Over the last decades, many scholars, feminist and others, have argued that critique must be reframed in different and more ‘productive’ ways because its ‘conventional’ formulation and practice have outlived its usefulness as a conceptual tool. Instead, they have called for affirmation or affirmative critique and a more generative mode of critical engagement in the search for new imaginaries, transformative potentialities and other futures. New feminist materialist thought’s emergence is, we argue, symptomatic of this contemporary intellectual landscape that claims to move beyond critique. While sympathetic with the desire to rethink a form of critique that speaks to the (urgent) politics of the present and the remaking of political imaginaries, we argue that the theoretical gesture to move beyond critique may offer a potentially troubling remapping organised around certain kinds of repression (of the undetermined and ambivalent work of critique) and amnesia (of feminist genealogies and over different feminist projects’ conceptualisation of matter) that yield a politics without politics.
AhmedSara (2008) ‘
Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the ‘New Materialism’. European Journal of Women’s Studies,
15(1): 23–39.
2.
Anker, Elizabeth S. and Rita Felski (2017) ‘Introduction’. In: Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (eds) Critique and Postcritique. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 1–28.
3.
BaradKaren (1996) ‘Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism Without Contradiction’. In: Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson (eds) Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 161–194.
4.
BaradKaren (2003) ‘
Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter comes to Matter’. Signs,
28(3): 801–831.
5.
BaradKaren (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.
Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press.
6.
BaradKaren (2011) ‘
Nature’s Queer Performativity’. Qui Parle,
19(2): 121–158.
BaradKaren (2015) ‘
Transmateriality: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings’. GLQ,
21(2–3): 387–422.
9.
BaradKaren (2017) ‘Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness’. European Graduate School Video Lectures: 2 August. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZHurGcoRmQ (accessed 20 May 2019).
10.
BaradKaren (2018) ‘On Touching: the Alterity Within’. Studium Generale Rietveld Academie ‘Hold Me Now – Feel and Touch in an Unreal World’, Lecture: 24 March. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7LvXswjEBY (accessed 27 May 2020).
11.
BaradKaren (2019) ‘
After the End: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice’. Theory & Event,
22(3): 524–550.
12.
BargetzBrigitte (2019) ‘
Longing for Agency: New Materialisms’ Wrestling with Despair’. European Journal of Women’s Studies,
26(2): 181–194.
13.
BarnwellAshley (2015) ‘
Entanglements of Evidence in the Turn Against Critique’. Cultural Studies,
30(6): 906–925.
14.
BarnwellAshley (2017) ‘Method Matters: the Ethics of Exclusion. In: Vicki Kirby (ed.), What if Culture Was Nature All Along? Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 26– 47.
15.
BerlantLauren (2011) Cruel Optimism.Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press.
16.
Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus (2009) ‘
Surface Reading: an Introduction’. Representations, Special Issue,
108(1): 1–21.
17.
BrownWendy (2009) ‘Introduction’. In: TalalAsadWendyBrownJudithButlerSabaMahmood (eds) Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech.
Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, pp. vii–xx.
ButlerJudith (2003) ‘What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’. In: Sarah Salih with Judith Butler (eds) The Judith Butler Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 302–322.
20.
ChenMel Y. (2012) Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect.
Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press.
21.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome (2015) ‘
Queer Crip Sex and Critical Mattering’. GLQ,
21(1): 153–162.
22.
Combahee River Collective ([1978] 1997) ‘A Black Feminist Statement’. In: Cherrie Morraga and Gloria Anzaldua (eds) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table Press, pp. 210–228.
Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost (eds) (2010) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics.
Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press.
25.
DavisAngela (1983) Women, Race, and Class.
New York:
Vintage.
26.
Dolphijn, Rick and Iris van der Tuin (eds) (2012) New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies.
Ann Arbor, MI:
MPublishing.
27.
FarrisSarah (2017) In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism.
Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press.
28.
FassinEric (2011) ‘
Between Criticism and Critique’. History of the Present: a Journal of Critical History,
1(2): 265–274.
29.
FelskiRita (2009) ‘
After Suspicion’. Profession, Vol 1: 28–35.
30.
FoucaultMichel (1980) ‘The Masked Philosopher’. In: Michel Foucault Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley and others, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, pp. 321–328.
31.
FraserNancy (1985) ‘
What’s Critical About Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender’. New German Critique,
35: 97–131.
32.
GroszElizabeth (1990) ‘Contemporary Theories of Power and Subjectivity’. In: Sneja Gunew (ed.) Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct. London: Routledge, pp. 59–121.
33.
GuillauminColette (1992) Sexe, Race et Pratique du Pouvoir. L’idée de nature.
Paris: Côté-femmes éditions.
34.
Hames-GarcíaMichael (2008) ‘How Real is Race?’. In: Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds) Material Feminisms. Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 308–339.
35.
HartmanSaidiya (1997) Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America.
New York:
Oxford University Press.
36.
HemmingsClare (2005) ‘
Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn’. Cultural Studies,
19(5): 548–567.
37.
HemmingsClare (2011) Why Stories Matter: the Political Grammar of Feminist Theory.
Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press.
38.
HennessyRosemary (2013) Fires on the Border: the Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera.
Minneapolis, MN:
The University of Minnesota Press.
39.
Hinton, Peta and Xin Liu (2015) ‘
The Im/possibility of Abandonment in New Materialist Ontologies’. Australian Feminist Studies,
30(84): 128–145.
Hollin, Gregory, Isla Forysth, Eva Giraud and Tracey Potts (2017)
‘(Dis)Entangling Barad: Materialism and Ethics’. Social Studies of Science,
47(6): 918–941.
42.
IrniSari (2013) ‘
The Politics of Materiality: Affective Encounters in a Transdisciplinary Debate’. European Journal of Women’s Studies,
20(4): 347–360.
43.
Kaiser, Birgit Mara and Kathrin Thiele (eds) (2014) ‘Diffracted Worlds –
Diffractive Readings: Onto-Epistemologies and the Critical Humanities’. Parallax,
20(3): 165--167.
44.
KoivunenAnu (2010) ‘An Affective Turn? Reimagining the Subject of Feminist Theory’. In: Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen (eds) Working with Affects in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 8–28.
45.
LatourBruno (2004) ‘
Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’. Critical Inquiry,
30: 225–248.
46.
LordeAudre (1981) ‘
The Uses of Anger’. Women’s Studies Quarterly,
9(3): 124–133.
47.
LoveHeather (2010) ‘
Truth and Consequences: on Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’. Criticism,
52(2): 235–241.
48.
LykkeNina (2010) ‘
The Timeliness of Post-Constructionism’. NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research,
18(2): 131–136.
49.
LykkeNina (2019) ‘
Making Live and Letting Die: Cancerous Bodies Between Anthropocene Necropolitics and Chthulucene Kinship’. Environmental Humanities,
11(1): 108–136.
50.
MacLureMaggie (2015) ‘The “New Materialisms”: a Thorn in the Flesh of Critical Qualitative Inquiry?’ In: Gaile S. Cannella, Michelle Salazar Pérez and Penny A. Pasque (eds) Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Foundations and Futures. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 93–112.
51.
ManningErin (2016) The Minor Gesture.
Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press.
52.
MassumiBrian (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation.
Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press.
53.
MeißnerHanna (2016) ‘New Material Feminisms and Historical Materialism: a Diffractive Reading of Two (Ostensibly) Unrelated Perspectives’. In: Victoria Pitts-Taylor (ed.) Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism. New York: New York University Press, pp. 43–57.
54.
NgaiSianne (2005) Ugly Feelings.
Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
55.
PuarJasbir (2017) The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability.
Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press.
56.
SaldanhaArun (2006) ‘
Reontologising Race: the Machinic Geography of Phenotype’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,
24(1): 9–24.
57.
SchaferSylvia (2012) ‘
Still Turning: Language, “Theory,” and History’s Fascination with the New’. Differences,
23(2): 165–174.
58.
ScottJoan W. (2007) ‘History-writing as Critique’. In: KeithJenkinsSueMogranAlunMunslow (eds) Manifestos for History.
London:
Routledge, pp. 19–38.
59.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky ([1997] 2003) ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’. In: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 123--151.
60.
SharpeChristina (2016) In the Wake: on Blackness and Being.
Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press.
61.
SondereggerRuth (2012) ‘Negative Versus Affirmative Critique: on Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Ranciere’. In: Karin de Boer and Ruth Sonderegger (eds) Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 248–264.
62.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present.
Cambridge, MA and London:
Harvard University Press.
63.
StrykerSusan (1994) ‘
My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamonix: Performing Transgender Rage’. GLQ,
1(3): 237–254.
64.
ThieleKathrin (2017) ‘Affirmation’. In: Mercedes Bunz, Birgit Mara Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele (eds) Symptoms of the Planetary Condition: a Critical Vocabulary. Lüneburg: meson press, pp. 25–29.
65.
van der TuinIris (2011) ‘
“A Different Starting Point, a Different Metaphysics”: Reading Bergson and Barad Diffractively’. Hypatia,
26(1): 22–42.
66.
WeheliyeAlexander (2014) Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human.
Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press.
67.
WhiteHayden (2007) ‘Afterword: Manifesto Time’. In: Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow (eds) Manifestos for History. London: Routledge, pp. 220–231.
68.
WiegmanRobyn (2012) Object Lessons.
Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press.
69.
WrightMichelle (2015) Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology.
Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
70.
ZerilliLinda (2017) ‘
Feminist Critique and the Realistic Spirit’. Philosophy & Rhetoric,
50(4): 589–611.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
