This article explores the possibilities of considering how ‘matter and meaning are mutually constituted’ in the production of knowledge (Barad, 2007: 152) through presenting a diffractive analysis of a piece of interview data with a six-year-old boy in a preschool class. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s (1997) and Karen Barad’s (2007) theorising, I understand diffractive analysis as an embodied engagement with the materiality of research data: a becoming-with the data as researcher. Understanding the body as a space of transit, a series of open-ended systems in interaction with the material-discursive ‘environment’, diffractive analyses constitute transcorporeal engagements with data. Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) theorisation of the transcorporeal is put to work diffractively with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1987) thinking on the process of becoming minor or minoritarian. This implies a reconceptualisation of the very act of thinking as a transcorporeal process of engagement, going beyond the idea of reflexi...

A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analysing interview data

Within developing and disadvantaged economies, women’s self-employment has been identified as a tool to assist in alleviating poverty and empowering individual women. To explore these arguments, th...

Impact of women’s home-based enterprise on family dynamics: Evidence from Jordan

This paper explores the changing role of science in public discourse on ‘race’ and racism, examining the contention that new biological accounts of human life (‘biologism’) are transforming how dif...

Racialized Futures: Biologism and the Changing Politics of Identity

Feminist technoscience studies is a relentlessly transdisciplinary field of research which emerged out of decades of feminist critiques. These critiques have revealed the ways in which gender, in its intersections with other sociocultural power differentials and identity markers, is entangled in natural, medical and technical sciences as well as in the sociotechnical networks and practices of a globalized world. As the sociocultural embeddedness of all scientific and technological theories and practices is a basic assumption among researchers within this field, the positivist distinction between scientific theories and their technological/practical applications is taken to be unsustainable. The term ‘technoscience’ is meant to challenge critically this distinction and the ensuing separation of ‘basic’ and ‘applied’ science. For researchers within the overlapping fields of science and technology studies (STS) and feminist technoscience studies, there is no such thing as a pure and politically innocent ‘basic’ science that can be transformed into technological applications to be ‘applied’ in ‘good’ or ‘bad’ ways at a comfortable distance from the ‘clean’ hands of the researcher engaged in the former. It is a shared assumption of researchers within the fields of STS and feminist technoscience studies that ‘pure’, ‘basic’ science is as entangled in societal interests, and can be held as politically and ethically accountable, as the technological practices and interventions to which it may give rise. The compound word ‘technoscience’ was coined to emphasize this unavoidable link. Following the tradition of, among others, feminist technoscience scholar Donna Haraway (1997a), we have chosen to emphasize this link as crucial to feminist critiques of science and technology by using the umbrella term feminist technoscience studies for this special issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies (EJWS). However, to avoid terminological confusion we should underline that the field is sometimes (including in some of the articles in this special issue) referred to by other names, such as feminist science studies, feminist cultural studies of science, feminist studies of science and technology, gender and science, etc. Genealogically, feminist technoscience studies is inspired by social constructionist approaches to gender, sex, intersectionalities, society, science and technology. However, it is important to underline that these studies, together with other kinds of material or postconstructionist feminisms (Lykke, 2008, 2010a), has also transgressed social constructionism, forcefully drawing attention to the ways in which the discursive and material aspects of sociotechnical relations and processes of materialization are inextricably intertwined. This is reflected in the articles on the following pages. They are all, in Editorial

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1350506810377692

Feminist technoscience studies

This article engages with recent critical research on the obesity epidemic to think through the bioethics of current obesity prevention and consider alternative responses to fat bodies. To develop ...

Rethinking Fat: From Bio- to Body-Becoming Pedagogies

Feminism has already raised significant questions about the relationship between the cultural and the physical However, this tends to open up science to the social, leaving the actual materiality of organic and non-organic matter intact That is, whilst feminism has cast light on social and cultural meanings of sexual difference, there seems to be a hesitation to delve into the actual physical processes through which differentiation and change take place The momentous shift in the natural sciences towards openness and play within the living and nonliving world will have an enormous impact on sociologists who increasingly grapple with issues involving life and matter (for instance in discussions of 'the body') The aim of this paper is to pay tribute to the work of Australian feminist theorists, whose recognition of the importance of new materialism for sociological theory is prescient I will argue that Australian feminist research is a major attempt to deal directly with materiality Resume : Le feminisme a deja souleve suffisamment de questions au sujet de la relation entre l'aspect culturel et l'aspect physique Il semble toutefois ouvrir la science a la vie sociale, sans toucher a l'importance reelle des matieres organique et inorganique Alors que le feminisme a mis en lumiere les significations culturelles et sociales de la difference sexuelle, on semble hesiter a etudier les processus physiques reels de cette distinction et de ce changement L'important virage des sciences naturelles a legard de l'ouverture et dujeu dans le monde des vivants et des non-vivants aura certes des incidences enormes sur le travail des sociologues qui ne cessant de jangler avec les questions touchant la vie et la matiere (par exemple les discussions sur le >) Le but de cette communication consiste a rendre hommage a l'oeuvre des theoriciennes australiennes dont on doit reconnaitre l'importance du nouveau materialisme pour la theorie sociologique Je ferai valoir que la recherche des feministes australiannes represente une tentative de taille pour aborder directement cette importance Introduction There have been a number of significant shifts in the natural sciences within the past few decades to suggest an openness and play within the living and nonliving world (for examples of these shifts see DeLanda, 1997a, 1997b; Deleuze and Guattari, 2002; Jonson, 1999; Kinsman, 2001; Kirby, 1997; Margulis and Sagan, 1997; Rabinow, 1992; Sagan, 1992) (1) I believe these developments within the natural sciences stand to make a significant impression on feminist sociologists who increasingly find themselves grappling with issues involving life and matter (for instance in debates about 'the body,' the 'sex'/'gender' binary and sexual difference) In this paper I attend to explorations of 'new materialism' that have recently been produced by Australian feminists (2) I want to suggest that Australian feminist theorists' keen interest in science represents a prescient recognition of the merits of engaging directly with the natural sciences As such, the aim of this paper is to pay tribute to the work of Australian feminist theorists, and to suggest how feminist theory might harness this work to reorient our approaches to bodies and sexual difference Discussions of materiality within sociology and much of feminist theory tend to be anchored by two critical assumptions (Soper, 1995) (3) Firstly, the constitution of matter is largely figured as inert, stable, concrete, unchangeable and resistant to socio-historical change Vicki Kirby argues that contemporary critical analyses' insistence that the target of scrutiny is the discursive effects of objects, and not the object themselves, belies a construction of materiality as 'rigid, prescriptive' and opposed to 'cultural determinations that are assumed to be plastic, contestable, and able to invite intervention and reconstruction' (2001: 54) …

Myra J. Hird

Papers

New Feminist Sociological Directions