Close encounters of a critical kind: a diffractive musing in/between new material feminism and object-oriented ontology

TAYLOR, Carol (2016). Close encounters of a critical kind: a diffractive musing in/between new material feminism and object-oriented ontology. Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies, 16 (2), 201-212.

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Abstract

For a number of years, new material feminists have been developing new theoretical tools, new modes of conceptual analysis and new ethical frameworks. Object-oriented ontology, part of the speculative realism ‘movement’, has been engaged in something similar. Yet these endeavours have often taken place in ‘parallel universes’, despite sharing – or at least colliding around – a range of somewhat similar ontological and epistemological commitments. Composed as a diffractive musing encounter in which insights are read ‘through one another’ (Barad, 2007: 25) in order to ‘attend to … details and specificities of relations of difference and how they matter’ (Barad, 2007:71), the article brings Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway, already a ‘foundational’ text for new material feminism, into an encounter with a speculative realist text of the same ‘foundational’ status, Harman’s The Quadruple Object. The article develops a notion of diffractive musing as embodied, sensory struggle which instantiates intellectual generosity as a mode of critique. Following this, it puts diffractive musing to work theoretically via an encounter between object-oriented ontology and new material feminism. Keywords : new material feminism, speculative realism, diffraction, musing, critique

Item Type:	Article
Research Institute, Centre or Group - Does NOT include content added after October 2018:	Sheffield Institute of Education
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616636145
Page Range:	201-212
Depositing User:	Carol Taylor
Date Deposited:	25 Jun 2015 09:43
Last Modified:	18 Mar 2021 06:51
URI:	https://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/10438

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