This conversation with Irina Aristarkhova, Katherine Behar, Johanna Burton, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Ashley Dawson, Piper Marshall, R Joshua Scannell, and Rebekah Sheldon explores object-oriented feminism (OOF), a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourses—like speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and new materialism—that take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary. Approaching all objects from the inside-out position of being an object too, OOF foregrounds three significant aspects of feminist thinking in the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, fomenting unseemly entanglements between things when objects come together in practices like art, science, activism, and everyday life; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims and instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being “in the right” by being “wrong.” The discussion centers on a new discipline-expanding volume, Object-Oriented Feminism (University of Minnesota Press), which seeks not to define object-oriented feminism, but rather to enact it by bringing together contributors from a variety of fields and practices including sociology, anthropology, art, science and technology studies, English, philosophy, and everyday life.
Co-sponsored by the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, Baruch College, CUNY.