Generational Feminism

Generational Feminism

New Materialist Introduction to a

Generative Approach

Iris van der Tuin

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Tuin, Iris van der.

Generational feminism : new materialist introduction to a generative approach / Iris van der Tuin.
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ISBN 978-0-7391-9017-3 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-9018-0 (electronic)
1. Feminism. 2. Feminist theory--Methodology. I. Title.
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“This task cannot be undertaken with a naïve acceptance that our work is
done (as in postfeminism), nor with the fatalism that nothing is to be done
(as in a revisionist second wave). This third feminist generation must
undertake the ethical act of making feminism’s time now.”
—Kirsten Campbell (2004)
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: On Being an Agent of Feminism xi

1 The Key Terms of Generational Feminism 1

2 Classifixation in Feminist Theory 19
3 Dutiful Daughters 39
4 Generation in Genealogy 59
5 The Transversality of Barbara McClintock 73
6 The Full Force of Feminist Genealogy 95

Conclusion: Advancing Generative Feminism 115

Epilogue: Rhythmical Order 119
Bibliography 125
Index 145
About the Author 153

v
 Acknowledgments

This book is the result of having spent ten years as a researcher and
teacher of gender studies and philosophy of science in the Department of
Media and Culture Studies and at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry of the
Faculty of Humanities of Utrecht University, The Netherlands. In this
light, my exploration of the canon of feminist epistemology has a strong
institutional basis, is founded on intense teaching experience, and is in-
fused with the dreams and desires of many (international) colleagues,
peers, and students. The engagement with the feminist archive per-
formed with a keen eye for feminist new materialisms has therefore been
a “material-affective” affair, to borrow a recent term from Karen Barad. I
believe that the knowledge produced has gained from this situatedness.
For one thing, this book is itself a feminist archive, the archive of a period
of ten years that started with my PhD research—completed under the
guidance of Rosi Braidotti and defended on June 20, 2008—and which
will end on the 31st of August, 2014, the date that marks the end of my
post-doctoral project “The Material Turn in the Humanities” (NWO-Veni
275–20–029).
My companions at work and at home know that writing this book was
between me and my desk. Here, I do not intend to refer to concrete and
pre-existing material circumstances of writing. I am rather talking about
the constant longing for the materialization of the desk during the writ-
ing of this book. Many persons and institutions have made my desk-life
matter. Rosi Braidotti, Gloria Wekker, and the entire teaching team of the
BA, AM, RM, and PhD in Gender Studies at Utrecht University, a team
led by Rosemarie Buikema: Cecilia Åsberg, Babs Boter, Maayke Botman,
Marieke van Eijk, Sanne Koevoets, Anne-Marie Korte, Eva Midden, Dom-
itilla Olivieri, Trude Oorschot, Bettina Papenburg, Sandra Ponzanesi,
Christine Quinan, Mariëlle Smith, Kathrin Thiele, Milica Trakilovic, Ber-
teke Waaldijk, Jami Weinstein, Doro Wiese, and Marta Zarzycka, plus
our many student assistants. Co-teacher and co-author Rick Dolphijn.
The Utrecht-based new materialist scholars of “4M”: Maaike Bleeker,
Rosi Braidotti, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Rick Dolphijn, Birgit M. Kaiser,
Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Birgit Meyer, Janneke Raaijmakers, Joost Raes-
sens, Willemijn Ruberg, Kathrin Thiele, and Nanna Verhoeff. Our inter-
national collaborators around the COST Action IS1307 New Materialism:
Networking European Scholarship on “How Matter Comes to Matter”
and beyond (especially Marie-Luise Angerer, Cecilia Åsberg, Karen Bar-

vii
viii Acknowledgments

ad, Estelle Barrett, Corinna Bath, Barbara Bolt, Sophie Chapple, Olga Cie-
lemecka, Rebecca Coleman, Felicity Colman, Noela Davis, Dorota Go-
lanska, Peta Hinton, Ilona Hongisto, Sari Irni, Katie King, Vicki Kirby,
Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer, Hanna Meissner, Astrida
Neimanis, Jussi Parikka, Beatriz Revelles-Benavente, Monika Rogowska-
Stangret, Sigrid Schmitz, Milla Tiainen, Pat Treusch, Rachel Loewen
Walker, and Liu Xin). The Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht Univer-
sity where I met role models such as Claire Colebrook, Peter Galison,
Moira Gatens, Gregg Lambert, Genevieve Lloyd, Patricia MacCormack,
Paul Patton, John Protevi, and Joan W. Scott. The networks in European
Women’s and Gender Studies—Athena, Atgender, GenderACT, and
WeAVE—in the context of which I worked together with Kerstin Alne-
bratt, Angeliki Alvanoudi, Quirijn Backx, Annabel van Baren, Paulina
Bolek, Claire Bracken, Rosi Braidotti, Susan Cahill, Vera Fonseca, Sabine
Grenz, Daniela Gronold, Brigitte Hipfl, Ulla M. Holm, Edyta Just, Mia
Liinason, Linda Lund Pedersen, Maria do Mar Pereira, Marlise Mensink,
Cornelia Moeser, Anna Moring, Anita Mörth, Mischa Peters, Andrea
Pető, Sandra Prlenda, Beatriz Revelles-Benavente, Lisa de la Rie, Harriet
Silius, Else van der Tuin, Berteke Waaldijk, Charliene van der Werf, and
Marek M. Wojtaszek. Iveta Jusová of Antioch’s Women’s and Gender
Studies in Europe program and her students. Other colleagues invited
me to lecture in their institutions: Paula Albuquerque and Maartje Flier-
voet (Honours Programme ART and RESEARCH, Gerrit Rietveld Acade-
mie / University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands); Cecilia Åsberg (Tema
Genus, Linköping University, Sweden); Murat Aydemir, Esther Peeren,
and Eliza Steinbock (Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis); Marie-
Luise Angerer (Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Germany); Estelle
Barrett (Centre for Memory, Imagination, and Invention, Deakin Univer-
sity, Melbourne, Australia); Stephan Besser and Paul Bijl (Netherlands
Research School for Literary Studies); Barbara Bolt (Victorian College of
the Arts, University of Melbourne, Australia); Nella van den Brandt, Julie
Carlier, Chia Longman, and Griet Roets (Gender Research Seminar,
Ghent University, Belgium); Vera Bühlmann (CAAD—Chair for Com-
puter Aided Architectural Design, Zürich, Switzerland); Ine Gevers (Yes
Naturally—How art saves the world); Sara Goodman (Centre for Gender
Studies, Lund University, Sweden); Hanna Hallgren, Ulrika Dahl, and
Jenny Sundén (Gender Studies, Södertörn University, Stockholm, Swe-
den); Annemie Halsema (Dutch Network Women’s Studies Philosophy);
Frédérique Bergholtz and Annie Fletcher (If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want
To Be Part of Your Revolution); Sari Irni and Liu Xin (Women’s Studies,
Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland); Marie-Louise Jansen, Chris-
tian Scholl, and Saskia Wieringa (Gender, Sexuality, and Culture, Univer-
sity of Amsterdam, The Netherlands); Vicki Kirby (Graduate Reading
Group, School of Social Sciences and International Studies, The Univer-
sity of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia); Nina Lykke (Nordic Re-
 Acknowledgments ix

search School in Gender Studies); Helen Malarky, Felicity Colman, and

Joanna Hodge (Institute of Humanities and Social Science Research, Man-
chester Metropolitan University, UK); Patricia Pisters (Film-Philosophy
seminar, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands); Christine Quinan
(Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of California,
Berkeley, USA); Alex Martinis Roe (Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the
Graduate School for the Arts of the Forum for Post-Graduate Studies at
Berlin University of the Arts, Germany); Adelina Sanchez-Espinosa
(GEMMA Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender
Studies, University of Granada, Spain); the late Saskia Poldervaart, and
Petra de Vries (Women’s Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Nether-
lands); Susan Stryker (Institute for LGBT Studies, University of Arizona,
Tucson, USA); and Karen Vintges (Political Philosophy, University of
Amsterdam, The Netherlands). The International Information Centre and
Archives for the Women’s Movement (now Atria) where I could rely on
the professional skills of Marianne Boere, Marjet Denijs, Annette Mevis,
Gé Meulmeester, Evelien Rijsbosch, Arlette Strijland, and Marije Wilmink
(of the feminist magazine Lover). Janet Browne, Lukas Engelmann, Peter
Galison, Aud Sissel Hoel, and Daniël and Liza Mügge at Harvard Univer-
sity, USA. Co-authors, co-organizers, and co-editors Bolette Blaagaard;
Maaike Bleeker and Jan van den Berg; Rosi Braidotti; Charles Esche and
Maria Hlavajova; Rosemarie Buikema; Susan Cahill and Claire Bracken;
André van Dokkum; Rick Dolphijn; Therese Garstenauer, Josefina Bueno-
Alonso, Silvia Caporale-Bizzini, and Biljana Kasic; Evelien Geerts; Ine
Gevers; Daniela Gronold, Brigitte Hipfl, and Linda Lund; Alex Hebing;
Clare Hemmings; Peta Hinton; Aud Sissel Hoel; renée c. hoogland and
Petra de Vries; Birgit M. Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele; Mia Liinason; Anna
Moring; Beatriz Revelles-Benavente; Kristof van Rossum; Maria Serena
Sapegno; Anneke Smelik; Veronica Vasterling and Jantine Oldersma;
Mirjam Westen; and Marta Zarzycka. (Former) students Vasso Belia,
Dieuwke Boersma, Paulina Bolek, Sophie Chapple, Claire Coumans, Lu-
cie Dalibert, Susanne Ferwerda, Gönül Fidan, Evelien Geerts, Magda
Gorska, Amarantha Groen, Jess Hardley, Alex Hebing, Dennis Kerck-
hoffs, Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki, Annelies Kleinherenbrink, Annette
Krauss, Trista Lin, Freya de Mink, Krizia Nardini, Sander Oosterom,
Charlotte Poos, Jannie Pranger, Rumen Rachev, Mariëtta Radomska, Lisa
Rebert, Beatriz Revelles-Benavente, Aggeliki Sifaki, Barna Szarmosi, Bibi
Straatman, and Eline van Uden. Friends and family also supported the
project. Thanks to Juul van Hoof; renée c. hoogland; Piet, Mozes, and
Nelson van de Kar; Else, Ankie, and Kneh van der Tuin. I could not have
foreseen that the start of the research for this book, and its completion,
would coincide with the commemoration of the lives of my two grand-
mothers: Hillechien van der Tuin-Bakker, whom we lost on May 7, 2003,
and Willemina Kemkers-Harms, whom we lost on June 23, 2014. They
x Acknowledgments

have each, and in their own way, been influential in my life and to my
work.
Academic editor Whitney Stark, artist Alex Martinis Roe, reviewer
Christine Quinan, and publisher Jana Hodges-Kluck have worked with
me on the final result: the book you are holding in your hands. Rosi
Braidotti was my most critical and creative reader. A big thank you to all
of you. A clean desk is a sign of a wasted desk-life!
I wish to end these acknowledgments by thanking Gaston Franssen
(for everything) and Gregg Lambert (for AIR).
Some sections of this book have been published previously and I am
thankful to the following venues for permission to reprint:
Taylor & Francis for a revised reprint of: Van der Tuin, Iris. 2009.
“‘Jumping Generations’: On Second- and Third-Wave Feminist Theory.”
Australian Feminist Studies 24(59): 17–31.
Edinburgh University Press for a revised reprint of a fragment of: Van
der Tuin, Iris. 2013. “The Untimeliness of Bergson’s Metaphysics: Read-
ing Diffractively.” In Bergson and the Art of Immanence: Painting, Photogra-
phy, Film, eds. John Mullarkey and Charlotte de Mille, 232–46. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
The epigraph of this book is from Campbell, Kirsten. 2004. Jacques
Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. London and New York: Routledge. It is
used with the permission of Taylor & Francis Books.
The epilogue of this book uses quotes from the song “Hot Topic,”
used with permission from Le Tigre, and “Broken English,” used with
permission from François Ravard Management, Ltd.
 Introduction
On Being an Agent of Feminism

What are you fighting for?

—Marianne Faithfull 1
Feminism is all around us. Consider the fully implemented emancipation
policies, the steps toward gender quotas in European governmental rep-
resentation. Look at the punk feminism of Pussy Riot in Russia and at the
controversy about the bare-breasted women of Ukrainian Femen, spread-
ing over continents and getting media attention everywhere. Take SHE,
the informational glossy for modern urban women in South Sudan; the
tech-savvy female spokespeople of the Arab revolutions such as Ala’a
Basatneh or rather #chicagoGirl; young Malala Yousafzai and her interna-
tional community of supporters; the Indian protesters against rape; the
recognition of everyday women’s oppression intersecting with the caste
system; and the Bangladeshi supporters at the “Generation Square.”
Think of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in Western academia as
successful products of second-wave feminism. Ponder the latest debate
on “the problem without a name,” fifty years after Betty Friedan’s formu-
lation, analysis made by a woman with boardroom experience at both
Facebook and Google. Reflect on the Dutch success story of Women Inc.
Nowadays, institutionalized and grass-roots actualizations of femi-
nism exist, but I have been feeling surrounded by feminist manifestations
since as a high-school pupil I accidentally read Anja Meulenbelt’s 1976 De
Schaamte Voorbij [The Shame is Over] in the early 1990s. 2 So the recurring
question about the contemporary existence of a feminist movement has
always puzzled me. The first time it was posed to me was as a university
student in the late 1990s: “Are you sure about your decision to go study
women’s studies? Feminism is over!” Now the question is raised as I am
a teacher: “Do gender and sexuality studies attract students at all? After
all, the emancipation of women has been completed and gays, lesbians,
and queers are fully accepted in today’s society.” These queries are predi-
cated on a set of assumptions that this book tries to unsettle. And I want
to address the flaky empirical evidence relied on by my skeptical interloc-
utors. Feminist theory and continental philosophy have formed a solid
base underpinning my initial, intuitive perplexity toward those who ex-

xi
xii Introduction

press uncertainty about the presence and relevance of contemporary fem-

inist movement.
What is at stake in the question about feminism in the here and now?
First, interrogating the existence of “a feminist movement” suggests that
feminism is a unified whole that can be neatly delineated in spatial terms.
This is a generalization that alludes to homogeny and repeats a “logic of
One.” Feminist philosophers, starting with Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 Le
Deuxième Sexe [The Second Sex], have typified this logic as patriarchal, a
theory and practice of divide and conquer based on male supremacy. The
partial list of contemporary feminist structures and events given above
makes clear that feminism today is scattered—just as it’s always been
(look at liberal feminism’s emancipationism, radical feminism’s separa-
tism, Black feminism’s intersectionality, and so on). Second, the tempo-
rality relied on by my interrogators is deterministic. The assumption is
that feminism can be pinpointed along a timeline that neatly follows
clock-time and the Western calendar. The second feminist wave is espe-
cially picked up in such arguments; this seventies social movement is
where and when the entire battle against sexism and homophobia is sup-
posed to have been fought. In other words, the cyclical movement sug-
gested by the “wave”-metaphor—perpetually curling, cresting, and
breaking—is discarded. 3 The powerful unilinear representation of femi-
nism has paralyzing effects on young people with a critical sensitivity for
“Difference,” according to which “to be different-from means to be
worth-less-than” (Braidotti [1994] 2011, 20), and a creative longing for
“differing” as Difference’s horizontal and radically open counterpart.
And second-wave feminists themselves are silenced too, because they
appear as nothing but relics of a lost political momentum, whereas they
too are all around us. 4
Both assumptions have consequences for the ways in which we con-
ceptualize the “movement” in “feminist movement.” The scattered, inter-
nally split feminist movement is ruled out by a logic of One which devel-
ops into a norm and marks all the rest as deviant (Other). Such logic is the
motor of Difference as a hierarchical, pejorative affair. And linear tempo-
rality precludes the zigzagging feminist movement that seeks to find
provisional commonalities in the difference of pressing sociocultural and
political issues, and scholarly debates. It rather embraces progress narra-
tives and relies on baseline measurement and quantifiable interim report-
ing. I want to assert that it is impossible to pinpoint where feminism has
started, where it is at, and where it is supposed to lead us. All of these
temporal markers start to slide the minute we put them to work. Was
Beauvoir really the first to tackle a certain logic as patriarchal? How big
are our successes in the realms of policy, politics, and academia in the
West actually? And to what extent are non-heteronormative sexualities
accepted now that right-wing Western parliamentary officials in coun-
tries like The Netherlands lay claim on them, and strange bedfellows in
 Introduction xiii

France strike alliances on expulsion from the legal right to marry? Are
Western women really emancipated? How is the situation in post-com-
munist countries and post-Soviet states? Has “emancipation” ever been
our sole goal? And was this liberal goal supposed to become the world’s
leading ideology pertaining to sexual difference? Affirming the creative,
playful dynamics that these questions hint at, I seek to dodge deploy-
ment of linear temporality, a temporal model built along a rational, fixed
and fixating measuring stick (coined “spatialized time” by the philoso-
pher Henri Bergson). 5 This book seizes the opportunity to reshuffle the
cards based on other empirical facts—the facts that disqualify the appli-
cation of temporally linear parameters—and hopes to establish a notion
of feminist movement as predicated precisely on a feminist “virtual past”
that produces contradicting, nonlinear feminist positions. 6
Let me lay out the first main argument that I will be making: my
allusions to the disjunctions between the logic of One and a dynamic
process of differing, and between linear temporality and the nonlinear,
experientially defined durée (coined by Bergson around the year 1890) are
simultaneously directed toward takes on feminism from the outside and
from feminism’s own, self-asserted rationale. Feminists may use a logic
of One as well, and thus they may also tell progressive stories. In other
words, feminism does not necessarily preempt its own dissolution. I find
this statement to be of great importance. Feminism, first of all, can be
unbeneficial to itself and, second, the narratives and conceptual tools of
certain self-conscious feminists share characteristics with the ones of their
fiercest critics. Feminism is the struggle against sexism, homophobia,
transphobia, and other intersecting forms of structural power imbalances
based on naturalizations of inequality. Its aim is to dissolve Difference,
not feminism. 7
Feminism is the movement towards (sexual) differing; its aim is to
allow for “a thousand tiny sexes” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987), or
“a thousand tiny races” (Saldanha 2006), or “a thousand tiny intersec-
tions” (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2013). 8 Feminism’s approach to differ-
ing is asymptotic, and therefore feminism in and of itself, never sits still.
Feminism only appears to be fixed and fixating when a certain normative
representation has taken over: this is the gender or the people that we
should become. This representation is either of second-wave feminism as
the sole, immobilized motor for change or it is a reference that molds all
feminist activity according to a certain type of feminism assigned eternal
importance. Above, I mentioned emancipationism or “equality femi-
nism” in this respect. This implemented form of feminism serves to si-
lence feminist movement in countries like The Netherlands; sexual differ-
ence has become an issue of policy makers, whose funding could be cut
by the government (cf. Davis and Grünell 1994). Another example would
be “state feminism” in Eastern European countries, a so-called feminism
that has served conservatism (cf. Pető 2006).
xiv Introduction

In order to leap out of the assumptions just reviewed, I want to make

clear that feminism cannot “move” when the contemporaneous feminist
practice entails running after the newest theoretical trend and along the
way forgetting all that has been established in the past by “feminist fore-
mothers.” 9 This is the second main argument of this book, and the one
that relates to feminism bringing its own movement to a standstill. It is
important to note that such a lapse of memory—forgetting the work of
feminist foremothers—is often ascribed to “generational feminism,”
whereas I want to suggest in this book that a feminism that does not seek
transgenerational continuity among women is more likely to fall into the
trap of slavishly following what is “out there”—in academia in particu-
lar. Despite the successes of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies
scholars in terms of both content and the long march through the aca-
demic institution, the dominant paradigms in the social sciences and the
humanities are still gender-blind and therefore sexist by implication in
the terms of concept formation and citation index. How can a
“malestream” philosopher or heteronormative paradigm ever be the life-
saver of feminism?
Clare Hemmings has recently pleaded the case of the disadvantages of
generationality in her book Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of
Feminist Theory. The book intervenes in practices of contemporary wom-
en’s, gender, and sexuality studies by uncovering the assumptions of
what passes peer review. Her notion of “generation,” however, is firmly
predicated on negativity. Earlier in this introduction, I labeled conceptual
negativity as buying into the dialectics of One and Other, and it is here
that I diagnose this logic to have been imported into critical feminist
scholarship like Hemmings’s. What follows is a significant passage from
Why Stories Matter:
Even where hostility is replaced with mentoring and encouragement,
on the one hand, and recognition and respect, on the other, the as-
sumption remains that feminist theory cannot but be passed on to the
“next generation,” as though only the young, or young-ish, could carry
its flags or burdens. . . . In generational narratives, creative, political,
intellectual feminist space is never shared beyond brief moments of
encounter, transitional moments for the young who are the only real
subjects of linear narratives (the rest of us are dead or dying). Impos-
sible here to grasp the possibility of feminist spaces of friendship, de-
sire, affiliation, and productivity that produce variegated historical ac-
counts whose subjects (of any age) shuttle back and forth between their
own and others’ memories, representations, and fantasies of past,
present, and future. (Hemmings 2010, 148–49)
Despite the fact that Hemmings ascribes agism and heterosexism to the
generational feminist—who is said to celebrate the young and reaffirm
the Oedipal plot of the fight against the mother—I am struck by the fact
that her notion of generation is partial to the point of being reductive.
 Introduction xv

Hemmings is evidently under great pressure to comply with the impera-

tive to pass on feminist theory to the next generation. But isn’t Hem-
mings’s repeated reliance on Judith Butler and Monique Wittig precisely
an exemplary case of a younger feminist claiming her heritage? Isn’t she
herself being utterly creative not on the ruins of second-wave feminism,
but with its creative force instead? Isn’t Butler in Hemmings’s potential
readership today and can’t the former in turn be creative with Why Stories
Matter? I would argue that Hemmings’s stalemated notion of generation
has prevented her from a certain empirical or bibliographic playfulness. 10
I identify as a younger feminist that tries to undo a media-induced
fetishization of the young by critically acclaiming the work of foremoth-
ers. It is my aim in this book to theorize, substantiate, and tap into transi-
tional moments of generational encounters in feminism. What I want to
make clear is the necessity of feminist methodologies (of transgeneration-
al exchange) that lead to situated insights in and timely strategies for
breaking through perpetual processes of naturalization. There is a lamen-
tation for a particular place in feminism underlying Hemmings’s dismis-
sive judgment of generationality and my own feelings of being misunder-
stood by an older role model (Hemmings). 11 How do we traverse these
everyday-psychological mechanisms directed by Oedipality? How do we
do methodological justice to the fact that a “place” in feminism implies
an oscillation or pendulous motion, a temporal place of rise-and-fall
within the cyclical movement of feminist waves? 12
As a teacher, I live through instances of bliss when I prepare my
lectures on the second wavers and find out that these feminists have
already said—in a manner that is much more eloquent—what I thought
the other day. The same joy occurs when I see the students being affected
by those very same writings in my lecture and when we discuss the
works collectively afterwards. A negative, oppositional sense of genera-
tionality is only one side of the coin of the generation-concept. A reduc-
tive notion of generation—whether self-employed or authoritatively as-
cribed to Others or both, like in the case of Hemmings—does not neces-
sarily lead to opening-ups of a feminist future. I need another vignette to
demonstrate how I go about making sure that the idea of a “feminist
future” does not get lost and what lies on the other side of the coin of
generation. 13
Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice,
edited by Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny Söderbäck,
is a volume that gathers third wavers (like the editors) and members of
what Rosi Braidotti has called the “infra-generation” 14 of feminists that
have helped solidify feminism’s infrastructure within institutions (like
academe) in particular. Judging from its title, the volume is staged in
generational terms. I want to make clear that, in comparison to Why
Stories Matter, its concept of generation appears as less overtly negative
and oppositional. But is it complex and dynamic enough to capture both
xvi Introduction

the generational classes structured by and structuring the Oedipal plot,

Hemmings’s and my lamentations, and the temporality of transgenera-
tional bliss reported above? This plethora of options requires a sense of
complexity of the legacies one inherits. 15 Let’s read the words of one of
the editors (referencing the human microphoning of the Occupy move-
ment):
Can we ever speak in one voice? Is consensus possible? Or even desir-
able? Does the human microphone have to repeat dutifully, or can it
take off on its own paths, undutifully challenging and changing the
discourse and its intended course? Might it be a healthy exercise to
commit oneself to a movement despite the fact that one does not em-
brace each and every claim made in the name of that movement? But
how can this be done without the appropriating forms of representa-
tion Henriette Gunkel speaks of . . . ? How, in other words, can this be
done without sacrificing difference and singularity, and without a de-
mand for dutiful unity? (Söderbäck 2012, 5; emphasis in original)
It is very clear that the sting is in the tail of this fragment: these feminist
theorists do not allow for a “dutiful unity” to be demanded. Söderbäck
(2012, 11) affirms indeed that “the task of an undutiful feminism . . . of
feminisms-to-come” consists of “putting aside for a moment the demand
for a unified coherent message and voice.” I share with these feminists of
my generational cohort the aversion to strong representations, but I won-
der whether they may not end up repeating the powerful representation
of second-wave feminism that—as I reported previously—paralyzes
many among the young? Who actually demands this representation? The
very second-wave feminists themselves? The members of the infra-gener-
ation that we have had as teachers? The media, once again? Maybe it is all
too easy to rely upon the analogy sought between Occupy and feminism.
When a clear political message is demanded of Occupy, is it automatical-
ly also required of feminism? Does feminism get proper media attention
in the first place? My question is whether we aren’t—by implication—
back at square one: the square of the politics of generational negativity
and the re-staging of Oedipal plot. Gunkel writes that “there is not only
one undutiful way; being and/or becoming undutiful itself consists of a
psychic, bodily, semiotic, and discursive web of subversive strategies and
desires and does not reflect any form of universality” (Gunkel 2012, 133).
Would we not be better off moving away from this paralyzing ghost of
essentialism, all too often ascribed to feminists of the second wave, which
imposes a negative generationality? Should we not direct ourselves to a
perverse dutiful unity that does not beg the question: “How do we relate
and refer to one another?” (Gunkel 2012, 132-3), but instead firmly estab-
lishes parameters of actually relating and referring to each other?
A dialectics of One and Other runs through Hemmings and also, un-
expectedly, through Gunkel et al., in the form of “undutiful daughter-
 Introduction xvii

hood.” This is unsatisfactory to me. Negative notions of generationality

have led to conflicts among feminists to such an extent that productive
feminist encounters have become unrecognizable. We need not embrace
undutifulness, as we are yet to run with the pulsating movement of
(transgenerational) feminist encounters. Nevertheless, Why Stories Matter
and Undutiful Daughters are state-of-the-art volumes in feminist theory
and practice. They demonstrate where feminism is at and cover acade-
mia, art, and activism. They direct us towards the feminist questions that
have remained unanswered. With this book, I want to pursue this debate
and innovate on this tradition, developing an affirmative, intra-feminist
generationality of transformation. I intend to conceptualize “generation”
in its double sense and take advantage of what the concept can do: ety-
mologically speaking, the concept of generation envelops generational
classes (the old, the young-ish, the young; first-, second-, third-wave fem-
inism) as well as the very active notion of “to generate.” The word gener-
ation rests on its Greek root genos. In spite of the fact that genos has
translated into generational classes, its more general meaning refers us to
the verb genesthai (Nash 1978). Genesthai means to come into being. It is
my argument that precisely the intricacies of this doubleness stir genera-
tion as a conceptual tool worthy of investment. I explore generationality
in this book by inaugurating close ties with the methodology of feminist
genealogy (De Lauretis 1993). Genea-logy enfolds generation.
I have found an interesting incarnation of a generational politics of
affirmation—a politics which does not use the dialectical stalemate or
(un)acknowledges essentialism as feminism’s Frankenstein—in Braidot-
ti’s preface to the essay collection I referenced last. In response to the very
real attempt of feminists to acknowledge diversity in the work of feminist
foremothers from the first and second wave in a text ambiguously titled
“The Society of Undutiful Daughters,” Braidotti writes the following:
Disloyalty to a multiplicity is almost a contradiction in terms and calls
for more imaginative forms of sustainable betrayal . . . being unfaithful
to Two emerges as a singularly difficult challenge. The figure of Two
seems to be so systematically deterritorialized that it becomes slippery.
Luce Irigaray’s work—especially in the second phase, which is devoted
to reconfiguring radical heterosexuality—is the most creative contribu-
tion to a different relationship to Two—the sexually differentiated yet
multiple space of difference. . . . Whereas under phallogocentrism, the
maternal marks the lack or absence of symbolic recognition, in the
“virtual feminine” proposed by Irigaray, it can be turned into an em-
powering and affirmative gesture. In this respect, Irigaray’s Two ac-
complishes the magical trick of turning non-ones into One-plus or su-
per-ones capable of fecund multiples. We can therefore relax and be
dutiful with regard to a virtual feminine as the stepping-stone to a
future, multiple Two, while continuing our struggle against maternal
despotism and paternal control. (Braidotti 2012, x–xi; emphasis added)
xviii Introduction

Highlighting the move to dutifulness that Braidotti makes, it becomes the

F-word indeed that deserves our fullest attention. What are our invest-
ments around sexual difference (Feminism)? How are we to tackle the
unwanted repetition of the dismissal of feminism by feminists (Franken-
stein)? The process itself is at work in the very quote: first, by being
dutiful to Irigaray (and quoting Gilles Deleuze), Braidotti is able to affirm
her often-criticized work as nothing but de-essentializing. The feminist
feminine is virtual. It can be, and become, many things. Second, Braidotti
acknowledges that this kind of feminist work is of course often read as
involving a loathsome unification exercise. Nevertheless, we can take the
virtuality of Irigaray’s feminine as a Bergsonian gesture of inexhaustibil-
ity (Olkowski 1999, 2000; Grosz 2004, 2005) according to which the femi-
nine becomes a thousand tiny sexes, races, or intersections. As a corollary,
this seeming “dutiful unity” may generate undutiful responses, but a
polyvocal society of actualized undutiful daughters can never bring this
virtual back into play (the negative response to a solidified feminist posi-
tion is incompatible with multiplicity as a qualitative, rather than quanti-
tative notion).
The fourth argument that I offer involves an attempt to deal with
dualism in such a way that what lies on both sides of the proverbial coin
of feminism and generationality is visible. Just like feminism and genera-
tional logic, dualism—as the gendering, racializing, and sexualizing
structure of thought and societal organization—is all around and within
us. Dualism is the structure that oppresses women, queers, and trans
people in an intersectional manner. But I have also demonstrated that
dualism is used by feminists. Certain feminist dealings with dualism,
dichotomy, or opposition result in nothing but a repetition of the patterns
that are the building blocks of patriarchal societies. Dualist reasoning
may effectuate the breakdown of (academic) feminist bonds. Dealing
with dualism in a responsible manner would follow the lead of what
Bergson ([1896] 2004, 236) terms “pushing dualism to an extreme,” re-
phrased by Deleuze’s statement that “difference is [then] pushed to the
limit” (Deleuze [1968] 1994, 45). What is at stake here is that, on an episte-
mological register, only one of the terms of a binary pair allows a scholar
to understand the other. I prefer to retain this more fluid and flowing
term, and employ it so as to understand the opposite which fixates. For
example: generational classes can be understood through the lens of ge-
nesthai, whereas the classificatory logic of generational cohorts prevents
generation-as-a-verb from view. I have a preference for analytics of genes-
thai, because genesthai references processual becoming and genos (tempo-
rary) sedimentation. This is why the rhythm of this book is flowing and
how my writing simultaneously tries to do justice to moments of halt in
the flow.
Drawing this introduction to a close: is there anything that unifies
feminists? By way of a final argument, I would like to propose that femi-
 Introduction xix

nists—all feminists—are “agents of change.” From the liberal feminist

that wants equality between two pre-established sexes to the radical les-
bian that demands separation or the transgender activist that strives for
the abolition of the notion of sex difference, from the slutwalker that
plays with the fashion industry to the ladyfester that invests in musical
counterculture: feminists diagnose a problem around a vertically orga-
nized sexual difference and demand a de-hierarchization or horizontal-
ization of the same concept (Scott 1996). The rise of advanced capitalism
has not resulted in a free and open system, although social and political
causes have been translated into business models and become corpora-
tized (just like the university and parts of the art world). 16 What I want to
flag here is that feminist teachers are (also) agents of feminism and that this
is how I self-identify in the light of generational concerns. 17 Agents of
feminism broker feminism in all of its complexities. Referencing
Söderbäck once again, I am indeed committing myself to a movement
despite the fact that I do not embrace each and every claim made in the
name of that movement. When I teach the sex wars, I teach the sex-
positive and the sex-negative views. When I teach feminism and technol-
ogy, I go into technophilia, technophobia, and the unavoidability of tech-
nological mediation in our screen-age. 18 When I teach following a view-
ing of Town Bloody Hall (the 1979 documentary of Chris Hegedus and
P.A. Pennebaker, featuring Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling,
Jacqueline Cebalios, and Norman Mailer), I try to do justice to the posi-
tion of the liberal spokesperson of the National Organization for Women
even when her words estrange me time and again. Being an agent of
feminism, one cannot be but affirmative about feminist materials. As an
agent of feminism, one performs generational feminism in its most affir-
mative incarnation. This book theorizes this subject position and affirms
that the subject position is entangled with the active roles of the textual,
visual, and physical materials taught and of second-wave feminist
agents.
In sum, the central arguments of this book are the following:
1) Talking about feminist movement today implies a certain logic and
this logic is a spatiotemporal one. When a linear logic of One is deployed,
“feminism” refers to the alleged unified whole of essentialist second-
wave feminism and the movement has come to a standstill. Tapping into
the nonlinear, durational logic of differing allows for feminism to exist in
constant transformation. Feminists and non-feminists alike use both log-
ics.
2) A logic of One translates into progressive narratives about femi-
nism. Well-known plots are that feminism is no longer necessary or that
the work of feminist foremothers is outdated. The latter evaluation comes
from within feminism itself. In an attempt to thicken the plot of contem-
porary feminism I argue that it is in the work of feminist foremothers that we
can find feminist futures worth fighting for. Their dreamed futures have
xx Introduction

not yet become true. The present post-feminism paralyzes us in our fight
for gender equality and instantiations of differential feminisms.
3) The relation between contemporary feminists and feminist fore-
mothers is twofold. On the one hand, this is a relation of two age cohorts
based on the etymological root of genoi, of (literal or metaphorical) moth-
ers and daughters. On the other, feminists of all ages experience the
generative force of feminism on a daily basis. This generative force (genes-
thai) undoes the plotting against one another of older and younger femi-
nists. It allows for feminism to keep moving.
4) Owing to the fact that dualism is feminism’s main enemy because
of its oppressive effects along gendered, racialized, and sexualized lines,
but is also a self-employed structure of feminist thought and practice, we
need to find ways of responsibly dealing with dualism. This can be done
by studying how what lies on one side of the coin of any oppositional
binary can be understood by deploying what lies on the other. A respon-
sible way of dealing with generational dualism implies understanding
genoi as nothing but spatiotemporal actualizations of genesthai. The rea-
son why is the flowing nature of the latter and the measured nature of the
former. A quantitative measurement (knowing) happens in the flow of
being. Hence we should prioritize that qualitative flow and give what is
measured its proper place as an effect.
5) This complex exposé is necessary in order to understand and act on
what is done to feminism—by feminism’s bystanders and stakeholders
alike—and what feminism can do, in academia, and the art world, and
for women, queers, and trans people that do or do not identify with the
label “feminist.” Feminist analyses are needed on a plethora of intercon-
necting levels ranging from statistical questions of the representation of
those who are made (in)visible to intricate projects of figuring out the
nitty-gritties of human and non-human gendered processes. This book
attempts to “make time” for these feminist gestures and thus to answer to
Kirsten Campbell’s call from Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology,
adopted as the motto of this book (Campbell 2004, 181).
I will provide the structure of this book and its chapters at the end of
chapter 1.

NOTES

1. From “Broken English” (1979). Used by permission of François Ravard Manage-

ment, Ltd.
2. Meulenbelt references Kate Millet in the title of her political autobiography.
Dutch feminist Meulenbelt had read Millett’s 1974 Flying before she had published her
own Shame is Over. Defending a revealing reading in Flying, Millett proudly says “the
shame is over.” In turn, Meulenbelt has called Millett a “sister in shamelessness.”
3. It has been suggested that the wave-metaphor is also linear or has similar, linear
consequences for thinking feminist movement. I will get back to this.
 Introduction xxi

4. Following the classificatory, Mannheimian cohort-logic, an important difference

exists between second- and third-wave feminists. First-wave feminists are the grand-
mothers of the second wavers, whereas the latter are the mothers of third-wave femi-
nists.
5. Bergson has set out to exchange this model for a model based on the lived
experience of time. The latter model he has coined “duration.” Famously, Bergson has
argued that both a rational approach and one’s daily habits lead to the spatialization
of time. His preferred approach centers around a specific take on “intuition” as an
alternative to both rational and habitual approaches. For a summary, refer to Bergson
([1934] 2007).
6. “Virtual past” is a Bergsonian concept too. The term has landed in contempo-
rary feminist theory through the work of Gilles Deleuze in particular. In his book
Bergsonism from 1966, Deleuze works with this notion to develop a take on the past
that allows for it to remain active; that is, women’s oppression is an actualization of
oppression as such. The widespread actualization of a particular kind of women’s
oppression does not exhaust the phenomenon of oppression, because (power) rela-
tions are a potential (they are of our virtual past) that resonates in the present and for
the future. In Deleuze’s terms, the virtual past is “a ‘past in general’ that is not the
particular past of a particular present but that is like an ontological element, a past that
is eternal and for all time, the condition of the ‘passage’ of every particular present. It
is the past in general that makes possible all pasts” (Deleuze [1966] 1991, 56–7).
7. When feminists use a deterministic paradigm of setting a quantifiable goal and
calculating progress in spite of a tenacious social imaginary, Difference gains ground
(again).
8. For “intersectionality,” see, among others, Crenshaw 1989, 1991; Wekker 2002.
9. For this concept, see Pető and Waaldijk eds. 2006.
10. It is in fact precisely in the context of Hemmings’s invented methodology of
“recitation” that the Butler-Wittig line is affirmed (chapter 5 of Why Stories Matter). I
have discussed a significant shortcoming of this technique—a presentism that results
in undervaluing the ontological force of textuality—in my co-authored review of the
book (Revelles-Benavente and van der Tuin 2012). Furthermore, in chapter 6 of the
current volume I will present an alternative line—the Rubin-Rich line—with which I
aim to address not only Hemmings’s methodology, but also the content of her work. It
is this paradigm-discussion in feminism that I will take up in the sixth chapter.
11. For an explicit example, compare van der Tuin 2009 and Hemmings 2009.
12. In the sections “Feminist Generationality” and “An-Oedipal Relationality” of
chapter 3 I discuss the ins and outs of the Oedipal plot and present a so-called an-
Oedipal alternative.
13. That I am not the only one experiencing bliss when (preparing for) class proves
Imelda Whelehan’s preface to Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfemin-
ist Mystique (Munford and Waters 2013). She even uses the same examples as the ones
used in this book (the documentary Town Bloody Hall, for example), the uncanniness of
which proves the “hauntology”-thesis asserted by Feminism and Popular Culture.
14. Braidotti proposed this term in response to a paper by Patricia MacCormack
during the conference Generation: On Feminist Time-Lines (Goldsmiths, University of
London; October 11, 2006). See Australian Feminist Studies 24(59) on “Generation: On
Feminist Time-Lines,” edited by Rosi Braidotti and Claire Colebrook for a collection of
the papers.
15. Noela Davis talks about physical inheritance in her 2014 article “Rethinking the
Materiality of Feminist Political Action through Epigenetics.”
16. Think of the demand to “valorize” scientific knowledge and the rise of “creative
industries.”
17. See also Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture (Buikema and Van der Tuin eds.
2009), a textbook that offers a historiography of gender studies. Let me make explicit
that I consider myself to be part of the current generation of academic feminists as well
as I act as this generation’s historiographer or, as I will later in this book claim,
xxii Introduction

genealogist in my scholarly work. After all, cartographies are “theoretically-based and

politically-informed reading[s] of the present” (Braidotti 2002, 2).
18. A powerful implementation of transversal generational dynamics in the context
of technology can be found in the practice of “reverse mentoring,” which establishes a
mentoring relationship in which the older person is the mentee and the younger
person the mentor. A situation in which both partners learn is assumed in this context
and there is a keen eye for the necessity to weave the generational knowledge of the
younger partner into the mentoring process. See, for example, Murphy 2012.
 ONE
The Key Terms of Generational
Feminism

Generational feminism finds itself in a complicated place. First of all,

many feminists discard the notion in explicit terms, whereas a certain
generationality is implicitly embraced in most feminist scholarship, art,
and activism. The state of the art of generational feminism can be com-
pared to the equally infamous “wave-model.” The ways in which those
that self-identify as “feminist” narrate feminism, especially in teaching
situations, demonstrate that the concept of generation and the model of
waves are often made use of as convenient alternatives for a more com-
plicated theorization of the historiography of feminist ideas, a complica-
tion that Wendy Brown described as follows in her 1997 article “The
Impossibility of Women’s Studies”:
what is needed is the practice of a historiography quite different from
that expressed by notions of cause and effect, accumulation, origin, or
various intersecting lines of development, a historiography that em-
phasizes instead contingent developments, formations that may be at
odds with or convergent with each other, and trajectories of power that
vary in weight for different kinds of subjects. (Brown 1997, 94)
This demand indicates, in my reading of it, that the depths of both gener-
ation-concept and wave-model are not taken advantage of. The induced
simplification is nothing but a self-fulfilling prophecy. This book focuses
on the deepening of the generation-concept. Secondly, I argue that this is
a good moment for a renewed outlook on generational feminism, because
as feminists, we find ourselves surrounded by updates of the spatiotem-
poral markers of feminism. Time and temporality are currently being
reconfigured along the lines of embodied “duration,” and spatiality is
now generally seen along the lines of a “jumping” of scale, which pre-

1
2 Chapter 1

vents feminists from using space as a linear container (of time). I wish to
take advantage of this momentum of contemporary feminism—driven by
current-day developments such as a turn to feminist new materialisms
and to “the posthuman” both in theory and in the practice of our screen-
age—and set out to re-assess the generation question in feminism in an
advanced introduction to its past, present, and future. Making time for
feminism in an era that is popularly regarded to be “post-feminist” arms
feminist scholars with a toolbox that does justice to sociopolitical as well
as intra-feminist theoretical pressures.
Seeking avenues for productive and affirmative relatings to the femi-
nist past, a post-feminist starting point is not beneficial. It is my under-
standing that the time is not yet ripe for post-feminism, although this
term has been around for a while, and prominently so. 1 I would even go
further and ask whether post-feminism can be an opportune stance at all.
Feminism is a working through of Difference as a structuring principle of
empirical realities as well as the social imaginary so as to seek less pejora-
tive relations of (sexual) differing. I do not foresee a stabilization of differ-
ing relations—it is in fact not in the nature of difference as an active verb
to stabilize—and therefore I predict that feminism has a long future
ahead of itself. Feminists working through Difference can only be helped
by embracing the work of feminist foremothers. Feminists of the past
have engaged with the same game.
Among others, Gayle Rubin made the fundamental point back in 1975
that sexually differentiated empirical relations are structured by the sym-
bolic order of the day (patriarchy or what French feminists call “phallo-
logocentrism”). 2 She has also claimed that the same counts for relations
among women. When sexual difference pertains to exchanging women
among men—as is the case in a patriarchal kinship system—relations
between women do not exist because such relations are immediately
overwritten by the relations between women and men (fathers, hus-
bands, bosses, casual male passersby). Similarly: in such a context, certain
identities do not exist, because (emergent) bodily experiences are over-
written too; they are overcoded by sex Difference (Butler 1988). Seeking
transgenerational continuity is therefore of great importance for femi-
nism. We can build our own canon based on this continuity and will
consequentially come out as less “exchanged.”
Rubin’s affirmations have been questioned owing to her strong, Lévi-
Straussian structuralism. Where is the space for, and place of, the agency
of women in a patriarchal system? Can we think this agency at all follow-
ing structuralist logic? Just like I cannot subscribe to post-feminism, I also
do not read “post-structuralism” as the abandonment of structuralism.
Post-structuralism does not place its bets on the opposite side of the
structure-agency hierarchy (celebrating agency in a manner that must be
naïve). Post-structuralist theorists affirm that “[b]eings do not pre-exist
their relatings” (Haraway 2003, 6). And next to rewriting relationality as
 The Key Terms of Generational Feminism 3

a bottom-up or transversal rather than top-down affair, they hold on to a

theory of time that is not into revolutionary ruptures (post- as after) but
into slow “revolt” instead, as has been affirmed in Julia Kristeva’s 1998
Lʼavenir dʼune révolte [The Future of a Revolt].
In short, my argument about generational feminism contains a strong
meta-theoretical and meta-methodological component (cf. Flax 1987): I
seek transgenerational continuity within feminism and have been in-
spired by post-structuralism in this search. But before I go into the term I
have coined for this specific continuum—“jumping generations”—I will
first specify the reference I made above to post-feminism and unpack the
ingredients that have been on the table since post-structuralism (relation-
ality and temporality).

AN ERA OF POST-FEMINISM?

In the introduction to this book I referred to the nagging questioning of

the very existence of a feminist movement that I got as a student of
women’s studies and still get as a feminist teacher. The question is trig-
gered by a post-feminist inclination. Post-feminism signifies at least two
positions. First, that feminism is no longer necessary. This post-feminist
stance is founded in the idea of a post-patriarchal society; the negation of
feminism is based on an embracing of post-patriarchy. Second, is the
embracing of post-feminism. This implies that one’s feminism is a post-
feminism. The latter presupposes a specific definition of feminism: femi-
nism is a theoretical, political, and artistic stance that forecloses a playful
approach towards sex, gender, and sexuality; desire, bodies, and repre-
sentation. Because of the alleged foreclosure, feminism is seen as antago-
nistic to a critical and creative consciousness. I continue to take on a
feminist position. Establishing a relation with past feminisms is crucial for
this project, firstly because all post-feminists relate to the second feminist
wave in their judgment to be beyond-it, secondly because the work of
1960s and 1970s feminists presents exemplary ways of dealing with a
sexually differentiated world.
The French historian of science, Hélène Metzger, has compared the
technics of human thinking to the embodied vision of the lantern fish:
“the eye of certain deep water fishes . . . is at the same time organ of
vision and source of light, if it prevents its own clarity it will quickly go
blind” (Metzger [1936] 1987, 56; my translation). I interpret the negative
reasoning that founds post-feminism as blinding, whereas an affirmative
account of the past-present-future connection in feminism takes on the
full force of what lantern fish can do: its object of study is at the same
time its analytical tool. Object and tool are simply feminism in its many
contradictory and ever-emerging manifestations. This book has been
written from a spatiotemporal location that is altogether different from
4 Chapter 1

post-feminism. As an inhabitant of this alternative location, I do not work

from post-patriarchy or a stereotypical rendering of feminism. The set
parameters for the assumptions of these two post-feminist inclinations
prevents from criticality. It is my contention that once the alternative
location is occupied, the feminist futures created in the feminist past flow
toward the present. These futures appear right in front of one’s search-
light. They never get fixed and they change (in) the present too. I experi-
ence such feminist movement primarily in my work as a teacher of femi-
nist historiography; and feminist epistemology, theory, and methodolo-
gy.

MOVING METHODOLOGIES

I see our times as patriarchal times and feminism as an exciting historical

juncture that extends into the present and is an important response to
phallologocentrism. Feminism resonates with current-day theoretical, so-
ciocultural, and political issues. Taking the productive interlinking of
then and now inherent in my view on feminism, it is easy to be inspired
by feminist foremothers. First- and second-wave feminists, and feminists
not belonging to a so-called wave did their work in contexts of perpetual
gendering. And since the feminist response to this gendering has never
been straightforward (Scott 1996), the fact that our times are paradoxical
times—with feminism ranging from one extreme to the other and being
scattered over continents, communities, and ideologies—should not pre-
vent us from engaging with the feminist past. The prevailing methodolo-
gies for relating to this, however, have often cut young women off from
the futures created in that past. Post-feminism has been the final result.
Following progressive narratives, classifications of feminisms have unin-
terruptedly lured us into “new” perspectives based on dualist responses
to, or negations of, the feminist archive. My argument introduces a differ-
ent approach to the archive of Western feminism and aims at keeping
feminism in motion by demonstrating how the feminist archive is not one
unified corpus, but many. It is dynamic and intricately active in and of
itself. It is this particular archive that I converse with and that holds a key
position among the teachers and students in feminist classrooms.
For a lively conversation with an archive that performs feminist fu-
tures—the multiple dreams and desires of feminists of the generation of
Baby boomers and further back, dreams and desires that have not yet
found or will never find fulfillment because they are about a different
difference—I have had to shift methodological habits. This is to say, the
available approaches to “the feminist archive” did not always allow me
to perceive feminist archival materials (texts, visuals, tangibles such as
commemorative skirts, banners, and badges) as active participants in
transformative talks about the future of sexual difference. Shifting me-
 The Key Terms of Generational Feminism 5

thodological habits can discuss avenues for contemporary engagements

with past feminist knowledge, practices, and in(ter)ventions 3 from an
innovative generational perspective. My approach is to be at once specific
about the location of some contemporary younger feminists and generous
to the work of feminists of older generations.
An important element of this approach is a cartographical relating of
terms and theorists (Braidotti 2002). The methodology of “cartography”
is transversal in nature for it extends across the well-known classifica-
tions of feminism: liberal, Marxist/socialist, radical, black, and lesbian
feminisms; postcolonial, queer, and trans feminisms; thinking equality,
difference, and deconstruction; and feminist empiricism, the feminist
standpoint, and feminist postmodernism. Classificatory takes on femi-
nism prevent us from treating the feminist archive as active and dynamic,
as flowing. Schools of thought are oftentimes seen as perfectly closed off
so only the most recent school can postulate a feminist future worth
fighting for. Cartographies—as an alternative to what is prevalent in aca-
demic descriptions of feminism in particular—advance links between ex-
isting schools of thought and breathe life in many categories at once. This
approach carves out a different feminist generationality that I have found
immediately applicable. This generationality gets me going in the femi-
nist classroom, but most textbook accounts of feminism—made for class-
rooms!—do not equip their readers for grasping the movement inherent
to this other generationality. We are not used to reading/studying along
the lines of such a fluid generationality. Affirmative relations with femi-
nist foremothers do take shape in feminist classrooms. This made me
realize that there is more to feminism than thinking; engaging with femi-
nist texts in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies has something to do
with affect and embodiment. 4
My proposal is to deal with the feminist generation of non-classifica-
tory “shared conversations” (Haraway 1988, 584) through the simultane-
ous development and use of jumping generations. These conversations
form the order of a contemporary feminism, perceived and practiced
once the compulsion to classification is left behind and the blinders of
post-feminism are taken off. The conversations are among feminists of
similar and diverging generations and with feminist texts and images as
active participants instead of passive materials to be classified. Classify-
ing feminist materials means that they are labeled to be such-and-such
and filed, whereas working with them, following a cartographical proce-
dure, demonstrates a more rhizomatic pattern of engagement which nev-
er sits still. From this we gain the space, but more importantly the time, to
work on our own feminist positions in academia, positions that have
been formed and continue to be formed in the world at large.
Classification is the most common methodological tool for teaching
feminism. Classifications are characterized by sequential negation, which
makes the narratives they create and structure progressive. In a classifica-
6 Chapter 1

tion, y is said to solve the problems of x, and z of y. Working toward a

cartographical mode of organizing texts and images, a first step is ac-
knowledging their power to transform and engaging with a reworked
temporality. Elizabeth Grosz has argued that “limited temporality char-
acterizes all feminist projects of equalization and inclusion as well as a
number of projects within postmodern feminism” (Grosz 2005, 162). As a
consequence, “[t]he future of feminism . . . is limited to the foreseeable
and to contesting the recognized and the known” (Grosz 2005, 162). In
other words, Grosz shows that equality feminism and some postmodern
feminisms are equally informed by a linear-causal theory of time, while
we tend to classify them as opposite to one another or as exhaustively
dichotomous. Such a temporality involves decidability and constraint in
the case of equality (women becoming equal to the known position of
“Man”) and undecidability and limitlessness in the case of postmodern-
ism (celebrating an unfounded “diversity” by quantifying the Others of
Man). A dualist model is thus part and parcel of Grosz’s theorization of
classificatory temporality. Hence she argues:
What is needed is the idea of a history of singularity and particularity,
a history that defies repeatability or generalization and that welcomes
the surprise of the future as it makes clear the specificities and particu-
larities, the events, of history. (Grosz 2000, 1018)
Grosz pleads for engendering a qualitative shift away from a stereotypi-
cal feminist past (one that is inherently conflict-based).
Extending across what is conflict-based in the eyes of a classificatory
methodologist, is an instantiation of what I call jumping generations.
Traversing the supposedly opposite classes of a classification leads to
shared conversations as it does not re-produce a stalemated account of
feminism or transpose the conflict to the here and now. Following
Grosz’s formula, the work generated by thinkers of both equality and
diversity can metamorphize in a plethora of feminist insights, acts, and
products. We are no longer bound to boxing the proponents of empiri-
cism and postmodernism; their work is no longer bound to the label we
have stuck to it. Hence, we find ourselves working with a generational
feminism that is based on an open cartography.

SUBJECTS AND OBJECTS AS TRANSPOSING AGENTS

Constituting and employing jumping generations as an innovative meth-

odology for capturing and creating feminist movement, and in attempt to
make Heidi E. Grasswick’s observation that “today, many build on the
theories and insights of feminist epistemologists developed in the 1990s”
(Grasswick 2011, xvi) precise, I have borrowed ideas about “transposi-
tion” from Rosi Braidotti as a springboard for the development of alter-
 The Key Terms of Generational Feminism 7

native generational feminist terms. Transposition enables the articulation

of generational continuity in terms that differ from progressive linearity
where a case origin and destination always already exist. “Jumping” is
my term for the traversing of schools of thought previously considered
incommensurable though they are in fact part of a non-exhaustive dichot-
omy; allowing case origin and destination as produced in a relational
manner; allowing for transformation. Jumping allows for conversations
among women and with textual, visual, and tangible materials that can-
not be pinpointed beforehand (they are embodied and embedded, and
stirred by affects) but are not limitless either—concrete events of feminist
history are intimately engaged with or simply negotiated. My point is
that the preferable order of contemporary feminism consists of a series of
transpositions or jumps resulting in a politics of transgenerational inclu-
sion. This inclusion allows for something other than identity-political
convictions (of generation) to regulate our relatings with canonical femi-
nist texts and visual and other materials.
Continuing the discussion started in the introduction, my approach
differs from Clare Hemmings’s important monograph Why Stories Matter
(2011) in this respect. Whereas Hemmings relies on the politics of identity
for her critique of women’s and gender studies and points at the neces-
sary undoing of a certain specific heroine—the next-generation Western
feminist subject or, in short, the unmarked feminist scholar—in (Euro-
pean) feminist narratives, I am interested in the opening-ups that appear
in the relatings of the mentioned subject and other scholars with canonical
feminist texts. A subject position is never fully fixed; in its fluidity, it
works against the grain of the dominant discourses of malestream society
and feminisms based on identity. I see alternative narratives unfolding
themselves in such relatings—relatings that precede and carry subject-
position—and would argue that these are powerful for a non-heteronor-
mative and potentially anti-racist take on the neo-discipline.
Let me provide an example. Reading a text like Susan Stryker’s 1994
article “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamou-
nix: Performing Transgender Rage,” I do not experience the disgust,
shock, and horror that, according to Hemmings, provides for a powerful
affective subjectivity. My relating to Stryker works on another register.
Stryker’s argument about naturalization of transgender bodies comes
close to my work on “feminist new materialisms” as it is ultimately about
naturecultures and the necessity to horizontalize material-discursively
produced inequalities. The text acts as a reminder of where lines are
drawn and how I am implicated in such boundary-work. 5 Boundary-
work closes down as it opens up. In fact, even in its oppressive nature, a
closing-down is never final. Reading “My Words,” I am time and again
struck by Stryker’s style, courage, and engagement with her own body,
the emergent bodies of other trans people, the body politic, and Mary
Shelley’s novel. This attraction gets me going; it is part of the generative
8 Chapter 1

force that infuses the feminist archive. Here we can find “resonances
across and between narratives [that] situate us as feminist subjects in
ways we are not fully in control of” (Hemmings 2011, 134). Stryker’s rage
is not the only affect transposing to me. It is what trans bodies can do
(raging included) that transposes to my writing and, in that sense, Stryk-
er’s early text materializes as a site that “seeks to propagate transgender
rhizomatically, in unexpected ways that trace lines of flight from the
harsh realities of the present moment” (Stryker and Aizura 2013, 4; em-
phasis in original).
Wishing to work with such rhizomatic patterns, I propose to translate
Hemmings’s “resonances” into Braidotti’s “transpositions” in an attempt
to switch registers:
Resting on the assumption of a fundamental and necessary unity be-
tween subject and object, the theory of transpositions offers a contem-
plative and creative stance that respects the visible and hidden com-
plexities of the very phenomena it attempts to study. This makes it a
paradigmatic model for scientific knowledge as a whole, particularly
feminist epistemologies, notably the critique of dualistic splits. (Brai-
dotti 2006, 6)
In the late 1940s, North American biologist Barbara McClintock formulat-
ed the theory of “jumping genes” by describing a way of genetic transfer
that differs significantly from the idea of programmed transfer from one
entity to another. Evelyn Fox Keller explains in her 1983 biography of
McClintock that transposition covers a process in which the entire cell is
involved; a process that is highly irregular but also systematic. In other
words, transposition can be employed to question—analogous to the
questioning of their temporality—the spatiality of classifications. Classifi-
cations are fixed—not only in time, but also in space—and as such, they
are not situated or proclaim a certain universal applicability. Transposi-
tions are dynamic, because they focus on the specificity of any nonlinear
event. 6
Neil Smith has conceptualized the transposition of spatial categories
and developed an alternative approach that has also become an ingredi-
ent for a qualitatively shifted generational feminism. With “jumping
scale,” he tries to show that thinking in terms of successive scales (small
to big) is nonsensical. He argues that it is idealistic to assume that the
world is dividable in bodies, houses, and neighborhoods; and regions,
nations, and continents. He also says that there is no natural boundary
between earthly and unearthly matter. He has documented political art
projects and actions “providing oppositional means for re-inscribing and
reorganizing the urban geography of the city, but they do so in a very
specific way. They open new spaces of interaction but not randomly”
(Smith 1992, 60). The work of Karen Barad strengthens Smith’s conceptu-
alization of scale as she stresses the importance of approaching the ways
 The Key Terms of Generational Feminism 9

in which spaces enfold in what she calls intra-action. “Intra-action” en-

ables a way of thinking and researching that moves beyond the existence
of isolated and established entities that subsequently start to interact. Fol-
lowing Barad, we should be studying the ways in which entities—like
spatialities—materialize (Barad 2001).
It is my gloss that categories or “boxes”—on a global, intermediary, or
very local scale; in past, present, or future—are produced in movements
of transposition, that is, in jumps or leaps. There exists no original femi-
nist positioning from which we subsequently and in the here and now
deviate for a feminist future. Original and copy are co-constitutive of one
another and none of the agents involved—textual, visual, or empirical—
is fully fixed.

“JUMPING GENERATIONS” AS META-METHODOLOGY

A sustainable and transformative feminist position carefully pursues and

implements those feminisms of the past that are useful for current-day
feminist generation. Like in Smith’s political art projects and in Braidot-
ti’s biological (and musical) intervals, there exists intra-active dis-closure
of feminisms that make a difference to patriarchal renderings on the per-
sonal, structural, and symbolic level and to conflict-based feminist gener-
ationality alike. Patriarchy is not being fought when we presuppose the
existence of a generation of members of a certain feminist wave 7 or a
theoretical strand with which the current generation should start to inter-
act so as to constitute yet another feminist category. Such prescriptions
only reaffirm the exchange of women as they are the means to confine the
circulation of feminist ideas. Instances of jumping-generation produce
perspectives that are not essentialist because they stem from the seven-
ties, or post-feminist because they are articulated today, as this would fix
feminism in the past and post-feminism—as its dual opposite—in the
present. In addition, it is simply not the case that feminism is passed on
by our mothers to us (the next generation) as the experience of being
inspired by feminist foremothers cannot be characterized along spatio-
temporally linear lines. It is precisely the unsettling consequences of
reading a feminist text from the archive that gets us going for the feminist
cause in all its multiplicity.
The methodology of jumping generations changes the parameters of
generational feminism and enables the abandonment of a feminist center,
takes advantage of running on multiple and transversal tracks, 8 and
stimulates channeling one’s energies and desires to seeking commonal-
ities in difference and useful coalitions vis-à-vis current-day problems.
This is helpful for feminist politics in academia, art, and activism because
it allows us to act on lessons learned from equality and difference femi-
nisms when we discuss issues of representation; from black, radical, les-
10 Chapter 1

bian, queer, and trans feminisms when we design the yearly events on
the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, International Women’s
Day, Gay or Queer Pride, and the Transgender Day of Remembrance;
and from transgender and disability/crip perspectives when we find our-
selves in conversations with medical doctors, security guards, or lawyers.
Jumping generations as a meta-methodology for relating to feminists of
other generations and to their textual, visual, and otherwise substantial
production can avoid both linear conceptualizations of time and space
and the trap of non-exhaustive dichotomies. It enables generative thinking
and acting and avoids dismissive discontentment with feminism as the
result of stifling categorization.
Jumping generations refers to a feminist conceptual tool that imagines
and advances a better future for women, men, and Others by “working
through” (Lyotard [1988] 1991) or “through and beyond” (Ahmed 1998,
118) the feminist past as well as the present conditions of persistent gen-
dering. Whereas—generally speaking—the second-wave feminist goal of
including women in the Western public sphere has been reached, a gen-
dered division between the public and private spheres is still upheld in
our societies. As such, “difference” is still a valuable compass for today’s
feminism. Despite our earliest successes on a structural level, generating
change in the dualist imaginary in which we find ourselves immersed
requires an inclusive notion of different difference and opening-ups to-
wards transformational differing. An inclusive notion of “sexual differ-
ing” has been silenced in the canonization of feminist theories—it did not
even get assigned a time and place—whereas encountering it when en-
gaging with the knowledge, practices, and in(ter)ventions of feminists of
previous generations generates a stir that Henri Bergson has described as
“disturbing my whole consciousness like a stone which falls into the
water of a pond” (Bergson [1889] 1913, 168). This productive disturbance
is caused by what Grosz has called “the surprise of the future” that we
find in the past. My argument is that jumping generations allows us to
formalize intergenerational transposition in feminism. The fact that
jumping generations is a methodology for generational feminism allows
for it to travel beyond the confines of this book and to be picked up and
transformed in a wide range of feminist politics. Jumping generations is
hands-on; this book is an attempt at experimenting with what it can do. 9
The feminist archive is among the surprising material that contempo-
rary feminists work with. Barad calls practices of producing generative
specifications rather than binary, classificatory oppositions “agential
cutting” (Barad 2003, 815; 2007, 333). Agential cutting allows for “boun-
daries [to] provisionally contain [what] remains generative, productive of
meanings and bodies” (Haraway 1988, 594). Despite the criticisms fired at
its products, equality feminisms (the question was, “equal to whom?”)
and feminist postmodernisms (the question was about relativism) can
still generate arousal. I argue that transposition among them, and in turn
 The Key Terms of Generational Feminism 11

transposed to the generous contemporary feminist, is responsible for

that. My case about generational feminism is to go “back to the futures”
in the feminist archive in order to push to the limit the productive and
zigzagging interlinks between the strands of second-wave feminism.
Let me state explicitly, just as I did earlier, that my approach to return
to the feminist past differs from Hemmings’s proposal, although the lat-
ter’s lesson about the necessity to refrain from story-telling techniques
that create a renewed Subject has, I hope, been taken on in this book.
Hemmings ascribes an authoritative “return narrative” to generational
feminism and mentions feminist new materialisms as an exemplary case
of such a structure (Hemmings 2010, 95–127). I intend to show how it is
not the next-generation feminist, or the feminist new materialist, that au-
thoritatively initiates the performance of the feminist futures of the past,
but that the feminist archive itself has remained in motion in spite of all our
pedagogical attempts at classifixating it (see chapter 2). 10 By exchanging
classification (created by a Subject indeed) for cartography (devised in
the transversal intra-action between multiple emerging active subjects
and objects), the ontology of irreducible feminist movement is reachable.
I therefore plead a meta-methodological case for qualitatively shifting the
customary practices of feminist canonization in order for feminist move-
ment—as a dynamic process—to become available again for contempo-
rary critical and creative subjects. This approach would actually liberate
the materials in the feminist archive as the materials become “co-re-
sponding” agents (cf. Haraway 2008, Ingold 2012).

WHAT THIRD-WAVE FEMINISM CAN DO

Before I turn to re-reading “feminist generationality” in chapter 3 and

specifying the roots of a reworked notion of generationality in chapter 4,
let me evaluate whether the feminist position of jumping-generations is a
“third-wave feminism.” After all, post-feminism is not the only term out
there for describing present-day feminism, and post-feminism is often
plotted against third-wave feminism. Does third-wave feminism capture
the tool and object of the study at hand? Do third-wave feminists neces-
sarily embody what Metzger’s lantern fish can do? Is their methodology
cartographical or should we say that third wavers, just like new material-
ists, constitute the newest branch of the progressively linear, classificato-
ry tree of feminism?
The category “third-wave feminism” has been featured in non-aca-
demic sources since the 1990s. Academic attention to third-wave femi-
nism started cresting around the year 2000 and, in particular, in an An-
glo-American context. 11 Third-wave feminism describes, in most general
terms, the feminist practices and products of the generation(s) that came
after the Baby boomers. Its main driving force is countering the societal
12 Chapter 1

climate and theoretical affirmation of post-feminism—think of the contin-

ual reproduction and popularity of the Leeds Postcard from 1986 that
says “I’ll be a post-feminist in post-patriarchy”—but third-wave femi-
nism also entails a theoretical response to the alleged universalist essen-
tialism offered in the heydays of the feminist activist and artistic move-
ment of the 1970s and to the celebration of hyphenated identities devised
under feminist postmodernism in academia and in the feminist move-
ment in the 1980s. 12 Essentialism does not do justice to the diverse lives
of women and reaffirms patterns of hierarchical Difference, whereas un-
bridled hyphenating taps into individualist modes of reasoning by taking
diversification too far.
Third-wave feminists have been educated by the infra-generation of
feminists that have set up women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. How-
ever, drawing together third-wave feminism and feminist theory has
been said to be a move in need of explanation (Siegel 1997, 47–9). Part of
the debate was—again—whether a third wave of feminist movement was
“out there,” whereas feminist theory seemed to be regarded as firmly
established in academia. Some scholars have claimed that a distinctively
new feminist wave exists, 13 whereas others state that it does not. 14 A
third division questions how beneficial this representationalist debate is
and warns against pointing fingers at those who do or do not tell a “true”
feminist story based in an exclusionary, generational logic. 15 I want to
forge a connection with the latter category of scholarly literature—
though (feminist) generationality is reclaimed here on the basis of a re-
configuration (not a dismissal) of the notion. I push for making third-
wave feminism favorable for feminist discussions today as long as its aim
is to connect the feminist past, present, and future. In this sense, third-
wave feminism will be shown to have more potential than post-femi-
nism. Post-feminism has itself been cornered by cutting all ties with the
feminist past, while cornering that past in the same stroke. Third-wave
feminism can be bent in such a way that the feminist archive becomes an
open cartography of texts, visuals, and tangibles that intervene in our
contemporary consciousness—in the classroom and beyond—because
they can generate surprises, surprises of desirable feminist futures we
may have never dreamed.
When third-wave feminism is not a strictly referential term, it is a
conceptual practice, the characteristics of which can be described but not
delimited. The umbrella offered by “third-wave feminism” makes ade-
quate preparation for a theoretical account of the relationship between
contemporary feminist theory and the feminist archive as well as gener-
ates political, artistic, and scholarly work instrumental for contemporary
performances of feminist futures with feminist pasts. The methodology of
jumping generations attempts to provide and activate an answer to the
call for “an aesthetic of conflict to help us redraw our maps of feminist
movement” (Hirsch and Keller 1990, 379). In this light, I work in confor-
 The Key Terms of Generational Feminism 13

mity with Julie Carlson et al., according to whom “[t]hird wave theory
synthesizes new and old theories, while continuously creating maps of
our own” (quoted in Siegel 1997, 60). And I wish to mention Colleen
Mack-Canty (2004, 158–59), who argues that third-wave feminism, com-
prising generational/youth feminism, postcolonial feminism, and ecofem-
inism, “is seen as an evolution, albeit a less than even one, in feminist
thought generally, not a break from the past” and “refutes dualistic
thinking.”
I would like to specify the “third” of third-wave feminism by connect-
ing to Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, who have explained in Dialogues
that any third should be seen as a cutting across and consequently as a
carrying away of, instead of adding to, binary opposition (Deleuze and
Parnet [1977] 1987, 131). This generates a singular usage of the term third-
wave feminism. Overviews have brought to the fore that many third-
wave feminists—nolens volens—employ post-feminist rhetoric (Gillis
2005, Snyder 2008, Clark Mane 2012). In spite of the eccentricity of devel-
oping and putting to work the third-wave theoretical angle, confirmation
can be found of a “third-wave feminist theory” (Siegel 1997, Renegar and
Sowards 2003), a “third-wave feminist epistemology” (Campbell 2004),
and a “third-wave feminist philosophy” (Alfonso and Trigilio 1997), next
to, for instance, “third-wave feminist media theory,” “third-wave femi-
nist television studies” (Johnson ed. 2007), and “third-wave feminist legal
theory” (Crawford 2007). As a consequence, I aim to outline the charac-
teristics of this third-wave feminist way of doing gender research by
engaging with the work of a new generation of feminist theorists from
several disciplines (feminist new materialists) and by theorizing and fur-
thering the ways in which they engage with the feminist archive as a
generative feminist force.
Employing a partial definition of third-wave feminism allows me to
write a text which is assertive of the issue and which develops a contem-
porary feminist logic not to be boxed along spatiotemporally fixed gener-
ational lines. For this reason, contemporary feminism does not necessari-
ly come with an age (anybody might try a third-wave feminist account).
This, in turn, explains why I do not need a fourth or fifth feminist wave 16
and why it is not a problem that the third wave, as it features in this book,
is not synonymous with a definition of third-wave theoretical feminism
equal to Sandra Harding’s “feminist postmodernism.” 17 Rather, I argue
that a third-wave feminism that is transgenerationally continuous, but
not reductively unifying, can be found among feminist new material-
ists. 18 The latter scholars’ work is an attempt to take on the full force of
transposition. If jumping generations is not a metaphor but the very con-
crete event of working with nonlinear historiographical dynamics and
active material-discursive agents, feminist new materialisms’ approach of
treating the materials formerly known as “objects” of research as stand-
ing on an equal footing with its subjects is the right practice to embrace.
14 Chapter 1

How do feminist new materialists jump generations? Let me provide you

with a sneak preview of the argument to come.

FEMINIST NEW MATERIALIST JUMPING-GENERATIONS

Feminist new materialist theoretical and research practice can be under-

stood with the help of a tool that Lynn Hankinson Nelson has termed
“unreal dichotomies” and “non-exhaustive oppositions.” The scholars
gathered as feminist new materialists say that the rhetoric which sur-
rounds us is fundamentally distortive, theoretically, politically, and artis-
tically speaking. Nelson’s terms account for the commonalities of what is
considered to be mutually exclusive (Nelson 1993). Categories such as us
vs. them, One vs. Other, sex vs. gender, nature vs. culture, and mind vs.
matter are now seen as the opposite sides of the same coin and as tra-
versed in the lived experiences of women, men, and Others. This kind of
questioning reappraises the standard approaches of unmarked thought
and feminist pedagogical practice and introduces a third alternative in the
sense of Deleuze and Parnet (neither . . . nor . . . but rather . . . ).
In the academic context, the conceptual and methodological shift
steered by feminist new materialisms is located and conducted in the
traversing of what is rendered dualistically opposite within the canon-
ized orders of C. P. Snow’s 1950s “Two Cultures” and feminist classifica-
tion alike. Both orders dominate (feminist) academia. A form of disiden-
tification with these classificatory approaches is not merely quantitative,
because third-wave feminist materialists do not work according to a
framework of diversity thinking. A return to modernist identity politics
is not what characterizes feminist new materialisms either (Alaimo and
Hekman 2008, 6). The latter would involve a negation of feminist post-
modernist epistemology—another binary opposition (Coole and Frost
2010, 26; Hekman 2010b, 4; Bolt 2013, 7)—and the former an affirmation
thereof—a sheer continuation of one of the epistemic categories of sec-
ond-wave feminist epistemology instead of a qualitative shifting of the
habit of classificatory canonization. Neither continuing postmodernist
epistemology, nor its negation, nor a return to an earlier epistemic branch
would legitimize the theorization of contemporary, qualitative generative
change in the order of feminist theory. This theorization is legitimate
because feminist new materialisms work on an onto-epistemological lev-
el—just like the lantern fish—traversing the differentiation between can-
onized readings and the lively performances of feminist futures in the
past and in the present. 19
When well-known schools of feminist thought pop up in feminist new
materialisms, the questions are asked what is done to feminist terms. Is a
certain term narrowed down owing to the deployment of a false opposi-
tion? Is the term opened up in a disidentification? What is done with the
 The Key Terms of Generational Feminism 15

narrowed-down or opened-up term and what work does this term do

itself? Feminist new materialists do not set out to use a feminist-postmod-
ernism-reduced-to-a-feminist-social-constructivism, but, instead, want to
show what work such reduction does and what the consequences are. As
I will demonstrate, by traversing “feminist empiricism” and “feminist
postmodernism” and finding itself inspired by “feminist standpoint theo-
ry” (Harding 1986), feminist new materialisms jump generations. Where-
as mentioned schools of thought are generally evaluated as (re-)produc-
ing reductive accounts of reality, this evaluation is not in line with the
once-visionary potential of feminist scholarly work founded upon them.
The question is how this disjunction has been put in place and the propo-
sal that this stifling is caused by feminist customs rather than by the
theories or theorists slotted into these categories (cf. Ahmed 2008, van der
Tuin 2008, Davis 2009, Sullivan 2012, Irni 2013). Feminist new material-
isms infuse new energy into the schools of thought by taking advantage
of their excessive nature and by keeping them active via a cartographical
methodology. The “new” of feminist new materialisms does not entail a
dismissively critical gesture and its specific materialist feminism should
not be read as yet another “post.” 20 Feminist new materialists jump on—
what I will summarize as—the genealogical movement of, and between,
classes in a classification. And they tap into the occurring transposition
between generations of feminists, which I will work out in the third chap-
ter as a form of “dutiful daughterhood.”

CODA

I have been involved in the collective development of feminist new mate-

rialisms since I wrote my PhD Dissertation at Utrecht University. 21 En-
gaging with feminist new materialisms as a trained feminist epistemolo-
gist implies that the practice of epistemology must change along the way;
feminist new materialisms are not a textbook epistemological venture,
although I will treat it as such for the sake of the argument in the second
chapter. Epistemologists have for centuries been satisfied with either a
normative approach (logically seeking out rules for conducting scholar-
ship) or an historical/empirical one (taking actual scholarship into consid-
eration so as to build one’s case on what was/is out there in the academic
world). And most epistemologists still are. Feminist epistemologies have
been formulated on the basis of embracing either of the extremes, but its
specific normativity has in fact been less explicitly based on the philo-
sophical discipline of Logic. Feminist epistemologists have imported the
societal concerns about patriarchy/phallologocentrism into their knowl-
edge-theoretical work and have therefore abandoned the disembodied
Subject and muted Object that logical reasoning commands. It would be
really “frighten[ing]” for us feminists to be “on our way to the bureaucra-
16 Chapter 1

cy of ‘objective’ figures, ‘rigorous’ statistics, ‘duplicable’ protocols indif-

ferently defining rats, the ‘youth,’ or women as the objects of scientific
knowledge,” said Isabelle Stengers (2000, 43). Feminist new materialists
have taken the emphasis on embodiment to the proverbial next level by
arguing that an analysis of the commands of mainstream academia and
their replacement by feminist alternatives does not exhaust feminist epis-
temology. Feminist new materialists are open to what has escaped the
attention of such identity-political second-wave feminist epistemological
concerns and they situate themselves consequentially before either the
normative commands or the feminist counter-commands have taken ef-
fect (descriptive ventures must be seen as normative by omission of a
theory of normativity). This particular situatedness implies a certain
speculative line that can be described in most basic terms as disconnect-
ing from the building blocks of phallologocentrism which drive our con-
scious, intentional thinking and doing. In the third chapter, I will start by
explaining how to position oneself before the Oedipal plot (which does
not imply resorting to the pre-Oedipal phase) and how that has proven
beneficial for transgenerationally establishing a materialist feminism for
the twenty-first century. In the fourth chapter, I will explicitly go into
what is entailed in embarking on a study of those processes and forces
that second-wave feminism has been affected by, but was unable to take
up. Jumping generations will be put to work in chapters 5 and 6. In these
final chapters, feminist new materialism’s innovation on the epistemolog-
ical level is placed at the forefront.

NOTES

1. A very recent neologism that extends beyond post-feminism is the term “gener-
ation war.” See Julia Serano’s blog post at juliaserano.blogspot.nl/2014/07/regarding-
generation-wars-some.html (last accessed: September 20, 2014).
2. French feminism and work that comes out of the Unites States—like Rubin’s—is
often distinguished from one another. I will come back to this issue later in the book,
but wish to make clear now that overlap and mutual inspiration cannot be ignored.
Think, for example, of the ways in which North American feminists in literary and
cultural studies took on sexual difference as a framework in the 1980s and early 1990s
(most notably scholars like Barbara Johnson [1981, 1998], Nancy Miller ed. [1986],
Domna Stanton [1984/1987], Catharine Stimpson [1988], Marjorie Garber [1992], and
Shoshana Felman [1993]), while “gender theory” was developed in the social sciences
in particular.
3. See for “in(ter)ventions” Hoel and van der Tuin 2013.
4. It is not my intention to evoke the “affective turn” in feminist studies, as the
parameters of this turn have received serious critique (cf. Hemmings 2005a, Papoulias
and Callard 2010, Leys 2011). Here affect simply refers to what exceeds ratio in acade-
mia and how feminists embody their archive. I do not mean to evoke emotion as an
alternative to rationality, however, which is why I speak of affect nonetheless (cf.
Sedgwick 2003, Clough and Halley eds. 2007, Papenburg and Zarzycka eds. 2013). An
interesting affective approach to the feminist archive can be found in Hesford 2013. In
a recent article, Karen Barad uses the term “material-affective” for scholarship and
epistemology (Barad 2012, 208).
 The Key Terms of Generational Feminism 17

5. “Boundary-work” is a term coined by Thomas F. Gieryn (1995).

6. Transposition happens in music too.
7. For discussion of the wave-metaphor see, for example, Springer 2002, Thomp-
son 2002, Purvis 2004, Aikau 2007, Hewitt ed. 2010, Nicholson 2010, and Byers and
Crocker 2012. I read waves as having great potential and connect with Rebecca L.
Clark Mane in this respect: “the use of the wave metaphor demonstrates an intention
to carry on, transform, and take up the torch of a central, if contested, feminist lineage”
(Clark Mane 2012, 72 n. 1; cf. van der Tuin 2011b).
8. For these multiple tracks, see, among others, Springer 2002, Henry 2004, and
Clark Mane 2012.
9. When it comes to rigorous renderings that do afford surprises, I am reminded of
Lauren Berlant’s take on “the case” which affirms both that “[a]s genre, the case hovers
about the singular, the general, and the normative” (Berlant 2007, 664) and that “the
case can incite an opening, an altered way of feeling things out, of falling out of line”
(Berlant 2007, 666).
10. Compare the neologism “classifixation” and my use of the feminist “virtual
past” with Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between differentiation and differenciation in
Difference and Repetition: “We call the determination of the virtual content of an Idea
differentiation; we call the actualization of that virtuality into species and distin-
guished parts differenciation” (Deleuze [1968] 1994: 207; emphasis in original).
11. Continental European texts on third-wave feminism are sometimes dismissive
of its (academic) marketability following the neo-liberal, advanced-capitalist, seeming-
ly secular political economy. See, for example, Puig de la Bellacasa 2001, Shugart et al.
2001, Prokhovnik 2002, Bessin and Dorlin 2005, Henneron 2005, Lamoureux 2006,
Bonfiglioli 2007, Fantone 2007, and Grzinic and Reitsamer eds. 2008. Note that the
French are generally skeptical about third-wave feminism as a specifically North
American term (Fougeyrollas-Schwebel and Varikas 2006, 9). The latter is an effect of
difference as dualism (Difference).
12. Dagmar Schultz’s 2012 documentary Audre Lorde—The Berlin Years 1984–1992
beautifully shows how Lorde introduced the concept and tool of hyphenated iden-
tities to black women in Germany in the 1980s and how a black women’s movement
was generated under the label “Afro-Germans,” which allowed for an understanding
of black women’s situation and history in Germany. See www.audrelorde-theberlin-
years.com/. Last accessed: June 20, 2013.
13. See, for example, Arneil 1999; Henry 2004; Heywood ed. 2005; and Orr 1997,
40–41. Note that other authors have mentioned a “fourth feminist wave” (for example,
Baumgardner 2011) and that Tjitske Akkerman and Siep Stuurman have questioned
the most common counting of feminist waves (Akkerman and Stuurman eds. 1998).
14. See, for example, Bailey 1997 and Findlen ed. 2001, xiii.
15. See also Detloff 1997; Orr 1997; Zack 2005; and Hemmings 2005b, 2009, 2011.
16. Such a next wave is nothing but “the vintage of the future” (as says the name of
a shop on the Czaar Peterstraat in Amsterdam, The Netherlands).
17. Such an argument comes to the fore when contemporary feminism is character-
ized by an intersectional logic of diversity. This is how Naomi Zack reads third-wave
feminism in her book Inclusive Feminism (Zack 2005, 18 n. 1). She immediately affirms
that this pluralizing act should be broken through (Zack 2005, 2), yet, her additively
epistemological proposal to bridge feminist empiricism and feminist postmodernism
(Zack 2005, 162) does not resemble mine.
18. The bibliography is growing but see Ahmed 2008; Alaimo and Hekman eds.
2008; Alaimo 2011; Bennett 2010; Barrett and Bolt eds. 2013; Braidotti 2000a, 2002, 2003;
Cheah 1996; Coole and Frost eds. 2010; Davis 2009; Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012,
2013; Fraser 2002; Frost 2011; Hekman 2010; Herzig 2004; Hinton and Van der Tuin
eds. 2014; Hird 2004; Parikka 2011; Rahman and Witz 2003; Rossini 2006; Saldanha
2006; Sheridan 2002; Sullivan 2012; Tiainen 2008, 2013; Van der Tuin 2008, 2011a,
2011b; and Witz 2000.
18 Chapter 1

19. Taking over Barad’s term “onto-epistemology” serves to confirm that (feminist)
new materialism is not a strict ontological turn in feminist theory, albeit that some
ontologists (for example, Saldanha 2006) have a stronger eye for epistemology than
others that tend to play the “God-trick” (for example, Bryant et al. eds. 2011).
20. Here I reference “post-feminism” in its many incarnations. Both postcolonial
and post-humanist scholars have discussed their use of “post” as a complex temporal-
ity. See, famously, Hall (1996, 248) and Hayles (1999, 94ff). Their “post” is far from an
easy “after.”
21. See van der Tuin 2008, 2009, 2011a, 2011b; van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2010;
Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2011, 2012, 2013; and Hinton and van der Tuin eds. 2014.
 TWO
Classifixation in Feminist Theory

Contributing to debates about the effects of how stories of (the origins of)
the scholarly field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies are told—
vigorously put on the twenty-first-century feminist agenda by Robyn
Wiegman (ed. 2002), Clare Hemmings (2010), and Joan Wallach Scott
(2011)—I engage in this book with “the importance of continuing to work
on the very systems of indexation, the categories by which we, as femi-
nist philosophers, organize our own work” (Braidotti 2003, 212; cf. Alcoff
2000). Feminist philosophers in particular are invested in questions of
how we generate a feminist academic canon. An appropriate starting
point for a project that wants to take these questions seriously for femi-
nist epistemology in particular is Sandra Harding’s seminal book The
Science Question in Feminism (1986), the main text of what we could call
“second-wave feminist epistemology.” 1 The Science Question introduced
the threefold progressive classification of feminist epistemology, a clas-
sification consisting of the strands of “feminist empiricism,” “feminist
standpoint theory,” and “feminist postmodernism.” 2 Harding’s triad has
been used and quoted widely since its publication, in the United States,
Australia, and Europe. Pedagogically, its potentials have proved to be
endless and these potentials continue to be utilized. Besides the overall
importance of Harding’s work as a tool, it has proven to be a constitutive
schema; it is, so to say, a canonization device. In the words of feminist
standpoint theorist Dorothy Smith: “In a sense, Harding created us”
(Smith [1997] 2004, 263). 3 What can Harding’s classification tell us about
the effect of classificatory systems of indexing feminist knowledge theo-
ries? In this chapter, I introduce the term “classifixation” so as to demon-
strate how a classification is not a neutral mediator but is thoroughly
entangled with the work that it does (cf. MacLure 2013). The study of

19
20 Chapter 2

Harding’s classification and its manifold uses serves as an exemplary

study into generational feminism.

WORKING THROUGH—AND BEYOND—CLASSIFICATION

Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism constitutes feminist epistemol-

ogy as a scholarly field while the book, through wide use made of the
text, is constituted as the source of feminist epistemology. 4 This double
bind is not without repercussions for feminist research, since Harding
has staged a conflict between the different branches of her classification:
the three strands of feminist epistemic discussion are represented as dua-
listically related (see also Harding 1991, 106). The problematic aspects of
feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory—namely the univer-
salizing tendencies ascribed to them—are said to be solved by feminist
postmodernism’s focus on diversity rather than equality or difference.
Harding inscribes oppositional binarism by saying that the relationship
between feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory is dualist
and by portraying their shared relationship to feminist postmodernism
likewise (Hemmings 2005b, 121–2). Such inscription of dualism risks hav-
ing fixating effects on what researchers can do with the epistemologies
once they are picked up and put to work.
Harding not only affirms the epistemic categories as conflict-based.
The Science Question postulates the entire field of feminist epistemology as
the opposite of epistemology or philosophy. In other words, the feminist
challenge constitutes an epistemology proper. Work such as Harding’s
reaffirms several paternal discourses and reconfirms Oedipal structures
by endorsing the construction of competing feminist epistemologies, and
this competition is currently considered to be the state of the art in the
field (see Grasswick 2011, xiii). In spite of the utopian-sounding “beyond
the paternal discourse” (Harding 1991), positivism, Hegelian Master-
Slave dialectics, and postmodern skepticism, as well as some post-struc-
turalist tendencies, receive confirmation by negation. 5 The second-wave
feminist epistemic categories get to share characteristics with their pater-
nal discourses rather than with each other, following a pattern of “ex-
change of women” (cf. Rubin 1975). Harding’s classification of feminist
epistemology rides the wave of a generationality that is questionable for
its Oedipalizing consequences.
Harding presents her classificatory schema as an ideal type and does
not state that it is necessarily True, as in, “out there” (Stanley and Wise
1993, 48–51; Wylie 2004, 340). And despite its constitutive effects, the
classification has been reworked over and over again. These reworkings
have been published in the wake of its inception in 1986 and they include
reworkings of the separate branches, of the interconnections between
branches, and of the schema as a whole. 6 Donna Haraway’s engagement
 Classifixation in Feminist Theory 21

with Harding’s work requires special attention. In the acclaimed article

“Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege
of Partial Perspective” from 1988, Haraway claims that feminist episte-
mology is caught in a trap because of its inability to formulate an other
objectivity, an objectivity truly moving away from universalism (Hard-
ing’s strands of feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory) and
relativism (the strand of feminist postmodernism). Universalism and rel-
ativism are epistemological tendencies that import problems into femi-
nist theory and research and do not necessarily benefit its (academic)
politics. They do not immediately generate avenues towards a feminist
future. I contend that Haraway has planted the seed of what are nowa-
days called “feminist new materialisms” with this analysis. Her creative
gesture involves at once a dis-identification with the well-known catego-
ries of feminist epistemology as fully rounded and the actualization of a
feminist objectivity called “situated knowledges,” generated by “materi-
al-semiotic actors” of the human and non-human kind. This transversal
gesture—an instance of jumping generations—does not negate the work
of Harding, but capitalizes on what the latter had to leave out so as to
make sure the classification worked as a classification. The latter move is
what I call classifixation.
Building on and furthering Haraway’s “situated knowledges,” femi-
nist new materialists have continued to engage with Harding’s triad
along the lines of an awareness of classifixation and a practice of jumping
generations. In “A Critical Genealogy of Feminist Post-Postmodernism,”
Rosi Braidotti claims that “[f]eminist philosophers have invented a new
brand of materialism of the embodied and embedded kind” (Braidotti
2011, 129). She lists Deleuzian feminism and feminist science studies as
examples. And indeed, I would like to mention Claire Colebrook as a
Deleuzian feminist new materialist and Karen Barad and Vicki Kirby as
feminist new materialists coming from science studies and anthropology.
They are three exemplars among many at the forefront of feminist new
materialist developments. The constitution of a new “brand” of feminist
thought—explicitly linked to the next generation—is accompanied by
raising “a qualitative question about the criteria of classification, the use
of analytic categories and the canonization processes” (Braidotti 2005,
177). Feminist new materialisms do not continue to classifixate feminist
thought, but rather imply a non-dualist take on the feminist theories of
the past. As such and in spite of its superficial claim to newness, it is
governed by a generationality fundamentally different from Harding’s.
Haraway foresaw, as it were, the feminist new materialisms when she
pled for diving into the material-discursivity of reality, thus traversing
and fusing together the diverse materialities of feminist empiricism and
feminist standpoint theory and the many discursivities of feminist post-
modernism and feminist post-structuralism. In addition, Haraway in
“Situated Knowledges” demonstrated generational awareness by making
22 Chapter 2

references to the PhD dissertations or unpublished manuscripts of

younger colleagues like Zoë Sofoulis and Katie King (Haraway 1988, 598
n. 15; 599 n. 17, 21), a practice that she has more than once reflected on
afterwards (see, for example, Haraway 1997, vii; Gane 2006, 157). Femi-
nist new materialisms place their bets on Haraway’s feminist future in
particular and demonstrate a strong eye for the non-dualist potential in
second-wave feminist epistemology. Feminist standpoint theory in par-
ticular is re-evaluated by feminist new materialists as an epistemology
that has—in and of itself—the capacity of being neither universalist nor
relativist. After all, feminist standpoint theory wants to de-hierarchize
the subject-object relation in research, simultaneously acknowledging its
patriarchal structuring and shifting it by inventing innovative feminist-
interviewing and feminist-fieldwork methodologies. What we find in
feminist standpoint epistemologies is a thorough engagement with the
real. Conceptually speaking, dualist logic structures the canonized kind
of second-wave feminist epistemology, 7 but the canon never preaches
what the generative content of the classes of a classification does. 8
Look at the intervention that comes from Janet Halley, who, in Split
Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (2006), produces a
well-researched cartography of lesbian and queer sexual politics in order
to shift second-wave feminism as the master narrative of theories of (fe-
male or feminine) gender and sexuality. Halley ascribes a reigning cen-
tripetal, that is, unifying force to an essentially internally divided femi-
nism, which is a unique complexification of common-sense takes on sec-
ond-wave feminism. But the dualism created vis-à-vis feminism and
within her definition of good politics (based on embracing incommensur-
ability) makes this book recognizably post-feminist. Despite this dualism,
Halley’s cartography project demonstrates an affirmative generational
politics. She writes:
if the project began as an effort to beat back the influence of Catharine
A. MacKinnon in left thought and practice about sexuality, it has
brought me to a vital new respect for her early, radical, and even criti-
cal work and a wish to promote and disseminate it. (Halley 2006, 13)
Here I notice a pattern of jumping-generations. Halley discusses how her
relating with the work of MacKinnon—installed in order to discard and
move away from that work—generates a new evaluation of the work of
the latter. This has generated a desire in Halley to actively pursue MacK-
innon’s feminist politics, a move that has transformed the next-genera-
tion feminist and will not leave the textual and political production of her
foremother unchanged either.
What are the effects of classifixation? Let me unfold an answer to this
question. I begin with the observation that second-wave feminist episte-
mology has a special relationship with postmodernism.
 Classifixation in Feminist Theory 23

“AT THIS CRITICAL REVISIONARY MOMENT”

Postmodernism entails the most recent Crisis of Reason for which the
French events of May of 1968 and its aftermath have become the short-
hand. For starters, there is the systematic claim that postmodernism has
enabled the creation of a feminist epistemology. Without the Crisis con-
cerning the unmarked (ergo foundational) knowing Subject, “feminist
epistemology” would have been a coinage of the most oxymoronic kind.
The knowing subject had to get a face (the face of a man) for the feminist
knower to come into being (the subject as an embodied, male subject
refers to only 49 percent of the world’s population). From a historical
perspective, the relation is seen differently: with the conceptualization of
the adjectified subject—the woman subject, the feminist subject, the black
subject, the postcolonial subject, etc.—Reason was found to be in Crisis.
Feminist and other critical epistemologies growing out of May 1968 fol-
lowing the “epistemic twist” in social movements, have caused this Crisis
of Reason, not the other way around. Here, the argumentation unfolds in
the opposite direction: with the claims to truth on the part of feminists,
the knowledge coming from a disembodied location was questioned (as
it must come from somewhere). Alternatively, postmodernism has been
criticized by feminists for the inauguration and hailing of “the Death of
the Subject” at the historical juncture of women and Others obtaining
subject-status (Haraway 1988, 585–86; hooks 1990, 28; Braidotti [1994]
2011, 268). Nevertheless, ever since the 1980s when the critical scholar-
ship in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and also in race, ethnic-
ity, and postcolonial studies, settled down in academia and got antholo-
gized, the claim has been that feminist postmodernism forms the epis-
temic apotheosis of academic feminism. Feminist scholarship has taken
on the structuralist analyses of social movements too, but structuralism
has also been declared bankrupt. Notably, in Harding’s classification of
feminist epistemologies, “feminist postmodernism” is argued to have
moved beyond feminist standpoint theory, which is, in turn, said to have
exceeded feminist empiricism (Harding 1986, 27). “Woman” and “wom-
en” were found as universalist and the hyphenated identities found “in
the field” were embraced.
Postmodernism as making a feminist epistemology possible stands
out among the different relationships postulated between feminism and
postmodernism. Feminist theory and its three epistemic categories are
usually introduced in the context of the crisis of philosophical founda-
tionalism, as resulting from the problematization of equalizing “Man”
and “human” in the context of the subject of knowledge. Since this crisis,
feminists could start working on the “explicit sexualization of knowledges”
(Grosz 1993b, 188; emphasis in original). This sexualization studies “the
relationship that models and goals of knowledges have to sexually specif-
ic (male) bodies” (Grosz 1993b, 188) and has had particularly productive
24 Chapter 2

effects: it opened the door to developing feminist epistemology as other

than an oxymoron (Code 1998, 173). 9 Lorraine Code (1998, 183) has sum-
marized the situation as follows:
It is these very tensions, at this critical revisionary moment, that can
generate the energies feminist epistemologists need if they are to nego-
tiate the complexities of a situation in which it is as important to be
objective in order to contest oppression with well-established facts
[feminist empiricism] as it is to be strategically skeptical in order not to
allow closure that could erase experiences and differences under an
assimilationist rubric [feminist postmodernism]. It is as important to
affirm identities and allegiances as politically informed, active thinkers
[feminist standpoint theory] as to acknowledge the falsely essentializ-
ing, solidifying tendencies of identity politics and political categories to
impose premature structures on events and circumstances that need to
be open to transformative intervention [feminist postmodernism].
Postmodernism as an era, paradigm, or disciplinary formation has al-
lowed feminists to theorize the subjectivity of women and to deconstruct
it at the same time. This double gesture is of great narrative importance:
the claim is that feminism has never had a unified subject and that all
three feminist epistemologies were created in one strike. Structuralist ap-
proaches lack this doubleness and because of the deconstruction being
epistemologically non-existent, feminist empiricism and the feminist
standpoint have fallen into the trap of universalism. What we see here is
that a rupture is generated within the schema of Harding, and between
postmodern feminists and famous predecessors such as Olympe de
Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft. Whereas feminist scholars tend to
overuse Sojourner Truth’s question of “Ain’t I a woman?” as a move
toward self-asserted, postmodern diversity (Zackodnik 2004), a univer-
salism is ascribed to feminists who (have) work(ed) with other notions. In
spite of the fact that Scott’s historical research claims it was precisely de
Gouges who argued that feminists have only paradoxes to offer (Scott
1996), feminist thinkers of the past are easily dismissed.
Narrating the intricate gesture of feminist postmodernism has a nega-
tive effect. In Feminist Epistemologies, Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter
stress the point of “deconstruction” by arguing that feminist epistemolo-
gists have realized—from the very start—that mainstream epistemology
is gendered and influenced by “race, class, sexuality, culture, and age”
(Alcoff and Potter 1993, 3). Acknowledging the fact that the work began
“as work on gender issues in the theory of knowledge,” Alcoff and Potter
(1993, 3–4) go as far as arguing that
feminist epistemology should not be taken as involving a commitment
to gender as the primary axis of oppression, in any sense of “primary,”
or positing that gender is a theoretical variable separable from other
axes of oppression and susceptible to a unique analysis.
 Classifixation in Feminist Theory 25

I want to argue that this argumentation is enabled by feminist theory’s

geo-politically unlocated origin story. Alcoff and Potter, and Harding
(1986, 28 n. 16, 55 n. 21) as well, implicitly incorporate French feminist
post-structuralist “sexual difference theory” under the rubric of Anglo-
American postmodern “gender theory,” thus allowing for an unmarked
Anglo-American feminist epistemology to be canonized (cf. Stanton
1980). As a consequence, the effects of the glancing over of national in-
dexation on feminist epistemology have remained understudied.
The dominant origin story of feminist epistemology as a genre and the
coinciding celebration of the epistemic category of feminist postmodern-
ism are still prevalent in academic feminism today. Even so, there is a
contention that we no longer live “at this critical revisionary moment.” In
contemporary academic feminism, a tendency toward a renewed celebra-
tion of empiricism can be found next to a rejection of postmodernism’s
radicalism (Assiter 1996, 5). Feminist theorists questioning the radicalism
of postmodernism, most notably Colebrook (2004b), uncover its implicit
humanist core and want to push feminist theory to a posthumanism,
whereas feminist neo-empiricists, such as the UK-based Sylvia Walby
(2000, 2001) who works in tandem with the Dutch feminist scholar Mieke
Verloo, prefer empiricism to postmodern social constructivism. Albeit
that it is difficult to draw strict boundaries, the latter response to post-
modernism conceptualizes post-postmodernism as an after-postmodern-
ism. It is on the basis of a definition of (feminist) postmodernism as
fundamentally relativist that a certain Master Narrative is reinvigorated
as the preferred and, in fact, only solution available in the quest toward
an (academic) feminist future. But is it altogether valid to equate feminist
postmodernism with relativism? Haraway has argued that feminist post-
modernism has never been relativist as “the strongest possible constructi-
vist argument [ . . . leaves] no cracks for reducing the issues to bias versus
objectivity, use versus misuse, science versus pseudo-science” (Haraway
1988, 578). Feminist postmodernism as fundamentally relativist rests on a
misreading caused by dualism. This response instigates a return to rela-
tivist postmodernism’s supposed opposite and constitutes feminist neo-
empiricism (cf. Knapp 2000, Potter 2007). 10
The second pull does not rely on a reading of feminist postmodernism
as relativist, because it is based on an analysis of postmodernism’s effects
instead of essence. The claim is that feminist postmodernism has func-
tioned in a manner that is relativizing. Included in this argument is a
claim about the geo-politics of the constituency, a response to the un-
marked nature of what has been canonized as feminist theory. Colebrook
has argued that “[s]exual difference becomes ‘gender’ in postmodernism
precisely because postmodernism remains a humanism, with the subject
as the point of construction or representation through which the world is
constituted” (Colebrook 2004, 284). She questions Anglo-American gen-
der theories’ distortion of sexual difference and postmodernism’s contin-
26 Chapter 2

ued reliance on a Subject. Here, the generation of post-postmodernism

works along the lines of a sharing relationship between the three feminist
epistemic categories, which is, in a next step, traversed. This non-dualist
strategy corresponds to Haraway’s famous plea from 1988 to end the
paralyzing feminist tendency of sticking to the three seemingly contradic-
tory feminist epistemic categories at once.
Let me repeat here that I read Haraway’s work as having planted the
seed for feminist new materialisms and that feminist new materialisms’
anthologies have tried to capture the current that runs through-and-be-
yond Haraway and scholars like Colebrook, oftentimes in spite of the
politics of citation on the part of individual authors. 11 Haraway and Co-
lebrook both provide an alternative to maintaining the two sets of polar
opposites that we have found in the lengthy quote of Code that I have
provided above. They do not predicate their work on dualism, but on
what the two sets share as non-exhaustive opposites and on the necessity
to disidentify with that shared foundation that anyway is nothing but an
effect of classification. Importantly, here feminist postmodernism is not
seen as a strand of feminist thought considered disruptive of philosophi-
cal foundationalism. Contemporary feminist theorists that work on a
“new” or “neo-materialism” 12 use the cracks in the feminist-theory canon
in order to shift the understanding of stalemated readings (of feminist
postmodernism) from either qualitatively shifting the terms of philo-
sophical foundationalism or as being a fundamental relativism. Feminist
neo-empiricism, however, tries to continue to classifixate what is crack-
ing. 13
Anthologists like Susan Hekman and Stacy Alaimo, Diana Coole and
Samantha Frost, and Estelle Barrett and Barb Bolt 14 develop the feminist
new materialists’ cartography on the basis of a relation to feminist post-
modernism and feminist empiricism differently staged from the feminist
neo-empiricist tendency I quickly hinted at. Yet their work is equally
involved in the generation of post-postmodernism. Feminist new materi-
alisms’ post-postmodernism is not an “after” but rather a rewriting (cf.
Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). Here, feminists do not do away with
the lessons to be learned from and the processual compasses produced in
the past. These lessons and compasses are taken for unraveling and act-
ing upon present cases of gendering. This is important. Our era asks for a
theoretical response to dualism (we are surrounded with “us vs. them”
narratives and experience their effects) instead of an unacknowledged
dependence on it (which would be an instantiation of the Subject vs.
object duality). Feminist new materialists recognize the epistemological
implications of the complexities of our contemporary neo-liberal, corpo-
ratized, and post-secular era. I fully sympathize with Clayton Crockett
and Jeffrey W. Robbins (2012, xiv) who argue that in the light of the
ecological, energy, and financial crises, “[i]t is no wonder that this des-
 Classifixation in Feminist Theory 27

perate material situation spurs the growth of apocalyptic scenarios, both

religious and secular.” But, they say:
[r]ather than give in to despair, or idealistic wishful thinking, we sug-
gest that this crisis could provide an opening for a new kind of orienta-
tion to thinking and acting, a new kind of being in and of the earth.
This opening is an opening onto a new materialism that is neither a
crude consumerist materialism nor a reductive atomic materialism, but
a materialism that takes seriously the material and physical world in
which we live. (Crockett and Robbins 2012, xv–xvi)
The germ of this non-dualist approach is found in feminist standpoint
theory. My argument is that feminist new materialisms allow for an ex-
pansive feminist standpoint on the basis of a transgenerational and trans-
disciplinary outlook.
The new Master Theories of today’s politics and culture are inherently
deterministic owing to a structural link between capitalist neo-liberalism
and the biological determinism of the genetic era: “[t]heir joint impact has
caused both inflation and reification of the notion of difference” (Braidot-
ti 2007, 65). Differences are celebrated (“diversity” [Franklin et al. 2000]),
yet—and at the same time—determinism holds on to an ideology of any
form of difference as hierarchical Difference. Feminist new materialists
argue that neither a feminist postmodernism confirming a notion of de-
terministic (gendered) difference via a quantification of identity catego-
ries, nor a homogenizing feminist neo-empiricism hiding inequalities be-
hind a seemingly inclusive, unmarked subjectivity is able to account for a
present characterized by “scattered hegemonies” understood as “the ef-
fects of mobile capital as well as the multiple subjectivities that replace
the European unitary subject” (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 7). What we still
need is insight into the ways in which feminists can “disengage differ-
ence or otherness from the dialectics of Sameness” (Braidotti 2005, 170). I,
as an epistemologist interested in feminist new materialisms, argue that
non-dualist difference is virtually present in feminist standpoint theory.
Jumping generations is the methodology which allows for reaching that
virtuality, and I want to read Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” as being
successful in that respect.

FEMINISM’S VIRTUAL PAST

The classificatory, or “taxonomical,” approach to organizing scholarly,

political, or artistic work has received famous criticism from Michel Fou-
cault, who opted for cartography in his archaeological and genealogical
work. In The Order of Things, Foucault reviews a text fragment discussing
a classification found in a Chinese encyclopedia by Jorge Luis Borges.
Foucault’s reaction to the text—unstoppable laughter—combined with
his subsequent analysis has become a classic case of questioning the
28 Chapter 2

scholarly practice of classifixation. The archaeological approach to

knowledge, instituting a form of cartography, enables Foucault to show
how grid-like order is produced and how language (word/sign, classifier)
and things (world/referent, classified) co-constitute one another in unex-
pected ways. Nothing in a classification is natural nor is it to be ap-
proached in a relativistic manner. In other words: there is a world, but it
is not “out there.” According to Foucault, the following questions are on
the menu:
When we establish a considered classification . . . what is the ground on
which we are to establish the validity of this classification with com-
plete certainty? On what “table,” according to what grid of identities,
similitudes, analogies, have we become accustomed to sort out so
many different and similar things? What is this coherence—which, as is
immediately apparent, is neither determined by an a priori and neces-
sary concatenation, nor imposed on us by immediately perceptible con-
tents? (Foucault [1966] 1994, xix)
Foucault’s answer to these questions is a most general claim that all clas-
sifications exist under the spell of an episteme. We can say that classifica-
tions do not provide Truth, but descriptively express situated knowl-
edge.
Following a classificatory logic, the situatedness of knowledge cannot
be theorized or acted upon. Classificatory approaches are founded on the
assumption of the ability to logically list categories that mutually exclude
one another. A classification—also in a feminist context (Stacey et al.
1992, 6–9)—is a dualist chart. It proposes that z is not y, and y is not x.
Everything is presumed to be fully fixed or predetermined; the author of
the classification—just like the signification process—is assumed to be
the neutral mediator between what is “out there” and what is “of the
mind.” Cartographical approaches complexify all this. By reaching be-
yond the linguistic realm, genealogies are onto-epistemological exercises.
Harding and other feminist classifixationists have not enumerated
“feminist epistemic categories” that are incongruous phenomena or in-
compatible theoretical reflections. Rather, the dualistic nature of classifi-
cation—the main strategy of second-wave feminism—prevents subse-
quent feminist epistemic categories from overcoming the characteristics
of the previous classes of this classification. And feminist epistemology,
as such, is prevented from overcoming mainstream epistemology. Incon-
gruity, here, is to be found in what is produced when the classification
cracks, when feminist epistemology comes to the fore as not being able to
be molded according to a preexisting structure of grids. Contemporary
feminist theory guided by the methodology of jumping generations con-
stitutes its own niche vis-à-vis the rationalist assumptions of second-
wave feminist classifixating, whereby the cracks in the second-wave fem-
inist classification are embraced and the life breathing through them is
 Classifixation in Feminist Theory 29

sought after and followed up. The cracks—not expected and often active-
ly dismissed by second wavers—allow for feminist futures of diverse
feminist epistemic categories to remain active, even though the specific
progress narrative structure which runs through textbook accounts of
feminism might suggest otherwise. It is such that feminist new material-
ists can affirm feminist standpoint epistemology and change the progress
narrative: neither apotheotic feminist postmodernism nor the categorical
repetition of the same exhausts feminism in feminist new materialisms.
Let us affirm that second-wave feminist materialism has an excess
beyond the ways in which it has been classified and canonized. This
excess has to be actively searched for because the academic world we
inhabit is saturated with classificatory processes of canonization. The fact
that contemporary feminists are not happy with the silencing act of clas-
sifixation is confirmed by their feminist scholarship that wishes to make
anachronistic leaps: the memory boom in feminist cultural studies
(Hirsch and Smith eds. 2002), anti-historical film research (Wortel 2008)
and anti-presentism in feminist musicology (Macarthur 2010), the tempo-
ral reorderings of performance studies work on “re-enactment” (Bleeker
2012) and of “the neuro-image” in digital screen culture (Pisters 2012),
generous narrations of ecofeminist movement (Moore 2011), the “retrofu-
turisms” or “vintage tomorrows” of steam punk studies (Sundén 2013),
the feeling of “vintage” in femme-nist movements (Dahl 2014), and the
queer collective utopias of José Esteban Muñoz (2009).
Reinvigorating the feminist futures of the feminist past through car-
tography does not repeat linear logic. These futures are part of femi-
nism’s virtual past in a Bergsonian sense. What is virtual can be actual-
ized while it is always real. What this entails becomes clear in Haraway’s
take on boundaries:
bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes.
Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn
by mapping practices; “objects” do not preexist as such. Objects are
boundary projects. But boundaries shift from within; boundaries are
very tricky. What boundaries provisionally contain remains generative,
productive of meanings and bodies. Siting (sighting) boundaries is a
risky practice. (Haraway 1988, 594; emphasis in original)
Haraway’s contention confirms that the (textual, visual, tangible) materi-
als confined in the classes formed by classificatory practices remain ac-
tive. Cracks craze classifications; they are not neatly gridded. And grids
can crack at any time. Theorizing classifications as dynamic events asks
us to think of cracking as an unexpected potentiality actualized instead of
as an expected possibility realized according to a plan. The plan of femi-
nist standpoint theorists is to oppose feminist empiricism, which has
proven as successful (a new school of thought was generated) as it was
unsuccessful (by negation, feminist empiricism was confirmed). 15 Just
30 Chapter 2

like how feminist empiricism has always been more than positivism be-
cause it invites women “as a group” to ask questions (Harding 1986, 25;
emphasis in original), the potentiality of feminist standpoint theory has
always been to generate a feminist new materialism, pushing horizontal
subject-object relations to the limit. Such leaps into the unknown are at
work in all classificatory projects; cartographical projects taking advan-
tage of these dynamics do not make a difference between the unsuccess-
ful and the successful in such a sense.
The feminist new materialist generation of post-postmodernism
avoids spatiotemporal fixations. Unlike a classification, a cartography is
not designed as a dualistic chart. Feminist new materialisms also avoid
linearity. A cartography cannot be read along the lines of progress narra-
tive. Feminist new materialisms produce and are produced by a carto-
graphical take on historiography, or archaeology, or of genealogy that
enacts “interference” or “diffraction patterns” (Foucault [1969] 1972,
65–6; cf. Haraway 1997, 16, Barad 2007, 71 ff.). A cartographical mode—
which, in Foucauldian terms, is the mapping of discursive or disciplinary
formations (Foucault [1969] 1972, 75–6) or, in Deleuzian terms, is a “to-
pology” rather than a typology (Deleuze [1986] 1996, 13)—engenders
contemporary dialogues between theorists and theoretical schools, with
the past and for the future. Clearly, the theorist of knowledge is explicitly
part of the dialogues as she is also leaping away; theory and practice
intra-act and a genealogy produces situated knowledge in a prescriptive
and even visionary sense, as I will later demonstrate.

BACK TO THE FUTURES OF “THIS CRITICAL REVISIONARY

MOMENT”

If I would, for the time being, attempt to capture feminist new material-
isms—risking the classifixation I intend to leave behind—I would say
that feminist new materialists argue that feminist postmodernism, in its
canonized form, has never been able to fully participate in a Crisis of
Reason since mainstream postmodern epistemology (its Master Narra-
tive) has stayed foundationalist. Feminist new materialists do not create a
relativist postmodernism from which they subsequently distance them-
selves. Critically engaging with (feminist) postmodernism, they do how-
ever acknowledge that “the postmodern condition” (Lyotard [1979] 1984)
is no longer theoretically and empirically valid. Feminist neo-empiricism
practices classifixation by performing a distancing act, which is why it
can occupy a fourth alternative to Harding’s list (Walby 2001, 492). 16
Feminist new materialisms rework Harding’s schema through a carto-
graphical rendering, allowing for a qualitative shift of the feminist-episte-
mology landscape instead of a furthering of its quantification. This shift is
 Classifixation in Feminist Theory 31

based in the movement running through, and opening up, the classifica-
tion (immanently).
Despite the fact that Harding’s classification of feminist epistemolo-
gies has a clear apotheosis (feminist postmodernism), Harding herself
opts for feminist standpoint theory. Harding writes that this is because of
the controversy of the theory, which, she says, allows for keeping scien-
tific, philosophical, and political dilemma’s as open as possible (Harding
2004, 1). The Science Question in Feminism stages Haraway as the quintes-
sential feminist postmodernist. Notwithstanding this, Haraway too self-
defines as a feminist standpoint theorist:
That Hartsock, Harding, Collins, Star, Bhavnani, Tsing, Haraway, San-
doval, hooks, and Butler are not supposed to agree about postmodern-
ism, standpoints, science studies, or feminist theory is neither my prob-
lem nor theirs. The problem is the needless yet common cost of taxono-
mizing everyone’s positions without regard to the contexts of their
development, or of refusing rereading and overlayering in order to
make new patterns from previous disputes. . . . Theory and practice
develop precisely through such recontextualization. (Haraway 1997,
304–05 n. 32)
Hence, Haraway affirms a transversal, transgenerational feminist materi-
alism in a plea for leaving the classificatory strategy behind. This gesture
liberates second-wave feminist epistemological categories, expressing
how we do not yet know what they can do.
Feminist cartography can be found in close proximity to the classifica-
tory work of Harding. It is even part of it. Feminist postmodernism has
been introduced as an attempt to overcome the diametrically opposed
assumptions of feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory. The
Science Question presents feminist empiricism as feminism’s pro-science
branch, holding on to existing scientific norms and methods and apply-
ing them to research stirred by feminists. As such, feminist empiricism
problematizes “bad science” (Harding 1986, 24–5) and advocates for a
“strong method only” approach (Harding 1993, 74), whereas feminist
standpoint theory has been introduced as the revolutionary branch of
feminist epistemology with its “stronger standards for maximizing objec-
tivity” (Harding 1993, 69). These stronger standards ask for a strong re-
flexivity, placing “the subject of knowledge . . . on the same critical,
causal plane as the objects of knowledge” (Harding 1993, 69). Feminist
standpoint theory is said to problematize “science-as-usual” and to in-
vent a science by and for women. The Science Question presents feminist
postmodernism as the framework which asks for basing feminist knowl-
edge claims in “fractured identities.” In Harding’s reading, Haraway’s
text “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in
the Late Twentieth Century” ([1985] 1991) departs from (appropriating)
frameworks that base knowledge in unitary selves and argues for:
32 Chapter 2

embracing our “fractured identities” as, say, a Black-feminist, a social-

ist-feminist, a lesbian-feminist, and so forth. Why not seek a political
and epistemological solidarity in our oppositions to the fiction of the
naturalized, essentialized, uniquely “human” and to the distortions,
perversions, exploitations, and subjugations perpetrated on behalf of
this fiction? Why not explore the new possibilities opened up by recog-
nition of the permanent partiality of the feminist point of view? (Hard-
ing 1986, 193)
Harding concludes that “Haraway develops her account explicitly in op-
position to the feminist standpoint strategy” and compares the impact of
Haraway’s postmodern feminism with Copernican/Galilean revolutions.
Postmodernism is said to work differently than feminist standpoint theo-
ry, as “the goal of telling ‘one true story’” is given up and “the permanent
partiality of feminist inquiry” (Harding 1986, 194) embraced. How is it
possible that even Harding has made provision for overlap and opening-
ups on this oppositional territory?
In the chapter “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is ‘Strong
Objectivity?’” Harding sticks to the fact that “lesbian, poor, and racially
marginalized women are all women” (Harding 1993, 66). Here, feminist
standpoint theory and feminist postmodernism are being bridged. As
early as in The Science Question, Harding notes that Haraway—tagged as
the feminist postmodernist par excellence—relies on Marxist epistemo-
logical assumptions:
This can be seen in her not so hidden assumptions that we can, indeed,
tell ‘one true story’ about the political economy; that in principle devel-
opmental psychologies can make no contributions to our understand-
ings of the regularities and underlying causal tendencies of historical
institutions; that we begin to exist as distinctive social persons only
when we get our first paycheck or, if we are women, when we first
begin adult forms of trading sexual favors for social benefits. (Harding
1986, 194)
Harding (1986, 194) states that Haraway “usefully incorporates two key
elements of that [Marxist] strategy” in her postmodern work, namely
“oppositional consciousness” and the intrinsic politicality of feminist
standpoint theory. Katie King, in Theory in its Feminist Travels: Conversa-
tions in U.S. Women’s Movements, shows that Harding’s account of Har-
away’s writing gives no credit to the scholars that are credited by Har-
away (most notably Chela Sandoval, whose oppositional consciousness
becomes Haraway’s term in Harding’s work). This has been evaluated as
an instance of agist and racialized/ethnicized appropriation (King 1994,
146; cf. Gane 2006, 157). The other side of the medal is that this example,
too, shows that Harding’s classification is unable, from the start, to fully
close off the categories. This does not undermine the classificatory project
altogether, as its effect is unambiguously such, but it is a very early exam-
 Classifixation in Feminist Theory 33

ple of jumping generations. Harding simultaneously holds to the classifi-

catory approach by bridging subsequent classes only and by “theorizing
down.” This bridging and (unconscious) implementation of a generation-
ality along grid lines do not change the temporality of feminist epistemol-
ogy or the telling of feminist stories. As such, this discussion cannot be
directly transposed to contemporary feminist theory in its feminist new
materialist incarnation, albeit that the unsituatedness of the classification
begs the question and indirectly there are possible points of entry in the
case of the bridging.
My position with regards to feminist new materialisms does not at-
tempt to bridge women-asking-questions epistemologies and epistemolo-
gies that undo the category of “women.” This duality—confirmed also by
Code—has been central to academic feminism since the outset, 17 despite
the fact that the classificatory strategy has suggested otherwise and has
resulted in paralysis by keeping up binary opposition. Feminist new ma-
terialisms do not argue for bridging theoretical perspectives presented as
in progressive opposition to one another while based on (unifying or
pluralizing) identity politics. Today, in short, a practice of negotiating
matter, materials, materiality, and materialism 18 forges a breakthrough of
feminist empiricism and feminist postmodernism that works towards
“more promising interference patterns” (Haraway 1997, 16). The result-
ing stance is explicitly linked to feminist standpoint theory while not
identical to its classificatory notation as second-wave feminist material-
ism. While matter is currently being conceptualized as an agent in knowl-
edge production—which is a posthuman move and might even extend
into non-anthropocentrism—the necessity to continue the standpoint
project of horizontalizing the subject and object of knowledge gets under-
lined. This generates a second-wave feminist materialism that is in move-
ment: feminist standpoint epistemology has always had the potential to
exceed its canonized identity-political version, which is fully acknowl-
edged and furthered for a contemporary feminist theory as well as for
engagement with current-day political complexities and complex subjec-
tivities. When the non-human object of knowledge is conversed or co-
responded with, we step out of the frame of humanist identity politics,
while the identity political framework—the primary location of the horiz-
ontalization program—is expanded.
The creative evaluations of determinisms in Western popular and po-
litical cultures, and of feminist (neo-)empiricism and feminist postmod-
ernism that together feature as “feminist new materialisms” in this book,
were first made mention of in a set of feminist journals published in the
2000s. 19 This debate pertains to a series of multilayered interference pat-
terns revolving around materiality. Let me quote Mariam Fraser, who, in
the article “What is the Matter of Feminist Criticism?” has claimed:
34 Chapter 2

The title of this paper appears as a question, in part because this is an

exploratory article, but also, principally, because the matter to which
feminist criticism may (or may not) address itself is neither something
that could, nor perhaps even should, be definitely settled upon. Indeed,
it is precisely the unsettling and unsettled nature of matter that has
proved so productive for much of feminist thinking. (Fraser 2002, 606)
The productivity of the “unsettling and unsettled nature of matter” cuts
across both the pejorative and the empowering identification of corpo-
reality with femininity based on Difference, and produces an innovative
cartography for feminist theory.
Feminist new materialists negotiate matter, materials, and materiality
and, as a consequence of that negotiation, break through classifixated
feminist epistemological positionings (including the positioning of mate-
rialism itself). Stalemated feminist epistemologies are traversed and dis-
located, allowing for a fresh feminist epistemological realm to open up.
One that does justice to second-wave feminist materialism’s potentials to
horizontalize power relations in research, and even pushes this potential
to its non-human limit. The feminist new materialist impetus—“the re-
sult of the butterfly effect,” says Bolt (2013, 3)—comes from all corners of
feminist academia and whereas it is impossible and undesirable to ex-
haustively delineate it as a brand, exemplary feminist new materialists
can be found and discussed. To begin, Karen Barad, 20 a theoretical parti-
cle physicist working in the field of feminist and queer science studies,
argues that traditionally realist approaches to science—assuming the
“mirror of nature” (Rorty 1980)—and social-constructivist ones—an in-
sufficiently radical feminist postmodernism assuming a “mirror of cul-
ture” in which scientific claims reflect academic culture—pursue a “cor-
respondence theory” of truth. This shared representationalism construes
realism and social constructivism as non-exhaustive opposites. Barad de-
signs her “agential realism” by demonstrating how any representational-
ism is a flawed starting point, just like “quantum anthropologist” Vicki
Kirby is interested in the ontology of language as a parceling of word and
world. Kirby demonstrates how such parceling is always already at work
despite (feminist) academic attempts at keeping up a firm border be-
tween the Two Cultures by assuming either a realist connection between
the words “in here” and the world “out there,” or a postmodern, schismic
disconnection which undoes the active contribution of what is worldly. 21
Deleuzian feminist philosopher Claire Colebrook puts at center stage the
seeming opposition between the primacy of the body and the primacy of
representation so as to demonstrate how all such presuppositions about
predetermination, whether modern or postmodern, are instances of
transcendence, whereas the primacy of the representation-matter dichot-
omy on the plane of radically immanent philosophies does not at all
exist. 22 Capitalizing on all these sharing relationships makes apparent
how feminist new materialisms should not be read along the lines of a
 Classifixation in Feminist Theory 35

successive schema moving from Marxist materialism to its feminist ap-

propriation, or from feminist standpoint theory to a post-feminist option.
Nor should a feminist new materialism be added to Harding’s classifica-
tory schema as a fourth category. Feminist new materialisms are materi-
alisms that extend across linear temporality and spatiality, in which
negotiations of matter, materials, and materiality and its agentiality func-
tion as a “threshold” 23 from which it is possible to build transversal
dialogues that are materialist in nature.
Feminist new materialisms are characterized by the simultaneous pri-
oritization of textuality/the discursive and corporeality/the material. This
is a horizontalization program pushed to the limit. For feminist new ma-
terialists, individual entities are phenomena, and phenomena are always
already material-discursive and it is especially confirmed that matter dis-
courses. This onto-epistemology is embraced in response to the represen-
tationalism—word represents world, I represent you—regarded as the
common denominator of conceptual pairs seeming to be opposites. Femi-
nist new materialists generate their theories, practices and analyses by
zooming in on what these sets of unreal opposites miss, thus establishing
the sets as never fully fixed, as always already in motion. In other words,
feminist new materialisms advance “encounters” or “events” as entry
points for scholarship into process or emergence, choosing not to carry on
with either a separatist feminist view or a reliance on feminist appropria-
tions of Master Theories (which would be the supposed dual opposite of
separatism). 24 Negotiating agential matter is a practice of (sexual) differ-
ing that is neither historically materialist nor post-materialist; feminist
new materialisms are third-wave materialisms. 25 Whereas all posts stage
themselves in dual opposition to something that is essentialized and sti-
fled, and find themselves subsequently and structurally under the spell
of that very same thing, feminist new materialists try to find more benefi-
cial entry points for understanding the entangled realities of the sciences
(Barad), the humanities (Kirby), and ways of philosophizing (Colebrook).
It is of great necessity for feminist new materialists to work with a femi-
nist canon moving in its national/continental, disciplinary, and genera-
tional terms (the canon is a virtual past). A feminist canon does not con-
sist of essences (the categories in a classification). Contemporary femi-
nists disidentify with, or are leaped away by, a canon in motion. Both a
certain slavishness and a dual opposition to that feminist past are forbid-
den.
Sara Ahmed has written in the chapter “Feminist Futures” that “[t]he
‘we’ of feminism is not its foundation; it is both an affect and an effect of
the impressions of others” (Ahmed 2003, 252). This statement can serve
as the epigraph for the generativity of feminist epistemologies which are
not simply additive or choose fractured identities, but opt for a plurality
within the knowing subject along the lines of a split subject of psycho-
analysis, a post-structuralist subject-in-process, or a feminist new materi-
36 Chapter 2

alist subject-as-mangle. 26 Since canonized versions of feminist postmod-

ernism are staged in alleged dual opposition to the “Subject” of feminist
empiricism and the “Woman” of feminist standpoint theory, they remain
fully gridlocked as quantifications of that very same notion. Feminist
new materialists that break through this linearity argue that the known
feminist responses to the scholarly, political, and artistic concentration on
the “I” are humanist and anthropocentric. Humanism and anthropocen-
trism are problematic because such (un)acknowledged stances push mat-
ter to the side, including the agential matter of the split, processual, or
mangled subject. The latter make humanism and anthropocentrism not
only problematic, but fiercely impossible. Third-wave feminist material-
ists demonstrate that even the question of the cogito (the I of subjectivity)
is in motion and works, as such, for a feminist future. The solution they
come up with is to be found in posthumanist, non-anthropocentric intra-
active approaches. In so doing, feminist new materialists follow up on the
generation of a new onto-epistemological position through an emphasis
on matter, materials, and materiality that affirms feminist standpoint the-
ory (it is a materialism) but not as it has been canonized (it is not identity-
based, because identity “is performed differently given different experi-
mental circumstances” [Barad 2010, 259]).

NOTES

1. For second-wave feminist aesthetics, see, for example, Doane 2004.

2. Edrie Sobstyl claims that Harding has “borrowed . . . and refined” Alison Jag-
gar’s earlier triad (Sobstyl 2004, 125). Harding does not refer to Jaggar’s epistemolo-
gies. She does quote Jaggar (1983) as an analyst of a related issue, namely liberal,
Marxist, social, and radical feminisms (Harding 1986, 159 n. 34).
3. When studying Harding’s work from 1986 onward, a growing self-awareness of
the constitutive effect of the work can be discerned. The same goes for Harding situat-
ing the respective branches in Anglo-American or European traditions as well as
presenting it as a cartography of strategies instead of separable strands (see Harding
1986, 1991, 1993, 2004).
4. Alessandra Tanesini’s 1999 An Introduction to Feminist Epistemologies is one ex-
ample of a text making use of Harding’s classification. At the November 2011 SWIP-
UK conference “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophical Traditions” at Kingston
University, London, however, Tanesini distanced herself from using Harding’s The
Science Question as a book of feminist epistemology. She now reads it as a book of
feminist philosophy of science. I interpret this move as a reduction. Feminist episte-
mology, in my understanding, encompasses feminist approaches to knowledge pro-
duction. Feminist epistemology, in this reading, embraces feminist philosophy of sci-
ence as a realm that produces feminist takes on natural-scientific knowledge produc-
tion, but that is not exhaustive of the field.
5. See, for example, “confirmation by negation” Serres with Latour 1995, 81.
6. See, for example, Hawkesworth 1989, Code 1998, Harding ed. 2004, Potter 2007.
7. While I suggest we keep in mind that dualism also characterizes post-feminism.
8. In the course of a meditation on the ways in which affect features in feminist
and queer theory alike (part of an article on reparative reading), Robyn Wiegman
(2014, 13–14) argues: “Some work is posited in distinctly Deleuzian terms while other
scholarship, like [Ann Cvetkovich’s], speaks of affect in its everyday idiom, as feeling,
 Classifixation in Feminist Theory 37

emotion, and sentiment. More precisely, we might cite two scholarly trajectories that
simultaneously convene and diverge here: an older emphasis on everyday life arising
from the protocols of standpoint theory and its rather fabled encounter with poststruc-
turalist takes on the subject; and the more recent reorientation toward the body in the
context of what is called ‘the new materialism,’ where critical practices are being
honed away from social constructionist emphases on ideology and performativity in
favour of less static engagements with embodied life, including those that forfeit the
centrality of the human altogether. While the latter intends a direct assault on the
essentialist theoretical phobias of earlier years in the name of renewed attention to the
ontological, the former—what I think of as the everyday affect school—reads both
embodiment and everyday life in affective terms and has been especially influential in
founding a distinct feminist project within and for queer studies today.” The scare
quotes around the new materialism (typified as a honing away of social constructi-
vism’s criticality) and the accusation of feminist standpoint theory’s supposedly ficti-
tious hooking up to poststructuralist tendencies and the disjunction created between
feminist new materialisms and Wiegman’s own queer feminist criticism demonstrate a
lot of antagonism, antagonisms which I am under great pressure to shift.
9. Code memorized in 1998 how her 1981 question “is the sex of the knower
epistemologically significant?” was first received as an outrageous question (Code
1998, 173).
10. Apart from Walby, I should mention Paula M. L. Moya (2001). Another exem-
plification is the feminist turn to evidence and evidencing, to be found in the current
work of Alessandra Tanesini and Nancy Cartwright. This latter version of feminist
neo-empiricism presents itself as a new naturalism (vis-à-vis feminist postmodern-
ism), and argues for a study of concrete situations of knowledge production. Lorraine
Code (1998, 184) asks how people live their professional and private lives? How do, or
can, they attempt to “know well” in concrete situations? Code’s examples are feminist
scholars such as Alison Wylie, Helen Longino, Lynn Hankinson Nelson, and Elizabeth
Anderson. Miranda Fricker’s 2007 Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (a
work on the epistemology of testimony) can be added to this list.
11. These are: Alaimo and Hekman eds. 2008, Barrett and Bolt eds. 2013, Coole and
Frost eds. 2010, and Hinton and van der Tuin eds. 2014.
12. See footnote 17 in chapter 1.
13. My reading of “cracks in the canon” as productive moments of generating trans-
versal connections in feminist (theoretical) movement comes close to Jo Reger’s gener-
ation-aware and community-based analysis of feminist activism in the United States
today. She refers to “[p]olitical opportunity theorists” who “posit that movements
emerge and respond to favorable (or unfavorable) openings in the social environ-
ment” (Reger 2012, 6).
14. Not explicitly feminist anthologies of the new materialism are Tony Bennett and
Patrick Joyce’s 2010 Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, and
Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey W. Robbins’s Religion, Politics and the Earth: The New
Materialism from 2012.
15. We can find this confirmation of feminist empiricism in the standpoint-theoreti-
cal work of Patricia Hill Collins. Wishing to counter determinist foundationalism in its
two incarnations—the idealist Subject researching passive objects and the materialist
identity politics that assumes that “a Black and/or feminist consciousness” comes
naturally to “being black and/or female” (Collins 1991, 21)—Collins (1991, 34) envi-
sions a key role, a “leadership,” for “Black women intellectuals.” Collins recognizes
the special position she puts Black women intellectuals in, yet she denies the fact that
this reinstalls modernism’s classism or elitism (which would be yet other foundation-
alisms). According to Collins (1991, 31–32), Black feminist thought is not about “rais-
ing consciousness” but about a “rearticulated consciousness [that] empowers African-
American women and stimulates resistance.” Bat-Ami Bar On (1993) takes Collins as
exemplary for framing this feminist epistemological project with the parameters of
Enlightenment philosophy, despite her intentions. When in Collins’s “Comment on
38 Chapter 2

Hekman’s ‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited’: Where’s the
Power?” Collins refutes Susan Hekman’s take on the feminist-standpoint debate as
one in which there is no room for “group-based realities grounded in an equally
central notion of group-based oppression” (Collins [1997] 2004, 248), she wants to
make the relation between individual and group complex by bringing in the very
same Black women intellectuals: “In the model in which an individual conducts inner
dialogues among various parts of his or her ‘self,’ the process of mediating conflicting
identities occurs within each individual. The individual always holds complete power
or agency over the consciousness that he or she constructs in his or her own mind and
the voice that she or he uses to express that consciousness” (Collins [1997] 2004, 251).
The question is whether Collins succeeds in repositioning foundationalism with this
(cf. Scott 1991).
16. Albeit implicitly, Samantha Frost (2011, 72–4, 77) does the same with feminist
new materialisms, especially when she compares feminist new materialism to earlier
feminist interventions (they are countered, critiqued, or supplemented).
17. See, for example, the “strategic essentialism” of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(1987), the questioning of the category “women” by Denise Riley (1988), the three
levels of sexual difference in Braidotti ([1994] 2011), the risky essentialism of Diana
Fuss (1989), and bell hooks’s (1990, 1991) yearning. Also Adrienne Rich’s unambigu-
ous women’s questions from 1987 allow for women to have different religions, nation-
alities, sexualities, and skin colors.
18. I owe this formulation of the “4Ms” to my colleague Ann-Sophie Lehmann.
19. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 19(1) (Winter 2004 on “Feminist Science
Studies”) and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture 28(3) (Spring 2003 on “Gender and
Science: New Issues”) in the USA and Feminist Theory 5(2) (August 2004 on “Feminist
Theory and/of Science”) in the UK. Australian Feminist Studies 14(29) was published
much earlier, yet had a very similar thematic outlook (April 1999 on “Feminist Science
Studies”). See also Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 17–18 n. 3 for a very similar cartography
of the originary impetus of a feminist new materialism.
20. See Barad 1996, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2007, 2010, 2012.
21. See Kirby 1987, 1997, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011b.
22. See Colebrook 1997, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2008.
23. For the threshold-concept, see Braidotti [1994] 2011, 115; De Boever et al. 2009,
39.
24. An example of subsuming new materialisms and third-wave feminist theory
under a paternal (Marxist) discourse can be found in Susan Archer Mann and Douglas
J. Huffman (2005). Their article “The Decentering of Second Wave Feminism” makes
clear that debunking second-wave approaches, on the basis of their supposed naïveté,
in order for a third wave strategy, dutiful to a paternal discourse, does not necessarily
lead to an innovative non-patriarchal and an-Oedipal materialism. See the French and
Australian bodily materialist feminists of Braidotti’s 1991 Patterns of Dissonance for the
opposite.
25. This third-wave materialist stance is not identical to the post-feminist appropria-
tion of the third-way approaches of left-wing party politics (see Genz 2006).
26. For the latter, see Hekman 2010.
 THREE
Dutiful Daughters

Baukje Prins, a feminist philosopher from The Netherlands, has ex-

plained that Donna Haraway’s famous 1988 proposal to analyze and pro-
duce “situated knowledges” concerns the intertwining of description,
prescription, and vision. Working as a visionary feminist epistemologist,
one does not just describe what others (humans, non-humans) do in or-
der to formalize one’s knowledge-theoretical insights in a bottom-up vein
nor does one self-consciously settle what should be of importance for
epistemological understanding. This would be a form of top-down pre-
scription. Prins characterizes the visionary element of the theory of situat-
ed knowledges as speculatively overcoming “the modern genre of cri-
tique”:
Here, better knowledge does not simply stand in opposition to domi-
nant forms of knowing, but involves the active construction of new
perspectives. . . . The dualistic oppositions and boundaries which are of
great epistemological significance, on this level lose most of their ex-
planatory meaning. (Prins 1997, 104)
This particular take on “better knowledge” is a design which has been an
academic feminist goal since the first attempts at formulating “women’s
studies,” attempts based on the need to disrupt male-biased curricula
and research set-ups. These were mainly undertaken in the 1970s by
Western feminist activists with one foot in the door of academia and, in
many cases, working in close collaboration with members of black libera-
tion movements. The design can explain how contemporary feminism
relates to a mainstream and second-wave feminist canon (for the genera-
tion of third-wave feminism) that can truly revolutionize vertical sexual
difference on a conceptual and bibliographical level, and in regards to
lived experience. The feminist critique of the mainstream furthers the
carving out of a place for this mainstream: it must be important, because
39
40 Chapter 3

we invite it into our work! And the second-wave feminist decision to not
transgress the boundary of the human might make sure there’s space for
a gendered binary even within feminist theory. Such critique is a human-
centered affair—with a Subject that is fully in charge—whereas Har-
away’s most explicit actively construed new perspective pertains to the
patented laboratory animal OncoMouseTM. Positioning herself on the
standpoint of this mouse, to whom she relates to as her “sister” (Dobbe-
laar and Slob 1995), Haraway has been able to see a different laboratory, a
different cruelty that needs to be abolished, and different opening-ups to
innovative knowledges that need our support (Haraway 1997).
Visionary epistemologies such as Haraway’s engagement with Onco-
MouseTM or Vicki Kirby’s engagement with an anonymous skull (Kirby
2011b), or Astrid Schrader’s work with Pfiesteria piscicida (Schrader
2010) develop in an “an-Oedipal” manner. “An-Oedipality” here signifies
that feminist utopian projects link to certain established theories, metho-
dologies, and/or artifacts which immediately appear as rewritten or are
instantly disidentified with, and they link to so-called mainstream theory
formation or second-wave feminism according to a relationality not
based in dualistic forms of response to pre-established materials. Femi-
nist scholars such as Haraway, Kirby, and Schrader do not start from
fencing off the human from the animal or material realm, but their “la-
boratory studies” in the sciences and the humanities resonate with the
bottom-up work of science studies scholar Bruno Latour. Latour has,
however, been accused of reinserting a human-animal hierarchy, as I will
later discuss in detail, so his work is not uncritically followed in dualist
opposition with a traditionally prescriptive epistemology. So I want to
work in this chapter from the broadly formulated claim that the visionary
outlooks of feminist epistemologists, like the ones just mentioned, em-
brace a certain “univocity” in which practice—the engagement with and
potential recording of empirical data and a plethora of materials—is
wholly entangled with a theoretical outlook on the performance of the
feminist future of subject-object de-hierarchization (horizontalization).
As such, the in(ter)ventions brought forth are of the embedded, embod-
ied, change-oriented kind. They are not just descriptive or prescriptive
because the starting point is that the understanding of these two well-
known epistemological options work with too many assumptions about
how knowing is done. In the words of Paul R. Carlile et al.:
One of our aims is to declare that the distinction between “subject” and
“object” is a result of historically situated human activity, not an onto-
logical condition. . . . [Our] approach asks that we pay special attention
to the future worlds disclosed and shaped by different ways of conceiv-
ing and enacting sociomaterial arrangements. (Carlile et al. 2013, 3)
The onto-epistemic claims and analyses of visionary feminists are more
informative than the claims and analyses that “equivocal” epistemologies
 Dutiful Daughters 41

of bottom-up description and top-down prescription can produce, be-

cause the former are not predicated on hierarchical sexual difference.
Bottom-up description revalues the undervalued in a pre-Oedipal man-
ner; it reestablishes intersectional femininity and masculinity according
to the dialectics of sex. Top-down prescription buys into established
male-dominated models of ruling the world. Visionary approaches do
not generate stalemates but thinkings and doings in movement instead.
Onto-epistemological work speculates about and works with the condi-
tions of possibility of a different difference, and implies that any gen-
dered, racialized, and sexualized hierarchy—however widespread—is
only one actualization of sexual differing as the fabric of the world.
Preferred in an an-Oedipal context is the embarking on a journey that
follows the intricate windings of “differing” because it is with(in) those
windings that interesting feminist futures are performed. These feminist
futures have the potential to work through the Oedipal plot and enter a
different place and time. For this, I imagine a rhizomatic pattern (a zig-
zagging cartography) in which theories and practices co-evolve in dy-
namic ways. These manners are not predictable, which means that, under
their influence, feminist futures are generated or emerge in ways that do
not rely on canonical feminist politics. Most white identity-political
stances have always needed the Oedipal plot as a grounding (revaluing
femininity) or in order to negate masculinity (resulting in reestablishing
the negated). 1 Onto-epistemology allows for theory and practice to be co-
constitutive of one another; separate theoretical and practical realms can
emerge, but never does one of them form from a starting point that over-
determines the other. Theories define practices as well as practices define
theories and from the get-go this co-responding intra-action or nonlinear
transposition is at work for a speculation not disembodied and dis-em-
bedded, but fully real, like OncoMouseTM and Haraway’s sisterly relat-
ings, or Kirby’s interdisciplinary dwellings on the skull of Anonym and
the earth itself, and Schrader’s response to the fish killer (that has always
already dis-appeared) and environmental policies alike. In her recent ar-
ticle “On Touching: The Inhuman That Therefore I Am” Karen Barad
formulates this co-evolution in terms that we will below come to under-
stand as “Greenblattian”:
Thinking has never been a disembodied or uniquely human activity.
Stepping into the void, opening to possibilities, straying, going out of
bounds, off the beaten path—diverging and touching down again,
swerving and returning, not as consecutive moves but as experiments
in in/determinacy. Spinning off in any old direction is neither theoriz-
ing nor viable; it loses the thread, the touch of entangled beings
(be)coming together-apart. All life forms (including inanimate forms of
liveliness) do theory. The idea is to do collaborative research, to be in
touch, in ways that enable response-ability. (Barad 2012, 108; emphasis
in original)
42 Chapter 3

Let me now try to be precise about the generational aspect of such re-
newed epistemological theory-practice intra-actions. I want to take cross-
species sisterhood very seriously. I also want to hold on to a seemingly
humanist and anthropocentric notation: “generation.”

FEMINIST GENERATIONALITY

Generationality is often disqualified in feminist research as well as conti-

nental philosophy. Here, too, it may at first seem unfounded to take
Haraway’s allusion to the topic too seriously (cf. Haraway [1992] 2004,
69). Philosophers like Jacques Derrida have claimed that generation is a
“terrible and somewhat misleading word,” for it defies singularity and
affirms universals without explaining them (Derrida 2001, 193). This is
said even as the discipline of philosophy is largely depicted as structured
by apprenticeship from Plato’s Phaedrus ([360 B.C.] 1973) to the work of
Naomi Zack (2005, 19 n. 3). Feminist scholars are prone to criticizing
generationality as a structuring principle, claiming it supposedly em-
braces the Oedipal plot and perpetuates its negative consequences for
women and Others (Roof 1997, Adkins 2004, Hemmings 2011). In arguing
against generationality, however, the concept reappears with a ven-
geance. Many authors, while writing against generationality, use its con-
ventions. We see this, for example, in how a most fierce critic of the
mother-daughter plot, Simone de Beauvoir, often gets termed as the so-
called mother of second-wave feminism! I argue, then, that it is important
to take the generational process seriously, albeit “less in the psychic time
of the individual than in the movement time of collective political life”
(Freeman 2010, 258). What is generational about visionary onto-episte-
mology? How do feminists re-deploy what comes from times before, and
how do these re-deployments of feminism, to speak in terms of Elizabeth
Freeman’s “temporal drag,” generate futures of sexual differing?
Haraway is one of those feminist scholars that feminist new material-
ists often refer to. I have argued in chapter 1 of this book that feminist
new materialists feel the need to free feminism from dualist interpreta-
tive categories because these structuring devices have reductive effects
and do not allow for materials (textual, visual, otherwise tangible) to also
“speak.” This is indeed what Haraway has been trying to do as of her
early texts like “A Cyborg Manifesto” from 1985, the seminal text that
convincingly demonstrated the cutting across of human-animal, organ-
ism-machine, and physical-non-physical boundaries in technocratic con-
texts as well as supposedly natural environments. In her famous 1988
article “Situated Knowledges,” Haraway devises a word for the active
role that materiality plays in processes of signification when she begins to
speak about “material-semiotic actors” that work together in “material-
semiotic generative nodes” (Haraway 1988, 595). Despite Haraway’s
 Dutiful Daughters 43

underreferencing of psychoanalytical dimensions that I cannot but notice

as a continental feminist theorist and philosopher, I want to claim here-
now that dualisms often have Oedipalizing effects. Dualistic plottings set
second feminist wavers apart as the dutiful daughters of Master theorists
(“I am a Saussurian”) and younger feminists as the undutiful, ultimately
post-feminist daughters of feminist foremothers (“But the linguistic turn
is over!”). If I manage to work with and among the new materialists
toward a shifting of the habit of thinking and working in dualist terms,
second-wave feminism will no longer have to be assessed as having pro-
duced feminist futures to be debunked. There is more to the work of
Ferdinand de Saussure than inducing a linguisticist feminism, Kirby’s
Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (1997) has taught us. Only
reductive, classificatory approaches to feminist theory, practice, and arti-
facts make us believe in this universalism, essentialism, and relativism of
concepts and traditions in thought. In addition, texts and visuals are also
materially real (Coleman 2009, 2014).
“An-Oedipalism” is a term by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
([1972] 1983) that accounts for the liberating exercise I am looking for
with and among other contemporary feminist theorists. An-Oedipal rela-
tionality proposes an alternative to generational dualism as it does not
stop at being simply dismissive (even of Oedipal structures, thereby con-
firming them by negation), but allows for, in this case, the generation of
contemporary feminisms in shared conversation with the feminisms al-
ready in place. The latter is of course a form of generationality, but since
it is not Oedipal, a rewritten notion of generation is engaged with. Just
like we would now say that Beauvoir claims that all dualist relations are
gendered but simultaneously opened up, 2 I want to claim that all such
relations are Oedipalized and tend to metamorphose as an-Oedipal be-
cause the respective positions in the Oedipal plot are predetermined to
relate in a certain oppressive structure with perverse consequences and
fierce material effects. In what follows, I show that what is produced
following an-Oedipal logic in feminism resembles the “lesbian continu-
um” of Adrienne Rich ([1981] 1993). This object and tool of second-wave
feminist theory performs continuity between women of different genera-
tions who work within different disciplines and on different continents,
while also doing justice to these and other differences (sexuality, class,
“race”/ethnicity). It is in this light that this book works through-and-
beyond the chasms that patriarchally divide women, whether generation-
ally, nationally, through an excessive commitment to epistemic strands,
scholarly disciplines, or identity markers. This constellation is able to
reach the movement of feminism, which is important in these days of
right-wing appropriation and the questioning of “authentic feminism” in
post-feminist times. I proceed in this chapter by describing and actualiz-
ing how it is that by working through Oedipal territory, one ends up
44 Chapter 3

beyond it, in a new somewhere or sometime where Oedipality is no

longer, or has never solely been, the paralyzing structural device. 3

AN-OEDIPAL RELATIONALITY

How can we conceptualize relationships with feminist foremothers, con-

stituted in the classification of second-wave feminist epistemology as dis-
junctive (and therefore Oedipal by implication) and opened up through
the cartographical methodology of, most notably, feminist new material-
isms? Making explicit the “how” of an-Oedipal rewritings of feminist
canonization processes is intended to substantiate the claim that what I
am signaling and putting to work in this book involves a “qualitative
leap” toward “creating conditions for the implementation of transversal-
ity” (Braidotti 2006, 123) in the field of feminist theories of knowledge in
particular. Syncing with the anti-anti-relational turn in queer theory (cf.
Daniel 2010), my claim and observation is that this leap is always already
performed; it happens in the excessive classification as much as it is,
more or less, a successful act on the part of third-wave materialist femi-
nists.
Feminist new materialisms are not identical to feminist standpoint
theory—the well-known feminist methodology of “thinking from wom-
en’s lives” (Harding 1991)—but the shift performed by contemporary
feminists to the material-semiotic or “material-discursive” agents (Barad
2007) should not be conceptualized as a conventional generational rup-
ture in regards to the power of definition about “materialism” either.
Feminist standpoint theory—as it has been actualized in both the canon
of feminist theory and as part of contemporary feminism’s virtual past—
forms a constraint on the constitution of a feminist new materialism.
Feminist new materialists work with the inclusive feminist futures pro-
duced by feminist standpoint theory; the attempt to de-hierarchize the
object and subject of research is fully embraced by the former. But such a
constraint does not dictate with what kind of framework contemporary
feminists must work. The conceptual confusion surrounding both femi-
nist new materialisms and third-wave feminism—what is it? who owns
it? to whom does it appeal?—can be employed to enforce an attainable
feminist perspective in light of the ever-renewing post-feminist tenden-
cies and neo-deterministic perspectives that thrive inside and outside
(academic) feminism.
Both Rosi Braidotti and Sandra Harding have typified feminist theo-
rists in general and feminist epistemologists in particular as the undutiful
daughters of male theorists. In the case of Harding, this claim illustrates
the generational dualism of second-wave feminist epistemology. Unduti-
ful daughterhood, in Braidotti’s account, signifies an Irigarayian stance of
affirming the need to build a women’s culture and subjectivity that is
 Dutiful Daughters 45

conscious that without a genealogy of women, women will continue to

fight for becoming the phallic Mother (Wright ed. 1992, 263, 314–5; Buike-
ma 1995, 103–4). The latter stance—different from stressing the pre-Oedi-
pal and highlighted also in the introduction to this book—will be used
further to illustrate the generational order of third-wave materialist femi-
nism in this chapter. It is where I locate dutiful daughters. The work of
Braidotti and Luce Irigaray has helped me to understand the order of
second-wave feminist epistemology and to capture and advance an alter-
native to its sometimes-Oedipal generationality. 4 I will therefore end up
arguing for distinguishing Braidotti from Harding; in fact, I will call Brai-
dotti’s generationality dutiful daughterhood, since the intra-feminist rela-
tions that the latter establishes in her cartographical or, as I will call it
later on in this study, genealogical work are never oppositional or plotted
vis-à-vis “male scholars.”
In The Science Question in Feminism (Harding 1986), the existence and
importance of positivism, Hegelian Master-Slave dialectics, postmodern
skepticism, and post-structuralist tendencies receive confirmation. Hard-
ing constitutes an epistemology and a philosophy “proper” through the
reassurance that a feminist challenge exists. She also reaffirms the so-
called “paternal discourses” of the three distinct feminist epistemological
schools of feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory, and feminist
postmodernism, and, finally, describes and buys into Oedipal structures
by endorsing the construction of competing schools of feminist episte-
mology (cf. Rooney 2011). The resulting epistemological categories share
characteristics with their paternal discourses rather than with each other.
This is to say, the resulting feminist epistemologies are as foundationalist
as their paternal discourses. Harding’s feminist epistemology is governed
by what Deleuze and Guattari, like Gayle Rubin (1975), have called an
“exchangist” framework according to which women do not just circulate,
but are allowed to circulate (or not) through the hands of men (Deleuze
and Guattari [1972] 1983, 142). Harding’s work verifies Judith Roof’s
fierce criticism of the generational dimension of academic feminism:
Importing the full force of Oedipal rivalry, recrimination, and debt,
generation is neither an innocent empirical model nor an accurate as-
sessment of a historical reality. Rather, generation reflects and exacer-
bates Oedipal relations and rivalries among women, relies on a patriar-
chal understanding of history and a linear, cause-effect narrative, and
imports ideologies of property. (Roof 1997, 71)
Structured by Oedipality, the undutifulness of second-wave feminist
epistemologists reinstates the power/knowledge of male “fathers.” What
is produced is a certain dutiful daughterhood in a scenario of the Law of
the Father.
Braidotti allows us to label Harding’s generationality as a dutiful one,
but this concept comes out transformed from her own work. In Patterns of
46 Chapter 3

Dissonance: A Study of Women and Contemporary Philosophy, Braidotti has

claimed that feminists wanting to change bad philosophy rather than
philosophy as such (a strategy structurally close to Harding’s feminist
empiricism) and feminists wanting to re-value the roles that patriarchy
assigns to women (equal to canonized feminist standpoint theory) both
reinforce a philosophy proper and patriarchy because Power and Knowl-
edge remain intricately connected along received axes of objectivity,
truth, method, and the knowing subject. Following Irigaray, Braidotti
calls this pattern, “I think therefore he is” (Braidotti 1991, 174). The solu-
tion Braidotti proposes to this non-exhaustive dichotomy of daughters
dutiful to Fathers does not equal second-wave feminist theory’s post-
modernism, which is Harding’s third option. Braidotti (1991, 209) is inter-
ested in the ways in which feminists enact the differing option of “I think
therefore she is.”
Braidotti follows Teresa de Lauretis, who has claimed that the tenden-
cy to make classifications is found mostly among Anglo-American femi-
nist scholars (De Lauretis 1987, 3–5). These scholars of gender theory are
said to engage with the constitution of binary, oppositional categories
and with the construction of progress narratives (feminist epistemology
getting more and more sophisticated), whereas continental feminist
scholars are said to deal with “difference in itself.” Theorizing difference
in itself has entailed “that they sexualize the issue, by positing differences
between men and women as the prototype of all differences” (Braidotti
1991, 210). The rationale here is that from the 1980s onward, feminists of
sexual difference have taken a different course than their sisters in gender
theory. Theorists of sexual difference have not moved from a so-called
universalist difference feminism (a feminist standpoint theory) toward a
pluralistic or diversified feminism (a feminist postmodernism). Rather
than the gendered reinforcement of the negative effects of generationality
and the Oedipal conflict, sexual difference theorists use a cartographical
methodology and have made the reconceptualization of difference their
main theoretical, political, and artistic project. However, only gender-
theoretical work has been canonized. In the broader field of second-wave
feminism, premised on what Domna Stanton called the “Franco-
American Dis-Connection” in 1980, radical feminists of sexual differ-
ence—not the radical materialist feminists of the social-sciences-kind
(Marxists) but the French bodily materialists that can equally be found in
Australia (post-structuralists)—were either read as essentialists confirm-
ing the patriarchal norm through leaving it untouched (another lan-
guage, another realm, etc.) or—in the case of the French—not read at all
(Braidotti 1991, 273). The first option is nowadays generally considered as
a misreading and product of the dominance of Anglo-American gender
theory. The second option does not play a role any longer, as a great
many feminists have picked up the ideas of what was once an avant-
garde movement.
 Dutiful Daughters 47

In the beginning of the second feminist wave, the claiming of space

was most important. This space could be claimed within the patriarchal/
phallologocentric order—canonized as equality feminism—or cut off
from this order—difference or postmodern feminism. Sexual difference
feminists theorizing positive rather than asymmetrical, Beauvoirian dif-
ference (“the dialectic of sex” in Shulamith Firestone’s terms) have re-
jected both of these options as both were said to buy into the Oedipal
conflict. In so doing, sexual difference theorists constitute a relation to
(dualist) Oedipality that differs from confirmation either by negation or
by subsumption (for instance through the affirmation of the pre-Oedi-
pal). Sexual difference theorists do not constitute a post-structuralism
“proper” through the negation of unmarked post-structuralist work.
Post-structuralist conceptualizations of difference have been dealt with in
a manner which is an-Oedipal. The countering of Oedipalized daughter-
hood—dutiful to men and the patriarchal/phallologocentric order—by
French radical feminists of sexual difference has led to “the idea of a
‘double militancy,’ a critical, ‘different’ participation” (Braidotti 1991,
176) which is different both from non-participation and from participa-
tion on patriarchal terms, recognizing that these options equally end up
reinforcing patriarchy. In Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus a similar
doubleness is employed.
Aiming at “circulation” or “desiring-production” freed from Oedipal-
ization, one needs to work through Oedipal territoriality, but also pass or
deterritorialize toward the an-Oedipal (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983,
362, 366–69). An-Oedipal deterritorialization designates non-anthropo-
centric circulation rather than anthropocentric representation, according
to which all situations—including generational conflict and science (De-
leuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 35, 371–72)—are always already humanis-
tically Oedipalized (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 308). This process
entails the following:
It is in fact essential that the limit of the decoded flows of desiring-
production be doubly exorcised, doubly displaced, once by the position
of immanent limits that capitalism does not cease to reproduce on an
ever expanding scale, and again by the marking out of an interior limit
that reduces this social reproduction to restricted familial reproduction.
(Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 304)
I read the radical feminists of sexual difference as illustrating and putting
forth Deleuze and Guattari’s an-Oedipal deterritorialization. Their notion
of (sexual) difference is never a strict humanism nor informed by the
centrality of anthropos.
The move which Braidotti’s daughters—dutiful to each other—made
in the 1980s can only now, and amidst third-wave feminists, be pushed to
the limit. Deleuze and Guattari claim that predetermined, Oedipal repre-
sentation involves an idealism and they plead for non-foundationalist
48 Chapter 3

materialist approaches (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 52, 75). It is in

their argument that science as well as art are Oedipalized, but this is not
necessarily so. Some writers have remained unaffected by the reduction
caused by classification and, as such, can potentially disidentify with
Oedipalization (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 134–46, 368–72). I am
convinced that the full potential of all this approaches actualization in the
contemporary work of feminist new materialists. 5 These scholars gener-
ate theory with, rather than engage in the endorsement of, one of the
feminist epistemic strands of the second feminist wave (cf. Bracke and
Puig de la Bellacasa 2004). One of the reasons why Deleuze and Guatta-
ri’s Anti-Oedipus is important for conceptualizing the generational order
of third-wave feminism is its complementary deviation from canonized,
that is, malestream positivism, social-science materialism, and social con-
structivism.
If third-wave feminism is not understood in a dualistic, second-wave
manner (such readings would make third-wave feminism synonymous
with post-feminism or read third-wave feminism as buying into capitalist
valuations of youngness, fitness, and bodily ability) but in a manner at-
tentive to third-wave feminist productivity, its relation to second-wave
feminism can be characterized according to a pattern of “disidentifica-
tion” (Henry 2004). Disidentification traverses both the installation of a
women’s realm—a place secured by patriarchy as “women and (pejora-
tive) embodiment” instead of “women and knowledge”—and the nega-
tion of the philosophical or epistemological mainstream—which, as dem-
onstrated above, results in a confirmation of/subsumption to the philo-
sophical Masters. Both seemingly opposite options do not allow for the
“double militancy” Braidotti (or Deleuzian feminism) describes and is
captured in the process and concept of disidentification itself. Disidentifi-
cation, read with Anti-Oedipus, produces the leap toward post-postmod-
ernism (not an after, but a through-and-beyond social-constructivist post-
modernism). Disidentification allows one to be attentive to Oedipaliza-
tion (“Your feminism is seen as having given birth to ours . . . ”) as well as
it allows for desiring-production/circulation as such (“but studying it we
found out that it is not more rudimentary, but simply different from and
equally complex as ours. It leaps [us, too] away to a new somewhere and
sometime”). 6 This double movement explains Deleuze and Guattari’s
claim about the generativity of the cracks in, precisely, an Oedipal rela-
tion which can unblock an-Oedipal desiring-production and circulation.
In the next chapter I will refer back to this process on a most fundamental
level when discussing a double genealogy. For now the question is: how
to be a dutiful daughter? And why have I discussed intra-feminist dutiful
daughterhood in a section that borrows heavily from Deleuze Studies?
What kind of movement—thinking in movement—is going on between
feminism and Deleuze? In other words: how does feminism turn with
Deleuze?
 Dutiful Daughters 49

FEMINIST TURNINGS WITH DELEUZE

Following an an-Oedipal relationality that establishes “her” because “I

think,” and that speculates across or though-and-beyond the realm of the
critical human subject is nowadays being called “posthumanist” and/or
“non-anthropocentric.” Posthumanism involves the destabilization of the
category of “Human” as well as its reactivation, leading to a conceptual-
ization of the human which Haraway has called an “imploded knot”
(Haraway [2000] 2004). This imploded knot keeps the other-than-Human
within itself: it has had to affirm that we are not fully rational, cultured,
etc. The Crisis of Reason of May ‘68 has enabled the reconceptualization
of specifically the knowing subject as other than Man/Human. 7 With the
liberalization of Higher Education, this has ultimately led to a postmod-
ern relativism—also of the feminist and postcolonial kind—which non-
exhaustively opposes the totalization of rationalist epistemology. (Femi-
nist) postmodernism has been unable to break free from a knowledge-
theoretical foundation based in humanism by quantifying and relying
upon what is human (women, postcolonial subjects, lesbians and gays) in
its move toward diversity and later intersectionality (Deckha 2008, Nash
2008, Puar 2012). In other words, it has continued to be representational-
ist both in the political sense of the term (Vertretung) and in terms of
epistemic and aesthetic representationalism (Darstellung). This is so be-
cause the Other of Man has remained fully human and the epistemolog-
ical twists in feminism, anti-racism, and the gay and lesbian movement
have not necessarily affected or asked what is human about the subject of
knowledge. This answer would have had to sound something like this:
“what is human” is infused with inhuman forces of desire, or affect.
Posthumanism’s human-as-an-imploded-knot traverses totalization and
relativism by acknowledging that the latter tendency celebrates a “hu-
man multiple” (for instance postcolonial + woman) and leaves intact the
boundaries between sex/gender, “race”/ethnicity, sexuality, class, health,
etc. (identity politics), the One and the Other (humanism), and the human
and non-human (anthropocentrism). Accordingly, posthumanism is inti-
mately linked with non-anthropocentrism.
Non-anthropocentrism tries to spin the notion of the human not by
rejecting it, but by acknowledging that the human has the natural Other
inside of itself, and that even this human is not the center (although not
wiped off of the map either). Non-anthropocentrism shifts the One as (a)
Man and the center of a whole range of practices—the universe, thought,
etc.—in a relational process-ontology of emergence. Dorothea Olkowski
has formulated this result as “[a] thousand tiny subjects [which] consti-
tute every global, logical subject” (Olkowski 2000, 101). Here the affirma-
tion is made that, even assuming to be a knowing Subject in control
(cognizing an actualization), one is inhabited by all kinds of inhuman
forces (the virtual that may not be cognitively captured, always already
50 Chapter 3

escaping cognition). Cultural identity categories are no longer prioritized

even in researching how they can emerge. Contemporary feminists work-
ing in non-anthropocentric veins of study practice with what has never
quite made it into the identity-political framework: the weather (Neima-
nis and Loewen Walker 2014) or environment and ecology more general-
ly (Alaimo 2008), 8 software code (Parikka 2011), voice as a bodily event
(Tiainen 2008, 2013), disability (Siebers 2008), and so on. Here, epistemo-
logical individualism has convincingly been left behind both in the sense
of the One and in the sense of the subject as hyphenated Other; “the
subject” is not only an imploded knot, but rather in the sense that it keeps
with psychoanalytical insights of a “difference within” (Braidotti 2013).
Posthumanism and non-anthropocentrism form the challenges of today’s
feminists.
How is it that contemporary Deleuzian feminists are dutiful daugh-
ters, not of Deleuze—which would constitute Deleuze as the new Master
to whom the Oedipalized feminists are dutiful—but of second-wave fem-
inists who we do not want to silence? Is Deleuze scaffoldable (as an an-
Oedipal thinker) and have feminists ever tried to do that?
In Dialogues, Deleuze and Claire Parnet have asked “what scientists
do” and have answered that scholarly work “is an event which passes
across irreducible domains” (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 1987, 66–7). The
formula Deleuze and Parnet use for their own approach, as well as for the
event-centeredness of science per se, reads “ENTITY = EVENT” (Deleuze
and Parnet [1977] 1987, 66; emphasis in original). In this univocal philoso-
phy, “[u]tterances are not content to describe corresponding states of
things . . . one is only assembling signs and bodies as heterogeneous
components of the same machine” (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 1987, 71).
This kind of work does not demonstrate a single trace of correspondence
theory of truth; practice and theory are completely intertwined and the
assembling alludes to a visionary epistemology. It is important to empha-
size how both scholarship itself and the reflection on science should be
seen along the lines presented here: the work of Deleuze (and Parnet/
Guattari) entails “a theory of experimental praxis” (Lorraine 2007, 270).
The focus on assembling, or “assemblage,” inaugurates the univocal
stance we find in the work under discussion here. Assemblages are creat-
ed following the force of “desire,” the breaking point being destruction or
death (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 1987, 140). Following desire—in other
words, “intensifying life” (Deleuze and Guattari [1991] 1994, 74)—in a
manner that deterritorializes involves a liberation of “pure matter” (De-
leuze and Parnet [1977] 1987, 72). Any trace of objectification is left be-
hind, but it is still possible that neither destruction nor liberation occurs.
In that case, an utterance gets a subject (“I”), a certain state of affairs gets
signified (“that”) and the development is limited (for example, in the
installation of the binary oppositions men vs. women, or humans vs.
animals). This is called a “reterritorialization” and is explained as how
 Dutiful Daughters 51

equivocity emerges. The event-as-the-entity, or smallest onto-epistemo-

logical unit, affirms that the world is primarily becoming and that this
movement can be furthered (deterritorialized), halted ([re]territorialized),
or destroyed. Much reflection on science and epistemology has followed
the territorializing line, which has certainly had reductive effects even for
feminism. We have seen above that the human subject of feminist schol-
arship has re-confirmed the unmarked Subject in an Oedipal relation,
whereas deterritorialization of thought has happened in the move of du-
tiful daughters who established a pattern of sexual differing following “I
think therefore she is.” This is precisely what Sarah Bracke and María
Puig de la Bellacasa verify as a most promising procedure for third-wave
feminists in the chapter “Building Standpoints.” Predicating their work
on the feminist standpoint as achieved and collective, they affirm that
they “would rather be better with/because of—than better than those
who came before us” (Bracke and Puig de la Bellacasa 2004, 314).
Event-centered, univocal work is done the material-semiotic way be-
cause assemblages generate their own signification. Here we see that
signification is immanent to assemblages; the utterances assembling signs
and bodies do not presuppose an outsider’s perspective, but run with
what is always already at work in events. In addition, the work makes
clear how these systems of signification are not static or solipsistic as they
can form assemblages with other assemblages and transform along the
way. This is, too, what happens when the person commonly tagged
“epistemologist” starts with her work. Assembling work is diagrammat-
ic, which is to say that:
[W]e must discover in every regime and every assemblage the specific
value of the existing lines of flight . . . a map of what is blocked, over-
coded, or, on the contrary, mutating, on the route to liberation, in the
process of outlining a particular fragment for a plane of consistence.
Diagrammatism consists in pushing a language to the plane where
“immanent” variation no longer depends on a structure or develop-
ment, but on the combination of mutating fluxes, on their productions
of speed, on their combinations of particles (to the point where food
particles, sexual particles, etc., reach their zone of proximity or indis-
cernibility: abstract machine). (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 1987, 118–19)
This diagrammatic approach to/with events is an instance of positioning
oneself before or underneath claims to, for instance, truth are made. Di-
agrammatics (also called pragmatics/schizoanalysis/rhizomatics/cartog-
raphy/topology/etc.) studies segmentation (Karen Barad’s Cartesian
cutting or what is here called “molar lines”), becomings rather than be-
ings (“molecular lines”), and lines of flight/escape lines (Barad’s agential
cutting). Diagrammatics confront chaotic events rather than “neat” states
of affairs from a “neat” subject’s point of view. In the essay “Theatrum
Philosophicum,” Michel Foucault infers that for Deleuze, “the world is
52 Chapter 3

our classroom” (Foucault [1970] 1998, 355). This geophilosophical ap-

proach entails a descriptive and utopian mapping of lines. Description
alone is not enough, says also Paola Marrati (2006, 316), because it as-
sumes exhaustiveness. Utopia “designates . . . conjunction of philosophy, or
of the concept, with the present milieu” (Deleuze and Guattari [1991] 1994,
100; emphasis in original). Utopia, or vision, in the sense of diagrammat-
ics, uses “milieu” to avoid having to think in terms of either beginnings
or ends. Where there is a clear beginning and a clear end, there is no
creation. And if we lack creative movement, Deleuze and Guattari claim,
“[w]e lack resistance to the present” (Deleuze and Guattari [1991] 1994, 108;
emphasis in original). This present—in the context of much of epistemol-
ogy—is classificatory. And classification works with the most reductive
of molar lines.
Traditional epistemology’s focus on prescription comes out trans-
formed in this constituency, and this is important because, by negating
prescriptive epistemologies, we are back with/in the Oedipal plot. From
now on, normative epistemology should no longer be seen in the tradi-
tional sense because “[t]here is no general prescription” (Deleuze and
Parnet [1977] 1987, 144). Claire Colebrook’s gloss explains that this re-
writing of “the normative” mirrors Bruno Latour’s 2004 questioning of a
critique that has run out of steam (whereas the descriptive methodology
of the first wave of Latourian science and technology studies had placed
its bets entirely on description, as I will later explain):
Philosophy had to be more than critical. It was not enough to expose
the illusions of transcendence, not enough to show that all our invented
foundations—such as God, Being, or Truth—were inventions rather
than givens. We also need to see the positive side of this inventive
process. What is thinking such that it can enslave itself to images of
some great outside? Does this tell us that there is something produc-
tive, positive and liberating about the very power of thought? (Coleb-
rook 2002, 71)
Marrati adds that Deleuze has introduced immanent criteria for what has
to be situated before or underneath prescription can take effect:
“Good” and “bad” are always a matter of what increases or diminishes
the power of a given body, and the ethical question is whether a being
can live up to the limits of which it is capable. In this sense, even the
notion of a hierarchy becomes purely immanent: it does not compare
beings with one another in order to rank them. On the contrary, hierar-
chy evaluates the power of each singular being in relation to itself.
(Marrati 2006, 317)
Interpreted through such a lens, the standpoint theoretical work on sub-
jugated knowledges becomes, indeed, a quantification exercise. And it
becomes clear that only by asking questions after its immanent condi-
tions of possibility, can we exit the stifling epistemologies we generate in
 Dutiful Daughters 53

the wake of its allusion of transcendence. As such, Deleuze’s project has

not engendered feminist questions after the “who-can-speak?” These
questions suggest a certain epistemology must leave space for “a feminist
subject” to speak. The Deleuzian project focuses on the beginning—espe-
cially the thinking—anew. It does not introduce a focus on thinking anew
in every respective instance—charting who is oppressed when and
where—but on thinking anew itself. This thinking cannot have a norma-
tive standpoint because even the fully hyphenated standpoints under
postmodernism presuppose grid lines, whereas these are in fact in the
making, and follow into territory yet unknown (Puar 2012, Geerts and
van der Tuin 2013).
But how is this feminist? Braidotti’s Patterns of Dissonance summarizes
the way in which the Deleuzian project escapes equivocity on all grounds
mentioned, that is, vis-à-vis description, prescription, and vision:
If on the one hand “pure” and definitive thought no longer exists, on
the other, all thought is considered to be the expression of the vital
power of being. Consequently, any attempt to alienate thought from
the creative force which dwells in it constitutes a mutilation of the
human spirit. (Braidotti 1991, 73)
Deleuze focuses on the event of thinking, and “in this universe the self
loses its privileged perspective on creation. Deleuze makes this loss the
founding argument of his questioning of subjectivity” (Braidotti 1991,
72). Braidotti celebrates Deleuze’s “self-without-qualities.” Rather than
reading this as an anti-epistemological gesture, Deleuze’s univocal focus
on positive forces should be seen as a move away from both a disjunctive
correspondence between words and world and from general thought.
Focusing on thinking, rather than Thought as something predetermined
(universalism) and antithetical to opinion (relativism), involves that only
the encounter of creation and concept is truly univocal. Epistemology is
turned upside down and the onto-epistemology that comes out is unrec-
ognizable in terms we are familiar with.
Colebrook (2000b) says that it is the style of Deleuze and Guattari—
where the event of thinking is key rather than thought and the Self/I—
that prevents feminists from asking two questions. First, do they ac-
knowledge feminism’s “thinking differently” or do they subordinate
feminism once more and, secondly, whether “becoming-woman”—
which is the first stage of the exercise of following the desire that leads to
what we have come to know as the cogito “becoming-imperceptible”—is
another cannibalization of women or the feminist movement by a male,
non-feminist theorist or not (cf. Grosz 1993b; Grosz 1994, 162). According
to Colebrook, the work of Deleuze and Guattari is “an inhabitation rather
than an interpretation” in which “[t]exts are read in terms of how they
work, rather than what they mean” (Colebrook 2000b, 3). In other words,
Deleuze and Guattari study what texts do, which is a strategy “of locat-
54 Chapter 3

ing oneself within a body of thought in order to dis-organise that body”

(Colebrook 2000b, 4). Claiming credit as feminists on the conviction that
Deleuze mirrors what feminists have been doing all along, is, first of all,
representationalist, and, second of all, not diagrammatic:
Feminism has never been the pure and innocent other of a guilty and
evil patriarchy. . . . [T]o not address the male canon would reduce
women to an impossible outside, silence or ghetto; but to establish
itself as a women’s movement there does not need to be a delimitation
of the tradition in order to speak otherwise . . . feminism has always
been marked by an odd relation to its other. (Colebrook 2000b, 4; em-
phasis in original)
In a Deleuzian vein, thinking differently itself rather than thinking differ-
ently in subjugated parameters (thinking differently as . . . ) should be
center stage. Colebrook wants, with Deleuze, for feminists to expel all
foundationalisms and cognitively governed a-priorisms, including be-
comings-of. Following a thinking as women, we assume that we become
women and that the thought here has a clear beginning/cause and end/
effect. We should, rather, acknowledge the nature of the work as always
already active. Philosophy should not be seen as genderless or strictly
masculine, but as a (re-)activation of concepts, according to which “think-
ing and speaking are trans-individual possibilities of becoming. All
speaking is already a collective utterance, and all thinking is an assem-
blage” (Colebrook 2000b, 4). As a corollary, feminists should not follow
Deleuze either. They must enact a philosophy of becoming. They should
not become dutiful Deleuzians or work as Deleuze in a representational-
ist manner. The opposite gesture of a becoming, which presumably be-
comes other-than-Deleuze, is not doing liberating work.
Writing this in the third millennium, I cannot overlook that enacting
the Deleuzian philosophy of becoming has been a specific problem for
feminists (Lorraine 2007, 274, 277–78). In early feminist engagements
with Deleuze, it has proved difficult to move away from constituting
oneself as Deleuze’s dutiful daughter, becoming-Deleuzian and reaffirm-
ing Oedipality. The first issue is a contradiction; precisely because De-
leuze’s decade-long marginality vis-à-vis the canon of Philosophy, pre-
cisely because he does philosophy differently. This double dynamic pre-
vents feminists from becoming the dutiful daughter of yet another Mas-
ter. The second issue is more serious. To some feminists, A Thousand
Plateaus ([1980] 1987) initially suggests that Deleuze and Guattari want us
to move all the way through a becoming-woman, becoming-animal, be-
coming-child, becoming-molecular to becoming-imperceptible. Apart
from the fact that many feminists critique the teleology considered im-
plicit in this list, there has been a lot of second-wave feminist discussion
about Deleuze and Guattari’s privileging of becoming-woman alongside
the dissolution of the subject. In the text “A Thousand Tiny Sexes,” Grosz
 Dutiful Daughters 55

claims that the “metaphors of becoming woman . . . prevent women from

exploring and interrogating their own specific, and non-generalizable,
forms of becoming, desiring-production and being” (Grosz 1993a, 168). I
am not going to discuss Grosz’s use of the term “metaphor” because this
usage, as such, opens an implicit critique of Deleuze’s work which is
beyond the point here. Instead, I want to discuss a claim expressed by
Alice Jardine, which reads that “[t]here is no room for new becomings of
women’s bodies and their other desires in these creatively limited, mono-
sexual, brotherly machines” which appear in the book series Capitalism
and Schizophrenia (Jardine 1985, 223). Braidotti, initially, furthers this ar-
gument by reading becoming-woman as a flaw in Deleuze’s materialism
and as detrimental for the generation of feminist futures of (sexual) dif-
ferings (cf. van der Tuin and Blaagaard 2014).
Owing to the fact that Deleuze does not engage with feminist move-
ment, Braidotti claims that “Deleuze becomes normative by omission”
because “when this ‘becoming-woman’ is disembodied to the extent that
it bears no connection to the struggles, the experience, the discursivity of
real-life women, what good is it for feminist practice?” (Braidotti 1991,
120–21). The primacy of becoming-woman has been said to invite equiv-
ocity to Deleuze’s work. Grosz adds to this, claiming that becoming-
woman involves a foundationalism, which would also have to be read as
a flaw in a third-wave feminist materialism. Grosz has said that Deleuze’s
becoming-woman and the primacy given to it involves nothing but “us-
ing women to obscure an examination of his own investments in wom-
en’s subjugation” and results in women becoming “the object or the prop
of man’s speculations, self-reflections and intellectual commitments”
(Grosz 1993a, 168). These arguments have in fact prevented feminists
from asking what feminists could do with Deleuze. In other words, a flaw
in second-wave feminist epistemology comes to the fore, which is undone
when Braidotti, Grosz, and dozens of other feminist theorists begin to
disidentify with their initial criticisms rather than with Deleuzian philos-
ophy. Moving away from this remainder of representationalism, femi-
nists nowadays no longer read becoming-woman as problematic and
have immersed themselves fully in the seemingly self-contradictory do-
main of Deleuzian studies, now institutionalized on both sides of the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans via conferences, journals, book series, and the
like. 9
The seed of this unexpected avenue to a feminist future can be found
in the early work of feminist Deleuzians themselves, who did not canon-
ize as feminist materialists back in the 1990s because they were not inter-
ested in setting up a gender theory but attempted to think through the
paradox of sexual difference. Also in Patterns of Dissonance, Braidotti
claims that the philosophy of becoming, and of becoming-woman in par-
ticular, should be seen as shifting the Hegelianism that has helped to
install feminist standpoint theory and its binary opposite (feminist post-
56 Chapter 3

modernism). In the work of Deleuze, the univocity and new materialism

is in the cutting across of the unreal binary opposition between majority
and minority, as quantitative indicators, through becoming-woman or
becoming-minoritarian. The latter becomings are seen as qualitatively
shifting “minority” from the simple reverse of “Man”/”majority” (De-
leuze and Guattari [1980] 1987b, 291–92). Women need to become-wom-
an as well (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987b, 275) because only thereby
can we escape the hierarchical dualism of sexual difference in quantita-
tive and qualitative terms. In sum, Deleuze’s materialism is not flawed.
Rather, thinking Deleuze’s materialism as flawed is representationalist. It
is important to focus on the becoming-philosophy of philosophy (De-
leuze and Parnet [1977] 1987, 2) in order to understand how we can actually
do univocal, event-centered work that is generative and transformation-
al. 10 In the text “The Image of Thought,” Deleuze writes that the one who
philosophizes should be:
[s]omeone who neither allows himself to be represented nor wishes to
represent anything. . . . For this individual the subjective presupposi-
tions [of a natural capacity for thought] are no less prejudices than the
objective presuppositions [of a culture of the times]: Eudoxus and Epis-
temon are one and the same misleading figure who should be mis-
trusted. . . . Such a one is the Untimely, neither temporal nor eternal.
(Deleuze [1968] 1994, 130) 11
Representationalist philosophy—whether empiricist, standpoint-driven,
or postmodernist—has always been equivocal and unaffected, and it will
always be such in that it works from certain epistemological and ontolog-
ical presumptions. As a consequence, “the world of representation is
characterized by its inability to conceive of difference in itself” (Deleuze
[1968] 1994, 138). An-representationalist philosophy involves a leap into
the unknown, as it is “[s]omething in the world that forces us to think.
This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental en-
counter” (Deleuze [1968] 1994, 139; emphasis in original). Such a univocal
undertaking—a “transcendental empiricism” as Deleuze calls it—in-
volves “the thought without an image” (Deleuze [1968] 1994, 167). We
can extrapolate that this involves asking how women become women,
qualitatively, but also how being is possible at all. The nervousness of
feminists around 1968 about the loss of the subject—the moment we
women had gained subject-status, we lost it to those male thinkers who
inaugurated the Death of the Subject—can be wiped off of the table as the
question of the distortive definition of the Subject is precisely on the table
with Deleuze: how can we push thought to the limit?
In sum, let me recall that Haraway has claimed that to her, Deleuze is
“Rosi Braidotti’s feminist trans-mutant” (in Gane 2006, 156), a statement
which demonstrates how the genealogical movement between Deleuze
and feminism, and within Deleuzian feminism, involves a “creative
 Dutiful Daughters 57

AND” (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 1987, 59). The encounters of thought,
and thought in this stream, entail “neither a union, nor a juxtaposition,
but the birth of a stammering, the outline of a broken line which always
sets off at right angles, a sort of active and creative line of flight? AND . . .
AND . . . AND . . . ” (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 1987, 9–10). The encoun-
ters that even Haraway—suspicious as she is of the Deleuzian work with
“wolf packs” in A Thousand Plateaus (Haraway 2008, 27–35)—runs with
happen in a century that is perhaps known as Deleuzian (cf. Foucault
[1970] 1998, 343). What we can be sure of is that stammerings, broken
lines, or simply “cracks in the canon” are fully active in the feminist
turnings with Deleuze.
In what follows next, I will concentrate on feminist movement from a
most ontological perspective. What does it entail when feminists move
dutifully in a manner that is not representationalist? And why do I dem-
onstrate this feminist movement in the current volume by undertaking
close readings of mainly textual material deemed feminist new material-
ist in the first place? The argument centers on “genealogy.”

NOTES

1. Black women and black feminists have a different relation with traditional kin-
ship structures (see Wekker 2006, 75–6).
2. Cf. chapter 7 of New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Dolphijn and van
der Tuin 2012) as well as Geerts and Van der Tuin 2014.
3. I take and extend the formulation of “a new somewhere” from Christine Batters-
by who has used it in the article “Learning to Think Intercontinentally: Finding Aus-
tralian Routes” (2000), as a form of jumping space. Battersby makes a point about
diffracted continents while keeping in mind (the) continentality (of feminist theory).
She does not offer “Australia” as a third synthesizing option in a classification that
consists of North America and Europe, but theorizes the ways in which the work of
Australian feminist theorists is characterized differently from positions in stifling di-
chotomized charts. She claims that Australian feminist philosophy, dealing with phi-
losophy’s past in a manner that is not thoroughly dutiful to it (Battersby 2000, 14), is
not a “school” but rather an “emergent tradition” that “starts with a reexamination,
and a reconfiguration, of philosophy’s past” (Battersby 2000, 4). In particular: “there is
nothing ‘anti-rationalist’ or anti-philosophical about [it]. Nor are we dealing here with
the kind of idealism or epistemological relativism that so often surfaces in North-
American (and British) varieties of postmodernism. Instead, what we find are new
modes of reason in which the universal is transformed through its relation with the
singular. . . . Tracking these routes will take us on to a new somewhere in which past
and present intertwine in a series of productive attempts to reconfigure the relation-
ship between philosophy and praxis” (Battersby 2000, 15; emphasis in original).
4. See Sabrina L. Hom’s 2013 article “Between Races and Generations: Materializ-
ing Race and Kinship in Moraga and Irigaray” for a diffractive reading on the white-
ness of (this) feminist generationality.
5. An example is Patricia MacCormack’s “Pro-Proteus,” an an-Oedipal strategy
that stresses the affirmative aspect of the disidentification with the Oedipal plot (see
MacCormack 2014).
6. See, for an example, Withers 2010.
58 Chapter 3

7. This is similar to what psychoanalysis has done in the context of “the generation
of 1890” (Hughes [1958] 2002, Burrow 2000).
8. Jane Bennett (2010) brings the identity-political framework back in by working
along the lines of “Thing Power,” which to me sounds too much like a renewed sense
of Black Power and Female Power as well as the post-feminist “grrrlpower.”
9. Think of work as heterogeneous such as Beckman 2013, Nigianni and Storr eds.
2009, Radomska 2010, Ringrose 2012, Saldanha 2012, and Sullivan and Murray eds.
2009.
10. This brings to mind the becoming-science of science of Alfred North Whitehead,
Bruno Latour, and Isabelle Stengers, a link that I will make explicit later.
11. Thorough studies of the image of thought are Thiele 2008 and Lambert 2012.
 FOUR
Generation in Genealogy

Starting from the etymological register, the established methodology re-

lated to “generation” is “genealogy.” Like I said earlier, genea-logy en-
folds generation. It is important to note that the continental philosophical
methodology of writing genealogies, of engrossing oneself in cartogra-
phies of conceptual shifting, allows for “a transformation of history into a
totally different form of time” (Foucault [1971] 1977, 160). Contrary to
classificatory generationality, the genealogical method helps to under-
stand conceptual shifting along timelines that capture the often erratic,
utterly nonlinear generation (of thought, practices, and artifacts) itself.
Genealogies divert from strictly referential approaches because their fo-
cus is on the very moment of creating innovative concepts (Deleuze and
Guattari [1991] 1994, 5), which moment was in the previous chapter se-
lected as among the most generative of feminism. Positioning oneself
before a category has been set up or underneath it once it has actualized
one captures, and flows with, the forces that have gone into a thought,
practice or artifact, and that carry it. This capturing is then unhindered by
what Henri Bergson called a “retrograde movement,” “[f]rom [which]
emerges an error which vitiates our conception of the past, as well as our
pretension to anticipate the future for every occasion” (Bergson [1934]
2007, 11). 1
Genealogies provide a window to the surprising futures that have been
dreamt in past feminist expressions, since we are no longer deceived by
narrow circumscriptions of them originating in classificatory accounts. 2
The lively generativity of past feminisms—caught unexpectedly or ac-
tively searched for—hinders the applicability of derogatory labels, such
as “essentialist,” “homogenizing,” and “naïve,” and brings forward a
renewed interest in what these feminisms have tried to engender. The
latter engenderings turn out to be of an excessive rather than straightfor-

59
60 Chapter 4

ward nature. Hence, the post-feminist negation of second-wave feminism

in particular, appears as an unnecessary disturbance. Owing to the theo-
retical promise of genealogy leaving behind stalemated takes on femi-
nism which led to post-feminism, how does the generational element of
any genealogy look? And how does it advance a generational feminism
for the twenty-first century? A generative approach capturing the impe-
tus of (feminist) new materialisms?

GENEALOGY AS METHODOLOGY

The genealogical method is unambiguously connected to the work of

Michel Foucault. It appears as early as page two of his piece, “Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History,” that Foucault affirms that genealogy includes mas-
tering as many cases as possible—a scientism—as well as it excludes the
tendency to equate this accumulation to full mastery (which implies a
much more modest approach):
Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound
gaze of the philosopher might compare to the molelike perspective of
the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of
ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the
search for “origins.” (Foucault [1971] 1977, 140)
In the light of “record[ing] the singularity of events outside of any
monotonous finality” (Foucault [1971] 1977, 139), it is the linear temporal-
ity of historical research that Foucault, just like Elizabeth Grosz (2000,
2005, 2010), uses as his springboard for an alternative to certain genealo-
gists “assum[ing] that words [keep] their meaning, that desires still
point . . . in a single direction, and that ideas retain . . . their logic”
(Foucault [1971] 1977, 139). Foucault is interested in “invasions, struggles,
plundering, disguises, ploys” in “the world of speech and desires” (Fou-
cault [1971] 1977, 139). In other words, he is interested in what Stephen
Greenblatt (2011) has recently coined the “swerving” of text directed by
the desires of people and institutions, the forces of nature, 3 and the re-
lentlessness of words.
Therefore, studying the etymology of even genealogy is all the more
suitable (Friedrich Nietzsche himself demonstrated how the etymology
of “origin” completely destabilizes the parameters of the discipline of
history). Etymology allows for retaining the meaning that words once
possessed, a meaning that has been deflected. Whereas a causally linear
or totalizing take on genealogy might suggest that this is precisely what
genealogies dig up, that same historicizing gesture implies the present-
ism that Foucault, on the first pages of his famous article, ascribes to
Nietzsche’s friend, foe, and colleague Paul Rée. I would like to refer to
Mikhal Bakhtin here, who has famously written that “the word does not
 Generation in Genealogy 61

forget its own path and cannot completely free itself from the power of
these concrete contexts into which it has entered” (Bakhtin [1963] 1984,
202). “The life of the word,” he says, is indeed a swerving “from one
context to another context, from one social collective to another, from one
generation to another generation” (Bakhtin [1963] 1984, 202). This has
nothing to do with teleology, but rather with the generative potential of
the ceaseless situated movement that is key to the swerve as an entangled
reality. Movement implies the possibility of (temporary) sedimentation.
But this relation is not a bi-implication, since sedimentation—for instance
in a class of a classification—is not the pre-condition of movement.
What is then the etymology of genealogy? And what does it teach
twenty-first-century feminists who are in want of a generative approach?
Here, a reference to Gregory Flaxman’s Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of
Philosophy is justified. Flaxman both affirms genealogy and shifts it to a
“geophilosophy” inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari ([1991]
1994). Geophilosophy—which includes geohistory as is explicitly af-
firmed by Manuel DeLanda (2000) and John Protevi (2013)—demon-
strates how genealogy is a materialist practice, how Bakhtin’s context,
collective, and generation are material-semiotic (worldly) in nature. Tak-
ing advantage of the affirmative gesture that does not throw genealogy
away but tries to push it to its extreme, genealogy has great potential.
Genealogy is not a human affair (the stifled paternal lines of Oedipality
and the exchange of women) but rather an inhuman, earthly practice
which does not care about the Oedipal conflict and perpetual gendering
in the sense that Oedipality and its materializations should not be pro-
jected back onto whatever origin we may be able to find. Flaxman asks:
“How does genealogy, the study of ancestry, presage a geophilosophical
practice in which ‘paternity does not exist’ and the subject dissolves in
the slow passage of geological time?” (Flaxman 2012, 73). Swerving can
be seen as such an earthly tracing and the genea- of genealogy might
therefore be connected to the geo- of geophilosophy.
Genealogy is to be “critical” and “creative,” to use the terms of Rosi
Braidotti (1991). We are critical of narratives of origins and creatively
stumble upon histories of which “[t]he form is fluid, but the ‘meaning’ is
even more so” (Nietzsche 1887 II §12 in Flaxman 2012, 77). Such fluidity
evokes the work of Bergson, who has proposed that philosophers try to
install themselves in reality so as to “arrive at fluid concepts, capable of
following reality in all its windings and of adopting the very movement
of the inner life of things” (Bergson [1934] 2007, 160). Genealogy becomes
an embodied and embedded practice, that is, we can lose sight of linear
and totalizing plots. It must be remembered, however, that fluid concepts
can sediment, whereas sedimentation does not precondition fluidity. The
study of the sedimentation of fluid concepts is an interpretation that does
not exhaust the definition of genealogy.
62 Chapter 4

Here I make the onto-epistemological claim that genealogists must be

after the emergence of the relational forces that allow for temporary sedi-
mentations as well as they constitute fluidity. Here, we find a genealog-
ical “doublet” which is not an oppositional dualism. 4 The side of fluidity,
for instance, is not exempt from force as power, which is what we imme-
diately expect the side of sedimentations to be full of. It is force as power
(or “value”) that can account for teleology, which actualizes when one
meaning takes over the swerve. Nevertheless, the swerve is ontologically
prior to such hierarchization. Again I find a reference to Bergson justified,
whose retrograde movement has been neatly summarized by Grosz as
“[t]he possible . . . being a reverse projection of the real” (Grosz 2005,
107). The swerve—in fact—is the real. But history, as well as the non-
exhaustive definition of genealogy, is seduced by the one meaning that
has won the battle.

GENERATION IN GENEALOGY

I propose to dig up the etymology of genealogy, and to do justice to

genealogy’s advancing of geophilosophy, by searching for the virtual and
the actual within genea-. This move can be found in Flaxman too, and by
necessity so, when we follow the way in which Bergson and Deleuze deal
with dualism. We must differentiate the gen- or genoi of genealogy (the
study of lineages, heriditary lines, or races; of familial resemblances be-
tween concepts) from the ge-, geo-, or gaia of geophilosophy (primordial
earth or “earth beyond the earth” [Flaxman 2012, 80–1]). Following He-
siod’s mythology, “gaia gives rise to generation, but what is generated
grows apart from gaia, on a different ground” (Flaxman 2012, 81). Here,
the virtual and the actual are actually opposed, whereas this Bergsonian
pair should not be read as a binary opposition; Bergson as well as De-
leuze have made use of dualisms in order to retain one of two alterna-
tives of a binary pair, since they are intricately connected. This is particu-
larly the case with the virtual-actual coupling. Bergson has argued that
“[t]he difficulties of ordinary dualism come, not from the distinction of
the two terms, but from the impossibility of seeing how the one is grafted
upon the other” (Bergson [1896] 2004, 297). When gaia is virtuality and a
genoi an actualization, this genoi is stirred by gaia and can be approached
as such. The logic of “pushing dualism to an extreme” affirms that the
negation of genoi by gaia is only the positive actualization of a certain
virtuality contained by both terms at once. This virtuality—in my read-
ing—is generation. Gaia gives rise to generation and the generated genoi
grows apart from gaia. In other words, the process at work is generation.
The virtual earth and what is actualized on its surface are grafted on
generatio, which is related to the Latin verb generare (to generate). The
human (of “humanism” and “anthropocentrism”) is being swept away
 Generation in Genealogy 63

by vital movement, although and at the same time sedimentations hap-

pen, temporary actualizations which have nevertheless never ceased to
over-code inhuman processes in which the human certainly has a place.
In turn, our exact origin will never cease to be simultaneously readjusted,
contested, and created anew. 5
Here we have not reached the limits of genealogy as we know it, but
rather its own immanent conditions of possibility. Genealogical trees are
possible because lineages are generated by generatio. The genea- of geneal-
ogy is comprised of both genus/genera (which is Latin and related to the
Greek genoi) and generatio. Genera are conditioned by generatio; hence,
generatio is, and is not, opposed to actualized genera. So where does the
remainder of generatio, active in genealogy if pushed to the limit and to be
read in tandem with Nietzsche’s Entstehung (the moment of arising),
come from?
Laura L. Nash’s article “Concepts of Existence: Greek Origins of Gen-
erational Thought” is the available study on the etymology of generation
and can make the above dictionary-based reflections precise. Generation
turns out to refer back to a plethora of Greek and Latin terms (genos,
genea, genesis, gonē, genus, generatio) and all these terms stem from the
same Indo-European root, namely *gen-, which means “coming-into-exis-
tence.” Nash argues that “our most secure standard for defining a gener-
ation rests on the Greek root of the word, genos” (Nash 1978, 1), whereas
she immediately affirms that the latter’s “basic meaning is reflected in the
verb genesthai, ‘to come into being’” (Nash 1978, 1). Nash starts from the
present (she wants to answer what marks a generation such as the “six-
ties generation”), but this presentism does not initiate a retrograde move
in the text-to-come; genesthai leads us elsewhere. From the get-go, Nash
affirms that the meaning of generation, dug up etymologically, entails a
paradox (cf. Parnes et al. 2008, 32–6): it talks about a clear-cut lineage
from parent (father) to offspring (sons), which nevertheless brings in “an
ever-shifting threshold in time” (Nash 1978, 2). After all, “there is becom-
ing from the child to the man” (Bergson [1907] 1998, 313), which shifts the
generational configuration or demonstrates how generationality—at the
core—deals with movement. The full version of Bergson’s argument, sub-
ject to sexual Difference and sexually differing at the same time, reads as
follows:
The truth is that if language here were molded on reality, we should
not say, “the child becomes the man,” but “there is becoming from the
child to the man.” . . . In the second proposition, “becoming” is a
subject. It comes to the front. It is the reality itself; childhood and man-
hood are then only possible stops, mere views of the mind; we now
have to do with the objective movement itself (Bergson [1907] 1998,
313) 6
64 Chapter 4

It is clear that this notion of generation is decisively anti-Mannheimian,

that is, it is not classificatory. 7 Rather, Luisa Passerini (2014) has taught
me, we could typify the notion as Eriksonian, given that Erik H. Erikson
in his classic Childhood and Society argues that extending one’s scholarly
work beyond “childhood stages” implies the necessity to pay attention to
“the concept of generativity [which] is meant to include such more popu-
lar synonyms as productivity and creativity, which, however, cannot re-
place it” (Erikson [1951] 1995, 240; emphasis in original). Importantly,
Erikson hints at the fact that a conceptualization of generativity must
begin by taking the work of scholars from around 1890 into account; he
himself mentions Marx and Freud (Erikson [1951] 1995, 241) and I work
with Bergson in this book. John Kotre has innovated on Erikson by devel-
oping generativity as a transversal notion, which entails “a desire to invest
one’s substance in forms of life and work that will outlive the self” (Kotre 1984,
10; emphasis in original) and therefore bursts out of the boxes of prede-
termined childhood and adulthood as per Bergson. Of course, in the
current study, generativity is, in turn, extended beyond Kotre’s emphasis
on human intention (even if gone astray or perverted) and on a disjunc-
tion between generational conflict and successful generational transmis-
sion.
In line with Bergson’s becoming, Nash’s final evaluation is that in
antiquity, “genea marks the passage of time itself and is the first tool for
its rational ordering” (Nash 1978, 16). About the transitive but moving
horizon of grandfather—son/father—grandchild/son—etc., she says, “the
schematic potential of the genealogy is strong, both to explain the nature
of things (‘coming-into-existence’) and to organize long periods of time”
(Nash 1978, 16). Here we see an entanglement of ontology (the passage of
time and coming-into-existence) and epistemology (rational ordering, an-
drocentrism), whereby process holds priority over, or carries, sedimenta-
tion. This latter insight points at the fact that it is the epistemic remainder
that genders Bergson’s words and not his work (cf. van der Tuin 2011a,
2013).
Nash discerns two kinds of “past” in the Greek logos: “the immediate
past, remembered and mortal” and “the heroic past . . . commemorated
and immortal” (Nash 1978, 16). There is no direct or progressive line
between the two, ergo, this relation has to be researched along Foucaul-
dian-Groszean lines: we must record the singularity of historical events
outside of progressively linear temporality. (In chapter 1, I referenced
Wendy Brown’s “historiography that emphasizes contingent develop-
ments.”) The genealogical focus is on the immediate past—on what is
living yet of the past, on what is in that sense before us—whereas history
assumes to capture the heroic past (like that of Troy) from an outsider’s
perspective. This outsider’s perspective has grown into the Mannheimian
definition of consecutive generational cohorts, luring generation away
from emergence (process), and emergence (process) away from genealo-
 Generation in Genealogy 65

gy. Bringing the movement back in entails, first, an openness to the non-
linear link between the immediate and the so-called heroic past, between
embodied memory of genealogical movement and disembodied Knowl-
edge of paternal lineage, and, second, the necessity of finding methodolo-
gies for genealogical research which are interested in movement and in
the realities of situated entanglements. Perhaps it is here that we are
trying to come up with an answer to the problematic of the concept,
formulated in What is Philosophy?:
The concept is not object but territory. It does not have an Object but a
territory. For that very reason it has a past form, a present form and,
perhaps, a form to come. . . . As for us, we possess concepts—after so
many centuries of Western thought we think we possess them—but we
hardly know where to put them because we lack a genuine plane,
misled as we are by Christian transcendence. In short, in its past form
the concept is that which was not yet. (Deleuze and Guattari [1991]
1994, 101)
Now that the genealogical doublet made of the interplay between “gener-
ationality” and “generativity” has been confirmed via the etymological
route, it is clear that the question of how to classify ideas is a historical
and disembodied one, whereas the question of how ideas are generated
and remain generative is embodied and able to give classification its
proper place. But how to embark on a genealogical study? How to study
singular events of meaning-making using the embodied, active temporal-
ity of generativity? The kind of temporality allowing for clock-time as
well as the epistemological gesture of classification? How to install our-
selves in the generativity of ideas, to speak with Bergson’s terms? How to
reach their inner life? Deleuze and Guattari have argued:
Geography wrests history from the cult of necessity in order to stress
the irreducibility of contingency. It wrests it from the cults of origins in
order to affirm the power of a “milieu.” . . . It wrests it from structures
in order to trace the lines of flight. . . . Finally, it wrests history from
itself in order to discover becomings that do not belong to history even
if they fall back into it. (Deleuze an Guattari [1991] 1994, 96)
In line with Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the “linking” capacity of con-
cepts (Deleuze and Guattari [1991] 1994, 91) which follows the logic of “a
road that links together a number of villages and hamlets” (says the
translator of What is Philosophy?) and exists next to their syntagmatic,
connecting, and consistent capacities, the swerving of ideas—or geophi-
losophy—is practiced in Greenblatt’s 2011 The Swerve: How the World Be-
came Modern. What is abundant in The Swerve are earthly practices inter-
connected with processes of signification. Poggio Bracciolini travels the
unbeaten tracks of Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and the United Kingdom
in order to find seemingly lost ancient texts such as Lucretius’s poem On
the Nature of Things from the first century B.C.E. Papal troops make simi-
66 Chapter 4

lar journeys, crossing the Alps and territorializing small German towns
such as Constance only to leave a mark and be sent away. Books are
palimpsests, surfaces of parchment (sheep and goat skin) or papyrus (a
water plant) that are written on with earthly materials mixed to cook up
ink, materials that are, in turn, scraped off only for the parchment or
papyrus to be written on again, merging the old with the new. Books are
covered with lava and dust, eaten by bookworms. Ancient texts are
found back as matter; the bookrolls in the Villa of the Papyri have be-
come bricks, unopenable until the products of twentieth-century
technoscience are brought along. The tooth of time is ignorant of them
being exponents of High Culture. Books return to the earth. “How the
world became modern” indicates a position before the affirmation that
“we have never been modern” (Latour [1991] 1993). In Greenblatt’s The
Swerve, we are standing on the brink of modernity, modernity being
nothing but a temporary sedimentation that, following Bruno Latour, has
failed to fully materialize. 8

GENERATION AS OBJECT AND TOOL

Generation refers to concept-generation as well as to the theories, prac-

tices, and artifacts created by generations of scholars, artists, and acti-
vists. I am convinced that the source of disqualifying generationality can
be found in Western epistemology’s strict focus on only one of genera-
tion’s etymological roots: generation as genos. In other words, a partial
definition of generationality—static cohorts based on age or philosophi-
cal schools that have become stuck to cohorts of apprentices—is being
employed. This bias—the result of “a bifurcation that wards off philoso-
phy in advance from the point of view of its very possibility” (Deleuze
and Guattari [1991] 1994, 93)—makes it impossible to study the condi-
tions of possibility for conceptual shifting along immanently generational
(generative) lines. Here, generation is a predetermined category (a cate-
gory of the mind) that is applied to research topics. As a pre-existing,
rational phenomenon, generationality is not allowed to vary historically
and culturally or to be at work with surprising results. We have seen that
certain continental philosophers have created an alternative by linking
genos to generation’s second etymological root: generation as genesthai.
For them, genera, following genesthai, are in constant movement or flux.
Affirming genera-in-motion, generationality becomes less biased and the
genealogical methodology can therefore be specified. Like Karen Barad
(2010, 250) has said, focusing on philosophy of science and the natural
sciences, “Newtonian inheritance is not one but many.” How to reach
such a plurality is a difficult question in an academy customarily saturat-
ed with classification.
 Generation in Genealogy 67

Studying the genesthai of feminist thought, practices, and artifacts elu-

cidates and embarks upon contemporary feminism’s relation with femi-
nist pasts. According to a most common, Euclidian conception of time
(Barad 2001, 2010), time is measured and cut up in successive fragments,
which is a spatializing act (Bergson [1889] 1913, 109–10). Several theorists
have argued that this habitual progressive linearity has to be exchanged
for something less representationalist and more embodied (DeLanda
1999; Grosz 2004, 2005). A temporality, that is, according to which past-
present-future are interlocking rather than successive periods. The meth-
odology of “jumping generations” builds on the concept that the archive
of feminist futures equals contemporary feminism’s virtual past. The ac-
tive interlinkages between the strands of second-wave feminism that are
silenced in its canonized interpretations—whether dismissively by post-
feminists or narrow-mindedly in identity politics by the classificationists
themselves—are being taken up by some contemporary feminists as a
potential in and of the feminist archive itself, confirming Donna Har-
away’s take on the permeable and moving boundaries in any classifica-
tion. These taking-ups are often implicit. Rebecca L. Clark Mane (2012)
has, wholly in line with the argument of this book, analyzed how the
explicit references of self-affirmed third-wave feminists often lead to pay-
ing lip service to the thoughts of the previous generation: the work of
second-wave (black) standpoint feminists might be affirmed (as origin
story), but is simultaneously and firmly relegated to the past. It is for this
reason that I am interested in subterranean generative links instead of
explicit intergenerational references. 9 I hope that by allowing for second-
wave feminist generation to have remained in motion—subterraneously,
which means that I am not the one controlling this process fully and nor
will the scholars (or others) that choose to work with jumping genera-
tions—instead of muting these voices in classificatory canonization, its
feminist futures come within reach again; as inspirational, as something
to fight for.

SEXUAL DIFFERENCE AS FEMINIST FUTURE

“Sexual difference” has a bitter aftertaste in post-feminism, canonized

feminist postmodernism and gender theory alike, whereas I find it as a
goal to fight for in contemporary feminist activist and artistic practices,
and in feminist academic turnings with continental philosophy. The cur-
rent-day feminist practices on the continuum ranging from right-wing
appropriation to radical academic curricula, from slutwalks to ladyfests,
are all based on sexual difference. The right-wing appropriation of the
notion installs a firm emancipated “us” and a backward “Other,” a Carte-
sian cut. I want to acknowledge that this fixating exercise to reach closure
is at work in any approach to sexual difference that bases itself in grid-
68 Chapter 4

lines of sexual differentiation. Therefore, canonized feminist standpoint

theory and feminist postmodernisms are not exempt from attempting to
fixate the real windings of differing, whereas post-structuralist feminist
experimentation with different differences have placed their bets on a
radical line of flight. However, by developing a take on the feminist
archive as a virtual past of a thousand tiny feminisms that generate fu-
tures of a thousand tiny sexes, races, and intersections, I have tried to
liberate theories such as the feminist standpoint from being understood
as solely a conscious attempt reconfirming gridlines. This consciousness
is itself inherently a thousand tiny subjects, and therefore never fully self-
conscious. The feminist standpoint has always already been swept away
by subterraneous zigzagging feminist movement. It makes me want to
shout out loud that feminist standpoint theory itself is a virtual past! In
other words, it cannot be pinpointed 100 percent and any attempt at
doing so invites for a sliding of the feminist epistemology, which I will
demonstrate genealogically in the next chapter. The cracks in the classifi-
cation provide me with insights into potential feminist futures of the
feminist materialist past which do not repeat binary oppositional logic,
but open up for a feminist standpoint theory that is unrecognizable along
Harding’s lines and which brings the force of their attempt at horizontal-
ization to fruition. Feminist new materialisms are transgenerationally
continuous with this feminist standpoint theory.
Turning one’s back to conceptualizing sexual difference repeats the
disciplining act of canonical renderings of feminism. According to this
classificatory canon, sexual difference is not something one is to be in-
vested in as it either falls under the rubric of old-fashioned feminist
standpoint theory (femininity appears as oppressively Oedipalized,
whereas we experience female masculinity [Halberstam 1998], lipstick
lesbianism [for example, Faderman and Timmons 2006], trans subjectiv-
ity [Stryker 2008], and so on) or it is not canonized at all (as a French
feminism silenced by Anglo-American canonization). Even so, feminist
new materialist tendencies seem to be rather unruly in this canonical
light and they usually and enthusiastically pick up on the French femi-
nisms of sexual difference. Feminist new materialists think equality when
they engage more and more transposing agents in need of emancipa-
tion—not from a One, but from a sexually binaristic regime. In the same
stroke, following a topology that studies the Cartesian and agential
cuttings in the world’s becoming, to speak in Barad’s terms about stale-
mating and liberating differentiations, and perceiving of a wide array of
material-semiotic agents from fat (Colls 2007) to fashion (Parkins 2008,
Smelik 2012) pushes gender equality to the limit and practices a line of
flight that affects the objects, subjects, instruments, and environments of
feminist research and policy. Nothing is left untouched as this practice
affects the very fundamental notion of sexual difference. Engaging trans-
posing agents, a horizontalization of subject and object is performed and
 Generation in Genealogy 69

the notion of hierarchy is so deeply subverted that thinking difference

and deconstruction are also pushed to their respective limits. Thinking
difference is no longer dependent on turning Difference upside-down, it
rather works inside-out, like the Möbius strip, and deconstruction be-
comes a process that is at work in spite of feminist attempts at putting it to
work (cf. Kirby 2011a).
Equality, difference, and deconstructive feminisms emerge in feminist
new materialisms as agential cuttings in a feminist canon that is very
much alive and kicking in the here and now, and for the there and then.
Here we encounter a canon that is crazed with cracks: the canon as a
craquelure. The same applies to the notion of sexual difference which
structures this classification-in-motion or cartography. Because whereas
the concept is often said to concern reductive conceptualizations of differ-
ence or simply standpoint feminisms only, Joan W. Scott’s 1996 Only
Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man has made con-
vincingly clear that any feminism starts from a notion of sexual differ-
ence. All feminist practices install a plane of action. Scott says:
Feminism was a protest against women’s political exclusion; its goal
was to eliminate “sexual difference” in politics, but it had to make its
claim on behalf of “women” (who were discursively produced through
“sexual difference”). To the extent that it acted for “women,” feminism
produced the “sexual difference” it sought to eliminate. This paradox—
the need both to accept and to refuse “sexual difference”—was the
constitutive condition of feminism as a political movement throughout
its long history. (Scott 1996, 3–4; emphasis in original)
Sexual difference is a “hyperinternalistic” or “immanent” affair, the most
basic, ergo, the most virtual of feminist objects and tools. It underlies all
actualized feminisms and all feminisms in the archive. As virtual, sexual
difference is not a form of Difference. Sexual differing is always already
virtually at work for feminist futures and therefore has the greatest po-
tential for the generation of these futures. This differing also produces
futures of renewed instantiations of Difference and it is our political and
ethical task to separate the wheat from the chaff. In addition, it simply
cannot be the case that the refusal of sexual Difference results only in a
reconfirmation of sexual Difference. I refuse to turn Difference into a
starting point. I rather claim that differing takes place before or under-
neath Difference. Difference installs the hierarchical relation of a Subject
and an object in one stroke, whereas differing is at work in assemblages
of thousands of “a thousand tiny subjects” who remain such and co-
respond with what we are used to calling objects (of research, as artistic
materials, of activist attention). These objects are “a thousand tiny ob-
jects,” and it is in the open, cartographical relating of “a thousand tiny
subjects” and “a thousand tiny objects” that horizontalization is to be
found. Differing is the relational force that runs through these horizontal
70 Chapter 4

assemblages, proper Deleuzian “agencements” or Baradian agential real-

ities (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2013, 138; Puar 2012, 57).
My ontological beliefs (about textuality in particular) and my onto-
epistemological stance are on the table now. It is clear that I set myself to
prioritizing the virtual—even if unknown—and that I plea for a position-
ing before or underneath actualizations—even when firmly canonized. This
positioning is a force in itself as no position is fully fixed. A reference to
Hélène Metzger, mentioned also in the introduction to this book, can
demonstrate why and how this is so. Metzger’s many studies in the histo-
ry of the natural sciences has led her to conclude that, while constantly
searching for a deepened understanding of the past, the historian tries to
penetrate with greater certainty and more active sympathy the creative
thinking of the past in which he infuses new life, that he revives for a
moment. Moreover, there is a personal, subjective factor . . . which is
impossible to eliminate completely; it is better to admit it honestly than
to deny it a priori. Historians, like all philosophers, like all scientists and
like all humans have innate tendencies, individual, but imperceptible
ways of thinking that are themselves not yet opinions or even systems
of thought, but that can and do engender such opinions and systems.
(Metzger [1933] 1987, 11)
Unwilling to separate thought from thinker and considering the thinker
along embodied lines, the historian, according to Metzger, “tries to find
or recreate, for a moment in itself, the forces underlying the works that
are the object of his meditation” (Metzger [1933] 1987, 11). This historian
is my feminist genealogist. Academic and canonized identity-political
feminisms alike request fully-fixed position(ing)s, whereas the genealog-
ical methodology of jumping generations does justice to the fact that both
the requirement of and the striving for such fixity will never reach clo-
sure. I will explain next what happens in the jumping of generations and
how precisely there’s liberation to be found.

NOTES

1. Translation adjusted by Gregg Lambert.

2. See, for a recent example, Cobble et al. 2014.
3. An example of such a force is the covering with lava of the bookrolls in what
became known as the Villa of the Papyri in the Italian coastal town of Herculaneum in
79 C.E. (Greenblatt 2011, 54–8). This natural disaster had a conserving and squander-
ing effect on the rolls.
4. Just like Foucault’s empirico-transcendental doublet (Foucault [1966] 1994), this
is precisely not a clear foundationalism.
5. An intriguing example pertains to the debate between the Dutch theologians
Ellen van Wolde, Bob Becking, and Marjo Korpel following Van Wolde’s 2009 article
on the separation of heaven and earth in Genesis, an example that has deeply fascinated
my father Henk van der Tuin.
6. Deleuze and Guattari have formulated the same point as follows: “But con-
versely, becoming-woman or the molecular woman is the girl herself. . . . She never
 Generation in Genealogy 71

ceases to roam upon a body without organs. . . . Thus girls do not belong to an age
group, sex, order, or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages,
sexes; they produce n molecular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism
machines they cross right through. The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-
between, to pass between. . . . It is not the girl who becomes a woman; it is becoming-
woman that produces the universal girl” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 276–77).
7. For a Mannheimian study of generation, see, for example, Burnett 2010.
8. Barb Bolt (2013, 1–2) has used Lucretius’s clinamen to introduce new material-
ism’s “active or agential matter.”
9. For explicit references, see Henneron 2005, and Byers and Crocker 2012.
 FIVE
The Transversality of Barbara
McClintock

In order to develop the methodology of “jumping generations,” I have

borrowed and creatively invested ideas from a plethora of feminist think-
ers from diverse disciplinary and national contexts. In chapter 1 of this
book, I started from Rosi Braidotti’s reference to biologist Barbara
McClintock’s “jumping genes,” which is a form of biological “transposi-
tion” that has structural links to musical intervals. I then moved to geog-
raphy through Neil Smith’s “jumping scale” and to quantum physics
through Karen Barad’s “intra-action.” Earlier I had mentioned Elizabeth
Grosz’s “leaps into the future” as a form of jumping linear time, which
was later on—in chapter 4—connected to Michel Foucault’s “genealogy”
which results in a perversion of clock-time too. It is interesting to note
that “McClintock” has served as a transposing agent, which is to say that
the reception of this historical figure has itself been following a transposi-
tion pattern by jumping the strands of second-wave feminist epistemolo-
gy. A study of the canon of second-wave feminist epistemology demon-
strates how McClintock’s work pops up in every corner, outlining genea-
logical movement within and between its strands despite McClintock’s
mythically marginal position in the science of her day (until her work on
corn was taken on by—mostly male—geneticists of bacteria and fruit flies
in the 1970s and she won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in
1983), the attempt at classifixation in the work of Sandra Harding, among
others, and the fact that institutionalized academic feminism was not
interested in biology for a long time. 1 How does the genealogical move-
ment—the swerving that also typifies McClintock’s nomadic existence
until she was granted a permanent position at Cold Spring Harbor—look
that presents itself when we follow the path through feminist theory cut
with McClintock as our searchlight and object of research? I demonstrate
73
74 Chapter 5

in close connection with the conclusions reached in the previous chapter,

that McClintock should not be seen as a self-conscious Subject of research
or, alternatively, as a muted object that can be molded by her self-con-
scious interpreters of second-wave feminist epistemology. It is in the zig-
zagging relating with McClintock—as a tiny thousand objects—that we
can see how these interpreters change into a thousand tiny subjects. In
the end, the transposition happens horizontally and the scholars from the
second feminist wave, as well as the archival materials tagged “McClin-
tock,” appear agential.

ONE AMONG MANY MCCLINTOCKS

Featuring in the vein of equality feminism in publications such as Nobel

Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries
(McGrayne 1998) and of difference feminism in (the reception of) Evelyn
Fox Keller’s A Feeling for the Organism (1983) in particular, telling the
story of McClintock is never neutral. Nathaniel Comfort’s 2001 study The
Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock’s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control,
which tries to undo the many myths around McClintock and argues—
recognizably—that McClintock’s story is “like a river, it swelled, mean-
dered, and gathered debris downstream” (Comfort 2001, 4), is not only a
study that consolidates archival materials and previous works on
McClintock. The study also falls prey to the suggestive possibility of a
neutral mapping of this multilayered terrain (the bird’s eye view). Com-
fort’s analysis has its own interests and these can be captured by Donna
Haraway’s famous formulation—abundantly deployed in this book—
that “[r]elativism is the perfect mirror twin of totalization in the ideolo-
gies of objectivity; both deny the stakes in location, embodiment, and
partial perspective; both make it impossible to see well” (Haraway 1988,
584). Hence, it is possible to label Comfort’s study as an empiricist and/or
postmodern one. One and many McClintocks . . .
So, what can be said about Barbara McClintock (1902–1992)? Born as
the daughter to a mother who hoped for a son, McClintock developed an
eccentric personality in that she was not bashful once she entered the
academic profession. She continued to dress unconventionally during her
studies in Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and laughed out
loud at many occasions while also doing her PhD research in the botany
department at the same university. She studied passionately and not
without success. As a young doctor, she was a regular recipient of schol-
arships and got to see American as well as European universities from
the inside (some of the institutions she decided not stay at owing to
internal gendered politics or the “climate change” around the event of the
Second World War). She was awarded leadership positions such as the
vice-presidency of the Genetics Society of America (in 1939) and later its
 The Transversality of Barbara McClintock 75

presidency (in 1945), and was elected into the National Academy of Sci-
ences around the same time. She worked at Cold Spring Harbor until the
end of her life, a long period of intense research which Jeffrey Eugenides
hints at in his novel The Marriage Plot (2011).
McClintock’s extravert personality did not prevent her from taking
full advantage of her studiousness. Her exuberance allowed her to con-
centrate fully and intensely on maize cytogenetics and to develop sys-
tems for the experimental study, storage, and analysis of corn. This led to
well-known discoveries (transposition, most notably) and articles (a fa-
mous 1931 article—ahead of its time for its content in disciplinary terms
as well as most timely in terms of scholarly competition—was written
together with research assistant Harriet Creighton). Apart from the fact
that McClintock managed to find the proof “that chromosomes carried
and exchanged genetic information to produce new combinations of
physical traits” in the late 1920s, early 1930s (McGrayne 1998, 154), she
was also among the first “to think of the genetic process as responsive to
signals from inside and outside the cell” (McGrayne 1998, 158). Later on,
McClintock developed the theory which is now called “transposition,”
based on the empirical finding of unexpected color patches on leaves,
flowers, and so on. She found “two new kinds of genetic elements: the
first is a controlling element, a switch to turn on and off the genes that
express physical characteristics like color or size. The second type is an
activator that can make the on-and-off switch jump around from one part
of a chromosome to another” (McGrayne 1998, 158). So “jumping genes”
does not imply that empirically confirmed flexibility or fluidity on
chromosomal and cellular levels prevented her from interpreting what
happens in the cell as a process of control, as Comfort stresses in the title
of his scholarly biography. Transposition would eventually make sure
her work was recognized across the academic board and hers was the
seventh science Nobel Prize given to a woman. The way in which she
heard the news reminds me of when Doris Lessing received the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 2007: through a journalist’s lens and in a somewhat
distracted vein.

TURNING TO MCCLINTOCK, HISTORICALLY

Now that I have established one of many McClintocks in this study in-
fused with feminist new materialisms, let me turn to one of the earliest
feminist entry points for epistemology as an established field of scholarly
reflection which has been through the legacy of Thomas S. Kuhn. The
“historical turn” in epistemology got glued to the proper name of Kuhn,
the “physicist turned historian for philosophical purposes” (Baltas et al.
2000, 320–21). With the latter’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
([1962/1969] 1996), epistemology became other than purely normative.
76 Chapter 5

The field moved from the requirement of the philosophical soundness of

logical reflection on scholarship to the demand of its historical correct-
ness. Events in the history of science were from then on to be embraced in
all of their complexity. In other words, the English-speaking world
moved away from logical positivism and “chronological empiricism”
alike. 2 This historical turn has coincided with the birth of postmodern-
ism.
Kuhn’s Structure 3 was groundbreaking in that it moved epistemology
and philosophy of science away from strictly prescriptive knowledge the-
ory towards history or historiography of science. The Kuhnian approach
evaluates the development of science as a nonlinear process. He focuses
on breaks (scientific revolutions, paradigm shifts, incommensurability)
and temporary sedimentations (normal science, exemplars, disciplinary
matrices) in which eminent men, young men, and other newcomers play
an important role in ignoring anomalies or proposing their alternatives.
Kuhn defines science as a communal and consensual practice: the schol-
ars in a discipline agree upon paradigms and exemplars. The rationale
here is that “[c]onsensus is commonly achieved, but it is rarely compelled
by the forces of logic and evidence alone” (Keller 1992a, 26). In order to
open up for other forces, epistemology must turn its back on armchair
philosophy.
The turn set in motion by Kuhn both attracted and repelled feminists
in the 1980s. Most early second-wave feminist epistemologists applauded
Kuhn for moving beyond positivist epistemology, rationalist philosophy
of science, and auxiliary history of science to a more thorough historio-
graphical approach of what scientists do. No longer was it mind alone,
which played a role in the production of knowledge. Space was carved
out for the agentiality of subject matter to generate puzzles and for the so-
called extra-scientific, which includes how the illogical and non-eviden-
tial play roles in academia. Feminists, nonetheless, questioned Kuhnian
analyses for remaining as gender-blind as their predecessors (Addelson
[1983] 2003, 166; Harding 1986, 199). Sarah Lucia Hoagland has ironically
formulated this argument in Kuhnian terms:
The patriarchal paradigm of misogyny was not affected by the scientif-
ic revolution. This suggests that change by shift in paradigm that
Thomas Kuhn suggests is not a total change . . . no significant change in
the dominant, patriarchal naming of women, either evolutionary or
revolutionary, leaps to mind. (Hoagland 2001, 127)
Second-wave feminist epistemologists thus treated pre- and post-Kuh-
nian studies of science as non-exhaustively dichotomous according to
their own yardstick of “sex” or “gender.”
Kuhn’s gender-blindness notwithstanding, Evelyn Fox Keller—the
early feminist biographer of McClintock—has invited feminists to take on
the historiographical approach, stating that this approach could help
 The Transversality of Barbara McClintock 77

“bring [to light] a whole new range of sensitivities, leading to an equally

new consciousness of the potentialities lying latent in the scientific pro-
ject” (Keller 1982, 601–02). Keller’s reading of Kuhn is firmly externalist
and she has also read gender into his account. She summarizes the femi-
nist move as follows:
If scientific knowledge was dependent on social and political forces to
give it direction, and even meaning, then it was surely reasonable to
suppose that “gender,” which exerts so powerful a force in shaping
other parts of our lives and worlds, would exert its force here as well.
(Keller 1998, 18)
In her early work, Keller indeed emphasizes the parts of Structure in
which Kuhn, if only by implication, allows for extra-academic forces to
influence consensus-seeking practices in the communal course of scientif-
ic development. When Kuhn claims, for instance, that “[a] paradigm
can . . . even insulate the community from those socially important prob-
lems that are not reducible to the puzzle form, because they cannot be
stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools the paradigm
supplies” (Kuhn [1962/1969] 1996, 37), he claims as well that this is not to
say that “normal science is a single monolithic and unified enterprise that
must stand or fall with any one of its paradigms as well as with all of
them together” (Kuhn [1962/1969] 1996, 49). 4 Pushing an externalist
Kuhn to the limit, Keller is interested in “the psychosocial (historically
‘masculinist’) dimensions of our dominant scientific traditions” (Keller
1992b, 2; cf. Brennan 1998, 276). She starts to aim at transformation, tam-
ing hegemony, and works toward a science that is human(e) rather than
androcentric.
In Reflections on Gender and Science, Keller addresses the topic of scien-
tific development as productive rather than progressive, capitalizing on
Kuhn’s affirmation of nonlinear scientific development. Keller also
argues that a direct implication of the work of Kuhn is “that not only
different collections of facts, different focal points of scientific attention,
but also different organizations of knowledge, different interpretations of
the world, are both possible and consistent with what we call science”
(Keller 1985, 5). Her Refiguring Life goes as far as acknowledging that
“[l]anguage does not simply construct reality” as the material needs to
cooperate and technical supplies must be available (Keller 1995, xiii).
Such ideas about “difference” have to do with Keller’s specific take on
the nature of science, which is “not the purely cognitive endeavor we
once thought it, neither is it as impersonal as we thought: science is a
deeply personal; as well as social activity” (Keller 1985, 7). Keller ad-
dresses the dialectics between public and private, personal and imper-
sonal, and, consequentially, masculine and feminine. She also addresses
the ways in which the gendered nature of the relationship between the
personal, the social, and the scientific informs the method for studying
78 Chapter 5

the development of science. Keller labels this constituency the “science-

gender system” (Keller 1985, 8), which is “the network of gender associa-
tions in the characteristic language of science [viewed] as neither natural
nor self-evident, but as contingent, and dismaying” (Keller 1985, 12). 5
In order to be able to see “the potentialities lying latent in the scientific
project,” Keller must find a way into another less dualist and oppressive
scientific system. She looks for a manner of conceptualizing objectivity
that does not stem from patriarchal social relations or from an individual-
ist dimension founded on an equally patriarchal notion of autonomy and
selfhood. Reflections discusses the case of McClintock as an exemplary
practice of doing science differently. What Keller finds in the singular
model provided by McClintock is a dynamic objectivity and a dynamic
autonomy (Keller 1985, 99, 126). Here we can discern the beginnings of a
visionary element in feminist epistemology, which coexists with the de-
scriptive element of the historical turn and the prescriptive element and
legacy of the pre-Kuhnian Vienna Circle or “Wiener Kreis” which in-
cluded Karl Popper (and in fact published Kuhn!). Keller discusses the
work of McClintock as uncovering qualitatively shifting ways of concep-
tualizing objectivity, truth, method, and the knowing subject.
The story of McClintock is written up in Keller’s A Feeling for the
Organism (1983) and this story is told:
neither as “a tale of dedication rewarded after years of neglect—of
prejudice or indifference eventually routed by courage and truth”
([Keller 1983,] xii), nor as a heroic story of the scientist, years “ahead of
her time,” stumbling on something approximating what we now know
as “the truth.” Instead . . . as a story about the languages of science—
about the process by which worlds of common scientific discourse be-
come established, effectively bounded, and yet at the same time remain
sufficiently permeable to allow a given piece of work to pass from
incomprehensibility in one era to acceptance (if not full comprehen-
sibility) in another. (Keller 1985, 161)
Keller focuses upon the social or communal as much as the personal and
the conceptual in a multidirectional manner. 6 What we find when Keller
pleads for studying “the force and efficacy of [scientific] representations”
(Keller 1992b, 4), is a first attempt at an immanent or “univocal” episte-
mology, claiming that “[w]hat counts as a usable, effective, and commun-
able representation is constrained, on the one hand, by our social, cultu-
ral, and disciplinary location, and on the other hand, by the recalcitrance
of what I am left, by default, to call ‘nature’” (Keller 1992b, 6). In fact,
Joseph Rouse has affirmed a similar marginal perspective prompting that
“Kuhn himself often reminded us that as philosophers we can dispense
with the rhetoric of correspondence to already-determinate facts without
thereby doing away with the sciences’ accountability to how the world is
manifest within their ongoing practices” (Rouse 1998, 50).
 The Transversality of Barbara McClintock 79

Zooming in on the feminist future created in the work of Keller, her

“gender-free science” should not be read as an attempt to undo the gen-
dered nature of science and/or the gendered socialization of scientists.
Keller argues that thinking about gender and science always introduces a
“shift—from no difference, or universality, to absolute difference, or du-
ality” while “the ease and the rapidity of the shift suggest[s] that univer-
sality and duality are, in some basic sense, two sides of the same coin”
(Keller 1986, 170). Her feminist knowledge theory does not refute Kuhn
or androcentric epistemology in general—confirming them by nega-
tion—neither does it produce a gynocentric alternative that will have
nothing but the same effect. Keller’s is a theory making a difference.
Science as the practice of difference exemplified by the story of McClin-
tock is a visionary reworking of the common materials of epistemology:
Because she is not a man, in a world of men, her commitment to a
gender-free science has been binding; because concepts of gender have
so deeply influenced the basic categories of science, that commitment
has been transformative. In short, the relevance of McClintock’s gender
in this story is to be found not in its role in her personal socialization
but precisely in the roles of gender in the construction of science. (Kel-
ler 1985, 174)
She transforms the categories of male and female, of nature and culture,
of mind and nature. In other words, she introduces “a different meaning
of mind, of nature, and of the relation between them” (Keller 1985, 175).
For McClintock, as acknowledged by Keller, nature is agential: “while
surely not a woman, it is also not a ‘thing,’ nor is it even an ‘it’ that can be
delineated unto itself, either separate or separable from a speaking and
knowing ‘we’” (Keller 1992b, 34). Gender traverses and consequently
connects all levels of scientific practice; McClintock was forced to con-
front the dominant, gendered construction of science on the personal,
communal, conceptual, and material levels alike. Simultaneously, her
work is made possible by the community’s recognition of her being a
scientist as well as by her own recognition of nature as some-body to
converse with (Keller 1985, 173–74; cf. Tuana 1996, 32–3). This implies
that Keller’s take on McClintock simply must make apparent that there is
“a variety and range of practices, visions, and articulations of science far
in excess of any ideological prescriptions” (Keller 1986, 174; cf. Comfort
2001). Whereas canonized feminist standpoint theory has been said to
construct ideological norms as fully fixed and fully binding, the work of
Keller demonstrates an eye for the surprising effects of the agentiality of
matter, while not ignoring the genderedness and gendering of science.
This is what she is able to do . . . with McClintock.
Kuhn argues that paradigms are constitutive of scientific activity. Par-
adigms consist of “law, theory, application, and instrumentation togeth-
er” (Kuhn [1962/1969] 1996, 10), but the latter element of a paradigm, next
80 Chapter 5

to other material forces, does not come out as agential in Structure. The
historical turn allows for historiographical, evaluative descriptions of sci-
ence and scholarship as well as for knowledge-sociological generaliza-
tions. The work does not allow for “an oscillation between [the] corpo-
reality [of thought] and the network of social representations which occu-
pies it” (Braidotti 1991, 44). According to the 1969 “Postscript” of Struc-
ture, descriptions consist of the ways in which the world changes under
the influence of disciplinary matrices. That is to say, “[a]ny study of
paradigm-directed or paradigm-shattering research must begin by locat-
ing the responsible group or groups” (Kuhn [1962/1969] 1996, 180). This
anthropo-centered origin is no longer present in the new materialism, ar-
guing that “the world [is] neither flat nor given; hence, the subject does
not exist prior to its orientation and instantiation in relation to its wider
environment” (Halewood 2005, 74). We have just encountered the first
opening-up toward the feminist incarnation of such a stance in the trans-
formative practice of McClintock, dutifully affirmed by Keller, who her-
self must have come out transformed.
Having extended beyond the defense of the sole possibility of differ-
ent takes on one world and having pushed Kuhn to the limit, Keller
argues: “we have yet to produce an account of the production of scientific
knowledge that fully integrates the social, the material, and the cogni-
tive” (Keller 1998, 19; emphasis added). Her account of the science-gen-
der system, authored with McClintock in a co-responding modality,
makes clear how nature (something feminized) can actually speak—even
in normal science—owing to the material under scientific scrutiny being
excessive and agential. In the work of Keller—with McClintock—the
speaking of nature is ultimately done through (marginal) scientists and is
gleaned from what they write and say in interviews. According to Keller,
the scholar has “a feeling for the organism” and the community recog-
nizes this scholar, whereas for Braidotti (who introduced McClintock to
Deleuzian feminism), both the scholar and the organism (nature, matter)
are always already transposing agents. Has it only been in Braidotti’s
work that the jumping genes as such were said to involve the way in
which matter comes to matter? Keller attempts to overcome the schism
between subject, object, instrument, and environment of research while
she continues to focus on the authoritative role of the scientist. Authority
is in the hands of the scientific community when it comes to McClintock.
For Braidotti, transposition is not about such a transitive relationship, but
about intra-active subject-object relating, a relating which Keller as it
were foresaw. The affirmation that the knowing is being done by a mesh-
work of human and non-human agents, both in the case of McClintock
and her corn and in the case of feminist genealogy produces a jumping-
generation fully actualized in the work of feminist new materialists. This
does not install progress-narrative, because McClintock and Keller are
 The Transversality of Barbara McClintock 81

both of the virtual past of feminism and therefore a feedback loop—one

like a perpetuum mobile—exists between their work and ours.

MCCLINTOCK: SILENCED BY IDEOLOGY?

Not just feminist Kuhnians, but also feminist Marxists have taken up the
case of McClintock. There is a picking up of good-old Marxism for femi-
nist knowledge theory with the postmodern twist that provided the polit-
ical, theoretical, organizational basis for what was happening in feminist
consciousness raising groups. Revisiting Keller’s study, Ruth Berman has
claimed that “observations often break out of the limits of communally
accepted theories and conflict not only with the paradigms of the scientif-
ic community, as described by Kuhn, but also with ideological prescrip-
tion” (Berman 1989, 247–48). Berman suggests that observations and re-
search results are either accepted when mirroring the social order or
marginalized when contradicting societal dogmas. Besides arguing that
McClintock’s feeling for the organism resembles Marxist “sensuousness”
more than Kuhnian consensus, 7 Berman (1989, 249) claims that McClin-
tock contradicting “the dogma of the constancy of the genome” and/or
“the parallel dogma of the hegemony of the DNA molecule” is what has
prevented her work from being accepted. The question is whether she
allows for active and dynamic feminist futures in the scientific archive
(androcentric and feminist alike), futures tapped into by Keller’s attempt
at transposition. Does Berman’s Marxist framework allow for the femi-
nist scholar (including McClintock) to be a thousand tiny subjects and the
archival materials tagged “McClintock” a thousand tiny objects? To what
extent is feminist genealogy pushed to the limit in this feminist stand-
point theory? And how is McClintock an active, material-discursive
agent in this context?
Feminist standpoint theory is based in Marxist materialism and, as
such, I would say that it has the tendency to become either universalist by
producing a universal standpoint for women or particularist by produc-
ing individual standpoints. Diemut Bubeck (2000) has claimed that the
second-wave feminist theorists who left universalism behind were left
with its opposite: engendering change as it bended backwards to a “cen-
trism”; a particularism with its own paralyzing consequences to be over-
come. This Marxist work produces a double bind: when everyone can
potentially speak from a standpoint and all women are individually (i.e.,
distinctly) situated, feminists are forced to find ways to assemble more
universal conclusions as women again. Bat-Ami Bar On has explained
that this vicious circle is a specific problem of the feminist translation or
appropriation of Marxist epistemology, because for Karl Marx himself,
“social marginality is a function of economic centrality” (Bar On 1993,
86). In other words, Marx conceptualizes proletarians as “outsiders with-
82 Chapter 5

in” (Patricia Hill Collins’s term from 1991), 8 whereas most feminist
standpoint theorists have conceptualized women as “outsiders.” This
simplification has led to several problems. Feminists have been obliged to
find other—read: diametrically opposed—ways in which women could
be called epistemologically privileged and a problem which has arisen is
which outsiders are best. Bar On (1993, 89) rightly asks: “Is any one of
these groups more epistemologically privileged than the others, and if
that is not so—if they are all equally epistemologically privileged—does
epistemic privilege matter?” Bubeck sets out to solve the paradox of both
universalism and particularism offering the solution to “transcend” our
particular location and neither presume nor deny the possibility of a
common condition. The unasked question is, in turn, what this transcen-
dence does to feminist theory and gender research?
We can say that intimate relationships exist between early Anglo-
American feminist standpoint theories and mainstream Marxist material-
ism and between second-wave feminism and Marxism/socialism per se. 9
The critical subjects of May of 1968 all refer back to the generation of 1890
in which Marx was but one representative. Nancy Hartsock’s 1983 “The
Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist
Historical Materialism” heavily relies on Marx (and Friedrich Engels),
but also on feminist psychoanalysts like Nancy Chodorow. The work on
the feminist standpoint in The Science Question in Feminism (Harding 1986,
26–7, 136–62) and in Harding’s “What is Feminist Epistemology?” (1991)
refers back to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectics,
Marx’s early source of inspiration. Harding’s own early work, in turn,
also provides synthesis of the work of fellow feminists such as Hartsock,
Hillary Rose ([1983] 2004), and Dorothy Smith ([1974] 2004). The tenden-
cy to synthesize, that is, to make use of a feminist archive, can be found in
an even stronger manner in the work of Collins (1991) who has worked
on building a black feminist standpoint and in Harding’s later work on
“strong objectivity” (Harding 1993). In sum, early feminist standpoint
theorists are not automatically dutiful daughters of Marx/ism, so we can
look for jumping-generations here too. The question is: what is produced
in this context with McClintock?
When Alison Jaggar canonizes the four feminist activist position-
ings—“liberal feminism,” “mainstream Marxism,” “radical feminism,”
and “socialist feminism”—in Feminist Politics and Human Nature, she
shows a clear preference for socialist feminism’s epistemic viability (Jag-
gar 1983, 353). Reflecting the interests of women, this perspective has
been considered to be the most objective, revealing, and useful one “con-
tribut[ing] to a practical reconstruction of the world in which women’s
interests are not subordinated to those of men” (Jaggar 1983, 385). Addi-
tionally, Jaggar has said this perspective—developed by Smith, Hartsock,
Harding, and Jane Flax—could explain its own grounds. Jaggar (1983,
377) claims that her “criterion for identifying all these theorists as social-
 The Transversality of Barbara McClintock 83

ist feminist . . . is that all of them adhere in principle to a historical

materialist approach for understanding social reality.” Her bibliography
of the standpoint of women consists of women scholars. Jaggar, whose
account is constrained by a classificatory approach, for which she has
been criticized (for example, in Sandoval [1991] 2004, 199), provides a
feminist genealogy.
Hartsock’s “Feminist Standpoint” was one of the first attempts at con-
structing a systematic feminist standpoint epistemology, the theory of
thinking from women’s lives. To build her case, Hartsock referred to Iris
Marion Young, who had already began to argue for the need of a specifi-
cally feminist historical materialism against the background of a dual
systems approach in which class and sex/gender were parallel tracks,
leaving the gender-blind historical materialism untouched (Young in
Hartsock [1983] 2004, 50). 10 At first glance, Hartsock is a dutiful daughter
of Marx/ism as she carefully appropriates Marxist categories and tools for
understanding not capitalism but “phallocratic domination” and for en-
visioning a different future devoid of “abstract masculinity” (Hartsock
[1983] 2004, 35). She wanted to underpin Young’s intuition epistemolog-
ically and proceeded through mirroring Marx:
I hold that the powerful vision of both the perverseness and reality of
class domination made possible by Marx’s adoption of the standpoint
of the proletariat suggests that a specifically feminist standpoint could
allow for a much more profound critique of phallocratic ideologies and
institutions than has yet been achieved. (Hartsock [1983] 2004, 40)
This being the case, half of her bibliography consists of writings of wom-
en and Hartsock has even claimed explicitly that she had been discussing
the issue with several feminists.
According to Hartsock ([1983] 2004, 36–7), a standpoint “carries with
it the contention that there are some perspectives on society from
which . . . the real relations of humans with each other and with the
natural world are not visible.” After illustrating this nature of a stand-
point, she argues that “each division of labor, whether by gender or by
class, can be expected to have consequences for knowledge” (Hartsock
[1983] 2004, 38). Hartsock ([1983] 2004, 40) chooses to design a “feminist”
standpoint and not a “female” one on the basis of a “‘sexual division of
labour’ rather than [a] ‘gender[ed] division of labour.’” The feminist
standpoint has to be achieved and “by definition carries a liberatory po-
tential” (Hartsock [1983] 2004, 40). Its basis is a division of labor that is
both social and biological. By calling the division “sexual,” Hartsock
hopes to engage with the bodily dimensions of human existence and
activity thus moving away from a strictly humanist Subject. The feminist
standpoint, which Hartsock—albeit reluctantly and therefore strategical-
ly—has designed on the basis of discarding differences between women,
is argued to be “related to the proletarian standpoint, but deeper going”
84 Chapter 5

(Hartsock [1983] 2004, 41). Since one is a woman twenty-four/seven and

laborers go home after work, women are—on top of their involvement in
production processes—being prepared for reproductive labor. Hartsock’s
feminist standpoint has become very influential in the pedagogical canon
of feminist theory, but her emphasis on the interaction between the social
and the biological/bodily has nevertheless been largely ignored.
Hartsock should be credited for building an argument that is not a
universalizing one. Even though she hesitantly brushes differences be-
tween women under the carpet and claims that the effects of the feminist
standpoint are the dual opposite of the effects of abstract masculinity,
“Hartsock does not aim to reverse the balance of power and offer a coun-
ter-notion of ‘abstract femininity’ in replacement of the previous one”
(Braidotti 1991, 265). Abstract masculinity and the feminist standpoint
are different in kind. They are not the opposite sides of the same coin,
since:
the female experience not only inverts that of the male, but forms a
basis on which to expose abstract masculinity as both partial and fun-
damentally perverse, as not only occupying only one side of the dual-
ities it has constructed, but reversing the proper valuation of human
activity. (Hartsock [1983] 2004, 46)
Hartsock allows for the specificities of the lived experiences of women,
wholly in line with Young. While Hartsock strategically focuses on the
commonalities between women, her account allows for being specific
about specific (groups of) women. Not reading this differing into her
work is a perfect example of the effects of classifixation: an inclusive
feminist future gets out of sight and we actively participate in silencing
the epistemological category.
Building feminist new materialisms with Hartsock and other second-
wave feminist materialists should not suggest that the account of third-
wave feminist materialists is in no way providing new insights and/or
qualitatively different epistemologies. But second-wave feminist materi-
alist work is not necessarily simply universalizing. Important (stereotypi-
cal) criticisms of second-wave material feminism are sometimes flawed.
What we need is the development and implementation of jumping gener-
ations.
In “Feminist Standpoint,” we read that Hartsock has set out to “ex-
plore and expand the Marxian argument that socially mediated interac-
tion with nature in the process of production shapes both human beings
and theories of knowledge” (Hartsock [1983] 2004, 35). Where Hartsock
uses the “standpoint” as a mediating device, thus affirming a social con-
structivism, she also states:
The Marxian category of labour, including as it does both interaction
with other humans and with the natural world, can help to cut through
the dichotomy of nature and culture, and, for feminists, can help to
 The Transversality of Barbara McClintock 85

avoid the false choice of characterizing the situation of women as either

“purely natural” or “purely social.” As embodied humans we are of
course inextricably both natural and social, though feminist theory to
date has, for important strategic reasons, concentrated attention on the
social aspect. (Hartsock [1983] 2004, 35–6)
Hartsock claims that, fundamentally, women and laborers are always
already both natural and social. This suggests that the two realms do not
exist independently of one another, despite the fact that Hartsock concep-
tualizes “interaction” and “mediation.” And yet, does she push far
enough to an intra-active epistemology highlighting material-discursiv-
ity? In contrast to her claim that women are never social instead of natural,
the additive concept that Hartsock provides us with does not change the
nature of its parts (cf. Davis 2009, 75; Frost 2011, 77). Feminist new mate-
rialisms allow for the actualization of this part of feminism’s virtual
past. 11 In fact, the rhetorical strategies of feminist new materialists repeat
Hartsock’s. Karen Barad’s opening statement of the article “Posthumanist
Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Mat-
ter” reads that “[l]anguage has been granted too much power” (Barad
2003, 801) and is much-discussed, rather critically so (see Ahmed 2008,
Sullivan 2012, and Bruining 2013). But there is genealogical movement
between Barad and Hartsock, allowing for a very positive evaluation of
Hartsock’s and Barad’s founding gestures. Barad agrees that “feminist
theory to date has, for important strategic reasons, concentrated attention
on the social aspect.” Would it be possible to find the entangled reality of
naturecultures in the work of McClintock? Could I repeat Comfort’s biog-
raphy of this Nobel laureate, the one with the evocative title, in the femi-
nist archive? I propose to take another turn in feminist genealogy so as to
enflesh these musings.

TURNING TO MCCLINTOCK, EMPIRICALLY

Reflecting upon the impact of Kuhn’s historical turn, Rouse has argued
that “[e]ven now, thirty-five years after the appearance of Structure, the
significant shift of philosophical focus from scientific knowledge to scien-
tific practices has not yet been fully assimilated” (Rouse 1998, 33). Ac-
cordingly, (and we could add the Marxist turn to “praxis” to his analysis)
engagement with science and knowledge production is still governed by
the primacy of the theoretical (which is then applied to practice). The
empirical turn introduced by Bruno Latour in the late 1970s and early
1980s is another attempt to shift this idealism on a fundamental level and
to introduce a new and univocal way of studying the production of
knowledge. Latour’s turn engenders the development of the field of sci-
ence and technology studies (often abbreviated as “science studies” or
simply “STS”). Feminists have been involved in this field since the initial
86 Chapter 5

stages of development. Despite the fact that Ludwik Fleck is embraced as

the “real” founder of the field (Fleck [1935] 1979, Oudshoorn 1994), the
work of Latour in particular has generated increasing attention from the
feminist academic community (Duran 1998, 84–6).
Latour and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientif-
ic Facts ([1979] 1986) brought forth the argument for a bottom-up ap-
proach to the study of academic knowledge production. Science studies
scholars evaluate traditional epistemology as a purely prescriptive affair
that presumes to know what scientific knowledge should be and that it
should differ from all other knowledges. Science studies itself is often
restricted in the opposite direction; by pretending not to know what sci-
ence is, Latourians might end up proclaiming a relativist particularism
(we have seen this dialectical dynamic too in the case of second-wave
feminist materialism). Its turn away from the textual and theoretical and
towards the material and practical involves a response that is sometimes
as dualist as the assumptions of the so-called “Received View” on schol-
arly knowledge production. As a consequence, these assumptions get re-
confirmed and are not necessarily “demystified” (Duran 1998, 85) or
“disenchanted” (Latour [1984] 1988, Latour [1991] 1993). Furthermore,
while Kuhn wants to start from “[h]istory, if viewed as a repository for
more than anecdote or chronology” (Kuhn [1962/1969] 1996, 1), Latour
and Latourians often end up studying anecdote and chronology. The
equivocal assumption here is that the theoretical and practical side of
scholarship can be distinguished prior to the undertaking of the study of
science. Despite Latour’s Dantian motto “ABANDON ALL KNOWL-
EDGE ABOUT KNOWLEDGE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE” (Latour
1987, 7; emphasis in original), and his conceptualization of scientific in-
struments and scholarly texts as Pandora’s boxes, bottom-up approaches
do not always reflect upon their assumptions or the role of the knowing
subject (the science student). In this sense, science studies—and other
post-Kuhnian approaches—and traditional philosophies of science/epis-
temologies are unreal opposites.
In fact, the latter is what Latour has claimed of the study of science by
a metaphorical Ivory Coast hunter as well as of the epistemological an-
archism of Paul Feyerabend (Latour 1981, 206). In an interview with T.
Hugh Crawford, Latour says that “[they are] debunking strateg[ies], and
all debunking makes people believe in the thing being debunked” (Craw-
ford 1993, 254-5). Nevertheless, Latour’s explicit “agnosticism,” accord-
ing to which “[w]e will have as few ideas as possible on what constitutes
science” (Latour 1987, 7), ends up confirming traditional armchair philos-
ophy through a debunking of its implicit yet foundational “God-trick.”
Agnosticism or a refusal to believe in the content of a belief, here being
science, or belief as such (Latour 1999, 275), and the God-trick as meaning
proclaiming Truth from a disembedded and disembodied point of view,
are ways that scholars cover up their “taking a stand.” Both of these
 The Transversality of Barbara McClintock 87

approaches claim to analyze science from the undefined outside.

Contrary to this, feminists, since the second wave, have talked extensive-
ly about knowledges, scholarly practices, and epistemologies as decisive-
ly situated.
William Paulson has claimed that:
historians and sociologists of science cannot use representations of na-
ture to explain how and why scientific controversies are settled, since
these representations are the outcome of the settlement. . . . Neither the
object nor the group could be taken as the cause of what [a scientist]
did. (Paulson 2001, 86)
Leaving texts but also scientific communities and research objects behind,
science students focus on activities. Therefore, they do not set out to be
either traditional epistemologists (like the members of the Wiener Kreis)
or strict sociologists (like Kuhnians or Marxists). In a programmatic state-
ment Latour claims:
[There] are five types of activities that science studies needs to describe
first if it seeks to begin to understand in any sort of realistic way what a
given scientific discipline is up to: instruments, colleagues, allies, pub-
lic, and finally, what I will call links or knots so as to avoid the historical
baggage that comes with the phrase “conceptual content.” Each of
these five activities is as important as the others, and each feeds back
into itself and into the other four. (Latour 1999, 99; emphasis in origi-
nal)
Latour ascribes activity and consequentially “agency” to humans (indi-
viduals and collectives) and non-humans alike (most notably instru-
ments). This is an attempt to traverse the unreal opposites in the canons
of epistemology and philosophy of science.
Upon publication, feminist science student Susan Leigh Star immedi-
ately criticized Latour’s seemingly revolutionary perspective. According
to Star, tracing networks does not stop science students from studying
only what has been engaged in this huge “heterogeneous association” (La-
tour 2003, 2004; Harman 2009). She bases her claims on the ability of
networks to have marginal perspectives:
A stabilized network is only stable for some, and that is for those who
are members of the community of practice who form/use/maintain it.
And part of the public stability of a standardized network often in-
volves the private suffering of those who are not standard—who must
use the standard network, but who are also non-members of the com-
munity of practice. (Star 1991, 43)
Star ascribes an authoritative gesture—one similar to traditional episte-
mologists—to science students, despite the fact that the latter present
themselves as humble di-agnostics making accurate descriptions even on
a meta-level.
88 Chapter 5

In 2003 and 2004, Latour published two papers that demonstrate a

certain sensitivity for these feminist questions, questions which have ac-
tually been voiced as of Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” (1988).
In “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” (2004), Latour pleads for the
development of a “second empiricism.” He argues that industries and
governments now seem to mirror the empirical turn—they, too, question
scientific facts—and states that science students should no longer ques-
tion but rather care for facts in order to prevent total appropriation from
happening. He introduced the conceptual pair “matters of fact” and
“matters of concern” in order to highlight what fact and fiction share and
how that commonality differs from matters of concern. Fact and fiction
are founded on a “critical-trick” according to which “we carefully man-
age to apply them on different topics” thus ending up “always right”
(Latour 2004, 239; emphasis in original). On the contrary, approaches
dealing with matters of concern argue against such deterministic a-prior-
ism. Therefore, matters of concern matter much more for the second em-
piricism.
The first empiricism “found itself totally disarmed” once matters of
fact were also debunked by, for example, the Bush administration, which
could now plug in some (fictitious) religious reasoning while concrete
situations of life and death asked for scientific facticity (Latour 2004, 232).
In other words, Latourian science studies got caught up in its own dual-
ism. Here, Latour verifies the feminist reception of his work. In the com-
panion article “The Promises of Constructivism” (2003), Latour argues
that positivists and deconstructivists alike have misused the term “con-
structivism.” Positivists conceptualize facts as totally independent from
the work that has gone into constructing them and deconstructivists talk
about the work at the expense of the factual core. This situation “ren-
der[s] practice opaque to enquiry” (Latour 2003, 37). Thus we should not
be positivists or social constructivists (first empiricists). Latour claims
that “all the subtle mediations of practice should be protected and cher-
ished instead of being debunked and slowly destroyed,” he asks for “an
appeal for the extension of care and caution, a request to raise again the
question: ‘How can it be built better?’” (Latour 2003, 42; emphasis in
original). Ultimately, Latour agrees that agnostics like himself are so
malleable that even conservative, totalizing forces like neo-liberal, ad-
vanced-capitalist government officials and CEOs can relate to them.
Now an unexpected reliance on the work of Haraway can be found.
Latour mentions Haraway as exemplary for protection of and care for
matters of concern (Latour 2004, 232; see Puig de la Bellacasa 2011 for
“matters of care”). However, when he talks about the partiality of matters
of fact as well as fiction, he does not refer to Haraway, even though
“partiality” has been one of her key concepts since 1988. Furthermore,
Latour does not make explicit that “the promises of constructivism”
forms an intertextual reference to Haraway’s “the promises of monsters”
 The Transversality of Barbara McClintock 89

and he does not say that the “critical-trick” is similarly resonant of the
“God-trick.” The asymmetrical relation between Latour and Haraway
(Prins 1997, 275 n. 2; Gane 2006, 156–57) is striking in comparison to
Latour’s scaffolding of the work of Isabelle Stengers. Relatedly, the sec-
ond empiricism forms the Whiteheadian turn in the work of Latour. Like
James Bono said, the second empiricism forms “Latour’s turn to [Alfred
North] Whitehead via Isabelle Stengers” (Bono 2005, 136 n. 3). For the
discussion in this chapter, it is important to note that the case of McClin-
tock returns to stage with Stengers.
In “Another Look: Relearning to Laugh” (2000) Stengers argues
against crimes conducted in the name of science, but she also makes fun
of the degree of seriousness with which science is usually approached.
Trying to dislocate both epistemology as a discipline that assumes Ra-
tionality and Objectivity and a feminist, Other science—because of its
alleged relativism and the danger of co-optation—Stengers argues in fa-
vor of the subversive power of laughter, which is said to be able to com-
plicate the power lurking behind all statements of, or antagonistic to,
Science. She circumvents the fact-fiction divide and proposes, “a public
who would neither anticipate, fear, nor hope for the next scientific ‘reve-
lation’” (Stengers 2000, 51). Following Whitehead’s suggestion to study
“how [Science] holds together” (Stengers [2002] 2011, 18) and what both
positivist scientists and critical social constructivists have to assume
(Stengers [2002] 2011, 79), Stengers is able to argue that the sciences must
“take actively and speculatively into account what they so easily define
today as opposing rationality, including the interests and demands of
those who believe in ‘another kind of science’: feminine, or holistic, or
caring, etc” (Stengers 2000, 52; cf. Stengers [1989] 1997, 124).
Latour has characterized Stengers as follows:
If [her work] subverts many disciplines from the inside, it subverts
even more political stands from the outside, and especially so many of
the “standpoint politics” where the outcome of the analysis is entirely
determined from the start from the position of the speaker. (Latour
1997, xviii)
Characteristic of Stengers’s work is without a doubt her “hyperinternal-
ism” (Latour 1997, vii). The next fragment clearly uncovers her particular
stance:
Learning to laugh, in the name of the singularity of the sciences, in the
name of the thousand and one sexes of their fictions, at those who give
an identity to science, who say that they know what the scientific meth-
od is, what the conditions of objectivity are, and what the criteria of
scientificity are is a proposition that is in no way neutral. In relation to
feminist movements it presupposes, notably, accepting the idea that
the women’s struggle does not represent another history, to the skein of
90 Chapter 5

our history, in which the sciences are active ingredients. (Stengers

[1991] 1997, 143; emphasis in original)
Stengers wants to complicate the history and conceptualization of the
sciences from the inside and emphasizes the involvement of the actual
(man or woman) scientist. An example of such complication can be found
in her picking up on the story of McClintock in “Is There a Women’s
Science?” Here, the doing is prioritized and a move away from the femi-
nist critique of ideology fleshes out: “Barbara McClintock did not practice
a women’s science, she was a woman doing science” (Stengers [1989]
1997, 126). In other words, “[h]er choice was that of a science in the
singular, and this choice is as difficult for women as for men” (Stengers
[1989] 1997, 130).
It is with McClintock that Stengers specifies the second empiricism.
Asking Whiteheadian questions after the immanent conditions of pos-
sibility of both positivism and social constructivism, of both science and
the feminist standpoint, Stengers affirms the entanglement of matter and
(ideological) signification because everything happens in the laboratory,
on the field, at the conference, and so on. Stengers is not caught up in the
predetermined dualism of Science vs. Ideology, as was the situation of
(early) feminist standpoint theorists. Positioning herself on McClintock’s
corn plantation, the affirmation that “she was a woman doing science” is
made on a horizontal plane with the claim that “the choice of a science in
the singular is as difficult for women as for men.” This does not reinstall
neutrality because we have seen that, for Stengers, neutrality means iden-
tity politics of the institutional kind (Science) and of some feminist kinds
(when feminists take Science too seriously and affirm their alleged au-
thority).

TRANSVERSAL TURNINGS

What has my tracing of the transversal, genealogical movement of

McClintock demonstrated? First of all, McClintock is a transposing agen-
tiality whose empirical and conceptual windings produce jumps through
feminist genealogy. Her work is stumbled upon and ran with in the
many twists and turns in feminist engagement with questions of episte-
mology and philosophy/history of science. This genealogical movement
lays out an excess of the canonized concepts of second-wave feminist
theory: they are opened up with McClintock proving that the historical,
Marxist, and empirical turns in feminism and beyond are excessive. Fem-
inist new materialisms—a third-wave feminist theory formation that is
also saturated with genealogical movement between feminist (genera-
tion)s—is posthumanist as well as it is non-anthropocentric because of its
tapping into to the excesses of classifications. We do not run with particu-
lar theorists but rather with the surprises of their theories, research appa-
 The Transversality of Barbara McClintock 91

ratuses, and/or research materials. Approaches such as Stengers’s are not

founded on the disembodied and disembedded Subject of feminist (neo-
)empiricism, the subject-as-Other of anecdotal feminist historiography of
science, canonized identity-political feminist standpoint theory, or the
hyphenated subjects of feminist postmodernism. Genealogical force im-
manently questions the humanism and anthropocentrism of the afore-
mentioned categories, while highlighting certain aspects of them—like a
horizontalized subject-object relation that also embraces the instruments
of scientific work as agential or the so-called contextual approach that has
an eye for the environment of scholarship. The limit here is (phal-
lo)logocentrism or anthropocentrism. 12
In conclusion, a knowledge claim or political statement is not made by
one (multiplicitous) human subject as it is always already made with a
thousand tiny objects of research. Feminist new materialisms start from
the material-semiotic generation of statements (the virtual) that generate
subjects, objects, and epistemological categories (actualizations). This co-
evolutionary starting point does not conceptualize or critique matter as
gendered female or mind as gendered male. The latter are a second-wave
feminist materialist moves, that is, they are reconfirmation exercises ei-
ther of a stereotypical feminism or of a malestream academia. Feminist
theorists such as Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Isabelle Stengers—
just like Karen Barad, Vicki Kirby and Claire Colebrook, Susan Hekman
and Stacy Alaimo, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, and Estelle Barrett
and Barb Bolt—do not lean on these reconfirmations and they also do not
project them back onto the meshwork in necessarily interdisciplinary labs
in order to grasp matter. In so doing, they move away from matter-as or
matterings-of. Posthumanist and non-anthropocentric becomings lead
into the feminist futures of the canonized past. Accordingly, I propose to
be fully affirmative of Barbara McClintock’s affective relation with her
corn, because her “becoming-plant” is now understood as devoid of hu-
manism and anthropocentrism, as a becoming that is not exceptional but
just real and utterly effective.

NOTES

1. Here I argue that for a long time “biology” was seen as a deterministic discourse
that was bad for women and Others, notwithstanding the work of feminist biologists
which opened up precisely this attempt at fixating and closing down a certain field (cf.
Ahmed 2008, Davis 2009, Sullivan 2012). Among these biologists is Lynda Birke of the
Brighton Women & Science Group (1980).
2. This term is Hélène Metzger’s (Metzger [1937] 1987, 58). Metzger was men-
tioned by Kuhn as one of his main sources of inspiration in an early footnote of The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
3. One can discern a turn towards the philosophy of language and logic in Kuhn’s
later work: “Kuhn’s . . . shift from the description of scientific revolutions in Structure
predominantly in terms of visual metaphors, to a description by means of a linguistic
or conceptual framework” (Hoyningen-Huene 1998, 7). It can be noted that Kuhn’s
92 Chapter 5

feminist followers turned, to borrow a phrase from Evelyn Fox Keller, “from gender
and science to language and science” too (Keller 1992b, 31).
4. It is important to note that here Kuhn phrases the problematic in terms of
paradigms. In the following fragment, Kuhn suggests that only immature sciences
“suffer from” extra-academic influence: “Breakdown of the normal technical puzzle-
solving activity is not, of course, the only ingredient of the astronomical crisis that
faced Copernicus. An extended treatment would also discuss the social pressure of
calendar reform. . . . In addition, a fuller account would consider medieval criticism of
Aristotle, the rise of Renaissance Neoplatonism, and other significant historical ele-
ments besides. But technical breakdown would still remain the core of the crisis. In a mature
science—and astronomy had become that in antiquity—external factors like those cited
above are principally significant in determining the timing of breakdown, the ease
with which it can be recognized, and the area in which . . . the breakdown first occurs.
Though immensely important, issues of that sort are out of bounds for this essay”
(Kuhn [1962, 1969] 1996, 69; emphasis added).
5. Keller uses tools from psychoanalysis because, as she explains retrospectively in
Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death, psychoanalysis is a method for understanding the ways
in which the individual and the social interlock (Keller 1992b, 9).
6. Lorraine Code’s Epistemic Responsibility has voiced the same need: “To hold that
knowledge is commonable requires neither that all knowledge be communally ac-
quired nor that cognitive autonomy be impossible. Rather, the stance shows some-
thing of the limitations of autonomy, the scope of commonability, and the need to
become clearer about the interaction between the two” (Code 1987, 196).
7. In his “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marx reflects upon the complex nature of praxis.
He designs his materialist point of view in contradistinction to both idealism and
earlier materialisms. In the latter, “the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only
in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice,
not subjectively” (Marx [1845] 2007, Thesis I; emphasis in original). Marx claims that
“[t]he question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a
question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth—i.e., the
reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the
reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic
question” (Marx [1845] 2007, Thesis II; emphasis in original). For Marx, “a reality
distorted by ideology” has to do with the way in which theory and practice relate.
Here, rationality is reformulated as practical and truth as gained in practice by agents
other than individuals. It is not the individual subject characteristic of the Enlighten-
ment doing the knowing because “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in
each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of . . . social relations” (Marx
[1845] 2007, Thesis VI). Marx follows Ludwig Feuerbach in turning upside down the
Cartesian cogito to claim that “thought arises from being, not being from thought” and
simultaneously “extend[ing] its logic from abstract philosophy to the material world”
(Wheen 2006, 13). Cartesianism is accused of being non-utopian, since, famously,
“[t]he philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to
change it” (Marx [1845] 2007, Thesis XI).
8. An additional genealogical link is necessary here: Virginia Woolf has coined
“the Outsiders’ Society” for “the daughters of educated men” in Three Guineas (Woolf
[1938] 2001, 204).
9. See, for example, Kuhn and Wolpe eds. 1978 and Hennessy and Ingraham eds.
1997.
10. Whereas Marxists and Marxist feminists alike focused on “class as the ultimate
determinant of women’s current social/economic status” (Whelehan 1995, 44) and
socialist feminists “view[ed] gender and class as equally powerful oppressive mecha-
nisms” (Whelehan 1995, 45), I inscribe myself in the tradition of Jaggar who has
argued that a clear-cut distinction between Marxist and socialist feminism is not to be
made as Marxism is the Master Narrative of both strands in second-wave feminism
 The Transversality of Barbara McClintock 93

(Jaggar 1983, 125). However, the situation is more complex than Marxism being the
Master Narrative of both strands of second-wave feminism.
11. Estelle Barrett and Barb Bolt make a similar point about the complex relation
between older materialisms and the new materialisms in the context of art theory and
the creative arts in their book Carnal Knowledge: Towards a New Materialism Through the
Arts. They state in the foreword that there is a continuity to be found between the
older materialisms of Lucretius, Epicurus, and Nietzsche; and the new materialisms of
for example Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Vicki Kirby, Elizabeth Grosz, and Donna
Haraway (Barrett and Bolt 2013, xi). Bolt complexifies this lineage in the introduction
to the edited volume when she explains that whereas the second-wave feminist mate-
rialism of Mary Kelly and Griselda Pollock responded to Kantian aesthetics in a man-
ner similar to the new materialisms of today, their historically materialist work should
not be seen as the same as new materialisms based on their overemphasizing of the
social (Bolt 2013, 4).
12. See also my review of Vicki Kirby’s Quantum Anthropologies published in Soma-
technics 2(2).
 SIX
The Full Force of Feminist Genealogy

I find it important to be vigilant about possible reconfirmations of

thought structures that do not allow for “sexual differing” and for en-
grossing oneself fully in pushing the immanent shifting of all grid lines
in, and dualist negativity towards, second-wave feminism to the limit. I
wish to affirm the dutiful nature of contemporary feminism, identified
here in an attempt to make feminist work from the past available in the
present and for a future. “Dutiful daughterhood” must therefore be seen
as a dynamic and transformative process of running with genealogical
movement “without an image.” This fluid movement is at work in the
classificatory canon of feminism in spite of itself and it is not goal-oriented
in that it flows. In chapter 4, I have called such fluid flows a subterranean
process that can be tapped into for the production of feminist thought,
practices, and artifacts or in(ter)ventions in today’s processes of perpetu-
al gendering, racializing, and sexualizing and I affirmed such jumping-
generations as beneficial for the unearthing of sexual differing.
It is about time to introduce “diffraction” as a contemporary tool for
capturing all this and I want to configure the move I am making here as
the “becoming-lantern-fish” of contemporary feminists, to refer once
more to Hélène Metzger’s analogy that was also mentioned in chapter 1.
Feminists need tools that can see and simultaneously produce phenome-
na; a dynamic rhizomatic pattern cannot be laid out before the analysis
takes place, because such a temporality would stop the patterning from
zigzagging. It would measure, whereas I am not interested in bringing
movement to a halt. Diffraction or “interference” is one of the ways in
which subterranean genealogical movement has been specified, although
neither Donna Haraway nor Karen Barad mentions genealogy very expli-
citly in their building of diffraction as a reading strategy. Nevertheless, its
ontology—regarding time, space, and matter—is structurally related to

95
96 Chapter 6

“transposition,” to the movement in and of genealogy as it has been

specified in this book.

DIFFRACTING THE CANON

Haraway was the first to specify the potentials of diffraction for feminist
purposes. Her seminal book on feminism and technoscience Mod-
est_Witness@Second_Millennium has added diffraction to the toolbox of
semiotics—which generally consists of “syntax,” “semantics,” and “prag-
matics”—in order to affirm how “interference patterns can make a differ-
ence in how meanings are made and lived” (Haraway 1997, 14). Taking
further advantage of the utopian dimension of her work on “cyborgs”
and “situated knowledges,” Haraway invents diffraction as a tool for a
past-present-future relationality around the theme of difference, which is
not linear or spatialized.
Working with the paintings and expository words of the artist Lynn
Randolph, Haraway affirms that “[d]iffraction is a narrative, graphic,
psychological, spiritual, and political technology for making consequen-
tial meanings” (Haraway 1997, 273). Feminists would be better off affirm-
ing diffraction instead of the spatializing act of “representation” or “re-
flection,” which lures us into reduction as well as reaffirms the phallolog-
ocentric order by distancing oneself from the materials at hand. Haraway
is wary of supposedly neutral and critical stances alike, which are both
said to assume the authority of words over things and bodies. A critical
stance can be ascribed to feminist materialism as actualized in the classifi-
cation of Sandra Harding. Diffractions leap out of the feminist futures
generated in the classification of second-wave feminist theory because
they disrupt linear and fixed causalities between words and things (al-
lowing for both things and bodies to be active in processes of significa-
tion), between theoretical schools (moving away from dualistically relat-
ed schools that only repeat one another and set up reductive readings),
and between past, present, and future.
According to Randolph, “every woman” is situated on a brink that is
constantly on the move. This image of a singular woman—itself made up
of “multiple selves” while being “one body”—travels through time in a
state of being marked by “[t]he screened memory of a powerful male
figure” (Randolph in Haraway 1997, 273). This screened memory “marks
a place where change occurs” (Haraway 1997, 273). Change is a diffrac-
tion “occur[ing] at a place at the edge of the future, before the abyss of the
unknown” (Haraway 1997, 273). The image of woman as metaphorically
material (cf. Lloyd [1984] 1993) is for once confirmed with the tool of dif-
fraction. Qualitatively shifting the feminist critique of the denigrating,
sexist gesture of naturalizing women by making sure that they are and
will remain their bodies only—bodies that have to live up to social im-
 The Full Force of Feminist Genealogy 97

ages of beauty (cf. Wolf [1990] 1991)—this body is no longer the body that
is successfully administered by patriarchy, where process installs the
powerful male figure as a mental origin that oppresses women through
sexist imagery and the woman as a physical origin that gives birth in the
paternal line and arouses men. The body incorporates images of patriar-
chy, reproduction, and male lust; of feminism, generativity, and female
desire constantly changing “with age and psychic transformations” (Har-
away 1997, 273). What we find here is a dynamic ontology of material
images—material-semiotic agents—that become-with one another and
are situated on the threshold of the future-to-come. This leads to the
question: where does the interference pattern come in? The pattern that is
so important for both Randolph and Haraway? I will look closely at the
philosophy-physics of Karen Barad in order to understand what diffrac-
tion can do.
In Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement
of Matter and Meaning, Barad is explicit about the double role of diffrac-
tion. Diffraction is “a physical phenomenon that lies at the center of some
key discussions in physics and the philosophy of physics” and “an apt
metaphor for describing the methodological approach . . . of reading
insights through one another in attending to and responding to the de-
tails and specificities of relations of difference and how they matter”
(Barad 2007, 71), thus “reworking” concepts that structure these insights
or appear in the traditions of thought from which they stem (Barad 2003,
811). At the same time, it allows for affirming and strengthening dynamic
links between schools of thought or scholars that apparently only work
toward the same (feminist) futures. These dynamic links are always al-
ready at work, even within classifications that have built fences around
certain schools of thought and boxed thinkers in different categories.
Diffraction is then the strategy with which new concepts or traditions,
new epistemologies and new futures can be engendered without them
being based on oppositional binarism. These concepts, traditions, episte-
mologies, and futures are always generated with the texts and projected
futures of the past and in the present as always already moving toward a
future (time cannot be pinpointed, because we are ever too late when we
say “now”). Futures and pasts “are not ‘there’ and never sit still,” just like
“the present is not simply here-now” (Barad 2010, 244).
The physical phenomenon of diffraction features in both classical and
quantum physical understandings, implying that the phenomenon is im-
mediately entangled with “the shortage of words” (Bernard Pullmann in
Guerlac 2006, 40; cf. Barad 2010, 252) that has characterized the turmoil in
physics on the brink of the quantum paradigm in the early twentieth
century. The current intellectual landscape that features Barad as a prom-
inent player is likewise on a cusp, searching for alternatives from (femi-
nist) new materialist positionings. Both events are structured by the de-
sire to work through-and-beyond dualism. Henri Bergson, for instance,
98 Chapter 6

was actively participating in the shift toward quantum physics in his

debate with Albert Einstein but also in his original philosophical works
and has argued:
divergences are striking between the schools, that is to say, in short,
between the groups of disciples formed around certain of the great
masters. But would one find them as clear-cut between the masters
themselves? Something here dominates the diversity of systems, some-
thing, I repeat, simple and definite like a sounding of which one feels
that it has more or less reached the bottom of a same ocean, even
though it brings each time to the surface very different materials. It is
on these materials that disciples normally work: in that is the role of
analysis. And the master, in so far as he formulates, develops, trans-
lates into abstract ideas what he brings, is already, as it were, his own
disciple. But the simple act which has set analysis in motion and which
hides behind analysis, emanates from a faculty quite different from that
of analyzing. (Bergson [1934] 2007, 168) 1
Bringing this process to the surface is what Barad seems to attempt with
the methodology that I pick up on in this chapter (cf. van der Tuin 2011a,
2013, 2014).
Barad opens her explicitly Harawayian account of diffraction by stat-
ing that “diffraction attends to the relational nature of difference” (Barad
2007, 72). Difference as a relation or rather as a relating has nothing to do
with essence (Being), but it does not shy away from “understand[ing]
diffraction patterns—as patterns of difference that make a difference—to
be the fundamental constituents that make up the world” (Barad 2007,
72). Diffraction—I want to infer—is at the very heart of Barad’s “onto-
epistemology,” which affirms that ontology changes with epistemology
(boiling down to the Kuhnianism of seeing the world as changed with
changes in paradigm-bound conceptual tools), just as much as epistemol-
ogy is obliged to attend very closely to the windings of reality (which
brings in phenomena on an ontological level as active participants in
processes of knowledge production). Therefore, I will have to continue
by asking what diffraction is in classical and quantum physics so as to
tune diffraction for the precise purposes of the problematic here at hand.
The classical understanding of diffraction pertains to “the way waves
combine when they overlap and the apparent bending and spreading of
waves that occurs when waves encounter an obstruction” (Barad 2007,
74). Noting that classical physics considers that particles (entities that are
in one location at a given time) and waves (processes that superimpose
and are in and out of phase) form two paradigms, it must be concluded
that “[f]rom the perspective of classical physics, diffraction patterns are
simply the result of differences in (the relative phase and amplitudes of)
overlapping waves” (Barad 2007, 80) and that particles do not produce
them. Quantum physics has, with the help of the famous “two-slit experi-
ment,” been developed on the research finding that under certain circum-
 The Full Force of Feminist Genealogy 99

stances particles—even single particles—can produce diffraction patterns.

This does not cancel out the possibility of particles not producing diffrac-
tions or light—classically a wave—behaving like a particle. These puz-
zling empirical results from the 1920s have constituted the “wave-particle
duality paradox” and form the backbone of quantum physics.
Without further ado, it is important to note that quantum physics can
understand classical physics, whereas classical physics has nothing to say
to quantum physics. This is because of the former’s static understandings
of “position” and “momentum.” In addition, quantum physics embraces
the key role of the physical research set-up in all this, which has comple-
mentary epistemological and ontological consequences. The traditional
correspondence theory of truth which stands at the basis of classical
physics—the researcher is positioned outside of her research object and
the instrument is but a neutral mediator that she uses in an authoritative,
goal-oriented manner—is being reworked along the lines of a “co-re-
sponding” theory that allows for researcher, instrument, and researched
to be active and entangled agents (cf., as mentioned before, Haraway
2008, Ingold 2012).
Without going into the curious and ambiguously received discussion
between Bergson and Einstein about (the philosophy of) physics, 2 it is
important to be aware of the fact that it is from the brink between classi-
cal and quantum physics that Bergson has produced his work, and that
Barad’s main interlocutor Niels Bohr plays a key role in the debate. This
debate as a whole has “forced into discussion a number of philosophical
questions (concerning causality, indeterminacy, and the limits of knowl-
edge) that Bergson had raised philosophically through the notion of du-
ration since the late 1880s” (Guerlac 2006, 38). In addition, I wish to note
that “[t]oday, if one accepts the analysis of [Isabelle] Stengers and [Ilya]
Prigogine [whose collective work comes close to the work of Barad],
Bergson’s conception of time has won out in the debate among physi-
cists” (Guerlac 2006, 199).
What a diffractive methodology boils down to is a mode of theorizing
about knowledge and knowledge production that Barad calls “performa-
tive.” Performativity entails “moving away from the familiar habits and
seductions of representationalism (reflecting on the world from outside)
to a way of understanding the world from within and as part of it”
(Barad 2007, 88). This univocal performativity is less linked to Judith
Butler’s “gender as performance” than it is to Stengers’ hyperinternalism
and Haraway’s material reconfiguration. Barad (2007, 90–91) says:
We do not uncover preexisting facts about independently existing
things as they exist frozen in time like little statues positioned in the
world. Rather, we learn about phenomena—about specific material
configurations of the world’s becoming.
100 Chapter 6

This performative mode comes close to what Bergson has suggested

when he considers life or reality as movement or flux:
Everything is obscure in the idea of creation [becoming] if we think of
things which are created and a thing which creates, as we habitually do,
as the understanding cannot help doing. (Bergson [1907] 1998, 248–49;
emphasis in original)
Barad also talks about “thingification” (Barad 2003, 812, 815) and she
pleads for scientists and (feminist) epistemologists alike to account for
the “cuts” they enact in the world’s becoming. Barad’s performance aims
at allowing for representationalism and thingification as shifting. Both
originate from unidirectional epistemologies and Barad positions perfor-
mativity before or underneath that epistemology and its effects have ac-
tualized. It is in this virtual realm carrying classifixation that theory, prac-
tice, and artifact are inseparable and that the bonds between description,
prescription, and vision are simply in place.
Barad’s posthumanist performativity wishes to “call . . . into question
the givenness of the differential categories of ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman,’
examining the practices through which these differential boundaries are
stabilized and destabilized” (Barad 2003, 808). Diffraction is a tool that
makes explicit the destabilization of the disembodied and disembedded
subject position of the scientist and critical student of science alike. Her
posthumanism is non-anthropocentric as the blurred human subject af-
fects its not-so-central role in knowledge production. Moving away from
(the effects of) the distancing act of “reflection,” diffraction acts in accor-
dance with the rule that “[o]ptical instruments are subject-shifters” (Har-
away [1992] 2004, 64). Haraway advances Trinh T. Minh-ha’s work on
“inappropriate/d otherness.” Working with Minh-ha allows Haraway to
argue that diffraction’s concept of difference does not follow the pejora-
tive line. In a situation of subject-shifting, a dialectic of One and Other
cannot be upheld. The visionary potential of diffraction makes “a map-
ping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction” (Har-
away [1992] 2004, 70). These mappings are not rationally made, because
the productivity of diffraction comes from elsewhere:
to be an “inappropriate/d other” means to be in critical, deconstructive
relationality, in a diffracting rather than reflecting (ratio)nality—as the
means of making potent connection that exceeds domination. To be
inappropriate/d is not to fit in the taxon, to be dislocated from the
available maps specifying kinds of actors and kinds of narratives, not
to be originally fixed by difference. To be inappropriate/d is to be nei-
ther modern nor postmodern, but to insist on the amodern. (Haraway
[1992] 2004, 69-70; emphasis in original)
Just like Randolph’s every woman, standing at the edge of the future,
before the abyss of the unknown, Haraway takes advantage of the fact
that what is inappropriate/d remains generative. In spite of Haraway’s
 The Full Force of Feminist Genealogy 101

irritation with Gilles Deleuze I commented on earlier in this book, we

may want to gloss via Deleuze ([1968] 1994, 56; emphasis in original) that
Haraway wants “[d]ifference [to] be shown differing.” Indeed, diffraction
enables showing difference differing in the material-semiotically entan-
gled reality of the living present. 3

GENERATION/KNOWLEDGE

I wish to take advantage of the full force of diffraction, that is, in genera-
tional terms, of the ways in which scholarly (or political or artistic) excess
has been captured by the methodology or force constituting “disidentifi-
cation” (Butler 1993, Fuss 1995, Muñoz 1999, and Henry 2004). 4 Astrid
Henry in particular has used the tool of disidentification in order to high-
light third-wave feminist relatings with second-wave feminism. This spe-
cific relating involves a negation (“This is not my feminism!”) that is
preceded or carried by an affirmation (“So this is what second-wave
feminism looks like. . . . ”). In other words, the negative gesture in dis-
identification is always already driven by a sometimes-disturbing or at-
least-surprising affirmation. In the words of Deleuze: “Negation results
from affirmation” (Deleuze [1968] 1994, 55). This affirmation can have
wonderfully counterintuitive effects that disrupt (diffract) all attempts at
the Cartesian cutting of spatiotemporally linear gridlines in the feminist
archive and current-day workings with it. This counterintuitive potential
of disidentification is perhaps why José Esteban Muñoz is explicit about
disidentification working “within and outside the dominant public sphere
simultaneously” (Muñoz 1999, 5; emphasis added).
Whereas the previous chapters dealt mainly with epistemology as an
exemplary arena of classifixation and cartography, this one will continue
by examining the academic feminist debate about methodology. How
should one probe into ways of doing feminist materialist work that impli-
citly or explicitly afford the diffractive method and run with generativ-
ity? How is sexual difference—as long as it allows for immanent sexual
differing—a feminist future worth fighting for today?
Continuing to zoom in on feminist new materialisms, I nevertheless
assume that there will never be one correct feminist epistemology gener-
ating one correct feminist methodology for the interdisciplinary field of
women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Feminist new materialisms are a
feminist onto-epistemology moving through-and-beyond feminist post-
modernisms and warding off neo-determinisms in academia (and society
at large). However, the onto-epistemology is particularly valuable for
academia and feminist political and artistic projects in the twenty-first
century owing to its dutiful, an-Oedipal, and noncompetitive stance vis-
à-vis the feminist past. If feminist new materialisms are a univocal and
visionary third-wave feminism, the relation they constitute between epis-
102 Chapter 6

temology, methodology, and method is not a one-way track. Third-wave

feminist materialist work does not stand in a hierarchical relationship
with methodology and method as it is an event of “generation/knowl-
edge.” Following process-philosophies of becoming, third-wave feminist
theory approaches any scholarly arrangement when it is actualizing in-
stead of as rationally intuited or socially constructed. Every end result
(genus) is always already a new beginning (genesthai).
As said, I do not see third-wave feminist materialism as accepting the
recurrent assumption that “a methodology works out the implications of
a specific epistemology for how to implement a method” (Sprague 2005,
5). 5 Assuming such transitivity leads to conceptualizing epistemology on
the most theoretical level and method on the most practical. Methodolo-
gy gets assigned the special quality of coupling theory with practice. 6 All
of this remains premised on a predetermined hierarchical relation rather
than on the entangled event of doing academic, action, or artistic research
(or of setting up or revising a women’s studies curriculum, as Wendy
Brown [1997] has convincingly taught us). Assuming transitivity by-
passes the underdetermination of theory by evidence, as famously for-
mulated by Willard Van Orman Quine in the early 1950s. Feminists as
well as other scholars are vulnerable to naïve realism or totalization when
bypassing underdetermination. But underdetermination does not trans-
late into relativism. I want to infer that evidence—agential matter, mate-
rials, and materiality, in this book—plays a key role in unsettling hier-
archies. 7 In sum, feminist discussions of the epistemology-methodology-
method triad are in need of complexification (cf. Fonow and Cook 2005,
2213–214).
Sandra Harding’s Feminism and Methodology—while communicating
that epistemology, methodology, and method all influence each other—
gives three separate definitions which I will use here to summarize the
discussions that feminist scholars have been having so far on the topic of
epistemology, methodology, method, and (sometimes) evidence or mat-
ter. Method is argued to consist of “techniques for gathering evidence,”
methodology is “a theory and analysis of how research should proceed,”
and epistemology concerns “issues about an adequate theory of knowl-
edge or justificatory strategy” (Harding 1987, 2). Hinting at a new kind of
feminist materialism, Marjorie Pryse (2000), and Mary Margaret Fonow
and Judith A. Cook begin by saying that disciplines affect the ways in
which a method is practiced and that there is an “interplay between
theory as defining one’s research and theory being defined by one’s re-
search” (Fonow and Cook 2005, 2214). The latter observation is in line
with feminist new materialisms’ univocity according to which research-
ing and (epistemic) theorizing are co-evolutionary with evidence. Evi-
dence is not so easily gathered as it has to be co-responded with.
N. Katherine Hayles has introduced the term “feedback loop” for the
intra-action just highlighted. Hayles’s feedback loop should not be con-
 The Full Force of Feminist Genealogy 103

fused with the positivist feedback loop of answers leading to new re-
search questions, then leading to better answers, and so on. The latter is a
progress narrative that has been questioned by anti-epistemologists as
well as by those doing epistemology differently. Hayles defines her own
feedback loop and its place in scholarship as follows:
Conceptual fields evolve similarly to material culture, in part because
concept and artifact engage each other in continuous feedback loops.
An artifact materially expresses the concept it embodies, but the pro-
cess of its construction is far from passive. (Hayles 1999, 15; cf. Nelson
1993, 144)
Feedback mechanisms exist between concept/theory and artifact, but also
between matter and discourse (Hayles 1999, 195) and between researched
and researcher (Hayles 1999, 91). Hayles’s onto-epistemological stance is
useful for thinking through the relation between epistemology, metho-
dology, method, and matter/evidence in the context of third-wave feminist
materialism.
New materialisms suggest that the varied and diversely valued stages
of research—idealtypes in research protocols—are entangled. They deal
with the event of research by emphasizing the messy generation of
knowledge and do not continue to rely upon the classical sexual differen-
tiation between the origin of knowledge and a distinguishable piece of
scholarship that is the result of a linear process of either Subject-objectify-
ing-matter or muted-subjects-speaking-up. Traces of a focus on the event
of research can be found throughout the history of academic feminism. It
has been claimed, for instance, that feminist researchers should be
“‘interested in generating concepts in vivo, in the field itself’ rather than
using ‘predefined concepts’” (Shulamit Reinharz in Gorelick 1991, 462).
The generative aspect of such claims contrasts with instances of reinforc-
ing or simply overlooking the opposition between the researcher and the
researched, even in feminist standpoint theory (Ikonen and Ojala 2007).
Reinforcing the opposition allows for elitism to re-enter feminist episte-
mology and results in another form of Truth-producing feminist scholar-
ship. Whereas we know that elitism is perverse and never clear-cut (Kir-
by 1987), this type of scholarship has been criticized by feminist scholars
in early feminist methodological musings. The critique has been dualist
and has had the distorting effect of affirming relativism by contending
that the production of Truth is impeded and that we only have access to
multiple truths, silencing the researched even further in a subjectivist
move.
Feminist new materialisms acknowledge the generation of knowl-
edge, researcher and researched, instruments, environments, and matter/
evidence by focusing on their capacities to be reconfigured and to recon-
figure. A deterministic and foundationalist stance is not new materialist
and feminist new materialisms do not resemble neo-empiricism’s unreal
104 Chapter 6

opposite of taking for granted the free-floating of objects, plural or frac-

tured subjects, and the contingency of knowledge claims from feminist
postmodernism. Feminist new materialisms analyze knowledge in the
making—they embrace an onto-epistemology of becoming—although
they keep on stressing that some knowledges, knowing subjects, objects
of research, instruments, material pieces of evidence are more prone to
being constituted as knowledges, subjects, objects, instruments, pieces of
evidence than others. Feminist new materialisms are confident about the
possibility of breaking through this power-laden pattern.
While some subjects have become more prone to being the researched
than the researchers (on the basis of sexism, elitism, classism, heterosex-
ism, and racism/ethnocentrism), we should not reconfirm such asymmet-
rical power relations. This pertains to the common phenomenon of “stud-
ying down” (Sprague 2005, 11) in a context where gender research is—to
a certain extent—unmarked. Stressing the above histories of determina-
tion as important constraints makes feminist new materialisms differ
from the Received View according to which science is fully Objective—
fully determined and as such fully unmarked—but also from second-
wave feminist reflections according to which reflexivity identifies the
researcher’s biases allegedly prior to the point of affecting the research.
The latter would be another form of full determination, but the assump-
tion here is that scholarship is fully marked until the point of either the
stable standpoint or relativist particularism. What could be called the
unreal opposite of “studying up” (Harding and Norberg 2005, 2011), that
is, talking from the point of view of women or Others has been identified
as contradictory and circular: “on the one hand, the feminist standpoint is
presented as a criterion for better knowledge, on the other hand, stand-
points have to be developed with the help of better knowledge” (Prins
1997, 81; emphasis in original).
Cutting across the practice of studying down and the idealization of
studying up, Hayles has written that “[o]ne implication of letting go of
causality is that systems always behave as they should, which is to say,
they always operate in accord with their structures, whatever those may
be” (Hayles 1999, 139). Hayles’s view is not a postmodern relativism. She
reworks the concept of causality assumed in the two fully fixed sexually
hierarchical approaches alike: androcentric research and (postmodern)
feminist standpoint theory. Hayles works on sexual difference on a fun-
damental level and wants to move away from origin and goal, from
determinism, yet she equally shies away from indeterminacy. Even in a
context that is blatantly patriarchal, racist, normatively heterosexual, and
so on, an assemblage like a research project can leap into the future. New
materialists are as attentive to such leaps as they are to the power-laden-
ness of where and when they occur.
Acknowledging the event of knowledge production, the researcher is
firmly situated within the research setting and her generative impact, as
 The Full Force of Feminist Genealogy 105

well as the generative impact of other transposing agents involved, is

taken into account. The researcher is not put on center stage according to
a positivism or its dual opposite, nor do new materialists purify the re-
search setting in such a way that the possible effects of the researcher on
the researched (and vice versa) and of the technical/conceptual instru-
ments on researcher and researched (and vice versa) are left unstudied
and remain under-theorized. Academic feminism has always been about
the transformative potential of feminist research—transforming subject(s),
object(s), and androcentric disciplinarity through research. By embracing
the co-constitutive effects of researcher, researched, instruments, setting,
and matter/evidence, one’s approach becomes univocal.
The genesthai of feminist knowledge specifies this intra-active process
and indicates the double move of zooming in on generating knowledge
as well as on the now-generative effects of the feminist knowledge gener-
ated. Affirming histories of determination (the generated) does not allow
for sexism, elitism, classism, and racism/ethnocentrism to go unmen-
tioned (cf. Sullivan 2012, 305). By focusing on the generative at the same
time, feminist new materialists do not get stuck in second-wave feminist
approaches of studying up, which unintentionally reaffirm ways of stud-
ying down. What are the contours of such generation/knowledge? It is
important to underline material evidence once more, because feminist
new materialisms traverse “the view that knowledge is socially con-
structed and constrained by evidence” (Nelson 1993, 129; emphasis in
original).

THE OTHER SPATIOTEMPORAL LOCATION (OF HARAWAY)

Feminist new materialisms want to break through art, politics, and epis-
temologies of recognition. In relation to art and politics, their most basic
claim is that aesthetics and politics of recognition are based on a recog-
nized “lack” and result in a call for inclusion. These projects will forever
fail, because they do not change any of the existing parameters. Hence,
Elizabeth Grosz has claimed that “[t]he problem is not how to give wom-
en more adequate recognition (who is it that women require recognition
from?), more rights, or more of a voice, but how to enable more action,
more making and doing, more difference” (Grosz 2011, 73; cf. Thiele
2014). The plea is for breaking away from canonized modernist and post-
modernist feminisms, because neither of them will truly revolutionize
sexual difference. Both are identity political and caught in the trap of the
studying-up-or-down dialectics. Feminist new materialisms want to free
academic, political, and artistic thought-practices from sexualized, racial-
ized, and otherwise naturalizing humanisms/anthropocentrisms. Indeed,
the canonical Cartesian cogito and Kantian representationalism have to be
shifted in order for new materialisms to be able finally to approach “what
106 Chapter 6

life is such that it yields signification” (Colebrook 2004b, 286; emphasis in

original). Only when this “point of view” (Haraway 1994) is put to work,
a truly inclusive notion of sexual difference comes within reach. This
does not mean, however, that such a definition has not also popped up in
the feminist archive and continues to do so. Claire Colebrook has stated
that
[i]f man is that matter who, through life, can give himself form, turn
back, and then recognize himself as the very eminence of life, woman is
a becoming who does not go through time to differ from herself but
remains without a relation. . . . In contrast with man, “woman” is a
becoming that is not the becoming of a subject prior to its relations, nor
is it a becoming toward realization. (Colebrook 2008, 81; emphasis in
original)
Feminism is therefore an exemplary project for changing the parameters
of recognition that have lured so many Western scholars into falsely op-
posing dogmatic thought.
Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” holds a special relationship to pol-
itics and epistemologies of recognition. 8 The influential article follows
two tracks. The first part conforms to an epistemology of recognition by
writing a response to Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism. In the
second part, an alternative is proposed and Haraway does not need the
classification brought to the fore in The Science Question for its composi-
tion. It is with/in the cracking of classification that a material-semiotic
onto-epistemology of naturecultures is proposed and this qualitative
shifting is the feminist future performed by the article itself. Whereas
“Situated Knowledges” is the one article that performs a feminist future
that we find feminist epistemology immersed in nowadays, there is no
progress narrative to be found in the article; I would like to propose that
the feminist future of “Situated Knowledges” comes into being with the
shifting of Harding as much as with the new materialisms. The gesture of
disidentifying with the known feminist epistemic schools encompasses
both continuity—the generated; histories of determination—and
change—the generative. Following Grosz, I am tempted to understand
the material turn in feminist theory as a
leap into the future without adequate preparation in the present,
through becoming, a movement of becoming-more and becoming-oth-
er, which involves the orientation to the creation of the new, to an
unknown future, what is no longer recognizable in terms of the
present. (Grosz 2010, 49)
As mentioned, the second part of “Situated Knowledges” no longer re-
flects upon the stabilized epistemic strands of second-wave feminist theo-
ry. It sets the canon in motion up until the point of feminist epistemology
being unrecognizable in its well-established terms. Here, making the idea
of a material turn as being an intended or unintended “rewriting” more
 The Full Force of Feminist Genealogy 107

precise, we do not find something (un)timely—feminist new material-

isms—in an excessive patriarchal or positivist/linguisticist past.
The work of Haraway, as it is active today, directs us to the question
of how to conceptualize and practice a “freedom (from concrete useful-
ness, from timeliness)” (Grosz 2010, 51). “Situated Knowledges” has also
been active as an instance of feminist standpoint theory, which could
only happen on the basis of second-wave feminist epistemology canons.
The untimely, on the other hand, has “no given space, no given time”
(Barad 2010, 258) and implies “direct[ing] itself to change, to changing
itself as much as changing the world” (Grosz 2010, 49). A careful study of
“Situated Knowledges” can prepare for an answer to the questions of
how to methodologically and conceptually leap into the future (cf. Hek-
man 2010b, 6). This is a special situation, because more often than not, the
feminist present is not the feminist future of the feminist past, whether
epistemologically speaking or when it comes to the sociocultural or polit-
ical reality of men, and women, and Others. Progressive linearity is often
assumed, but the space-time manifold hardly actualizes as such. So we
need to be careful in our methodological musings and should not rush to
conclusions.
Bypassing Harding’s classifixation and its excessive opening-ups, the
second part of “Situated Knowledges” proceeds by rethinking “vision”
instead of objectivity. Haraway makes a second empiricist move here (in
Latourian terms), starting from the observation that all vision is embod-
ied, which means that we can “reclaim the sensory system that has been
used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze
from nowhere” (Haraway 1988, 581). This gaze from nowhere is of course
the God-trick that underlies positivist science, feminist “successor sci-
ence,” and feminist postmodernism. Haraway’s move is Whiteheadian,
as Haraway wants to research what all these epistemic strands have had
to assume in order to work: these being “primate color and stereoscopic
vision” (Haraway 1988, 582). Such a vision demonstrates in and of itself
“the particularity and embodiment of all vision” (Haraway 1988, 582).
Haraway goes on attesting to the consequential potential of affirming all
vision by feminists: from dog’s vision, to the vision of the modest wit-
ness, to high-tech vision, to the second-wave feminist vision from below.
A truly inclusive and therefore unrecognizable sexual differing comes
within view.
It is significant that Haraway prepares for all mentioned visions to be
connected via their shared methodology of particularity and embodi-
ment—feminists no longer need to set up dualist debates contra modest
witnesses and technocratization—while feminists are still able to opt for
alliances with only those that explicitly acknowledge situatedness.
Whereas some imply “a bad visual system” and actualize “a bad strategy
of positioning” (Haraway 1988, 585), others have a theory of their own
embeddedness and embodiment. Innocent positionings—whether pro-
108 Chapter 6

claiming a powerful Subject or disempowered subjects—are unworthy of

feminist alliance because they are based on an ontology of unproblematic
Being. Here feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory qualita-
tively shift, yet without needing opposition because even the known ac-
tualizations of these positionings do not exhaust what they can virtually
do. Because Being is conceptualized as not flexible enough for seeing
from somewhere else “without being accountable for that movement”
(Haraway 1988, 585), feminist postmodernism is qualitatively shifted as
nothing but an actualization as well. Haraway states that “[w]e are not
immediately present to ourselves” (Haraway 1988, 585). All known sec-
ond-wave feminist epistemologies (and their Master Theories) are imma-
nently generative, and French and Australian feminist takes on sexual
difference come within reach here too.
By affirming and traversing the many canonized epistemic dualisms,
Haraway generates the following insight:
Feminist accountability requires a knowledge tuned to reasonance, not
to dichotomy. . . . Feminist embodiment, then, is not about fixed loca-
tion in a reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in fields,
inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-
semiotic fields of meaning. (Haraway 1988, 588)
Confirming material-semiotic fields of meaning as our onto-epistemolog-
ical vantage point implies that subjects, objects, and technologies of all
kinds are material-semiotic. Whether language or bodies are our research
objects and in whatever way we conceptualize subjects or objects of re-
search: all involve “material-semiotic actors” in “material-semiotic gener-
ative nodes” (Haraway 1988, 595). The minute we confirm text/body/
subject/object, we are already affirming an eventful, material-discursive,
relational entity; atomist metaphysics is fundamentally untenable as
there is always already more trouble to it.
Labeling Haraway’s method as second-empiricist or Whiteheadian
now becomes tense (cf. Sullivan 2012, 307–8). Such boxes are material-
semiotic actors too; they are constantly shifting from within and by en-
gaging them in onto-epistemology. Haraway’s move can be understood
following jumping generations. On a superficial level, can the new con-
cept of the material-semiotic be understood as a rewriting of Harding’s
famous schema of feminist epistemologies? After all, the article takes off
as a review of that schema. However, “Harding” is no longer any kind of
fixed yardstick in the second half of the article, which is not an antagonis-
tic response to that text either. What happens here is a series of jumps
between Haraway and her dog, her humanities colleague, popular sci-
ence, primatology and technoscience, the archive of feminist epistemolo-
gies, and so on. The future of second-wave feminist epistemology is de-
termined in such jumps too. This future is not intrinsic to the work of
Harding and her second-wave feminist colleagues by negation as it is not
 The Full Force of Feminist Genealogy 109

an essence that can be grasped from a distance. The jumping-generation

between Haraway’s material-semioticity and the feminist new materialist
attempts at working in less linguisticist ways drags the former out of the
predetermined schema of Harding’s feminist epistemologies of recogni-
tion and drags the latter into a relation of continuity and change accord-
ing to which the material-semiotic is always already in The Science Ques-
tion too. This is the event in onto-epistemological philosophies of becom-
ing.
Trying to understand not “Haraway” but feminist new materialisms
along these lines, I must conclude that this work capitalizes on the poten-
tialities of second-wave feminist epistemology that are only determined
in jumping-generations with the production of today’s third-wave femi-
nists (regardless of their age, for example, their year of birth). The poten-
tialities of the latter are equally determined just there and then. Third-
wave feminism is not a referential term, but it is a conceptual practice.
When the futures of second-wave feminism can be embraced for being
contemporary feminism’s virtual past, I feel invited to treat these futures
in a manner that does not overcode them by simply applying what we
now think they thought of as equality, difference, and deconstructive
feminisms, slavishly following the way in which second-wave feminism
has been classified. Equality feminism does not necessarily lead to the
“equal-to-whom?” question, because opening-ups are inherent to the
concept. The radical edge of including women to a masculinized sphere
is the “stir” that is experienced when these women start to act according-
ly. The same goes for difference feminism’s alleged essentialism and de-
constructive feminism’s supposed relativization. All essences are gross
generalizations and the minute the essence “women” is picked up—by a
white or a black, a straight or a lesbian, a bourgeois or lower-class wom-
an, or a trans person alike—there is something that seems not quite right.
And when an essence is broken down until the point of its evaporation, it
is easy to bend it back to the truthworthiness of the maligned category on
the basis of a commonality that cannot be brushed under the carpet so
easily. All in all, new materialisms invite us to study a “pure event”
(Patton 2000, 28), which implies a facing with the constraining (actual-
ized) and enabling (virtual) material-discursivities (the canon and its cra-
quelure) of knowledge production, policy strategies, and artistic works in
their entanglement. Contemporary feminists are asked to consider these
material-discursivities as a past that is not theirs or ours, but that is sin-
gular; a past that is not concrete, but abstract precisely in its concreteness;
a past that is not fixed in time and space, but that is a space-time mani-
fold that is in and of itself extraordinary (cf. Kirby 2011b).
In onto-epistemological terms, feminist new materialists aim then at
theorizing all recognition-based representationalisms as always already
organized according to an interference pattern of transposing agents.
This is done in order not to repeat the humanist/anthropocentric canoni-
110 Chapter 6

cal gesture of matter-made-passive and discourse-as-fully-binding. The

goal is to exchange definitions founded on (un)acknowledged recogni-
tion for definitions that value subjects, objects, instruments, and environ-
ments as material-semiotic actors, as a thousand tiny subjects, objects,
and relatings, all generating evidence and being surprised by that materi-
al in return.
All of this is to say that generation/knowledge is an ongoing process
of instances of Cartesian and agential cutting. Even anthologized insights
of the past produce surprises today. But this is not a process free(d) from
stereotypes, stifled insights of past and present continue to have an im-
pact too. The feminist new materialist researcher actualizes an inclusive
future in keeping with the particular histories of determination that have
become stuck to certain bodies, as Sara Ahmed (2004, 92) formulates the
point. Generation/knowledge as the new materialist version of Foucaul-
dian power/knowledge (or body/knowledge) conceptualizes text and
matter as generated and—in order not to be easily lured back into objec-
tifying matter or classifying thought—simultaneously as generative in
and of itself. New materialist scholars enact and perceive knowledge
production as working with this kind of agential matter (text, visuals,
tangibles). A social-constructivist that overlooks the matter of, for instance,
books as physical objects or bodies as resistant to being molded accord-
ing to some predetermined signification, is as deterministic and reductive
as the positivist workings on matter. In the case of the book (Hayles 2002,
Brillenburg Wurth et al. 2013), or the artwork (Bolt 2004, Lehmann 2012),
or the digit (Van den Boomen et al. 2009, Hayles 2012), one would only
look at what “it” represents without looking at its effects as a material
thing or incorporating the study of the specificities of the so-called “me-
dium” (Buikema 2006). These epistemologies do not work out that way,
because—as I have heard Rosi Braidotti say many times in lectures on
feminism and psychoanalysis—they do not drive, but are driven.

FUTURE TURNINGS TO FEMINIST GENEALOGY

In an attempt to flesh out the above methodological musings, I wish to

perform an affirmative close-reading of two feminists of our collective
virtual past by treating them as undisturbed by their classification in two
different traditions of feminist/lesbian politics. 9 Following the diffractive
procedure I have been lured into the close-reading in question many
times as I was teaching one of the two texts (or both). What generations of
sexual differing might come to the fore from my work and how do these
conceptualizations shed light on sexual difference as a generated struc-
ture whose perpetual gendering, racializing, and sexualizing still plagues
so many women, men, and Others and whose opening-ups generate con-
stant surprises? 10 How can this possibly be “feminist new materialist?”
 The Full Force of Feminist Genealogy 111

Gayle Rubin and Adrienne Rich are among the founding mothers of
the theory of patriarchy. The former’s “The Traffic in Women: Notes on
the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” from 1975, discusses the parameters of
patriarchy by employing Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the exchange of
women in the feminist cause. In so doing, she construes an early feminist
theory of patriarchy and of the patriarchal interest in securing Oedipal
relations. Rubin claims:
If it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give
and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relation-
ship rather than a partner to it. . . . The relations of such a system are
such that women are in no position to realize the benefits of their own
circulation. As long as the relations specify that men exchange women,
it is men who are beneficiaries of the product of such exchanges. (Ru-
bin 1975, 174)
As Rubin makes clear, feminist scrutiny exposes the circulation of wom-
en through the hands of men as patriarchal and unbeneficial for women.
Women are, as it were, fenced in by the kinship system; they have no
affirmative relations to other women, only competitive and conflict-based
ones. And since they only exist within the family structure, they exist
according to their relations with older men (fathers), men of their own
age (husbands), or younger men (sons). In performing this analysis, Ru-
bin theorizes an important second-wave feminist insight: patriarchy—or
“the sex/gender system,” as she calls it—only allows for women to be
defined in relation to men and as such there can only exist discontinuities
between women. Rubin has shown that it is this form of social organiza-
tion structured by the exchange of women (patriarchy) that engenders
discontinuity or what throughout this book I have called negation or
oppositional dualism. In addition to laying bare the foundations of the
negative aspect of conventional generationality, Rubin also shows that
generationality in such a constellation must be referential. In other
words, the relations according to which women get to be placed in the
social and familial sphere are always already determined, that is, the
situation in which women find themselves is grossly overcoded.
Subterraneously acting upon Rubin’s conclusions and explicitly quot-
ing Lévi-Strauss (see Rich 1986, 217), hence diffracting the canon, Rich
moves beyond the analysis of patriarchy to create a program for femi-
nism. To smash patriarchy, we need to work on continuities between
women. In Of Woman Born, Rich shows how a non-dualist and affirma-
tive conceptualization of generationality can be built. In patriarchy, the
mother-daughter relationship has become a relationship of mutual exclu-
sion despite the empirical fact that each mother is a daughter too and
each daughter may become a mother. This is true in a real as well as
figurative sense: all women are mother and daughter alike, because
women act-to-type in relating to other women. “Mothers” and “daugh-
112 Chapter 6

ters” are also concepts, that is, they extend beyond empirical reference. In
addition, mutual exclusion entails a hierarchical order according to
which mothers are the equivalent of the “eternal giver” and of the nega-
tive, and daughters are the equivalent of the “free spirit” and of the
positive. These equations are the effect of patriarchy since “patriarchal
attitudes have encouraged us to split, to polarize, these images, and to
project all our unwanted feelings of guilt, anger, shame, power, freedom,
onto the ‘other’ woman” (Rich 1976, 253). This empirical and conceptual
pattern should be subverted because “any radical vision of sisterhood
demands that we reintegrate them” (Rich 1976, 253). Her conclusion is
that there might have been the “deepest mutuality” between mother and
daughter if patriarchy had not intervened and feminism should aspire to
create this mutuality (a “lesbian continuum”). Rich’s work allows us criti-
cize both the referentiality and the negativity of the patriarchal conceptu-
alization of generation.
Rich’s standpoint—like Rubin’s early one in “The Traffic in Wom-
en”—is that continuity between women will have to be restored and that
this can be characterized as a feminism that is affirmative of sexual differ-
ence. Such feminism is now considered to be outdated (and, in fact, typi-
cally French) if we look to the well-known classifications of second-wave
feminism. Considering this feminism carefully allows me to show how it
not only provides a diagnosis of Oedipal (feminist) generationality—as
presented above—but also how it presents an alternative conceptualization
of generationality as well as an alternative methodology for (transnational)
feminism. In addition, Rich has been able to embrace sexual difference in
all of its differing complexity in a text such as the 1981 “Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (cf. Cole and Cate 2008).
Apart from critiquing referentiality and negativity, Rich critiques se-
quential negation and progress narrative—the characteristics of a classifi-
catory methodology—as she transposes the question of women,
(hetero)sexuality and the possibility of relating to an affirmative “contin-
uum.” The following statement encompasses all of this:
Without the unacclaimed research and scholarship of “childless” wom-
en, without Charlotte Brontë (who died in her first pregnancy), Marga-
ret Fuller (whose major work was done before her child was born),
without George Eliot, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rosset-
ti, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir—we would all today be suffer-
ing from spiritual malnutrition as women. (Rich 1976, 251–52)
Rich affirms the importance of these writers’ work, so as to reinstall conti-
nuity between women. This is a conceptualization of a bond and genera-
tionality that shifts the patriarchal concept and practice reviewed above.
The conceptualization is also in contrast to the post-feminist habit of
critiquing women who have come before us, or are among us, and as a
consequence repeat the patriarchal concept of Oedipal generationality.
 The Full Force of Feminist Genealogy 113

Rich wishes to think in a female line—to “think back through our moth-
ers” (Woolf [1929] 2001, 65)—which is not necessarily teleological. This
allows her to conceptualize a feminist generationality that is affirmative
instead of negative. In addition, by bringing in cartography as a continu-
ous way of relating, feminism can also shift the referentiality of the nega-
tive concept of generation: cartographically or diagrammatically grouping
feminists permits us to abandon generations as predetermined age
groups. It yields the constitution of links between feminists on the basis
of what their work does or allows us to do. The work is no longer seen as
merely referential or treated in a representationalist manner; allowing for
taking into consideration what the work does permits us to move beyond
where the work comes from, and what it, consequentially, is assumed to
do or even be. This is not an identity-political move as it is based in a
differing concept that needs not be preceded by “sexual.” 11
Cutting across age groups, a feminism of sexual difference—con-
strained by a focus on women—is indeterminate in its outcomes. I might
produce a text or work with a text by one of my foremothers, give a
lecture or analyze a lecture of one of my own teachers in 2014 that does
what a second-wave feminist text, analysis, or lecture was supposed to
do in the 1970s. A second-wave feminist claim might be third-wave in
that it does not work with sequential negation or produce progress narra-
tive. And so on. Allowing for this through moving away from a classifica-
tory logic, I want to claim that a generationality is constructed that is
generative of feminist theories, methodologies, and insights and as not
always already generated in a referential and dualist sense; that is, buy-
ing into the parameters set by patriarchy. It is this conceptualization of
generationality that might structure third-wave feminist theory. It is im-
portant to emphasize that the concept gets constructed when two genera-
tions of feminists work together in disidentificatory or diffractive spirit.
Feminist new materialisms leap into the future by picking up on
good-old scholars, themes, and objects of research—Rubin, Rich, patriar-
chy, female lines, bodies—yet leap into the future with them toward terri-
torities of sexual differing that are as yet unknown. With Noela Davis I
wish to make clear that “[d]ifference is not a joining of two separate
categories, but instead implies differentiation within one system, where
the differentiated parts are entangled such that they cannot be distinctly
and separately identified” (Davis 2009, 76). In spite of all our attempts at
doing so in second-wave feminist epistemology, we will never be able to
classifixate the tumultuous windings of one differing system.

NOTES

1. Bergson talks about the faculty of “intuition” here. A discussion of his intuitive
method lies beyond the scope of this chapter.
114 Chapter 6

2. Many Bergson scholars have affirmed that Einstein remains within the classical
understanding of linear time and causal determinacy. See, for example, Murphy 1999,
70 and Guerlac 2006, 40 n. 83. A found-footage film about the debate between Bergson
and Einstein has been made by Jimena Canales and can he found here:
www.fas.harvard.edu/~hsdept/bios/docs/canales_einstein_bergson.mov (last ac-
cessed: December 17, 2012). A recent text on the matter is Lambert forthcoming.
3. “Living present” is a Deleuzian concept too. See Deleuze [1968] 1994, 70–1. The
concept is key to the work of the Canadian feminist new materialist Rachel Loewen
Walker; see, for example, Walker 2014.
4. I have experimented with diffraction as “posthuman interpellation” in van der
Tuin 2014. This conceptualization immediately jumped on the generative nature of a
diffraction and was less explicit about the doubleness of generation (generational
classes and generativity, as discussed in chapter 4).
5. Cf. Harding 1987, 2; Fonow and Cook 1991, 1; Ramazanoglu and Holland 2002,
11; Naples 2003, 1; Lykke 2005, 243; Hawkesworth 2006, 4.
6. Contrary to the common acceptance of this relation, second-wave feminist
methodologists have explicitly tried to cut across the dichotomies fundamental/basic
vs. applied research, discipline vs. field of studies, and disciplinarity vs. multi- and
interdisciplinarity.
7. To assume an interrelationship between methodology and method (K.E. King
1994) does not affect the aforementioned terms, because in both cases (epistemology
and) methodology and method are considered as primordially distinguishable, that is
to say, inherently differentiated, relativization notwithstanding.
8. See, for a reading that differs from mine, Hinton 2014. Peta Hinton did write her
piece as a feminist new materialism though, which is why the term is consistently
written in the plural in this book.
9. Cf. Janet Halley’s work on Catharine A. MacKinnon (mentioned in chapter 2)
and also Clare Hemmings’s treatment of Monique Wittig in chapter 5 of Why Stories
Matter (see Introduction). Omotayo Oloruntoba-Oju and Taiwo Oloruntoba-Oju (2013,
7) position Wittig among feminist new materialists. I have worked on Chantal Chawaf
myself (van der Tuin 2014).
10. See also van der Tuin 2009, where I deal explicitly with exemplary teaching
situations.
11. It is precisely in this sense that C.L. Cole and Shannon C.L. Cate (2008, 283-85)
refer to the productivity of Susan Stryker’s conceptualization of “trans” as transversal
rather than additive, as in “LGBT” (see for instance Stryker’s early essay “My Words
to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender
Rage” referenced in the introduction to this book).
 Conclusion
Advancing Generative Feminism

Successful women’s, gender, and sexuality studies programs today fol-

low the economically determinist rules set by the corporatized university;
and emancipation and diversity policies and artistic interventions bid for
restrictive government monies. Neo-liberal, advanced capitalist logics
have been very good at swallowing feminism. And feminists have com-
plied with these logics up to the self-proclamation of the post-feminist
era. Feminists have of course also been critical about their own complicity
with the mainstream, claiming that a self-affirmed post-feminism is a
contradiction in terms and cannot creatively rework sexual Difference.
How can being after-and-against a certain expression of feminism be
made into the radical stance of DIY youth? Isn’t this post-feminist argu-
ment about a feminism that is no longer functioning-for but rather work-
ing-against a particular cause, an oversimplified notation that, on a base
level, implies sexism, racism, heteronormativity, and transphobia, but
most of all ageism? In addition to asking “where is feminism today?” I
prefer to ask the more pressing question of “how to make feminism’s
time now?”
I have argued that for feminism to be all around us, we need to ward
off all instantiations of circular reasoning. 1 In this book, classificatory
logic must pay the price for feminism’s reclamation. Based on an analysis
of its structuring device of negativity, I have argued the classifications of
feminism—liberal, Marxist/socialist, radical, black, and lesbian; postcolo-
nial, queer, and trans; equality, difference, and deconstruction; empiri-
cism, the standpoint, and postmodern feminism—cannot be sustained.
But arguing that we are now beyond (feminist) classification would imply
another circularity based in negation. Every negation puts the negated on
a pedestal and implies a progress narrative. This narrative has led to
embracing the post-feminist position, to the resolution of feminism. I
have designated classification as an affair of classifixation, an affair, how-
ever, that is transformative. This has led to the coming-into-existence of a
meta-methodology of “jumping generations,” a programmatic statement
for reaching (the) transformation (in and of classificatory work).
“The Coming-into-existence” has been key to setting in motion intra-
feminist rationales. This book has not dealt with extra-feminist ways of
wiping feminism off of the map (think of homonationalism and pink-
115
116 Conclusion

washing), 2 but discussed feminists’ manners of mapping. One of the

words that expresses processes of becoming is the Greek verb genesthai.
This verb, as I explained in chapter 4 in particular, is the mirror twin of
the word genos, also Greek. The terms are the etymological roots of gener-
ation. By demonstrating how generation or generationality is fundamen-
tally double—including generational classes and generativity—I have
been able to affirm post-feminist and other feminist reasonings as based
in dualism and to shift these reasonings at the same time. More specifical-
ly, I argue that any classificatory logic has an excess or an undertone that
does not allow for the classification to contain its contents. The minute
that something textual, visual, or tangible is labeled, the label is ques-
tioned by the material substance (of labeling) itself. Material substances
are themselves discursive; they participate in their own representation or
permit a process of signification. This is to say, substances have been
characterized as agential in this book. Just like the text is textual, visuals
and tangibles exist in order to be looked at and touched. These processes
cannot be captured anthropocentrically, although humans participate in
many encounters (of knowledge production). The human intellect, eye,
and otherwise embodied constitution must align with textuality, visual-
ity, and tactility. Knowing entails a co-respondence of knower and
known.
Feminist knowledges have been built on a wealth of logics. These
logics contain traditionally vertical ones (Subject-capturing-objects) and
have been both striving to and surprised by methodologies of horizontal-
ization (subjects-turning-with-objects). The latter methodologies have
been intentionally (and as a result, authoritatively) devised, but they
have also been subterraneous, that is, directed from elsewhere, from be-
fore or underneath conscious attempts at understanding. Feminist
knowledges about knowledges, or simply feminist epistemologies, have
been lured into explicit classificatory logics that repeat verticality even
when the goal is set to be inclusive of “Others.” It will not come as a
surprise that these feminist epistemologies are nothing but classifications
showing cracks. Any verticality slips in and out of the top-down or bot-
tom-up reasoning and any humanly driven humane-ness (also vis-à-vis
animals and other non-humans) becomes exclusive as it is inclusive (and
vice versa). How can an explicit diversity politics ever do justice to a
diversification that is always already pushing to the extreme? Diversity is
an attempt at domesticating differing, whereas it is not in the nature of
(sexual) differing to come to a standstill. To come into existence implies a
process-ontology that cannot be captured by the fixed terminology of
scholars, even if encyclopedic. Process-ontologies move on and on. More
and more emerges. Terminologies flow.
Is feminist scholarship running out of steam? Or should we rather run
with the slippages, craquelures, and indeterminacies that come with our
scholarship of pinpointing, classification, and containment? The gist of it
 Conclusion 117

is that the only constant of spatiotemporal fixation is that it flows. Just

like the only constant of feminism is that we have not yet reached the
goals of any category of feminism whether of the past or the present.
Even post-feminism poses nothing but questions and is, in that sense,
virtual. I have therefore argued that the way forward for feminism is to
affirm its movement at an irregular pace. Feminist works of academia,
art, and activism leap into the future, I have glossed, and therefore the
works of the feminist past will still be at work, there, tomorrow.
Taking genesthai seriously as the ever-moving foundation of feminism
has allowed me to write a book about generational feminism that is a new
materialist introduction to the study of change and transformation, to a
generative approach. Whereas generational feminism is unpopular and
even dismissed by default, it is in reality a most valuable conceptual
practice that corresponds with the world with which we engage our-
selves, even in the distancing acts performed by reductive feminist meth-
odologies. Genesthai is how the world winds, how the words swerve, and
how it is in this winding and swerving that world and words find each
other. Genera pop up when this flow fixates, spatiotemporally and disci-
plinary, but such actualizations live under the condition of genesthai too.
Expressing “now,” one is always already too late, and indicating “this,”
“here,” consists of an interpellation that happens in a whirlwind of move-
ment. Feminist movement.
There is no reason to dismiss generational feminism, because any fem-
inist expression is generative and refers beyond itself, and any generation
is a generation-to-come.

NOTES

1. Unless this circularity is seen as a wormholing, a practice of demonstrating how

the seemingly distant is in fact always/already proximate or entangled. Both Karen
Barad (2007, 388) and Katie King (see pullingtogeth.blogspot.com [last accessed: July
1, 2014]) and Whitney Stark (see dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/280272 [last ac-
cessed: July 1, 2014]) have taught me about wormholing as a critical and creative
practice.
2. For “homonationalism” and “pinkwashing,” see the important 2007 book of
Jasbir Puar—Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times—and her 2013 “re-
thinking.”
 Epilogue
Rhythmical Order

You’re getting old, that’s what they’ll say, but

Don’t give a damn I’m listening anyway
Stop, don’t you stop
I can’t live if you stop
Don’t you stop
Please don’t stop
We won’t stop
—Le Tigre 1
Just as I did in the introduction, I open the epilogue with music lyrics.
Apart from the content of the specific lyrics inserted here, there is some-
thing to music that has helped me in my journey through third-wave
feminist generationality. Music has been instrumental in this journey;
music, or more precisely: rhythm, has directed its course.
In the introduction to this study, I analyze the ways in which feminist
movement is halted and I propose a set of arguments for its opening-up. I
argue that feminist movement is halted as a consequence of certain forms
of questioning feminism (Is this form of political, artistic, and scholarly
engagement still relevant today? Does it allow for a playful engagement
with sex, gender, and sexuality?) and the societies in which we live (Are
these societies post-patriarchal? Has the battle against sexism, racism,
heteronormativity, and transphobia been fought?). Questions like these
do not do justice to the kinds of claims and impacts of feminism as I have
experienced them for as long as I can remember. Feminism is not a quan-
titative affair; even its most quantitative actualizations (equality femi-
nism or emancipationism) involve the layout of a sexually differentiated
terrain that is not to be closed down; rather, it is in need of opening up.
The opening-up of the feminist terrain involves a qualitative gesture of
sexual difference as an epistemology, ontology, and ethics.
“Rhythm” stems from the Latin rhythmus and from the Greek rhyth-
mos. Both terms signify movement in time and the flow of movement
itself. Rhythm is positioned before or underneath lyrics; rhythm carries
lyrics. In medieval Latin, rithmus came to signify rhymed verse, that is, a
verse that was not a quantitative affair, but rather a qualitative one. This
qualitative nature of the rhythmic flow (of verse) is how the movement in
feminist movement, and the generativity of feminist generation is best
119
120 Epilogue

expressed. Rhythm involves a working on an affective, engaging, collec-

tive, and complex register. As a conceptual tool 2 “rhythm” has the power
to bring together the seemingly contradictory currents that make up this
book: the feminist archive and the memory of it cut across by the zigzag-
ging opening-ups of transposition or jumping.
When feminist movement is rhythmic, it is not necessarily linear.
Rhythm implies an embodied and embedded flow that rises and falls,
that swells and wanes. But it must be said that nonlinear rhythmic move-
ment does imply a pattern, so it is not without structure. As such, rhythm
can also do justice to the fact that feminist movement is, in certain con-
texts and at certain moments, spatio-temporarily halted by processes that
go against its grain, shutting down what feminists were intending to
open up out of fear of essentialism, racist, and heteronormative under-
tones and generational conflict. The fact that these limiting pulsations are
part of the ontology of rhythm makes it a useful conceptual imaginary for
the very specific movement of feminist movement and generation of fem-
inist generationality. Feminism has been halted by itself just as much as it
has been halted by outside powers. The former has happened in the
development of feminist Master narratives, for example, or as the effect
of embracing classificatory, progressive tools to think with.
A powerful feminist implementation of rhythm-speak can be found in
Virginia Woolf’s argument on androgyny as it was voiced in A Room of
One’s Own from 1929. The argument, published twenty years prior to
Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal text Le Deuxième Sexe [The Second Sex] saw
the light of day, picks up on “a signal pointing to a force in things which
one had overlooked” (Woolf [1929] 2001, 83). Woolf ([1929] 2001, 83–4)
narrates how she finds a certain “rhythmical order” in the actual instance
of a coming together of a cab, a young man and a young woman in 1920s
London: “a natural fusion,” a “co-operat[ion].” The conclusion about sex-
ual difference that she is led to make reads that:
[i]t is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and
uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot
create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine . . . perhaps . . . the
androgynous mind is resonant and porous; . . . it transmits emotion
without impediment; . . . it is naturally creative, incandescent and undi-
vided. (Woolf [1929] 2001, 85)
Differently phrased, “[p]erhaps to think . . . of one sex as distinct from the
other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of mind” (Woolf [1929] 2001,
83). More important than inviting for the unnecessary quarrel about an-
drogyny per se (Woolf here argues that the unity of mind holds virtual
priority over feminine and masculine actualizations) is to note that the
order thus stumbled upon and conceptualized stems from Woolf’s own
mind being swept away by a non-anthropocentric force, a force that leads
 Epilogue 121

her to performing a posthuman mode of reasoning. Leisurely looking out

of the window of her apartment, a leaf and a river drove her away:
A single leaf detached itself from the plane tree at the end of the street,
and in that pause and suspension fell. Somehow it [the leaf] was like a
signal falling, a signal pointing to a force in things which one had
overlooked. It seemed to point to a river, which flowed past, invisibly,
round the corner, down the street, and took people and eddied them
along, as the stream at Oxbridge had taken the undergraduate in his
boat and the dead leaves. Now it [the river] was bringing from one side
of the street to the other diagonally a girl in patent leather boots, and
then a young man in a maroon overcoat; it was also bringing in a taxi-
cab. . . . (Woolf [1929] 2001, 83)
The performance of this particular reasoning in movement is what I hope
to have achieved in this book. Performing such a thought is risky; the
tools do not have a predetermined program. What they offer instead is a
different methodological register, one that does its utmost to be open to
reaching the conditions of possibility of sexual differing. Maybe we can
therefore argue that Woolf’s alleged “androgyny” is nothing but a sexual
differing itself. Alice Walker’s rewriting of A Room of One’s Own through
the story of the eighteenth-century slave Phillis Wheatley, published in
the essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” demonstrates how halt-
ing is part of this rhythmic differing:
Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have
existed among the working class. [Change this to “slaves” and “the
wives and daughters of sharecroppers.”] Now and again an Emily
Brontë or a Robert Burns [change this to “a Zora Hurston or a Richard
Wright”] blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got
itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked,
of a woman possessed by devils [or “Sainthood”], of a wise woman
selling herbs [our root workers], or even a very remarkable man who
had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a
suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen. . . . Indeed,
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems with-
out signing them, was often a woman. (Woolf [1929] 2001, 40–1 in
Walker [1972] 1994, 407)
What about the content of the music lyrics inserted in this book? Why did
I choose them and not the more rhythmic instantiations of the same sing-
er or band? Marianne Faithfull’s 1979 “Why’d Ya Do It?” for example, not
only expresses that “[t]he whole room was swirling,” 3 but rhythmically
swirls itself, sweeping its performers and listeners away. I have inserted
Faithfull’s “Broken English,” also from 1979, because this song has had
quite an impact on feminists of the infrageneration, the generation in-
volved in the long march through the (academic) institutions. Similar to
Anja Meulenbelt recalling Janis Joplin singing “Freedom is just another
word for nothing left to lose” 4 in her political autobiography De Schaamte
122 Epilogue

Voorbij [The Shame is Over] from 1976, I have had many conversations
with European feminists—most notably Maria Serena Sapegno—in
which the role of Faithfull’s question “What are you fighting for?” 5 has
been mentioned. I hear the song: I can’t stop my thoughts from lingering
to Paris in the early 1980s. I giggle about making the sign of the feminist
triangle with my hands in the air, something that I am nowadays re-
quired to do in airport security scans when I travel to, and in, the USA,
but which, for me, is intrinsically connected with the feminist cause and
the archive of the feminist demonstrations of the second wave. Joplin
died when she was twenty-seven. Faithfull is still around and gives con-
certs every now and then in Amsterdam’s concert hall Paradiso (which
used to be the headquarters of the Amsterdam creative leftist scene, men-
tioned in De Schaamte Voorbij). Going to those concerts, I encounter Janis
too.
The USA riot grrrl band Le Tigre, formed by Kathleen Hanna (former-
ly of Bikini Kill) and Johanna Fateman in the late 1990s, comes up in many
feminist conversations as well. The band has been anthologized as “third-
wave feminist” in Leslie L. Heywood’s two-volume, 2005 edition The
Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism, but
more importantly: it is the 1999 song “Hot Topic” that expresses third-
wave feminism’s generationality as it has been developed in this book.
The age of second-wave feminists is irrelevant to Le Tigre. Hanna and her
band members express the need and the wish to listen to what they 6 have
to say in order to be agents of feminism themselves. Second-wave femi-
nist production in the current times is a lifeline for Hanna and her col-
leagues as much as it is against the grain of plotting “the old” against
“the young.” Their lyrics express and exemplify the thought that contem-
porary feminists cannot move or generate without the continuous work,
or continuing the work, of the second-wave feminism. They implicitly
repeat Faithfull’s question “what are you fighting for?”—addressed in
actual fact to Ulrike Meinhof of the Rote Armee Fraktion—as an affirma-
tive engagement that is open because it is a curious question.
Third-wave-becomings do not entail the end of the second feminist
wave. Third-wave feminists need, and wish, to jump generations in order
to generate their work. 7 Let me therefore end this book accordingly with
a plea for second-wave feminist political, artistic, and academic genera-
tion. Contemporary feminism does not entail a move away from but
rather a move closer to the long march through the institutions; (black)
(lesbian) separatism; women-asking-questions; consciousness raising;
feminist anthologies; body politics; essentialism; the women’s health
movement; technophilia and technophobia; herstory; the dinner party;
women’s studies and women’s centers; the shame is over; the sex wars;
and feminist standpoint theory. Being lyrical about the second wave
makes time for an upbeat feminism.
 Epilogue 123

NOTES

1. From “Hot Topic” (1999). Used by permission of Le Tigre.

2. Cf. Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987, 313–14; emphasis in original) in the chap-
ter on “the refrain,” where the point is made that “[f]rom chaos, Milieus and Rhythms
are born. . . . A milieu does in fact exist by virtue of a periodic repetition, but one
whose only effect is to produce a difference by which the milieu passes into another
milieu. It is the difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition, which nevertheless
produces it: productive repetition has nothing to do with reproductive meter. This is
the ‘critical solution of the antinomy.’”
3. From “Broken English” (1979). Used by permission of François Ravard Manage-
ment, Ltd.
4. From “Me and Bobby McGee,” written by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster
(1969) Combine Music Corp.
5. From “Broken English” (1979). Used by permission of François Ravard Manage-
ment, Ltd.
6. They are also mentioned in the song and chanted in a rhythmic manner: Carol
Rama and Eleanor Antin, Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneeman, Gretchen Phillips and
Cibo Matto, Leslie Feinberg and Faith Ringgold, Mr. Lady, Laura Cottingham, Mab
Segrest and The Butchies, Tammy Rae Carland and Sleater-Kinney, Vivienne Dick and
Lorraine O’Grady, Gayatri Spivak and Angela Davis, Laurie Weeks and Dorothy Alli-
son, Gertrude Stein, Marlon Riggs, Billie Jean King, Ut, DJ Cuttin Candy, David Woj-
narowicz, Melissa York, Nina Simone, Ann Peebles, Tammy Hart, The Slits, Hanin
Elias, Hazel Dickens, Cathy Sissler, Shirley Muldowney, Urvashi Vaid, Valie Export,
Cathy Opie, James Baldwin, Diane Dimassa, Aretha Franklin, Joan Jett, Mia X, Krystal
Wakem, Kara Walker, Justin Bond, Bridget Irish, Juliana Lueking, Cecilia Dougherty,
Ariel Skrag, The Need, Vaginal Creme Davis, Alice Gerard, Billy Tipton, Julie Doucet,
Yayoi Kusama, and Eileen Myles.
7. Examples of not forgetting include: feminist classics courses at universities and
in other educational settings, websites such as www.vrouwennuvoorlater.nl (last ac-
cessed: December 12, 2012), songs providing cartographies of second-wave feminists
such as Le Tigre’s “Hot Topic” and the Profesora project of Swedish performance
artist Catti Brandelius (www.cattibrandelius.se/?page_id=39; last accessed: December
12, 2012). Note that such projects are often co-productions of second- and third-wave
feminists.
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 Index
academia, xi, xii, xiv, xv, xx, 5, 9, 12, 14,
16, 23, 34, 39, 76, 91, 101, 117
affect, 5, 7, 8, 16n4, 35, 36n8, 49, 91, 102,
120
affirmation, xvii, 2, 12, 14, 47, 49, 66, 77,
80, 90, 101
age, xiv, xx, 13, 24, 66, 70n6, 97, 109,
111, 113, 122
agency, 2, 37n15, 87
agent, 6, 9, 11, 13, 33, 44, 68, 73, 80, 81,
92n7, 97, 99, 104, 109; of change,
xviii; of feminism, xix, 122
agential cutting, 10, 51, 68, 69, 110
agential realism, 34
Ahmed, Sara, 10, 15, 17n18, 35, 85,
91n1, 110
Alaimo, Stacy, 14, 17n18, 26, 37n11,
38n19, 50, 91
Alcoff, Linda, 19, 24, 25
androcentrism, 64, 77, 79, 81, 104, 105
animals, 40, 42, 54, 116
an-Oedipality, 38n24, 40, 41, 43, 44, 47,
48, 49, 50, 57n5, 101
anthropocentrism, 36, 42, 47, 49, 62, 80,
91, 105, 109, 116
anti-racism, 7, 49
archive, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16n3,
67, 68, 69, 82, 85, 101, 106, 108, 120,
122
assemblage, 50, 51, 54, 69–70, 104
Baby boomers, 4, 11
Bakhtin, Mikhal, 60, 61
Barad, Karen, 8, 9, 10, 16n4, 18n19, 21,
30, 34, 35, 36, 41, 44, 51, 66, 67, 68,
69, 73, 85, 91, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 107,
117n1
Barrett, Estelle, 17n18, 26, 37n11, 91,
93n11
145
Beauvoir, Simone de, xii, 42, 43, 47,
112, 120
becoming, xvi, xviii, 6, 45, 51, 54, 55, 56,
58n10, 63, 64, 65, 68, 91, 95, 99, 100,
102, 104, 106, 116, 122; becoming-
woman, 53, 54, 55, 56, 70n6
Bennett, Jane, 17n18, 58n8
Bergson, Henri, xiii, xviii, xxin5, xxin6,
10, 29, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 97,
98, 99, 100, 113n1, 114n2
biology, 8, 9, 73, 83–84, 91n1
black feminism, xii, 5, 9, 32, 37n15, 39,
57n1, 58n8, 67, 82, 115, 122
bodies, 3, 7, 8, 10, 23, 29, 50, 51, 55, 96,
108, 110, 113
Bolt, Barbara, 14, 17n18, 26, 34, 37n11,
71n8, 91, 93n11, 110
boundary-work, 7, 17n5
Braidotti, Rosi, xii, xv, xvii, xviii,
xxin14, xxin17, 5, 6, 8, 17n18, 19, 21,
23, 27, 38n17, 38n23, 38n24, 44, 45,
46, 47, 48, 50, 53, 55, 56, 61, 73, 80,
81, 84, 91, 110
Brown, Wendy, 1, 64, 102
Butler, Judith, xv, xxin10, 2, 31, 99, 101
Campbell, Kirsten, xx, 13
canon, 2, 7, 19, 22, 25, 26, 28, 29, 35,
37n13, 39, 41, 44, 48, 54, 57, 68, 69,
73, 84, 87, 95, 96, 105, 106, 107, 109,
116
canonization, 10, 11, 14, 19, 21, 22, 25,
29, 30, 33, 35, 36, 44, 46, 47, 48, 67,
68, 70, 79, 82, 90, 91, 105, 108
capitalism, xix, 27, 47, 48, 83
cartography, 5, 6, 11, 12, 22, 26, 27, 30,
31, 34, 36n3, 38n19, 41, 69, 101, 113
change, xiii, xviii, 4, 9, 10, 14, 15, 29, 32,
40, 46, 74, 76, 80, 81, 85, 92n7, 96, 98,
105, 106, 107, 109, 117, 121
146 Index
class, 24, 37n15, 43, 49, 83, 92n10, 104,
105, 109, 121; generational, xv, xvii,
xviii, 114n4, 116
classification, xviii, xxin4, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10,
11, 14, 15, 19–21, 23, 26, 27–35, 36n4,
43, 44, 46, 48, 52, 57n3, 59, 61, 64, 65,
66, 67, 68, 69, 83, 90, 95, 96, 97, 106,
110, 112, 113, 115, 116
classifixation, 11, 17n10, 19, 21, 22, 26,
27, 28, 30, 34, 73, 84, 100, 101, 110,
113, 115
classroom, 4, 5, 12, 52
Code, Lorraine, 24, 26, 33, 36n6, 37n9,
37n10, 92n6
cogito, 36, 53, 92n7, 105
Colebrook, Claire, xxin14, 21, 25, 26, 34,
35, 38n22, 52, 53, 54, 91, 105, 106
Collins, Patricia Hill, 37n15, 82
come into being, to, xvii, 23, 63, 106
competition, 20, 75, 111
conceptual practice, 12, 109, 117
conflict, xvii, 6, 9, 12, 20, 37n15, 46–47,
61, 64, 81, 111, 120
continuity, xiv, 2, 3, 7, 43, 93n11, 106,
109, 112
Coole, Diana, 14, 17n18, 26, 37n11, 91
corporeality, 34, 35
co-respond, to, 33, 41, 80, 102, 116, 117
correspondence theory of truth,. See
also truth 50, 53, 78, 99
creativity, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xxin16, 3, 8,
11, 21, 33, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 61, 64,
70, 73, 93n11, 115, 120, 122
crip. See disability
Crisis of Reason, 23, 30, 49
critique, 7, 8, 16n4, 38n16, 39–40, 52,
54–55, 83, 88, 90, 91, 96, 103, 112
daughterhood, 15, 44, 45, 47, 48, 95
daughters, xx, 42, 74, 92n8, 111, 112,
121; dutiful, 43, 45, 47, 48, 51, 54, 82,
83; undutiful, xv, xvi–xvii, xviii, 43,
44
Davis, Noela, xxin15, 15, 17n18, 85,
91n1, 113
Death of the Subject, 23, 56
deconstruction, 5, 24, 69, 88, 115
Deleuze, Gilles, xviii, xxin6, 17n10, 30,
48, 49–57, 62, 93n11, 101, 114n3; and
Claire Parnet, 13, 14, 50–51, 52, 56,
57; and Félix Guattari, xiii, 43, 45,
47–48, 50, 52, 53, 54, 56, 59, 61, 65,
66, 70n6, 123n2
desire, xvi, 3, 4, 9, 22, 49, 50, 53, 55, 60,
64, 97
determinism, xii, xxin7, 27, 33, 37n15,
88, 103, 110, 115; biological, 27,
91n1; neo-, 44, 101, 104
deterritorialization, xvii, 47, 50, 51
dichotomy, xviii, 10, 14, 46, 76, 84, 108,
114n6
difference, xii, xiii, xvi, xvii, xviii,
xxin7, 2, 4, 5, 9–10, 12, 17n11, 24, 27,
30, 34, 41, 43, 46–47, 49, 56, 68, 69,
77, 79, 83, 84, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101,
105, 108, 109, 115, 123n2. See also
differing; sexual difference; sexual
differing
differing, xii, xiii, xix, 2, 10, 35, 41, 46,
55, 67, 69, 84, 101, 112, 113, 116, 121
diffraction, 30, 57n4, 95, 96–101, 101,
110, 113, 114n4
disability, 10, 50
disidentification, 14, 26, 35, 40, 48, 55,
57n5, 101, 106, 113
diversity, xvii, 6, 12, 14, 17n17, 20, 24,
27, 46, 49, 98, 115, 116
dualism, xviii, xx, 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, 14,
17n11, 20, 22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 36n7, 39,
40, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 56, 62, 70n6, 78,
86, 90, 96, 97, 103, 107, 108, 111, 113,
116
duration (durée), xix, xxin5, 1
elitism, 37n15, 103, 104, 105
emancipation, xi, xi–xiii, 67, 68, 115,
119
embodiment, 1, 3, 5, 7, 15, 21, 23, 36n8,
48, 61, 65, 67, 70, 74, 85, 103, 107,
108, 116, 120
emergence, 2, 3, 7, 11, 35, 37n13, 41, 49,
50, 51, 57n3, 59, 62, 64, 69, 116
empiricism, 56, 74, 76, 88–89, 90, 107,
108; feminist, 5, 15, 17n17, 19, 20, 21,
23, 24, 26, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37n15, 45,
46, 108; neo-, 25, 26, 27, 30, 33,
37n10, 103
entanglement, 64, 65, 90, 109
 Index
epistemic twist, 23, 49
epistemology,. See also onto-
epistemology xviii, 15, 16n4, 18n19,
20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 31, 37n9,
37n10, 39, 40, 42, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52,
52–53, 53, 56, 57n3, 64, 65, 66, 75–76,
79, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 91, 97, 98,
99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 110,
114n7; feminist,; feminist
standpoint theory xx, 4, 6, 8, 15–16,
19, 20, 21, 23–25, 28–29, 30, 31, 33,
34, 35, 36n4, 37n15, 39, 40, 44–45, 46,
68, 76, 78, 81, 82, 83, 100, 101, 106,
108, 109, 116, 119; second-wave
feminist,; feminist standpoint
theory 14, 19, 22, 31, 44, 45, 55, 73,
74, 107, 108, 109, 113; third-wave
feminist, 13
equivocity, 40, 51, 53, 55, 56, 86
essentialism, xvi, xvii, xix, 9, 12, 36n8,
38n17, 43, 46, 59, 109, 120, 122
ethics, 37n10, 52, 69, 119
etymology, xx, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66,
116
event, xii, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 23, 24, 29, 35, 50,
50–51, 53, 56, 60, 64, 65, 74, 76, 97,
102, 103, 104, 108, 109
excess, 15, 29, 43, 44, 59, 79, 80, 90, 101,
106, 107, 116
exchange of women, 2, 9, 20, 61, 111
Faithfull, Marianne, xi, 121–122
femininity, xvii–xviii, 22, 34, 41, 68, 77,
84, 89, 120
feminist standpoint theory, 5, 15,
19–36, 36n8, 37n15, 40, 44, 45–46, 51,
52–53, 55–56, 67, 67–69, 79, 81–85,
89, 90, 91, 103–104, 107, 108, 115, 122
feminist theory of knowledge. See
feminist epistemology
feminist wave, fifth, 13; first, xvii,
xxin4, 4; fourth, 13, 17n13; second,
xi, xii, xiii, xv–xvii, xix, xxin4, 3, 4,
10, 11, 14, 16, 22, 28, 38n24, 39–40,
42, 43, 46–47, 48, 50, 54, 60, 67, 74,
82, 87, 92n10, 95, 101, 109, 111, 112,
113, 122, 123n7; third, xv, xvii,
xxin4, 11–15, 17n11, 17n17, 38n24,
38n25, 44, 47–48, 51, 67, 101, 109,
147
113, 119, 122, 123n7
foremothers, xiv, xvii, xix, 2, 4, 5, 9, 22,
43, 44, 113
Foucault, Michel, 27–28, 30, 51–52, 57,
59, 60, 70n4, 73
Franco-American Dis-Connection, 46
Friedan, Betty, xi
Frost, Samantha, 14, 17n18, 26, 37n11,
38n16, 85, 91
future, xiv, xvii, xxin6, 2, 3, 6, 9, 10, 11,
12, 30, 59, 67, 73, 83, 95, 96–97, 100,
104, 106–107, 110, 113, 117; feminist,
xv, xix, 4–5, 9, 11, 12, 14, 20, 22, 25,
28, 29, 35–36, 40, 41, 42–43, 44, 55,
59, 67–69, 79, 81, 84, 89, 96, 97,
106–107, 108–109
gender, xi, xiii, xix, xx, 3, 14, 16n2, 22,
24–25, 25, 27, 38n19, 40, 41, 43, 46,
49, 54, 55, 64, 67–68, 76–77, 79, 82,
83, 91, 91n3, 92n10, 99, 104, 111, 119.
See also women’s, gender, and
sexuality studies
gender-blind, xiv, 76, 83
gendering, xviii, 4, 10, 26, 61, 79, 95, 110
genealogy, 21, 30, 45, 48, 57, 59–64,
95–96; feminist, 80, 81, 83, 85, 90, 95,
110
generation, xiv–xx, xxin17, xxiin18,
1–3, 4–7, 9–15, 21, 26, 30, 35, 36,
42–48, 55, 57n4, 58n7, 59–70, 71n7,
82, 90–91, 110, 111, 112–113, 114n4,
116, 117, 119–120, 122. See also
jumping generations
generation/knowledge, 101–105, 110
geophilosophy, 52, 61, 62, 65
God-trick, 18n19, 86, 89, 107
Greenblatt, Stephen, 41, 60, 65–66, 70n3
Grosz, Elizabeth, xviii, 6, 10, 23, 53,
54–55, 60, 62, 64, 67, 73, 93n11, 105,
106–107
Halley, Janet, 16n4, 22, 114n9
Haraway, Donna, 2, 5–10, 11, 20–22, 23,
25, 26, 29, 30, 31–33, 39–40, 41,
42–43, 49, 56–57, 74, 88–89, 91,
93n11, 95, 96–101, 105–109
Harding, Sandra, 13, 15, 19–21, 23, 24,
25, 28, 29, 30–32, 34, 36n2–36n6,
148
44–45, 68, 73, 76, 82, 96, 102, 104,
106, 107, 108–109, 114n5
Hartsock, Nancy, 31, 82–85
Hayles, N. Katherine, 18n20, 102–103,
104, 110
Hekman, Susan, 14, 17n18, 26, 37n11,
37n15, 38n19, 38n26, 89
Hemmings, Clare, xiv–xvii, xxin10,
xxin11, 7–8, 11, 16n4, 17n15, 19, 20,
42, 114n9
Henry, Astrid, 17n8, 17n13, 48, 101
heteronormativity, 115, 119, 120
heterosexism, xiv, 104
Hinton, Peta, 17n18, 18n21, 37n11,
114n8
Hird, Myra, 17n18
historiography, xvii, 1, 4, 30, 64, 76, 91
homogeny, xii, 27, 59
homophobia, xii, xiii
horizontalization, 7, 33, 34–35, 40, 68,
69
humanism, 25, 33, 36, 40, 42, 47, 49–50,
62, 83, 91, 105, 109
identity politics, 7, 14, 16, 24, 33, 36,
37n15, 41, 49, 50, 58n8, 67, 70, 91,
105, 113
ideology, xiii, 4, 27, 36n8, 45, 74, 79,
81–85, 90, 92n7
immanence, 30, 34, 47, 51, 52, 63, 66, 69,
78, 90, 91, 101, 108
individualism, 12, 35, 37n15, 42, 50, 54,
56, 70, 78, 81, 92n5, 92n7
infra-generation, xv, 12
interference. See diffraction
intersectionality, xii, xviii, xxin8,
17n17, 49, 68
intra-action, 8, 9, 11, 30, 36, 41, 42, 73,
80, 85, 102, 105, 115
Irigaray, Luce, xvii–xviii, 44–45, 46,
57n4
Irni, Sari, 15
Jaggar, Alison, 36n2, 82–83, 92n10
Joplin, Janis, 121–122
jumping generations, 3, 5, 6–8, 9–11, 12,
13, 14, 16, 21, 22, 27, 28, 32, 67, 70,
73, 80, 82, 84, 95, 108–109, 115
Index
Keller, Evelyn Fox, 8, 12, 74, 76–81,
91n3–92n5
King, Katie, 22, 32, 117n1
kinship, 2, 57n4, 111
Kirby, Vicki, 21, 34–35, 38n21, 40–41,
43, 69, 91, 93n11–93n12
knowledge theory. See epistemology
Kristeva, Julia, 3, 93n11
Kuhn, Thomas S., 75–81, 85–86, 87,
91n2–92n4, 98
Latour, Bruno, 36n5, 40, 52, 58n10, 66,
85–89, 107
Lauretis, Teresa de, xvii, 46
Law of the Father, 45, 46, 111
lesbian continuum, 43, 112
Le Tigre, 119, 122, 123n1, 123n7
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 2, 111
linearity, xiii, xiv, xix, xxn3, 2, 6, 7, 9,
10, 11, 29, 30, 34, 35, 45, 60, 61, 64,
67, 73, 96, 101, 103, 107, 114n2, 120
linguisticism, 43, 106, 109
location, 3–4, 5, 23, 33, 74, 78, 82, 98,
105
Logic of One, xii–xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xix,
14, 49–50, 68, 100
long march through the institutions,
xiv, 121, 122
Lorde, Audre, 17n12
Lyotard, Jean-François, 10
Marx, Karl, 64, 81–85, 92n7; and
Engels, Friedrich, 82
Marxism, 5, 32, 35, 36n2, 38n24, 46,
81–85, 87, 90, 92n10, 115
Master Narrative, 22, 25, 27, 30, 35, 50,
54, 92n10, 98, 108, 120
Master-Slave dialectics, xiv, xvi, 20, 45,
82, 100
material-discursive, xvi, 7, 13, 21, 29,
35, 42, 44, 51, 61, 68, 81, 91, 97, 101,
106, 108–109, 110, 116
materialisms, bodily, 38n24, 46;
feminist new, 2, 7, 11, 13–16, 18n19,
21–22, 26–27, 29–31, 33–36, 36n8,
38n16, 38n19, 42, 44, 48, 60, 68–69,
75, 80, 84–85, 90–91, 97, 101–105,
108–110, 113, 114n3, 114n9;
historical, 35, 81–83, 92n7, 93n11;
 Index
neo-, 26–27, 36n8, 37n14, 43, 56,
57n2, 80, 93n11, 103–105, 106,
109–110, 117; post-, 35; second-wave
feminist, 29, 33, 46, 48, 55, 68, 84, 86,
91, 96; third-wave feminist, 14,
38n24–38n25, 55, 84, 102–103
materiality, xxin15, 21, 33–36, 42, 102
material-semiotic. See material-
discursive
materials, xix, 4–5, 7, 11, 13, 34–36, 40,
42, 66, 69, 74, 79, 81, 91, 96, 98
matter, 8, 14, 33–36, 50, 52, 66, 71n8, 76,
79–80, 82, 85, 88, 90, 91, 96, 97,
102–105, 106, 109–110
May of 1968, 23, 49, 56, 82
McClintock, Barbara, 8, 73–91
media, xi, xv, xvi, xix, xxin17, 13
memory, xiv, 29, 65, 96, 120
method, 31, 37n15, 46, 59, 60, 77–78,
92n5, 101–103, 108, 113n1, 114n7
methodology, xv, xvii, xxin10, 3, 4–6,
9–11, 12, 14, 15, 22, 27, 28, 40, 44, 46,
52, 59, 60, 65, 66, 70, 73, 97, 98, 99,
101–103, 107, 110, 112, 113,
114n6–114n7, 115, 116, 121
Metzger, Hélène, 3, 11, 70, 91n2, 95
Meulenbelt, Anja, xi, xxn2, 121
mothers,. See also foremothers, feminist
xxin4, 9, 42, 45, 74, 111, 111–112, 121
movement, xiii–xv, xvi, xvii, xix, 5, 9,
15, 33, 41, 42–43, 48, 50–52, 56,
59–65, 66, 73, 85, 90, 95–96, 100, 106,
117, 119–121; feminist, xi–xiii, xvi,
xix, xxn3, 3–4, 6, 11, 12, 17n12, 23,
29, 32, 37n13, 39, 46, 49, 53–54, 57,
68, 69, 89, 117, 119–120, 122
Muñoz, José Esteban, 29, 101
naturalization, xiii, xv, 7, 32, 96, 105
naturecultures, 7, 85, 106
negation, 3, 4, 5, 14, 20, 29, 36n6, 43, 47,
60, 62, 101, 108, 111, 112, 113, 115
negativity, xiv, xvi, 95, 112, 115
Nelson, Lynn Hankinson, 14, 37n10,
103, 105
neo-liberalism, 17n11, 26, 27, 88, 115
neo-materialisms. See materialisms,
neo-
149
new materialisms. See materialisms,
neo-: feminist; materialisms,
feminist new
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 60–63, 93n11
non-anthropocentrism, 33, 36, 47, 49,
50, 90, 91, 100, 120
non-dualism, 21–22, 26, 27, 111
non-foundationalism, 47, 70n4
non-humans, xx, 21, 33–34, 39, 49,
61–63, 80, 87, 100, 116
non-linearity, xiii, xix, 8, 13, 30, 41, 59,
64, 76–77, 96, 120
object (of study), 3, 6–9, 11, 13, 15, 22,
26, 29–30, 31, 33, 37n15, 40, 43, 44,
55, 56, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 73–74, 80,
81, 87, 91, 92n7, 99, 103–104, 105,
108, 110, 113, 116
objectivity, 15, 21, 24, 25, 32, 46, 56, 63,
74, 78, 82, 89, 92n7, 104, 107
Oedipal plot, xiv, xv–xvi, xxin12, 16,
20, 41, 42–48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 57n5, 61,
68, 111, 112
onto-epistemology, 14, 18n19, 28, 35,
36, 40–41, 42, 51, 53, 62, 70, 98, 101,
103, 104, 106, 108–109
ontology, xxin6, xxin10, 11, 34, 36n8,
49, 56, 57, 62, 64, 70, 95, 97, 98–99,
107, 116, 119–120
opposition, binary, xv, xviii, xx, 8, 10,
13, 14, 20, 32–35, 39–40, 45, 46, 50,
56, 62, 68, 97, 103, 108, 111
Other, xii, xiv, xv, xvi, 6, 10, 14, 23, 42,
49–50, 54, 67, 89, 91, 91n1, 100, 104,
105, 107, 110, 112, 116
‘out there’, xiv, 12, 20, 28, 34
paradigm, xiv, xxin7, xxin10, 8, 24,
76–81, 92n4, 97, 98
paradox, 4, 24, 55, 63, 69, 82, 99
paternal line, 20, 38n24, 45, 61, 65, 97
patriarchy, xii, xviii, 2, 4, 9, 15, 22, 43,
46–47, 48, 54, 76, 78, 97, 104, 106,
111–113; post-, 3–4, 12, 119
pedagogy, 11, 14, 19, 84
phallologocentrism, 2, 4, 15–16, 47, 96
philosophical foundationalism, 23, 26,
30, 37n15, 45, 70n4, 103
150
philosophy, xi, 20, 36n4, 37n15, 42, 45,
46, 52, 54–56, 57n3, 61, 65, 66, 67, 76,
87, 90, 91n3, 92n7, 97, 99; third-wave
feminist, 13
politics of citation, 26
positivism, 20, 30, 45, 48, 76, 88, 89, 90,
103, 105, 107, 110
postcolonial feminism, 5, 13
postcolonial subjects, 18n20, 23, 49
post-feminism, xix, 2–5, 9, 11–13,
18n20, 22, 34, 36n7, 38n25, 43, 44, 48,
58n8, 60, 67, 112, 115–117
posthumanism, 2, 25, 33, 36, 49–50, 85,
91, 100, 114n4
postmodernism, 6, 14, 22–25, 30, 34, 49,
53, 56, 57n3, 74, 76, 81, 100, 104;
feminist, 5, 6, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17n17,
19–21, 23–27, 29, 30–34, 37n10, 45,
46–47, 49, 67, 91, 104, 107, 108, 115;
post-, 21, 25–26, 30
post-secular era, 26
post-structuralism, 2–3, 20, 21, 25, 35,
36n7, 45, 46–47, 67
Potter, Elizabeth, 24–25, 36n6
power/knowledge, 45, 110
pre-Oedipal phase, 16, 41
Prins, Baukje, 39, 89, 104
process-ontology, 49, 64, 116
progress narrative, xii–xiii, xix, 4, 5, 7,
11, 19, 29, 30, 46, 64, 67, 80, 103, 106,
107, 112, 113, 115, 120
psychoanalysis, 43, 50, 58n7, 82, 92n5,
110
quantum physics, 34, 73, 97–99
queer theory, 34, 36n8, 44
‘race’/ethnicity, 43, 49
race, ethnicity, and postcolonial
studies, 23
racializing, xviii, xx, 32, 95, 110
racism, 104–105, 115, 119–120
rationalism, 16n4, 28, 49, 57n3, 76, 89,
92n7
realism, 34, 102
reduction, xiv, 13, 14–15, 27, 36n4,
42–43, 48, 51, 69, 96, 110, 117
referentiality, 12, 59, 109, 111–113
Index
relationality, 2, 7, 40, 44–49, 62, 69, 96,
98, 100, 108
relativism, 10, 21, 25–26, 28, 30, 43, 49,
53, 57n3, 86, 89, 102, 103–104, 109,
114n7
representation, xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, 9, 25,
34, 47, 56, 78, 80, 87, 96
representationalism, 12, 34, 49, 54–57,
67, 99–100, 105, 109, 113
reterritorialization, 50
retrograde movement, 59, 62, 63
revolution, xi, 3, 31–32, 39, 75–76, 87,
91n2, 91n3, 105
rewriting, 2, 26, 40, 43–44, 106, 108, 121
rhizomatic, 5, 8, 41, 51, 95
rhythm, xviii, 119–121, 123n2, 123n6
Rich, Adrienne, xxin10, 38n17, 43,
111–113
Roof, Judith, 42, 45
Rubin, Gayle, xxin10, 2, 16n2, 20, 45,
111–113
Sandoval, Chela, 32, 83
Sapegno, Maria Serena, 122
Schrader, Astrid, 40–41
science studies, 21, 31, 34, 38n19, 40, 52,
76, 85–90
Scott, Joan Wallach, xix, 4, 19, 24,
37n15, 69
secularism, 17n11, 27
sedimentation, xviii, 61–64, 66, 76
separatism, 35, 122
sex, xii, xiii, xviii–xix, 2, 3, 14, 37n9, 41,
47, 49, 54, 68, 70n6, 76, 83, 89, 111,
119, 120
sexism, xii, xiii, xiv, 96–97, 104, 105,
115, 119
sexual difference, xviii, xix, 2, 4, 16n2,
25, 38n17, 39, 41, 46–47, 55–56, 63,
67–69, 101, 104, 105–106, 108, 110,
112–113, 115, 119, 125–xiii. See also
difference; differing; sexual
differing
sexual differing, xiii, 2, 35, 41, 42, 51,
55, 63, 69, 95, 101, 107, 110, 112, 113,
116, 117
sexuality, 3, 22, 24, 43, 49, 119
sexualizing, xx, 23, 46, 95, 105, 110, 125
sex wars, xix, 122
 Index
signification process, 28, 42, 51, 60, 65,
81, 105, 110, 116
silencing, 29, 84, 103
singularity, xvii, 6, 13, 17n9, 42, 52,
57n3, 60, 64–65, 78, 89–90, 96, 125
Smith, Dorothy, 19, 82
Smith, Neil, 8–9, 73
social constructivism, 14, 25, 34, 48,
88–89, 90, 110
space, xiv, xvii, 2, 5, 8, 10, 40, 47, 53,
57n3, 76, 95, 107, 109
spatiality, xii–xiii, xxin5, 1, 8–9, 34, 67,
96
standpoint. See feminist standpoint
theory
Star, Susan Leigh, 31, 87
Stengers, Isabelle, 16, 58n10, 89–90, 91,
99
structuralism, 2–3, 23, 24
Stryker, Susan, 7–8, 68, 114n11
subject, xiv, xix, 1, 6–8, 11, 13, 15, 22,
23–24, 25–27, 30, 31, 33, 35–36, 36n8,
37n15, 40, 44, 46, 49–51, 53, 54, 56,
61, 68, 69, 70, 74, 78, 80–81, 82, 83,
86, 91, 92n7, 100, 103–104, 105,
106–110, 116
Sullivan, Nikki, 15, 17n18, 58n9, 85,
91n1, 105, 108
swerving of ideas, 41, 60–62, 65–66, 73
Tanesini, Alessandra, 36n4, 37n10
teaching, xi, xv, xvi, xix, 1, 3–4, 5, 61,
110, 113, 114n10
technology, xxiin18, 31, 96, 108
temporality, xiii, xv, 1, 3, 6, 8, 32, 34,
64–65, 67, 95
textbook, xxin17, 5, 15, 29
Tiainen, Milla, 17n18, 50
time, xii–xiii, xx, xxin5–xxin6, xxin14,
1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 41, 42, 43–44, 48,
56, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 73, 75,
78, 95, 96–99, 106, 106–107, 109,
114n2, 115, 117n2, 119, 122
totalization, 49, 60, 61, 74, 88, 102
trans feminism, 5, 9–10, 115
transformation, xvii, xix, 4, 7, 9, 10, 24,
59, 77, 79, 95, 97, 105, 115, 117
transgender activism, xix, 7–8, 10,
114n11
151
transgenerationality, xiv, xvii, 2–3, 7,
13, 16, 68
transphobia, xiii, 115, 119
transposition, 6–15, 17n6, 41, 73–75,
80–81, 96, 120
trans studies, 7–8, 68, 114n11
transversality, xxiin18, 3, 5, 9, 11, 21,
31, 35, 44, 64, 90–91, 114n11
truth, 23, 24, 28, 34, 37n15, 46, 51, 52,
63, 78, 86, 92n7, 99, 103, 109. See also
correspondence theory of truth
turn, xvii, 37n10, 43, 44, 48–49, 53, 57,
67–68, 69, 89, 90, 91n3, 110, 116;
affective, 16n4; empirical, 85–88, 90;
historical, 75–80, 85, 90; material, 2,
37n14, 106; ontological, 18n19, 36n7;
to praxis, 85, 90
universalism, xvi, 8, 12, 21–24, 42–43,
46, 53, 57n3, 70n6, 79, 81–82, 84
univocity, 40, 56, 102
us vs. them, 14, 26
virtual past, xiii, xxin6, 17n10, 27, 29,
35, 44, 67–68, 81, 85, 91, 109–110, 117
Walker, Alice, 121
Walker, Rachel Loewen, 50, 114n3
wave-metaphor, xii, xxn3, 17n7
wave-model, 1
Whelehan, Imelda, xxin13, 92n10
Whitehead, Alfred North, 58n10, 89,
90, 107, 108
Wiegman, Robyn, 19, 36n8
Wittig, Monique, xv, xxin10, 114n9
women’s, gender, and sexuality
studies, xi, xiv, xxin17, 3, 5, 12, 19,
23, 101, 115
Woolf, Virginia, 92n9, 112, 120–121
working through-and-beyond, 10, 20,
26, 43, 48, 97, 101
Young, Iris Marion, 83–84
young, the, xii, xiv–xvii, xx, xxiin18,
4–5, 22, 43, 48, 74, 76, 111, 120–121,
122
youth, 13, 16, 115
Zack, Naomi, 17n15, 17n17, 42
152 Index

zigzagging, xii, 11, 41, 68, 74, 95, 120

 About the Author

Iris van der Tuin is associate professor of gender studies and philosophy
of science at Utrecht University.

153