Feminist new materialisms: Activating Ethico-Politics Through Genealogies in Social Sciences

• Main Author: Rogowska-Stangret, Monika (auth)
• Other Authors: Ernst, Waltraud (auth), Revelles, Beatriz (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI - Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute 2020
• Subjects: Cuidado; participatory practices; n/a; diffraction apparatus; grassroots activism; sexual harassment; food sovereignty; diffractive design; togetherness; sex-positive; political ecology; belonging; children; emotionality; Barad; social engagement; feminist environmentalism; diffraction; entanglement; touch; robot sex; doing-cooking; community; research-activism; transversalism; social justice; We Fuck!; creative methods; Yes; methods; faith; new materialisms; Documentary; new materialism; ecology; response-ability; intra-action; performativity; sound and noise art; art; Spanish cinema; feminist new materialism; sex robots; queer studies; posthumanities; materiality; religion; diffractive reading; resbala; feminist new materialisms; La Via Campesina; feminism; human-machine interaction
• Online Access: DOAB: download the publication; DOAB: description of the publication

For the editors of this collection, new materialisms have always been the entanglement of epistemology, ontology, ethics, and politics. Looking back to the notion of "situated knowledges" (Haraway, 1988) that - among others - "planted the seed for feminist new materialism" (van der Tuin, 2015, 26) - one sees how those (at least) four planes are entangled (Rogowska-Stangret, 2018) in order to bring forth "response-able" (Haraway, 2008) research. New materialism is thus an ethico-onto-epistemological framework (Barad, 2007; Revelles-Benavente, 2018) that by activating its ethico-politics helps to diagnose, infer, and transform gendered, environmental, anthropocentric, social injustices from a multidimensional angle. Social injustices are a driving motivation to pursue research and are the reason why the editors and authors of this Special Issue cannot understand new materialism without feminism (in the lines of eds. Hinton & Teusch, 2015). Contemporary feminist researchers are providing new materialisms with a transversal approach, (Yuval-Davis 1997) that comes from many different disciplines without canonizing back again knowledge creation and production and in hope that they will not enter back into classifixations (van der Tuin, 2015). It is "situated" (Haraway, 1988) research "response-able" (Haraway, 2008) to material-discursive practices that iterate in a dynamic conceptualization of matter.