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Over a decade ago, Karen Barad challenged feminist and queer theorists to give a precise account of how discourse materializes in and as bodies. Recognizing that many of the most important theories of sex and gender at that time took the flesh as the result of iterative performative enactments, she asked what we might be able to say about the nature of the flesh such that it is open to the shaping effect of discourse. "If performativity is linked not only to the formation of the subject but also to the production of the matter of bodies," as she put it, "then it is all the more important that we understand the nature of this production" (2003, 808). Elizabeth A. Wilson's recently published monograph Gut Feminism contributes to the growing literature in feminist new materialism that takes up this task. As in Barad's own major contribution, Meeting the Universe Halfway (whose influence can be felt throughout Gut Feminism), Wilson does not seek to supplant language, culture, history, or representation with their material opposites, but rather to consider the nature of their entanglements. Matter and meaning, discourse and embodiment, epistemology and ontology: the great achievements of the last decade of feminist new materialism have been to demonstrate (in concrete and historically situated terms) that the actual is the result of the elicitation of the virtual and that such elicitation happens all the time and everywhere. Culture, technics, embodiment, language, psychology, history, and many other things as well coincide in the labor of meaning-mattering.
Wilson's Gut Feminism operates within this broad and transdisciplinary endeavor, contributing her specific region-the enteric nervous system or what she calls "the thinking gut" (5)-to the archive of feminist analyses that also includes, for example, Myra Hird's work on symbiogenesis, Annamarie Jagose's sweeping consideration of orgasm, and Sarah Franklin's pinwheel mosaic of technologies of kinship in the age of IVF1. These and other examples of feminist and queer inquiries into science and technology studies situate Wilson's work in the field. Her skilled and persuasive analyses of depression, psychopharmacology, bulimia, metabolism, and non-Oedipal psychologies annexes important territory. Both the belly (subject of so much popular advice aimed at women) and the brain (and the reifying popular scientific discourses that have grown...