Object-Oriented Feminism

by Katherine Behar (Editor)

The essays in Object-Oriented Feminism explore 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 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.   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.

Genres: Feminism, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory

280 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2016

Reviews

[Michael Rapp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Impossible for me to review objectively, as i do not nearly have the expertise to pretend to have understood more than half of what is written in here. But even if i am not really familiar with Object-Oriented-Ontology, i was able to get a grasp on fundamental concepts and how they are put to use in different ways in this volume to reflect on issues surrounding deviant bodies and nonormative ways of beeing in the world. I especially liked the contributions of Katherine Behar (Facing Necrophilia, or 'Botox Ethics'); Anne Pollok (Queering Endocrine Disruption) and R. Joshua Scannell (Both a Cyborg and a Godess: Deep Managerial Time and Informatic Governance) to be more accessible and resonating with me.

[D.W. Miller]

A good collection, though, many of the essays do not directly engage with object-oriented ontology or speculative realism (which is purportedly the purpose of this text), but rather put forward various feminists positions from new materialist/affect or queer theory that indirectly intersect with the concerns of OOO and SR. All of the essays were excellent, but I would say the Katherine Behar, Elizabeth Povinelli, Timothy Morton, Irina Aristarkhova, and Adam Zaretsky texts most explicitly dealt with problems of object-oriented ontology. Behar and Povinelli's essays especially raised some very pressing feminist critiques of this new branch of philosophy.

[Bill Brydon · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The only way to disconnect, to get off the grid, is to self-destruct. Plasticity reminds us that our repertoire of self-practices includes this capacity for deadliness, too: a necropolitical aesthetics. As objects consisting in plasticity—which is to say, as plastic objects—we engage both creative and destructive processes in the work of “self-fashioning” ourselves. Catherine Malabou writes, “Self-fashioning implies at once the elaboration of a form, a face, a figure, and the effacement of another form, another face, another figure.”[30]

[Margaryta · Rating 3 out of 5]

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