ABSTRACT
How do we make matter (matter), and how does matter make us (matter)? This question is the guiding force of this paper, and the question is not to be read as a practice with a linear function of production but an entangled process that occurs spatially, temporally, and simultaneously. Therefore, it is difficult to capture this entanglement, much less untangle the elements in the making. However, one entrée into such an analysis would be to examine what is mutually constituted in the intra-action among matter, including the human and the non-human – not the inter-action (or dynamic between the separable things) but the intra-action, the ways in which all matter makes other matter, or how they produce each other in a mutual process of becoming (Barad 2007; Deleuze and Guattari 1987). To venture into this new material feminist of matter ‘as indeterminate, constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways’ (Coole and Frost 2010, 10) – or matter ‘becoming’ rather than merely ‘being’ – requires a reconsideration of the concept of freedom. Grosz’s (2010) provocative essay, ‘Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom’ centers on her reading of Bergson; she ‘explores the subject’s freedom through its immersion in materiality’ (141). Grosz pushes aside conventional, subject-oriented concepts of freedom (‘freedom from’ and/or ‘freedom to’) to focus on free acts: ‘those which both express us and transform us, which express our transformation’ (146). In this paper, I offer a very close reading of Grosz thinking
*Email: jacksonay@appstate.edu
and Education, Vol. 25, No. 6, 769-775, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2013.832014
l Jac s
ti l t ies, Appalachian State University, Boone,
with Bergson in order to reconceptualise freedom, matter, and the subject in new feminist materialisms. My central argument is that these free acts are mutually constituted in the intra-action (Barad 2007) between human and non-human forces.
