Inventive Feminist Theory: Representation, Materiality and Intensive Time

Abstract

This article examines key arguments on the relations between bodies and images developed in the context of the discursive turn to consider what light a feminist materialist approach might shed on them. Rather than set the discursive and materialist ‘turns’ in opposition to each other, the author tries to draw connections between different theories of the relations between bodies and images, and unpack how certain feminist concerns are approached from different angles in different historical and intellectual contexts. To do this, the author focuses on the prevalence of images of transformation in contemporary visual culture and analyses them in terms of how both ‘new materialist’ and feminist theories grapple with the worlds they engage with, where change and transformation are seen as key. The author takes up three specific and related points that are currently being debated in feminist materialisms: (1) the concept of representation and, more widely, representational thinking; (2) the concept of causation and an understanding of time as non-linear, intensive and inventive; and (3) the understanding of theory as immanent and inventive. Drawing on insights developed in both the discursive and materialist ‘turns’, the author focuses on how bodies and images are entangled together as material assemblages and, in Barad's terms, how theories are performative of the phenomena they seek to understand. The article concludes by suggesting that such an understanding of theory as inventive might be a way of continuing to ensure the animation of feminism's transformative nature.

Keywords:

• Bodies
• images
• feminist new materialism
• representation
• non-linear time
• inventive theory

Notes

1 This turn is variously characterized as the cultural, discursive or linguistic turn. In this article, I call it the ‘discursive’ turn because I primarily attend to how feminist Foucauldian work has argued that the body is a discursive construct. It is worth noting the slipperiness of these terms and turns, as it is difficult to unpack the distinctions between them and the ways in which they turn into a new set of theories and approaches. Indeed, below I discuss the notions of ‘returns’ (Hughes and Lury 2013) and of diffraction as a means to trouble the setting up of distinct turns and/or the notion that turns have linear historical trajectories.

2 For a discussion of de Beauvoir's focus on the transcendence of the immanence of biology through the Deleuzian concept of immanence, see Coleman (2009).

3 Such work has come from different disciplinary backgrounds, including media and cultural studies, film studies, art history, sociology and philosophy; has taken as its focus different kinds of images, including photographs, fine art, mirror images, advertisements, television programmes and Hollywood cinema; and has developed a range of theoretical approaches, including Marxist feminist, psychoanalytic, textual and empirical. Given the breadth of this field, it is difficult to provide references to all of this work. I refer to specific examples below and, for a discussion of some of it, see also Coleman (2009).

4 It is worth noting here that an alternative reading of Foucault, where materiality is emphasized rather than, or as well as, discourse, is possible. For example, the concept of biopower draws attention to the production of materiality as well as its regulation and governance.

5 It is also not as simple as reversing the relations, to suggest that bodies create images. Such an argument would place emphasis on individuals to change the images that they produce, when one of the most powerful insights of the discursive turn has been to highlight how the images that dominate visual culture are cultural images.

6 Interestingly, Barad explains diffraction in contrast to representationalism: ‘[Diffraction] is not a self-referential glance back at oneself. While reflection has been used as a methodological tool by scholars relying on representationalism, there are good reasons to think that diffraction may serve as a productive model for thinking about nonrepresentationalist methodological approaches’ (Barad 2007: 88).

7 I use the grammatically incorrect ‘effect’ here and below to draw attention to the unidirectionality of a cause-and-effect relationship between images and bodies (see Coleman 2009).

8 Of course, for crucial reasons, theories of power and/as discourse were developed to combat the idea that biology determines women's bodies. Part of the reason why McNeil cautions against the material turn is that the determinative role of biology remains powerful today (McNeil 2011).

9 For a much more detailed discussion that problematizes this unidirectional relationship between images and bodies from a Deleuzian position, see Coleman (2009).

10 Ahmed et al. note that: ‘such a belief requires a questioning of our understanding of history, not only through a questioning of who or what should be the subjects of and for history, but also through a rethinking of how we, as feminists, relate to the past’ (Ahmed et al. 2000: 6).

11 On worlding as an ethical and political project, see also Haraway (2007) and Suchman (2006).