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What Really Matters?

The Elusive Quality of the Material in Feminist Thought

University of Strathclydemomin.rahman{at}strath.ac.uk

Anne Witz

University of Leicesteraw81{at}le.ac.uk

The concept of the ‘material’ was the focus of much feminist work in the 1970s. It has always been a deeply contested one, even for feminists working within a broadly materialist paradigm of the social. Materialist feminists stretched the concept of the material beyond the narrowly economic in their attempts to develop a social ontology of gender and sexuality.Nonetheless, the quality of the social asserted by an expanded sense of thematerial – its ‘materiality’ – remains ambiguous. New terminologies of materiality and materialization have been developed within post-structuralist feminist thought and the literature on embodiment. The quality of ‘materiality’ is no longer asserted – as inmaterialist feminisms – but is problematized through an implicit deferral of ontology in these more contemporary usages, forcing us to interrogate the limits of both materialist and post-structuralist forms of constructionism. What really matters is how these newer terminologies of ‘materiality’ and ‘materialization’ induce us to develop a fuller social ontology of gender and sexuality; one that weaves together social, cultural, experiential and embodied practices.

Key Words: effectivity • gender • material • materiality • materialization • ontology • sexuality • the social

Feminist Theory, Vol. 4, No. 3, 243-261 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/14647001030043001


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