Introduction: Bodies/Objects/Agents

We began brainstorming for this special issue in June 2016, when the threat of Donald Trump's election as president was looming but was not yet a certainty. We recognized the structures of white nationalism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism that buoyed his campaign, and we wanted to think critically about them, especially about their intersections with the work we do in the academy.

We were worried: taken aback by the sight of a presidential candidate openly mocking a disabled journalist onstage; sickened and angered by relentless images of police violence against black men and women; ashamed at witnessing white supremacists taunting immigrant individuals and families seeking asylum. We knew that we, too, were vulnerable, as states lined up to roll back reproductive rights, anti-discrimination laws, and workers' protections. Bodies that we loved, inhabited, and communed with were under attack. What value did literature hold in such a moment, we wondered, especially when so many canonical authors and their works felt reiterative of those same structures of oppression? What use was our archival study of oppression when faced with physical and emotional challenges in real time? And what tools were we equipped to offer our students that might help them to survive these times?

Three years later, here we are. The structures of oppression that culminated in the 2016 election were not new. What does feel new, however, is an emboldening of white male power across the globe, a kind of narrative of normalcy around issues and ideas that were once interpreted as radical and extreme. Teaching in the humanities has also gotten much harder. Institutional pressures have stretched departmental budgets, degraded our labor, and intruded in our classrooms. Many of our colleagues are working without the protection of tenure, in non-renewable, temporary appointments. Some have been targeted by hate groups for simply teaching about black lives in classical and premodern eras. And the work in our classrooms has changed, as our students collectively process, analyze, and confront the violent effects of this rise in white power on our campuses and in our communities.

At the same time, new narrative modes of embodiment, history, and materialism have transformed the humanities and its objects of analysis. In this journal issue, we want to explore the activist potential for such critical work, focusing particularly on posthumanist trends as both historical products of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century neoliberalism (vis-à-vis N. Katherine Hayles's 1999 How We Became Posthuman) and as philosophical provocations that challenge bodily boundaries (vis-à-vis crip, queer, feminist, and trans theory). How do these new theories of bodily matter engage with and support the political work of pro-choice and Black Lives Matter movements, for instance? Or the activism of disability justice and transgender rights groups?

Posthumanist theory categorically protests the 'human' embedded in the humanities, explicitly naming the problem of bias built into western philosophical traditions, and it lays bare the terms by which some individuals and groups benefit from the liberal arts while others do not. Rooted in feminist theories about agency and stemming from crip, queer, and trans challenges to embodiment norms, the posthuman demands new narratives about being and becoming.

Object-oriented ontologies (OOO) further blur the boundaries of 'subject/object/agent,' questioning what constitutes matter at all: are discursive objects more or less real than physical ones? Following the logic of Bruno Latour's theory of actor-networks as social fields in which everything both can act and be acted upon, OOO-inflected analyses flatten ontologies of difference, rendering all matter equally agentic. Karen Barad's theory of "mattering," a term that describes not only visceral experiences of embodiment but also the frameworks that ascribe meaning and value to these experiences, further argues that discursive matter impacts physical matter. "Accountability and responsibility," Barad chides, "must be thought in terms of what matters and what is excluded from mattering" (357).

What does this mean for activism? What new stakes are raised for the stories we tell about the future and the past? This issue aims to explore what happens when we...