ABSTRACT
The word 'thing' derives from the Germanic thingan and is related to the Gothic theihs, time. The thing is the appointed time for deliberation, accusation, judicial process, and decisions. This chapter focuses on materiality to explore what it is about matter that makes it amenable to the imprint of sexing and gendering practices. Few questions are more fundamental to the study of gender and sexuality and to the question of cultural influence on matter, and indeed whether a distinction between the two is even tenable. The chapter includes the work of Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze to explore the questions through metaphysics. It summarises the work of Karen Barad who, writes that: Existence is not an individual affair; it is about entanglements of ideas, practices, politics, ethics, and apparatuses of production. 'Barad's agential realism' is a fusion of ideas from feminism, quantum mechanics, queer theory, post-structuralism and philosophies of science.
