‘New feminist materialisms’

This review essay discusses and contextualizes four recent publications in and on ‘new feminist materialism’. The discussion of the three edited volumes and one monograph demonstrates what the new feminist materialism wants to provoke in different (inter)disciplines, and the contextualization is aimed at dealing with the question of what is ‘new’ in new feminist materialism. Ultimately, the essay boils down to exploring the theoretical tools that scholars from diverse (inter)disciplinary fields, continents and generations have developed for dealing with agential matter rather than (gendered) passive matter. The contextualization exercise wants to show how the new materialism is not a paradigm shift or a rewriting of, for instance, the linguistic turn. These two seemingly opposite epistemological tools are both grounded in an epistemology of recognition, whereas the new materialism wants to move away from such linguisticism. Experimenting with the tool of the ‘quantum leap’, the essay ends with openings for future (epistemic) research on and of the material turn.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Feminist Review</Emphasis>: 25 years and beyond

The article explores the textual construction of gender categories in the political discourse of Simón Bolívar by means of a close critical reading of his seminal writings made public between 1812 and 1820. The historical and political processes known as Latin American independence constitute a moment of radical transformation. It was during this period that the questions of political rights, nationality and citizenship were most open to debate throughout the continent. The article shows how the category woman is constructed ambiguously in Independence/anti-colonial discourse, how gender is employed to create hierarchical systems of social organization to legitimate the exercise of power by an elite of white creole men and how myth is deployed in order to reinforce gender hegemonies. It will be shown that in Bolívar's writings colonial relations are recast as family relations and political independence from Spain legitimated in terms of sexual difference and masculine domination.