Women: A Cultural Review

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Politics Materialized: Rethinking the Materiality of

Feminist Political Action through Epigenetics

Noela Davis

To cite this article: Noela Davis (2014) Politics Materialized: Rethinking the Materiality of
Feminist Political Action through Epigenetics, Women: A Cultural Review, 25:1, 62-77, DOI:
10.1080/09574042.2014.901101

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Politics Materialized:
Rethinking the
Materiality of Feminist
Political Action
through Epigenetics
Abstract: The new of new materialism should not be read as current feminisms
distancing from or disavowal of the legacy of previous feminist movements. This past
cannot be left behind as it is enfoldedboth conceptually and materiallyand
reconfigured as feminisms current theorizing and political action. This article argues
that this cultural inheritance is at the same time corporeally manifested in the biology of
feminist bodies. Such a contention is inspired by Karen Barads argument that concepts,
ideas and other social phenomena are specific physical arrangements materialized
through apparatuses. Barad insists that the relationships between the social, political and
discursive and physical matter are not relations of externality. Instead, there is a complex
entanglement where the differences between the cultural and the physical are matters of
making separate rather than there being two radically separate realms. Barads claims are
supported by epigenetic research into the intergenerational health effects of the experience
of social stigma. The results of this research suggest that an individuals environment, both
physical and social, current and historical, manifests in biology at the molecular level. So
politics, then, is a truly material practice which is at the same time constitutive of its
practitioners. New materialisms history of feminist action and theorization can never be
excluded from current practices of feminism but neither can it determine them in
advance. Politics and feminism are particular, contingent, material histories, with each
practitioner reconfiguring her or his specific biological and social materialization as their
present-day political and feminist actions.
Keywords: materiality, new materialism, body, epigenetics, Karen Barad, Foucault

H are we to read the new of new materialism? Is it, as Sara

OW
Ahmed suggests, a disavowal or a forgetting of the legacy of previous
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Women: a cultural review Vol. 25. No. 1.
ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2014 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2014.901101
 POLITICS MATERIALIZED 63
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feminist work? Ahmed herself resists the term new materialism, as her
work, she says, draws on and owes much to earlier feminist engagements
(Ahmed 2010: 234).1 By refusing the appellation new, Ahmed reasons,
she makes apparent her indebtedness to feminisms histories and, by
default, it must be assumed that by accepting this label a feminist is still
caught in a progress narrative, one which assumes that newer is somehow
an advancement on, or a discarding of, past error.
But might new materialism, rather than signifying a dismissal of
feminisms legacies, instead indicate a reconfiguring of this inheritance
and an opening up of new possibilities? Diana Coole and Samantha Frost
suggest that it is a process whereby older traditions are pushed in novel,
and sometimes experimental, directions or toward fresh applications
(Coole and Frost 2010: 4)that is, new materialism acknowledges and
respects the fullness of its heritage even as it reworks the endow
ment which is enfolded within it. We could even suggest that the new
is making newly visible the connections which were previously
obscured.2
The new of new materialism thus does not necessarily indicate a
distancing from or a disregard of the diversity of feminist theorizing that
has gone before, but can be viewed as a renewed enthusiasm for the
potentials immanent to previous feminist traditions. It is a chance to
rethink matter, its vibrancy, dynamism and agency, and with this a
politics that takes matters ontological insistence seriouslya politics
1 Ahmeds claim here that worlds the world. It is a matter that is alive to its own possibilities
echoes her earlier
critique of new
and a politics that must account for this at the same time as it takes part
materialisms and their in the reconstitution of the world.
supposed forgetting of As a contemplation of what a new materialist feminism might be, this
their legacy (Ahmed
2008). Her criticisms
article will suggest that feminism, feminists and their politics are material
of new materialism and materialized in all senses of the wordsthe cultural, social and
have received recent discursive are not separate from matter and biology, but are physically
support from Nikki
Sullivan (2012). For a
and molecularly manifested in bodies. This assertion forms part of the
critique of Ahmeds long-standing feminist tradition of contesting binaries such as nature/
position and positive culture and biological/social. But while these various feminist engage-
suggestions for how
ments with the politics of exclusion premised on these binaries have been
we might theorize
new materialist necessary and fruitful, I agree with Vicki Kirbys assertions that there has
feminisms, see Iris van been a tendency in feminism to invert and revalorize the terms ofand
der Tuin (2008) and thus ironically reinforcethis logic rather than radically question it
Davis (2009).
2 This point was (Kirby and Wilson 2011: 230). To take up the challenge offered by Kirby
articulated by Karen is not simply to reverse the terms and declare matter and biology to be
Barad in her keynote agentic and dynamic, but instead to show that matter and the social,
address at a recent
conference bodies and discourse are not pre-existing entities which work on each
(Barad 2013). other from an absolute outside, each confined to their own circumscribed
64 WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
...........................................................................................
realm, but are an entanglement, where bodies are materialized as
matter-and-the-social, as biology-and-discourse. They do not precede
their meeting, but are performative configurations or materializations
of the world. Matter and biology, as well as culture, are all dynamic,
agentic, political and worldly reconfigurings.
Such a theorization also suggests that matter-as-dynamism is open to
investigation and that empirical study of how biological mechanisms
operate does not, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty complains, amount to a
stagnation of matters vibrancy (see Coole 2010: 93). Merleau-Ponty
contends that scientific investigation robs our sense experience of its
mystery by reducing it to physico-chemical processes and causal
relationships of stimulus and response. This amounts, he says, to a
physicists freezing of being, and his remedy is to concentrate enquiry
on the lived, felt experience of sensory being (cited in Coole 2010: 93).
While not contesting Merleau-Pontys assessment of the empiricist
tradition, I want to suggest that scientific work is open to a material
feminist rereading. Does physical investigation have to reduce bodies and
matter to fixed entities, devoid of agency? I argue that to bracket out
exploration of the biological mechanisms through which matter expresses
itself and to restrict study only to phenomenal and affective experience is
to limit the study of materiality to the confines of a realm that is assumed
to be isolable, at some level, from biology. This circumscribed investiga-
tion, by assuming that biology and experience can be studied in isolation
from each other, reinstantiates the binaries which feminisms of many
types have attempted to rethink (for an elaboration of these arguments,
see Davis 2009).
In order to elaborate these contentions of matters vibrancy and
sociality, this article will draw on Karen Barads conceptualization of an
apparatus of bodily constitution, Michel Foucaults theorizations of
bodies and descent from Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (Foucault
1998a), and, as empirical backing for these claims, case studies from
epigenetic research. In telling the story of these entangled narratives, the
exposition will necessarily take the form of a linear sequence with a
temporal succession. But these appearances of linearity, temporality, and
cause and effect will be queered by the argument that otherness,
inheritance of the past and anticipation of the future are already enfolded
into the now of the worlds material configurations.

Practices That Matter

I have chosen Barads theorizations as she offers a material conceptualiza-
tion of an entangled world where the constitutive cuts that form bodies
 POLITICS MATERIALIZED 65
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and the world do not come from a radical exterior (see, for instance,
Barad 2007, 2010, 2012b). This offers the potential to rework the impasses
that arise when biology and the social, for instance, are considered to
reside in different domains external to one another (for an elaboration of
these problems, see Kirby 2011). The conundrum we are faced with in
such circumstances is that of how two apparently incommensurate
entities can communicate, affect and constitute one another.
In Barads conceptualizations, bodies and matter are active practices;
they are performative processes of materialization rather than given or
inert bases to be worked on by cultural activity. The divisions that we
see, such as those between biology and the social, are differentiated
materializations of the world where the cuts are already internal and the
one is already its (purported) other. Barad argues that we should not
assume that biology and the cultural (or the terms of any oppositional
pair) can be made sense of when studied as independent entities which
come together to interact. She emphasizes that knowing, theorizing or
political action are not about applying our endeavours to pre-existing
objects or facts to uncover their independent and stable characteristics.
Instead, our politics, theories and practices are specific material engage-
ments with the world that form the particular configuration which we
investigate as part of that configuration (Barad 2007: 91). She offers a
vision where we can see biology already implicated in the social, and thus
a social world already entangled with the physical world. When Barads
theorizations and epigenetics are read with and through each other, her
analysis brings out the implicit enfoldedness of past, present and future in
epigenetic findings. Epigenetic research at the same time supports Barads
insistence that apparatuses are world-making practices.
The agent of production for Barad is a material-discursive apparatus
(Barad 2007: 146). This is not a pre-existing thing, nor does it mediate
between the objects and practices that we observe and are part of. Instead,
an apparatus is a physical, intra-active practice that makes determinate, as it
is also produced by, ideas, knowledge, thinking, bodies, societies, politics,
environments, time, space and other apparatuses. Each material produc-
tion of an apparatus makes the world determinate in its own unique way
(Barad 2007: 59, 901, 148; 2012a: 12)that is, such apparently abstract and
immaterial aspects of the world as theories, concepts, social movements
such as feminism, asymmetries such as racism, sexism and gender
inequalities are all physical arrangements embodied in and through the
apparatuses that produce them, determine their boundaries and their
characteristics, and thus make discrimination between aspects of the world
possible (Barad 2007: 1289). And as individual entities are not antecedent
to the productive apparatus, measurement, knowledge and political
 66 WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
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interventions are not interpositions between independent objects. Rather,
determinate entities and their interrelations are produced by the intra-active
boundary-making practices that make the indeterminacy of the world
meaningful (Barad 2007: 148; 2012b: 41). The social and conceptual are
differentiated from, but not separable from, matter in such an analysis.
The agential processes elaborated here, while presented as a series of
events, must be understood as one doubly constitutive movementthat
of the making separate of spacetimemattering. Spacetimemattering is a
term Barad uses for the indeterminacy that is made determinatethat
which is made identifiable and produced as entitiesby the various
apparatuses iteratively producing the world. This making separate is one
intra-active action that entangles and divides, which Barad terms a
cutting together-apart or a single event that is not one (Barad 2012b:
32, 46; 2010: 244). Determinate history and potential future are produced
as a sequence of cause and effect through an intra-action that tempor-
alizes. Enfolded within apparatuses are inheritance, memory and
anticipation: a diffraction of a past never simply there with an
indebtedness to an always open future (Barad 2012a: 11). History is a
hauntology where past and future are entangled, where what is produced
as past can anticipate the future (Barad 2010: 240). Kirby calls this a
mysterious clairvoyance. It is as if things or people are brought together
before their actual meeting, as there is found a readiness to receive a
message yet to arrive, possibly yet even to be addressed (Kirby 2011: 9).
3 Food and diet is a This is a scene that, I contend, plays out in epigenetic findings.
widely researched
epigenetic topic, and it
shows that there is not Epigenetics Anticipated
simply a direct
relationship between
eating and genetic As will be elaborated below, epigenetics is a recent science which studies
effects; food is not just the dynamic genebodyenvironment conversations that enact the
a physical substance. It physiological mechanisms through which an organisms genome is
enfolds climate, soil
profiles, nutrients, expressed. The conversants are genes, bodies, biochemistry, history,
pests, pesticides, cultural practices, geography, economics, climate, feminist theorizing and
environmental toxins, diet, to name but a few.3 It offers experimental evidence in support of the
ritual practices,
agricultural practices,
contention that the social and the ideational or abstract are constitutively
and social and familial entangled and produced with, and as, the physical.
bondingin short, I want to suggest that we can find in Foucaults work Nietzsche,
multiple aspects of
both the social and
Genealogy, History an anticipation of epigenetic research findingsthat
physical environment. is, a material account of the physical constitution of bodies by history,
For a comprehensive power, the environment and social institutions (Foucault 1998a).
review of epigenetic In various works, Foucault insists that he is theorizing a history of the
work on food and
diet, see Hannah physical production of bodies. For instance, he asserts the materiality of
Landecker (2011). power and discourse, and their inextricability from physical bodies
 POLITICS MATERIALIZED 67
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and processes, in declaring that: deployments of power are directly
connected to the bodyto bodies, functions, physiological processes,
sensations and pleasures (Foucault 1998b: 1512). One of his aims is to
make the body visible through an analysis in which the biological and
the historical are not consecutive to one another but are bound
together in an increasingly complex fashion (Foucault 1998b: 152).
Barad adds her voice to assertions that Foucault is not, as he
maintains, theorizing materiality as biology and the physical, but is
instead limiting his thinking to a cultural-discursive domain.4 It is
claimed that the practices he describes, while performative materializa-
tions, are processes affecting social bodies only. Barad summarizes these
concerns when she explains that Foucault does not tell us specifically
how we should distinguish between discursive and non-discursive
practices, or how the biological and historical could be bound together
(Barad 2007: 635; see also Coleman, in this issue, on this reading of
Foucault).
I argue that in Nietzsche, Genealogy, History we can see how
Foucault can be reread as including biology and the physical in his
conceptualizations of bodies and materiality, and thus can provide us
with suggestions as to how biology and history are related. The following
quotes seem to be speaking to concerns now associated with epigenetics.
If these excerpts are kept in mind when reading the elaborations of
epigenetic findings that follow, we can see how Foucault has already
spoken to us of the same work as epigenetics and given us a prescient
foretaste of how we might read this research.
In analysing Nietzsches concept of descent, or Herkunft, Foucault
sets the stage for a reading of the environment as always constitutively
entangled in the body when he states that:

Finally, descent attaches itself to the body. It inscribes itself in the

4 For feminist theorists nervous system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus; it
who make such claims appears in faulty respiration, in improper diets, in the debilitated
against Foucault, see, and prostrate bodies of those whose ancestors committed errors
for instance, Judith
Butler (1989, 1997), The bodyand everything that touches it: diet, climate, and soil
Ladelle McWhorter is the domain of the Herkunft. The body manifests the stigmata of
(1989, 2004) and past experience and also gives rise to desires, failings, and errors.
Caroline Ramazanolu
(1993). Margaret
(Foucault 1998a: 375)
McLaren supports
Foucaults contentions, This is suggestive of a body that has corporealized its ancestral history of
but also elaborates the both social and physical environmental interactions. Every experience
arguments against his
position (McLaren materializes and is incorporated as the body, and at the same time is
2004). inflected in the bodys further interactions with its surroundings.
68 WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
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Foucault provides another clue to a theorization of the physical
entwining of bodies, culture and environments when he contends that:

We believe, in any event, that the body obeys the exclusive laws of
physiology, and that it escapes the influence of history, but this too
is false. The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is
broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is
poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws.
(Foucault 1998a: 380)

I contend that we can profitably rethink the materiality of Foucaults

theorizations and gain insights into how to read epigenetic research as an
implication of the social and the biologicala reading which amplifies
that of Barad and epigenetics already suggested.

Epigenetics
As previously stated, this account of bodily production through
epigenetic processes is presented as a temporal narrativebut the
apparent separations and causal trajectory will be unsettled by Barads
elaborations of worldly constitution. While the etymology and earlier
usage of the term epigenetics suggests optional processes on top of
genetics, investigations show these processes to be integral to an
organisms development. Rather than being afterthoughts, epigenetic
processes are essential to life and development, as they are the mechanism
by which cell differentiationand thus lifetakes place. As all cells in an
organism contain the same genetic complement, for the organism to
develop, its cells must differentiate into the bodys various organs and
tissues. Epigenetic processes regulate this differentiation by relaying
biochemical messagessuch as DNA methylation and histone acetylation
which set how receptive a particular gene is to binding with the
various proteins activated by transcription factors. The various epigenetic
mechanisms act to facilitate or suppress the degree of a genes expression
(Harper 2005: 344; Zhang and Meaney 2010: 442). What is relevant to this
discussion is that epigenetic mechanisms are not processes that are
entirely internal to an organism, but are an active environmental
conversation. The organisms contextboth social and physical
impacts on the epigenetic processes of gene expression (see, for instance,
Harper 2005; Meaney 2010). Epigenetics demonstrates that it is not genes
in themselves that give form to an organism, but instead patterns of
genetic expression that give the distinctive characteristics of a cell or tissue,
 POLITICS MATERIALIZED 69
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and thus of the organism, through a dynamic crosstalk between genes,
organism and environment.
While there are critical periods during early development when
epigenetic processes have their greatest effect, research also supports the
contention that genetic expression is always open to environmental
modification (Kuzawa and Sweet 2009: 10; Meaney 2010: 45). These early
exposures prime an organisms typical pattern of response to the
environment, giving the organism its particular and individual character-
istics, its resiliencies and weaknesses, and the personality that guides, but
does not determine in advance, its future environmental interactions (see
Kuzawa and Sweet 2009; Meaney 2010; Zhang and Meaney 2010). Even
though genetic expression is relatively stable, the organism is always
responsive to the specifics of its environmental context and always open
to further environmental modifications, as each organism responds to its
environment in its own individual way (Meaney 2010: 61; Zhang and
Meaney 2010: 4478; see also Crepaldi and Riccio 2009).
But the question I want to raise is that of at which point does this
early exposure begin? Research findings support the hypothesis that this
environmental conversation does not originate anew in each organism,
but is passed on intergenerationally. Epigenetic modifications are not, as
was previously thought, completely erased between generations, and
there is now a significant body of evidence demonstrating the inter-
generational inheritance of environmental responses (see, for example,
Cropley et al. 2006; Gallou-Kabani and Junien 2005; Kuzawa and Sweet
2009; McGowan et al. 2009; Meaney 2010; Zhang and Meaney 2010).
While we do not have a detailed understanding of the earliest
molecular developmental decisions, researchers suggest that we are
always already in conversation with the environment and with our
inheritance. Lawrence Harper contends that: to fully appreciate parental
influence and the dynamic interplay between the individual and envir-
onment, the time frame for affecting the individual may be as early as
5 Gametogenesis is the
formation of germ gametogenesis (Harper 2005: 352; see also Reik 2007: 430)5that is, he is
cellsthat is, ova and not suggesting that epigenetic conversations only affect already formed
sperm (Reik 2007:
430)and the
individuals. His subject is only the possibility of an individual, yet already
suggestion that this possibility is a storehouse of environmental experience and propen-
environmental sities. Before the particular individual can be said to exist, their genetic
influences are already
effective at this stage
and environmental inheritances are already prepared to influence their
demonstrates that developmental pathways. The implications of Harpers claim call to
epigenetic effects are mind Kirbys mysterious clairvoyance. There is no specific or already
not additions
modifying an already existing addressee for this message, but the history of this particular
existing individual. individual is already predicting a future. The message is intended for the
70 WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
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yet-to-be individual and has already met their possible future without yet
meeting with them.
This epigenetic viewpoint suggests that binary theorizations of bodies
and the social are not sustainable. Nor is there a place for simply
inverting a binary because there is not first a biological body which is
then worked on by a physical or social environment. Rather, we are
always already environmental, always already social, and the relations of
difference, between body and environment, biology and the social, are
relations of externality within usor, as Kirby says, a difference [that]
already inhabits the identity it would discriminate (Kirby 1997: 55).

Stigma: A Brief Example

Stigma is an example which provides evidence for Barads claim that
concepts, theories and abstractionsthe social, cultural or discursive
are material enactments of apparatuses of bodily production. Viewing it
in this way, biology is not radically separate from, or prior to, the social
or political. Stigma has been linked to adverse physical health effects, and
studies demonstrate that these can be traced across several generations
that is, a social labelling, a negative belief or a psychological denigration
is at the same time physical and manifested in the biology of the body
not just of the person experiencing the stigma, but also of their
descendants.
Work by Rikke Lund and Bitte Modin and their respective colleagues
has investigated the reproduction of social mortality patterns across
generations (Lund et al. 2006; Modin 2003; Modin et al. 2008, 2009). They
conducted longitudinal studies of the descendants of people born out of
wedlock in the first half of the twentieth century in Scandinavia. Their
research found a correlation between the grandparents being illegitimate
and an increased risk of suffering from ischaemic heart disease in the
subsequent two generations compared to their control groups.
This research demonstrates a complex interplay of factors at work in
these situations. Circumstances associated with being born out of
wedlock can include poverty, inadequate nutrition, a lack of social
networks or support, lower social class, compromised motherchild
relations, poor coping strategies and high psychosocial stress (Modin
et al. 2008: 823). But the salient point that Modin and Lund make is that
they see social stigma, moral condemnation and exclusion from areas of
social life as vital contributing factors to the increased incidence of
intergenerational health problems in their experimental groups (Modin
2003: 493, 496; Modin et al. 2008: 823). Both conclude that the results
cannot be explained solely by a shortage of material resources. The
 POLITICS MATERIALIZED 71
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crucial aspect of this research is the conclusion that stigmaa social and
seemingly abstract attributioncan be passed on physically across
generations. There is a transmission of values, attitudes and moral
condemnation, which together have the ability to affect physical health
(Lund et al. 2006: 499; Modin et al. 2008: 8234). Such findings also
support Foucaults claim that: the body manifests the stigmata of past
experience (Foucault 1998a: 375).
Other researchers (see, for instance, Kuzawa and Sweet 2009; Meyer
2003; Sweet 2010; Williams et al. 2010) similarly report that the stigma
associated with social marginalization, discrimination or lack of social
status due to, for instance, sexual orientation or race must be factored in
to account for the development of the health effects observed in
their work.
Studies investigating family dynamics can help illuminate the
mechanisms which are at play in these findings. Recent research
hypothesizes stress reactivity as a mechanism for the development of
illness. Researchers have proposed the notion of minority stress, which
is the stress that the stigmatized or marginalized are subjected to in
addition to, and in excess of, the everyday stresses which we all negotiate
(Meyer 2003: 675; Williams et al. 2010: 81). A poor quality of family life,
stigmatization or perceptions of a failure to conform to societys norms
stresses people.6 The stress hormones released produce several effects.
One is to increase the availability of energy substrates, which can
promote, among other things, insulin resistance and hypertension, which
can eventually manifest as diabetes and heart disease (Meaney 2001: 1163).
At the same time, these increased stress hormone levels can also affect the
methylation status of various genes, giving, for instance, reduced glucocorti-
coid receptor expression which may lead to increased hypothalamic
pituitaryadrenal function. This can result in an increased release of
hormones in response to stress, indicating that the individual has
developed a heightened stress reactivity, which is often accompanied by
hypervigilance, where they are always alert to the possibility of
stigmatization or discrimination (McGowan et al. 2009: 342). This is
associated with a sustained change in the expression of genes in brain
regions that mediate responses to stress (Meaney 2001: 1170).
6 This should not be What can then play out is a concatenation of behavioural disturbances
considered a
in the stressed individual, which may in turn elicit a further cycle of
determined outcome.
Each individual has abuse or neglect from the parent, or further alienate the individual and
their own particular entrench them in their marginalized social position. And this will then
susceptibility to be elicit further increased stress responses, and reinforce the change in
damagedor
energizedby their genomic expression and stress reactivity in the individual. What is also
life situation. manifesting in this scenario is that the parents behaviour or the social
 72 WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
...........................................................................................
attitudes towards the stressed individual are being made chemical/
hormonal. They are being molecularized at the same time as the
individuals responses to life are similarly becoming chemical, hormonal
and molecular.
This scenario of being born into a stressful environment has been
described as anticipatory development (Meaney 2001: 1182), again
recalling Barads hauntology and Kirbys clairvoyance. Even before the
individual has experienced the environment for themselveseven before
they exist as an individualtheir inheritance has messages from their
environment already signalling their life conditions to them: they are
born into stigma. The individual is already epigenetically prepared to
respond to a high-stress environment.7 Thus, enfolded in their history is
a future possibility, and this is already present at their birth as a past,
present and future always in conversation.
While this research concentrates on dysfunction, epigenetic processes
and outcomes must not be limited to the negative and dysfunctional. We
find in Foucaults theorization of descent that he also seems to
concentrate on negative effects, but he provides clues that we must
consider all materializations as epigenetic, such as when he claims that
the bodyand everything that touches itis the domain of descent
(Foucault 1998a: 375; my emphasis). Thus, both the normal and the
dysfunctional must be seen as materialized through epigenetic appara-
tuses of genes in context. All possible expressions of individual propen-
sity are already environmental.

Queering Epigenetics
7 Meaney emphasizes
that stress reactivity is
neither good nor bad Approaching epigenetics through Barads theorizations shows that its
in itself, but must be processes are twofold. Epigenetic mechanisms function as apparatuses
viewed in context. that resolve and materialize the indeterminacy of genes into determinate
Heightened stress
responsivity, he notes, organisms with their particular propensities, resiliencies and character-
can actually help an istics. There are no genes in themselves, but only a genetic possibility
individual born into that epigenetic conversations materialize as the body in questionthat is,
challenging life
circumstances to
if we recall Barads argument, epigenetic mechanisms cut: they are
survive into boundary-making practices that differentiate the organism internally and
adulthood. It is an also differentiate it from its surrounding environment. Their cutting
individual costbenefit
enactments also materialize the narrative of cause and effectthat is,
analysis as to whether
this outweighs the there is not a linear trajectory of cause and effect, but specific
propensity for later configurations materialized as relations of cause and effect in the
disease and mortality particular phenomenon under investigation (Barad 2007: 149).
risks associated with
this life situation But epigenetic processes simultaneously entangle. Biology and the
(Meaney 2010: 656). environment, both physical and social, are inseparably materialized in
 POLITICS MATERIALIZED 73
...........................................................................................
the body, a molecular and chemical materialization of environment and
biology, the differences between them internal to this body. In
materializing the particular individual, past and future are also entangled.
Anticipation and inheritance, and future possibility (of, for example,
heart disease or good health), are enfolded and sedimented into the now
of this individual.
Barad explains this double action as cutting together-apart (Barad
2012b: 32, 46), and it is one intra-active movement, not successive actions.
Differentiation is a matter of entanglement, again as one move, a
differentiated indivisibility (Barad 2010: 253). The cuts are agential: the
separation produced is not absolute, but is a heterogeneity or otherness
that is already within. History and memory are written into the
materializations of bodies (Barad 2007: 383). All parts of bodiesflesh,
molecules, hormones, physical and mental capacitiesare reconfigured as
the memory of their particular enfoldings. Physical bodies are not static
vessels written by the social or by history, but are the active,
performative rematerializations of their constitutive conditions. The
social is materialized as and in the body, configured in its molecular
and hormonal history.

Possibilities for a New Materialist Politics

The body and the world suggested by Barad, Foucault and epigenetic
research are an entanglement. Differences are not absolute and immut-
able, but are differentiations of a system that is continually making itself
separate. Environment, biology, history, morality, concepts and politics
are constitutive of bodies and are entangled in a mesh of mutual
reconstitution and reconfiguration of the world. This confounds the
notion that we can, a priori, specify the boundaries of biology and
the social, of subject and object, of the human and the non-human, of the
material feminist and his or her history, or of the political and the non-
political. There are only distinctions made within context, where matter
articulates the social and the politicalor, more correctly, both matter
and the social/political are enlivened by the articulating energies of the
entire system, which cuts and differentiates its own indeterminacy.
What, then, are the implications of this view of the materialization of
the world for feminism and politics? What might a new materialism look
like within such a theorization? Both feminism and politics are material
engagements with the world, and both are materializations of their
constitutive physical and social contexts. Following Barads contention
as illustrated by epigenetic findingsthat concepts, ideas and other
abstractions are specific physical arrangements, and Foucaults claim that
74 WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
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the body does not escape the influence of history, we could say that the
history of feminism materializes in and as current feminisms. The various
waves of feminism are part of the stock of ideas and concepts that form
contemporary society and, as such, materially constitute new materialism
and its practitioners.
If we consider feminism in this way, there cannot be a disavowal or
forgetting of feminist legacies, as they are, in some form, materialized as
the history of material feminism, and in and as material feminists. We are
not the autonomous humanist subject who chooses to acknowledge or
reject previous social or political movements, but are produced by our
heritage. This informs all our worldly engagements. And as we each
materialize and enact our, and our societys, history in our own
particular ways, there can be no one way to be a new materialist
feminist; nor can there be a unified subject matter of new materialism.
Similarly, politics is a material enactment, a relation that worlds the
world, and, again, the form of this engagement cannot be prescribed in
advance. Nor is politics a separate or limited space of action, but a way of
addressing our society. Elizabeth A. Wilson, in discussing politics,
feminism and the non-human, makes a relevant point here. Politics, she
says, is present to all objects of investigation. There is not a specific
conceptual realm of politics and another that is, a priori, not political;
nor do we have to dissociate ourselves from one political object to study
another. Politics is embedded in life (Kirby and Wilson 2011: 228). Kirby,
in speaking of science, suggests that, in the processes of worldly
production in which we produce and are produced, we are already
practising science (Kirby 2011: xi). As with Wilsons commentary on
politics, science is also not an endeavour separate from other aspects of
our lives. In extending these arguments, I would suggest that, in our daily
lives, we are already practising politics (and feminism)and, indeed, that
we are politics in practice. Both politics and feminism are bodily
practices of the worlds constitution.
Returning to Ahmeds (2010) argument, the conceptualization of
feminism and politics developed in this article suggests that feminists
cannot have forgotten or dissociated themselves from their legacy, as it is
in their being and way of relating to the world. There can be no absolute
break with the past, as the past is enfolded and materialized in and as the
present. In this way, new materialism and its politics is, as Coole and
Frost suggest, a reworking of traditions and a pushing of them in new
directions, and through this it is also potentially able to make visible
connections which were previously obscured (Coole and Frost 2010). But
we cannot determine in advance where these experiments may take us.
While the present builds on the past and the past anticipates the future,
 POLITICS MATERIALIZED 75
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none of this is predetermined. We physically materialize our feminism
and politics in context, and they and us are produced as matters of
current concern.

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