐political climate pedagogies consistent with rationalism are in the ascendancy. One way to challenge the purchase of rationalism within educational discourse and practice is through the body, or by re‐thinking the nature of mind‐body relations. While the orientation of this paper is ultimately phenomenological, it takes as its point of departure recent feminist scholarship, which is demonstrating that attending to physiology can provide insight into the complexity of mind‐body relations. Elizabeth Wilson's account of the role of the (...) gut in psychological processes suggests a far less hierarchical relation between brain and body than rationalism allows. Such insights are also supported by recent phenomenological inquiries into cognition and the body. My question is, what implications do these insights have for how the nature of embodiment is understood, and, by extension, learning? This paper explores how informal, non‐cognitive modes of knowing, or of engaging with the world, inform learning in higher education contexts. More specifically, it raises the question of what role non‐cognitive modes of engagement, such as sensibility, have in augmenting, enabling or delimiting the learning process. (shrink)

Drawing upon the practice of caregiving and the insights of feminist care ethics, I offer a phenomenology of caregiving through the work of Eva Feder Kittay and Emmanuel Lévinas. I argue that caregiving is a material dialectic of embodied response involving moments of leveling, attention, and interruption. In this light, the Levinasian opposition between responding to another's singularity and leveling it via parity-based principles is belied in the experience of care. Contra much of response ethics’ and care ethics’ respective literatures, (...) this dialectic suggests that they are complementary in ways that productively illuminate themes of each. I conclude by suggesting that when response and care ethics are thought together through the experience of caregiving, such labors produce finite responsibility with infinite hope. (shrink)

In this Introduction, we present a collection of articles under the topic “the reproductive bodies of postgenomics.” Through individual and collective research, the articles explore—sociologically, ethnographically, and philosophically—how bioscience in the postgenomic age is changing our understanding of reproductive bodies, and more broadly, how it is challenging existing ideas of heredity, embodiment, kinship, and identity. Feminist and postcolonial theories of technoscience are at the heart of this collection, and our aim is to further biosocial thinking while being cognizant that practices (...) of postgenomics also continue to reproduce deterministic paradigms. The concepts of “knowledge,” “experience,” and “justice” form the reference points animating our investigations. We bring these concepts into conversation with one another to disentangle how postgenomics operate differently on the reproductive body, namely on the levels of practice, discourse, and norms. This is an important exercise as it will enable social science and humanities scholars to evaluate the political capacities of postgenomics for the future study of reproduction. (shrink)

People with gut issues are often constrained in the foods they are able to eat. The choices they are able to make about food, however, are shaped not merely by specific medical and dietary needs but also by social, relational, and environmental factors such as the presence of trusted and supportive others who take their needs seriously. Drawing on work in disability theory and relational autonomy, as well as interviews undertaken in summer 2019, the paper explores the ways that choices (...) are enabled or undermined, and argues that these should be taken into account in work on the ethics and politics of food. (shrink)

Re-evaluating dominant cultural narratives around dying and death is central to new critiques of individualism and human exceptionalism. As conceptual tools for theorizing the end of the individual proliferate, the affective dimensions of this project are often overlooked, especially as they pertain to individual subjects. In contrast, a significant number of iconic queer and feminist thinkers have suffered breast cancer and written memoirs representing the subjective experience of confronting mortality. This article identifies the affective orientations towards one’s own mortality as (...) missing from queer and feminist thinking on embodiment in the Anthropocene. As a remedy, the article reads several iconic feminist breast cancer memoirs – Sontag, Lorde, Sedgwick, Jain and Boyer – for their complex representations of affect, in particular fear, in relation to dying and death. Using the affect theory of Silvan Tomkins, this analysis contributes to critiques of cancer culture in medical humanities and of mortality and embodiment in feminist environmental humanities. (shrink)

This article is about the future of sociology, as transformations in the digital and biological sciences lay claim to the discipline’s jurisdictional hold over ‘the social’. Rather than analyse the specifics of these transformations, however, the focus of the article is on how a narrative of methodological crisis is sustained in sociology, and on how such a narrative conjures very particular disciplinary futures. Through a close reading of key texts, the article makes two claims: (1) that a surprisingly conventional urge (...) towards disciplinary reproduction often animates accounts of sociology’s crisis; (2) that, even more surprisingly, these same accounts are often haunted by a hidden metaphorical architecture centred on biology, vitality, vigour and life. The central gambit of the article is that, perhaps in spite of itself, this subterranean image of life actually hints at less reproductively conventional ways of understanding – and intervening in – sociology’s methodological ‘crisis’. Drawing, empirically, on the author’s recent work on urban stress and, theoretically, on Stefan Helmreich’s (2011, 2016) account of ‘limit biologies’, the articles ends with a call for a ‘limit sociology’ – a form of attention that could, similarly, expand rather than contract the present moment of transformation. At the heart of the article is a hope that thinking with such a limit may help sociologists to imagine a less deadening future than that on offer from a canonised discipline cathected by endless crisis-talk. (shrink)

This article examines the reparative turn in current queer feminist scholarship by tracking its twin interest in the study of affect and time. By foregrounding Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s influential critique of what she called paranoid reading, I am interested in the ways that various critics – Ann Cvetkovich, Heather Love, and Elizabeth Freeman in particular – take up the call for reparative reading by using the temporal frameworks of the everyday, backward feeling, and queer time to reparative ends. In the (...) process, I consider the reparative work being done to reclaim Sedgwick as a major thinker for queer feminist concerns, and speculate on the attraction, in a time of declining economic and cultural support for the interpretative humanities, of a critical practice that seeks to love and nurture its objects of study. (shrink)

This article explores a theoretical legacy that underpins the ways in which many social scientists come to know and understand obesity. In attempting to distance itself from essentialist discourses, it is not surprising that this literature focuses on the discursive construction of fat bodies rather than the materiality or agency of bodily matter. Ironically, in developing arguments that only critique representations of obesity or fat bodies, social science scholars have maintained and reproduced a central dichotomy of Cartesian thinking – that (...) between social construction and biology. In this article I examine the limitations of social constructionist arguments in obesity/critical fat studies and the implications for ignoring materiality. Through bringing together the theoretical insights of material feminism and obesity science’s attention to maternal nutrition and the fetal origins hypothesis, this article moves beyond the current philosophical impasse, and repositions biological and social constructionist approaches to obesity not as mutually exclusive, but as one of constant interplay and connectedness. (shrink)

Often, political theories of the subject detach the subject from nature or else reduce the subject to a mere aggregate of natural features. Consequently, many attempts to articulate theories of the subject purport to preserve political theoretical concepts such as freedom, normativity, or responsibility by means of disjoining the subject from its environment. This article proposes a new theory of the ecologically conditioned subject. Developing the concept of companion ecologies, the article employs three examples – architecture, the human microbiome, and (...) indigenous Amazonian ontologies – to show how theorizing the subject at all necessitates theorizing her ecological conditions, as well. Companion ecologies do not refer merely to our environmental conditions, then. The term also functions as a referent. Ultimately, companion ecologies reveal that the individuation and formation of the subject is a process that takes place, paradoxically, only because of the ecological plurality underlying it. From this, I derive a minimalist theory of the subject for which subjects are materially and temporally extended and causally distributed morphogenetic sites, which emerge only in the context of interactive, multiscalar, and overlapping companion ecologies. (shrink)

In this article, I wish to engage in reflecting on the limits of affirmative and vitalist potentials visible in new materialist research. An enthusiastic note is clearly heard from within the new materialist perspective, for example in the important work of Rosi Braidotti. I offer an interpretation of her ‘The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible’ in hopes of reflecting on the limits of the affirmative approach. This interpretation is fuelled by more hesitant notes also heard within new materialist research, tones expressing (...) doubts, tracing the limits of materialist, vitalist, affirmative takes and offering perspectives that turn to ‘a matter that fails to come to life’, ‘unproductive and devoid of relations’. This turn – according to my reading – is an effort to respond to the need to recognise ‘our today’ in its complexity. To fully grasp the landscapes of ‘our today’, I offer a concept of bare death (in dialogue with bare life as coined by Giorgio Agamben and as used by Braidotti) as a concept that relates to instances where something has died but cannot enter into the ‘generative powers of a Life’. It is depicted with references to the nuclear and plastic landscapes of the Anthropocene. Relating to those landscapes, I make use of an art installation by Pinar Yoldas, The Ecosystem of Excess, as a kind of companion for thinking about becoming and the transformation of life and death in order to respond to the ambivalent landscapes of ‘our today’ and to understand how death matters beyond the human self. (shrink)

Feminist analyses have made important contributions to the sociocultural experiences of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding. This article draws upon recent theorizing within science studies to focus on the mattering of these processes. Specifically, the article expands upon Mauss's notion of the ‘gift’, which Diprose develops through the idea of ‘corporeal generosity’. I am interested in corporeal generosity insofar as it circumvents descriptions of relationships in terms of a closed economy in which resources are exchanged without excess or remainder. Corporeal generosity (...) refers to the often missed but nevertheless inescapable debt that a body owes to other bodies. At the same time, this embodied ‘gifting’ is both unpredictable and intrusive – there is as much possibility of threatening the integrity of bodies as there is of opening new possibilities. (shrink)

The issue of what is proper to nature, or life itself, is central to critical accounts of biomedicine and its complex interrelations with social, political and economic forces. These engagements, namely biopolitical accounts of medical practices and ethical-political critiques of biomedical discourse, grapple with the indistinction between the political and biological that biomedicine enacts. Making a significant contribution to both literatures, Ed Cohen’s A Body Worth Defending argues that the emergence of the concept of biological immunity signals the entry of (...) politics into life itself and, as such, constitutes a concrete example of biopolitics. This article examines Cohen’s account of how the political becomes biological, and the view of life it assumes. Seeking to open up the question of biology, it draws on the work of Georges Canguilhem, and New Materialist accounts of matter–meaning entanglement, to offer a reading of knowledge and life, or politics and biology, as ontologically entangled. (shrink)

Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness: A Lively Entanglement explores the interaction between technology and physically active humans, with a particular focus on sport and feminist concepts....

Drawing on research in posthumanism, science and technology studies and biosemiotics, this essay analyses the challenges epigenetic processes pose for our understanding of embodied subjectivity. It uses the work of Charles Sanders Peirce to argue that epigenetic processes are indexical in their patterned logic, that they are meaning-making processes and that, consequently, they can be conceived as a form of attention. To conceive of bodies as paying attention through epigenetic processes is to rupture the distinction between matter and meaning that (...) governs many philosophical categories. This in turn invites us to recalibrate our conception of the relationship between self, body and world. (shrink)

What are the testicles and who should we talk to to find out? What structures of women’s bodies are left over and what are missing? What matters in a body? Starting from Donna Haraway’s invitation to narrate «naturoculture» stories, in this article I am interested in how subaltern bodily narratives of intersex people and their companions change expert biologic knowledge, overflowing the classic dualisms of the clinic. I propose to read biology inside the «contact zone» in order to explore the (...) remaking of the body that extend or reconfigure expert imaginaries. This crafting approach to biological knowledge leads to treating expert objects as the provisional result of meaning negotiation processes. I argue that conceptualizing such objects as biological crafts allows us to expand the material cultures of biology to enable other bodies through conversations outside of expert/layman and nature/culture logics. (shrink)

Over the last few decades feminists, science and technology studies scholars and others have grappled with how to take materiality into account in understanding social practices, subjectivity and events. One key area for these debates has been drug use and addiction. At the same time, neuroscientific accounts of drug use and addiction have also arisen. This development has attracted criticism as simplistically reinstating material determinism. In this article we draw on 80 interviews with health professionals directly involved in drug-related public (...) policy and service provision in three countries to identify the main ways the neuroscience of addiction (and thus the agency of the brain) is understood. We analyse these understandings using contemporary posthumanist theory to develop new options for conceptualizing matter in public responses to addiction. We close by calling for a new approach to addiction and the brain based on a process model of materiality and public debate. (shrink)

The placenta has played an important role in feminist theories of subjectivity; however, the placenta of feminist theory has been the fully functional placenta of what is considered a successful full-term pregnancy. Pregnancy loss, a topic that has been generally overlooked within feminist scholarship, is absent from feminist theories of the placenta. This article uses early placental development, particularly development that takes place before the placenta becomes fully functional as an organ for hormone production and interchange, as a space through (...) which to consider theorising subjectivity, reproduction and relation through pregnancy loss. In so doing, I argue that turning our attention to the placenta’s early development, regardless of outcomes, allows us to reimagine the role of process for feminist theories of subjectivity while also making room for a wider array of pregnancy outcomes, reinvigorating our ability to think about relations and models of hospitality that do not end as we might imagine. (shrink)