In this talk Iris van der Tuin looks back on, and pushes forward, a review essay on the new materialisms that she published in 2011. The essay discusses four contributions on this topic and sets out to synopsize what feminist new materialisms want to provoke in different (inter)disciplines, and how these feminist-materialist debates are ‘new.’ According to Iris van der Tuin it should neither be seen as a paradigm shift in feminist theory, nor can it be seen as Lyotardians notion of ‘rewriting’, as both are grounded in an epistemology of recognition that the new materialisms want to move away from. This talk revisits the essay in order to discuss where we are at with/in feminist new materialisms. Questions posed are a selection of the following: How have the new materialisms been critiqued, and how are feminist new materialisms anti-racist, post-, and decolonial scholarly practices? How do the new materialisms contribute productively to academic and activist understandings of, and engagements with, the ecological, economical, and postsecular crises of our interregnum? (Bauman 2012)
Short biography:
Iris van der Tuin is associate professor, and program director, of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Utrecht University (The Netherlands).
She is chair of the COST Action New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’ (2014-18).
Trained as a feminist epistemologist, she is specialized in gender studies and new materialisms.
Iris van der Tuin wrote Generational Feminism: New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach (Lexington Books, 2015). She co-authored New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Open Humanities Press, 2012) with Rick Dolphijn and edited ‘Feminist Matters: The Politics of New Materialism’ (Women: A Cultural Review, 2014) with Peta Hinton.
