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The New Materialism and Sexual Difference

There is a rising tide within feminist theory, referred to as the new

materialism, which has been described as an emerging new paradigm

ð Alaimo and Hekman 2008; see also Ahmed 2008Þ. This article ex-

amines key strands in this new materialism, which is differentiated from the

materialism rooted in Marxism. The new materialism is, rather, a response

to the linguistic turn that has dominated the humanities in the past few

decades and that, it is claimed, has neglected the materiality of matter.Concerned with rectifying this neglect, the new materialism has devel-

oped, in part, in debate with poststructuralism and with Judith Butler’s

theory of the body, which often serve to exemplify the linguistic turn.1

Butler’s work is criticized for not allowing an adequate role for the ma-

teriality of the physical body in the process of its materialization. The new

material feminisms attempt to address such an imbalance by returning to

the materiality of matter. Their aim is to find a way of theorizing the inter-

implication of the discursive and the material, the natural and the cultural,

the body and its social construction in a way that is more respectful of theagency of matter — to find a way of according matter a more active role in the

interimplication of each of these aspects.

A concern with the agency of matter is thus a key feature of the new

materialism, in relation not just to the body, sex, and gender but all as-

pects of the material world, all aspects of that which is designated “nature”

in opposition to that which is designated “culture,” including, for some,

the environment ð Alaimo 2010Þ. Indeed, the neglect of the agency of

matter and, in keeping with this, a lack of attention to science studies are

considered the most problematic features of the preoccupation with lan-

guage and signification, the social and the discursive, that characterizes the

linguistic turn.

I would like to thank Kathleen Lennon for her helpful comments, encouragement, and

inspiration during the writing of this article.1 There is some confusion over the use of the phrase “the linguistic turn.” While it is

sometimes taken to characterize poststructuralism or postmodernism, others accept that post-

structuralist theories such as Butler’s are, rather, an attempt to avoid a reductive linguisticism.

Either way, Butler’s account of the materiality of matter falls short from the perspective of thenew materialism.

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2015, vol. 40, no. 2]

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Much of the work in the new materialism accepts the basic insights of

feminist poststructuralism concerning the mediated nature of our access

to the world. It is felt, nevertheless, that the constitutive role of language

and meaning needs some kind of foothold in or interaction with the worldof matter — what Karen Barad calls “intra-action” ð2003, 2007Þ — in order

to understand its full force. In relation to the body, it is argued that a focus

entirely fixed on the cultural effects of the body’s constitution fails to ap-

preciate that the biological body involves open systems — as contempo-

rary developments in the physical sciences ðespecially nonlinear biology Þ are

increasingly emphasizing — and does not simply provide a fixed, inert basis

for cultural interpretation, as some constructionist accounts would seem

to imply. Hence, understanding the active role of matter in the cultural con-

struction of matter requires combining insights from the physical sciences with social studies of science as well as philosophical inquiry. The basic

premise is that accepting that we cannot access these materialities in and of

themselves should not blind us to the ways in which materiality, including

the materiality of the body, is in intra-action with its cultural intelligibility.

Uniting the various strands in the new materialism, then, is a broad aim

to give the materiality of matter a more active role. This includes redressing

the “biophobia” that would seem to characterize much contemporary fem-

inist body theory ðDavis 2009, 67Þ. It also involves rethinking the nature/

culture dichotomy to recognize that it is not just that nature and/or matterare products of culture but that culture is also in some sense a product of

nature. Indeed, nature is that without which culture wouldn’t exist at all

ðKirby 2008Þ.

In this article, I examine two different claims running through these new

materialist positions. The first is a kind of metaphysical claim about the

link between our articulations and that which they are articulating. This

reasserts a general claim about the interimplication of the material and

the symbolic and reflects the concern that contemporary theories of the

body, such as Butler’s, are not respectful enough of the agency of matterðColebrook 2000; Barad 2003Þ without going so far as to make matter the

determining force. The aim here is to develop a better understanding of

the process of interimplication, of the mutual articulation of nature and

culture, matter and discourse. The second claim is a stronger one, about

the relationship between biological processes and social formations, forms

of social identity and culture, in which culture is resituated as part of na-

ture. In this strand, the emphasis is on culture as inescapably, inevitably a

product of nature and matter. Nature thus becomes the determining force,

however open-ended and contingent. In this view, culture was nature allalong ðGrosz 2005, 2008; Kirby 2008Þ, although not in the reductionist

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sense that feminist theories of the body and feminist critiques of science and

animal studies ðamong othersÞ have extensively contested.

These two claims are examined in the context of debates about sexual

difference. This is a key aspect of Elizabeth Grosz’s work, in which sexualdifference is deemed an ineradicable, ontological difference. I argue, how-

ever, that addressing the concerns of the new materialism does not lead to

the conclusion that the duality of sexual difference is in any way inevitable,

nor does it provide justification for the claim that there is a metaphysical

basis for sexual difference in biology. I argue instead that considering sexual

difference in the context of the new materialism provides the possibility of

reconfiguring such difference beyond the binary frame. The reason for this

is that rethinking the relationship between nature and culture, materiality

and discourse to allow some kind of agency for matter also requires re-thinking the relationship between epistemology and ontology. Although

rethinking this relationship is a significant aspect of Butler’s work, her refusal

to allow the ontological aspect any active role stems from a privileging of

the epistemological over the ontological in an attempt to avoid a meta-

physics of presence or substance ðButler 1990, 1993Þ. It is this avoidance

that results in her refusal to allow the materiality of the physical body a

significant role in the process of its materialization.2 Rethinking the rela-

tionship between ontology and epistemology in the context of the con-

cerns of the new materialism can avoid this impasse. It can help us to betterunderstand the active interimplication of ontology and epistemology ðfor

Butler, only the latter is activeÞ without succumbing to a metaphysics of

presence or substance. This then allows us to see, first, that sexual difference

is not given in matter, ontology, or metaphysics and, second, that the binary

constitution of sexual difference is open to challenge and reconfiguration.

This becomes clear when sexual difference is considered in the context

of Barad’s agential realism, which underpins her account of posthumanist

performativity. Although this involves respecting the agency of matter, it

also involves a fundamental rethinking of ontology as relational. I arguethat this gives Barad’s account an edge over other new materialist positions

such as Vicki Kirby’s and Grosz’s because it better explains the relationship

between culture and nature, discourse and materiality as a matter of ac-

tive interimplication on both sides. In so doing, it undermines the idea

of sexual difference as immutable: sexual difference becomes a product of

2 In Butler’s view, ontology is always already bound up with regimes of power/knowledge,

such as the “epistemic regime of presumptive heterosexuality” ðButler 1990, xÞ. It is these epi-stemic and ontological regimes that reify and produce any purported categories of ontology.

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boundary-making practices in the intra-action between the material and

the discursive rather than an immutable, ontological difference that exists

outside the material-discursive relation.

Claim 1: Active matter

One important area of discontent running through the new materialism,

then, stems from a sense of unease about the way that the discourse/

materiality or discourse/reality dichotomy has been rethought in the past

three decades. The general contention is that rather than rethinking the

interimplication of these two aspects in the constitution of reality — as,

for example, Donna J. Haraway ð1991Þ and Butler ð1993Þ have explicitly

attempted —

there has been what amounts to a wholesale capitulation tothe discursive side of the dichotomy. The focus on discourse has been at

the expense of the material, as Susan Hekman ð2008, 86Þ puts it, which has

led to an unfortunate loss of concern with the real. Although the aim has

been to understand the real in discursive terms, there has been instead a

privileging of the discursive. The main problem with Butler’s account is

that matter becomes a postsignificatory effect of power ð Alcoff 2006, 158;

Colebrook 2008Þ.3 Consequently, her account is much criticized — not

only for failing to link the materialization of the body in performative

acts to the materiality of social and economic structures ðMcNay 2000Þ butalso for not allowing the body “more of a drag on signification” ðMartin

1994, 112Þ. Butler’s approach is thus emblematic of contemporary fem-

inist theory’s “flight from the material” that, Stacy Alaimo and Hekman

suggest, has foreclosed attention to “lived material bodies and evolving

corporeal practices” ð2008, 3Þ. The demand within this claim, then, is to

find a more satisfactory way to define the relation between the discursive

and the material, building on the insights of poststructuralism without

losing sight of the reality of matter.

Hekman ð2008, 2010Þ thus echoes those feminists who insist on a “real”beyond discourse — not in a modernist sense of an independent, objective

reality but more in a postpositivist, realist sense ð2008, 90; citing Alcoff

2000Þ that moves away from the idea of language as constituting reality to

one of language as “disclosing” reality, drawing on Joseph Rouse’s work in

3 “Postsignificatory” refers to the way in which, for Butler, matter is always only ever that

which is posited, in a Hegelian sense. As such, it can be known only within conceptual schemes,

including those of language and signification, which are the products of regimes of power/knowledge.

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the philosophy of science.4 The aim here is to include an ontological as-

pect as well as an epistemological one, which, it is claimed, is missing in the

linguistic turn and in Butler’s account. The idea of disclosure aims to avoid

both the assumption that there is a fixed reality about which we can haveabsolute knowledge ðas in modernist realismÞ and the problems of repre-

sentationalism, which assumes a gap between reality and our representa-

tions of it. Indeed, the rejection of representationalism is a key concern

that runs throughout the new materialism. The aim, instead, is to over-

come the duality of words and things, language and reality, that underpins

modernist conceptions of passive nature ðor matterÞ awaiting representation

in language and culture.5 In this view, there may not be an objective, inde-

pendent reality to which we can compare the results of our investigations,

but we can, nevertheless, compare different disclosures to find the mosteffective. Most important for this claim, there is a world that shapes and

constrains our knowledge even though we cannot get at it independently of

our conceptualizations. As Hekman states, “We know our world through

our concepts but the difference is there is a world that we know” ð2008,

110Þ. Reality ðthe worldÞ is considered to be agentic rather than passive:

“Language structures how we apprehend the ontological but it doesn’t

constitute it” ð98Þ.

This approach, it is suggested, involves a kind of realism and view of

ontology that is disallowed in Butler’s account because “½it ðlike Hegel’sLogic Þ conflates the being of a thing with the mode in which it is known”

ðColebrook 2000, 78Þ. Butler could turn this comment back on realist

accounts, however. For, as Alison Stone puts it, Butler’s account is anti-

realist because “she regards any realist account of bodily forces as epistemi-

cally confused, mistakenly regarding its normative and productive claims as

neutrally descriptive” ð2005, 20Þ. From Butler’s perspective, it is in fact realist

accounts that make the error of misrecognizing ðor, at least, underplayingÞ

4 Although the idea of “disclosure” was originally Martin Heidegger’s, Hekman rejects that

sense of the term as too mystical, involving “the showing forth of Being throughout the

ages” ð2010, 92Þ. Rouse’s development of it in relation to scientific practices has been more

influential in the new materialism; see especially Rouse ð2002Þ.5 Hekman ð2010Þ provides a detailed discussion of the problems of representationalism

and the many critiques of it from a wide range of approaches, including philosophies of sci-

ence, social studies of science, social theories concerned with political representation, postco-

lonial studies, and queer theory. She examines the metaphysical and ontological implications

of representationalism and the far-reaching implications it has had for modernist and con-

temporary social and scientific understandings of the nature of the relationship between reality and our representations of it.





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the constitutive role of particular conceptualizations in any apparent objective

reality, a danger the new materialists must address.

The guiding thread in this first claim is thus a rethinking of the inter-

implication of the material and the discursive in a way that allows some kindof active role for the physicality of the body in the constitution of our em-

bodied subjectivities. This involves finding a means to get at the concrete

reality of bodily forces without ðgiven Butler’s possible responseÞ succumb-

ing to normative descriptions of them and despite the ubiquity of media-

tion. There is a general contention that it is one thing to show that bi-

ology does not determine social norms but that it is going too far to make

biology irrelevant to sexed embodiment ðMoi 1999; Alcoff 2006Þ.

In this article, I focus on Barad’s account of posthumanist performa-

tivity ð2003, 2007Þ, which addresses these concerns. It provides an ac-count of “the entanglement of matter and meaning” ð2007Þ by combining

feminist and queer theory with science studies, especially quantum physics

via the “philosophy-physics” ð2003, 813Þ of Niels Bohr. Barad’s work

provides a way of thinking the interimplication of the discursive and the

material in way that allows a more creative role for matter than post-

structuralist accounts such as Butler’s would seem to allow. Moreover, in

relation to the second claim my article is addressing, Barad’s account does

not, I will show, require a commitment to a metaphysics of sexual differ-

ence or provide a basis for a metaphysics of sexual difference. On thecontrary, it shows the implausibility of any such notion.

Posthumanist performativity and agential realism

Barad’s account of posthumanist performativity attempts to get at the in-

tertwining of social and scientific accounts of nature and culture in order

to rethink the relationship between the discursive and the material as one

of interimplication. She suggests that this could be read as a “diffractive”

elaboration of Butler and Haraway’s crucial insights ðBarad 2003, 808 n. 10Þ

because it aims to shed light on how discursive practices produce materialbodies. Indeed, this was Butler’s task in Bodies That Matter ð1993Þ and again

in her turn to psychoanalysis and reconsideration of G. F. W. Hegel and

Louis Althusser in The Psychic Life of Power ð1997Þ. Nevertheless, there

remains a lacuna in her work, because if matter cannot be understood ex-

cept as an effect of power and signification, then the account remains one-

sided. In contrast to that, Barad wants to get at the intertwining of matter

and discursivity in the “mattering” of the world ðBarad 2003, 817Þ, a re-

lation she describes as “material-discursive” ð with a hyphen to denote the

linkage ½810Þ. Her account of agential realism, which is the central shift inher “performative metaphysics” ð811Þ, allows her to do this. It involves

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drawing on Bohr’s work in quantum physics, which Barad suggests could be

regarded as a kind of “protoperformative account of scientific practices”

ð813 n. 17Þ, and applying it to the question of ontology.

The turn to Bohr is of great significance for Barad because Bohr’s work is the source of her fundamental rethinking of ontology as relational rather

than as something beyond meaning and metaphysics. This move is crucial

to the development of the agential realist ontology involved in her refor-

mulation of performativity as a kind of performative metaphysics ðfurther

explained below Þ. It is this fundamental rethinking of ontology that allows

her to rethink matter as playing an active role in the discursive-material

relation and to avoid the charges of antirealism that haunt an account such

as Butler’s. In addition, it allows Barad to avoid the problems of represen-

tationalism that Butler’s approach, and others deemed antirealist, also at-tempts to avoid.

The most significant insight, for my purposes here, that Barad takes from

Bohr’s work is his radical rethinking of the atomist metaphysics that under-

pins much modern thought, including science and liberal social theories,

which take “things” as ontologically basic entities that are individually de-

terminate ðBarad 2003, 813Þ. Bohr’s work in quantum theory undermined

both Newtonian physics and Cartesian epistemology, with its tripartite

structure of knowers, words, and things and its distinction between subject

and object, which in turn underpins representationalism. Bohr’s work em-phasized instead “the inseparability of ‘observed object’ and ‘agencies of

observation’” ð814Þ and the significance of Werner Heisenberg’s uncer-

tainty principle. These insights, taken together, lead to the conclusion that

the primary epistemological unit is not the independent object with in-

herent boundaries and properties but, rather, “phenomena” ð815Þ. These

phenomena are produced in the interaction of what amounts to practices

of knowing and seeing and being. While Bohr wanted to develop a new

theoretical ðepistemologicalÞ framework to make sense of his empirical find-

ings and retain the possibility of objective knowledge, Barad applies the in-sights of his work to the question of ontology ð814Þ. She argues that Bohr’s

work undermines the idea of ontology as outside meaning and metaphysics

and suggests instead that ontology is fundamentally indeterminate. Setting

these insights in the context of contemporary science studies that empha-

size the performative impact of scientific practices, Barad develops the

agential realist ontology that underpins her account of posthumanist per-

formativity and her account of the material-discursive relation.6

6 In Barad ð2003Þ, she refers in particular to Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Rouse.





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Barad’s work thus focuses on the ways in which metaphysical assump-

tions, basic philosophical beliefs, have shaped the study and understand-

ing of ontology and, in this sense, are inseparable from it. She questions,

in particular, the assumption that reality ð“beings” and “things”Þ consistsof individually determinate entities with inherent attributes that are on-

tologically prior to their representation. For Barad, this is a problematic

metaphysical starting point. Thus, she claims, we need a different meta-

physics ð2003, 812Þ. Hence, she describes the agential realist ontology that

is the cornerstone of her “materialist, naturalist, posthumanist elaboration”

ð803Þ of performativity as a kind of performative metaphysics. This per-

formative metaphysics is based on the idea of ontology as fundamentally

indeterminate yet locally decidable via the boundary-making practices in-

herent in the material-discursive relation. Hence, Barad’s agential realistontology addresses some of Butler’s concerns regarding the interrelation

of ontology and epistemology but without succumbing to the problems

that stem from Butler’s insistence on the undecidability of matter or to

the concomitant failure of Butler’s account to accord the materiality of the

body any role in the process of its own materialization.

The distinction between undecidability and indeterminacy is crucial

here. The ontological indeterminacy that underpins Barad’s account is not

the same as the undecidability involved in Butler’s account in relation to

matter. Thus, to say that the meaning of something is indeterminate inontological terms in Barad’s account is not the same as to say that that some-

thing is fundamentally undecidable, as in Butler’s account. It is, rather, as

Barad puts it in explaining the significance of the wave/particle duality par-

adox that gave rise to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, to say that an

inherent ontological indeterminacy is decidable only locally and “within phe-

nomena” ðBarad 2003, 815 n. 20Þ, through specific material resolutions —

that is, in specific causal intra-actions in which the apparatus of observation

plays a constitutive role.7 In Barad’s performative metaphysics, despite a fun-

damental ontological indeterminacy, decidability is enacted in the boundary-making practices inherent in the material-discursive relation and is thus a

matter of the ongoing intra-activity of the world in its becoming ðdiscussed

further below Þ.

7 Apparatuses are open-ended practices of rather than in the world — always in intra-action

with other apparatuses, involved in the production of phenomena even as they are also phe-

nomena themselves ðsee Barad 2003, 815 – 17; 2007Þ. They are continually changing, iterative

and reiterative, thus open to rearticulation: “Apparatuses are dynamic ðreÞconfigurings of the

world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclu-

sionary boundaries are enacted” ð2003, 816Þ.

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Like Butler, Barad thus argues that “matter is always already an ongoing

historicity” ðBarad 2003, 821Þ; it is not fixed and inert. Where Barad differs

from Butler is that the rethinking of ontology as relational in Barad’s ac-

count of agential realism addresses what she refers to as the anthropocentriclimitations of Butler’s account by providing a way of linking discursive prac-

tices to material phenomena. Butler’s account is described as anthropocen-

tric due to its enclosure of the performative process, including resistance and

agency, within language and signification, so that the constitutive outside

in her account remains inaccessible except as an outside within language or

as excess. Therefore, matter remains a passive product of discursive practices.

In contrast to this, in Barad’s account of agential realism, matter is rather a

matter of “substance in its intra-active becoming” ð828Þ and, as such, is always

given within phenomena that are inherently material-discursive. Matter is ac-corded an active role in this relation, and no priority is given to either side.

The performative process includes matter within it. There isn’t an outside

in Butler’s sense, because all is enfolded within the material-discursive re-

lation, in an ongoing dynamic process of interimplication. Thus, this ac-

count acknowledges that the material dimensions ðmatterÞ of regulatory

practices are important factors in performative production, not just a mat-

ter of excess that cannot be captured, as in Butler’s account. Rather than

coming to be in a process of citationality as Butler ðdrawing on Michel

Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and speech act theory Þ would have it, mattercomes to matter through the iterative intra-activity of the world in its be-

coming: “The world is intra-activity in its differential mattering” ðBarad

2003, 817Þ. For Barad, the performative process is thus more one of on-

going iterative intra-activity in which matter — “the weightiness of the

world” ð827Þ — is accorded an active role in the fullness of its historicity.

This view of the material-discursive relation is based on a relational on-

tology in which the primary ontological units are not things but phenomena

and in which the primary semantic units are not words but material-

discursive practices ðBarad 2003, 818Þ. Particular intra-actions produce phe-nomena in an ongoing dynamic process that involves the configuring and

“reconfiguring of locally determinate causal structures, with determinate

boundaries, properties, meanings, and patterns of marks on bodies” ð817Þ.

Hence, it is through material-discursive practices that particular boundaries

come to be constituted. In this process, properties are stabilized and desta-

bilized, precisely because the world is a continually open process of mat-

tering involving “the realization of different agential possibilities” ð817Þ that

arise in the interaction of the discursive and the material. Material-discursive

practices are thus boundary-making practices that have no finality in the on-





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going dynamics of agential intra-activity. In this view, reality is not com-

posed of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena but things-

in-phenomena.8 Hence, it is these phenomena that are constitutive of re-

ality, including, I will suggest, the “reality” of sexual difference.Most important for understanding the significance of sexual difference

as an ontological feature of natural life, neither discursive practices nor ma-

terial phenomena are ontologically or epistemically prior: “Intra-actions are

causally constraining but nondeterministic enactments through which

matter-in-the process-of-becoming is sedimented out and enfolded in fur-

ther materializations” ðBarad 2003, 823Þ. The concept of sedimentation is

significant here, as reality in agential realist terms consists of the sedimen-

tation of particular intra-actions and boundary-making practices that have

produced intelligible configurations ðor materializationsÞ. Sedimentationthus indicates an ongoing process of configuration and reconfiguration,

involving both human and nonhuman agencies, a process that constitutes

reality and yet is open to change. Reality is “sedimented out of particular

practices that we have a role in shaping” ðBarad 1998, 102Þ. And this gives

us responsibility and accountability ð which is of particular significance con-

cerning the possibility of reconfiguring the apparatus of bodily production

in relation to sexual differenceÞ. Although Barad’s account allows the pos-

sibility of active agency on the part of matter, that active agency is clearly

intertwined with its ongoing discursive articulation and is not a matter of causal determination in a traditional sense.

In relation to the body and sexual difference, Barad’s account helps us to

see that bodies do not preexist their discursive production but are in-

tertwined with it ðas Butler insistsÞ while fully incorporating materiality

in the process of the body’s materialization ðin a way that Butler’s ap-

proach cannot accommodateÞ. Although the idea of ontological purity is

undermined in Butler’s account of performativity, as is the idea of sexual

difference as ontological difference, Barad’s performative metaphysics pro-

vides a fuller rethinking of ontology, one that might help us to better ac-count for the establishment ðor “enactment,” to use Barad’s terminology Þ of

binary sexual difference as ontological difference. Thus, Barad’s account

is more respectful of the materiality of the body while also, I shall argue,

allowing the possibility of opening up sexual difference beyond the binary

frame.

8 Barad distinguishes phenomena in the agential realist sense, in which “phenomena are

the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting ‘components’” ð2003, 815Þ, fromboth Immanuel Kant’s sense and the sense used in phenomenology.

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Claim 2: Culture is nature

The second claim running through the new material feminisms is a claim

about the link between biological formations, forms of social identity, and

culture. The common thread here is an overturning of the nature/culturedichotomy so that rather than seeing nature ðor matterÞ as the passive

ground of social construction, or as some kind of inaccessible otherness,

culture becomes the product of nature. In this view, “culture was really

nature all along” ðKirby 2008, 214Þ. Two proponents of this view are

Kirby and Grosz. Kirby extends the Derridean notion of writing and dif-

fe ́ rance to the question of the materiality of matter, to make the process of

differentiation immanent to matter rather than some kind of grid imposed

on it, as in Butler’s account. This involves renaturalizing language so that

both language and culture become the stuff of nature. Grosz, on the otherhand, committed to a kind of Spinozian monism and Bergsonian vitalism

emphasizing the creativity of life as it constantly strives to animate matter

ðBergson 1912Þ, turns to a feminist revision of Charles Darwin to explain

culture’s immersion in nature.

Kirby, différance, and the consubstantiality of nature and culture

Kirby has long questioned feminist attempts to theorize the body without

reference to what she refers to as its “corporeal substance” ðKirby 1997,

2002Þ. She uses this term rather than “matter” to get at “the very meat of carnality that is born and buried, the stuff of decay that seems indifferent

to semiosis,” “the concrete and tangible thingness of things” ðKirby 2002,

277Þ. She thinks it is a mistake to separate discourse and culture from na-

ture, “from the body of the material world, indeed from the material body

of human animality” ð2008, 220Þ, as if the body could be some sort of pri-

mordial and inhuman outside, which includes the materiality of the body.

Hence, Kirby wants to argue that nature and culture are consubstantial

ð2008, 223Þ However, her understanding of consubstantiality is based on

two rather radical claims: first, that culture is nature because it is in ournature, in our biological makeup, to produce culture and, second, that

“‘life itself’ is creative encryption” ð219Þ because nature ðincluding biol-

ogy Þ is literate and articulate. This leads to the provocative conclusion that

the workings of language could be “an instantiation of a more general ar-

ticulation and involvement whose collective expression . . . we are ” ð229Þ.

To make these moves, Kirby draws on Bruno Latour’s ð2004Þ work in

science studies, which takes issue with social constructionist critiques of

science. She draws in particular on Latour’s concept of “realistic realism”

ðKirby 2008, 226Þ, which is based on a refusal of the separation of na-ture and culture. It involves, rather, the idea that “the referent is actively





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as biological organisms are.11 Hence, “the systematic cohesion of modes

of reproduction ðforms of repetitionÞ, with their resulting mutations, which

are imperfect or innovative copies ðforms of differenceÞ, and modes of

‘natural’ selection ðsystems of differentiationÞ, produce a system —

or, rather,an asystematic systematicity — that is co-extensive with all of life in its po-

litical, cultural, and even artificial as well as its natural forms” ðGrosz 2008,

39Þ. This understanding of the relationship between nature and culture

thus involves the disquietingly radical claim that culture is nature’s way of

thinking itself: we simply are our biologies.

The question for Grosz thus becomes, “How does biology, the bodily

existence of individuals ð whether human or nonhumanÞ, provide the con-

ditions for culture and for history, those terms to which it is traditionally

opposed? . . .

How does biology —

the structure and organization of livingsystems — facilitate and make possible cultural existence and social change?”

ðGrosz 2008, 24Þ. She argues that the turn to Darwin provides a means of

answering these questions positively, primarily because it involves a view of

matter as creative without being determining, which suggests an active but

transformable and historicized account of biology.12 It thus involves a re-

jection of the idea of matter as inert and passive or fixed and determining or

as that which is posited postdiscursively, as in Butler’s account. It also allows

Grosz to conceive of differentiation as immanent to matter rather than

extraneous and imposed on it, as in traditional dualist accounts as well as inButler’s attempt to avoid them.

Hence, Grosz emphasizes that the three principles that ðin her inter-

pretationÞ govern evolution — natural selection, individual variation, and

heritability — are underpinned by a logic of self-transformation that pro-

vides the motor for change. They “provide an explanation of a series of

processes and interactions that are fundamentally mindless and automatic,

without plan, direction, or purpose, which are, on the other hand, entirely

unpredictable and inexplicable in causal terms” ðGrosz 2008, 36Þ. What

she likes about this is the “asystematicity” ð46Þ it involves and the way that cultural change can be seen to be part of natural evolutionary change

precisely because cultural relations are not separated from living material

relations.

Grosz wants to positively embrace the possibilities for change and

transformation that evolutionary theory, thus interpreted, involves. She

11 In this interpretation, Grosz rejects Daniel Dennett’s distinction ðfollowing Richard

DawkinsÞ between the biological evolution of species and the mimetic evolution of cultural

and mental concepts, because that distinction reproduces mind/body dualism.12

For a discussion of the reasons she thinks the turn to Darwin makes a positive contri-bution to feminist projects, see Grosz ð2008, 40 – 46Þ.





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emphasizes that evolutionary theory avoids the idea of linear progress.

Although history fixes what was fundamentally a matter of contingency

and chance, the future is constrained only by what has gone before. She

argues that Darwin “offers an account of the genesis of the new fromthe play of repetition and difference within the old” ðGrosz 2008, 29Þ,

moving “toward a future with no real direction, no promise of any par-

ticular result, no guarantee of progress or improvement, but with every

indication of inherent proliferation and transformation” ð38Þ. Thus, she

offers a dynamic and open-ended understanding of the intermingling of

biology and history that emphasizes the significance of temporization and

the antihumanist and broadly mechanical “movements of difference, bifur-

cation, and becoming that characterize all forms of life” ð28Þ. Or, as Claire

Colebrook puts it, “‘Matter,’ ‘life,’ and ‘embodiment’ name that which dif-fers to produce complex morphologies, such as the male/female binary, and

intricate structures, such as the beauty of art and the systems of language,

reference, and knowledge” ðColebrook 2008, 75Þ.

For Grosz, the political promise lies in the capacity to harness the po-

tential for alternative futures in the service of feminist goals, although this

would also involve radically rethinking those goals and feminism itself. As

she points out, developing this potential would need to begin with radi-

cally rethinking matter, biology, time, and becoming in more politicized

ways. It would also involve identifying the processes through which, ascontemporary forms of life have descended from earlier ones, “descent

with modification” occurs ðGrosz 2008, 29Þ. But there is an additional im-

portant factor. Underlying Grosz’s work is a deeply held conviction con-

cerning the irreducibility of sexual difference, a conviction that, she wants

to argue, is fully supported in her feminist interpretation of Darwinian evo-

lutionary theory. In this view of the intertwining of history and biology,

sexual difference was once subject to the vagaries of contingency and

chance but has since become fixed historically as an ineliminable feature

of human becoming: “the requirement of genetic material from twosexes” has become an ontological feature “of life itself, not merely a detail,

a feature that will pass” ð44Þ. Indeed, Grosz claims that, in this sense,

Darwinism confirms Luce Irigaray’s claim that sexual difference is an im-

mediate natural given, a real and irreducible component of the universal

ð40Þ. Moreover, Grosz’s account of sexual difference as ontological differ-

ence involves the claim that there is something in our biological natures that

influences our becomings differentially as women and men. This is in keep-

ing with Irigaray’s later work. However, for Grosz it also leads to the sug-

gestion that feminist science studies, especially in the biological sciences,

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may well have some explanatory power regarding social relations between

men and women ðGrosz 2008, 46 n. 2Þ.13

All-encompassing nature: The ontology of life as given in matter? The unifying principle in these two accounts is that they both want to

move from a position that sees ontology as a product of conceptual schemes

to a recognition of the ontology of life as given in matter. Hence the struc-

tures of differentiation that for Butler remain linguistic and symbolic are re-

garded in the work of both Kirby and Grosz as instead immanent to matter.

This includes the matter of the body, which is expressed in modalities of

becoming. Moreover, they each want to include scientific accounts of the

material world in explaining social relations, because both the material

world and social relations are considered to be part and parcel of the samething. In this endeavor, Kirby turns to Derrida to explain the ontology of

life in terms of language and linguistic codes, while Grosz turns to Darwin

to explain it in terms of evolutionary principles. Thus, Kirby argues that writ-

ing and difference structure nature and culture, that biological processes

function like language, and that in this sense there is nothing outside nature

because language is the nature of nature. Alternatively, Grosz argues that all

aspects of social and political life, even the evolution of language and con-

cepts, are products of evolutionary and biological processes and, as such,

are governed by the principle of natural selection. For both Kirby and Grosz,then, we are natural rather than cultural products in the sense that we sim-

ply are our biologies and that it is a human conceit, a kind of anthropo-

morphism, to suggest that ðhumanÞ culture is anything other than nature

ðhere identified with biology Þ acting out its concerns. The possibilities for

human becoming are governed by natural codes modifying themselves or

by evolutionary principles. We cannot get outside nature or even find a rel-

ative autonomy for culture in either of these accounts.

Consequently, rather than getting at the interimplication of nature and

culture —

as in Barad’s account of the material-discursive relation, which ac-cords some mutuality to either side — both Kirby and Grosz produce an

account that is ultimately dominated by one side: nature. While Butler is

accused of overemphasizing culture as the dominant force in the materi-

alization of matter, such that matter itself is posited as radical otherness,

neither Grosz’s nor Kirby’s account allows any otherness, radical or other-

wise. Hence, as Colebrook puts it in relation to Grosz ðmaking a point

13 Irigaray is less enamored with scientific inquiry and evinces an affinity with Heidegger’s

critique of modern science as reductive and instrumentalist, as Stone ð2006Þ attests.





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that, I would argue, is equally applicable to Kirby Þ, “If we take Butler’s

work to be a deconstructive radicalization of the nature/culture binary,

we can then see how Grosz refuses a critical deconstruction” ðColebrook

2008, 73Þ. Neither Kirby nor Grosz deconstructs this dichotomy. Instead,they ultimately capitulate to one side. The full implications of a decon-

structive approach to the interdependence of these twin poles are thus

not fully developed. Most significantly, neither approach takes account

of the interdependence of the textuality of materiality and the materiality of

textuality, which allows the possibility that concepts may arise from matter

and out of matter but still be more than the expression of matter, more than

matter simply expressing itself ðColebrook 2011Þ.

Thus, if the aim of the new materialism is to provide a way of rethink-

ing the interimplication of culture and nature, moving away from thenegation of one in the determination of the other, difficulties remain in both

Kirby’s and Grosz’s accounts. This is not the case, however, with Barad’s

account of the intra-action of nature and culture in the material-discursive

relation: it involves a process of mutual articulation that is a matter of

interimplication.

I would argue that making the concession that culture is indeed part

of the natural world — in interaction with our biology, physiology, and en-

vironment as living open systems — does not require giving up all hope of

a relative autonomy for culture. If it is in our biological natures to be cul-tural, could we not also concede that it is in our natures to be antinatural

and that the potential for this is given in the dynamic, open, temporal, and

diverse nature of our biologies? If so, the claim that we simply are our

biologies is a step too far in the concession to matter. This is not a claim,

however, that follows from Barad’s agential realism. Although more re-

spectful of the agency of matter than an account such as Butler’s is, Barad’s

reformulation of the material-discursive relation retains an equally strong

role for the significance of discursive articulation without suggesting that

the latter is nothing more than nature expressing itself.

Sexual difference: Beyond the binary frame

It is, moreover, also a big jump to make from saying that structures of

differentiation are immanent to matter to saying that ultimately all differ-

entiation of human becoming has at its root sexual difference, as Grosz

claims. In my view, this jump is both untenable and unjustified. This is

made evident when sexual difference is considered in the context of Barad’s

agential realism. As Barad’s work demonstrates, any such structures of

differentiation are always in intra-action with their discursive articulationand cultural intelligibility; this is an immanent relation in which neither

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structures of differentiation nor structures of discursive articulations are

fixed or foundational to the other. As bodies do not preexist their dis-

cursive production but are intertwined with it, in their very physicality, so

sexual difference, I would argue, becomes a product of boundary-makingpractices in the intra-action between the material and the discursive rather

than an ontological or metaphysical difference with roots outside the material-

discursive relation.

This would suggest that, first, challenging and reformulating sexual

difference as a causal structure ðand opening it up beyond the binary frameÞ

would be possible and, second, that the way to do this would be through

intervening in the boundary-making process ðto reconfigure the material-

discursive apparatus of bodily productionÞ through which phenomena such

as sexed bodies are constituted ðin Barad’s agential realist senseÞ. This would, in turn, involve identifying and reformulating those practices that

work to produce the binary construction of sexual difference ðin intra-action

with the physical world of bodiesÞ. Part of this would consist in identifying

all the ways that social and scientific accounts of sexual difference, sexuality,

and sexed identity continue to be read through a binary framework despite

the multitude of challenges to this binarism to be found in studies of nature,

animal studies, and transgender and transsexuality studies ðsome of which

are discussed below Þ. It would then entail identifying and reworking those

practices that ensure the exclusion of anomalous bodies, those that do notreadily find expression in the binary framework.

Indeed, in the new materialism in general, and in Grosz’s work in par-

ticular, there is an insistence on the need to accommodate science studies as

a means to overcome the nature/culture dichotomy. Yet even without

considering the significance of Barad’s insights, science studies repeatedly

show that binary sexual difference is undermined in nature. Biological studies

are increasingly revealing that the duality of sexual difference is rooted in

human and scientific conceptual schemas rather than in the biological fac-

ticity of organisms ðFausto-Sterling 1993, 2000; Hird 2003, 2004; Keller2010Þ. This would suggest that insistence on the immutability of sexual

difference reflects a cultural need to support dimorphism, not that the basis

of sex duality is revealed in “nature” ðHird 2003Þ. We can see that in nature

there is no such necessary fixed division, as these studies show.14 Insisting on

14 Emerging new works — on queer ecologies ðMortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010Þ;

human and nonhuman gender and sexual diversity ðRoughgarden 2004Þ; posthuman envi-

ronmental ethics ð Wolfe 2010Þ; and transcorporeality, which focuses on the intersection of

science, the environment, and the body ð Alaimo 2010Þ; among others —

also indicate theproblems with this view.





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the immutability of sexual dimorphism stands only by suppressing the di-

versity in nature and rendering those outside the binary frame, at best, un-

natural and unintelligible or, at worst, inhuman. These studies help to make

evident the boundary articulations and exclusions involved in the consti-tution of sexed identity and thus, I would argue, help to reveal the role of

cultural constructions of sexual difference in the enactment of sexual differ-

ence as a causal structure in an agential realist sense. If we see sexual differ-

ence as multiple and overlapping, in terms of a continuum, rather than as a

dimorphism ðas the variation and diversity in nature that these studies high-

light would seem to suggestÞ, we can better see that dimorphic sexual differ-

ence based on ineradicable difference is a social construction with roots in

power relations — the power of difference and differentiation — not in nature.

Studies concerned with trans experiences of embodiment also support this view. For example, Riki Lane draws on scientific accounts that stress the con-

tinuum of sex differences to argue that “mobilizing a reading of biology as

open-ended and creative supports a perspective that sees sex and gender di-

versity as a continuum, rather than a dichotomy — put simply, ‘nature’ throws

up all this diversity and society needs to accept it” ð2009, 137Þ. If human

being is recognized as capable of multiple variations in sexed embodiment

along multiple trajectories of male and female categories, then social identi-

ties of masculinity and femininity need not be tied to male or female bodies.

I would therefore suggest that sexual difference becomes an apparentontological feature of human becoming only if we make it so through the

possibilities we provide for the modalities of becoming that give expression

to our bodily natures. That there are always everywhere men and women,

which Irigaray says is the reason for her recent turns to nature and biology,

does not require that the basis we have for understanding and living out

our lives as human beings must involve an understanding of maleness and

femaleness in oppositional or binary terms or, as Grosz would have it, as in-

volving an immutable ontological difference. Much feminist work has gone

into demonstrating the continuum of sexed identity; much trans work hasgone into challenging the basis of sexed identity in a biological account

based on genitalia or chromosomes; psychoanalysis has shown the signifi-

cance of the imaginary, rather than biological, libidinal drives, to the in-

stitution of sexed identity; and Barad’s work, as I have shown, accords an

active role to the materiality of the body while undermining the idea of

any such fixed difference. Thus, if we want to recognize the multiplicity

of biologically based drives in the matter of human bodies ðin their corpo-

reality Þ, does it really make ðnaturalÞ sense to insist on a basic dimorphism

at the root of the principles of natural selection? Or does it make more senseto see this insistence as yet another form of anthropomorphism? If those

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material drives are shown again and again to be other than dimorphic in

nature but are repeatedly binarized in our conceptualizations, wouldn’t it

make more sense to develop an approach based on multiplicity and potential

in human becomings as men and as women —

an approach that is basedneither on fundamental difference nor binarism but on relationality and

overlapping?15 Barad’s account of ontology as relational, I have suggested

in this article, provides an important step in this direction. In challenging the

ontological distinction between cultural practices and natural bodies, rather

than rendering the former a product of the latter as in Kirby’s and Grosz’s

accounts, Barad’s agential realism not only provides a means of getting at

the way that our modalities of becoming do more than simply express our

biological natures. It also reveals our responsibility and accountability in

determining which practices are in intra-action with which bodies and which exclusions are effected in order to produce and sustain the binary

frame.

Conclusion

Rethinking the interimplication of the material and the discursive to allow

a more active role for matter does not require the claim that we simply are

our biologies. To make such a claim is to continue to privilege one side of

the dichotomy at the expense of the other rather than to more fully ap-preciate the interimplication of both. I have argued that difficulties remain

in Grosz’s and Kirby’s accounts in this regard, whereas Barad’s account of

15 We also do not need to confer fundamental significance on the characteristics of human

reproduction, which, in any case, are increasingly open to human intervention, as recent de-

velopments in life sciences have shown: babies don’t need to be breast-fed, and fertilization

doesn’t require sex acts or even a biological mother’s body ðfor instance, in surrogacy Þ. That is

not to say that there are not really women. Rather, it is to say that the being of women is not —

or, at least, not necessarily — given by binary sexual difference inherent in every aspect of hu-

man being, as Grosz and her interpretation of evolution would want to suggest, and that there

is no justification for a metaphysics of sexual difference in the differential roles of men and

women at the point of conception. For the purposes of reproduction, we might need matter

ðgenetic materialÞ from what are deemed oppositional or ineradicably different male bodies and

female bodies, but if the binarism of male and female is contested, shown in nature and bio-

logical studies to be a product of human conceptual schemes rather than present in corporeal

matter, then we might find female eggs in male-identified, nonoperative trans men ðfor ex-

ample, Matt Rice, who gave birth in 1999, and Thomas Beatie, who gave birth three times be-

tween 2008 and 2010Þ and sperm in female-identified, nonoperative trans women. These pos-

sibilities must be denied or suppressed and their implications ignored to sustain a commitment

to binary, ineradicable, immutable sexual difference. This would suggest that for reproduc-

tion to take place, we need matter from two sexes only because we have already assumed thatthere are only two sexes.





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the material-discursive relation involves the active participation of both

sides. Moreover, when applied to the question of sexual difference, Barad’s

account of the interimplication of the discursive and the material allows a

more active role for matter, one that does not entail the conclusion thatsexual dimorphism is inevitable, nor does her account support a meta-

physics of sexual difference. If anything, it undermines it.

Thus, to say that biology constrains what we can say about it does not

require the claim that social identities must at root be divided into two. If

we accept all the diversity that “‘nature’ throws up,” as Lane suggests, we

can recognize the continuum of sexed identities and accommodate those

for whom the binary framework doesn’t allow expression of their sexed

“nature” that is, nevertheless, felt to be biologically based. This is so pre-

cisely because biology is never separable from the social and discursive,biology is not neatly divisible into two, and finally, biology is better char-

acterized by diversity, nonlinearity, and dynamism than by binarism and

immutability.

School of Social Sciences

University of Hull

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