Material Feminisms

Theoria means “a way of seeing” the world, and the study of political theory asks us to deeply recognize our own way of seeing, as one of the vast variety of ways that are available. Political theory is about making sense of human experience of the world, and how our own way of engaging with it is implicated in how power operates. This edited collection is meaningful because of the difficult journey to transform my overlong and complicated doctoral dissertation into a book. I was under a lot of pressure to do so and struggling to articulate the connections of a then controversial worldview. I had to find already published and brilliant words to wrap up my thoughts and convince the publisher of their worth and timeliness. This book was one of the key texts that gave me hope, and new terms for radical and complex ideas, and ultimately pulled my argument together. The ideas, especially in (feminist quantum theorist) Barad’s chapter on “how matter comes to matter” helped form the apex of my work as a renegotiation of Cartesian dualism, the history of sex/gender, and the host of pervasive polarizations at the root of Western thinking.