ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how reading data with and through a feminist materialist lens opens up new ways of seeing and thinking, as well as to present an illustration of how such practices produce a different encounter with data, research settings, and participants. It is the project of material feminists or new materialists to explore how we are constituted by both the material and the discursive without privileging one over the other. Hird (2009) made an important distinction between the emerging fields of material feminism from what she described as the more familiar ‘material feminism’:
This latter field is concerned with women’s material living conditions – labor, reproduction, . . . and so on. . . . What distinguishes emerging analyses of material feminism – alternatively called ‘new materialism,’ ‘neo-materialism,’ and ‘new sciences’ – is a keen interest in engagements with matter. (pp. 329-330)
It is the work of Karen Barad and others named as ‘new materialists’ or ‘material feminists’ to ask how our intra-action with other bodies (both human and non-human) produce subjectivities and performative enactments enabling an approach that reinserts the material into the process of analysis.
