All materialisms are 'new' materialisms

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"I would suggest, though, that there is a sense in which all materialisms are ‘new’ materialisms, and this is because there very notion of materiality must have a gestural or oppositional component. One might say that any intellectual movement must be somewhat uncharitable to its previous generation in order to establish a difference, and one might also say that intellectual movements as such come in dialectical response to each other; after years of insisting on the importance of social and linguistic construction, one would turn back to materiality, and then perhaps be critical of a too-immediate emphasis on matter. That may be so, but there is something about the problem of feminist materiality that is far more insistent than the standard philosophical squabbles that toggle back and forth between idealism and realism, or historicism and absolutism (or any other series of conflicts and oppositions). If one looks over the debates regarding matter, materialism and materiality over the past several decades of feminist scholarship, the problem is not one of ontology (of what really is) that is then applied to feminist politics; rather, when ‘matter’ is asserted as some ontological bedrock it is deemed to be already gendered and sexualized. The first possibility is that the assertion of some neutral substrate of matter that then takes on form repeats a passive matter versus active mind dichotomy that has always been aligned with the male female binary; the concept of matter is structurally gendered. The second possibility is that being resistant to the notion of passive matter, or insisting upon mind or language as the determining factor is to have an overly subjectivist and rationalist prejudice against something that simply is; once again reason and activity are valorized. One does not, then, simply assert the side of the binary that has been devalued or dismissed, for the binary itself – and even the project of ontology, or of finding what really exists – is already sexualized. 

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 To see ‘sex’ as something that occurs after matter, as the differentiation of matter, is to have a notion of matter as some blank, pre-relational, formless base that will then take on form. It is that notion of formless, pre-relational matter that – as many feminists have pointed out – has always been sexed. This is both the case in the history of philosophy where the forming power of light or reason gives shape and identity to a formless matter figured as a maternal ground; and it is also the case in the history of Western gynecology where males were deemed to contribute the forming power to the material base that was provided by women. The notion of a blank and formless matter has been dismissed by feminist philosophers because of its longstanding association with mere matter that is then brought into life and being by reason and form […]".

 Claire Colebrook (forthcoming), "Materiality" in Stone, Alison; Garry, Ann & Khader, Serene (eds.), Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy.

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