The politics of materiality: Affective encounters in a transdisciplinary debate

Introduction: Affective encounters

I was compelled to write this piece – by frustration, I admit. (Ahmed, 2008: 36)

I refuse to simply accept the claim that those whose work has most interested and inspired me are at best one-eyed, and at worst, wilfully blinded to hydra-headed nature that they allegedly fear may fix them to that which they have worked so hard to escape. Why, I am left wondering after having read a plethora of ‘new materialist’ writings, do we need to turn to ‘scientific’ studies of bonobos, bowhead whales, bighorn sheep, buffbreasted sandpipers, aphids, to see physical intimacy as radically diverse? (Sullivan, 2012: 308)

Sara Ahmed’s (2008) and Nicki Sullivan’s (2012) comments illustrate the affectivity of scholarly encounters in the feminist debate about materiality. Sara Ahmed seems to have been provoked by the texts termed ‘new materialist’, because she writes that she ‘was compelled’ … ‘by frustration’ (Ahmed, 2008: 36) to confront the texts that, in her reading, exclude a number of feminist engagements with biology in order to instantiate the ‘new’ of new materialism. I read that her frustration is also related to what for Ahmed, is ‘[t]his caricature of poststructuralism as matter-phobic’ (Ahmed, 2008: 34) in the new materialist texts she analyses, which include those by Karen Barad. Nicki Sullivan concurs with Ahmed in her defence of poststructuralist feminists, and her comment above foregrounds what interests me in this article: the relations between feminist approaches which engage with what could be called ‘natural science matters’ and other feminist approaches which draw their points of focus as well as their methodologies mainly from social sciences and/or the humanities. The latter may also analyse natural sciences, but these analyses are seen as outsiders’ critiques or at most, extraction of concepts, rather than a serious engagement with the natural sciences (Hird, 2009). I read the emotional responses by Ahmed and Sullivan, however, not as a sign of the individual writers’ emotional state, but as a sign of a ‘cultural politics of emotion’ (Ahmed, 2004) at work. As Ahmed, feminist philosopher and cultural studies scholar, writes elsewhere about the links between emotions and power, emotionality in cultural products can be read as a sign of ‘past histories of contact’ that involve particular relations of power (Ahmed, 2004: 7). Here, I read both Ahmed’s and Sullivan’s work in a broader context, involving and emanating from power relations between disciplines in the feminist transdisciplinary debate about materiality.

Critical encounters are an ongoing challenge in any scholarly discussions, and the combination of generosity and critique is as rare as it is valuable, as Kathy Davis has recently suggested (Davis, 2010). In this article I meditate on interdisciplinary feminist encounters within what could be called a transdisciplinary debate on materiality, the debate about the strand of feminist thinking called ‘new materialism’ (Ahmed, 2008; Van der Tuin, 2008) or ‘material feminisms’ (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008). I will use the term material feminisms, in order to avoid the problematic instating of the term ‘new’. (For a critique of this term, see Ahmed, 2008.)

The debate about materiality can be called transdisciplinary since it clearly moves ‘beyond disciplines and beyond existing canons’ in the sense that this debate per se is not dependent or attached to particular disciplines, such as sociology, literary studies, medicine or physics (Lykke, 2004: 96–97). I do not analyse transdisciplinarity here in an institutional sense, as in whether or not women’s, gender or feminist studies are institutionally truly inter- or transdisciplinary, or whether certain institutional structures enable or promote transdisciplinarity (cf. Hark, 2007; Lykke, 2007). Instead I analyse what interdisciplinary encounters do and how disciplinary differences are implied in this transdisciplinary debate. Even if I suggest that pertaining to the debate about materiality and its themes, feminism is in Lykke’s sense transdisciplinary, it is still obvious that approaches are involved which are more attached to certain disciplines – or to particular interdisciplinary approaches such as ‘interdisciplinary humanities’ (Hemmings, 2011: 86). Stemming from this, my focus is on interdisciplinary encounters in a transdisciplinary debate, and I am especially interested in how engagements with natural sciences encounter other feminist perspectives.

My aim is neither to evaluate the success or failure of inter- or transdisciplinarity in feminism, nor to ‘discipline’ the discussants by firmly placing them within particular disciplines. Rather I wish to look at particular tendencies in this debate, tendencies which I call politics of materiality, and in which, I suggest, interdisciplinary encounters play a role. I will specifically focus on the debate between approaches which engage with natural sciences and those which do not. The notion of politics can be understood in several ways: it can be seen as an arena, a ‘polity’, or as particular sets of arguments within such an arena. In addition, politics can be understood as an activity, such as in the notion of ‘discussing politics’. The act of defining whether or not an activity belongs to the realm of ‘politics’ can also be described as a political activity; that is to say, as the (a)politicisation of a particular issue (Palonen, 2003: 470). In a sense this article intends to politicise the debate on materiality. This is to suggest that instead of further pursuing the question of whether materiality or biology is properly accounted for in previous feminist studies (cf. Ahmed, 2008; Davis, 2009; Van der Tuin, 2008) the debate could be more closely analysed from the perspective of how power relations inform the debate and are recreated in it.

In relation to the interplay of trans/inter/disciplinarity and materiality, I wish to raise two specific issues. First, I discuss one of the ways in which ‘materiality’ is presently defined in the debate; in other words, I analyse what I call the politics of definition, which is one aspect of the politics of materiality. I suggest that part of the critique posed in this debate is enabled by its transdisciplinarity, as those studies which do not engage with natural sciences seem to be treated as curiously ‘limited’ due to their particular discipline-based focus. However, I argue that such critique involves not only a concern for enhancing transdisciplinarity, but on the contrary, a rather problematic power relation between disciplines. This is because the notion of materiality tends to be regarded as an object of research within a particular disciplinary orientation; it becomes (a) ‘natural science matter’, with the result that engagement with the natural sciences becomes primary. Second, I discuss the matter of material feminisms in relation to postcolonial critique, and pay attention to how race figures in the debates about materiality. I suggest that at times an interest in themes and ‘objects’ traditionally belonging to the natural sciences, as well as the argument for more engagement with the natural sciences, is worked into an affective move that marks other approaches as ‘traditional’, and hence less interesting. This in turn, I suggest, risks promoting a politics in material feminisms which bypasses postcolonial critique and excludes analysis of race from the sphere of the new and interesting.

The politics of definition: Natural science matters and the surface

One of the most impressive aspects for me of the feminist work that I discuss is the aspiration towards fruitful encounters both within feminism in general and between different disciplinary perspectives. In my reading, Sara Ahmed (2008) is in her above-mentioned critique of new materialism seriously concerned about engagement with previous feminist work. What bothered her was the generalised critique of the feminist neglect of biology, without close ‘attention and care’ to previous feminist work, while many ‘male writers (who are usually dead and white) are engaged with closely’ (Ahmed, 2008: 30). I agree with her that critique is ‘after all a labour of love’ (Ahmed, 2008: 30), and hence engagement with other feminist work, in contrast to sweeping generalised rejection, is of utmost importance for the future of feminist theory. I hope that the critique presented in this article will be read as ‘a labour of love’, since I concentrate on discussing the scholars who at the moment most inspire me.

Feminist biologist Lynda Birke has felt as if she were ‘sitting on a fence’ (Birke, 2000) in between mainstream biology and (apparently more social science and humanities orientated) feminism; she has also been concerned about interdisciplinary engagement:

… we have always prided ourselves on feminism being interdisciplinary. It is not. The problem with thinking about materiality in biology is that we are not doing a good enough job at engaging with biologists, trying to figure out how to talk to each other in ways that generate new ideas, and new methodologies. (Åsberg and Birke, 2010: 419)

Myra Hird, for her part, has identified three kinds of feminist relationships with the natural sciences: first, she notes that of critique by an outsider; second, she identifies the extraction of concepts for other purposes; and, the third and in my reading most valued kind of relationship for her, is an engagement with natural sciences (Hird, 2009). What is notable in these feminist texts is the aspiration towards fruitful interdisciplinary encounters within feminism. What is striking, however, is the focus in most of these texts on the need to engage specifically with natural sciences. Recently it has even been stated that the broader audience ‘will remain skeptical [of feminist research] as long as biology is not addressed directly by gender researchers’ (Lie, 2011: 57).

At this point it is important to note that the debate about materiality also includes other interdisciplinary encounters than the one analysed here between the natural sciences and the social sciences and/or humanities, even though I see the role of the natural sciences in the debate as pivotal at the moment. Clare Hemmings (2011), who has analysed the story-telling of feminist pasts, implies that affectivity related to feminist pasts and the opening up of futures is narrated through particular disciplinary differences. She has constructed out of recent feminist debates three narratives: those of progress, loss and return. The loss and return narratives, in particular, pertain to the debate about materiality and to interdisciplinary encounters:

In loss narratives, then, discussions of disciplinary differences tell a story of how the social sciences and empirical inquiry have been forced from popularity by approaches that privilege text and context over world and experience. Through its association with poststructuralist approaches, this shift away from social sciences and towards the interdisciplinary humanities is often named ‘the cultural turn’, a turn to representation and abstraction over social meaning. (Hemmings, 2011: 86)

In Hemmings’ analysis, it is the empirical social sciences that are analysed alongside ‘interdisciplinary humanities’, which enables her to detect another narrative that involves similar disciplinary differences. This narrative calls for a ‘return to materiality’ in the sense that materialist feminism should be re-valued, and hence, it calls for a return to the social science ‘rigorous’ methodologies that are claimed to be more effective in feminist politics in comparison to ‘apolitical deconstruction’ in what she called above interdisciplinary humanities (Hemmings, 2011: 95–127). In other words, Hemmings analyses, first and foremost, the dispute between materialist and poststructuralist feminists. She further mentions the ‘sociology of science and technology’ in her discussion about ‘biomaterialist’ critiques of poststructuralists, under which she also situates Karen Barad, whose texts I will discuss below (Hemmings, 2011: 101, 106–107). Hemmings, however, conceptualises this ‘biomaterialism’ through Braidotti’s new materialism, rather than explicating and analysing the relations of the natural sciences to both social sciences and humanities. I hence wish to add to her analysis by focusing specifically on interdisciplinary encounters that involve natural sciences, rather than on material feminisms generally or in Braidotti’s ‘new materialist’ Deleuzian sense.

The first issue related to what I call the politics of materiality pertains to how the proponents of material feminisms who engage with natural sciences define materiality (see also Irni, 2010: 172–173, 197–199). A case in point is when the approaches that do not engage with the natural sciences are repeatedly accused of remaining in their analyses on the surface of bodies. For example, attempts within social sciences and humanities to discuss the materiality of bodies and to question the biological/social distinction have been accused of remaining only on the ‘surface’ of bodies, because they do not discuss bodies from a biological perspective. (For examples of such critiques of Butler, see Barad, 1998: 107; Honkasalo, 2004: 317; Kerin, 1999: 93; for a related critique of Grosz, see Birke, 1999: 2.) Ahmed (2008) cites several related critiques, and such critiques have also provoked Sullivan (2012). It seems that ‘poststructuralists’ or ‘feminists’, whether social scientists or humanities scholars, have repeatedly been criticised as prone to focus too much on language and signification, and to comment on bodies in a limited way. A central argument hence seems to be that biological processes also need to be accounted for by feminists in general, not specifically by natural science feminists. I take it that a critique such as Barad’s is relevant in its apt call for an analysis of biological processes as active engagements in society (Barad, 1998, 2007; Davis, 2009; Kirby, 2011). However, what is crucial is that this particular set of arguments about the need to account for biology also sometimes conflates an engagement with the natural sciences with accounting for ‘materiality’. Hence within material feminisms, materiality sometimes becomes by definition a natural science matter. For example, Barad criticises Butler’s (1993) notion of materialisation in the following way:

Perhaps the most crucial limitation of Butler’s [approach] … is that it is limited to an account of materialization of human bodies, or more accurately, to the construction of the surface of the human body (which most certainly is not all there is to human bodies). (Barad, 1998: 107)

In addition to criticising Butler, Barad criticises Leela Fernandes’s materialist feminist study of the jute industry. Barad suggests that Fernandes could have broadened the concept of materiality to include ‘naturalcultural forces’ (Barad, 2007: 242). According to Barad, an analysis of naturalcultural forces would have entailed that Fernandes analysed ‘the replacement of jute by new synthetic materials, interests of agribusiness, including agricultural “vulnerabilities” of the jute crops, [and] proposed biotechnology fixes, such as genetic modifications to try to make the plants caterpillar and flood resistant’ (2007: 452, n30). Barad argues further that neglecting these issues makes Fernandes’s study ‘limited in important ways’ (2007: 242). Regardless of the quality of Fernandes’s study, which Barad acknowledges to be high, such a notion of a limitation prompts the question of what kind of accounts of matter suffice, so that a study will not be, by definition, ‘limited’ in its analysis of materiality.

On the one hand, every study has to be restricted to a particular focus, and in this sense, every study is by definition ‘limited’ in some ways. On the other hand, I propose that the recent arguments about limitedness involve what I have here called the politics of materiality: assumptions that involve power relations between different disciplinary perspectives. In my reading, Barad’s and others’ critique on this particular point assumes a conceptualisation of materiality as it is analysed in the biomedical or natural sciences – only from such a point of view can Butler’s study be criticised as limited because it focuses on the ‘surface’ of bodies. Only from this perspective can Barad also argue that Butler does not deal with the issue of how matter materialises, but only how discourse materialises (that is, because ‘matter’ is per definition here a natural science understanding of matter, engaging with the matters pertaining to what Barad calls the ‘surface’ of bodies is not considered to be an analysis of materiality). I thus suggest that Barad’s argument here involves a particular understanding of what qualifies as an analysis of ‘matter’, which is based on a natural science perspective. This also concerns other similar critiques of Butler as well as Grosz, which argue that they focus only on the surface in their analysis of the materiality of bodies (Birke, 1999: 2; Honkasalo, 2004: 317; Kerin, 1999: 93).

Myra Hird’s (2009) analysis raises a similar challenge, when she uses the notion of engagement with science interchangeably to mean an engagement with matter: ‘What distinguishes emerging analyses of material feminism – alternatively called “new materialism,” “neo-materialism,” and “new sciences” – is a keen interest in engagements with matter’ (Hird, 2009: 330, emphasis in original). Likewise, Hird points out about her own interests: ‘My own research is inspired by attempts to engage with matter’, which means that she is ‘concerned to build a micro-ontology by thinking through the possibilities for, and parameters of, engaging seriously with the bacteria’ (Hird, 2009: 343).

For those who engage with natural sciences, the notion of ‘matter’ hence seems to slide towards ‘natural science matter’ without explicit reflection on this conceptual twist and its consequences for the transdisciplinary debate. It is one thing to suggest that more engagement with natural sciences is needed, which is obviously part of the argument in the above-mentioned texts. However, when materiality is conflated with natural science matters by definition, the arguments are at risk of suggesting that the other studies – namely, those which do not engage with natural sciences – are per se ‘limited’ in their focus and fail to analyse (that which) matter(s). Disciplinary boundaries seem to do implicit work in these transdisciplinary feminist negotiations of materiality and even enable some of the critiques: without the assumption that matter is always the matter of the natural sciences, the choice of focus of the other studies – that they refrain from engaging with the natural sciences – could not intelligibly be uttered as a critique of their ‘limited’ scope. Nor could it be argued that they have neglected or bypassed an analysis of ‘materiality’.

The matter and politics of race

The second issue discussed here in relation to politics of materiality is whether race matters, and in what ways, within material feminisms. Clare Hemmings importantly shows a difference in how race and sexuality are situated within the debates about materiality. In Hemmings’ words, ‘we might say that culture sticks to sexuality – and particularly queer theory – as the “opposite” of feminism, while materiality sticks to race’ (Hemmings, 2011: 117; about sticking, see Ahmed, 2004: 13, 89–92, 194–195). However, I argue that for the analysis of race within the discussions about materiality, it is important to note that it is not any materiality to which race sticks; it is crucially the materiality of materialist feminists. Having discussed the ‘new’ field, which I call after Alaimo and Hekman (2008) material feminisms, I will therefore now turn to materialist feminism.

As Martha Gimenez (2000) has noted, the terms ‘material basis’ and ‘material consequences’, in which the term ‘material’ often appears in the materialist strand of feminist thinking, have a variety of meanings. ‘Material’ refers in this strand of thought mainly to the sphere of the economic but the word is also used to denote qualities such as the real, the objective, the influential or important (Gimenez, 2000; see also Rahman and Witz, 2003). Hence a crucial part of the ‘return to materiality’ narrative that Hemmings describes is the juxtaposition of materialist and poststructuralist feminisms – as when calling for analysis of real, economic inequalities rather than ‘ludic’ analysis of ‘resignification’ (Ebert, 1996: 31, 48, 122). The result of such narratives, enabled by the diffuse meanings of ‘materiality’, is that the discursive is seen as opposed to materiality, which in turn is seen as more real, objective or important. It should, however, be noted that the juxtaposition of poststructuralist and materialist feminism is not overarching. Butler’s work, which has been the most central target of criticism in the return narrative, is sometimes also taken as compatible with or inspiring for a materialist feminist approach (Hennessy, 1993: 88, 95; Korvajärvi, 1998: 31–32; Rahman and Witz, 2003: 254–258; Ramazanogˇlu and Holland, 1999: 388–389).

Instead of being necessary, juxtapositions are created between approaches, and it is crucial for feminist theory whether and how such juxtapositions are made. The differential situation of race and sexuality in relation to materiality is a case in point. While according to Hemmings, ‘racial inequalities are always understood as material and worthy of attention’ (Hemmings, 2011: 117), the links between sexuality and the notion of materiality are narrated with a problematic twofold definition of culture. On the one hand, deconstructive work and especially queer theory figure in this narrative as ‘merely cultural’, and on the other, sexuality is seen as having material relevance only in connection to its ‘culture-bound’ understanding. Hence the narration invokes a distinction in which pleasures and play are seen as the ‘frivolous’ project of western queer theorists, and queer theory is constructed as antagonistic to global women’s ‘realities’ and effective politics, while sexuality in the so-called non-western countries is ‘reattached to framings of sexuality as tied to the worst examples of patriarchal cultural norms and practices’ (Hemmings, 2011: 119–124). In her critique of the narrative of the return to materiality Hemmings focuses on social science analyses that are first and foremost problematic from a postcolonial feminist point of view; in other words, analyses that could be said to fall into the trap that Chandra Mohanty describes in her article ‘Under western eyes’ (2002). In these narratives the situation of non-western women is presented as a projection of the particular narrative of western gender equality (see also Keskinen et al., 2009).

In addition to the return to materiality narrative which Hemmings sees as particularly problematic from a postcolonial feminist point of view, a materialist feminist critique of poststructuralist approaches comes from another, namely, postcolonial feminist perspective. These approaches that I have in mind concern more broadly the whiteness of feminist theory. Such critique has been aimed towards Butler’s, as well as towards Donna Haraway’s and Rosi Braidotti’s work (Liu Xin, forthcoming; Martínez, 2010; Moya, 2000; Schwartzmann, 2002). This critique does not rely on making a juxtaposition between poststructuralist and materialist feminism per se. Rather, the critique points to the ways in which seemingly neutral theories may be construed (via citational practices, for example) as white, or as pertaining merely to elite polyglots rather than migrants in less privileged positions. This in turn has implications as to what is seen as relevant and which questions are seen as important when a theory is put to use. Hence it is crucial how race becomes situated in the discussions within material feminisms. As I have suggested, it is not any materiality to which ‘race’ sticks, but the materiality of what I here call ‘materialist feminism’. For example, Myra Hird makes the distinction in the following way – here she uses the term ‘the more familiar “material feminism” ’ where I use the term materialist feminism:

By way of preliminary outline, I want to distinguish the emerging field of material feminism from the more familiar ‘material feminism’ that grounds significant feminist analysis. This latter field is concerned with women’s material living conditions – labor, reproduction, political access, health, education, and intimacy – structured through class, race, ethnicity, age, nation, ableism, heteronormativity, and so on. (Hird, 2009: 329)

Two years later, in the introduction ‘Feminism theorises the nonhuman’ to a Special Issue of Feminist Theory, my concern about the place of race in the feminist analyses of materiality is again raised. I have emphasised the parts that affectively do such placing work:

For some readers, focussing on the nonhuman may signal a worrying turn away from the more traditional grounds of feminist theory and politics. We hope this Special Issue will convince them of the vitality and urgency of the questions raised by attempts to address the multiple ways in which nonhuman actors (be they rats, aliens, syringes, robots, plastinates or virtual deer) affect who we are and how we (might) live. In often deliberately provocative and/or humorous ways, feminists working in this field demand that we take ‘things’ seriously: not that we give up on concerns about women, power, sexuality, racialisation, etc., but rather that we come to recognise more fully how these come to be constituted and thought in and through particular worlds in which ‘we humans’ are but one nominated set of players. (Hird and Roberts, 2011: 115, my emphasis)

This narration, on the one hand, clearly places the concerns about power, sexuality and racialisation among the discussions about nonhuman actors, but on the other hand it reiterates the posthumanist concerns affectively as the new – vital and urgent – in contrast to the other, ‘more traditional’ (and implicitly, not as exciting) concerns that include materialist and postcolonial feminism. It seems that analyses about materiality informed by natural science have been rethought as exciting, while social science concerns about, for example, racialisation do not seem so inspiring. For the politics of materiality in terms of race it is hence crucial, whether race ‘sticks to’ materiality in the social science sense which is now defined as ‘traditional’, or whether analyses such as Deboleena Roy’s (2008) or Nancy Tuana’s (2008), which effectively combine a postcolonial analysis with an engagement with natural science and with the analysis of nonhuman actants, become exemplars of how race remains relevant within the newly interesting natural science feminist approaches to materiality.

Concluding remarks: Transdisciplinarity and the politics of materiality

In this article, I have analysed the recent discussions about materiality, wishing to raise the issue of power at work in this debate. I have suggested that the debate involves what I call ‘politics of materiality’, and that such politics are at work in the very definitions of materiality, they are implied in the affectivity of the debate, and they work in promoting particular analyses of matter as new and interesting. I read the debates about materiality as transdisciplinary in Nina Lykke’s (2004) sense of the term. I have taken transdisciplinarity as a starting point and focused on the power relations which such transdisciplinary constellations give rise to. Counterintuitively perhaps, the very transdisciplinarity of the debate seems to result in affective encounters between disciplinary approaches. In particular, I have been interested in encounters between those who engage with the natural sciences and those who follow other feminist approaches. I wish to have shown that this debate is not only about materiality being discussed in new ways (cf. Davis, 2009; Van der Tuin, 2008), or about expressing the argument that the materialisation of matter (cf. Barad, 2003; Hird, 2009) should deserve a broader assessment, but that particular politics of materiality also are at work and even define the contours of the very debate.

I suggest that in order to understand and further the contemporary feminist discussions about materiality, a notion of the politics of materiality might be helpful. Such a notion calls for more attention to – in this case – the disciplinary politics inherent in the contemporary feminist discussions, such as implicit discipline-based assumptions about what counts as bodily ‘matter’ – and what, for example, counts as mere surface. Moreover, a focus on the politics of materiality calls attention to which studies can be criticised for being ‘limited’ and why – for example, is a social science study worthy of critique only because it does not discuss ‘naturalcultural forces’? The transdisciplinary nature, so to say, of feminist studies seems to enable an assumption that ‘feminists’ – including both natural scientists and social science and humanities scholars – as a whole should be responsible for accounting for the biological. The critique about only focusing on the ‘surface’ of bodies only makes sense if it is assumed that feminists as a group are responsible for accounting for biological processes. Without this assumption, it would be difficult to understand why social scientists and humanities scholars are being criticised for not accounting for bodies from the perspective of natural scientists. The present material feminist arguments thus seem to propose focuses that entail work that crosses disciplines, but with the critical finger pointed towards social scientists and humanities scholars, who should according to the critique engage with the natural sciences.

I hence suggest that in the contemporary debate, a relation of power is created between natural sciences and other feminisms by defining ‘matter’ as first and foremost pertaining to what I have called ‘natural science matters’. The affective responses by Sara Ahmed (2008) and Nicky Sullivan (2012) can be interpreted in relation to such a power relation, ‘past histories of contact’ (Ahmed, 2004: 7), where poststructuralist feminist approaches in particular have become targets of criticism (see references in Ahmed, 2008 for a review of this criticism). In this sense, I agree with Nikki Sullivan in that it is indeed problematic if a ‘failure to focus on so-called non-human life forms, on (in some cases at least) “nature” as some sort of perverse generativity or pluripotency, is [taken as] an effect of structurally excluding “matter” ’ (Sullivan, 2012: 309). However, I also disagree with Sullivan and her way of invoking the notion of ‘matter as such’ (Sullivan, 2012: 309–310) in her response to natural science orientated material feminists.

Sullivan’s and other similar responses to, among others, Barad, would deserve their own broader discussion, which goes beyond the limited space of this article. I can only point out here that Barad has become the central target of responses after her 2003 article in Signs. Barad’s critique is countered by in turn criticising her for reintroducing ‘the binarism between materiality and culture that much work in science studies has helped to challenge’ (Ahmed, 2008: 35) and ‘an opposition between language and reality’ (Hemmings, 2011: 101). Since Barad’s argument also can be read otherwise (e.g. Irni, 2010; Kirby, 2011), it can, though, be argued that these responses rather construct a binary within Barad’s thinking. In the future, it would be important to elaborate on what the responses to material feminisms do in their repeated suggestion of a binary in, for example, Barad’s thinking. Even though it is not possible to elaborate it here, I suspect that this construction of a binary effectively serves to dismiss the call to pay attention to the agency of nature, including the way in which for Barad, nature might be literate (Kirby, 2011: xi, 76, 96, 149 n7). To account for the agency of nature or technological matters, such as in ultrasound technology as part of the material-discursive apparatuses (Barad, 1998), which is Barad’s key plea, is hence in my reading not a project where ‘matter as such’ is assumed. In her response to Barad’s critique of Butler, Ahmed proposed in relation to Butler’s Bodies That Matter that even if she ‘is not offering in this book a theory of the material world’ – I read: of natural science matters – her thinking still ‘could be used or extended to other forms of materialization’ (Ahmed, 2008: 33). Instead of reading Barad’s argument as involving ‘a rather mournful lament: a call for a return to the facts of the matter’ (Ahmed, 2008: 34), it can be read as precisely such a project of extending, among others, Butler’s insights into natural science matters (Irni, 2010: 71–94).

Hence, even though I sympathise with Ahmed’s and Sullivan’s affective responses to Barad’s and others’ critiques – because I interpret them as being informed by a power relation between feminist approaches which engage with the natural sciences, and ones which do not – I thus do not agree with their reading of Barad. My point here is neither to dismiss Barad’s work altogether, or Myra Hird’s, nor to set it fundamentally against Butler’s. That would be as problematic as equating ‘materiality’ with natural science matters. Crucially, my motive in raising the politics of materiality is to contribute to more fruitful transdisciplinary debate, rather than conducting what Vicky Kirby calls ‘murderous maneuvers of dialectical reasoning that negate another’s position as wrong in order to affirm our own position as right’ (Kirby, 2011: 83).

So far the analysis of the discussion has mostly concentrated on terms such as materiality and poststructuralism, such as in Ahmed’s (2008) response, with which Sullivan’s (2012) defence of poststructuralist approaches strongly accords. Clare Hemmings’ (2011) analysis continues along a similar line of reasoning by pointing out the problematic oppositions between materiality and culture, paying particular attention to the encounters between social sciences and humanities approaches. I have argued in this article that to account for interdisciplinary encounters in the debate about the engagement with the natural sciences, and how it is set against other feminist approaches, is crucial. A focus on race and its place in the debate suggests that it is definitely materiality to which race ‘sticks’, as Hemmings proposes, but crucially, it is the materiality of materialist feminists, rather than the materiality of the ‘new’ material feminisms. This means that an affective relation is created between the ‘new’ and presumably exciting engagements with natural sciences, and the ‘more traditional’, and hence implicitly not so exciting, materialist feminist analyses, including the analyses of race and class.

To add another point to Hemmings’ analysis: the critique of the contemporary poststructuralist writers, including Butler, Braidotti and Haraway – Haraway would also be included in the material feminist corpus which engages with natural science – has not only come from the direction of materialist feminism, or even from those who engage with natural science. Crucially, these writers, often taken as central feminist theorists, have been criticised for perpetuating and contributing to the whiteness of feminist theory for example, by their practices of citation (Liu Xin, forthcoming; Martínez, 2010; Moya, 2000; Schwartzmann, 2002). I suggest that one of the crucial challenges within material feminisms is whether this strand of feminism can effectively answer to the call to question the whiteness of feminism, posed as far back as the 19th century (Brah and Phoenix, 2004: 76).

It is intriguing, for example, that even if Barad has been extensively referred to in the contemporary debates about materiality, it tends to be her critique of Butler and of poststructuralists which is cited, and not what I interpret as her commitment to feminist analyses of power, which I read as compatible with the above-mentioned critical postcolonial feminist voices. Barad, for example, points out in her example of ‘gender-and-science-in-the-making’ not only the ‘significant materials’ such as a cigar which tend to be overlooked in analysing scientific apparatuses, but also that ‘The cigar is a “condensation” – a nodal point, as it were – of the workings of other apparatuses, including class, nationalism, economics, and gender’ (Barad, 2007: 167). To take another example, included in the article where she presents her most elaborated Butler critique, she also discusses race relations which mark women’s bodies. According to Barad, ‘the new reproductive technologies work to reproduce the fetus and particular race relations’ (Barad, 1998: 115). In this context Barad also points out the ‘racialized and classed construction of an “epidemic of infertility” ’, which ‘has served as justification for the expanded development of a range of new reproductive technologies for the production of white babies’ (1998: 115). In my reading, this indicates that the analysis of race does not belong to a different, ‘traditional’ materialist feminism but it is intrinsic to Barad’s approach. As both Ahmed and Hemmings remind us, citations are an important way in which scholarly narratives as well as approaches such as the ‘new materialism’ are constructed (Ahmed, 2008; Hemmings, 2011: 161–190). Barad herself cites postcolonial and materialist feminist research, and such commitments are, as the above citations of her texts also suggest, an integral part of her approach. Because of this it is telling that she has come to figure in the feminist debates mostly as a proponent of ‘new materialism’, and the citations of her texts seem to almost invariably silence the materialist and postcolonial feminist aspects of her approach. With this in mind, I wish that material feminisms would not be affectively pitted against the study of race and class, and that interdisciplinary encounters would be in Ahmed’s words a ‘labour of love’, both caring for feminist predecessors and shattering juxtapositions. With such work fruitful transdisciplinary debates would also be furthered.