“Cutting together/apart”-impulses from karen barad’s feminist materialism for a relational sociology

Abstract

The most pressing questions for how the world, with its range of phenomena, can be shared in a fair and egalitarian manner, how differences can be made possible while not being essentialized and exploited, in short: how alterity can be practiced as entanglement/relatedness, is currently discussed by authors, whose-still heterogeneous-approaches refer to a so called ‘New Materialism’. In this contribution the works of one of the representatives of this approach, the queer-feminist science theorist and physicist Karen Barad, are taken as a starting point to discuss, what kind of impulses her theory project of ethico-onto-epistemo-logy and her methodology of agential realism has to offer to a practice oriented sociology. Barad’s theoretical-methodological considerations provide connection points for two concepts which are very influential in sociology: for Pierre Bourdieu’s praxeology and Judith Butler’s queer-theoretical considerations concerning socio-ontological precariousness of (human) life. In addition to these entanglements, Barad’s concepts-as argued here-enable theoretical and methodological shifts of these practice oriented sociological and performativity-theoretical approaches regarding their understanding of sociality and anthropocentric anchoring.