Description
Book SynopsisThe essays in Object-Oriented Feminism explore OOF: a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourses—like speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and new materialism—that take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary. Object-oriented feminism approaches all objects from the inside-out position of being an object too, with all of its accompanying political and ethical potentials.
This volume places OOF thought in a long history of ongoing feminist work in multiple disciplines. In particular, object-oriented feminism foregrounds three significant aspects of feminist thinking in the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, employing humor to foment unseemly entanglements between things; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims, instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being “in the right” by being “wrong.”
Seeking not to define object-oriented feminism but rather to enact it, the volume is interdisciplinary in approach, with contributors from a variety of fields, including sociology, anthropology, English, art, and philosophy. Topics are frequently provocative, engaging a wide range of theorists from Heidegger and Levinas to Irigaray and Haraway, and an intriguing diverse array of objects, including the female body as fetish object in Lolita subculture; birds made queer by endocrine disruptors; and truth claims arising in material relations in indigenous fiction and film. Intentionally, each essay can be seen as an “object” in relation to others in this collection.
Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, University of Michigan; Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh; Marina Gržinić, Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts; Frenchy Lunning, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Timothy Morton, Rice University; Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University; R. Joshua Scannell, CUNY Graduate Center; Adam Zaretsky, VASTAL.
Trade Review"Taking on object-oriented ontologies and speculative realism, the authors of these essays are not shy in reestablishing feminist theory as a primary resource for thinking about objects, things and environments. The editor, Katherine Behar, offers a brilliant introduction to object-oriented feminism and the encounter it stages with current philosophical trends."—Patricia Ticineto Clough, author of Autoaffection and coeditor of Beyond Biopolitics
"Object-Oriented Feminism will be of particular interest for readers in feminist theory, philosophy and poststructuralism as they intersect with curatorial and art practices, and thus also being interesting for artists, curators and cultural workers navigating their ways in the worlds of theory and philosophy."—Identities: Journal for Gender, Politics and Culture
Table of ContentsContents
An Introduction to OOF
Katherine Behar
1. A Feminist Object
Irina Aristarkhova
2. All Objects Are Deviant: Feminism and Ecological Intimacy
Timothy Morton
3. Allure and Abjection: The Possible Potential of Severed Qualities
Frenchy Lunning
4. The World is Flat and Other Super Weird Ideas
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
5. Facing Necrophilia, or “Botox Ethics”
Katherine Behar
6. OOPS: Object Oriented Psychopathia Sexualis
Adam Zaretsky
7. Queering Endocrine Disruption
Anne Pollock
8. Political Feminist Positioning in Neoliberal Global Capitalism
Marina Gržinić
9. In the Cards: From Hearing “Things” to Human Capital
Karen Gregory
10. Both a Cyborg and a Goddess: Deep Managerial Time and Informatic Governance
R. Joshua Scannell
Acknowledgments
Notes
Contributors
Index
