Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research

A Tale of Solidarity? Exploring Sino-Nordic Gender Studies Network

Xin Liu, Dušica Ristivojević, Yan Zhao — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article provides an account of the Sino-Nordic Gender Studies Network, which was founded in 2002, and had since then played a significant role in shaping feminist research and activist exchange between China and Nordic countries. However, the history and practices of this network has received scant attention in studies on transnational feminist solidarities. The aim of the article is twofold. First, we analyze the network using historical and autoethnographic approaches and map out a genealogy of feminist knowledge production that is located at the intersection of China and Nordic contexts. Second, we read the network through the lens of solidarity, all the while critically engaging with its defining parameters. As we will show, although solidarity has been increasingly associated with transnational feminism’s political and ethical orientations, the case of Sino-Nordic Gender Studies Network compels rethinking how and why the term is used and criticized. The complex relation between interpersonal relationships and the power imbalance between the various institutions and funding schemes calls into question the strict division between collective and individual that informs much discussion of feminist solidarity. Rather than simply being a good practice of feminist solidarity, this article argues that the Sino-Nordic Gender Studies Network offers important insights into the doing of solidarity even in its seeming absence.

Relationality, Not Universality: A Dialogue on Solidarity Across Movements, Borders and Species

Nóra Ugron, Maria Martelli, Veda Popovici — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper is an unfolding dialogue filled with questions and half-answers between three activists and engaged researchers from Eastern Europe, looking into the connections between different social movements, building internationalist solidarity and the possibility of (total) liberation. We think through issues such as the hegemony of what counts as politically relevant in a globalized world, the overrepresentation of Man following Sylvia Wynter, pain and grief in the face of current (social and ecological) crises and joining the fights for human and animal liberation. Drawing from feminist, queer, antispeciesist and Indigenous theories, as well as from our personal experiences, this exchange sinuously follows the question: What is to be done to always already facilitate the process of blooming into queer, decolonial and antispeciesist worlds?

Assembling the Brain: Disseminated and Confused Cognition at the Threshold of Ecological Relationality

Alberto Micali, Nicolò Pasqualini — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The perspective of philosophical posthumanism and the new materialist strands allow a rethinking of cognitive processes beyond the locationist standpoint. Locationism, indeed, acknowledges cognition as being singularly localised: now in neurons, now in the brain, now in the body of an organism that holds logo-centred, individuated and autonomous rationalism. Rather, the proposal of an assemblage-brain, and more broadly of an assembled-cognition, leads towards a rethinking of cognitive processes. Cognition becomes an extended and spread conjunction of processes, which can be barely located, whilst being open on an intensive and relational plane. To what extent is it, however, possible to presume such an ecologisation of cognition? What is the threshold of such a process, in regards to relationality itself, and to the alterities that are not necessarily endowed with a nervous system, or – further – non-biological ones?

In this article we advance the proposal to reconsider the embodied mind as being disseminated and confused, by overviewing some of the latest conceptualisations that offer an understanding of cognition as assembled in relations. Our proposal discusses mind processes as incessant and intensive exchanges amongst materialities. From a recursive, closed and neuro-centred event – a local property that is confined in an organ-organism, or concentrically prolonged from it – cognition extends beyond embodiment and the dualism that separates embodiness from a presupposed external; it assembles alterities, emerging as a necessarily ecological and plural process that overcomes the individual, and surpasses life as biologically individuated.

Fluid Anatomies and Technological Alterities. On Postanatomical Aesthetics in Contemporary Performance Art

Andrea Giomi — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This study seeks to examine postanatomical aesthetics in contemporary performance art by shedding light on its contribution to the new materialist debate on human and technology intra-actions. To this end, we highlight the influence of cyberfeminism, phenomenology and feminist queer discourse on the artistic representation of (techno)corporeality. The work of four artists will be presented: Isabelle Van Grimde, Jaime del Val, Marco Donnarumma, and Margherita Pevere. The paper demonstrates how their artistic practices provide an anti-normative representation of bodies, while suggesting a horizon for rethinking body politics.

Plants as Performers (and More): Rethinking Agency in the Multispecies Performance Ikebana

Jenni Vauhkonen — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article studies plant agency in a multispecies performance Ikebana (2022) by Fern Orchestra. The performance is not only made with, but also for plants. Through a participatory case study, this article demonstrates how due to the plant turn, as described by Natasha Myers (2015), plants in contemporary art are no longer seen as passive objects of artistic expression – which would be the case in traditional art history. Instead, they have become active agents in the formation of works of art. This shift challenges the anthropocentric view of art as a human creation only. Importantly, it also calls humans to reposition themselves in the multispecies environment more widely and therefore, as I argue, it has the potential to provoke change in anthropocentric societies.

Notes Toward an Anarchist Theory of Life: Three Animist Ontologies

Jesse Cohn — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores affinities between New Materialisms, anarchism, and varieties of Indigenous thought. It is suggested that all three share an animist ontology, a certain pragmatist and “meta-fetishistic" stance, a distrust of vertical thinking, a preference for horizontal arrangements, and even a kind of comedic “theory of life”. Taken together, these set New Materialisms on a firmly antifascist basis, helping to answer the frequent charge that they lack clear political commitments. Having made that argument, I then want to open up for consideration some ethical questions about life so theorised and explore some possible ways forward.