Conversing with the Unexpected: Towards a Feminist Ethics of Knowing

Abstract

[1] The (new materialist) challenge to radically question notions of (human) subjectivity and agency is paradoxical insofar as its protagonists and addressees are a human 'we' who seek to understand nature and who strive for responsible relations with Others. Reading Karen Barad in an affirmative confrontation with the work of Donna Haraway and Judith Butler, this paper sketches possibilities of keeping in a state of permanent tension contradictory theoretical sitings/sightings of human and social agencies, arguing that in terms of a project of refiguring knowledge practices as communicative relations with Others, they are equally necessary. Perhaps our hopes for accountability for technobiopolitics in the belly of the monster turn on revisioning the world as coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse (Haraway, Promises 68) [1] Feminist epistemologies can be characterized by the assumption that practices of knowing are inherently political and that ethics is thus an integral part of knowledge production (Rouse; SingerAs Andrea Doucet and Natasha Mauthner point out, the ensuing questions of accountability and responsibility, of "what it means to 'know well' and to 'know responsibly'" (124) are, to an important degree, questions of relationality, of conceptualizing and maintaining relationships with the research subjects— which/who can then no longer be approached as objects of knowledge. Turning to Barbara McClintock's research into corn plants, Doucet and Mauthner specifically focus on practices of knowing that are not concerned with humans, to illustrate the ethical importance of developing research practices that operate as communicative relationships, allowing for an opening of unexpected alterity, for that which exceeds assumed patterns and categories: "Not only did McClintock develop and maintain a close and 'loving' relationship with her research subjects, but she also focused in on the uniqueness of each research subject, even those subjects whose characteristics fundamentally challenged the theoretical, ontological and epistemological perspectives that she started out with" (Doucet and Mauthner, 128). In this sense, feminist engagements with knowledge and knowledge production are generally oriented towards a reconfiguring of given practices of knowing in order to achieve greater responsiveness in these relational processes and to thus transform hierarchical, exclusionary, and violent relations.