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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 Materialismsdemonstrate. 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...