REVIEW
Review of Teaching with Feminist Materialisms by Petra Hinton and Pat Treusch (Utrecht: ATGENDER, 2015)
Rebecah Pulsifer
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
pulsife2@illinois.edu
The emergent area of scholarship invoked by the phrase “new
materialisms,” most often identified with scholars such as Karen Barad,
insists on the entanglement of matter and meaning. When paired with
feminist theory’s concern for the relationship of embodied difference
to forms of power, feminist engagements with the concept of new
materialism invite reassessments of the relationships between theory
and practice, epistemology and ontology, knowing and being. These
reassessments have significant implications for the role of matter in
pedagogy, as the nine essays in the edited collection Teaching with Feminist Materialisms
demonstrate. This collection, a part of the Teaching with Gender series
published in Utrecht by the European Association for Gender Research,
Education, and Documentation offers instructors of undergraduate and
graduate students both an overview of feminist materialism’s core
questions and tools for incorporating feminist materialism into their
classrooms. These tools include specific course topics, assignments,
and handouts. Collectively, the essays in Teaching with Feminist
Materialisms explore how feminist materialism might be leveraged in the
classroom, focusing on why and how instructors might use feminist
materialism’s understanding of knowledge as indistinguishable from the
environments, objects, and practices in which it emerges.
The collection’s Introduction by editors Peta Hinton and Pat Treusch
offers a genealogy of feminist materialism, which will be especially
generative for readers familiar with current debates in new
materialism. Hinton and Treusch point out the links between, on the one
hand, feminist theory’s “scrutiny of the nature/culture binary,” which
“has left little room for any simple separation of an empirical world
from an inquiring subject,” and, on the other hand, new materialism’s
awareness of how “objects and subjects of inquiry are entangled,
emergent, and contingent” (3). For Hinton and Treusch, feminist
materialism is the sign under which these two critical traditions
overlap. As a pedagogical practice, it reveals that text-based learning
is “not animated by (human) student- or (human) teacher-led reading
practices alone,” but rather that “the process of formulating ‘what
matters’ in the text is a co-productive engagement of bodies, spaces,
and wor[l]ds” (4). This critical account of feminist materialism raises
questions about whether—and, if so, how— feminist materialism might be
distinguished from new materialism more broadly, or from related areas
of inquiry, such as feminist science studies. After all, Hinton and
Treusch suggest that new materialism is always already feminist in that
it emerges from feminist theory’s investigations into the ways in which
embodied subjects and material worlds are mutually constitutive. Their
introduction, therefore, does not delineate feminist materialism from
other forms of materialism so much as shed light on new materialism’s
feminist backbone. Although at times it claims to elucidate feminist
materialism as “an emerging topic of feminist studies” (19), the
introduction summons work by Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and others
in revealing materialism to be fundamental to feminist studies.
The chapters in Teaching with Feminist Materialisms
attend to feminist materialism’s insistence on the inseparability of
practice and theory. The chapters can be broadly divided into those
that focus on specific classroom practices and those that focus on
larger theoretical questions of teaching with materiality in mind.
Several essays provide sample writing prompts, classroom handouts, and
assignments, such as Sofie Sauzet’s “snaplog” assignment prompts,
Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer’s discussion questions for scaffolding “memory
work,” and Astrida Neimanis’s handouts and workshop notes for teaching
“weather writing.” The chapter by Iris van der Tuin and Rick Dolphijn,
editors of the formative collection New Materialism: Interviews and
Cartographies (2012), will be of particular interest to new materialist
scholars interested in questions of pedagogy. The chapter describes
Utrecht University’s Thresholds Project, a seminar format in which
students spend ten weeks mapping alternatives to the binary oppositions
of humanism in the context of student-selected course themes, including
“Naturecultures,” “Immanent Time, Immanent Space,” “Science,
Humanities, and the Ethics to Come,” and “Semblance and Event” (23).
Van der Tuin and Dolphijn describe the Thresholds Project as a platform
from which experiments with new materialism, including those focused on
the intra-action of matter and discourse, can be conducted (32). Like
Van der Tuin and Dolphijn, Sigrid Schmitz surveys specific course
formats that work at the intersection of science studies, new
materialism, and feminist theory; her chapter reflects on the
importance of promoting “transcultural” dialogues that account for
differences among student identities, learning styles, and disciplinary
backgrounds. The essays focused on in-class practice are saturated with
the heady theoretical apparatuses of new materialism and feminist
theory. Nevertheless, many of the in-class activities and assignments
they describe will be recognizable to anyone familiar with
student-centered pedagogy: close reading (van der Tuin and Dolphijn),
visual and rhetorical analysis (Sauzet), reflection papers
(Lorenz-Meyer and Neimanis), and group work (Schmitz). In these
accounts, feminist materialism recalibrates classroom content, but it
is less clear how it transforms the means by which this content is
received and practiced by students.
More intriguing are the chapters that take a broad view on how feminist
materialism might transform the contemporary academy. For Beatriz
Revelles Benavente, feminist materialism means “de-centering the figure
of the teacher” and also teaching itself; she argues that the
institutional realities of the contemporary academy still allow for the
creation of “agential spaces,” in Barad’s sense, which in turn can
enable potential acts of resistance and change (61). Hanna Meißner,
too, sees hope in the contemporary academy. She resists the nostalgia
inherent in presentist pessimism by pointing out that “academia never
was a paradise of critical pedagogy but, rather, an institution shaped
by and mired in exclusionary practices and epistemic traditions founded
on limiting dichotomies” (130). Meißner optimistically reads what many
call the current “crisis” in higher education as an opportunity for
“new practices of knowing” (138). Kathrin Thiele, through her sensitive
reading of Hannah Arendt, concurs that the academy might become a place
“to practice thinking as action” (108). Maya Nitis, drawing primarily
from Jacques Rancière and Paulo Freire, argues compellingly against
“the pernicious norm of mastery” as the goal of higher education (115).
“Entering a class with a text, film, etc. without objectifying or
instrumentalizing the material on hand,” Nitis writes, “rewrites the
presumed relationship of humans as subject-doers and material as
passive object/s” (119). For Nitis, the classroom should become a space
in which teachers, students, and objects are reconfigured as
“collaborators” in necessarily partial and contingent experiences of
inquiry (120). These chapters demonstrate how feminist materialism can
go beyond radical pedagogy’s challenge to the teacher/student binary
and posthumanism’s displacement of the human by exploring the ways in
which the academy exposes the politics of materiality. Thinking
hopefully, Benavente, Meissner, Thiele, and Nitis together suggest that
thinking with, through, and about matter can be a way of acting against
hierarchies of power.
Although the collection is pedagogically strong, Teaching with Feminist Materialisms
may leave readers wondering about another aspect of materiality; that
is, the material constraints forced upon teachers and students by the
contemporary neoliberal academy. To what extent can higher education
instructors model their in-class activities, assignments, or course
designs on the feminist materialist practices described in these
essays, while still attending to requirements of their departments and
disciplines? In other words, how can the pedagogical practices proposed
by these authors be enacted by academics constrained by, for example,
financial cuts to higher education, requirements for tenure, and
administrative demands requiring the legibility of academic work?
Surely the possibility of doing so would be greater for tenured faculty
in certain departmental, disciplinary, and national contexts. The
volume’s relative silence on the topic of instructors’ and students’
material realities, and how these realities may affect their degrees of
educational access, learning capacity, and pedagogical freedom, is
emblematic of the ongoing challenge of attending to the interrelation
of theory and practice, a point of contention among many critics and
thinkers of feminist materialism.
As a whole, Teaching with Feminist Materialisms
provides a welcome contribution to current conversations about how the
mutuality of theory and practice that feminist materialism avows can
come into being in the contemporary academy. To those already familiar
with the core principles of new materialism and feminist theory, the
collection’s Introduction will be a welcome reminder of their mutual
entanglement. Admittedly, the collection does not radically alter
ongoing discussions within new materialism, feminist studies, or
pedagogy. The volume’s essays encourage thoughtfulness about teaching,
even if they leave ambiguous how feminist materialism in particular can
inform classroom practices. They do, however, show that holding these
areas of inquiry in mind at the same time does open and extend up
important questions about how, as teachers and students, we differently
encounter and experience matter—how, indeed, we are matter.
References
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.
Dolphijn, R., & van der Tuin, I. (2012). New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Open Humanities Press.
Hinton, P., & Treusch, P., eds. (2016). Teaching with Feminist Materialisms. ATGENDER Press.
Bio
Rebecah Pulsifer is a PhD Candidate in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.