When Theory Is Not Enough: A Material Turn in Gender Studies

Abstract

In the introduction to their Material Feminisms (2008), Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman point out, as a caution in the second sentence as it were, that they are aware that they will be sparking ‘intense debate’ with their (re)turn to matter as a concern of Gender Studies and Gender Theory. And this is not surprising, in that feminism and gender studies have had a hard time with materiality if and insofar as the materiality of women’s bodies has been and continues to be the site on which gender is being installed, defended, called for, impelled. For Alaimo and Hekman, therefore, materiality is ‘an extraordinarily volatile site for feminist theory—so volatile, in fact, that the guiding rule of procedure for most contemporary feminisms requires that one distance oneself as much as possible from the tainted realm of materiality by taking refuge within culture, discourse, language’.

It is this truism—that liberation lies in a detachment of men and women, feminism and gender, from materiality—that, however, has caused considerable scepticism, most virulently and wittily perhaps in Eve Kosofsky Sedwick’s attack on ‘theory’ as that which in all seriousness believes that ‘the distance of any … account [of human beings or cultures] from a biological basis is assumed to correlate near-precisely with its potential for doing justice to difference … and to the possibility of change’. This begs the question why, in everyday lived experience, a fully deconstructed concept of gender as it is currently available in academic debate, a concept that is founded on the dynamics of the linguistic-performative turn, seems to have made next to no difference as gender discourses continue to produce ‘men’ and ‘women’ in blissful ignorance of their deconstruction. Working on the suspicion that turning away from matter and towards ‘construction’ may not per se be as liberatory as one might think, Sedgwick sets out to reverse it in a variety of micro-manoeuvres, for example by finding the ‘formidably rich phenomenology of emotions in [Silvan] Tomkins’, a phenomenology that is fully grounded in the body and that is ‘formidably rich’ not in spite of this grounding but because of it. And it may be ‘formidably rich’ precisely because Tomkins chooses to focus on the largely ungendered but fully material terrain of affect rather than the more culture (and hence gender) driven history of emotions.

It is such notions of materiality, to the side of gender as it were, that have become the focal point for much stimulating (gender) work in recent years and this contribution is designed to engage with this ‘material turn’ and bring it to bear on the question of how matter could be made to matter differently. In the process, prominent current proponents of this ‘material turn’ as well as forerunners such as Luce Irigaray’s ‘matter mysticism’, and indeed women’s long history of siding with matter rather than against it, are introduced and discussed. But in the end, theory alone will not be enough, for how can ‘theory’, an exclusively cerebral exercise, speak of and to matter without taming it once again into discourse, language about matter and its discursive place? The author sees literature (yes, even though it is entirely made of language) as one privileged site on which new materialisms are being developed, deployed, brought to bear on an audience, and tested. The interesting question will be what happens to ‘gender’ in an arena in which the human is one material phenomenon among many, internally criss-crossed by material events, and articulated in literary formats designed to re-somatize human bodies along unpredictable lines. The work of A. L. Kennedy, currently maybe the most experimental writer of matter and its ‘formidably rich phenomenology’ of affect, will provide the literary field in which the ‘material turn’ is experientially explored. Here, this chapter touches on what the editors have called ‘the renewed interest in the phenomenological side of reading processes that figures the (reading of a) text as an event’.