In this Book
- Object-Oriented Feminism
- Book
- 2016
- Published by: University of Minnesota Press
The essays in Object-Oriented Feminism explore OOF: a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourses—like speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and new materialism—that take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary. Object-oriented feminism approaches all objects from the inside-out position of being an object too, with all of its accompanying political and ethical potentials.
This volume shows OOF thought as being part of a long history of ongoing feminist work in multiple disciplines. In particular, object-oriented feminism foregrounds three significant aspects of feminist thinking in the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, employing humor to foment unseemly entanglements between things; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims, instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being “in the right” by being “wrong.”
Seeking not to define object-oriented feminism, but rather to enact it, the volume is interdisciplinary in approach, with contributors from a variety of fields, including sociology, anthropology, English, art, and philosophy. Topics are frequently provocative, engaging a wide range of theorists from Heidegger and Levinas to Irigaray and Haraway; and a wide array of objects, including the female body as fetish object in Lolita subculture; birds made queer by endocrine disruptors; truth claims arising in material relations in indigenous fiction and film; and more. Intentionally, each essay can be seen as an “object” in relation to others in this collection.
Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, University of Michigan; Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh; Marina Gržinić, Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts; Frenchy Lunning, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Timothy Morton, Rice University; Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University; R. Joshua Scannell, CUNY Graduate Center; Adam Zaretsky, VASTAL (The Vivoarts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd.).
Table of Contents
- Title Page, Copyright Page
- pp. 1-4
- An Introduction to OOF
- pp. 1-38
- 1. A Feminist Object
- pp. 39-64
- 5. Facing Necrophilia, or “Botox Ethics”
- pp. 123-144
- 7. Queering Endocrine Disruption
- pp. 183-200
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 275-278
- Contributors
- pp. 279-280