Matter That We Make, and Matter That Makes Us: Finding Freedom in New Feminist Materialisms

• In Event: New Material Feminist Methodologies

Abstract

Objectives and overview
The purpose of this paper is to explore how we make matter – and how matter makes us – via a re-thinking of freedom in new feminist materialisms.

Theoretical Framework
In structuralist and poststructuralist theories, freedom is attached to the subject. In structuralist theories (e.g., Marxism), freedom is a right, a commodity, and something that is a possession; that is, you either have freedom, or you do not. The problem with this view of freedom-as-a-possession is an assumption that those who “have” freedoms intentionally decide and act on their own free will. In poststructural theories, freedom remains situated within a model of constraint; however, freedom is not endowed but becomes possible through a range of choices that are produced through historical, linguistic, and discursive forces. That is, subjects become free only on the conditions within which they are produced by discourse. Their expressions of subjectivity – their freedoms – are always constituted (paradoxically) by that which seeks to contain. In poststructural theories of freedom, there is neither a prior intention nor a “doer behind the deed” (p. 134) – yet the attention remains on the subject.

New materialisms take a post-humanist view of freedom and rather than attaching it to the subject, freedom is associated with acts. Specifically, intra-action with matter creates freedom. For this paper session, the author uses Elizabeth Grosz’s (2010) reading of Bergson’s “free acts” – “those which both express us and transform us, which express our transformation” (p. 146). If freedom is located in acts rather than subjects, then freedom is not attached to any inherent quality of the subject but “immanent in the relations that the living has with the material world” (p. 148). In this way, freedom is tied to the subject’s ability to use matter in a way that transforms living: we make matter, and matter makes us.

Method
To explore “free acts” and engagement with matter, the author uses interview data from a qualitative study of first-generation women academics. Applying Grosz’s interpretation of Bergson reveals how women academics make matter in their teaching, scholarship, and service in ways that resist traditional expectations of the academy. In turn, the matter makes them in that the provocative objects they work with (e.g., book writing, interactions with other bodies/students) transform their academic lives into something more viable.

Significance
The author illustrates how these acts were not determined in advance but, following Grosz, “contracts matter into what is useful for future action and to make matter function differently in the future than in the past” (p. 153). Such a post-humanist view of freedom is linked to invention, transformation, and innovation – and opens up new ways of becoming and doing in the world.

Author

• Alecia Youngblood Jackson, Appalachian State University