Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Feminists today are re-imagining nature, biology, and matter in feminist thought and critically addressing new developments in biology, physics, neuroscience, epigenetics and other scientific disciplines. Mattering, edited by noted feminist scholar Victoria Pitts-Taylor, presents contemporary feminist perspectives on the materialist or 'naturalizing' turn in feminist theory, and also represents the newest wave of feminist engagement with science. The volume addresses the relationship between human corporeality and subjectivity, questions and redefines the boundaries of human/non-human and nature/culture, elaborates on the entanglements of matter, knowledge, and practice, and addresses biological materialization as a complex and open process. This volume insists that feminist theory can take matter and biology seriously while also accounting for power, taking materialism as a point of departure to rethink key feminist issues. The contributors, an international group of feminist theorists, scientists and scholars, apply concepts in contemporary materialist feminism to examine an array of topics in science, biotechnology, biopolitics, and bioethics. These include neuralplasticity and the brain-machine interface; the use of biometrical identification technologies for transnational border control; epigenetics and the intergenerational transmission of the health effects of social stigma; ADHD and neuropharmacology; and randomized controlled trials of HIV drugs. A unique and interdisciplinary collection, Mattering presents in grounded, concrete terms the need for rethinking disciplinary boundaries and research methodologies in light of the shifts in feminist theorizing and transformations in the sciences" -- From the publisher.

Part I. Probing New Theories of Matter: 1. Matter in the Shadows: Feminist New Materialism and the Practices of Colonialism / Banu Subramaniam -- 2. New Material Feminisms and Historical Materialism: A Diffractive Reading of Two (Ostensibly) Unrelated Perspectives / Hanna Meibner -- 3. On the Politics of "New Feminist Materialisms" / Stephanie Clare -- 4. Nonlinear Evolution, Sexual Difference, and the Ontological Turn: Elizabeth Groszs Reading of Darwin / Janet Wirth-Cauchon -- Part II. Nature/Culture in the Twenty-First Century Sciences: 5. The Lure of Immateriality in Accounts of Development and Evolution / Susan Oyama -- 6. Embodying Intersectionality: The Promise (and Peril) of Epigenetics for Feminist Science Studies / Lisa H. Weasel -- 7. Sex/Gender Matters and Sex/Gender Materialities in the Brain / Anelis Kaiser -- 8. The Communicative Phenomenon of Brain-Computer-Interfaces / Sigrid Schmitz -- Part III. Biopolitics and Necropolitcs: 9. Technologies of Failure, Bodies of Resistance: Science, Technology, and the Mechanics of Materializing Marked Bodies / Josef Barla -- 10. The Enactment of Intention and Exception through Poisoned Corpses and Toxic Bodies / Teena Gabrielson -- 11. Neurofeminism: An Eco-Pharmacology of Childhood ADHD / Julian Gill-Peterson -- 12. Female Bodily (Re)Productivity in the Stem Cell Economy: A Cross-Materialist Feminist Approach / Sigrid Vertommen -- 13. Prisons Matter: Psychotropics and the Trope of Silence in Technocorrections / Kym Bradley -- Part IV. New Materialism and Research Practices: 14. Urban Api-Ethnography: The Matter of Relations between Humans and Honeybees / Lisa Jean Moore -- 15. Un/Re-making Method: Knowing/Enacting Posthumanist Performative Social Research Methods through Diffractive Genealogies' and `Metaphysical Practices' / Natasha S. Mauthner -- 16. Experimental Subjects Kick Back: A Provocation for an Alternative Causality in Biomedical Research and Bioethics / Marsha Rosengarten.

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