Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research

Editorial

Monika Rogowska-Stangret — 2023-07-31

The issue of “Matter. Journal of New Materialist Research” we offer our readers this summer consists of the articles, texts, and reviews that undertake a variety of research topics, methodologies, and approaches within new materialisms. This issue is about putting theory to practice. Through this very gesture the complex and multilayered entanglements and relationalities are revealed. How biology, medical conditions, politics, and economy are in the performative conversations? How an effort to produce knowledge otherwise is permeated with bodily-technology and collective becomings beyond binary logics? How human-non-human encounters challenge the object-subject division? How to look for “queerer forms of intimacy”, create a “community of oddkin”, and “defamiliarize” the apparently familiar? How neuroqueerdiversity is experienced, felt from within, constructed, and performed? How might it guide us into more just human-more-than-human entangled worlds? The authors contributing to this issue are challenging the readers with the above-mentioned questions introducing range of topics and approaches.

Doing infertility: an agential realist approach to the experiences of women with ‘atypical’ development of the reproductive system

Caynnã Santos — 2023-07-31

The current focus of feminist literature on the workings of new reproductive technologies has overshadowed a conclusion that also follows from approaching questions related to bodily reproductive capacities from a perspective informed by the relational ontologies advocated by feminist new materialisms, namely: like fertility, infertility is not an independent, strictly biological property inscribed a priori in human bodies, but rather consists of a phenomenon performatively enacted through specific material-discursive practices. To further explore this argument, this article proposes a reading of embodied experiences of infertility through Karen Barad’s (2007) agential realism and their theory of posthumanist performativity. The text is structured around excerpts from interviews with women diagnosed as infertile due to Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome. We seek to demonstrate how an ethico-onto-epistemological shift from “things” to material-discursive phenomena opens up important possibilities for developing new understandings of infertility that can overcome the limitations of both traditional biomedical and sociological approaches.

Weaving Rhizomes in Photography Research

Lorena R. Bañares — 2023-07-31

Anchored on Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhizome concept, this postqualitative research puts philosophical concepts to work in the doing of inquiry to produce knowledge differently. It adheres to ontoepistemology where the act of knowing is through performativity. Letting the (un)thought guide the work, I experimented with how materialities in photography are constituted in photographing Cambodia’s Angkor temples. The inquiry yielded a new visual rhizomatic approach in research-creation that disrupts the colonial and stabilizing methods in research. Called Weaving Rhizomes, this approach acknowledges the imbricated relations of humans and non-humans, constantly entangled and (re)produced in the doing-making of research: the becoming of photographer-researcher.

The Infallible and the Specter – Manifesting (artificial) subjectification in female sex robots

Gosia Wojas — 2023-07-31

The text outlines a recent artistic practice and theoretical research into a female AI sex doll object, its materiality, and signification. It is a culmination of a three-year study and intervention into the coded systems of control and sites of resistance that play out within the context of an artificial female body. Machine Learning (ML) algorithm is the mediator between sex robots, their users and cloud data storage, facilitating learning from their inter-actions. I examine this engagement and materiality of the sex robot through notions of feminist mimesis, substitute and simulation against emancipatory politics in object formation. I connect these ideas with theories of new materialism and recent scholarship on digital data science.

Human-animal relationships, silliness, and queer homemaking in Sven Nordqvist’s Pettson and Findus

Arwen Rosenberg-Meereboer — 2023-07-31

This article argues that the picture book series Pettson and Findus by Sven Nordqvist can be a valuable resource when looking at ethics of matter and thinking through relationships with the more-than-human. Pettson and Findus is a series of picture books written and illustrated by Sven Nordqvist. The books depict the relationship between old man Pettson and his cat Findus, who live in an old farmhouse in the south of Sweden together with chickens, invisible “muckles” and a variety of other creatures and people. The books centre on relatively mundane activities, made into small adventures by the various different creatures. This article analyses the Pettson and Findus series through Donna Haraway’s analysis of human animal relationships in When Species Meet (2008) and calls for the making of oddkin in Staying with the Trouble (2016). This article, using Will McKeithen’s analysis in Queer Ecologies of the Home and Monica Flegel’s Pets and domesticity in Victorian culture, argues that Pettson and Findus live in a queer kind of household, and participate in queer home making. Using Jack Halberstam’s analysis in The Queer Art of Failure (2011) this article centres Pettson as a figure that is both queer and silly, and through this queer silliness creates certain openings for queer community with the more-than-human, and the making of oddkin.

The journey of late diagnosis of autism from an autoethnographic, neuroqueer, affective and performative perspective

Tània Codina — 2023-07-31

In this article, I present my journey of late diagnosis of autism employing autoethnography with video performance, affects and the concept and practice of “neuroqueering”. Within the framework of Performative New Materialism, the neurodiversity paradigm and Critical Autism Studies, I try to respond to the cultural narratives created by non-autistic authoritarian figures, generate a different point of view within Critical Autism Studies by correlating the autistic experience with affects, and give a step forward in changing how the autistic experience is culturally researched, written about and spoken of.

Sympoiesis

Camila Bernava — 2023-07-31

Book review of Visual Participatory Arts Based Research in The City: Ontology, Aesthetics and Ethics

Blanca Callén Moreu — 2023-07-31

This review of the book Visual Participatory Arts Based Research In The City: Ontology, Aesthetics and Ethics, edited by Laura Trafí-Prats and Aurelio Castro-Varela, brings together contributions that continue and are part of the tradition of urban STS studies, and highlights the most original contributions that artistic research brings with it: fundamentally, art as a medium and device for sensitising bodies through aesthetic experiences that make contemporary urban problems tangible; and art as a creative and affirmative act, experimental and speculative in nature, which helps to re-imagine the city from subaltern and historically marginalised visions.

Haunting the Way in New Materialist Ecocriticism. Book review of Spectrality and Survivance. Living the Anthropocene

Sam Le Butt — 2023-07-31

The Resilient Stain. Book review of The Three Sustainabilities: Energy, Economy, Time

Amanda Boetzkes — 2023-07-31

This article is a book review of The Three Sustainabilities: Energy, Economy, Time (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) by Allan Stoekl. The book marks a new contribution to the critical theory of ecology by one of the translators of the writings of George Bataille. The article situates the book in relation to Stoekl’s previous theorization of postsustainability, and considers its insights with regard to recent accounts of systems theory, energy humanities, continental philosophy and literature. The author considers how the spectre of extinction governs Stoekl’s theorization of three interleaved versions of sustainability.