Becoming Otherwise: Embodied-Thinking and the ‘Transformative Matter’ of (New) Feminist Materialist Theorizing

Beyond the affirmation of theory as an abstract, disembodied mindful project defined in opposition to a too-corporeal passive (feminized) matter/body, by poststructuralist feminist materialist philosophers (i.e., Irigaray, Rich, Cavarero, Braidotti) theorizing has been reformulated as a en embodied process, in which the corporeality of the thinking subject – among other factors – is called upon in order to rethink simultaneously what it means to theorize and what it means to exists as a corporeal subject. Similarly, riding the critical-creative wave of reclaiming the agential materiality of “embodied-embedded” (Braidotti, 2011) thinking processes, the question: How does theorizing matter? remains crucial (in both senses of the word to matter) to new feminist materialist conversations. Reading affirmatively poststructuralist feminist movements, this text aims at stressing the relevance of going beyond the dominant western philosophical habitus of thinking disembodiedly “from nowhere”, namely from the position of a neutral or Abstract Masculinity (Hartsock, 1987), and argues, with Van der Tuin and Dolphijn (2010, 2011), that theorizing is “always already” a material-discursive ongoing practice. Moreover, acknowledging the material processes of theorizing is not only relevant when it comes to “onto-epistemological” accountability (Barad, 2003), but also it is a task that carries with it ethico-political implications insomuch as, only by virtue of acknowledging how theorizing does matter, the transformative potential inner to new feminist materialism becomes possible. The phrase “becoming otherwise” is therefore introduced here to point at the generative force that a new feminist materialist framework assigns to concepts and to “onto-ethico-epistemological” (Barad, ibid.) processes of embodied-embedded theory making(s).