Inventive Feminist Theory: Representation, Materiality and Intensive Time Women: a Cultural Review, Special Issue on Feminist Matters, Edited by Peta

It is widely noted that much of social and cultural theory is currently invested in examining matter, the material and materialization. Feminist theories have been especially important in both establishing this ‘material turn’, and in staking out some of its key features, including thinking about gender and sexuality, the body, nature and culture. Conceiving matter as that which is necessarily entangled with culture and that acts in and of itself, feminist theorists have done much to complicate and break down the opposition between nature/biology and culture/language. In so doing, many commentators of feminist materialism, and new materialism more generally, argue that it marks some kind of break with the linguistic or discursive turn, which dominated in the 1980s and 1990s, and therefore indicates a new and changing framework for theoretical enquiry. For Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, feminist materialism is a new paradigm, a ‘wave of feminist theory that is taking matter seriously’ (2010: 6).