New Materialism and Intersectionality: Making Middles Matter

New Materialism and Intersectionality advances the interplay of intersectionality theories and feminist new materialisms, arguing that co-constitutive influences between these fields will provide feminist and gender studies scholars with improved tools to analyse markers of difference and identity in 21st-century realities.

In exploring the intersection of new materialisms and intersectionality studies, this volume puts forward a concept of ＂the middle＂. It refers to the situation-bound mutual impact of material, social, human, and more-than-human elements in the formation of differences, identities, subject positions, and power relations. The chapters elaborate this understanding of the middle in empirical research concerned with the relational emergence of differences in various social, cultural, artistic, and ecological settings. The middle is also proposed as a verb, whereby researchers who practise ＂middling＂ cultivate a capacity to account for the open-ended processes and relationships through which intersectional and materially lived differences unfold and reconfigure in particular contexts.

This concept of the middle enriches understandings of how intersectional differences exist and can be studied, and what ethical and political implications they involve. The volume will interest scholars and students working with intersectionality, feminist new materialist, and posthumanist theories across the humanities and the social sciences.

Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Associate Professor (Docent) of Contemporary Art Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. She specialises in feminist art and theory, processes of making and encountering art, new materialist methodologies, and art-based research, and is the author of Ways of Following: Art, Materiality, Collaboration (2018).

Taru Leppänen is Professor of Gender Studies at the Åbo Akademi University. Her research interests include music and sound, feminist new materialisms, intersectionality, and children’s musical practices. She is the author of the forthcoming monograph Politics of Feminist New Materialisms at Music Playschools: Musicking in the Middle.

Tara Mehrabi, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the Social and Psychological Studies, Karlstad University, Sweden. Her research is situated in feminist technoscience studies, feminist new materialisms, intersectionality, gender studies, and queer death studies. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook of Queer Death Studies.

Milla Tiainen, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Turku and Associate Professor (Docent) of Musicology at the University of Helsinki. She has published widely on musical performance research, feminist and ecocritical studies of music and sound, and new materialist and posthumanist research approaches to the arts. Recently, she is co-editor of Mattering Voices: Studying Voice through New Materialisms (forthcoming).