The New Materialism and Sexual Difference | Gill Jagger (Article)

Link: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/678190

Abstract

This article examines key strands in the new materialism, which is differentiated from the materialism rooted in Marxism, and identifies two different claims that run through these new materialist positions. One is a kind of metaphysical claim about the link between our articulations and that which they are articulating. This reformulates a general claim about the interimplication of the material and the symbolic and reflects a concern that contemporary theories of the body, such as Judith Butler’s, are not respectful enough of the agency of matter. The other is a stronger claim about the relationship between the biological and social formations, forms of social identity and culture, in which culture is resituated as part of nature. Nature thus becomes the determining force, however open-ended and contingent. On this view, culture was nature all along. These two claims are examined in the context of debates about sexual difference. I argue that the new materialism neither necessarily leads to the conclusion that the duality of sexual difference is in any way inevitable nor provides justification for the claim that there is a metaphysical basis for sexual difference in biology. This becomes clear when sexual difference is considered in the context of Karen Barad’s work, specifically the relational ontology that underpins her elaboration of posthumanist performativity.