Revisiting Feminist Matters in the Post-Linguistic Turn: John Dewey, New Materialisms, and Contemporary Feminist Thought

Feminist theorising on the body and on emotion has recently undergone a revival of sorts, as a cohort of “new” materialists and affect theorists have advocated a move away from philosophical preoccupations with culture, cognition, and language, towards a focus on corporeality, ontological immanence, and affect. Much of this work proposes the need for contem- porary theory to disavow the “linguistic turn” and to return to the material world of bodies and embodied affects. What this approach assumes, more or less explicitly, is a loss of feminist concern with such topics at some stage in the past, and an imperative to recover same in order to avoid feminist thought being compromised or unproductive in the present. Some cri- tiques have been mounted against the new affect and materialist theorists, notably with regard to their emphasis on “newness” and “recovery” in light of feminist work clearly highlighting a continuous engagement with materiality and affect.