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The Living Present as a Materialist Feminist

Temporality
Rachel Loewen Walker
Published online: 09 May 2014.

To cite this article: Rachel Loewen Walker (2014) The Living Present as a Materialist Feminist Temporality,
Women: A Cultural Review, 25:1, 46-61, DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2014.901107
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R A C H E L

L O E W E N

W A L K E R

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The Living Present as

a Materialist Feminist
Temporality
Abstract: Bringing together the work of Barad and Deleuze, this article develops the
concept of the living present as a frame for an emerging feminist temporality. Within
feminist and queer theories, there has been much discussion of the value of nonchronological time in opening up a transformative and unknown future. The author
expands on this arena by discussing not only the future, but also the echoes, resonances
and traces of the pasta past whose material effects continue to act as living,
changing forces on the present and the future. Described as the present of retention
and expectation, the living present is never a static now, but always a stretching
between past and future as it contracts all past experiences and expects those yet to
come. As it builds on the work of Grosz, Colebrook and others, the living present
encourages non-linear, open-ended readings of past events, and therefore represents a
new lens through which to approach documented and assumed histories. By opening
up collaborative lines of flight between new materialism, Deleuze and feminism,
the thick time of the living present reveals a past of forceful, intra-active materialities.
It is a realm of possibility to which one is accountable, but not bound.
Keywords: feminist materialism, temporality, living present, Barad, Deleuze

Everything is imprinted forever with what it once was (Winterson

2009: 119, 207)

Wintersons The Stone Gods tells the stories of Billie (Homo

sapiens) and Spike (Robo sapiens), two lovers who blur the boundaries
between human and non-human, organism and machine, across varying
temporal sites. Moving through (and back in) time, Wintersons tale folds
in on itself; time repeats and rewinds, love echoes through technology and
organism, and cause and effect become the ever more distant relatives of
possibility and production. The novels tone is apocalyptic as each of its
EANETTE

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Women: a cultural review Vol. 25. No. 1.
ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2014 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandfonline.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2014.901107

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three vignettes explores the theme of environmental destruction: the first

and third through an imaginative future where humankind has exhausted
the earths resources and has resorted to other means of consumption and
control, and the second by travelling back in time to 1774 where Billy and
Spikkers are placed in the middle of mans takeover and destruction of the
lush, balanced ecosystem of Easter Island.1 But there is a sense in which
Winterson is less concerned with a present moment of global crisis than
with re-imagining the stories we tell ourselves about what constitutes the
past, what counts as progress and what humanity means in relation to an
elongated temporality of earths existence, one where the time of human
beings becomes just one moment among others. Displacing the readers
reliance on a linear narrative, The Stone Gods winds through time; it is
self-referential, it trips over itself and, at any given moment, it could be
revealed that what we think is the future is actually the past (or the
present, or an alternate timeline altogether).
I begin with The Stone Gods because it expresses two phenomenal
operations that form the touchstones of this article: the co-creative
relationship between meaning and materiality, and the becoming of time.
Although there are multiple overlaps between these processes, the first
draws from new and critical feminist materialisms,2 while the second builds
on Gilles Deleuzes (with Bergson) philosophy of duration, becoming and
the living present. It is in the collaborative contact zones between these
processes that we find sites of possibility for feminist projects, as the living
present re-imagines our reliance on linear, chronological time, offering
instead a dynamic engagement with temporality, one where the past is
continually re-imagined in its present invocations. The metaphysical
implications of such a move lie in its recognition that a living present is
always a live present: it is an enactment of the processes of growth, change,
movement and touch that characterize not only our human bodies, but
bodies of water, insect bodies, and the systems of a city as it breathes its
workers in and out from dawn until dusk and beyond. Each of these
processes is temporal not in its adherence to an externally imposed
timeline, but to its own making of time as the becoming of materiality.
Building on this, I develop the concept of a living present as a frame
for an emerging feminist temporality. Relying on Karen Barads (2007)
concept of intra-active becoming as indicative of a collaborative,
productive and open-ended relationship between time and matter, I
look at the consequences of such an approach in relation to feminist
and queer theorizing. There has been much discussion of the value of nonchronological time in opening up a transformative and unknown future
for example, Elizabeth Grosz has long argued that the potentialities of
feminist politics hinge on the fact that beings are impelled forward to a

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future that is unknowable, and relatively uncontained by the past (Grosz
2005: 29). Although I support the optimism of such sentiments, I argue
here that what is missing from this arena is a more developed discussion of
the pasta past whose material effects continue to act as living, changing
forces on the present and the future. I therefore explore the becoming of
the past through Deleuzes living presentan enfolding of past, present
and future (Deleuze 1994). Described as the present of retention and
expectation, the living present is never a static now, but always a
stretching between past and future as it contracts all past experiences and
expects those yet to come. As it builds on the work of Grosz, Claire
Colebrook and other scholars working on feminist temporalities (Colebrook, 2009; Grosz 2004, 2005), the living present encourages non-linear,
open-ended readings of past events, and therefore represents a new lens
through which to approach our documented and assumed histories,
including our feminist histories. For, in fact, I understand one of the
radical potentials of new materialism as primarily a philosophy of time,
one which illustrates the absolute possibility of any given moment when
conceived as a living present. Through this framing, we can then reread
Groszs above-indicated claim, recognizing that a future uncontained by
the past is not a future without a past, but rather a thick time of the present
that stretches to all past experiences in its very engendering of a novel future.

Matters of Life
New materialist scholars contend that post-structuralist theories of
language and discourse have neglected to attend to the role of matter in
our epistemological, ontological and ethical projects (see Barad 2006;
Hekman 2010; Kirby 2011; van der Tuin 2011a). Now, post-structuralism
has been invaluable as a means of destabilizing binarized biologies of
gender, sexuality, race and ability (Where would we be without Butlers
In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender
itselfas well as its contingency or Derridas there is nothing outside of the
text [Butler 1990: 175, original emphasis; Derrida 1984: 158]?), but it has
also meant that feminist theory has retained a deep mistrust of the bodya
denial of the materiality of the bodily self (Braidotti 2000: 160).3
Consequently, our familiar categories of gender, sexuality, race, class and
ability, and others, often persist as neat sign systems that are unable to
transcend their structuralist legacies (see Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2011).
Within such a framing, then, the structural force of the sign as only the
referent to an inaccessible real leaves us unable to recognize the affective
force of the material.4 Instead, new materialisms point towards a radical
immanence: there is no inside/outside, no origin and end, no gap between

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sign/structure/language and reference/nature/matter (van der Tuin

2011b: 288). Such projects work to begin at the real or the full presence
of the material (sexing/gendering body), exploring the effects we have on
those things (whether people, plants, highways or animals) around us and,
concurrently, the effects that such things have on us. By collapsing the
binary between the real and the representational, life itself becomes the
affective capacity of matter, where life is neither material nor immaterial,
neither organic nor inorganic, neither actual nor virtual, but instead a
spatio-temporal relationality that constitutes singularities and meaning
through the dynamism of an intra-active becoming.
Enlisting her background in theoretical physics, Barad uses intraactivity to refer to a cardinal relationship between entities, whereby
individual entities cannot be said to exist as things in themselves, but are
instead understood as relational phenomena. By phenomena, Barad diverges
from common uses of the term within philosophy and instead relies on the
work of physicist and philosopher Niels Bohr. Bohr describes phenomena
as the ontological inseparability of objects and apparatuses (quoted in
Barad 2006: 128), where apparatuses are externally imposed cuts, boundaries and structures that themselves act as material configurations of meaning.
Individual entitiesmatter, human, non-human, discourse, nature and
culturethen, only find meaning or expression through their co-creative
connections and entanglements with other entities. As the process by
which this activity occurs, intra-action is to be distinguished from
interaction, such that the latter refers to the interactions of individual
agencies (still interconnected but distinct), while the former looks at the
ways in which these distinct agencies are themselves formed through their
engagement. Intra-activity indicates that meaningful units of analysis are no
longer the table, the molecule or the human, but rather the construction (or meaning-imbuing) of the table as a surface on which to place ones
work. More importantly, this event of table-making is not merely a
product of my placing things on the table, but instead the differentiating
instant of my and the tables co-creation of the experience, such that
determinate entities emerge from their intra-action (Barad 2006: 128).
The accompanying concept of becoming is no stranger to feminist
projects, as it has been used to destabilize normative categories of
identity (for example, illustrating that identities such as heterosexual
or even homosexual are stagnant and fixed, therefore limiting the
productive uptake of diverse sexual subjectivities). Such a proliferation
of identities and movements places an emphasis not on coherence,
sameness or self, but on differencean ontology not of being per se, but
of being in process. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze illustrates the
phenomenon of becoming by reference to Lewis Carrolls Alice in

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Wonderland. When Alice first falls down the rabbit hole and is
presented with the dilemma of fitting her body through a doorway
that is half her size, she drinks a bottle of liquid which shrinks her
down to the door, only to realize that she is now too small to reach the
key, which she has left on the table above. Alice then eats a piece of
cake, which shoots her up to the ceiling, turning not only the door, but
also the table and key into tiny fixtures below. With regard to Alices
change in size, Deleuze draws attention to the way we often try to
understand such events as having happened in time, such that when one
says Alice becomes larger, one means that she is larger now; she was
smaller before (Deleuze 1990: 3). We identify Alice as huge and Alice
as tiny as distinct events taking place in static time. When thinking in
terms of becoming, however, we must refrain from thinking according
to distinct events, for becoming does not tolerate the separation or the
distinction of before and after, or of past and future (Deleuze 1990: 3).
Becoming eludes the present moment; Alice becomes larger than she
was at the same time as she is smaller than she becomes.
In effect, the process of becoming means to move in both directions at
one: Alice does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa (Deleuze
1990: 3). Furthermore, her becoming taller and becoming smaller do
not occur in abstraction from the food and drink that accompany
her changemuch less the table, key and doorway which are themselves
becoming smaller/larger along with Alice. In this sense, becoming
constitutes more than an (anti-)identity claim; it expresses a temporality,
a movement of an intra-active becoming, whereby rather than thinking
about time as a chronological counting of momentssets of befores and
afters that are progressively directed towards a futurean intra-active
becoming illustrates that time is a durational succession of change
which apprehends any distinct moment or present as a becoming
that is co-determinate with a live temporal frame. In this way, Barads
idiomatic quote that matter comes to matter through the iterative intraactivity of the world in its becoming illustrates that materiality and
temporality are inextricable (Barad 2003: 823, original emphasis); our
comprehension of materiality itselftake Alices key, for exampleis
made possible by a memory of the function a key serves, as well as the
anticipation of a future where its use satisfies Alices present desire to
move her body through a doorway.

Rethinking Time as Progress

Such an operation of time contrasts with traditional views of time as
chronos: a chronological before and after that we can bind together

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through interpretations of cause and effect. This method orients itself

towards a set of goals that will remedy the travesties of the past and, in so
doing, it remains fixated on the anticipation of a superior future.
Discussing this future-oriented politics of temporality, Vincanne Adams,
Michelle Murphy and Adele E. Clarke note the affective power of
anticipation in maintaining such a perspective, describing it as a regime
of being in time, in which one inhabits time out of place as the future
(Adams et al. 2009: 247). Alice shrinks so that she can get through the door
(and yet no one thought to wonder whether or not the door grew so that she
may step through). Although the authors are not entirely critical of the
function of anticipation, they raise concern about the ways such a focus
can form a totalizing orientation. For example, modes of preparing for
or speculating upon future events, whether in the realm of technoscience, biomedicine or environmentalism, have the effect of bringing
future events (and disasters) into the frame of the present moment. In this
way, Adams et al. write, the future increasingly not only defines the
present but also creates material trajectories of life that unfold as
anticipated by those speculative processes (Adams et al. 2009: 248, original
emphasis). Take, for example, the discourse surrounding new reproductive technologies. In Disciplining Mothers: Feminism and the New
Reproductive Technologies, Jana Sawicki writes that while fertility
treatments, surrogacy and genetic developments respond to infertility in
increasingly adept and effective ways, there is a faction of the discourse
that relies on the image of a future where there is no infertility as
justification for procedures in the present. The result is that medical
models and norms isolate types of abnormality or deviancy, while
[constructing] new norms of healthy and responsible motherhood
(Sawicki 1999: 194). Sawickis observation that medical solutions to
fertility issues will become the only methods of response, while other
approaches will be ignored, illustrates the ways in which an anticipated
future where new reproductive technologies are considered de facto
valuable ends up working as if the virtues of movement into valued
futures are already known (Adams et al. 2009: 251).
Wendy Brown likens this uncritical acceptance of the virtuous
movement into the future to modernitys progress narratives: The
conviction that history has reason, purpose, and direction (Brown 2001:
5). Through its description as having emerged in inegalitarian, unenlightened times, modernity embodies the movement of continual
progress. Likewise, the thesis that humanity is making steady, if uneven
and ambivalent, progress toward greater freedom, equality, prosperity,
rationality, or peace emerges as a condition for the possibility of
contemporary human subjectivity (Brown 2001: 6). Folded through

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Sawickis critique of new reproductive technologies, this progress narrative links with the logic of consumerism and commodification by inciting
the desire for better babies (Sawicki 1999: 194). The result is that such
technologies are fundamentally perceived as enabling, as themselves better,
more productive and as indicative of technological progress. Furthermore,
by locating the problem of infertility largely within womens bodies, the
discourse around new reproductive technologies replicates neoliberal
constructions of time as a linear and cumulative movement forward. The
result is that we remain fixated on human agency as the sole means by
which we can bring about the anticipated future.
The force of the neoliberal progress narrative has also been critically
taken up within queer theory, as Shannon Winnubst argues that it is
precisely a temporality of futurity that anchors [a] contemporary politics
of normalization (Winnubst 2010: 138). By this she means that the social
and political forces of capitalism, whiteness, heteronormativity and
nationalism are structured by their reliance on teleological progress
narratives which maintain our unwitting obedience to the future
(Winnubst 2010: 138). To contrast this, there is a long history within queer
theory of re-imagining temporality outside of a heteronormative future of
childhood adulthood marriage children death (see Ahmed 2006;
Edelman 2004; Halberstam 2005; Winnubst 2006). While this trajectory
may indicate the given course of development and growth for most, for
queer subjects, movement through time has often taken a different path.
For example, Judith Halberstams queer time explores the elongated
adolescence that queer persons may experience as she writes that: in
Western cultures, we chart the emergence of the adult from the dangerous
and unruly period of adolescence as a desired process of maturation; and we
create longevity as the most desirable future (Halberstam 2005: 152).
Halberstam questions these pre-existing chronologies of maturity by
tracing the diversity and richness of queer subcultures, thus retelling and
re-imagining the time of a stretched-out adolescence, rather than the
directedness towards a predetermined (heteronormative) future that casts a
particular net of maturity and expectation.5
Now, it is not ridiculous to hope for a future that is different, a future
where queer youth can attend high school without fear or where
reproductive technologies make it possible for two women to contribute
genetic material to their shared child. Although there are problems
with the myth that we can progressively reach a particular space and time
of liberation and freedom, there is merit to the complexities of hopefulness, imagining the new and wishful thinking, which have
been invaluable for feminist theorizing and political feminist projects
(see Coleman and Ferreday 2010; McKenna 2001; de Pizan 1982).

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As Rebecca Coleman indicates, hope operates as a potentiality, an

interpellation into a future that is within the present (Coleman 2013;
Coleman and Ferreday 2010). At the same time, the very presence of
hope reminds us that feminist visions of the future have not been
realized in the present (Ahmed 2004: 187, my emphasis). I would argue
that materialist feminisms are deeply and productively infused with an
optimism that we are not doomed to live out the same injustices,
discriminations and violences for all time, and yet they are not
circumscribed by expectations of what exactly a feminist future might
look like. The temporality of hope is such that at the same time as it
projects us forward, it recognizes the persistence of the past in the
present (Ahmed 2004: 187), and, furthermore, its potentiality is one of
inventiveness; in hoping for transformed futures, we, as feminists, are
enacting such possibilities in the present (Coleman 2013). Thus, there is
hope in Barads call for a different starting point, a different
metaphysics (Barad 2003: 812), and a view of the future as an openended arena that holds possibilities for worlds, bodies and practices
beyond what we can imagine in the presentas Grosz calls for in
The Nick of Time and Time Travels (Grosz 2004, 2005).
I also recognize that there are vast differences between the progress
narratives of modernity that shape popular discourse and the talk of
futurity that characterizes feminist and new materialist scholarship.
However, for the purposes of this discussion, I remain hesitant about
an uncritical acceptance of such a politics. Like Brown and Sawicki, as
well as Adams, Murphy and Clarke above, I worry that by continuing to
focus so much on the future, even in its untimeliness and open-endedness,
we may unwittingly subject ourselves to a paradigm in which the
rational, human subject remains at the helm of times passing. I wonder
whether, in lauding a politics based on random ruptures and chance, we
sometimes forget the value of thinking the past. A materialist temporality
shifts the focus on an open-ended future, ever so slightly, to include the
affective power of the past and the present, or, rather, cueing Wintersons
time travellers Billie and Spike, we cannot think of their story as the
cumulative journey of autonomous individuals to a future in which we
will finally access the knowledge needed to fix our past mistakes and
respond to our present environmental problems. The Stone Gods refuses to
provide a sequential tale of cause and effect, and instead skips around on
itself; it reminds us that, by thinking in duration, we can never fully
mark the future as future. In fact, there is a scene in the novel where Billie
finds the unfinished manuscript of The Stone Gods on the London Tube,
presumably the copy that the reader is presently reading. She writes:

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I was traveling home on the Tube tonight and I noticed that

someone had left a pile of paper on the seat opposite The Stone
Gods, said the title. OK, must be anthropology. Some thesis, some
PhD. Whats that place with the statues? Easter Island? I flicked
through it. No point starting at the beginningnobody ever does.
(Winterson 2009: 119)
The novels reflexivity ensures that the reader is never fully able to
determine the chronology of the narrativea piece (or manuscript) is
always left behind.6 The three vignettes of the narrative could, in fact, be
read in reverse, out of order or even horizontally, as if they are taking
place simultaneously in presents that could have been. In this way, the
reader is compelled to let go of an expectation for a particular outcome.
Each moment of the narrative becomes a living present, where time is
stretched to include the effects of that which has not yet happened and to
re-imagine a past that has supposedly already been lost.

The Living Present

The value of the living present lies in its resistance to conceptions of the
present as a fixed now. Instead, the time that we may experience as
present is always a stretching between past and future, as it contracts those
experiences that contribute to the sense of the moment and expects those
yet to come (Deleuze 1994). This means that the past and the future are
always dimensions of the present, and they operate on, with and
alongside the present through the passive synthesis of habit. Moving
beyond the common understanding of habit as an acquired behaviour
pattern, Deleuze 1994 describes it as the automated retention of past
experiences and expectations of future outcomes that give meaning to the
present: an adult hand reflexively pulls away from a hot surface, while a
child reaches towards the stove, not yet having lived through the present
that will add this experience to her plethora of habitual contractions.
Habits constitute our expectation that a familiar song on the radio will
continue and not end abruptly after the next note, therefore forming
the material of continuity. It is only because the present is livinga
contraction of past and futurethat we experience a connection between
one note and the next at all. We know that the melody follows a
certain form and has a particular character to it, and so we are able to
draw a connection between sounds which would otherwise be noise.
Now, Deleuzian habits must also be differentiated from common human-centred understandings, as they do not refer to psychological processes that only take place in the human mind. Just as the

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preoccupation with human consciousness has tied us to modernist progress

narratives, our understandings of time have bound us to a metaphysics of
counting, calculating and living in a time which we apprehend through
human reason. Instead, all organisms and entities are made by passive
habits of contraction: What we call wheat is a contraction of the earth and
humidity (Deleuze 1994: 75). The act of contraction in such a process,
then, indicates the synthesis that takes place in a living present that is
thick with the past (Deleuze 1994: 701). It is through contraction that
we intuit duration, or a whole universe which is relational and intensive,
and what this indicates for us is that time itself is formed through these
passive contractions of habit. Time neither pre-exists the contraction of
the melody, as a timeline on which we find distinct notes, nor is it the
container in which a five-minute-long piece of music takes place; it is
made by the duration of the notes themselves (Williams 2011: 25). We
could think of this in relation to a tree: a tree that ages, grows larger and
decays is not acted on by the passing of time, but rather making time
through its movements and changes. In this way, matter itself is the
force of times passing and, consequently, [w]e live as time makers
(Williams 2011: 37)tables, chairs, animals and plants live as time
makers. Existence is predicated on the making of time, and each time
maker is part of a living present or an intra-active duration.

Feminist Re-imaginings
To think about a living present in relation to the projects of feminist
philosophy is to develop a different sense of the time of history. Rather
than relying on chronology or the construction of a politics of the
subject formed around key dates and events which represent progressive
states of self-actualization, we are able to think such events out of time.
Take, for example, the date that same-sex marriage was achieved in
Canada: 20 July 2005. In such a chronological time, the past is only
actualonly the set of archived and stored events that have occurred
and been completed (Colebrook 2009: 12). So the passing of Bill C-38:
The Civil Marriage Act constitutes a moment forever emblazoned in the
history of queer rightsthe moment of emancipation. The problem with
such a telling of history is that it aligns with the modernist progress
narrative identified above. Here we have a group fighting for their rights
and freedoms, attaining them and then continuing to live on in a
future that has overcome the past. The past in this narrative is a static, actual
event, while the living present construes the past as intra-activethat is,
as always already enfolded in the present.

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The ethical implications of such an enfolding are that the living present
introduces a responsibility to the past in the present not as a specific
demand from particular past commitments, but rather as an awareness
that the present cannot absolve itself selectively of the past (Williams
2011: 18). So the present Canadian government cannot continue to use Bill
C-38 as the poster child for its tolerance while enacting human rights
violations against transgender persons. Ahmed might call this the
stickiness of the past, such that historical harms live on not only in the
body of the individual, but in the skin or the intergenerational affectivity
of whole communities (Ahmed 2004: 334). To forget the past (and we are
no strangers to such large-scale forgettings in the face of historical injustices),
then, would be a repetition of the violence or injury (Ahmed 2004: 33);
our bodies, our communities and our ecologies remember these pasts. As
Noela Davis has recently demonstrated in relation to epigenetics, our very
bodies are rich compositories of past experiences, and these experiences
serve as much more than haunting memories, but rather play out through
patterns of illness and social behaviours (Davis 2013). Thus, if we focus
only on a future yet to come, we fail to see that there is still an infinite
number of past experiences, habits and memories that enact our particular
present. A homophobic slur could be examined according to its distinct
spatio-temporal location: why did that word come from that individual at
this time? By asking questions about what wider materialities are at play in
any event, we respond to the complexity of injustices, which can not only
bring about change for the better, but also reveal the assemblages of
violence and negation, which are different every time.
A temporality of new materialism, or of thinking in duration, means
that the past is always a haunting of the present: each text, word, fragment
and image of the past acts as an always present resistance (or insistence)
to a simple moving forward (Colebrook 2009: 13). Just as we cannot
expect to jump up and run away the minute after we twist an ankle, we
cannot erase a history of exclusion with the great big stroke of legalizing
same-sex marriage in Canada. Our pasts are remade in the present,
through the anti-gay sermons of a Catholic priest and in the heteronormativity that pervades the concept of marriage itself. The living present
is heavy with lineages that mimic, critique and undo our assumed histories,
and, rather than wiping away the past or seeking absolution for our
actions, we can embrace this thick temporality, recognizing its ability to
deepen our accountabilities to those pasts and their possible futures. In this
way, such a focus becomes a necessary form of ethical engagement with the
world which begins not from the point of subject/object relations (or
human/inhuman, nature/culture or cause/effect, for that matter), but
from the position of being always already entangled in a vital materiality.

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So, to return to Bill C-38, 20 July 2005 need not stand in as the day of
queer rights in Canada. Instead, it can be folded into the present rise in
queer teen suicides. How do we read the present politics of queer identity
alongside the legislation of same-sex unions and the largely sanctioned
bullying of queer youth? Just as Colebrook writes that any feminist
claim in our present is in harmony and dissonance with a choir of past
voices (Colebrook 2009: 1314), any instances of violence against queer
persons in the present echo a past (and a future) of violence and
discrimination that continues to act. This method of reading produces
new futures at the same time as it produces new pasts, and furthermore it
entails a more careful reading of the apparatuses of knowledge production that contribute to the organizing narratives of history. In fact, it
may lead us to interrogate (and forget) those identities, representations
and reflections that we cling tothe way that we call marriage progress
and the fact that we want sameness in our rights and freedoms, without
questioning the complex materialities that mitigate these rights and
freedoms. The living present of a feminist politic is one where we can
bring Sojourner Truths bold queryAint I a Woman?to bear on
twenty-first-century identity politics, for it (re)creates a space where we
can question the effects of this category woman: the freedoms it affords
as well as the deeply drawn boundaries on which it relies.

Conclusion
I began this discussion with Jeanette Wintersons The Stone Gods, a novel
which creatively and pointedly looks at the relationships between humankind and the earth in a variety of temporal zones. The central characters, Billie
and Spike, are the star-crossed lovers who find each other across time,
regardless of sex, gender and race (in two out of the three vignettes, Spike is a
Robo sapiens), lending to the quasi-Nietzschean view that life is the eternal
recurrence of the same. However, as it plays out, Winterson adeptly illustrates
not the return of the same, but rather a temporality that is fundamentally one
of difference and repetition. History repeats itself in The Stone Gods, but each
repetition differentiates the one that came before. As a result, the novel tells us
that we can never properly predict, speculate or anticipate what the future
will hold, at the same time as we must look deep into our presents and our
pasts in order to make sense of those things that we think we know. Deleuze
describes this dual process as that of always creating and always forgetting.
On the one hand, we are always participants in the creation of a world
that is otherwiseand this is not a spontaneous, mystical activity; it means
that the examples I use in a journal article (queer rights in Canada) have force
in future configurations of partnership arrangements. Holding the pages of

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Wintersons cyber-feminist narrative between my fingers compels me to
rethink the trajectory of a story, to imagine ways of writing and thinking that
do not rely on a beginning and an end. On the other hand, we must forget
those identities, representations and reflections that we cling toto begin
from an assumption that heterosexual and homosexual constitute distinct
and divergent identities is to argue for rights based on beings who are fixed in
time. Were we to forget these identities, we may be able to multiply our
understandings of the changing subject; we may begin to imagine differentiations not based solely on sex or desire, but rather on the connections and
possibilities that are afforded by ones material engagements with the world.
In effect, Winterson is correct when she writes that [e]verything is
imprinted forever with what it once was (Winterson 2009: 119, 207), and
we could extend this to include the sentiment that everything is
imprinted forever with its own futurity, its own becoming. In many
ways, such an immense stretching of time indicates that there can never
be anything purely new in the abstract, disconnected sense of being an
originality, void of ties and conditions: each new becoming has a
duration that contracts the past virtualities from which it came. And yet,
it is important that we do not mistake this for a metaphysics of
determinism, a sense that we are bound to our pasts and fated to our
impending futures. We can, rather, understand memory as the passive
contraction of the whole of the past, where the act of contraction
influences, transforms and recreates the living present. This reflexive
practice illustrates the difference (every moment becomes anew) and
becoming (while at the same time the new is always in process, imprinted
with a past and an anticipated future) that shape our experiences and
understandings. The living present constructs new feminist futures at the
same time as it rewrites the stories and events that we take to be
feminisms past, so that we are unable to remain fixated on being as a
knowable identity and instead are stretched to comprehend the dynamic
responsibility afforded by the living present. The feminist politics that
arises from a living present can then apply this responsibility to the way
that we use these stories and events (i.e. rather than criticizing secondwave feminism for its liberalism, we can think about the work that the
act of critique does in challenging feminisms of the present to imagine
alternative political and social configurations).7 Such a practice illustrates
that to be of the world in its dynamic specificity is to be a time maker
(Barad 2006: 377): a complex process of habit, memory and chance as
they make and unmake the world around us. By opening up collaborative
lines of flight between new materialism, Deleuze and feminism, the thick
time of the living present reveals a past rich with intra-active materialities
a realm of possibility to which we are accountable, but not bound.

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Notes
1. Wintersons use of Easter Island refers to the factual Polynesian island of the same
name. Also called Rapa Nui, Easter Island is famous for its 887 stone statues, called
moai, which were created by its early inhabitants. For Winterson, these Stone Gods
represent the humanist desire to master both time and nature.
2. The new materialist scholars which this article echoes include Karen Barad (2003,
2006), Rosi Braidotti (2002, 2006, 2010), Elizabeth Grosz (2004, 2005, 2010), Vicki
Kirby (2011) and Iris van der Tuin (2011a, 2011b), among many others.
3. That said, it is this particular critique of post-structuralismthe claim that poststructuralists have failed to fully account for the bodythat has caused the largest stir
in relation to the wider reception of new feminist materialisms. A set of articles in the
European Journal of Womens Studies, spanning 2008 to the present, has gone back and
forth on the issue, beginning with Ahmeds challenge to Barad and others within the
field. She writes: the reading of Butler as anti-matter seems to be motivated, as if the
moment of rejection is needed to authorize a new terrain (Ahmed 2008: 33). Ahmed
argues that this enactment becomes a gesture of the theorist embarking on a heroic
and lonely struggle against the collective prohibitions of past feminisms (32). She
further charges new materialisms (and Barad, in particular) as providing a caricature of
poststructuralism as matter-phobic (34), a practice which has the unintended effect of
fetishizing materiality (35). Responses from van der Tuin and Davis argue that Ahmed
provides only a cursory reading of the scholarship and fails to attend to the
complexities of Barads work, but, more importantly, they clarify nuances of new
materialism, as Davis draws attention to the fact that new materialists are not arguing
that feminist theory has been anti-biological per se, but rather that the ways in which
biology has been understood and used have been reductiveit has been restricted to a
dualist framework where biology remains the other to the social (Davis 2009: 70). Van
der Tuin demonstrates that new materialism is deeply indebted to the contextualized
historicity of feminist theory. In fact, she describes the work of new materialism as
that of feminist generation, as in the multiple generations of feminist projects that have
gone before and those that are yet to comeprojects which always operate as a mess of
entangled conditions of emergence and possibility (van der Tuin 2008: 412).
4. My use of affect here and throughout the article draws more on a Deleuzian
understanding of affect than its indication of an emotional or physiological force.
Specifically, I use the term to refer to that which is produced when things come into
contact, whether bodies, a body and a song, or a chair leg scraping along the floor. For
Deleuze and Guattari, affects result in intensities beyond themselves, as they discuss
affect most often in relation to art, indicating that the affective power of art is the
capacity it has to create sensations, knowledges and meanings beyond the piece itself
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 1623). The affective force of the material, then, is not
only its emotional impact, but also its capacity to be world-making. The chair legs
scrape along the floor is an intra-active intensity. It moves us to understand the
relationality of the chair and the floor in the production of a sound, a scratched
floorboard or a moment of surprise.
5. For example, think about the North American It Gets Better campaign, which relies
on the bootstrapping humanist narrative of the autonomous man who struggles
through persecution (the requisitely painful teenage years of the queer youth) in order
to reach an adulthood of wholeness, progress and freedom from constraint.
6. In fact, one of Wintersons editors did leave a copy of the unfinished manuscript at an
underground station in south London, where a fan found it and then returned it to the
publisher.
7. The value of a responsible feminist politics has further been developed by Peta Hinton
in this special issue, where she attends to the importance of a materialist politics of
location, such that, as feminist scholars, we are responsible for our modes of

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theoretical production as they create the very identities, positionalities and marginalities with which we engage.

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